Family

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Romania - Travel: Romania

Scaling new heights (and Dad’s operation)

June 21, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Tuesday one of my students invited me on a hike this weekend, with him and about half a dozen of his mates, to the top of Țarcu Mountain, at an altitude of 2190 metres. I shifted and cancelled this weekend’s lessons (it was hard to do that at short notice) and accepted his invite. We’ll be staying at a hut on Saturday night. I know it will be beautiful up there and I really want to get away and also explore more of Romania, so saying yes was an easy decision. I’m still (as always in these situations) apprehensive, though. Will I be equipped enough? Fit enough? Waterproof enough? Then there’s all the social stuff. My student is Hungarian. So are all his mates. I can’t speak a word of Hungarian. (It’s amazing really that even the Hungarians can speak Hungarian, it’s so complex and unlike anything else on the planet.) But it has the potential to be a great experience and a whole lot of fun too. Part of the whole point of living in Romania is to have these sorts of experiences. I had a gap in my schedule this afternoon where I ran around the mall trying to find a sleeping bag and other bits and pieces.

Dad. That’s the big news. The operation went about as well as it could possibly have done. I haven’t managed to speak to him since Monday’s op: the reception on the top floor of the hospital is patchy at best. Mum has been very impressed by the staff at Timaru; they’ve looked after him very well. He had a big feed at Mum’s birthday dinner, which he described as being like the Last Supper. It was his final opportunity to eat anything solid. We now anxiously wait for the results of his biopsy.

I’ve got a tricky-ish day in store tomorrow (but even the trickiest days are miles better than life insurance ever was). Two hours with Mr I Don’t Know’s mum, followed by two with Mr IDK himself, then 90 minutes with the 7½-year-old boy, then a final hour with a new boy of just five. Definitely a challenge.

Family - Language teaching

Mum and Dad and fish and chips

June 13, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents on FaceTime this morning. I had a good chat with Mum on the last day of her sixties, while Dad was out to get fish and chips. (That made me think. Why has fish and chips always been a Dad thing in our family? Is it like that in other families, just like with barbecues? Mum would never and will never go inside a fish and chip shop, or make fish and chip phone orders, or doing anything fish-and-chip-related except eat them. It also made me think that although Romanian food is lovely at this time of year, I could still just about murder some cod and chips.) Mum was tired, and wanted nothing to do with the birthday dinner she’ll be going to tomorrow at my uncle and aunt’s place. There are good practical reasons to avoid something like that; with all those people, Dad could pick up a cold, delaying his operation which is scheduled for Monday. We all just want the whole thing over with. If the surgery is successful, my parents plan to go to one of the islands and not do a whole lot.

Mum looks very good for 70. She has always kept fit, and I guess she has reasonably good genes. She shares her birthday with Steffi Graf (who will be 50 tomorrow) and Donald Trump (73).

Work. So far this week I’ve had loads of it. Fourteen lessons on the first three days, including six on Tuesday. The only way to handle Tuesday’s workload, and lack of preparation time, was to give three people exactly the same thing. It was an especially tiring day, with a 10:15 pm finish, and having to trek across the city in the baking sun, both for one of my lessons and to pay my rent. Tomorrow I’ll be starting with a five-year-old boy. Heaven knows what that will be like.

There’s not much else to say, except that I miss having my parents here, and I hope it won’t be long before I see them. Fingers, toes, and everything else crossed for Monday.

Family - Life :) - Tennis

Better news from Dad

June 7, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

There’s been some much better news from Geraldine in the last few days. We now know that Dad has a low-grade cancer and he’s caught it early. We all hoped that was the case – he has no symptoms, after all. He’s not exactly out of the woods yet, and a huge ordeal awaits him in ten days’ time, but it’s still one hell of a relief. In March he had a stream of blood when he went to the loo – a one-off, but scary enough for him to ask questions. (A lot of men would have just let that slide.) That might not have been cancer-related at all, but an effect of the Warfarin he takes, so perhaps the heart valve replacement he had in 2005 didn’t only save his life back then, but also 14 years later. Perhaps. Until he has the op, we won’t really know.

Yesterday I watched Simona Halep’s match against Amanda Anisimova. Just wow. Both the last two years Simona reached the final of Roland Garros, and I met Mum and Dad on the evening of the match. The results weren’t the same, and neither were the places I met my parents (in 2017 it was at the airport; last year it was at the train station) but it was beginning to feel like a routine. This Saturday though, there will be no Simona in the final and my parents won’t be here either. That’s a bit sad.

