Month: August 2022

Family - Life :)

The travel bug (squashed)

August 25, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents yesterday, shortly after they nearly set light to their fence and heaven knows what else. The ashes they’d disposed of were hotter than they thought, and soon their garden was in flames. Emergency over, we discussed their travel plans. Dad used to be keen to push off anywhere at the drop of a hat. Not now. Since he last left New Zealand, he’s had a major health scare and he’s been understandably spooked by the spectre of Covid. He also had a check on his heart recently; they found that his aortic arch was unusually wide, and they won’t know whether it’s expanding (which would be bad news) until he has another check-up next year. He should have been having regular checks ever since his aortic valve replacement way back in oh-five, but that was done in the UK and he slipped through the net in NZ. On top of that, he’s had a long run of splitting headaches. As for Mum, she now finds all the organisation and online booking (which inevitably she has the privilege of doing) a pain in the arse, and I can’t say I blame her. They have two kids in Europe and a grandchild coming fast, so they’re flying over, but I’m not putting any pressure on them to come and see me in Romania. They’re arriving in London on 12th October, when the new addition should be three weeks old.

Last Monday when I dismantled the massive wardrobe that was in my teaching room, I got a surprise. At the back of the top shelf, seven feet up, was a brown Gucci box which I fully expected to be empty. But no, it had a women’s Gucci bracelet watch inside. Worth a fortune? A fake? I googled Gucci watches and then went to the watch repairer next to Auchan in Iulius Mall. He put a battery in it and said that it probably is the real deal, but from Gucci’s “cheaper” collection, i.e. it would have been bought for hundreds, not thousands. It’s not the sort of watch that appreciates in value, so it might be worth £100 or maybe a tad more. Rather than selling it, I’ve decided to give it to my sister-in-law when I next see her, hopefully in October.

My big thing (by my standards) right now is doing up my teaching room. After tonight’s lesson in it, which will be almost entirely in Romanian, I’m going to set about painting it. I spoke to Dad about this yesterday. Paint it magnolia, he said. Too late, I’ve already bought a big tub of yellow paint. Real yellow. When I was growing up, my parents were always painting everything magnolia, a “colour” that I could never see the point of. It’s quite a departure for me to be painting or DIYing anything. I mean, this is the first time in my life I’ve really had my own place. My flat in Wellington was mine in name only. And here there’s extra motivation, because it’s a room I’ll be using for my business. The “teaching zone”, which I want to look distinct from the rest of my flat.

It’s late summer, so the fruit is great right now. On my last trip to the market, I bought some lovely crisp apples that reminded me of the Worcesters we had in England. There are peaches and nectarines and plums. Mountains of plums. I read somewhere that Romania is the world’s second-biggest exporter of plums, and yesterday I could see why. I went to Mehala, an older district of town where the streets have wide berms, many of which are lined with plum trees. I now have some accurate scales; I picked 5.9 kilos of plums, but I could have removed the decimal point from that and still wouldn’t have scratched the surface. Those trees were loaded; even the odd branch had collapsed under the weight of the fruit.

My teaching hours are, for the moment, way down. It gives me the chance to go for longish bike rides like I did this morning, work on my Romanian, and yes, attempt to do up my classroom before all the students (hopefully) come back.

Language learning - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - Tennis - The UK

What do you really do?

August 21, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My 14-year-old student has just resumed maths lessons with me, and after this morning’s algebra session in Dumbrăvița I met my English friend for lunch at Casa Bunicii, a restaurant just down the road. He and his girlfriend had just got back from a six-week road trip around central and eastern Europe. A storm had been brewing for a while, and as I cycled back home I got soaked to the bone but happily avoided being struck by lightning. I’m glad that the temperature has dropped after another sweltering few days.

The day I got back from my trip, I called Barclays because my bank card didn’t work in the UK. After an interminable wait, the call centre woman told me that my account had been closed because of Brexit. As a non-resident I can no longer have an account over there. “Are there any funds in your account?” Yes! I have, or had, five figures in there. She was looking at a blank screen. How can they do this? In 2022, in a supposedly civilised country, they can just disappear your account. (Bad grammar, I know.) I now have to go through a laborious process, lasting possibly three months, to hopefully get my money back.

I started with a new student on Tuesday. He wanted to start from scratch, in other words learn English in Romanian. Explaining English concepts in Romanian is no easy task for me. He seems to have a decent brain on him, and at least it was face-to-face and not online. He asked one question though that I get a lot. “What to you do for a job?” I do this. I teach English. “No, what to you really do, other than teach English?” People have a hard time believing that don’t also work for Bosch or something. A real job.

I’ve been trying to learn some Italian, in the hope that I’ll one day travel to a part of Italy where the locals are at the English level of my latest student. The good news is the internet is brimming with Italian resources, and I’ve even got a pretty handy grammar book. And it’s one notch down from Romanian in terms of complexity. The bad news is that it’s so easy to mix up Italian with Romanian, especially the simple stuff. Mai for instance means “never” in Italian, while in Romanian it means “more”. Many words end in i in both languages, but while in Italian the final i gets its full value, in Romanian it’s often a very short sound that can be close to inaudible. And so on.

