by If the world hadn’t been turned upside down, Mum and Dad would have been making their way here about now. It seems a lifetime ago that long-haul travel was even thinkable.
My grandmother (Dad’s mum) would have been 98 today. Ten years ago she was still around, thanks to the marvels of modern medicine, and I was staying with her in the UK. I took her to a pub in Houghton for a birthday lunch – it was deathly quiet. I wrote about my time with my grandmother – my last time, sadly, before she passed away in January 2012 – in my old blog, which I called Fixed and Floating.
Ah yes, Fixed and Floating. I called it that because (a) I supposedly had a life and a career but in reality I was directionless, and (b) I was living in New Zealand, a country obsessed with the housing market. At the time I was even living in Auckland, where the feeding frenzy was quite ludicrous. “Do you fix or float your mortgage?” was a common topic around the water cooler.
When I did buy my first property, I fixed part of my mortgage but had a revolving-credit facility for the rest, so I wouldn’t risk losing my flat if the house of cards (a.k.a. my job) caved in, which of course it did almost the moment I moved in. And now, eight years on, I’ve decided to sell my flat at a gigantic loss. A horrible decision, but I (and the other owners who didn’t want to sell originally) have finally run out of road. Every morning lately I’ve woken up to emails where people have written screeds, and I’ve been forced to take an interest in something I’m nowhere near thinking about caring about. I think the body corporate committee, especially the chair, secretly enjoy all the expansive language and officiousness. I’ve now had three Zoom meetings, including one on Monday that lasted an hour and 50 minutes. I won’t make Sunday’s deadline to sign, because of all the legal requirements, but the body corporate have said I’ll be OK if get all the wheels in motion. This morning I saw a notary public (in Romania this is simply called a notar) to certify my ID documents. Surprisingly she didn’t make me take off my mask – none of the pictures on my passports and driver’s licence look much like the current version of me, even maskless. It might take ages for us to sell (the pandemic won’t help), but in the meantime I’ll still receive rental income, and I’ll be able to concentrate on things I care about, like teaching, writing this book, learning a language or two, and maybe even travelling when that becomes an option again. It’s absolutely bloody awful but I just have to make the best of it.
On Tuesday I finally dared to visit the market, so I could buy some strawberries. They were very good.
