I’m tired. Tons of lessons. Not enough sleep. The end of the world as we know it, fast approaching. Just six days now. At least I’ve been amassing a healthy brick of lei, even though I don’t get as many cash payments as I did in pre-Covid days.
I felt shattered when I got up on Sunday. I still decided to make the trip to Szeged, a city just over the border which like Timișoara is replete with beautiful architecture. Our clocks had gone back an hour the night before, and then Hungary is a further hour behind Romania. So I had four different times in my head all at once: Romanian summer, Romanian winter, Hungarian summer, and Hungarian winter, the middle two of those four being equivalent. (Szeged’s buildings featured many clocks, some of which hadn’t yet been put back to winter time.) Szeged sits on the Tisa which is a major river. I parked by the river and mooched around the city for a couple of hours. Then, because it was still quite early, I decided to go to Kecskemét, the city we visited in early September on the way back from Vienna. On the way I met more pheasants than I’d ever seen before. The autumn colours were stunning. Szeged is a clean, modern-looking European city, while Kecskemét has a very different vibe with its communist blocks crowding out the lovely empire-era architecture that it still has. At the car park a woman tried to communicate with me. Do we have to pay? It’s Sunday. I could tell that was her question, but I had the same question and I couldn’t speak her language. She asked somebody else, then relayed the reply of “nem” (no) to me. I had a tortilla there – this was a bit of a disappointment – and then went back home. In total I did 425 km. Luckily I only had short queues at the border. I noted that they no longer bother to stamp my passport. That’s a shame; all those stamps were a useful memory jogger.
SzegedI really liked the design of this phone box. Surprisingly, the phone still worked.Kecskemét
This was on the table of the fast food place I ate at. Hungarian names are always surname first. In Romanian they can go either way, which can be horribly confusing when the surname happens to be a possible first name too.
Just outside Szeged
Back in Romania, at a small lake in Sânnicolau Mare, popular with fishermen. Next to the lake, a couple were roasting a chicken in their back garden.
Tomorrow we’ll know whether my nephew will get a little brother or sister to terrorise. Mum and Dad are still recovering from their extended family time. I’m sure all five of them would have had a better time if my sister-in-law had stayed at home.
Now for some pictures from my Vienna trip.
The view from our apartment. Red squirrels abounded.
Above: Pictures from Schönbrunn Palace. The bottom photo is from the Gloriette.
The Gloriette: a display of strength and power
The next day: Walking to the Albertina, and below: some paintings I particularly liked.
Christian RohlfsAlbin Egger-LienzOskar KokoschkaRudolf Wacker. This might have been my favourite of all. Dorothy and I spent considerable time perusing it.Franz Sedlacek. At first glance you think they’re birds.Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, painter and scupltorMarc Chagall. I could have stared at this one for hours.
There was a whole room of Picassos that I didn’t take photos of, then we saw the extensive collection of American photographer Gregory Crewdson which was well worth it. Each photograph included a frozen figure; the small-town America setting only increased the creep factor.
This little girl was transfixed by the violinistThese newsstands add colour to a city, but they’re thin on the ground these daysSt Stephen’s Cathedral
The Belvedere
Cities need more buildings like these. The height and general appearance make you feel good.
So last Thursday I drove to Vienna with Dorothy (70), Sanda (54), and Sanda’s uncle Valeriu (about to turn 80 and who had never been out of Romania before). Another long drive for me. After some stops along the way and a very slow run into Vienna, we finally made it to the Park & Ride. Sanda, who speaks excellent German, was able to ask someone how that whole system worked. Then we took the underground to our apartment which was in an old building similar in style to the ones in Timișoara. (Timișoara was part of the same empire then, after all.) I shared a room with Valeriu. My mother’s father was 77 when he first left New Zealand. Valeriu had him beat, and at times he was like a fish out of water. He relied heavily on his niece. (Valeriu lost his wife last year after a long illness. They never had children.)
The apartment had cooking facilities and we used them three nights out of four. The next day I was completely shattered. A combination of the long drive, broken sleep, and the sheer heat meant I couldn’t stop yawning the whole day. A shame, because we visited the beautiful Schönbrunn Palace, the residence of the Habsburgs until their monarchy ended in 1918. Valeriu was very keen to see everything there was to see about Empress Elisabeth, otherwise known as Sisi, who Romanians have great affinity with. She was stabbed to death in 1898. We did an audio tour of the palace – I had no hope of keeping up with the Ferninands and Josephs – then climbed up to the top of the Gloriette which sits at an elevated position at the end of Schönbrunn’s garden. I tried to decipher the inscription on the Gloriette with the help of Dorothy who once taught Latin and Greek. The way I was feeling, my favourite part of the day was in the morning when I had a very good coffee with Dorothy at an underground station while Sanda helped Valeriu buy an “Austria” baseball cap.
