by I spoke to my brother last night. He’d been skiing in France (Les Deux Alpes) with his army mates. I ended up speaking more with my sister-in-law than with him. She’s a lovely person; it still amazes me how he managed to find someone as nice as her. After that I had a long chat with my parents. It was good to talk to my mum for a decent length of time. Dad’s headaches are still unremitting. He survives cancer, and now this? Every day?
Yesterday one of my students called me to say she was at the Christmas market with her husband and eight-year-old son. Would I like to join them? That was kind of them, and I was only free because another student had cancelled. They’re from Bucharest, came to Timișoara for work, and are now itching to go back. I had some mulled wine and sarmale, and tried some șorici, or strips of pork rind. I couldn’t stomach it. There was a march commemorating the 30th anniversary of the revolution. My student and her husband thought it was all a waste of time. “It’s been thirty years!” As if that’s somehow a long time. It was clear that they’re part of the modern generation of Romanians, happy to forget their past.
On Friday I bumped into the elderly couple who live on the sixth floor. A different generation, a different world almost from the people I met yesterday. They lamented the benign December we were having, and longed for the Decembers of fifty years ago with snow up to their knees. According to them, Timișoara was going to hell in a hardcart, judging by the way people dress (flip-flops!) and their lack of respect for one another. I felt sorry for them as they told me about their aches and pains, and even more sorry when they said they had a son who had lost contact with them. However, I enjoyed the chat, and I came away feeling a certain pride that I was able to communicate in Romanian with people from a very different background without too many problems.
The election result. I saw it coming. An 80-seat overall majority for the Conservatives. I don’t think Brexit affected the outcome so much as Jeremy Corbyn, who was deeply unpopular. He’d been vilified. One of my students sent me a link to a Daily Mail article written in August about Corbyn’s choice of summer holiday destination. Corbyn had visited, guess where, Romania. An ex-communist country! And we know he’s a communist. But regardless of that, going to Romania proves that he’s weird. Not like you normal people reading this column who wouldn’t even be able to locate Romania on a map. And what’s more, he flew Wizz Air! How can you be a prime minister if you use a budget airline?
Labour picked up the wrong message from the 2017 election. Yes, they overperformed expectations and importantly prevented a Tory majority, but Corbyn was not the man to build on what was still, after all, a defeat. It reminded me somewhat of the 2005 general election in New Zealand, where National under Don Brash (in his mid-sixties) bounced back from a devastating loss in 2002 to only lose narrowly, but National realised they needed to hand over the reins to somebody younger and fresher. Labour (in the UK) are now in a pretty bad place. Corbyn’s acolytes are front and centre in the party. Unless that changes, we’re looking a whole decade of Boris and his mates.
So what does this all mean for me? Honestly I’ve got no idea. In a few months, my registration certificate with an expiry date of September 2022 might not be worth the paper it’s written on. I plan to visit the immigration office tomorrow, but I bet the bloke at the desk won’t have a clue.
Three cancellations so far today. Oh, and guess what, I bumped into S on Thursday, not long before my worst election fears became reality. I thought that if I hadn’t seen her in all this time, I perhaps never would, but I was cycling back from a lesson and there she was. She told me her grandmother, who must have been nearly 90, had died. Perhaps we’ll meet up again after Christmas.
