suggzy

Hello again.

Yes, it’s been a while, but my excuse for the delay is much better than the usual apathy and laziness. In fact, I have been a busy bee indeed. For, after a good year and a half of trying, I have finally landed a Proper Job. After countless trips to Birmingham, Cambridge, Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln and Kent, And Coventry. And York. Oh, and Warwick, and London. All of those opportunities, all of those experiences (some of which I shall chronicle in the coming weeks), and where did I finally manage to lay out my wares successfully..?

Qatar. Doha.

Of course I did. Why would one choose the straight and simple road, eh? Conformity’s for losers, etc.

In 24 hours from now, it’s hi ho and off I jolly go. A suitcase of clothes and e-cig liquid, some snaps of the dog and wife, and here goes with eleven months of beavering away at UCL Qatar. Air-conditioning, scary cab rides, and a year in prospect of little or no booze and absolutely zero bacon (unless I gather together a note from my Big Boss indicating that pig purchases are on the menu – one of the many idiosyncrasies of life by the Gulf). Still, career-wise it’ll be a winner, and should take us back into the black/keep the hound in clover. In many ways my boldest adventure yet. Probably.

How did all this come about, you may very well ask? And I will of course let you know, as time goes by. However, first, a little planning and a characteristic digression away from the main subject of this symposium.

I am going to have some time on my hands, it is fair to say. SWK will be visiting me, and I’ll pop back to Blighty a couple of times, just to make sure you are keeping the place suitably ship-shape. Therefore, sensible use of that time needs to be considered. No doubt I shall gather together a new chum or two, and will seek as best I can not to fall into the wrong crow of ne’er-do-wells. No doubt I shall also have a certain amount of work to get on with, too. However, I am determined to also mine my various seams of hobbies. With the creation of homemade wines and beers very firmly off the menu, it’ll be the more wholesome pursuits of running (I have become a bit too spherical in this indolent interregnum, and need to take my midriff firmly in hand), a little swimming, some new adventures in cooking, and a good deal of writing that will fill the emptier hours.

On the last front, I’m intending to change tack a bit on the Blogulatory front. I think something more by way of a regularly-produced diary is in order. A fortnightly bulletin of my triumphs and disasters, with the working title of ‘Cox of Arabia: Nearly a Year in Qatar.’ What fun we shall have, if my laptop continues to function and I stay out of clink.

But there is something else on my mind that will take some time to leak out onto these pages before I am fully at rest on the matter. And that’s the business of trying to find a job. It’s been a none-too-splendid couple of years, if the truth be told. Various self-serving insurrections, posturings and some none-too-friendly manoeuvrings at my last employer but one saw me out on the street quite abruptly, a little time short of my 42nd birthday. Quite the Kristallnacht, it was, and not just for me, either. This came at a high price for them in the form of the guilt-soaked £££ that kept me going for the first of those wilderness years, but for me in the form of some confusion and at times some misery.

It’s all very well looking for a job when you already have one. Looking for one as your bank balance starts to dwindle, and the creases around and the bags under your eyes gain prominence? Not so much fun. The opposition always seems about half one’s age, and possessed of an alarming number of PhDs, winning smiles and an absence of careworn early middle age. Being Old School just makes you bloody old. Nevertheless, with the memory of a certain tall man and a certain little man, neither of whom would ever be the better for meeting me in a dark alley, very much thrust into the background, I went out into the world with my CV.

As we know, after ten months of schlepping around, I eventually fell into a spot of temporary work that, in the final reckoning, turned into a year of not-unhappy beavering away on the fringes of things at the local Medical School. I combined that with several additional months of facing up to various whey-faced and cheerless interview panels, and performing a range of endeavours, all in the pursuit of the square route of bugger all. Right up to the point when I got an e-mail on a Thursday morning telling me to fly to Qatar the following Tuesday to be interviewed for the job that I have now secured.

As I sit and type this, I reflect that it’s been a life of some not unusual forays into the world of work, and at times the recruitment process has been bewildering, annoying, frustrating, hilarious and other things beside. I think I am going to spend a little time drip-feeding some of those experiences into the forthcoming tales of life by the Gulf. I express the humble hope they will amuse you, and test how far you can raise one or both eyebrows.

Perhaps I might begin with one from the far-off past, before even my Higher Education ‘career’ really took off?

18 years ago, I was working in a temporary capacity for the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. The latest in a series of temporary contracts that were keeping the wolf from the door as I worked on finding something grown-up to do. I’d done some marking in a draughty warehouse, and had spent a couple of weeks ferrying scripts in a van, back and forth to northern Birmingham. The latter of those gigs saw me throwing pallets into a furnace, on one occasion, at the want of anything better to do and with a local manager keen to make use of me. On another occasion my lunch at Corley Services on the M6 was interrupted by a man attempting to sell me knocked-off watches that were hanging from the inside pockets of his jacket. As I am fond of saying, it would not do to be bored. I rarely have been.

After a time, I was engaged in a short period of something called Script Management, which was undertaken in the steaming cellars of UCLES HQ. One descended into the dark, and acted as a human pit pony, lugging around wheeled receptacles of freshly-scribed A-Level papers, ripe for being marked.

My abiding memory of this came one day when, in yanking one such bin of endeavours across the cellar, I saw beneath me a single page of lined paper filled with the untidy scrawl of an examinee. A teenager’s missive on some subject or another. It had been torn from an answer book, and wore in the middle the impression of a large footprint, presumably that of one of my colleagues, although I suppose it may have been a bold and unlikely additional bit of final punctuation on the part of the writer? Whatever the case, I took it to the person in charge. I do hope that its misappropriation has not robbed the world of the next Orwell. There is no way to know, of course, and in truth I would rather not know.

Anyway. One such sweltering day came to an early end, as I had to collect my ailing Skoda and whizz home to change into a suit and then whip back up towards town so as to attend an interview at the Open University. First stage of the operation was to actually get into the car. Not as easy as it sounds as, by then, although mechanically in full working order, the Favorit had picked up some cosmetic oddities, such as door handles that no longer functioned. Consequently, it had, in recent days, become necessary to enter the vehicle through the passenger door, to then cradle one’s testicles in a spare hand so as to draw them clear of a potential spiking on the gear stick, and sort of shimmy to the right, into the driving position.

Even that uncommon form of egress was denied me, that hot July lunchtime, owing to a misfunction of the other door handle also. So it was, then, that I opened the hatchback boot, removed the parcel shelf, and made my way into the car over the rear seats and through the gap where the handbrake lay waiting to puncture me. Just the sort of operation a chap on a tight-ish time table wants to perform. Happily, there were no Constables attending, so I got away with it, but gave some lunchtime commuters something to chuckle at. I’m not unhappy that Instagram was not yet a ‘thing’.

