a romanian adventure

Sunday 30^th December

Over breakfast Mum read out an email she’d received from my aunt who stayed two nights in Timișoara after my brother’s wedding. Wow, some people have stressful Christmases. We went for coffee along by the river and met an old friend of my parents on the way; I think he thought I was weird for living in Romania. After coffee we had a very enjoyable walk down the thicket to Houghton and back. The track was busier than I ever remember it; people were making the most of the weather which was extraordinarily mild for the time of year. After a late lunch we messed around with my beard trimmer and I got packed for my evening flight. I was happy to be heading back, but it had been a real pleasure to spend some time with my family. I still marvel at how my brother found such a wonderful partner, and how they’re able to do all that housey stuff together that I could never imagine. Mum and Dad have their moments, but it helps a lot that I get on much better with Mum these days. I realise that she’s always wanted the best for me. She hasn’t always known what the best is, but that’s not really her fault.

I arrived at the airport with time to spare and got some “reduced to clear” sandwiches from Marks & Spencer. It was very busy at the check-in desk with several hundred Poles and Romanians jockeying for position in the queues. One bloke directed a barrage of F-bombs and other insults at the poor woman behind the desk, and after insulting her sister (!), he got chucked off the flight. By the time I reached the gate, I felt I was already in Romania. There weren’t a lot of Brits on the flight. I sat on the very back row, next to a younger chap from Petroșani, which is a three-hour drive from Timișoara. What an ordeal. We landed at 1:40 am, to a customary round of applause, and I was home in no time, although I didn’t get to sleep until nearly four.

Monday 31^st

I got up at ten to ten. At lunchtime I met S at a café on Strada Mărășești. She asked me about New Year’s resolutions and I said I wanted to improve my Romanian. Could we speak Romanian from the start of 2019? She let out a huge groan. She doesn’t understand why communicating in the local language is so important to me. When I was in England she texted me to ask if I wanted to go a New Year’s Eve party. I said yes, hoping that she might forget. She hadn’t forgotten. She told me where it was, but I didn’t take it in, due to the anxiety that the mere mention of a party provokes in me. “Under something” and “on the corner of something and something” was all I remembered. Everything is closed here on 1^st January, so I did a load of grocery shopping in the afternoon, making good use of my new backpack. Close to party time, I wandered around Libertății and Unirii, thinking I might figure it out, but to no avail. I had to call her. It was definitely under something. It was a small dungeon-like room, beneath one of the city’s many pharmacies, where you could see the brickwork and smell the mould. The music would have been fine if it had been at half the volume. I’m sure S (whom I hadn’t seen in party mode before) and her two friends could tell I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life there. Just before midnight we went out to see the fireworks, be couldn’t see much from our vantage point. S told me that her two goals for 2019 were to travel around the world and, um, to have a baby. Both?! I thought that might be it for the night, but no such luck. We bundled back into the vault, and by the time we left (phew!) it was 2019 in the UK too. It would be nice if parties or social events could one day be as much fun as, say, being stuck in Airportworld.

Tuesday 1^st January

After breakfast I had a bout of excruciating sinus pain, lasting an hour and a half. With the New Year bells going full-bore from the cathedral, I thought, hell must be something close to this. It was that painful, like a screwdriver being rammed up my nostril. The lack of sleep probably didn’t help, and neither did the alcohol, not that I drank that much. Lying in bed was no good; I paced up and down, up and down, until it gradually subsided. What a start to the new year.

Tuesday 25^th December

This was my first Christmas Day in the UK for 16 years, and what an incredible day it was. My brother and sister-in-law had it all planned with military precision. It was the first time they’d done Christmas dinner, but they could have fooled me. We had Eggs Benedict (their own eggs, of course) with salmon for breakfast, an unexpected treat. My brother followed our late uncle’s method for cooking the turkey: two hours in the oven and as long again on the barbecue. It was melt-in-the-mouth stuff. Before long the Christmas pudding (which is always a highlight) was eaten and the dishes were washed, and it was back to TV watching. Michael McIntyre’s show was really funny (especially this cooking prank), as was Dad’s Army, which is now almost half a century old. As for presents, I got some kids’ books and the Bananagrams game (for my lessons), a backpack, some cash from Mum and Dad (it’s a bit ridiculous to be getting cash from my parents at my stage in the game, but there you go) and all kinds of stuff to help tame my beard. Christmas Day 2018 will live long in my memory.

