a romanian adventure

I can’t get away from my flatmate. There seem to be at least four of him. If only he (they?) could pay me accordingly. A hundred bucks a day and I’d happily give them 24/7 access to every room of my apartment while I sleep in the car. I’d probably (seriously) get more sleep than I do now. I average about 90 minutes less per night than before my flatmates all piled in. The problem is the sheer amount of interaction required, with the same person (people?), each and every day. With no chance to replenish my tank, I’m now running on empty (that’s a link to a song that appeared on Forrest Gump; sorry if the different colour for links isn’t showing up in your browser). My mind and body are shutting down. I might as well not have shown up to work today.

The whole arrangement is far too hands-on and it’s affecting every aspect of my life. There’s no escape, whether I’m at work, at the supermarket (now that’s stressful), at the tennis club, in the car, or even when I’m on a different island. At this rate I’m not going to Romania or very far at all. (Remember when I used to write about learning the language? By some bizarre coincidence that finished at about the same time as my living situation changed.)

I had a discussion with one of my flatmates at the weekend. He now knows I want him and his gaggle of friends out before September, but has no idea quite how soon. I’ll have to hit him with a May termination date in the hope that he agrees to June. Any later than that and my plans will be in tatters. None of this is easy. What a mess I’ve got myself into. The thing is, I’m not depressed, but I’m very anxious and in a permanent state of fatigue.

I don’t know how I won my singles match at the weekend.

On Thursday night I found, completely by chance, a letter that my brother sent me in March 2007 from Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. He was replying to my letter that had taken nearly two months to get there. He told me that three of his friends had died. He talked about our grandmother who died four years ago. It brought a tear to my eye; I’d be seeing my brother in a matter of hours.

The next morning I flew to Timaru. Air travel as it should be. That flight always makes me feel good. Dad picked me up from the airport, and soon I met my brother and his girlfriend, all six foot one of her. Wow, what a contrast between her and his last one who was pernicious. She’s a breath of fresh air; I could relax around her (and that’s saying something – most people intimidate me). The three of us headed to the Village Inn pub in Geraldine and had a good chat over a few beers. As usual, my brother and I got on well – it helps I think that we’re not very similar. (Y’know, Afghanistan, not really my scene. The mind boggles when I think of the places he’s been to.) I’m so happy that he’s happy.

The temperatures on Friday and Saturday soared into the thirties. We went to the beach at Caroline Bay, I saw my aunt and uncle who came over for a barbecue, I watched Dad fly his model glider, we picked some blackberries (I’ve just baked an ice cream container full of them with some apples in a crumble) and that was just about it. I got two very good nights’ sleep – they were extremely welcome. The third night was much more fitful, probably because I had to fly back the next day. I really didn’t want to go back. On the plane I saw Temuka go by and in no time we were into the clouds. I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on outside the window after that. When I arrived in Wellington, for almost certainly the last time on the 19-seater Beech plane before they bring in the bigger ATR on that route, I dawdled through the airport. I wouldn’t have minded staying there.

I really felt that extra day in February; it was a long month. And now the next few months stretch in front of me like a desert.

For most of today at work I couldn’t even log on and the help desk didn’t live up to the first half of their name. I managed to get most of an assignment done for my English teaching, so it wasn’t a completely wasted day.

I’ve got interclub tennis on Saturday. I’m not especially bullish about my chances, even if the team might win.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying down to Timaru to see my brother and his girlfriend. I spoke to him last night; he seemed happy but tired after a gruelling flight. It will be great to see him. We always get on pretty well even though our lives have drifted apart. It’ll be good to meet her too – by all accounts she’s a big improvement on the last one. We should get very nice weather down there. What a fantastic February it has been (and oh so many cicadas).

Britain will vote on whether to leave the EU on 23rd June, sooner than I expected. This has obvious implications for my plan to move to Romania, possibly in late September. If there’s a vote to leave, will my plan be scuppered? The EU wheels tend to move slowly, so I expect the leaving process to be a long, drawn-out one. But all those ghastly Romanian (and Bulgarian and Polish) immigrants are fuelling people’s desire to exit the EU, and I can imagine if the UK wants to close its borders to those people, Romania and the like will want to reciprocate. So far everything I’ve read about so-called Brexit is pure speculation.
The bookies’ odds point to a 31% chance of Britain leaving the EU. My spidey senses tell me the probability is somewhat higher: I’d say just under 50%. On the whole, British people just don’t feel European. Although EU is a clunky machine that has got too big and powerful for its own good, I think wanting to isolate yourself from the EU countries is silly. Being able to travel and live and work and study in 28 countries is awesome. Look at me: it’s given me the chance to go on a big life-changing adventure and all the excitement and optimism that goes with that. And some of that annoying red tape people go on about is actually helpful: workers’ rights are stronger, beaches are protected, you know what’s in your food and where it came from.
Elections and referendums are ripe for coinages of new words for supporters of people or causes, especially by people who don’t support them. Last year supporters of Jeremy Corbyn became (and are still) known as Corbynistas, a word with a Spanish suffix that evokes hard-left South American rulers. The latest one I’ve seen for the EU referendum is Remainian – quite clever when you think about it, and obviously coined by people who don’t want Britain to remain in the EU. The Remainians need to come up with something in response, and quickly.
I’m eligible to vote in the referendum because I was living in the UK, and on the roll, less than 15 years ago.