Day two was much better. Sanda and Valeriu went to a technological museum, while Dorothy and I visited the Albertina, a quite wonderful art gallery near the centre. The previous time I properly went to an art gallery was in 2006 when I visited the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. This was at least as good. The Monet to Picasso collection could hold you transfixed for hours. Zoom in, zoom out. What is this supposed to be? What was he thinking? What further wonders would he have produced if he hadn’t been killed in the war? How shocking was this at the time? Look how incredible those hands are. We must have spent four hours there. The thermostat was turned right down – it was pretty parky in there – but much better that than sweating and yawning and rapidly losing interest. The night before I’d found an out-of-the-way restaurant with local cuisine; the four of us met up there at 6:30. (I relied mostly on an old map. Outside the apartment, my phone was a brick with a camera.) We took one look at the prices and went next door instead. Sausages, goulash, beer. Perfectly good, only I could have eaten twice as much.
Our last full day involved us all meeting up with two of Sanda’s friends at a café slap-bang in the middle of the city, in the shadow of St Stephen’s Cathedral. Again we split up – Valeriu stayed with Sanda and her friends, while Dorothy and I wended our way through the Mozart zone to the Belvedere Gardens. We didn’t go to the museum; we just walked through the gardens which were free to enter. On the way back we had tea and an apple strudel in a café, then met the other two in the city centre once more. By this stage, Sanda had tummy troubles and Valeriu was understandably tired. I wonder what he made of the whole experience. He certainly travelled light; he came with one small holdall and no shorts or other summer clothes. He predates even the baby boomer generation and grew up in the sticks not too far from where I went in late June, and having never been abroad before, the idea of changing his wardrobe from the tried and true was alien to him.
Dorothy and I got on well. We talked a lot about language. That subject came up a lot with Sanda too; she is practically fluent in four languages (Romanian, English, German and Italian) – that level of mastery isn’t that rare in Romania, but it continues to blow me away. I did get slightly annoyed by Sanda’s tendency to organise everyone, even though she meant well, and her penchant for selfies. Valeriu had clearly done a lot of driving back in the day; much of our conversation focused on that.
After breakfast the next morning, we were off back home. A short loo break 170-odd km down the road, then a similar distance to Kecskemét, a small city in the centre of Hungary, far from the tourist trail, where we stopped for lunch. (It was close to 3pm by then. I was ravenous.) Sorting out parking payment was hard work. None of us could read the Hungarian signs. Does that mean three wheels? But I’ve got four wheels. What the hell? Dorothy and Sanda exchanged forint notes for coins at a bank – this took ages and Dorothy thought it was jolly good fun – while Valeriu and I stood by the car. Eventually that was sorted. Now for some food. A bistro round the corner. Looks good. Then it came to ordering our meals. A major performance. We found one guy who spoke English but he didn’t work there. Sanda made cow noises and flappy bird gestures. Google Translate came out. I was rapidly losing the will to live. We got there in the end, and it took them less time to bring us our food than it took to order it. I had a substantial meal of pork escalopes and chips. Great. But then two massive plates of food materialised that we hadn’t ordered – a communciation breakdown despite everyone’s best efforts. By 7:45 I’d dropped the others off and I was home, but not before a tight squeeze in the car park behind my apartment block which nearly threw me after being on the road for so long.
Yesterday I spoke to Mum and Dad. A sigh of relief. Bar the first couple of days, it had been a really shitty time for them all. Dad still isn’t right. My sister-in-law didn’t want to come to NZ anyway, as far as I could see. She’d rather have used up her leave allocation elsewhere – probably something involving a cruise. Mum and Dad were pissed off that my brother did most of the work when it came to looking after my nephew. He was up early while she stayed in bed. And as for my nephew, he’s a very bright little boy, and physically strong with it. He hurt my parents on several occasions, and seemed to enjoy it. (Yikes.) He can already count to twelve. Count me out.
I can’t wait for the sub-30 temperatures that we’re forecast to get early next week. Right now it’s still far too hot. My university friend and his girlfriend are staying with me for two nights from the 21st. Not many people other than students get to see the inside of my flat, so that’ll be slightly nerve-wracking for me. I’m now off to Dedeman to get flat-related bits and pieces. When they’ve gone it’ll all be back to normal.