Roared sweatily home, showered, and pulled myself into best bib and tucker. Attempted to roar back, in suitable time, only to be met with traffic that rather blew my timing. A ponderous half-an-hour or so of swearing and seating followed, together with a lot of snaking through various back streets until eventually a parking space appeared. Off came the jacket, as I performed the exit procedure in reverse, and fell out onto the hot tarmac looking a bit like Michael Douglas’s William Foster, in the closing scenes of ‘Falling Down’.

It was 2.00pm. My appointed time of arrival for interview. I bolted down the road, and into Cintra House, full of apologies and sheened in perspiration. After a few moments, a kindly face appeared from the lift, and ushered me in, whereupon I broke into a full-on pouring sweat. By the time we exited I was an utter grease spot, speaking only in machine-gun sentences in-between gulps for air.

“We’re a little behind” said my handler, looking at her watch – “I’ll take you straight into the interview room”.

I attempted to tuck a few things in, straighten my tie, and drew a hand through my soaking hair. My penultimate mistake, as it came back rather ‘slick’.

In we went. A small sea of alarmed faces greeted me, and I was told very kindly to sit down, take a few moments to myself and “help yourself to a glass of water – these things happen, and we quite understand”.

“Thanks awfully” I said, and plonked myself down. I withdrew my crumpled notes, straightened them out on the table in front of me, and, driving one last enormous boatload of oxygen into my screaming lungs, reached for the jug of iced water.

I might still pull this off, I thought. I had visions of a Lazarus-like comeback. A victory against all the mounted odds. But it was not to be. Higher Education would have to wait a few months before I made my bow. Why, you might ask? Well, mostly because as soon as I had hold of the very full jug in my very wet paw, it slid through my fingers, and so the contents were emptied over me, my notes, and the most proximal of my interlocuters. The further delay that followed was an uneasy affair of paper towels, lowered eyes and general dampened awkwardness. To give them their due, the panel went through the rigmarole off taking me through their questions, having already no doubt made some preparatory notes like ‘Loose Cannon’, ‘Timekeeping?’ and ‘Heart attack risk?’

It was not my day. And on a number of other occasions it has not been my day, but in fairness not all of those days have been quite my fault. As you’ll see, when I describe to you the Day of The Shield, when I write to you next as a citizen of the great nation of Qatar.

Part Two

With the now customary apology for a massive delay in providing some more reminiscences, let us return to the experience of motoring and navigating the wrong way ‘round.

But first, a not wholly unrelated word about Barcelona.

A little more than a year ago, I made an attempt at landing a job there. Remember? That didn’t go anywhere, but hey ho, at least I landed some sort of gainful employment, and things are on the up a bit – I am shortly to begin a career as an academic Ghost Writer, to supplement my nugatory ‘survival level’ wages from the temporary gig (which has now been temporary for eight months…) Best hope I am better at knocking that stuff out at a regular rate than I am this; I imagine being paid to do so will make me apply myself rather more, by way of a stick to my own backside.

I took the Barcelona opportunity seriously, because I had been there once before, and sensed it was a very nice place. I say sensed, because I went there on a stag-do in 2005. Yes, a stag-do in Barcelona; all that cool stuff to do and to look at and I go with a tribe of Northern Monkeys (nice chaps really) for three days of Compulsory Lager. A rare old affair it was, too. Stolen phones x 2, someone other than me being rounded on by a tribe of Ladies of the Night, and the Groom to be managed to break the Best Man’s leg, on a roundabout, at three in the morning (I was safely abed when that bit happened, but still got landed with nursemaid duties (I read my book, drank cold cans of Coke and smoked; he groaned – took morphine – slept – groaned – took morphine – slept, ad infinitum). Part of my life has been made up by a search for morphine, in fact. So much so that we might have a little bit of an accompanying piece sometime, about my life experiences of watching other people take morphine and never getting to have it myself.

But yes, Barcelona. And here’s where we head back to our main theme, a bit. We’re off there next month. Well, four weeks from now we fly to Bordeaux, and hang around there for five days. Then it’s a train and a bus up into the mountains, so as to visit Andorra, and knock off my fiftieth country. And finally, back down the hill in another bus, to spend five days by the sea in Barça. Many a website tells you to drive that last bit, but balls to that, frankly. And not just because I am lazy, and fearful of what SWK might do on a Pyrenean pass, after the 2015 Greek Tragedy (see later). No, because of my experiences of City Driving overseas (with you in a moment on that – this is just a preamble, as if you’d noticed) and also of the last time I was in the capital of Catalonia.

On the second morning, once heads had cleared and the team was reassembled, it was announced we were to tour the city with a guide, on bicycles. On the face of it, no problem, but with the drag factor to be included that is me on two wheels. When not in my own jalopy, I have generally spent my last 25 years or so either walking or on public transport. I can cycle, and passed my proficiency test (remember those?) in that wettest of wet Winters of 1984. I can still recall having instructions boomed at me through a loudhailer, as I wobbled through standing water on the playground. It’s just that it’s remained a largely theoretical thing, for me. A modest skill one pops in the drawer of the mind and doesn’t really think to pull out again, unless the situation demands it utterly. A bit like, oooh, having a small smattering of a foreign language, I suppose? You don’t just blurt it out at people all the time, you wait to be addressed in it, and then fumble and bumble your way to a credible response. So as you see, I did not voluntarily pop out for a bike ride of a Sunday.

That lack of recent form added to the challenge a bit, when the bikes were handed out on the morning of the ‘grand tour’. I always seem to be last when it comes to these things. Anticipating a comic outcome as you will be, I’ll not disappoint you. I am sure you are all expecting I got landed with some sort of Krusty The Clown bike, on which I had to heave my mighty frame? Like one of these fellows?

Nope, quite the opposite. I was in fact gifted the services of a bicycle the height of a sturdy pit pony. And the width of a piece of foolscap. Very modern, and very bloody useless for a short, fat, 31-year-old. The only way to mount the thing successfully was to sort of take a run at it, and jump across the saddle from about four feet away. This temporarily resulted in one wearing one’s balls as earrings, but it did at least get one into the saddle.

Getting underway on the thing was no picnic, either. The pedals appeared to be just under my thighs, and so the downward pressure needed to move this monster truck and me forward was immense. And then, once one had swung through the full revolution a couple of times, the thing gathered the pace of a runaway train, given the diameter of the wheels was about eight feet, so the only way of stopping it was to apply the brakes and leap from it using much the same manoeuvre as one did to get on it. Because the nature of Barcelona is that there’s something cool to look at about every 30 feet, the whole on-and-off routine was required a lot. After about half-an-hour I was weaving around like a man who’d just had a fight and a Vasectomy at the same time.

In typical fashion, it was just in the closing minutes of this rather bruising tour that I started to feel competent, in any way. I had even taken to looking up, now and again, and taking in the city, before we descended back into its underbelly. And so it was, as we cycled down a characteristically wide and unhindered boulevard, that I inclined my eyes to the left for a view down the street where the Sagrada Familia is stationed and came to an abrupt halt as I cycled directly, head-first, into a lamp-post. It’s probably the case that the fact I was on such a behemoth of a bike actually saved me. Such were its gigantic dimensions that I was nowhere near the actual point of collision. There was the most enormous, cacophonous, traffic-stopping CLAAAANG, and I spiralled out of the saddle and onto the flags. To the most uproarious amusement of several hundred people, and a gentle patter of applause. Europe united itself around the folly of the Englishman. “Why does he have such a crazy big bike?” they asked themselves.

