by My work volume has dropped off a little in the last week or two, so I’ve started advertising again. I put up an online ad, mostly in Romanian but with the last line in English: “I look forward to teaching you English.” Someone replied to my ad, questioning my command of my mother tongue. He didn’t think the -ing on the end of “teaching” should have been there. I swiftly corrected him; he was making a very common mistake.
Last night I bumped into Bogdan, the guy in his early forties who lives on the second floor of my block, in apartment 10. (I live at number 13, on the third of eight floors.) For months and months I saw him hanging around outside the apartment building, and until I got talking to him I never imagined he actually lived there. We decided to go for a beer in the square, just opposite our block, and he seemed reasonably switched on. He even knew a reasonable amount of English; he said he’d done eight years of it at school. He doesn’t work, and doesn’t currently have a functioning cell phone.
Among all the big news stories that flashed by in the first half of last week, I completely neglected to mention Thomas Cook, a big travel company that went to the wall. The number of people stranded overseas was in six figures. The modern company didn’t bear much resemblance to the outfit whose memorable slogan I remember as a kid: “Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it.” However, it was still headquartered in Peterborough and it will be a huge blow to the city.
When I spoke to my dad yesterday, he reminded me of the time (or one of the times) I completely freaked out when I was small. I would have been three or four, and we’d gone to the airport to pick up my grandmother who had flown all the way from New Zealand. I guess this must have been Terminal 3 of Heathrow. Even in the eighties it was vast and chaotic, and none of that helped, but I think it was the loudspeaker announcements that did it for me. I screamed and bawled, and broke out in a hot sweat. Dad said he wasn’t angry with me, but instead he felt powerless and sad. Another episode came in a shop called Habitat in the newly-opened Grafton Centre in Cambridge. On this occasion it was the thick ceiling pipes that I couldn’t handle. They totally spooked me. There were all manner of shops I just wouldn’t go into back then. Shops with freezers were a particular problem. I really didn’t like freezers. Except the dozens that must have been in John’s Freezer Centre in Godmanchester, where I often went with Mum; somehow those ones were OK. Tesco’s in Bar Hill was never an easy one for me. It was huge for a start, there were frequent tannoy announcements, and of course lots and lots of freezers. I was about seven when I got over all of this.
Dad and I also talked about the political situation in the UK, following the incendiary session in the Commons on Wednesday. We agreed that the risks associated with Brexit have now become secondary to the risks that Britain’s democracy will be irreparably damaged. Dad said that he voted to leave in 2016 because he wanted to “shake the tree” a bit. We had a good laugh at that. He now says he’d vote to remain in a future referendum.
I recently watched the five-part Chernobyl series. Very good. Chilling, but brilliant. I imagine the cover-ups and chicanery were even worse than depicted on screen. I certainly won’t be watching the Russian-made version.