Like my recent drives across Hungary – four of them – this post has gone on far too long.
After three days in which things were getting dangerous (the day before I left was really shitty), I desperately needed to press the reset button. My short trip to Slovenia had that effect, so I’m putting it down as a success.
Maribor is hardly just up the road; it’s roughly the same as going from Auckland to Wellington. My outward journey weighed in at 645 km, almost entirely on motorways, and took me 8 hours and 50 minutes including breaks and two hold-ups – a queue at the Romania–Hungary border (the Hungarian border guard couldn’t speak a word of anything non-Hungarian, so that was fun), then a traffic jam around Budapest. I went back a different way, taking a slightly more countrified route through Hungary. That cut the distance to “just” 622 km; surprisingly I had no delays to speak of, and got back ten minutes faster despite going on slower roads. Coming back I stopped at a town called Balatonlelle, which is on Lake Balaton as its name suggests. I picked it practically at random, expecting to find a sleepy village by the lake, but instead it was a bustling tourist destination. Over the border into Romania, the motorway was eerily quiet.
In between I stayed three nights in Maribor, the second city of Slovenia, a country of only 2.1 million people. It sits on the Drava river, a tributary of the Danube (which I’ll see very soon) but a major river in its own right. My motel (that’s what I’d call it) was 4 km out of the city. Once I’d checked in, I drove into town (after I’d been convinced by a passerby not to walk) and was struck by how beautiful and peaceful it was. The river, the bridges, the buildings, the people milling around, the perfect temperature, it was all uplifting. I sat outside and enjoyed my pizza and Sprite, which I felt I’d earned after nearly nine hours on the road. (The pizza was very yummy indeed, come to think of it.)
That evening I called New Zealand. I hadn’t told them I was going to Slovenia. The line was terrible, as was the general mood, caused by everyone’s illnesses. The worst sufferers have been my sister-in-law and my father. Dad wrote to me in an email that my brother and his family have had a nightmare “holiday” in NZ and will never come back. Mum has escaped virtually unscathed, but her stress levels must have been way up there.
The next morning I took the bus into town and wandered around. Some cities look happy, others look sad. Maribor looked happy. The only negative was that all the touristy stuff like the museum and wine tasting were beyond what I was prepared to pay. I’d been looking forward to trying some Slovenian wines, but when a severe young lady at the entrance said it would be €20 to try three wines or €25 for four, I declined. (I bought a cheap bottle of Slovenian red at the supermarket instead.) Yep, Slovenia uses the euro; unlike some other ex-Yugoslav states, they’ve gone all-in on the European project. On the evidence of what I saw, it’s been to their benefit. (By the way, after the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early nineties, Slovenia adopted the tolar is its currency. It was replaced by the euro in 2007.) The only vaguely touristy thing I did was visit the aquarium/terrarium, which I didn’t expect to find in the city park. The aquarium wasn’t exactly Kelly Tarlton’s but the terrarium bit was rather good. I had another pizza – I’ll give kebab pizza a miss next time – and walked back to the motel.
What to do on my second and last full day? It was Saturday. Probably the worst day of the year if you want to avoid plagues of tourists, which I always want to do. The lakes, Bled and Bohinj, were out for that very reason. I set off for Ljubljana but the motorway was chocka – rammed as everyone says in the UK now – and I couldn’t hack it any more. I got off the hellscape of the south-westbound A1 and decided to visit the town of Ptuj (a short way downstream of Maribor on the Drava) instead. The name is fun to say: think tui, as in the native NZ bird, with a p sound immediately before it. There were lovely old buildings, you could walk (or cycle) alongside the river, although when I visited it was wedding day. At least three of them. It had a castle which I chose not to take a tour of because it was just too hot.
The motel was quiet and had a simple balcony; it was nice to just sit out there and have a beer. One more night before the long trek home. I had €99 in cash when I went. This will do me. I came back with €3, and that’s after buying stuff like washing powder that I saw was cheaper over there. All in all, the trip cost me around £400 or NZ$800.
It’s incredible all the places I can see, now that I have a car. (It has added complexity and expense to my life too though, so I’d say it’s been neutral to my wellbeing.) Just think, Mum and Dad could come over next spring, or heck, next month, and we could go travelling for three weeks or more. What wonders could be in store for them. You can but dream.
Now for some photos of Maribor:
The Plague Column in Maribor, built after the plague of 1680. Ptuj had one too. Timișoara has one. Vienna apparently has a famous one. And when monkeypox really takes off…
I’ve mentioned these Roman numeral “puzzles” before. These were everywhere in Maribor. This is a modern one which was inscribed when the plague column was renovated (in 1991, if I’m not mistaken).
