by On Friday I got a call from the police. What happened to my your bike? I told him, and he said I had to come in to give a statement so he could close the case. I went in first thing this morning. When I arrived, the receptionist was smoking. He asked me who I’d spoken to. No idea, I said. Eventually the officer met me and showed me to an upstairs corridor with several rooms on both sides. He led me into room 8 where we sat down. There were mugshots pinned to the wall as well as two stopped clocks, one advertising Camel cigarettes. I tried not to get too close to the officer; he wasn’t wearing a mask. Just imagine getting Covid because of a $90 bike. That would be so typically Romanian. He typed up a statement and I had to write some bits and bobs on the end. He told me my written Romanian was better than some Romanians’. Then I was free to go.
Yesterday I met the guy who teaches at British School. We had a drink in Piața Unirii. It was sunny, 17 degrees, and pretty lively when you consider that it came at the end of Romania’s deadliest week since the Second World War. (This week will surely be deadlier still.) Nobody checked our green passes or anything of that sort. We talked about teaching and Margaret Thatcher, then I gave him a short impromptu Romanian lesson.
My near-neighbour, whose husband plays tennis, recently gave me five pancakes. In return I baked them a quince crumble. I’ve had no feedback whatsoever on that, despite meeting him twice at tennis since then, so I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly a hit. At the weekend a new guy in (I guess) his late fifties showed up. Shortly after my arrival in the country, I learnt that one in three adult Romanians no longer have any of their original teeth. This guy had about four teeth in total. The spoof travel guide Molvanîa, written by Australians and a minor hit in New Zealand at about the time I moved there, is surely based on Romania and its neighbour Moldova.
Another British politician has been murdered. Conservative MP David Amess was stabbed to death on Friday at his constituency office in Essex. I didn’t know much about him, except that Mum once joked about his surname (“a mess”), and he once spoke out in parliament against a drug, Cake, which was entirely fictitious. British politics, and Britain in general, is in a dark place right now.