I played tennis on Sunday and it was embarrassing. I was reduced to a heap in the last set of doubles, moping around the baseline and blasting everything miles out. If home still felt like home I couldn’t have got home fast enough.

Work. That’s starting to come apart at the seams too. On Monday I joined my boss off site as he gave a presentation I’d completely forgotten about. I was forced to spend far too much time with him afterwards. Then on Tuesday we had the team meeting as usual, where my boss prattled on expansively. At times I was obliged to interject briefly, pretending that I cared. I simply won’t survive the 200-plus team meetings, 17 performance reviews and four Christmas parties I face between now and when I turn forty. It was great last Thursday to have a beer with someone who gets it. He’s worked in banks before, but now mostly works in people’s gardens, doing odd jobs here and there, and couldn’t face going back to anything approaching a corporate job.

I want to get back into the positive frame of mind in which I started this blog back in October, when I was happy to be me. I’ve got a big, exciting plan in place. If I need my own space more than the average person, so what.

I think I’ll give my posts Romanian titles for the next little while. I’m completely exhausted, shattered, washed out, epuizat (which is just like the French word “épuisé”).

Yesterday I tried to learn some Romanian in the downstairs room but didn’t get very far. I’ve got the concentration span of a gnat at the moment. I then went to the beach via the market. Navigating my way through the market stalls was a struggle. It was an amazing day to go to Worser Bay and it wasn’t crowded but it was great to see kids and families enjoying themselves. My cousin was sailing there with her youngest boy Jack but I didn’t see them among all the other Optimists. Gosh, what a name for a boat or anything else at the moment. I swam in the sea which wasn’t too cold and read about five pages of my book, all the while with one eye on my watch. I needed to be home by five. Oh no, it’s half-way to five, two-thirds of the way to five, shit it’s ten past four and I want to get an ice cream on the way home and I’ve got to pick up some bits and pieces that my flatmate texted me to get. I had to be home by five so we could eat before going to the pub. My flatmate cooked dinner. We had chips. Just chips, about twenty of them each, although he also had some still-frozen peas. I think I might cook tonight. With the last flatmate I did virtually all the cooking, which was a bit of a pain but at least I got a good substantial meal each evening. We then went to the pub – I used to enjoy that. We watched the Chinese New Year fireworks from Frank Kitts Park – a much longer and more spectacular display than I was expecting. Eventually we got home and I tucked into the fruit cake that Mum gave me when I was down there last weekend. I was starving. I went to bed and woke up several times during the night, as I always do at the moment.

This morning I ambled very slowly down to the waterfront – I was almost totally sapped of energy – and the thought that I might never be able to live with other people again filled me with sadness. Humans are social creatures; if I can’t live with other humans, maybe I’m not fully human. It was very peaceful down there at that time of the morning. They were selling fish from a boat. I hadn’t seen that before; it made a lovely scene. Even the sign was pleasing. Then I had to amble home again.

I was totally unprepared for having a flatmate this time.

Seven more days would be a pain in the butt but I could manage. Seven weeks would be a major effort, something I’d really have to plough through. Seven months?! My god. I’ll snap long before then I’m sure.

When I was down south we were listening to the radio and Our House by Madness came on. Mum asked me if I remembered it from when I was little. I said no, although I know the song very well. That got me thinking. It’s a simple song with very little-kid-friendly lyrics and I’m sure it would have been on the radio all the time, but I was only two and a half. I can definitely remember Uptown Girl and Karma Chameleon that both came out when I was about three and a half, and that suggests a cut-off age of around three for remembering songs.