Some things still have that lovely early-June feel about them. The strawberries, the cherries, the apricots, the big juicy tomatoes that make me wonder how I ever eat those crappy imported tomatoes at other times of year. And the smells. Blindfold me and earplug me and I’d still know I was in Timișoara. The most distinctive smell of all is the tei, or lime trees. Temperatures are starting to nudge 30, which is normal at this time of year, but the rain shows no sign of abating. Some houses in Timiș County have been flooded.

I’ve had five cancellations this week, so I’ve managed to watch more tennis than I’d bargained for. I get less pissed off by cancellations than I used to. Yes they’re annoying, especially at the last minute, but they give me the chance to recharge my batteries.

Family - Life :) - Tennis

Matter of fact

June 2, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother just after we found out about Dad’s cancer diagnosis. My brother was at the tail end of a three-week stint in North Carolina; he’ll be flying back to the UK tomorrow. His living quarters looked like a public loo, with pipes and shiny paint and bits of zinc.

We remarked how matter-of-fact Dad seemed about his situation. No despair, no blind optimism either, no mention of fights or battles, none of that ridiculous notion that cancer can be beaten by pure strength of will. My brother is thinking of travelling to New Zealand later this summer, but I’m not sure I see the point at this stage. At any rate, we won’t have much idea of Dad’s prognosis until after his operation in two weeks’ time.

Dad showed me on FaceTime some diagrams showing six types of bowel cancer surgery; his will be the least severe, with the smallest section of bowel to be removed. That is at least something.

There’s no let-up to this wet and stormy weather. Matei’s grandmother, who is in her mid-70s, said she could never remember anything like this. Dad informs me that after a very pleasant May, the temperature is now rapidly dropping in Geraldine.

The French Open has reached its half-way point. There have been so many great matches already. It was quite a dramatic day on the women’s side yesterday, with Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka both going out. Simona, after a bumpy ride in her first two matches, cruised through to round four.

Simona is also the name of my next student; our lesson starts in an hour.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble - Tennis

Dribs and drabs

May 20, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I had a lesson with the 17-year-old girl, and then had a half-hour wait while some family member delivered her nine-year-old half-brother for my lesson with him. I was scheduled to see the boy immediately after the girl, but they had made a detour to a phone repair shop on the way. I told the girl that I won’t stand for that kind of crap from her family. Lesson first, phone second. Got that? During my lesson with the boy, my phone rang. My parents were FaceTiming me. Obviously I couldn’t answer. This frustrated me because the lesson should have been over by then. After we finished, I called my parents back from nearby Parcul Dacia. It was a pleasure to show them the park – a hive of activity on a sunny Saturday lunchtime, with games of football and four table games in full swing. Dad is still waiting for the results of his colonoscopy. We talked about the books that Mum had ordered for my birthday. They’ve been coming in dribs and drabs. When she read out the titles to me, I told her it sounded like a horse race commentary. Nobody’s Boy coming up the outside; Chasing the Scream bringing up the rear. I’ve made a start on A Death in the Family, which admittedly doesn’t sound a lot like a racehorse.

I’ve managed to pick up a cold, after what had been a good run by my standards. Last night we also had a thunderstorm, so I didn’t sleep a great deal, and I’ve felt sapped of energy today.

I failed to mention that ten days ago I had my first knock of tennis for two years. I wasn’t up to much, but the exercise did me good. If the weather plays ball I’ll book myself in for a session on the wall next to the courts in Parcul Rozelor. In 2014, after an extended spell off the court, I did some long wall workouts using the squash court in our apartment block. They were a great help.

Scrabble. I’m on a winning streak, and my rating is now tantalisingly close to 1500. A lot of that might simply be dumb luck. Yesterday I won all five of the games I played fairly handily, playing eleven bingos to my opponents’ one, but I did draw eight blanks. My favourite play of late is CHIRPED, a 60-point double-double. No bonus, no parallel play, no big X or Z spot, just a good old-fashioned word. I’m still trying to learn words, and my attention has shifted to fours. Learning words is like a giant game of whack-a-mole. Every time I learn a new word, it seems another has vanished from my memory.

Family - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

9/3/99

March 10, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last week was an exhausting one. I’m not sure why – my 30 hours of lessons were pretty standard – but after yesterday’s final lesson I didn’t feel like doing a whole lot. It might have been the late finishes (on five consecutive days) and all the extra to-ing and fro-ing that happens when I teach kids. With the exception of one boy, a 14-year-old, all my lessons with kids involve a trip.

