by When I moved to New Zealand in 2003, I was proud to be British. All the wonderful music and comedy that appeared on my TV screen made me homesick. I still remember how I felt when I went back to the UK in 2006 – this is a cool country. New Zealand is picturesque and everything, but it’s culturally dead. This place, on the other hand, is humming.
But now I switch on the TV and it’s the UK that seems culturally dead. It’s felt that way for years, long before this pandemic hit. Is Brexit to blame? Is it the internet? Something is missing. It seems the London Olympics in 2012 were Britain’s last hurrah, and since then the UK has become an increasingly inward-looking nation. Perhaps it’s just me looking in from the outside, and if I lived in the UK everything would feel as alive as ever (once you ignore the effects of coronavirus, of course).
I watched bits of Boris in parliament this afternoon. I’ve heard some people say that he’s mad (and the same of Trump). Maybe, but that’s not the right criticism. There’s nothing wrong with being a bit mad. The most interesting, most creative people tend to head in that direction. (The attraction of Romania to me as opposed to, say, Hungary or Poland, was that it would be a bit madder. Things would be faded, rusty, coming apart at the seams. Things might smell a bit. Colours wouldn’t match. My kind of place.) No, the problem with Boris is that he’s massively overprivileged. He hasn’t got to his position by being any good; he’s got there on this connections, on being able to make it up as he goes along, on having far too much self-confidence pumped into him at Eton. In a pandemic crisis like this, you need attention to detail, clarity of message, and bucketloads of sincerity. In other words, Boris is exactly who you don’t want at the helm. He’s potentially dangerous. (He’s still better than Trump, though. With Trump, there’s no potentially about it. That guy is evil. In all 17-plus stone of him, there is not an ounce of empathy.)
I had a sad lesson this afternoon with the woman I once played tennis with. She’s clearly been unhappy in her marriage for some time, and is now having Skype meetings with a psychologist. After the session we had a good chat in Romanian, and I felt I did reasonably well.
The nightmare with my apartment in Wellington means I’ve gone eight years without caring about money, except at a basic level. I’d pretty much given up on achieving any sort of long-term financial strength, because that ship seemed to have sailed. And really I’d checked out about four years before I got that awful letter from the council – I still had my career in insurance, but I was going through the motions. Now though, having hit 40, it’s about time I did something. I’ve managed to kill off most of my mortgage, and my immediate goal is to eradicate it completely. With KiwiSaver and the little pots of money I have in the UK and Romania, my financial situation isn’t all that dire when you consider the enormous loss I’ve incurred in Wellington. My almost total avoidance of expenditure on anything I can’t eat has helped.
Radio Timișoara plays all sorts of weird and wonderful music, most of it surprisingly good. I sometimes Shazam the songs when I hear them. Usually (but not always), Shazam tracks down the artist and the song title, and tells me how many people have Shazammed the song to date. These numbers are often in six or seven figures, but with lesser-known Romanian songs they might only be in the dozens or hundreds. On Monday I got a bit of a surprise when I heard a new song by Ștefan Bănică (Junior – his father died some time ago). This song had interesting lyrics, including Ceaușescu and Simona Halep. I was the first person to Shazam the song:
Then a few minutes later I heard a song I liked by a band from Timișoara called All In Green. This time I was a bit tardy and had to settle for bronze:
Contrast that with Master Blaster (Jammin’) on this evening’s Stevie Wonder-themed show. Fantastic song; nearly 1.6 million searches. (The song was made in 1979 and came out in ’80, just like me.)