I trailed in last, in the end, and made woozily for the afternoon’s insalubriousness.

As you can see, if this is a metaphor for overseas City motoring, I am not about to risk an Andorran motor trying to find my way through that place. Oh no. And certainly not after the Florence experience, either…

I’ve had two honeymoons, in my life, and hired a car on each occasion. On the first, I did all of the driving, and on the second I handed the duties over, briefly, to SWK. Neither period of stewardship was without incident.

So yes, Tuscany, in early 2007. Newlywed the first time out, I had hired and driven a little Fiat safely to our lodgings all the way from Pisa airport. The tolls confused one, but we just handed out money and hoped for the best. Got slingshot off a couple of hairy roundabouts, but no real drama came of it. The tremendously OTT instructions actually got us there pretty well, and we had a few fairly local days before branching out somewhat, having picked up a boot’s worth of provisions en route.

So on, I think, the third or fourth day, we set out to find Vallombrosa Abbey, on the face of it not far from our place in a hamlet near Reggello. Looked nice, for a wander and a trip out, up some hills through the forest. Lovely stuff.

As I said last time, I’m fine when I know where I am going. The owners had sent such precise instructions, and we’d even found neighbouring Figline, so as to take a train down to Siena. Parked up safe, found our way back, all that stuff. However, this was a bit more off the beaten track, and even with the map to refer to, we somehow managed to take a right turn too early, and within minutes, the fun began. It was one of those times when you think “ah, it’s the countryside, this’ll open out in a minute”. And it doesn’t. Indeed, more to the point ‘it’ narrows, to the point at which even one’s little Punto is struggling a bit for breath, as it squeezes up a mountain pass, trying not to look left, to the thundering abyss that awaits an ill-considered flick of the steering wheel. Very much a case of the closing minutes of The Italian Job. Only without any gold bullion, and with a couple of idiots thrown in, going uphill.

The biggest error came when we drove straight on through a farm, as a last hope that we were on the right road. A nice, spacious area, in which I could have safely turned round even that bloody bike I had crashed in Barcelona a couple of years before. Probably. But no, we ploughed on and before long reached a point of no-return. A rocky wall to the right, and the inky void of the late afternoon plunging to the left. Can’t go forward, going backwards would have made it a very short marriage (and I had form in this area, having almost plunged our Rover 400 off a cliff-top on the Isle of Harris, on our first holiday together, 18 months beforehand).

And so a 35629365-point turn followed. Every violent wresting ‘round of the wheel gaining us a precious few inches in pursuit of a full turn. Various items of the mechanics of the motor car either clunked, grated or screamed in sympathy and agony with one another. A burning smell filled the air, as we nestled backwards into the mountain. It was not a January bonfire from a farm below. I tried to remember what the ‘Excess’ was that I had agreed to in hiring the little motor, and wondered if just rolling it forward and walking home, whistling un-self-consciously as it exploded in the valley below us might not be the better course of action. But, with the speed of a glacier, a full turn was finally reached. The hiss that filled the car was the sound of the two of us finally breathing out. Game of the old girl to actually join me inside the car for the duration, looking back.

We pretty much just rolled back down the hill, to the ill-fated junction, as the molten underside of the car cooled off. We were, after a while, to reach the Abbey, and as I recall had a nice time, albeit left to look at it from the outside, as it was shut. Really the element of the trip that I remember best was the espresso that we stopped for after our hillside trial. It was blisteringly strong. Just extraordinary – the sort of coffee that briefly allows you to see into the future. Didn’t half do the job after the experience that had preceded it.

Motoring wise, there were no real additional challenges to be faced down, thereafter, until the day we were surrender the vehicle. I was quite pleased it had come though things intact, despite the ineptitude and histrionics of its pilot. But one challenge did remain. Our mission? Drive to Florence, find the AVIS store and drop the car off, before heading for our next base.

No problem, really. Tootle back out to the A35, turn right, drive for a bit, get some petrol, then turn right into Florence and pull up at the car place. Ha ha ha ha ha..

Happily, we left in plenty of time. The bulk of the journey was no bother at all – I even managed to buy the fuel with a smattering of Italian. Smooth. And we even managed to find the right exit off the highway, in pursuit of our goal.

And then matters became absolutely terrifying. Those last two miles must have taken us an hour. Our European friends drove onto the arterial road into the city from seemingly random directions, at fearless speed, and I was consigned to clutch and brake as the drama played out around us. I was, not to put a finer point on it, scared shitless. STF, to her eternal credit, did the most splendid job of map-reading, and kept us on course through the storm. But the storm would not cease, and as we inched into the centre of the City, the hubbub became heavier and heavier and heavier. Eventually, we reached a roundabout. Sort of descended to it, if I remember right. And there were the seven circles of hell, laid out before us, that Dante tried to warn everyone about. Rings of unbroken traffic, circuiting at a speed such as to make the end of one vehicle indistinct from the start of the next. How in the name of God anyone was actually joining or exiting this elliptical beehive, I truly did not know.

However, eventually it was our turn, of course. Procrastination would only have drawn horned opprobrium from those behind us in the queue. So I sort of tried to just use ‘The Force’ like Luke Skywalker at the end of Star Wars, when he is encouraged to “let go” by the trusted voice of Obi Wan Kenobi. And strangely, having faith worked. I just lurched us forward towards the nearest thing that had the appearance of a gap, and the eye of the storm appeared, with an unerring sense of calm to it. We surged round the first 180 degrees, I swung the wheel right, nothing hit us and we were in a side road. Words cannot describe this. One reads about the notion of a driverless car future, where computation keeps everyone from smashing into one another. This was the cosmological photographic negative of that. The fury of the urbanite Italian commute somehow possessed of so much energy as to pull as all apart from one another, like whizzing electrons in a destroyed atom. Or something.

Whatever it actually was, we had arrived. But do not imagine for a moment that I was done with the comedy-tragedy. Oh no. False hope was gained when, a few hundred yards down the road, we saw the AVIS sign on our left. Theory had it that one just swung left, across the traffic, and parked in one of the diagonal bays outside the place. It stayed theoretical; they were all full.

One remained calm. Arguably uncharacteristically so. There were cars parked everywhere, and I figured that as this was just a drop-off, one ought to be able to park pretty much anywhere nearby, run in with the keys and a quick word as to where the motor was, and on to the Hotel we would go. Sounded sensible. And simple. Headed to the end of the road, turned right, and after about 100 yards or so, after a long rack of scooters, I found a gap on our side, and even reverse-parked into it. Failed to notice the orientation of the other cars, which might have given me a hint that something was wrong. Left STF with our luggage, and confidently popped back to drop off the keys, oblivious to the number of pairs of eyes on me from inside the café I had parked outside of.

