Month: October 2016

International travel

My happy place: boarding a train

October 6, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m on the Eurostar, the second of five trains that will, I hope, get me to Timișoara. Travelling by train is bloody great. I think I could do this for weeks. My journey started with an early morning bus ride from St Ives to Cambridge. We just managed to avoid a protest in Cambridge that would have probably caused me to miss my train to London. Public transport in the UK is a much bigger deal than it ever is in New Zealand. Several times already I’ve been on a packed bus or train and one of the passengers has shouted a command: to vacate seats for elderly passengers or move down the carriage. The experience, which really can be cramped at times, has an almost military feel about it.

As I got a coffee at St Pancras I got a rare look “behind the scenes” at the café’s so-called Happy Board. The company had four values: Integrity, Freshness, Collaboration and something beginning with E that has slipped my mind. Ah, Excellence, of course. Employees’ ratings were posted on the Happy Board in columns of ticks and crosses. Next to Alex’s scores was a message in purple: “Not good enough Alex! Retrain!” This is 2016 so I’m guessing Alex has a 2:1 in psychology (or something) from a good university.

I watched the speech that Theresa May gave yesterday at the Tory party conference. It was compelling, and signalled the end of neoliberalism that has been part of British politics since I was born. I’ve never known anything else. Whether any of what May talked about actually materialises is another matter, and there was precious little policy in the speech anyway. For the foreseeable future the EU exit (which didn’t need to happen to move away from neoliberalism) will dominate.

On Tuesday night I dropped in on some friends of my parents who have lived in the same house, on the street I grew up in, since 1978. I like them. We must have chatted for two hours. It was an extremely cosmopolitan street back then: they said that it had a reputation for being “where the wogs and hippies live”. They still live a fairly alternative lifestyle all these decades later, and have always just made ends meet by running a craft shop in town. They voted to remain and said they felt numb at the result. The referendum brought out some very strong emotions in people that you rarely see even at a general election.

Yesterday I figured out where all the interesting British clothes have gone. They’re in charity shops, of which St Ives has at least six. I’ll definitely try and pick up some bargains the next time I’m in the UK.

The sun is shining and I’m whistling through northern France at 300 km an hour.  Yeah man, this my happy place.

International travel - The UK

England: latest update

October 4, 2016 plutomanby 1 Comment

On Sunday I did a six-mile walk through Hemingford Grey, Hemingford Abbots, Houghton and St Ives. It’s so easy here to go on a longish walk, or bike ride, without having to worry about personal locator beacons or wear lycra. It’s all so much more accessible. You don’t even have to wear helmets on your bike here (I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but they are a hassle). I walked past our old house, my grandmother’s old house, the tennis club, the school I went to until I was eight, and the place where my playschool used to be (it has been replaced by a smarter building and only the old sign now remains). I saw the water mill in Houghton in operation and watched a narrow boat make its way through Houghton Lock; it was travelling upstream. As I watched the lock fill up an old lady remarked how wonderfully slow and calm the process was. Being early October the blackberries were out, and in enormous quantities (I might fill up a shopping bag and make a pie tonight, but I’ll only have two evenings to eat it). The stinging nettles were everywhere as they were as a kid. The thicket linking Houghton and St Ives, following the Ouse, that I must have walked and cycled through hundreds of times to see my grandmother, had that same distinct smell. This time I didn’t see a muntjac deer. When I was almost home a brass band was playing on the Quay.

On Saturday I met up with my university friend in London. He was with his girlfriend from Normandy who, after just two years of living in Birmingham, is fluent in English which she speaks with a Brummie accent. I was blown away. What’s the secret?

We met in Covent Garden and saw one of those street performers who unties himself. We walked along the Thames, got some food from an outdoor market, then spent a couple of hours at the Tate Modern (trying to figure out at least some of the exhibits) and a couple more at a pub before finishing up at a pizza place on Tottenham Court Road.

The highlight of London for me was the pub, because that gave us the chance to chat. We talked about Brexit quite extensively. My friend was amazed by the result; he’d expected something along the lines of a 60% Remain vote. I’d expected a close vote, and although I was bitterly disappointed by the Leave result, I wasn’t all that surprised (as anybody who for some bizarre reason read my blog in June would have seen). We agreed that Remain failed to make an emotional case for their position (peace in the region since WW2 being the obvious one to make); otherwise they probably would have won. Following Theresa May’s speech on Sunday it appears Britain will be out of the EU (but I’m still not sure what that really means) by March 2019. My friend and I for some reason ended up discussing my mum. He said that you don’t win by having the most shit when you die. Mum would do well to understand that.

Yesterday I went to Cambridge, which is a beautiful city, especially on a lovely sunny day like yesterday. I tried in vain to find a Romanian dictionary. Well, they were there, but in short supply and well beyond what I was prepared to pay. My best bet would be to wait till I get to Romania. I know there are all kinds of dictionaries and apps out there, but with a physical dictionary you get to see adjacent words and I think you learn more as a result. I went into some clothes shops, expecting to find the more interesting items that you’d never get in New Zealand, but I was sorely disappointed. Unlike what I saw the previous times I’ve come back here, everything was deeply drab. Maybe austerity under Cameron and Osborne is to blame. In Oxfam I found David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, a large tome that I bought for £2.50 and will remain at my parents’ place until I next come back here.

I see this is my 100th post.