by My brother called me yesterday morning to wish me a happy birthday. He said he got a Facebook message saying that it was Hitler’s birthday which reminded him that it was mine too. I’m not that keen on this whole birthday thing anymore. That’s half the reason I came to Romania; I could feel the years gradually slipping away.
Flying out of Timișoara is almost as easy as flying from Timaru. My flight landed at Stansted on the dot of six but I didn’t get to St Ives until after nine; I just happened to miss both the train and the bus by a couple of minutes. By that stage I was ravenous and grabbed a curry. My brother (6 foot 3) and his girlfriend (6 foot 1) arrived the following evening. She’s lovely, perhaps too good for my brother if anything. The next morning he went into town to get a haircut, while she and I had a chat. Without my prompting she brought up Brexit, saying how upset she was with the result, unlike my brother. She works as a podiatrist and gets a huge amount of satisfaction from her job but is frustrated by cuts to the NHS and feels it’s only a matter of time before the whole thing is privatised.
On Thursday I spent some time in Cambridge and picked up about a dozen language-related books from charity shops. My favourite is The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal, an impressive tome that hasn’t lost its relevance despite being thirty years old. The next day, Good Friday, I caught up with my university friend and his French girlfriend in Camden in London. Camden Market is really a series of massive alternative markets that would be right up my street if they weren’t quite so packed with people. In the past I used to go there for a short time if I just wanted a quick visual hit. I’d like to go back there but will try and avoid doing so on a bank holiday again. I took the train back to Cambridge at about four; any later I’d have needed to get a taxi home from either Cambridge or Huntingdon, and I don’t feel I can afford that kind of expense at the moment. (My brother and his girlfriend like to eat out in situations where I wouldn’t dream of it, and the cost of that did add up for me.)
Most of the time I just spent in St Ives with my brother and his girlfriend. Sometimes I’d go for a walk to get out of their hair. I realised how unused I am to spending whole days with other people, even people I get on with. My brother is very happy and, outwardly at least, has bucketloads of self-confidence. I’m hardly immune to swearing but he swears a lot, and makes a lot of black-and-white sweeping statements that could make him seem a bit of a dick to someone who didn’t know him better. (I’m guessing he tones his brashness down among people he doesn’t know.) He’s has quite conversative views on a lot of subjects, most notably drugs. So we’re very different people. Maybe being so different, and inhabiting two very different worlds since we both left home in 1998, has helped us to get on well. I look at my cousin in Wellington and her three younger sisters; the four of them have gone down similar paths: they’ve all got degrees from Canterbury, they all got married between the ages of 27 and 30, they’ve all had successful careers, two of them in finance, two of them in law. And they see plenty of each other. But after decades of competition in just about every aspect of their lives, they’re not exactly the best of friends now. It also helps that my brother’s and my sense of humour overlap quite a bit.
Talking about living in a different world, we turned up at my aunt’s house in Earith on Saturday morning. It was half-ten. She was half-cut. I don’t know how much she’d already had to drink but she was only semi-coherent. She gradually sobered up, then gave us all a glass of quite expensive Marlborough riesling. It’s puzzling why she spends twelve quid on a bottle of wine when she only drinks it for the alcohol content. Her garden looked lovely as it always has done. She then showed us her new sporty black Audi A7 with a three-litre engine that she only uses to go up and down the road in. She said, “Why can’t I have fun?” but to my mind that car is an obscene waste of money. I get on fine with my aunt; she isn’t a bad person (not now she isn’t, anyway – in her mother’s final years she was positively evil) but she’s never had any purpose in life and never listens to anyone but herself on any subject that even vaguely matters. My aunt married into the RAF at a young age, and since then everything she’s done in her life has purely been play. She conveniently shipped her kids (work!) off to boarding school when they were eight. She’s got no concept of actually having to earn money to make ends meet and mocks people who have “boring” jobs that pay the bills. Even now she gets her husband’s healthy pension. He sadly died of lung cancer in 2002; he never smoked but she smoked like a chimney until e-cigarettes came along. This total lack of purpose has contributed to her drink problems, which were in full swing even when my uncle was still alive, and other mental health problems including multiple suicide attempts. In October she’ll turn 70. She said that when she lived in Italy she gave a few English lessons and described them as “money for old rope”. (I don’t think it was just money either. I think she got the odd shag chucked in.) She probably thought my attempt to make a living from lessons was ridiculous. When we got back to St Ives we tried to guess how much her Audi cost and were open-mouthed when we saw prices ranging from £48,000 to £62,000. I’d guessed something in the low forties, which would have still been vastly more than my aunt has earned in her entire life.
Stansted is a bit of a nightmare these days; it’s expanded so much from how I remember it. I got back here at 11:30 on Sunday night and that felt pretty good. This is the closest place I have to home.
Wow, a snap election. I didn’t see that coming. They don’t quite do snap elections in the UK like they used to in New Zealand.