Supposedly the oldest grapevine in the worldWhat’s the mata mata with you? A freshwater turtle from the Amazon basinOrange iguanas
In a first for me, I managed to fall asleep in a lesson yesterday. It wasn’t face-to-face – I’m not that hopeless – but an online session with an eleven-year-old boy. I got him to do a written exercise in the present continuous, then a couple of minutes later I heard my name. Repeatedly. How embarrassing. We finished the lesson, then I had a session with his little brother. Please just let this be over. I then set an alarm on my laptop so I’d wake up in time for an online lesson in the evening, in case I fell asleep, which I did. The alarm made me jump out of my skin; I thought I was still in St Ives.
Getting back home was brutal. My bus arrived at Luton Airport at three minutes to midnight. I hardly slept a wink there. At 5:30 I blew £4.50 on an extra-strong coffee, then I had to think about my flight which was due to leave at 8:05. At gate 21 there was a picture of Timișoara taken right where I used to live, along with an up-to-the-minute weather report for the destination. I could see the temperature climbing into the 30s. We were stuck on the ground and took off from runway 07 an hour late, meaning it would be even hotter when we arrived. I had a window seat on the very back row. I got a great view of Lake Balaton which is the largest lake in Central Europe and marginally larger than Lake Geneva. There’s something amazing about seeing a major geographical feature like that in its entirety. I was one of the first off the plane; as I stepped onto the tarmac it was like walking into an oven. I got the bus to Badea Cârțan and from there I walked home in the heat. That and the lack of sleep just buggered me. Next time I might try the Ryanair flight from Stansted to Budapest followed by the train; I won’t put myself through that again.
It was a pretty good trip in all. I saw a lot of my family friends. Plenty of walks and meals – either homemade ones, or pub ones that didn’t come with enough chips. On Sunday, after my trip to Cambridge, we had a three-course meal which involved vegetables from their garden and seemed to take for ever. Conversation sometimes strayed into politics, which is never a good idea. When I suggested that young people have it harder than the older generation, I got the usual spiel about 15% mortgage interest rates in the 1970s and 80s. At least I was spared any mention of the threat of nuclear war, which is the other one that usually comes up. On Monday we walked to Houghton where we met one of Dad’s old friends. He lives with his wife in a beautiful old house; he had a selection of anti-woke posters in the windows including “I (heart) JK Rowling” and “Keep men out of women’s sports”. They’ve both had varying health complications. On Tuesday we went to Wetherspoons for their happy hour which runs from two till five. I had fish, nowhere near enough chips, and mushy peas. Then I tidied up the flat (someone is staying there on Friday) and took the guided bus to Cambridge where I got some provisions for my trip home. I got two Scotch eggs; I was years since I’d last had one.
What did I think of Britain this time? (It always changes.) Maybe I’m biased because that’s where I come from, but the people all seemed great. Calm, considerate, happy to help. Everyone doing their best. The problems are systemic; people’s lives are dominated by unavoidable systems and processes that are failing to function. To that point, the bank I photographed in my previous post is closing down in January and St Ives, a town of 17,000 people, will soon be bankless.
In New Zealand, my brother and his family are suffering with a bug they picked up on the plane. Even Mum has come down with it.
Lloyds Bank in Cambridge on Tuesday nightSunset in Timișoara on 24th July
Our two-week heat wave has come to an end, for now at least. Yesterday the temperature dropped ten degrees from the day before, and finally I could breathe again. First I dropped over a quarter of a ton of crap off at the tip – bags of hardened cement, big sheets of MDF from an old wardrobe, and one of those old-style TVs. That felt good – the small room next to my office, which had become a junk room, could be pretty useful. There’s still a horrible carpet in there that I need to get rid of. Then I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român and back – only the second trip I’ve made on the new bike since I bought it.
After that, I grabbed lunch and sat back and watched round three of the golf. Round two had been dramatic enough. The howling wind, even worse than on the first day which was bad enough, sent scores skyrocketing. Pity the poor Japanese guy who made two successive nines (on a par-four followed by a par-three). At the end of the second round, roughly half the field would be cut. I was strangely emotionally invested in what the cut line would be. Would it be five or six under par? It could have gone either way as the wind dropped for the last few players out on the course, but six it was, and that allowed ten or so more players to come back for the weekend. Nice. The more the merrier. Then on to yesterday. After some better weather in the morning, which helped a Korean player in a Hawaiian-esque shirt hit a hole-in-one, sheer madness followed as it sheeted down with rain. The wind, which is affected by the tide, also picked up. Spectators and players were like drowned rats out there. The temperature plunged. Commentators described hands as being prune-like. But it was all beautiful in its way too.
