by 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.
