by I’ll be getting a niece to go with my nephew. When my brother told me, I was over the moon. I don’t really know why. I might just be that so much of the toxic crap we face these days is generated by men. The due date is 22nd January. Hey, isn’t that around the date of the presidential inauguration? How about a little Kamala, then, if she wins? Goes pretty well with our surname. Of course they wouldn’t dream of calling her anything like that, but it’s fun to think of slightly out-there names.
Last night I had my longest phone chat ever with my brother. He’s not one for talking on the phone, or even WhatsApp video (as it was), but we managed a whopping 50 minutes. There was a lot to get through. The baby gender reveal (should be “sex reveal”, really), the New Zealand trip, the flight back in which my nephew screamed and bawled for hours, and my parents’ house. He was horrified by how impractical it was. How did our eminently sensible Mum and Dad descend into such madness? Then when I told him how much the renovation cost (he didn’t know), his jaw dropped.
This summer is the first time I’ve ever been seriously mentally affected by weather. The floods in St Ives, the humidity of Auckland, the howling wind and horizontal rain of Wellington, my pretty brutal first winter in Timișoara, even some heat waves I’ve experienced here, none of it comes close to the summer of 2024. It’s been unremitting. I’ve almost put housework on hold, because after 15 minutes I’m dripping with sweat and need a cold shower. With the air con, the living room stays nice and cool, but that’s meant I’ve been confined to just this one room. The good news is that seasons don’t change gradually here; you shift abruptly – bam! – from one to the next. The forecast tells me that we’ll get the bam next week, and it can’t come soon enough. One ray of light has been my sinuses. At just about the moment I got back from NZ a year ago tomorrow, they stopped running. I’d had a constant stream for a year and a half, mostly from my left nostril. Then like magic, it stopped. How I have no idea. I still get pain sometimes, and end up taking paracetamol or occasionally something stronger, but the stream drying up has made a huge difference.
Yesterday I saw One Life at Cinema Timiș with Dorothy. Starring Anthony Hopkins, it told the story of Nicky Wilton who helped hundreds of mostly Jewish children escape from Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia on trains to Britain, just before the start of WW2. The last train, with 250 children on board, never made it – it was aborted, tragically, when Germany invaded Poland. The film flitted back and forth between 1939 and the autumn of 1987, when Winton was an old man. (Winton died in 2015 at the extraordinary age of 106.) I clearly remember the autumn of ’87 when so much bad stuff happened. Mum’s mother was over from NZ at the time. She got bronchitis when she was with us, during which time world stock markets plunged, our garden was waist-deep in water (there are photos of my brother and I canoeing in the garden), an unforecast hurricane ripped through southern Britain giving us a day off school, and (the day before my grandma left the UK) a fire at King’s Cross underground station killed 31 people.
The inquiry into the Grenfell fire, which killed 72, came out last week. Damning stuff. So many players, all cutting corners, ignoring dire warnings about the cladding, putting their own profits above human lives, blaming each other. A good number of them need to be banged up. Owners of flats in the UK (600,000 people) are having to pay to have the cladding replaced. A lot of them simply can’t afford to. This is all a lot like the earthquake-prone building business in NZ which I was caught up in, only at least it’s getting some proper coverage.
Three new students, all women, at the end of last week. I really seemed to click with the last one; that’s always nice.