When I turned up nine days ago for my lesson with seven-year-old Albert (I’d seen a Victoria earlier in the day), my heart sank. He stood almost pinned to the back of the sofa, cowering, wondering why this strange man had entered his lair. I felt sorry for him. Look, I said, it’ll be fine, knowing of course that I had an hour and a half with him, and it was likely to be anything but fine. But to my surprise, I was able to put him at ease. Being able to communicate with him in Romanian was a huge help. Unlike some kids who expect me to be fluent in their mother tongue, Albert seemed quite impressed with my Romanian skills. He had a pretty good knowledge of the basics: numbers, colours, animals, simple food items. We played a simple board game I’d created involving frogs, and before I knew it our time was up. On Friday I had my second lesson with him, and he ran up to me when I arrived. It was quite incredible to see that. He spent half the lesson wanting to run: he was a bundle of boundless energy. Simon says for god’s sake stop running! It truth it’s much easier to teach someone like him than a kid who looks perpetually bored and whose favourite words are “no” and “I don’t know”.

Yesterday I had a pair of new students – an ambitious 20-year-old couple – who want to do the Cambridge exam and perhaps move to the UK. They were both at a good level, around a 7½ on my 0-to-10 scale. They specifically mentioned Birmingham as a city they’d like to live in. The bloke marvelled at what I see as my extremely standard British accent. I get that from time to time from people who have been brought up on a diet of American movies and games. With this couple, I’ve now had 76 students (but no trombones) since I started back in November 2016.

My grandfather (Dad’s dad) passed away twenty years ago yesterday. It was a Tuesday, I was in my first year of university, my brother was in his first year in Army uniform, and my parents had been in London to try and fix up a teaching exchange for Mum in New Zealand. As it happened, New Zealand was booked out, so my parents decided to spend 2000 in Cairns (Australia) instead. My grandfather, who had been a physically strong and debonair gentleman, with quite a sense of humour to boot, spent the last decade of his life in the ever-tightening grip of Alzheimer’s. It was all very sad, and extremely hard for my grandmother. His problems came to the fore when they visited New Zealand in the summer of 1989-90 (we were living there at the time). He, who had always been a lover of the outdoors, became dizzy and disoriented when exposed to the sun. From then on it was a downward spiral. My grandmother tried to keep things as normal as possible, even going on holiday in Barbados with him and my father as late as 1996, but it was very hard work. I remember the speech my dad gave at his funeral – a very good one, especially for someone who doesn’t normally speak in public.

Last weekend S and I watched an unusual film about Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president. It wasn’t an easy watch – it brought back some ugly memories of the early 2000s: that awful election, 9/11, and the Iraq War which Britain, and of course my brother, got dragged into. I learnt plenty about Dick Cheney and the machinations of American politics at that time, but it was hard not to watch it and feel angry. It was all just a bit too close to home. S disagreed with me, but it showed to me that elections can and do matter. Had Al Gore been the victor in 2000, which he perhaps would have been if the Florida recount hadn’t been stopped by the Supreme Court, the world would be a different place now. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people’s votes in elections matter, but that wasn’t my point.

Scrabble. Five games yesterday, and just one win, despite averaging 402. At the level I play, that kind of average is likely to give you four wins rather than four losses, but it wasn’t my lucky day. I lost one game by five points when my opponent played an out-bingo, and in another game I was a long way behind, but found a bingo and some other high-scoring plays, only to fall short by three points. Even in my final game I was made to sweat a bit when my opponent played a 97-point bingo to the triple, making several overlaps, but I managed to edge over the line. My rating has dipped into the low 1300s, which is probably an accurate reflection of where I am right now.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Politics - Tennis

Don’t panic!

January 27, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I had my first “half-and-half” lesson with the teacher at Universitatea de Vest. In the Romanian half of the session, she kept complimenting me on my knowledge of the language, but said I need to relax a lot more when speaking it. I shouldn’t beat myself up when I can’t find the right word. Nor should I panic when I’m at the front of a long queue and I’m told to “Speak!”. That’s solid advice. She also helped me with those pesky pronouns. “She sent it to me.” Mi l-a trimis or Mi-a trimis-o, depending on whether the thing she gave me is masculine or feminine. You might add a mie at the end if you want to emphasise that she gave it to me and no-one else. It gets way harder than this, and after more than two years I still struggle.