As this wonderful advert for a Scottish summer was playing out, it was time for me to play tennis. It seemed the weather system had moved south-eastwards in some style. Florin and I got there. We hit for 15 minutes when it started spitting, then after another 15 (following our best rally in which I finally got the ball past Florin at the net) the spits had become drips and drops and there was fork lightning in the near distance. Time to call it a day. When I got back, the golf was still on. Our shortened tennis session and the crazy weather in Scotland (which made everything take longer) meant I saw more of the closing holes than I otherwise would have. It’ll be one heck of a final round. Billy Horschel is on his own at four under par; six players are just one shot behind, including Dan Brown (not the Da Vinci Code guy) who was desperately unlucky on the final two holes. There are a further five players at even par or better; the winner is extremely likely to come from those dozen men. There could quite easily be a play-off, which would add even more excitement. I haven’t seen the weather forecast.
Travel plans. It looks like I’ll go up to Maramureș a week on Monday or Tuesday for five days or so. Then I’ve got my UK trip from 8th to 14th August. After that I’m thinking of four days in Maribor in Slovenia (19th to 23rd, or thereabouts), then there’s Vienna from 29th August to 2nd September.
I’ve just had a longish Skype chat with my cousin who lives in New York state (I stayed with him in 2015) but is currently in northern Italy. It’s always good to catch up with him.
We’re getting scorching weather again. We’re forecast to nudge 40 in the coming days. I’d planned another road trip, but I won’t even want to travel outside this air-conditioned room if it’s like that. I’m now thinking of making a trip to Slovenia in the next few weeks, then I’ll probably spend a few days in the UK in the second half of August before going to Vienna from 29th August to 2nd September.
Last night I played tennis with Florin. I wasn’t very good. I led 3-0 and 4-1 but yet again we found ourselves at 6-6. I came from 3-0 down to win the tie-break 7-5. He won more points in the set; tennis is very first-past-the-post-y. We played to the sounds of Festivalul Inimilor, the festival of traditional music from many nationalities that takes place in Parcul Rozelor every July. It’s completely free, and after the game I grabbed a beer from one of the stalls and watched some of it. In the good old days, the musicians would parade past my apartment block, Olympics-style, to mark the start of it all. They still do that but I no longer live there. I really miss those early days.
Lately I’ve been lacking motivation and the capacity to enjoy things. I met Dorothy yesterday at Prospero, the bakery close to where I used to live that also serves coffee. It was my suggestion to go there; they always did very good bread. The place was packed with intimidatingly sophisticated women with perfect hair and matching handbags and jackets even on such a hot day; there were separate queues that made the ordering process painful. (When I’m on my own I find a simple little bar or a vending machine. It’s cheaper and I beat all that stress.) Things were fine once we eventually sat down.
We talked a lot about the UK election. Unlike me, she stayed up half the night to watch it. I wanted to upload a graph showing the huge disparity between vote share and seat share and how ridiculous it is, but WordPress isn’t allowing me to upload any pictures at all for some reason that is well beyond my understanding.
Ed Davey’s novel strategy of falling off paddleboards and screaming “Vote Liberal Democrat!” mid-bungee jump paid off, in terms of seats at least. It got him out there, and he used his frivolous stunts to make a serious point about social care; he has a disabled son who has to be looked after day and night. Good on him.
Dorothy said the Lib Dems (12% of the vote) were too woke. Dad said Labour (34%) were too woke. The Greens got 6%, and they’re obviously very woke. By my calculations, that’s a majority who voted for these woke parties. What that means that is most people under 70 don’t give a damn about wokeness or unwokeness and have more pressing issues like heating their homes and feeding their kids and seeing a doctor when they need one. Dad said the state of Britain is hardly the Tories’ fault – they didn’t create Covid or start the war in Ukraine. I said, no, it bloody is their fault. Institutions in and around London have got richer while the poor have continued to get poorer. They’ve caused that. Dad agreed with me.
The Tories were rejected wholesale by the young and the not-so-young. It’s only when you get to properly old that their vote held up, saving the party from total oblivion. The baby boomers have had their own way politically for a very long time. This time they didn’t. That can only be a good thing.
Some more good news is that the incoming government is much more serious than the old one. This is a moment in history that calls for seriousness. Much of that is down to Labour ministers coming from far less privileged backgrounds than their predecessors. “Born to rule” is hopefully dead.