I breezed in to the air-conditioned office, just as the last customer exited the place. Smilingly removed my sunglasses and told the staff I had brought our trusty Fiat back.

“Ah, yes, and where is the car, please?” said the lady, receiving my keys across the counter.

“Ah, I’m afraid your drop-off bays were all full, so I turned right at the end of the road and dropped the..”

“I’m sorry, what?” she said, cutting me off. I detected a derisive snort from the back office. Her eyebrow was set to inquisitive.

“I turned right at the end of the road and parked up by the café there”, I said, concluding my description of events.

“Oh, Mr Suggzy” she said, swallowing down a grin and choking down a laugh.

“This is no turn right. This is one way street.”

Bollocks, I thought, as the first pips of perspiration found their way to the surface.

“Please to go left, instead, and drive up the ramp into our garage”.

I wondered about requesting someone else did this for me, but thought better of it, wanting to salvage some pride from this latest balls-up.

“Righto” I said. And attempted to leave jauntily swinging the keys in the manner of a confident adult, whilst inside the store, cooler and better-looking people pealed with laughter.

Back to the junction I went and yep, sure as shit, there was a bloody great sign saying AVIS DROP-OFF GARAGE FOR STUPID ENGLISH. Or something like that – I don’t recall precisely.

I sighed at the inevitability of it all. And made for my new bride and our luggage.

As I got within hailing distance, she called out to me:

“Someone came out of the café, and said we’ve parked the wrong..”

“I know”, I growled through my teeth. A moment of silence, and back into the motor I folded myself.

At which point I made my last questionable decision of the motoring for this holiday. I reasoned that, as I could not see ahead to a point where one could turn right, and so begin a route back to where we had been (with the possible threat of a trip back to the roundabout), I would reverse back to where I had made my erroneous turn. That way, I would at least not actually be driving straight at the enemy, would I?

Well, no, but it wasn’t a manoeuvre without its problems. I got back into a position in the middle of the road easily enough, but soon found that going backwards meant the road behind me appeared perilously narrow. And the drivers now advancing upon my position, bonnet to bonnet, were not slow to reach for the horn, as I began to weave, uncertainly backwards. I came within a whisker of sending the scooters over like dominos. Crowds ooh-d and aah-d with every little flick of the Englishman’s steering wheel exacerbated the developing drama. I’ve just looked the street up on Google Maps (Street View) and gone both cold and sweaty at the same time.

Sometime in what appeared to be the late evening, I arrived back at the bloody junction. I righted my wheels, and roared off up the other way into the garage, never to look back upon my vehicle once I had locked it up and sprinted for the exit. Wordlessly, I submitted my keys a second time, and the whole affair was, very gladly, over.

As we know, however, I do insist on getting married now and again. And so came another honeymoon, eight and a half years later. SWK and I had spent 48 hours settling into Crete, and were readying ourselves for a couple of days of road trips under our own steam. This time, the lady had submitted her driving licence for behind-the-wheel duties. All most exciting. Guide books had suggested to us that perhaps Greek motoring wasn’t the absolute safest, but ever the optimists, we made ready.

Matters vehicular were somewhat concerning from the very off, just as an observer in the back of a cab that we hailed at the airport, to take us to the hotel we were staying at, about ¾ mile outside of Heraklion. A tired-looking cabbie leaned back across the seats to us, and asked where we were going.

“The Hotel Paradise” I replied, wielding a piece of paper with the address on it.

Another one of those long pauses. This time a Greek rather than an Italian eyebrow was raised.

“Really?”

“Well, er, yes” I countered.

“Mmmm. That’s no place for a holiday” said our man, rather decisively, and pulled out into the traffic.

The mind boggled. And it boggled rather more, once we took a long left-hander up and out of the airport, and our chap had to violently swerve into oncoming traffic, whilst a squad of stray dogs commenced an impromptu canine orgy, smack in the middle of the road.

“Bit hot for that malarkey” I commented. To silence.

Two days later we walked down to the port, to collect our trusty steed, and to have a bit of a practice on rather more local roads, before we set sail for Rethymnon the following day (about 50 minutes or so from where we were). Plan was to noodle up the coast to a beach for a swim and a spot of lunch, then go for a nosey in a cave that afternoon. Handed the keys by a big friendly bear of a fellow, for some reason I handed over a few extra € when presented the option to extend the insurance cover somewhat. Not the sort of thing I normally go for, but unusually prescient, as it turned out.

We found our way gently out onto the highway, and made our way through suburban Heraklion, past the airport and up the coast to a beach. Prior to swimming, we scarfed a spot of lunch (breaking all the rules of childhood, there), which included some salted anchovies. Big buggers, they were, and so intensely salty as to require one to immediately bolt a half-bottle of water to level one’s chemistry back out again.

There was swimming, and then we went cross country, in what was now the searing heat of the day, to go visit a cave. Second choice cave in the end – the other one eluded us, but in the end, after a lot of driving, all of it rather sedate and worry free, we came upon a tiny church, and a path down to the yawning mouth of a huge cave, which was really rather startling. One climbed down into it for what felt like miles, and I have never been so struck by the temperature differential in all my life. Outside, it was frankly infernal, but clamber down a couple of hundred feet or more, and one started to shiver, after a while.

Plenty of snapping and touristy behaviour, and then it was herself’s turn to pilot. With a nervy start: “it’s all the wrong way ‘round!” she exclaimed. “Well.. yes”, I replied, helpfully, earning myself a rather dark look. However, before long we were tootling along quite nicely, and I even managed a spot of video, which made me enormously popular, in those early foothills of married life.

Back towards town, a bit of local road sense and gentle reserve was employed, and SWK deposited us back at the Hotel Paradise (which was fine, it turned out). High fives all ‘round. Drinks, dinner, shuteye, then off to Rethymnon the following morning.

No bother. Had us over there in no time. Basically just drive along one road, and turn right. Park up on the front. Lunch, some wandering through the cooler and atmospheric streets, then another afternoon swim, before a coffee and hometime.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that this was a simple case of repeating the same trip in reverse order? But no. My attempts to navigate were confounded at every turn – literally. Farm animals blocked the road, slip roads proved elusive, and we were soon driving parallel to the motorway on country roads. Indeed I think we may briefly have charged through someone’s farm.

But, eventually, we came to a hill, up which SWK was driving – looking back, quite a long way to the right hand side, and I spied what I believed to be the way back onto the main drag. “Over there” I cried in triumph. “What? Where?” the driver replied, as we veered inescapably near to the parked cars next to me, and then, with a crunch and a tinkle, into them.