I had a couple of Skype chats with New Zealand relatives, yesterday and today. They were shocked when I turned the screen around and everything was white; we’ve had another fairly major dumping of snow, including mega-snowflakes the likes of which I’d never seen before. My cousin and family might be coming over next January. Let’s hope so. I really miss the ten-minute drive to their place on a Sunday, seeing the three boys grow up, the roast dinners, the chats. Just as we were about to hang up, my cousin dropped a bombshell of sorts: her husband had just resigned from his job.

The watched the women’s Australian Open final this morning, and a bloody good match it was too. It lacked those long, scrambling, edge-of-your-seat rallies (the only point that fell into that category came at 5-5 in the first set and featured three net-cords), but apart from that, it was gripping stuff. The lefty-versus-righty match-up and the fact that they’d never played before added to the unpredictability. The drama dial got turned up to 9 when Kvitova saved those three match points. From 5-3 in the second set to 0-1 in the third, Osaka went through a stretch where she lost 11 points out of 12, then another where she lost 12 of 12. The stuffing had been knocked out of her. But she showed impressive fortitude in putting all of that behind her. At 2-4 in the third, Kvitova even fended off triple break point with a barrage of big serves, and at 4-3 Osaka might have cracked, but her own serve was brilliant throughout. Either player would have been a worthy champion (and don’t forget that Kvitova was stabbed two years ago) but Osaka has now won the last two grand slams and is the new number one.

Tomorrow we’ve got the men’s final. Djokovic against Nadal, yet again, in a repeat of the final from seven years ago, which might as well have been played on another planet. I’ll stick my neck out and say that this match won’t last almost six hours, because there’s now a super tie-break (boo!) if they get that far, and a proper shot clock. I can’t pick a winner though: they’ve both been in supreme form the last two weeks. The 2012 final was a bright spot in what was otherwise a shitty period for me. I moved house, something I wasn’t particularly interested in doing, everything went pear-shaped at my job, and my grandmother died. I still miss her. At times I wonder what she’d have made of my move to Romania. I think she’d have loved it here, actually. The late summer evenings, sitting out in the bars in the square, the buildings, the similarities between the Romanian language and Italian (she spent some time in southern Italy).

I’ve been watching the Brexit shambles, and it seems Britain of 2019 bears little resemblance to the country I was brought up in. A country of compromise, of pragmatism, of tolerance for others’ views. The actions of senior politicians in the last few months have been totally irresponsible. That includes Jeremy Corbyn, whose non-Brexit policies I have a lot of time for. Regarding Brexit, however, he just seems to want maximum chaos. As for Theresa May, I had sympathy for her in the early days of her tenure, but not any more. In 2017 she called an unnecessary election, thinking she could lead the Tories to a thumping majority without even showing up. That didn’t exactly happen, but she acted as if nothing had happened. Ten days ago her deal got annihilated in parliament. Still it was as if nothing had happened. In between, she has kowtowed to the extremists on the back benches of her party, while the country has become more and more polarised. The saga has become a game, where leavers want the gold medal they “earned” in 2016, they want it now, and sod the consequences. The tragic thing is that 2½ years have gone by since the referendum, and the multitude of reasons why so many people decided to give the middle finger in 2016 haven’t been addressed at all.

Family - The UK

Proper Christmas! Part 4 of 4

January 5, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Sunday 30th December

Over breakfast Mum read out an email she’d received from my aunt who stayed two nights in Timișoara after my brother’s wedding. Wow, some people have stressful Christmases. We went for coffee along by the river and met an old friend of my parents on the way; I think he thought I was weird for living in Romania. After coffee we had a very enjoyable walk down the thicket to Houghton and back. The track was busier than I ever remember it; people were making the most of the weather which was extraordinarily mild for the time of year. After a late lunch we messed around with my beard trimmer and I got packed for my evening flight. I was happy to be heading back, but it had been a real pleasure to spend some time with my family. I still marvel at how my brother found such a wonderful partner, and how they’re able to do all that housey stuff together that I could never imagine. Mum and Dad have their moments, but it helps a lot that I get on much better with Mum these days. I realise that she’s always wanted the best for me. She hasn’t always known what the best is, but that’s not really her fault.

I arrived at the airport with time to spare and got some “reduced to clear” sandwiches from Marks & Spencer. It was very busy at the check-in desk with several hundred Poles and Romanians jockeying for position in the queues. One bloke directed a barrage of F-bombs and other insults at the poor woman behind the desk, and after insulting her sister (!), he got chucked off the flight. By the time I reached the gate, I felt I was already in Romania. There weren’t a lot of Brits on the flight. I sat on the very back row, next to a younger chap from Petroșani, which is a three-hour drive from Timișoara. What an ordeal. We landed at 1:40 am, to a customary round of applause, and I was home in no time, although I didn’t get to sleep until nearly four.


