by This afternoon I had a Skype chat with my cousin. He lives in upstate New York, and I stayed with him and his Italian wife (and saw the US Open with them) on my trip through America four years ago. (They weren’t married then. They tied the knot in Italy the following year.) I’d say my cousin has aged a bit. We talked about his job, my job, our parents, tennis, cricket, and I can’t remember exactly what else. Oh yes, he thought that S (regular readers might remember her) was still possibly a thing. We did venture briefly into the world of politics, and he thought Trump would probably fail in his re-election bid. “I hope he gets annihilated.” Well, so do I, but I wouldn’t bank on it. I’d put his chances of re-election at 50%, which admittedly is low for an incumbent presiding over a strong economy. So much will depend on who the Democrats nominate. On the bright side for us anti-Trumpers, the nominee probably won’t be as unpopular as Hillary Clinton was.
My brother told me that, according to some app he checks every five minutes, his house had dropped in value, in a currency that is itself dropping in value. Where’s it all going to stop? The pound is languishing at €1.064. British airports are now giving one euro (or less) for a pound, high-street bureaux may soon do the same, and before we know it the official rate – the one you see on sites like xe.com – might crash through the one-for-one barrier. Then we’ll all watch the same thing happen against the US dollar. And then, who knows? The Canadian dollar? The Bulgarian lev (currently two to the pound, and pegged against the euro)? I remember when the pound used to make me feel proud. I know it’s silly because the value of a unit of currency is arbitrary, but I’d look at the board at a Cambio Wechsel in Singapore or Bali or wherever, and the pound rate would jump out at me. It was always the biggest number. The Rolls-Royce of currencies. Now somebody needs to slam on the brakes before it hurtles over the cliff.
I’ll have money in all kinds of varieties and colours to contend with in the next twelve days. I say “contend with”, but weird and wonderful money is quite fun to deal with, really. I read that Montenegro doesn’t have a currency. That has the potential to be really fun, or not, but unfortunately Montenegro is pretty boring when it comes to money, and just uses the rather insipid euro with all its pictures of pretend bridges, even though it isn’t in the EU. Serbia’s note-heavy money is a bit more inspiring, while I’m looking forward to my first taste of the Bosnian convertible mark (currency code: BAM!).
My itinerary: tomorrow I’m taking the bus from Timișoara to Belgrade, where I’ll stay two nights, then I’ll the train from Belgrade to Bar (three nights in Bar), then I’ll need to take a bus and taxi to Mostar, where I’ll spend two further nights. From Mostar I’ll probably take another supposedly spectacular train to Sarajevo. Yes, I’ll be visiting some places that were all over the news in the nineties. I’d like to visit Jajce, a much smaller place in Bosnia, but I’m likely to just run out of time. A week on Friday I intend to be back in Belgrade and spend one night there on the way home. Whatever happens I’m just grateful for some time off.