We remained calm, under the circumstances. Pulled up, got out, and walked back to retrace steps. First thing I saw was a car with a smashed windscreen, which set the pulse racing rather. Got a bit closer and realised it was simply a derelict car. Soon enough, one was picking up a partially-smashed wing mirror glass off the highway, and SWK was chatting up some older-stager who’d appeared at the sound of her giving his motor a friendly nudge. She signalled to him what had happened, and pushed his own wing mirror back into place, on what was, I recall, not a motor on A-Grade order, and arguably the veteran of rather more forceful impacts. His overall attitude was summed up with two words in English: “who cares?” Sold.

Fine for him, but we had gifted the Greeks a wing mirror. SWK declared herself no longer willing to drive the wrong way ‘round (and has not since), and in between her (rather breath-taking) criticisms of my own attempts to drive back (hands up if you haven’t had an RTA today… oh, just me?),  we gradually cobbled together a tale of woe about how our car had been cruelly damaged whilst parked-up. Complete hooey, of course, but neither of us somehow felt up to the paperwork the following day. White lie. When it came to the time to deliver it, we were so utterly transparent in our bullshit excuses that it was more acutely embarrassing than telling the simple truth would have been. Sad and sympathetic eyes from our big friendly bear, as we pointed out that the car now only had one eye. An assurance that the advanced insurance I had purchased would, of course, cover the cost of this dreadful tragedy.

And so we departed, back onto feet alone. Tails between legs a little. Best I don’t get married again, eh?

I shall have a little think about what to cover next. Back soon! Probably..

Part One

I’ve got gout. And not for the first time, either. Eighth day, now.

I first became conscious of it during a trip to Bremen, with Sarah The First, about eight years ago. A holiday made memorable because of the way it was supposed to be a surprise for her 30th, which I then blew in innocuous fashion whilst doing the Sunday evening ironing, with the famous words “when we get back from Germany…”

It comes on gradually (gout, not being a thicko husband), but then hits you with everything it’s got. And the pain? Extraordinary, frankly. Hope I never get to know worse. Hobbling across the cobbles of that lovely city was just bloody agony, after the symptoms had finally kicked in to the full extent. I slept not a wink on the night before the flight back. That line about how even a light sheet cannot be laid upon the affected part of the body? All true. If an angel had farted on my big toe that night, I’d have hit the ceiling.

Eventually I was told of a pill you can take to treat it. Except I turned out to be allergic to it. Pain stopped, but I nearly flayed myself alive through itching.

So, I get it now and again. Fat, thin, drinking, sober, fit or unfit; makes no difference, it seems. Try and catch it early (failed this time; I went to a job interview last week with the gait of a man invalided back to Blighty in 1916), gobble the ibuprofen down, hydrate and elevate. It’d be a pain in the arse, were it not a pain in the foot.

As a consequence, I find myself taking it easy when I kind of wanted to be out walking and running, as part of the health kick I am now on, for the foreseeable. Annoying to be laid up, but at least I can use my remaining digits with full function to witter on further about events from days gone by. As I am typing this (at work, shhhh.. I’m kind of up to date with things) my foot is sat on the top of a box of A4 printer paper, throbbing quietly.

On the subject of health more generally, it’s fair to say that my 20 plus year career as a smoker did me little good. I was diagnosed with asthma as a boy of about six, so taking it up some years later was a terrific idea. Still, with that said, I loved it, and I reckon I got my money’s worth across those decades of puffing. And I think I have managed to emerge as one who, whilst he no longer indulges himself, can avoid doing the puritanical thing with those who still do. None so annoying as the reformed and the ‘reborn’; often possessed of only a single note to sing, and a flat one at that.

Happily, whilst still polluting the world, I had the opportunity to travel a good deal of it.  As such, I was rarely far from the opportunity to pick up 20 for little more than a quid. Less than that, I remember, from the kiosks in Belarus. And an airport always presented one with an opportunity to load up with a brick or two of my beloved Gauloises Blondes. Travelling overseas so frequently meant I never felt the need to try and squirrel away too many (although a small fag wall built up over time, back home; my Dad was the beneficiary when the end came) but it was always fun watching one’s countrymen and women attempting to flout the law so brazenly.

Probably the best example I have seen was on one of the handful of morning flights I have taken back from Budapest, either after working there or visiting chums. I had a poke around, found the EU section and grabbed my standard boxes and made for the queue. It was all a bit hurried, as my friend Benj (he of the Macedonian wedding, you’ll recall) and I had made it rather a late evening the night before, drinking Armenian brandy and listening to the Smiths on his balcony. Aesthetes that we imagined ourselves to be. Mrs Benj declared herself really rather unimpressed, as one day segued into the next. However, I made my dawn cab and got to the airport in some sort of order, in need of coffee and, well, a fag.

The lady in front of me at the till pushed-in, which isn’t a habit that goes down well with me; being British, I am genetically 1.5% queuing etiquette). I started to mutter, but sort of dribbled to an astounded stop, as she proceeded to pull at least 15 bricks of fags from her baskets (yes, note the plural) and lob them one by one onto the cashier’s conveyor. The scene started to look like one of those Fordist factory machines that they showed ‘through the round window’ on Playschool, when I was a child.

With the numbers motoring into the low thousands of cigs, a chap with epaulettes and several lanyards arrived from the fringes, asked to see the lady’s Boarding Pass, and asked him to come with her. Not a scene I had witnessed before, but you do wonder from time to time how anyone would be able to claim anything like ‘personal consumption’ rights if truly grilled on the subject. She made a few noises of Estuarian English protest, said something about being “alaahed as maneey as I wont”, but ultimately crumbled in the face of authority, as we do. Off they went, she presumably to have her card marked forever in Hungary as the Silk Cut Smuggler, only to return to Tilbury Docks shamefaced and empty-handed.

It took the cashier and I some considerable time to bring down the higgledy-piggledy construction that had gathered at her end of the conveyor. A purple and white depiction of the after-events of a Fred Dibnah Special. Anyway, we eventually laid eyes on one another, once the pile had dropped down sufficiently, sufficient for us to exchange our best “dearie me, some people eh?” faces before she swiped my more modest haul and my credit card.

Those last couple of years as a smoker came with a diminution of opportunities to travel for work, so periodically my Dad and I would saddle up the motor car, with me at the wheel, and make for the Port of Dover for a day trip and a spot of shopping in Calais. A crude exercise in gathering together wine, cheese and tobacco, with a few other sundries (like candles – Johnny France makes a good candle). In our defence, it was done in my neat little Citroen, rather than a rusting Transit, so I can look back on it with a certain amount of superiority.  This was, in fact, something by way of a miniature European Tour, as on the occasion of our second or third paté foray my Uncle pointed us in the direction of a tented village of Tabacs, just barely inches across the border into Western Belgium. The place is actually a suburb-cum-village called Adinkerke, which Wikipedia tells me is actually a location of some history, and the site of a significant WW2 Military Cemetery.

But, yeah, it also flogs fags. Lots and lots and lots of them. Multiple stores, and row after row after row of cigarettes. Sold, mostly, to English and French people, taking advantage of the price set against the cost of smokes back home. And it was a rare old saving; costing probably about 45% of that in the UK. One pulled off the motorway, and performed that most exciting of manoeuvres that is crossing a road to the left, in a right-hand-drive car, on the right hand side of the road. One needed a fag after that, as well.