Monday 31st

I got up at ten to ten. At lunchtime I met S at a café on Strada Mărășești. She asked me about New Year’s resolutions and I said I wanted to improve my Romanian. Could we speak Romanian from the start of 2019? She let out a huge groan. She doesn’t understand why communicating in the local language is so important to me. When I was in England she texted me to ask if I wanted to go a New Year’s Eve party. I said yes, hoping that she might forget. She hadn’t forgotten. She told me where it was, but I didn’t take it in, due to the anxiety that the mere mention of a party provokes in me. “Under something” and “on the corner of something and something” was all I remembered. Everything is closed here on 1st January, so I did a load of grocery shopping in the afternoon, making good use of my new backpack. Close to party time, I wandered around Libertății and Unirii, thinking I might figure it out, but to no avail. I had to call her. It was definitely under something. It was a small dungeon-like room, beneath one of the city’s many pharmacies, where you could see the brickwork and smell the mould. The music would have been fine if it had been at half the volume. I’m sure S (whom I hadn’t seen in party mode before) and her two friends could tell I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life there. Just before midnight we went out to see the fireworks, be couldn’t see much from our vantage point. S told me that her two goals for 2019 were to travel around the world and, um, to have a baby. Both?! I thought that might be it for the night, but no such luck. We bundled back into the vault, and by the time we left (phew!) it was 2019 in the UK too. It would be nice if parties or social events could one day be as much fun as, say, being stuck in Airportworld.


Tuesday 1st January

After breakfast I had a bout of excruciating sinus pain, lasting an hour and a half. With the New Year bells going full-bore from the cathedral, I thought, hell must be something close to this. It was that painful, like a screwdriver being rammed up my nostril. The lack of sleep probably didn’t help, and neither did the alcohol, not that I drank that much. Lying in bed was no good; I paced up and down, up and down, until it gradually subsided. What a start to the new year.

Family - The UK

Proper Christmas! Part 3 of 4

January 5, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tuesday 25th December

This was my first Christmas Day in the UK for 16 years, and what an incredible day it was. My brother and sister-in-law had it all planned with military precision. It was the first time they’d done Christmas dinner, but they could have fooled me. We had Eggs Benedict (their own eggs, of course) with salmon for breakfast, an unexpected treat. My brother followed our late uncle’s method for cooking the turkey: two hours in the oven and as long again on the barbecue. It was melt-in-the-mouth stuff. Before long the Christmas pudding (which is always a highlight) was eaten and the dishes were washed, and it was back to TV watching. Michael McIntyre’s show was really funny (especially this cooking prank), as was Dad’s Army, which is now almost half a century old. As for presents, I got some kids’ books and the Bananagrams game (for my lessons), a backpack, some cash from Mum and Dad (it’s a bit ridiculous to be getting cash from my parents at my stage in the game, but there you go) and all kinds of stuff to help tame my beard. Christmas Day 2018 will live long in my memory.


Wednesday 26th

We walked off our Christmas dinner by doing a tour of Poole, which I quite liked. I discovered that gin bars had become a thing. Another trip to Primark, then it was TV time. We watched programmes about Ken Dodd and Torvill & Dean, although the highlight was the BFG which was beautifully done. We played a few games of Bananagrams.


Thursday 27th

A third trip to Primark to get a suitable suitcase for my flight back to Romania, and then it was time to say goodbye to Poole, and my very house-proud brother and sister-in-law. It was great to see them, but being in someone else’s territory for any length of time always makes me anxious. The journey to my parents’ flat in St Ives was a long one. Many people were driving home after Christmas, but many others were simply shopping. Consuming. Sometimes we barely moved. A journey of 180 miles took over six hours, including the two short stops we made. At least the road signs in the UK are good. It’s one of those things I took for granted when I lived there, but I now see that they’re brilliantly designed to be read at 70 mph. The little details like the hook on the lower-case ‘l’ that helps make for a friendly, readable font, the yellow route numbers on a green background for A-roads, the calming blue motorway signs, the airport icon that also functions as an arrow: these things all add up. They save lives.


Friday 28th

In the morning I called on some family friends, the couple who came to Romania in 2017 for the road trip we did, and we had a very enjoyable chat. They then came to my parents’ flat in the evening for so-called nibbles (in reality a proper meal). In the middle I went for a walk with Dad around the meadow and back through Hemingford.