None of this will be easy. They aren’t even talking about the environment or mental health, both massive issues. And where’s the money? They’ve kept quiet about raising taxes but surely they will have to. Then there’s the business of getting people engaged in politics at all. People have had enough. My brother voted at 8pm, two hours before polls closed, and was shocked by how few ticks there were on the list as his name was checked off.
One last thing: I bought a bike on Thursday. It’s German and far more modern than my previous ones. I guess you’d call it a hybrid: half mountain bike, half road bike. It’s got a dizzying number of gears. Why I need more than four or five I have no idea. The brand is Steppenwolf, which I thought was just the name of a band. I’ve now got two old bikes I somehow need to offload.
I managed to pack a reasonable amount into ten days in the UK, and enjoyed my time there. Whether I could live there again is a different story. I’d find the sheer number of people suffocating, and how could I earn enough to afford it? I was lucky this time to save money by not paying for accommodation. The best part for me was escaping the heat. The ten-degree drop in temperature gave me a new lease on life. Not feeling fatigued all the time was a bit of a novelty.
I remember when Stansted was a relaxing little airport, in sharp contrast to the behemoths of Heathrow and Gatwick. Now it’s up there with the giants. But even though it’s now a stress-inducing monster, arriving three hours before my flight (as Ryanair had told me to do) was overkill. I had no bags to put in the hold, so I went straight through to security. The departure lounge was jam-packed, and there’s only so much time you can spend staring at bottles of gin. My plane to Bergamo took off an hour late. I’m always amazed by how fast the ascent is; you’re up into the clouds in no time. I had a window seat, and the scenery was very pleasing on the eye, especially on our descent when we flew over the beautiful towns and villages of northern Italy. By the time I checked into my hotel, I was starving. I had a kebabby something or other, and a beer, in a little courtyard. I liked being outside on such a balmy evening, but my ankles got bitten to shreds by mosquitoes.
The next morning, after a big breakfast, I took the train into Milan – about a 50-minute journey. It pleased me that in Italy, just like Romania and most other sensible countries, a return ticket costs twice a single and there’s a clear relationship between the distance travelled (which is printed on your ticket) and the price. In the UK, train fares are inscrutable and invariably ridiculously high. Apart from the short hop from Cambridge to Stansted, I didn’t dream of taking a train in the UK. On the train to Milan a policeman asked me to put on my mascherina (why isn’t it just a masca?), but I didn’t have one. I’d almost forgotten that this was ground zero, the unfortunate epicentre of the pandemic in Europe, where it was headless-chickens territory in early 2020. The nice policeman gave me a mask and I was fine.
We soon pulled into the lovely central train station which was one of my highlights of Milan. Otherwise I found the city a bit disappointing. I’m sure other people would love the place, but there wasn’t much for me there. I wandered from the station, through a nice park and into the Brera district. I then found myself in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the arcade where you find all your Gucci and Prada, and which spills out into the big tourist draw card of Piazza del Duomo. The massive Duomo is spectactular of course, but I didn’t feel a thrill at seeing it, probably because it’s so ridiculously popular. I liked climbing up to the rooftop, and later I went inside the cathedral and then underground where you can see the remains of the Baptistry of St John, which was built in the fourth century. It was a hot day, and after also visiting the museum I was quite happy to leave Milan and get back to Bergamo for a pizza. And a pee. I remembered when I previously visited Italy in 2010 that toilets were thin on the ground, and that hadn’t changed.
The long list of archbishops of MilanA digital gizmo that mimics the look and sound of the old split-flap displays
My flight was just after ten the next morning, so I had my breakfast at seven, checked out, and got the bus to the airport. My plane, a Boeing 737 Max, left on time. I noticed that the word Max wasn’t visible or audible anywhere, probably because they knew it would freak people out – the aircraft suffered two fatal crashes in 2018 and ’19, after which they were grounded worldwide for a while. FYI, if you see or hear the numbers 8200 on your plane, it’s a Max and you can officially freak out.
By mid-afternoon, after stopping at the market on the way, I was back in my flat. I’d spent two weeks in rich countries, specifically rich parts of rich countries; that marked quite a contrast to the place I now call home, even though it’s not exactly poor. I liked having real fruit and vegetables again, that didn’t come in a tray, weren’t identically sized and shaped, and weren’t barcoded. I felt that the UK had gone the way of America, where “fake food” was rampant.
My teaching volumes have dropped in the few days since I got back. It’s peak getaway time.