Round a sort of mini-golf roundabout, down the hill and into a car park. All you can see for the first 600 yards are tarted-up warehouses, with, oddly, adverts (lets called them fagverts, just for fun) written onto the sloping sides of the roofs. I must look the place up on Google Earth, sometime. It must look like the side of a 1980’s F1 Car, parked outside a snooker tournament.

You pull up, and head in. Everyone is English, grey-faced, and stinks of fags. One gets suckered-in to begin with by the fact that the coffee machine is free. So, you grab a coffee, and wander out for a contemplative gasper, and start to do the maths on your purchase. Some folk have the bearing of punters who’re there pretty much every day, and have an unsettling over-familiarity about them. These are the Transit owners, frankly, and one tends to try to avoid their gaze.

One suspects that it isn’t everyone that makes it further into the settlement, as this first place is so large. However, partly because it flogged my favoured brand, back then, I preferred the place down the road, on the corner. Plus they have a crazy fibreglass statue outside of some sort of Flemish Laurel and Hardy pairing, and next door is a shop that sells, if I recall correctly, exclusively, garden gnomes. Another reason to go in there is all the free stuff you get; lighters, chocolates and the like? They just chuck in a fistful when handing over your bag of boxed-up 200s. Wonderful. Somewhere within the maelstrom of the ground floor of our house we’ve still got some of those lighters, even though neither of us has been a smoker for more than three and a half years. And the chocs were always dead handy when one forgot someone’s birthday. I imagine we’ll still be going, all the while the old man keeps puff-puffing away.

SWK has the distinction of being the only person I have ever known to buy an e-cigarette from this ‘Tobacco Alley’, as I now know it to be called. Tuesday 30^th December 2014, it was. The day we went with Dad on a jaunt of this sort to buy, amongst other things, the 96 bottles of sparkling Cremant wine that we served at our wedding, the following Summer. I was piloting us down to Dover, first thing, and SWK had the responsibility of guarding the traditional bounty of egg sandwiches, prepared the night before (we always sit in the queue, reeking of boiled egg sandwiches, on arrival at Dover as we wait to board – I have no idea where this tradition comes from – nice though, with lots of pepper).

Generally my wife is a quiet co-traveller. She pecks away at her phone, sometimes dozes off, that sort of thing. On this occasion she was perched in the back, holding the foil pile of white and yellow bounty. When suddenly she piped up:

“Bollocks!”

“What’s up?” we chorused in question.

“Forgotten my fucking e-cig” she sang back. Sounding a bit like me, poor thing.

We’d come just that bit too far to go back and collect it and make the ferry in time, so I proffered my own. During the crossing it went back and forth between us, and I remember getting that same ‘charge fear’ I described in my last piece, but, happily, good old Fagtown provided.

We were on our way back to France for the liquid element of the day’s shopping when I offered her the opportunity to drive overseas for the first time. As she’s normally one undaunted by any of life’s challenges, I was very surprised when she turned down the invitation, and didn’t really say why. Northern French A-roads have very little traffic on them, and, the odd moron bombing up the wrong lane excepted, are trouble-free, in my experience. However, one took the good lady at her word, and on we went. Her time was to come, as you’ll see in the next instalment, which features honeymoon driving quite prominently.

This trip was not quite done for drama, though, as both my fellow travellers decided to get a little excited about the prospect of ‘popping in to Dunkerque on the way’. They wanted to have a look at the locality of Operation Dynamo, etc. Of course they did, when you’ve got fairly minimal time and a load of stuff to buy 20 miles down the road. However, being a decent chap, I acquiesced to their wishes and headed off at the next turning. And regretted it pretty much instantly.

I’m alright driving the wrong way ‘round when I know where I am going. Or when there is an obvious objective in sight. Tasked with driving across a foreign town, dicing with the traffic, and trying to recall the Highway Code in crude reverse, whilst looking for signs to ‘la plage’? No, then my confidence fails me and I start driving rather like Mr Magoo, I’m afraid. We did quite a bit of circuiting around, and sort of eventually came out at a long car park, in front of some modern flats. In the distance there were some salt flats and the edge of what might have been a beach. A bit disappointing, but a return journey was promised, and we made good speed back to the main business of the day, and even managed to fit in a spot of lunch at the marvellous ‘Le Bleriot’ café, which is attached to the Auchan hypermarket. They do the most smashing omelettes, which I favour with Merguez spicy sausage.

Dunkerque deviations aside, this was a comparatively untroubled trip. But as we shall see, it’s not always been plain sailing. Far from it.

Back in a short while to conclude with some rather more hair-raising tales of driving over there. Look out for:

• The Search for Vallombrosa Abbey
• How To Turn Left
• Florence The Wrong Way
• And the quite unforgettable Gifting Wing Mirrors to Greeks

A short series of smaller reflections on the minutiae of travel

Hello, once again, for the first time in a while.

Some of life’s recent events, and longer-term recollections that have sprung back to mind, mean I am that tempted to write an extended piece about the search for work, and the experience of interviews I have had across the years. It’ll bowl you over, trust me. However there is just that lingering fear in me that I’ll be about to get a job, and someone in a dark office somewhere will perform a search of some sort on me, which would exhibit such satirical musings to their search engine, and that would be the end of that. A teensy bit difficult to anonymise all subjects for finger-pointing, and therefore a bit too risky for the present times.

However, at some stage soon, please return to read what I am tentatively titling: ‘The Jug Of Water And The Daily Mail Question’. If I ever get the hang of or do any proper work on the presentational side of this Blog, I might even revisit this piece and make that title above a link. I bet it can be done, if I take a couple of hours off to work on it…

Anyway, for now, and before safe publication of my expose gets the internal green light, we’ll carry on with some travel-related stuff, for there remains more in the tank of memories, most certainly. I’ll probably split this into a few bits by the time I have written it up (not sure how many, I just wanted to write again), and finish up with a few shorter bursts over the coming weeks. Busy weekend this weekend, as, like one does, I am playing Jimmy White at pool, in West Norfolk, with both of my wives to date cheering me on. Remind me to let you know how I got on with that, when I return for the next bit.

A few shorter bits and bobs, now. Trials, tribulations, amusing moments, revelatory moments. All sorts. Odds and sods. An index of stuff that occurred to me, that doesn’t really fit anywhere else obvious. Something for everyone, one hopes.

The perils of the modern age

Technology is, of course, a wonderful thing. The operability of the world around us and the communications made possible in an instant by the rise of the silicon chip and the digital doo-dah has changed things utterly, even during the short walk of 43 years of life I have had so far. Even in my third year as an undergraduate, only half that span ago, I was writing what I called ‘essays’ by hand, and sticking in cut-outs of photocopies of pages of textbook diagrams to illustrate my ‘point’. Now I could cut and paste the lot out of Wikipedia, move it around a bit, chuck in some new words and Bob’s etc.

