by The coronation pictures that were beamed around the world didn’t do much to help the stereotype: it always rains in England. I get that practically every time it rains here. You must be used to this. It’s like England. Hahaha. Of course I haven’t actually lived in England for almost twenty years, and we got pretty low rainfall where I lived anyway. The iffy weather meant they unfortunately couldn’t do the full fly-past over Buckingham Palace.
After a terrible night’s sleep I rose to England-ha-ha-ha weather. An early lesson where I got my student to translate an article about magic mushrooms from Romanian to English. It tipped it down all morning, then magically cleared. A glorious afternoon. My eighties Dutch bike had been playing up again so I took it in to the repair shop; they said I’ll need a whole new rear wheel at a cost of about 200 lei. It should be ready tomorrow. So I had to use my even older German bike (late seventies?) to get to my lesson with the single pair of twins. I hadn’t ridden it for ages. It seemed very tough going; how did I ever manage on that thing? But the lesson was so much fun and gave me such an energy boost that on the way back home I wondered what the problem was. One of the questions in the lesson was from an oldish textbook – it mentioned sending a fax. What the hell is a fax? Do you mean facts? Flax? Flex? Ha. They’re twelve. I had a low-tech upbringing thanks to my parents who didn’t want to spend the money. My brother and I eventually persuaded Dad to buy a fax machine, and I still remember the man-on-the-moon feeling in the living room when we received our first fax. In 1997!
I still can’t get over how dark the twins’ ground-floor flat is. Permanently. Not a shaft of that wonderful sunlight penetrated their apartment this afternoon. I looked at a few places to buy in that area, and I’m glad I didn’t go any further than that. It’s handy to everything, but the traffic there is horrendous, and nothing there is older than about 1980. The lack of anything old would have got to me. As for the real new suburbs, I just couldn’t.
On the way to the twins I dropped off my British driving licence with a translator. To get it converted to a Romanian one, my British one has to be translated, even though there’s nothing to really translate, then notarised. I had to pay 85 lei up front. I hope they actually do it and I get my licence back. That’s the problem with living here: you constantly have to trust people. (Currently they have two licences; one that allows me to drive and another that allows them to print money.) I wasn’t happy with having to shell out so much today. At least the bike people actually do something useful instead of purely bureaucratic.
One of my evening lessons was online, in which I played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with a bright nine-year-old girl. She actually texted one of her friends for the phone-a-friend lifeline. Her dad was there, and he said in English, “Don’t ask him, he’s dumb.” Charming.
A red 1.4-litre Dacia Logan has just popped up in my search results. That would be just right for me.
