by The sweet aroma of tei – lime – is now permeating the whole city, as it always does in June. It’s now 46 days until I really go away – this summer will be a short one for me.
As for my mini-trip to England, it wasn’t much of a holiday. I’d been struggling with sleep all week, and then on Friday I had to be up just after four to catch the plane. When I called the taxi at that ungodly hour, it was here in under a minute. The flight to Luton was as about as fine as it can be when you’ve hardly slept a wink. I took two comfortable buses to Cambridge and I was happy that they took a while. I arrived in Cambridge just before midday, and my first stop was – ugh – Barclays. The lady at Barclays didn’t accept my Romanian power bill as proof of address, so she asked me to provide a Romanian bank statement with my address at the top. Slight snag: my bank statement didn’t show that information. Oh god, what do I do now?
I took the guided bus to St Ives. The small market was on, and in a very British conversation, two stallholders were discussing the amount of jelly they liked in their pork pies. Up to the flat. Cup of tea time. Alas, no water. My brother had turned it off. I scrabbled around and eventually found the tap. Phew. A cup of tea and then off to the library. I needed online access to my Romanian bank, but I couldn’t receive text messages. After an enormous amount of faff, and two separate payments, I had roaming access. Whatever I did though, I couldn’t find anything on my online bank account that gave proof or even the merest inkling of my address. My only option was to phone my bank and hope they could email me something. Phone calls to Romania didn’t work, so I used Skype. I was on hold for ages but got through to a woman who said that, yes, they could email me something. After complimenting me on my Romanian she said she’d need to put me through to a colleague. While I was on hold for a second time, my Skype credit ran out, and after two hours in the library I left, defeated.
I went over to my parents’ friends’ place. They were working in the garden. He had improved since his I saw him last summer following his near-death experience, though he was still underweight. She was now quite frail. They let me use their laptop, and on my third Skype call (I got disconnected after 25 minutes on both my first two attempts), I got through to the bank. Yes, we can send you something, but it won’t be a statement as such, and anyway you won’t get it until you’re back in Romania. Fantastic. (Unlike the UK, where it’s a legal requirement for bank statements to show addresses, in Romania it’s a legal requirement for them not to show addresses. I was in something akin to a Catch-22 situation.) I didn’t want to outstay my welcome with my parents’ friends because they were heading down to Southampton the next morning for a surprise family birthday party.
That evening, and most of the next day, I felt shattered and didn’t want to do anything. The sinus pain wasn’t helping. I read and tried my best to complete a puzzle book that Mum had started in 2017. I could see that Mum had struggled to fill in the names of celebrities, and I was no better on that score. In the afternoon I forced myself to cycle to my aunt’s place in Earith, six miles away. I knocked on her door. No answer. The back entrance was unlocked, and I tapped on the window. My overweight, hobbling aunt appeared in a pink dressing gown. This was 3pm. As usual, she was aware of what was happening in the world but showed little interest in other people’s lives. She did however give me a beer while she smoked and drank, and then gave me a pizza to take home.
On Sunday I went for a longish bike ride to the Godmanchester nature reserve, and otherwise just read and hung around St Ives; the area around the river where I grew up, and away from the housing estate to the north, is very nice indeed. My brother would like to move back there, to the place where he grew up, and I could see why. I recently read an article about the other St Ives, the more famous tourist hotspot in Cornwall whose numbers swell every summer, and someone left a comment saying that people would have a better time in the less renowned (but just as interesting) historic Cambridgeshire town.