I suppose it’s a passing negative to note that it allows permanently malcontent middle-agers like me who fancy themselves a ‘bit of a writer’ to write our way across the skies and continents, but it probably just about staves off the heart attack brought on by endless frustration with our existence, and there’s always somewhere else to click, eh?

Of course, all of this high-end stuff like ‘phones that do everything, cameras that make you look a lot better at the old-fashioned art of photography than you actually could be said to be, and, in our case, electronic cigarettes; it all comes at a charge. That charge? Charge. Electricity – the dangerous and invisible ‘juice’ that runs the whole gig. Travel around a bit, and you’ll start to gain a bit of an instinctive view on the likelihood of the hotel room you have just entered having what you deem to be ‘sufficiency’ by way of power-points to plug into. Particularly if, like me, you are irretrievably obsessed about having all items charged-up to the point at which they are screamingly hot and about to launch some sort of AI-led assault on humanity. SWK can seemingly skip gracefully through her life on a permanent blood-red 3%, without an outward care in the world. And I utterly envy that state of being, dear reader.

My ‘phone is sat here in the office (yes, I’m hard at it this Friday afternoon) on a sturdy 72%, which will get me comfortably through the day. But already I am sweating it a bit. I plugged my e-cig into the laptop this morning for the two-minute duration of my post-coffee motion, just to ensure the light on the end went back to green, indicating enough charge for me to impersonate Ivor The Engine until the sun dawned on us once again. Why? Why on earth do I do this? Why can’t I just let my battery die, and feel free for a little while? Take joy in being incommunicado for that brief interval, and just write it off as a tiny element of life’s rich pageant? By the way, I once lived with a young man who thought Incommunicado was a place in Brazil; he was a bit of a dreamer, too, looking back, so there’s an argument that perhaps people like me should think it all through a bit and do some worrying for the rest of humanity.

But I cannot rest. Find yourself sharing lodgings in a fresh corner of the earth with me, and within moments of our bags hitting the bunks, you’ll find me circling the joint, on hands and knees if necessary, auditing the power supply. Wrenching substantial pieces of furniture out of the way, hoping to reveal ‘a double’ to relax me into my stay. I’ll always seek them out in the end, and will willingly unplug just about anything else (save air-conditioning, but that’s w whole other blog) to gorge myself on that sweet nectar of connectivity. And to my shame, I will find myself announcing to my dear wife that “there are a good supply of power points”; because I am an incurable romantic, like that. Poor woman.

The real heart-stopper when it comes to this trial of modern life concerns the instance when the portal itself does not immediately hold one’s adaptor in place. I’ll cry out, heralding disaster, if the whole Gordian Knot of wires and USBs falls free from the wall. My mind casts forward to a moment in time (about 20 minutes hence) where all devices cease to function, and one will be left wandering the streets in a state of powerful nicotine withdrawal, searching in utter desperation for an internet café to find some way of telling the entire Godforsaken world what a Nice Time one is having.

Except that never happens. What does sometime happen, and in some ways gives me a sad fanfare of triumph, is you have to insert your equipment at a rather unorthodox angle (when it Rome, etc.) to get stuff to light up and that satisfying thrum to begin again. One might have to balance the whole production against an idling kettle or paperback so as to preserve the angle of connectivity. On the face if it that sort of thing, or sockets pried free of the wall, revealing live wires, ripe to forward me beyond the hell of living, – that’s all dreadful and one should complain. But for me? No. Perverse little me feels his electricity was hard won, and as such a commodity to be valued.

There’s an argument, and a strong one, for taking my passport, if not my entire liberty, away.

Two ring cookery

However, with the rough comes the smooth. With the weeds, the flowers. Even for me.

I absolutely love cooking on holiday. And no, not because it allows me to suckle at the teat of the Alternating and Direct Currents. My holidaymaking culinary efforts on even the most Spartan of facilities is my living testament to the great works of my parents in the 1980s, when they would churn out homemade ‘Spanish fishcakes’ from the proceeds of but a few Pesetas, on a regular basis. Crisp on the edges, and a symphony of soft Smash, pepper and canned tuna on the inside.

It oughtn’t to go without remarking on that, just occasionally, they’d fall foul of the local lingo, and finish up providing something a little unwise, for Lil’ Sis and I, when at table. Like the time they congratulated themselves on the purchase of some very frugal fruit juice for my sibling and I to start the day. Which transpired to be a half litre share each in some Sangria; the carton had been drained by the time they started to twig why their 13-year-old Son and 11-year-old Daughter were quite so carefree and giddy with the morning.

Hotels? Fine. Stayed in hundreds, and in that number, some grand ones. Fine, if someone else is paying. Don’t care. Comfortable and presentable will do for me. Unlike some folks I know, I don’t really get much of a kick out of a whirlpool bath or the latest trouser press. I never, ever, wear the free dressing gown, and use the minibar to cool my own drinks.

But if the opportunity is there to have a ‘kitchenette’? I am to be found hovering over the ‘book’ button. A grill, if you’re lucky, but two rusting rings and a handful of pots and pans, two mismatching plates, an odd number of (blunted) knives and forks, and a slotted spoon and a spatula, and I am a Grump Transformed. I’ll start to dream of covered markets, attractively-perspiring tomatoes the size of rugby balls, and complicated-looking local fish. Open a cupboard to reveal a leftover half packet of pepper and some indeterminate oil, and I am in raptures.

Once again, I am not sure where this comes from. Alright, yes, the familial, parental example of fending for yourself. A love of cookery for the last 25 years, too. Mostly, I just think it’s the thought of living slightly outside of the expected. The factor that is plastering on the sun-cream, sliding on the flip-flops, and striking out for whatever supermarket is to be found. And little or no idea what you’ll finish up with, or quite what it will be turned into, or how.

In warmer climates, Ratatouille (always to be said in a cod-Welsh accent) is a must. Whatever’s on the go, goes in, and it will partner most pieces of meat. Sarah the First will tell you any time you like about my Belarusian mustard-smothered chicken breast, wrapped in local cured Mystery Meat, accompanied by a lusty slick of tomato-ey overdone gloop. All purchased from the supermarket a few doors down where we didn’t know the word for or recognise anything. It wasn’t even that clear what the water was. Must. Bone. Up. On. Cyrillic.

I’ve mentioned travelling with my Father before. Like me, he’ll got to a restaurant and have a thoroughly decent time, and pay the bill happily at the end. But you can see the glint in his eye when a Baby Belling is nearby. Our finest hour was probably the production of filtered coffee in our tiny room in Bratislava. A saucepan, a packet of coffee, a frying pan, a colander and a packet of kitchen towel. That, and a vague grasp of some principles of heating and filtration, a bit of cleaning the floor, a fag break and a bit of swearing and then, then, it was as if one was sipping from bone china in St. Mark’s Square. Sort of. These are small things, but I think I am coming to understand with age that it is smaller things that make me happy, and bigger things that make me cross.