Saturday 29th

At 10am we went to my aunt’s place in Earith. It’s been sad to see her world get progressively smaller over the years. She doesn’t have meaningful relationships with either of her children, who are now both in their late forties. She does, however, have a soft spot for both me and my brother, perhaps because we’re harmless. On this occasion she wasn’t too bad, and even in her worst periods she’s always had the knack of making people laugh. We didn’t stay too long. In the afternoon we called into Homebase where my parents spent ages not choosing some wallpaper, and then drove through some villages I hadn’t seen in a couple of decades, such as Abbots Ripton and Woodhurst. We stopped at Broughton and went for a walk there. My brother sent Mum links to properties in St Ives. He’s always felt bitter about my parents moving to New Zealand in 2003, and now that they make regular trips to back to the UK, he senses that they might want to move back permanently. I think that would be very unlikely and a bad move: the UK isn’t a great country to get old in.

Family - The UK

Proper Christmas! Part 2 of 4

January 5, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Saturday 22nd December

My last two lessons of 2018 were thankfully at home, and with students at vastly different levels. When they were over with, I took the bus to the airport. My plane was delayed by an hour, and it was quite pleasant to hang around in the terminal with the machines selling inexpensive coffee, snacks and even books. The click-clack of the big split-flap display board is pleasing, although the some of the letters get stuck and they’ll probably replace the board with some insipid screen in the not too distant future, if not the entire terminal. The trick with Timișoara airport, as elsewhere, is not to go through security until you have to. On the other side you’re no longer in Romania but in Airportworld, with all those bottles of scented water going for dozens of euros. In Airportworld, they don’t even use Romanian money. The flight to Luton was uneventful, and my parents met me at 10pm. It was lovely to see them, as it always is. The three of us stayed in a relatively cheap hotel near the airport. I heard on the news that Paddy Ashdown, leader of the Lib Dems throughout the nineties, had died. I reckon he would have made a good prime minister.


Sunday 23rd

Dad and I both had colds. For me it was my fourth in a couple of months, but Dad’s was worse. How would he cope with the drive down to Poole? Breakfast at the hotel was excellent, though the dining room was jam-packed with people. My parents had planned to drop in on some friends on the way to Poole, but they were suffering from colds too, so we gave them a miss. As we drove through Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Hampshire, I thought, shit, I couldn’t come back here to live. Get off the M something at junction whatever for yet another soulless dormitory town. Milton Keynes with its endless roundabouts, coded H for horizontal and V for vertical. Too many bloody people. I could see why 17.4 million of them voted to escape this crap (even if their votes will probably just serve to make things even crappier). We wanted a hot drink so pulled into one of the services. At any service station in the UK, you either get Costa or (in this case) Starbucks. We went for the cheaper option, filter coffee, and it was pure poison. It didn’t help that they only had two young staff, who were rushed off their feet. Starbucks: never again. We reached my brother’s place in late afternoon. Their two-storey terraced house is modest, I suppose, but still beyond my wildest dreams. A lot of time and effort had gone into the interior, and it was all looking very Christmassy. They have a cat, named Major Tom but usually just Tom, and four hens that give them more eggs than they know what to do with.


Monday 24th

On Christmas Eve we visited Wimborne, a picturesque town nearby. It was bigger than I imagined, and full of lovely old buildings. We went to Primark after that, so my parents could buy me some clothes. I wish they wouldn’t. We watched the Snowman on TV – it never stops being a wonderful animation – and then it was time for church. Midnight mass was an option, but we attended the 5:30 pm service instead. It lasted 80 minutes, which would be very brisk by Romanian Orthodox standards, but Catholic services are usually shorter, even at Christmas, and people were getting decidedly antsy. We had an unusual reading where 42 generations – who begat whom, ending up at Jesus – were itemised. After church (I wonder when I’ll do that again next) it was time for more TV. Gogglebox. A TV programme about people’s reactions to watching TV. I’d forgotten the cultural importance of TV in Britain, especially around Christmas. And I’d totally forgotten how celeb-obsessed Britain is. One celebrity game show after another, where many of the categories used in the quizzes are celebrity-based themselves. Later that evening we chatted about the sister of an old friend of mine, who has become a semi-famous live artist, comedian, call her what you will. She defies categorisation. We watched her “Fanny Song” on YouTube and my sister-in-law in particular was in stitches.