On Wednesday the 3rd I left Birmingham after my 48-hour stay there. The bus went through Leicester, which seemed massive and full of monstrous architecture. We wended our way along streets dotted with shops called “Polski Sklep” and “Bunătăți Românești”. After several hours I arrived in Cambridge on a sunny evening; the bus dropped me off at Parkside, beside a park (!) where a cricket game was in progress. The local buses had changed since my last visit in the Mesozoic, and I was frantically trying to determine where my bus to St Ives went from – it wasn’t Drummer Street as usual – only finding out when it whizzed by. That meant another half-hour wait. It was a nice feeling to arrive at my parents’ flat in St Ives again. I liked the homely smell that it has.
In St Ives
The next morning, after a particularly good sleep, I read something online about taramasalata. I’d never eaten it before – its lurid pinkness and complete overkill of a name turned me off – so I decided to buy a tub of the stuff from Waitrose. That sort of food doesn’t last long when you open it, and anyway I’d be leaving in three days, so I ended up having lashings of bright pink paste with everything. I’m not sure I’ll have it again. I then met up with some old friends over coffee. These were the couple who came to visit me in Romania five years ago. He was very ill earlier in the year, and is in the middle of a long recovery. In the afternoon I took Mum’s bike out for a ride down the thicket and through the Hemingfords and Houghton, and then I went back to my friends’ place for dinner, which was almost all homegrown produce. She had earlier given me a tour of their extensive fruit and vegetable patch (not that “patch” does it justice).
This tomb, at the Parish Church in St Ives, is dated 1657
Then came Friday. The big day. The day I’d maybe see my aunt. My brother had warned me that she’d be almost unrecognisable from the time I last saw her in December 2018. I’d tried calling her the day before but got no reply, so I hopped on Mum’s bike for a six-mile ride over to my aunt’s place in Earith, passing through Needingworth and Bluntisham, knowing my trip might be in vain. Handily, they have a bike track all the way to Earith. I arrived at her four-centuries-old house which has two numbers and a name, and knocked on her cobwebby door. No answer. Then I phoned her. To my surprise, she answered. “I’m right outside your door,” I said. She got dressed, then let me in via the back gate. She had aged, a lot, and had put on several pounds. Her back greatly reduces her mobility, but she refuses to have surgery on it, saying it’s too risky. No, it isn’t. Without surgery, you face the certainty of being housebound very soon. But there was no point in saying that. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. At 9:30 in the morning, I half-expected her to offer me a glass of wine, but she seems to have cut back on that. Her house and garden looked in good nick. (Admittedly she has a helper.) We chatted for over an hour in her garden, when normally she doesn’t want to talk to anyone. It was all very pleasant. After I left, she offered to take me to the station on the day of my flight, and although it was easier for me to simply get the bus from St Ives, I appreciated that.
That afternoon I met my friends again. She and I walked through the meadow to the Hemingfords, and there I got a taste of how the other half really live. He met us at the end, the Three Jolly Butchers pub, in his car, because he can’t walk that sort of distance. In the middle, we had a pint in the beer garden at the Axe & Compass in Hemingford Abbots, which is just across the road from my old kindergarten, or “playschool” as we called it. At the Jolly Butchers we all ate something different. I had fish and chips again, and a cider – about twenty quid’s worth.
St James Church, by the river in Hemingford Grey
The next day I took the bus into Cambridge. I didn’t do a lot there. I wandered over to Midsummer Common where they have a big fair every June where loads of people get stoned, or at least used to. That day, instead of a fair they had “Our Place in Space”, a kind of exhibit of the Solar System. This was the start of the tour, and the four inner planets were all a short stroll from the sun. Walk across the common to the Cam and several miles beyond (it was all at scale), you could reach the outer planets, including (yes!) Pluto, but that would have taken me all day, so I abandoned that idea and instead grabbed an enormous coffee in a two-handled cup from Costa. I then bought some books from Fopp, which was always one of my favourite shops in the city, and more from Oxfam, though I knew most of them wouldn’t go in my luggage.
The inner planetsSt Ives
I finished a second book, then saw my friends one last time, then saw I had a message from Ryanair telling me to be at the airport three hours before my flight. Flying is deceptively time-consuming. I had a quick chat to my parents until the data ran out on my phone – blame Brexit for that – and after a broken sleep I was off to Stansted.