Wednesday 26^th

We walked off our Christmas dinner by doing a tour of Poole, which I quite liked. I discovered that gin bars had become a thing. Another trip to Primark, then it was TV time. We watched programmes about Ken Dodd and Torvill & Dean, although the highlight was the BFG which was beautifully done. We played a few games of Bananagrams.

Thursday 27^th

A third trip to Primark to get a suitable suitcase for my flight back to Romania, and then it was time to say goodbye to Poole, and my very house-proud brother and sister-in-law. It was great to see them, but being in someone else’s territory for any length of time always makes me anxious. The journey to my parents’ flat in St Ives was a long one. Many people were driving home after Christmas, but many others were simply shopping. Consuming. Sometimes we barely moved. A journey of 180 miles took over six hours, including the two short stops we made. At least the road signs in the UK are good. It’s one of those things I took for granted when I lived there, but I now see that they’re brilliantly designed to be read at 70 mph. The little details like the hook on the lower-case ‘l’ that helps make for a friendly, readable font, the yellow route numbers on a green background for A-roads, the calming blue motorway signs, the airport icon that also functions as an arrow: these things all add up. They save lives.

Friday 28^th

In the morning I called on some family friends, the couple who came to Romania in 2017 for the road trip we did, and we had a very enjoyable chat. They then came to my parents’ flat in the evening for so-called nibbles (in reality a proper meal). In the middle I went for a walk with Dad around the meadow and back through Hemingford.

Saturday 29^th

At 10am we went to my aunt’s place in Earith. It’s been sad to see her world get progressively smaller over the years. She doesn’t have meaningful relationships with either of her children, who are now both in their late forties. She does, however, have a soft spot for both me and my brother, perhaps because we’re harmless. On this occasion she wasn’t too bad, and even in her worst periods she’s always had the knack of making people laugh. We didn’t stay too long. In the afternoon we called into Homebase where my parents spent ages not choosing some wallpaper, and then drove through some villages I hadn’t seen in a couple of decades, such as Abbots Ripton and Woodhurst. We stopped at Broughton and went for a walk there. My brother sent Mum links to properties in St Ives. He’s always felt bitter about my parents moving to New Zealand in 2003, and now that they make regular trips to back to the UK, he senses that they might want to move back permanently. I think that would be very unlikely and a bad move: the UK isn’t a great country to get old in.

Saturday 22^nd December

My last two lessons of 2018 were thankfully at home, and with students at vastly different levels. When they were over with, I took the bus to the airport. My plane was delayed by an hour, and it was quite pleasant to hang around in the terminal with the machines selling inexpensive coffee, snacks and even books. The click-clack of the big split-flap display board is pleasing, although the some of the letters get stuck and they’ll probably replace the board with some insipid screen in the not too distant future, if not the entire terminal. The trick with Timișoara airport, as elsewhere, is not to go through security until you have to. On the other side you’re no longer in Romania but in Airportworld, with all those bottles of scented water going for dozens of euros. In Airportworld, they don’t even use Romanian money. The flight to Luton was uneventful, and my parents met me at 10pm. It was lovely to see them, as it always is. The three of us stayed in a relatively cheap hotel near the airport. I heard on the news that Paddy Ashdown, leader of the Lib Dems throughout the nineties, had died. I reckon he would have made a good prime minister.

Sunday 23^rd

Dad and I both had colds. For me it was my fourth in a couple of months, but Dad’s was worse. How would he cope with the drive down to Poole? Breakfast at the hotel was excellent, though the dining room was jam-packed with people. My parents had planned to drop in on some friends on the way to Poole, but they were suffering from colds too, so we gave them a miss. As we drove through Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Hampshire, I thought, shit, I couldn’t come back here to live. Get off the M something at junction whatever for yet another soulless dormitory town. Milton Keynes with its endless roundabouts, coded H for horizontal and V for vertical. Too many bloody people. I could see why 17.4 million of them voted to escape this crap (even if their votes will probably just serve to make things even crappier). We wanted a hot drink so pulled into one of the services. At any service station in the UK, you either get Costa or (in this case) Starbucks. We went for the cheaper option, filter coffee, and it was pure poison. It didn’t help that they only had two young staff, who were rushed off their feet. Starbucks: never again. We reached my brother’s place in late afternoon. Their two-storey terraced house is modest, I suppose, but still beyond my wildest dreams. A lot of time and effort had gone into the interior, and it was all looking very Christmassy. They have a cat, named Major Tom but usually just Tom, and four hens that give them more eggs than they know what to do with.