I decided to blog again after all. With the holiday for Bob Marley Day it’s been a short week, but it hasn’t felt like one that’s for sure. The truth is that my flatmate isn’t too bad, but the pressure of always having someone there, and having to interact all the bloody time, can be overwhelming for me. Mealtimes are the worst. When we had the Risk night my flatmate left his phone here and came back the next day to pick it up. I thought, I wish I didn’t have to see him today, and then it hit me. In six days he’ll be here every day and every night. Oh fuck. At least he’s helping me (in a small way) to pay off my mortgage, but I have to wonder whether it’s worth it (no I don’t; it’s not).

After shifting to the small bedroom upstairs (on the same floor as the kitchen and living area) it almost feels like I’m camping, which can be fun for a couple of nights, but after a couple of hundred the novelty might wear off just a tad. I had no real choice though.

Suddenly we, in little old New Zealand, are all expected to understand the workings of the Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses or primaries or whatever they call them, and are even expected to know vaguely where Iowa and New Hampshire are, otherwise we can’t make conversation with any of the cool media-savvy people. Google “New Hampshire primary” and lots of numbers come up which supposedly mean something. I’m sure as recently as four years ago none of us needed to know any of this stuff. Life keeps getting more complicated.

Last night I met up with the very nice bloke I met up with in October, and other times in between. He said that back in October I was buzzing. I need to get back there again.

The marimba course started up again tonight; only three of us were there excluding the teacher, and they’d taken the amplifiers off so things were quieter than before. That defeats the object a bit. It’s a lovely sound though all the same, and hammering out tunes (or pieces, as the teacher calls them) was a nice way to escape.

The weather in Wellington is stunning at the moment. We’ve had a great summer. Tomorrow I think I’ll go to the beach.

• There’s nothing upbeat about how I’m feeling at the moment, and until life feels possible again it’s goodnight from me as far as this blog is concerned. (I might still report on my tennis matches if I’m in the mood.)

  I got rid of the Camry on Friday. Turners gave me $300 for it, twice what I would have got if I’d scrapped it. I was just glad to offload it in such a hassle-free way. It had been part of my life for 5½ years and it’s a shame I couldn’t have made it last just a few more months. I swam at Oriental Bay that evening. When I lived in Auckland I went to the beach almost every weekend during the summer. Soon I might be a ten-hour drive from the sea.

  I took the 6:45 flight to Christchurch on Saturday morning. My parents picked me up from the airport. They’re very good to me. We stopped at Ashburton where they had their usual farmers’ market, but to celebrate Bob Marley’s birthday (it might even have been Waitangi Day come to think of it) they also had stallholders of various nationalities: Samoan, Tongan, Filipino, American, Ukrainian… look, there’s a Romanian one! We were far too early to sample any sarmale, but I did talk to the Romanians running the stall, mostly in English admittedly. Unfortunately I’ve lost momentum in my attempt to learn Romanian. The woman was from Bacău and had lived in Ashburton since 2002; the bloke was from Sibiu. “We hope that tourism will take off in Romania. It’s a beautiful country but people don’t go there.” There are forty or fifty Romanian families in and around Ashburton; the Romanian rugby team stayed there during the 2011 World Cup. My parents then got all excited and decided that they’d go to Romania in May. They’re going to Italy for my cousin’s wedding (that’s the cousin I saw in Albany, NY last August) and will probably book a flight from Milan to Timișoara shortly after that. That morning was the highlight of my long weekend.

  Sunday was a bit of a disappointment – I was hoping for better weather so we could go to the bay or go somewhere, anywhere, but we stayed at home. Then yesterday I drove my parents’ Honda the 470 km to Picton, from where I took the Bluebridge ferry. I didn’t get back till 11:30 last night. Back in October this would have been an amazing trip, what with more seals than I’d ever seen in my life just after Kaikoura, but now I have home waiting for me and that’s somewhere I want to be even less than when I arrived back from the US last September and almost burst into tears. I didn’t sleep much last night but I rarely do at the moment. This is partly due to my decision to change where I sleep. Having a flatmate has changed everything. Now I can’t appreciate anything or enjoy anything or concentrate on anything or take anything in and I’m no longer living, only existing and barely that. Things might improve. When I’ve got the downstairs room sorted I’ll have at least some space to myself.

  We’ve got this damn restructure at work and it’s inevitably generating a lot of discussion but I’ve got my fingers in my ears, going la-la-la-la. I’m going on a 2½-day training course from the 18th to the 20th and will go down south the following weekend to (hopefully) see my brother and his girlfriend who are coming over from the UK for three weeks. If everything goes to plan I’ll start the actual teaching around 10th March.

  I’m trying to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick. I keep reading and rereading the same few pages, not getting far past the introduction which is a news item about the death of the near-200-year-old turtle given to the King of Tonga by Captain Cook in 1777.