On Monday morning (1st August), it was time to say goodbye to my brother and sister-in-law, and their very scenic part of England. My brother dropped me off at Bournemouth bus station, or should I say coach station, from where I had five-hour-plus journey to Birmingham. (This was the only bus I could find that cut out even more hours by avoiding London.) At the front of the bus was a young man who was completely mad, but in a good way. There were mad people in Dorset too; I was pleased that the UK still has room for them. We stopped for 45 minutes at a service station just before Oxford; this was probably some health-and-safety thing. At Oxford itself the madman got off. At 2pm I arrived in Birmingham; my friend met me at the station, and we walked to the apartment where he and his French girlfriend live. It’s a biggish flat in a large block in the centre of town. Their building is in the middle of having all its cladding replaced as a response to the Grenfell disaster. A depressingly familiar tale to me. Endless board meetings. All that time and energy. And the propect of eye-popping bills. At least he can afford them.
His girlfriend had a busy day working from home, so my friend (who had some time off) showed me around the city centre which was humming because of the Commonwealth Games and the sunny weather. The giant bull from the opening ceremony had been plonked in Victoria Square. We walked down one of Birmingham’s many canals; this is always a pleasure. In the evening we visited three eating and drinking establishments – places where locals go to – and for some reason I found this massively enjoyable. In one of the pubs we played the Romanian-made rummy game that I’d bought them. They play a lot of board games so I thought they might appreciate that. They seemed to. I like his girlfriend who has a great sense of humour and is a big fan of languages. Her English is mindblowingly good. She’s even picked up a Brummie accent.
Birmingham Library
I slept well on their sofa bed, and the next morning it was off to the Games. It was a much greyer day. When we got to the venue, which just happened to be our old university campus, the marshals and even the police were on happy mode. They’d been instructed to be as nice to the public as possible – surely they weren’t like that in real life – and the tactic worked. We saw two women’s hockey matches – that’s without ice in case you’re wondering. First up was Australia against New Zealand. Australia scored early via a penalty stroke, and they kept their slender lead until the final whistle. (Damn!) The second match was far less close, Canada smashing Ghana 8-1, but if anything it was more enjoyable. The Ghanaian men’s team were in the stands, and they burst into song and dance to encourage the beleaguered women. The biggest celebration of the morning was when Ghana scored. I liked that many of the announcers clearly came from in and around Birmingham, and other little touches like playing ELO’s wonderful Mr Blue Sky injected a local flavour. After that, we grabbed lunch in Selly Oak and wandered around the campus. Twenty years after graduating, this felt slightly weird to me. The maths block, complete with the “bridge” where people their assignments at the last minute, still stood, as did the twelve-storey Muirhead Tower which was an ongoing joke when we were there. Inexplicably, the grand old library building had recently been torn down.
New Street Station, looking rather different to how I remember itAustralia v NZThe Ghanaian menMy old campus, including the famous Old Joe clock tower
My friend left me to my own devices so I could see the squash that started at 4pm. I liked not having to engage with anyone for a few hours. Squash. What would that be like? Intriguingly I sat facing the front wall of the glass court, so all the balls were being hit towards me. (That’s why I was keen to go. Visually I had no idea what to expect.) Above the court was a video screen that provided a more traditional view, and my eyes kept flitting between the screen and the court.
I saw four matches: the semi-finals of both the men’s and women’s. It was gladiatorial stuff. Play was punctuated by lets and video appeals and ball warming after stoppages in play. On several occasions there was “court service” which meant vigorous moppage to wipe potentially dangerous sweat patches from the surface of the court. There were set points, or rather game balls, that came and went, and rallies that left both players gasping for air. One of the women’s matches ended on a tie-break. This was all something I could relate to from my travails on the tennis court.
A dramatic fourth-game tie-break
On the way back to my friend’s place I had a job finding a place to eat because, since Covid, so many places had gone cashless and cash was all I had. I managed in the end. When I got back, the three of us chatted and soon I was off to bed. The next morning my friend and I hung around town, and there was a shared sense of disappointment in how much was closed (for renovation or some other reason) given the big sporting event in town and rare opportunity to showcase the city. The central library normally affords a spectacular view from the top floor, but that day it was out of bounds. The museum and art gallery, impressive as you go in, only provided a skeleton service. As we had coffee in the beautiful Edwardian tearoom, we pondered how Birmingham can better promote itself. Right now it does a shitty job. We decided that a heavy metal museum – the World Heavy Metal Museum – would be a good start.
Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath
After lunch it was back on the bus, er, coach. I’d enjoyed my time in Birmingham, twelve years after my previous visit, and I was extremely lucky to be there for the Commonwealth Games. I was in New Zealand for the 1990 Auckland Games which were a huge success. I can still remember Goldie the kiwi and the official song, This Is the Moment. The Commonwealth games have become something of an anachronism since then, but I must say I liked what I saw in Birmingham.
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