Monday 24^th

On Christmas Eve we visited Wimborne, a picturesque town nearby. It was bigger than I imagined, and full of lovely old buildings. We went to Primark after that, so my parents could buy me some clothes. I wish they wouldn’t. We watched the Snowman on TV – it never stops being a wonderful animation – and then it was time for church. Midnight mass was an option, but we attended the 5:30 pm service instead. It lasted 80 minutes, which would be very brisk by Romanian Orthodox standards, but Catholic services are usually shorter, even at Christmas, and people were getting decidedly antsy. We had an unusual reading where 42 generations – who begat whom, ending up at Jesus – were itemised. After church (I wonder when I’ll do that again next) it was time for more TV. Gogglebox. A TV programme about people’s reactions to watching TV. I’d forgotten the cultural importance of TV in Britain, especially around Christmas. And I’d totally forgotten how celeb-obsessed Britain is. One celebrity game show after another, where many of the categories used in the quizzes are celebrity-based themselves. Later that evening we chatted about the sister of an old friend of mine, who has become a semi-famous live artist, comedian, call her what you will. She defies categorisation. We watched her “Fanny Song” on YouTube and my sister-in-law in particular was in stitches.

My site got hacked (again!), and I’ve just this minute got it unhacked. This is the first part of what happened after that.

Wednesday 19^th December

Timișoara was beautiful following the weekend’s snowfall, but the snow had frozen and the roads and pavements were treacherous. I only had a pair of two-hour lessons but getting to both of them was a mission. In the morning I slipped and fell on the ice during the 40-minute trudge to my appointment in the Soarelui area. The lesson wasn’t the easiest either, as my devoutly religious student tried to sniff out my beliefs. “But what does Christmas really mean to you?” In the early afternoon the plumber came over and fixed my hot water – snow had somehow got into the boiler from a duct. He fixed it impressively quickly but I still had no chance of catching the bus to Dumbrăvița for my 92^nd lesson with Matei. Or so I thought. Traffic was gridlocked to the point where I managed to catch the bus up just by walking, and I clambered on two stops later. I called Matei’s grandmother to say I’d be pretty late, and that seemed to be fine. I gave him the full two hours. After the lesson I walked 2 km over the border into Timișoara, to the nearest bus stop where buses were still going to and from. I caught up with S in the café where we first met in September, and she wasn’t too bothered that I was seriously late. I gave her a box of biscuits as a Christmas present; she’d earlier given me the Romanian translation of The Little Prince.

Thursday 20^th

A much easier day. My only lesson was at the university, a stone’s throw from my flat. My student teaches Romanian and linguistics there. Her surname is Pop, and we went on a whistle-stop tour of English phrasal verbs that feature her name. I’m just popping out to get some milk. A message just popped up on my screen. Pop round whenever you like. My grandmother even used to say, “when I pop off”. Pop is just such a fun word. It probably helped Kellogg’s sell many thousands of extra boxes of Rice Krispies. Just snapping and crackling would never have been enough. (When I think about it, there’s a lot going on there. A trio as in “snap, crackle and pop” is often deadly effective. Spelling “krispies” with a K, which of course is emblematic of Kellogg’s itself, also plays a pretty big role.) In future we’ll hopefully have two-hour sessions, half in English and half in Romanian. A Romanian teacher would be enormously helpful for me.

Friday 21^st

After the monthly tram trip to pay my rent in non-Romanian cash, I had two lessons. One was with David, my 11-year-old student. He’s a nice kid, extremely polite, but he has a habit of responding to my questions with “I don’t know”, killing the conversation stone dead. In his room he has a collection of Harry Potter books, and even a photo of him holding one. “So, do you like Harry Potter?” I don’t know. David is an only child (one of many) and there is certainly pressure on him to achieve at school. He’s in the A-stream. Extra maths. Extra Romanian grammar. Lots of questions that have a definite, right and wrong answer. In our previous lesson I asked him what he’d be doing afterwards. “Santa,” I thought he said. What will Santa be doing? No, not Santa. Centre. Centre of excellence. In the Romanian language. All this means that when faced with open-ended questions, he seems afraid to give the wrong answer. He likes games though, and I ensure that those take up almost half of each session. I was getting a bit stressed at the prospect of flying out the next day, and trying to find last-minute Christmas presents in a god-awful shopping mall. That evening I went to the cafeteria in Auchan but when the woman behind the counter insisted on speaking to me in English even after I told her not to, I stormed off.