by As much as I’m enjoying the warm weather, my flat is approaching sauna territory, so I’m currently shirtless.
On Thursday I made my monthly trip to the out-of-hours doctor and the next day I picked up my drugs from the pharmacy, including (of course) the antidepressants. Going to the pharmacy here is always fun, because you get to see the tremendous array of over-the-counter medicines available. You can get the wonderfully-named Spazz, which comes in a yellow and black box, or better still, Codamin. Who knows what Codamin does, but judging by the box alone, I know I want some.
My life isn’t exactly terrible right now, but my time in the UK made me realise it could still be better. Here’s what I’m going to do:
1. Use the internet less. Way less. Of course sometimes I really do need it – it’s kind of important for my job – but not having it in the UK made me realise what a time-waster it can be. (My internet is currently down for some unknown reason, so I’m tapping this out in Word.)
2. Get up at seven, at the latest, every weekday (sometimes I have lessons which force me to get up earlier than that).
3. Lose some weight. Last month I stepped on a set of scales for the first time since I moved here. I pretty much dismissed the reading out of hand. I mean, the first digit was an eight! That couldn’t be right. Obviously. But then I tried to get into two pairs of trousers I’d left at my parents’ flat. I wriggled my way into one of them, just, but I had no chance with the other. Mainly I need to eat smaller lunches, as much as I love the salami and cheese and eggs I’ve become accustomed to, and far less bread in general.
4. Wear (and in some cases buy) clothes that I want to wear. Not what I think I should wear. Shit, I’m my own boss now. I’m the only person doing what I’m doing in this whole city. I can do what I like (and if I do, I’ll feel better for it).
5. Join a tennis club. For social reasons. Outside work, I’m not meeting enough people.
I was going to write about the rest of my UK trip, but not a lot happened. I did a fair bit of reading (by my standards), met up with my friends who came to Romania last autumn, bought a suit in Marks & Spencer’s in Cambridge for my brother’s wedding, watched Masters golf and snippets of the Commonwealth Games on TV (watching sport is a bit of a rarity for me these days), and got wet. Other than the day I spent in London, the weather ranged from iffy to atrocious. I found a new appreciation for St Ives – if you ignore the northern two-thirds of it where most of the people live, it’s very pleasant and at times bustling town that I was blasé about when I lived there. On my last day I got my brother’s old racing bike pumped up and took it for a pleasant ride around Houghton and the Hemingfords. It was locked away in a shed with a yellow “Danger of Death” sign on the door. He assured me it was safe and the sign was a deterrent only, but I admit I did get a second opinion from somebody else who lived in the complex.
Flying back from Luton was horrible. Flying from major airports is such a rigmarole now, and there are simply too many people in too little space for too long. This time we faced a 90-minute delay because our plane was late arriving from Tel Aviv. Probably 95% of the passengers were Romanian and when I got chatting with a family in their native language, I thought, you know what, I’m not doing too badly here. So that was something. But it was a low-stakes situation, and I need more of them. The in-the-air bit was fine, and as for arriving to the sounds and smells of Timișoara, well that bit was bloody fantastic. Even if it was after two o’clock in the morning. This place felt like home.