Thinking about a hypothetical Birmingham-based heavy metal museum (I discussed this with my friend over there), in 2015 I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, one of many highlights of the city. At the Hall of Fame I clearly remember a woman in her twenties, who might have been autistic but it’s hard to tell, in her element and almost overcome by joy at being there. Seeing her living that dream gave me considerable pleasure.

No tennis today. The courts are waterlogged. I got two sessions in – both singles again – last weekend. After Saturday’s session I led 6-0, 2-2; the first set score flattered me as four of the games went to deuce. Sunday was a different story as I struggled to win the big points. I did hold on to win the first set 6-4, but then I fell 4-0 behind in the second. That’s a big hole to climb out of. I won the next two games, then the game after – which ended up being our last – was truly brutal. It must have gone eight deuces at least. It’s rare that I remember a specific shot in tennis – the game is nothing like golf in that respect – but as I held break point he came to the net and I put up a lob that landed in his backhand corner. Not only did my 60-year-old opponent retrieve it, which was impressive enough, but he hit a clean winner from it. It bounced so high that there simply wasn’t room between the baseline and the fence. I’ll remember that one for a while. On the last point, another break point, I lobbed him once again and he got that back too, but several shots later I was able to win the point. It’s a shame time ran out on us; 6-4, 3-4 is an interesting scenario to be in.

International travel - Photos - The UK - Travel: Europe

Getting away — part 5 of 5

August 14, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

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 Milan

A 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.

Family - Photos - The UK - Travel: Europe

Getting away — part 4 of 5

August 13, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

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 planets
St 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.

Other sports - Photos - The UK - Travel: Europe

Getting away — part 3 of 5

August 12, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

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 it
Australia v NZ
The Ghanaian men
My 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.

Family - Photos - The UK - Travel: Europe

Getting away — part 2 of 5

August 12, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My brother’s place – a four-bedroom house with an actual garden in a semi-rural part of Dorset – is something I could only dream of owning. (Or, more likely, the upkeep would be a total nightmare for me. I wouldn’t mind having their cat, though.) I got there in time to see the tail end of the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games on TV, with a mechanical bull and Duran Duran. A few days later I’d be seeing the action live.

I slept well, and my first full day in the UK went by quickly. My brother took delivery of a new bike, we went to the pub, my brother had a long chat with his neighbour and again at the local butcher’s where he got meat for the evening’s barbecue. He chatted away freely and I felt slightly jealous. After the barbecue, my sister-in-law offered me Eton mess. I had to admit that I didn’t know what Eton mess was. It’s one of those things I’d heard of and knew you could eat, but that was the extent of my knowledge. Just like Prosecco, which you can’t move for now, it wasn’t a thing when I last lived there almost two decades ago. (Eton mess is a dessert containing meringue, whipped cream, and various berries.) Then we sat down to watch the last ever episode of Neighbours.

Car boot sale

On Saturday morning I went to a car boot sale with my brother. These open-air household goods markets soared in popularity in the early nineties (“they’re better attended than church!”) and are obviously still very popular today. This one was big. For a combined fiver, I bought two games for my younger students. If I lived there, I’d be going all the time. My brother then showed me his record player and stereo system, which I quite fancied. (I don’t think he bought it for a fiver at a car boot sale.) The clear highlight of the day came in the evening when we ate fish and chips and mushy peas on Bournemouth Beach. Judging by the price, fish and chips have become something of a delicacy during my time away. Growing up, they were the treat to end all treats. The smell, the wait, the unwrapping, the proper greasy chunky chips. When my brother and I were little, there were abandoned sheds at the bottom of our garden and we pretended to run a fish and chip shop from one of the sheds. When we got home we saw a documentary on Kate Bush. I really enjoyed that. I think she’s amazing and really cool, and I’d definitely like to have some of her stuff when I get my record player.

Durdle Door

On Sunday we visited Durdle Door, which is a limestone arch on the renowned Jurassic Coast. It’s also a fun name to say. It was pretty busy there, but it would have been heaving, or rammed as Brits tend to say these days, if the weather hadn’t been overcast. We speculated as to how much money it would take for us to jump from the top of the arch. A million pounds? Ten million? We quickly settled on infinity. For me personally, the question becomes far more interesting if you leave the world of money. Would I jump if it meant I could have a family and all that normal stuff? Probably not – just watch this – but for sure it gets closer then. We also speculated on when the arch will collapse. It will one day. On the way back we stopped at Wareham, which lies on the River Frome, and had an ice cream. It was a typically British setting that doesn’t even begin to exist in Romania. Then we had a pint at a nearby pub and watched the second half of the women’s Euro football final between England and Germany. We only had one eye on the game. With ten minutes to go, Germany duly made it 1-1 and the match entered extra time. “They’ve fucked it up now, as usual,” my brother said. But no, the Lionesses scored in the added period and lifted the trophy. During the match my sister-in-law was cooking. “Hey Google, twenty minutes,” she said to her tablet. Ms Google confirmed, and the countdown commenced. I got strong Black Mirror vibes from that. My non-voice-activated phone timer gets plenty of use in my lessons, but when I’m cooking I think, it’s about quarter to now so that’ll be five-past-ish, and if I forget and it all burns to a crisp, no-one will see my calamity anyway. Such is life when you live alone.

