by Mum is in Central Otago on a four-day golfing trip. That gave me the opportunity to talk to Dad last night. Properly. We talked about Trump (good lord!), Brexit (again, agreeing on just about everything even though we voted differently), Leonard Cohen (Dad was quite a big fan), the restoration of Dad’s MGA, the quite magnificent swarm of starlings I saw in town the night before, my challenges here in Romania (there are many), and so on. We talked for an hour and a half and it was great. Most importantly, we talked about Mum. On the train from Deva to Sibiu I received an email from Dad in which he said that life at home was becoming uncomfortable due to Mum’s high stress levels. I replied, including a short paragraph about Mum: “When anything slightly annoying happens, Mum always has to raise the stakes and make the atmosphere unpleasant. It’s all so unnecessary. She’s completely unaware of what she’s doing. Of course if you tell her that, things get very ugly indeed.” Dad read my email out to Mum, omitting that paragraph, but she knew Dad’s password and she read it herself two days later. I phoned them from Sibiu just after she read it and she wouldn’t speak to me. Dad said he forgot to delete the email. I didn’t regret writing what I did, or that she read it, but I still felt sick and didn’t sleep much that night.
I love Mum to bits. That should go without saying. She’s done a heck of a lot for me over the years. But that doesn’t mean she’s perfect. She’s always had a short fuse, and as Dad and I agreed last night, it’s got even shorter of late, to the point where she creates a perpetual state of tension and gloom. If Dad checks the mail and finds a brown envelope, he’s loath to show it to Mum because he knows it’ll set her off. Somebody at the golf club will provoke her one minute, someone at the church group the next, her next-door neighbour the minute after that. They travel overseas a lot but almost anything can go wrong when you’re travelling, and with Mum, the slightest thing can trigger the switch. The episode just before I left where she almost break-danced would have been funny if didn’t reveal that she has a fairly serious problem. And you absolutely can’t talk to her about any of this. Dad can’t. I can’t. Nobody can. In fact it’s very hard to reason with Mum about anything. You might as well reason with Donald Trump (who, thankfully, Mum can’t stand).
Mum is 67. She could easily (and hopefully will) be around for another quarter-century, as her own mother (who had the same short fuse) almost was. She could easily outlive me. We’re in for a lot of screaming and shouting, and perhaps break-dancing, in the meantime.
At times I get down too. Yesterday I walked seven or eight miles trying to find supermarkets where I could put up ads for teaching. I found two, but haven’t had a bite yet. Perhaps I never will. It was a sunny day, I saw some parts of the city I hadn’t seen before, I had a pleșkaviță and two langoși for lunch at Piața 700, so things weren’t too bad. Autumn has been a lovely time of year to see Timișoara. But my confidence is low, I’m struggling to meet people, and at times it feels people are actively trying to avoid having anything to do with me. Learning Romanian has been interesting, in the same way that learning Ancient Greek would be interesting, and so far it’s been about as much use. But I need to keep going, I need to get up early, to walk those eight miles in the sun or the rain or (give it a month) the snow, in the hope that something will happen. It will take time, but I have time. I also want to start writing a book I’d planned to write years and years ago, because I now have time.
I also need to spend less time on the bloody internet. The US election was a huge moment in modern human history, and it’s hard not to read what everybody is saying about it, but gosh all those news sites are a time-waster. Then there’s Facebook. The people at that language school said I should have a page to help me promote my teaching. Not a bad idea, so I set one up, this time in my real name. But I really can’t be arsed with it. I’m interested in engaging with people about 30% of the time and with dozens of people all at once about 0% of the time. I messed around with one or two settings to reduce the creep factor, and I didn’t even provide my email address, instead signing up through my Romanian phone number which is almost a blank slate. I certainly didn’t say which school I went to; why on earth would I suddenly want to connect with my classmates from 20-plus years ago?
I’ll cover the election properly in my next post. Hillary Clinton is currently about 600,000 votes ahead. There are still a couple of million to count but I think she’ll be fine.