Wareham


It was great spending time with them. They’re lovely people, both of them. Five years ago I said that if you didn’t know my brother, you might think he was a dick from some of the overconfident black-and-white stuff he came out with. But since then his sharp edges have been rounded off. He’s contemplating life outside the army, he’s doing a correspondence university course to helpfully aid him in that, and he’s a few weeks from becoming a father. As for my sister-in-law, she’s as nice as ever.

Family - International travel - Photos - Tennis - The UK - Travel: Europe

Getting away — part 1 of 5

August 11, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a while, but after two weeks away, I’m back.

On the Sunday before I left, I felt a sense of foreboding about my trip that I can’t remember feeling before. Things were bound to go horribly wrong. I played tennis that evening – singles once again – and finished (from my perspective) at 6-3, 6-3, 2-4. In the first set I led 5-0 with a set point in the next game, then my opponent started to play. At 5-3, 15-15 (shit! I’m going to lose this set now, after being up five-love), Domnul Sfâra arrived, and that perhaps knocked my opponent off his stride just enough for me. Tiredness, that near-permanent fatigue I’d been feeling, really hit me towards the end of our session. Monday was a busy day of lessons and goodbyes and finding some gender-neutral shoes for the new addition. I wasn’t able to get the made-in-Romania shoes delivered in time, so I bought some Reebok trainers with a friendly face drawn on the tongue; the woman at the checkout asked me if they were for a cat. And then I was off.

I had tons of time for my flight, but needed it all. When your previous flight was in a different epoch, expect the unexpected. I wore a mask to be on the safe side, mainly because of my heavily pregnant sister-in-law. At the airport I met a Frenchman in his seventies who had arrived too early and was in a state of anxiety and confusion. I empathised with him; the airport was full of information that was out of date or misleading or only partially correct. Signs abounded pointing to destinations that you could fly to from Timișoara ten years ago, which might as well have been the Eocene. Timișoara still has one of those delightful split-flap displays which are a dying breed. Whenever a flight takes off or lands, everything has to move up a row, and there’s something poetic about watching all those letters and digits flickety-flack into place every few minutes. If nothing else, the flick-flack noise attracts one’s attention like no video board ever could, unless it is designed to mimic the sound. (In Milan I saw a video board that did just that.) Anyway, I tried to help the Frenchman, apologising for my broken French. Once through security (and yes, I’m almost guaranteed a pat-down of some sort) we all had to stand on the staircase for what seemed like hours. I realised I’d become almost allergic to crowds.

We were delayed by an hour or so, but the flight itself was uneventful, and soon I was in the afternoon heat of Bergamo. I eventually gave up on finding a bus to my B&B on the outskirts of the city, and took an expensive (by my standards) taxi instead. I spoke some simple Italian with the taxi driver, making four languages for the day. (There was no point speaking Italian with virtually anyone else. In that part of northern Italy, it seemed anyone under fifty had more than a decent command of English.) The woman at the B&B was very pleasant. The place was like a farmhouse on the edge of the countryside, and it was popular with cyclists. I slept well but still felt tired the next morning. I had a hearty breakfast (I always appreciate that second B), called my parents, sent my brother a birthday message for his 41st, then made it up the hill to the very picturesque old town. I walked up the famous bell tower, eschewing the lift, making sure I’d reach the top just before the half-hour bell tolled. However, on reaching the top I’d forgotten all about that (this wasn’t the last time on my trip that I felt my age) and I got quite a shock two minutes later. Bonngg!! For a couple of hours I wandered around the old town, or high town as it was otherwise known, grabbing the odd coffee and gelato. I was grateful that it wasn’t so hot. I walked into the new town but found surprisingly little of interest there, so then I trekked back to the B&B.


The next morning after another breakfast where I had the works, I checked out of my relaxing accommodation and got a free bus ride to the city centre because I couldn’t figure out how to pay. I read my book – Anxious People by Fredrik Backman – by the fountains near the railway station until the dot of twelve when sprinklers for the plants suddenly came on and got me soaked. I soon dried off, and I was back on the bus to the airport. Bergamo Airport is modern and surprisingly big, considering the small size of the city. Evidently they’ve turned Bergamo into a hub of sorts. There were automated Covid-hangover toilets that barred you from entering at a certain level of occupancy. I thought I had ages before boarding, but I had an unexpectedly long hike to reach my gate. Two hours later I landed at Stansted, where my brother and sister-in-law picked me up in her almost-new Mazda, which must be a work car. (I panicked initially because we couldn’t find each other and every minute was precious. The parking fee – already exorbitant – became stratospheric after 15 minutes.) It was a real pleasure to see them again, and in three hours on the M-something and the A-something I was at their new house just outside Poole. My brother had changed – mellowed – since I saw him previously. I gave them the trainers which they put in the baby room next to the cot and pram and car seat and who knows what else.