Back next week, for the Cigarette Village, and Driving over there.

Part Two

Ah. So not exactly a week, then?

Oops. Last third of last year got characterised by rather a lot of running about, in the end. Just as I was threatening to unleash this ninth piece upon the reading public. Oh well. More interviews, and a temporary job that somehow became a sort of temporary/permanent hybrid, and another job sifting through 641 dull applications in the hopes of finding a non-existent jewel. Trying, at times, bundled in with Christmas and illness, and canine duty and all that, but at least we’re rather more thriving than we were.. and, whisper it, country number 50 may be on the cards come June! A foray into Andorra, no less! So, for now, I shall finish the Maltese tale, and we’ll see what we get up to after that – I may diversify for a while and touch on some other subjects, who knows? There’s certainly a piece to be written some time on the subject of job interviews. Oh my, there is. If not an actual fully paid-up job, I most certainly should have been afforded some sort of medal by now. Anyway, back to that another time. For now… <scenes fades expertly into 2013>…

At last our holiday was actually beginning. An amount of investigation revealed that the bus would pick up near enough opposite the hotel, so something, at least, was going right. And on the face of it there were timetabled to be about 12356672195 services per day, and a couple of the routes went through Slima. One could pay on board, and they charged near enough nothing. A Euro, if I remember right.

Eventually a bus rather Chitty Chitty Bang Banged into view. It was blue, flaking, noisy, and I think dated from about 1958. So warmish, too. We boarded, paid our nugatory fares, and clung onto the soft furnishings, as we made our way onto the main drag, to make our way from Bugibba (where it transpired we were based) back to Slima. This journey was one rendered halting and slow by a lot of later-afternoon traffic, and really provided no hint at all of what was to come. We even had a seat, after a while, and I took a few early photos. Around 45 minutes into the journey we emerged at a promenade, and Mother left the bus apace, with me trotting gently behind her. The ferry crossing was not far away, and we were ten minutes or so ahead of time before the closing service of the day, with the option of a bus back up the coast later. So, she was dispatched to purchase the tickets for our floatation, and I made out on foot to buy us a couple of cold bottles of water. And promptly nearly got into a fight.

I’ve mentioned before that I have an unfortunate habit of, with no intention of doing so, winding people up. However as I have got older I have got a little more vocal about matters when I think I am being treated badly; as should we all. I think this little tale plays me out fairly blamelessly.

50 yards down the main drag, before all the bars and restaurants and tourist offices and hotels really thickened out, there was one of those vans, with a hinged-open side. One buys burgers, kebabs and the like from them. Know the sort I mean? I approached, jingling my change from the bus, all smiles and holiday spirits once again, and waited my turn in the queue. As the punter ahead of me breezed off with an ice cream, I met with the face, albeit briefly, of the proprietor. He was, I think, 15. But one of those 15-year-olds so fleshy in adolescent construction from a mountain of sweets and chips as to have the bearing of an unfit Prop-forward. Lank hair, and an early attempt at a moustache of the most misplaced vainglory. I daresay some quite harrowing halitosis, too, had I been able or willing to draw near enough to sample it. I don’t sound very kind to him, no, but then again he was most unpleasant to me. You be the judge.

He eyed me quite clearly with a scowl before turning into the van to light up a ciggie. Tough day in the office, evidently. Still, you know, service industry and all that. I fished out my change and gave a polite and gentle cough of the sort designed to request attention inoffensively.

“WHAT?” he roared back at me, wobbling a little back through 180 degrees.

Bit startled. Be firm old man, I told myself.

“Two bottles of water please, one flat and one sparkl..”

“UGH!” he came back.

I stood off, as the lad sliced his way into the stockroom out the back, rendering cardboard asunder, and emerged with two bottles of warm water, and dumped them on the side in front of me, eyeing me up and down, just defying me to say a word out of turn. No indication of the price, at this point, so I drew out a fiver of the local, stead, and popped it down lightly. He made off with it, like a chunky Gollum heading back into the cave.

Nope, I wasn’t having it. This was no occasions for tipping. I pulled out the light cough a second time.

“WHAT, YOU!?” he enquired, in enraged fashion.

“My change, perhaps?” I replied sweetly.

A long stare, and with a Batman cartoon like <WHAM!> my 2€ change was driven into the counter, sending a bottle onto the ground for me to pick up. I gathered my money and my water, and stood back up. He was still there, radiating his rage through me and into the harbour beyond. I met him with my Best British Piercing Gaze, and a slightly jaunty eyebrow. Taking a bit of a risk here; he could comfortably have eaten two of my limbs in a sitting.

“WHASSA!? YOU GOTTA PROBLEM?! I COME ROUN’ THERE?” him bumfluff moistened.

I paused just long enough to see a few of his veins wriggle to the surface before popping the smile on again, just as his next customer (and my potential witness) arrived and issued a final retort:

“Not necessary my dear chap. Thanks ever so much.”

Clicked my heels and turned on them off in the direction of my Mother. I mused for a bit that in a different life I might perhaps have bopped the cheeky young git one on the hooter, but on balance contented myself with the side of that particular counter I was on, and the surety that his Duke of Edinburgh Award would likely be a long time in arriving.

From that point, as we swung across the water into Valletta, things looked up. Actually there is a lot of looking up, in that delightful city, as it’s about 80% steps. And, in an Escher-like way, they’re always upward steps. Still, as the heat waned a bit we started to soak it all in, and very fine it was. Not a huge amount of time to actually do anything that first day, of course, but certainly to get the sense of the place. Beautiful it was, too, with water all-around, cobbled, higgledy-piggledy, streets lined with sensitively mixed buildings from the present and the past. It was busy, but wholly friendly and enthusiastic, it seemed to me (take that, Waterboy).

After a time we decamped to get some nosebag and a cold drink down us. On a recommendation from a friend we dropped in for an hour or two for some free WiFi, a local beer and some wine and two courses of cheap and largely delicious food at the Café Jubilee. I qualify that particular delicious just a tad, because, me being me, I had to dive straight into the localmost local thing on the menu, which was a sort of filo pastry cheese and spinach pie: Torta ta L-Irkotta.  All jolly well, yes, but one of those crisp filo pastries that just seems to fracture and shed, everywhere (like a petrol station sausage roll eaten behind the wheel) and put one at the constant risk of breathing in slightly too hard and choking to death on the resultant shrapnel. Took the edge off a bit, but still a real lip-smacking experience. We clarified that he who had been left behind was surviving as best he could, and I attempted some distant flirtation with SWK, and started a week of boring the arse of Mother about her Daughter-in-Law-to-be. I was buzzing with the buzz of the Truly Smitten.

We rolled out of there, and walked back up the main drag to the ‘bus station’ for our first Malta Night Bus experience.

To describe it as a bus station entirely oversells it, by modern standards. It was a large traffic island, with vehicular stopping points every few yards, set at 45-degree angles from the flow of traffic. The commencement of each and every journey from this dusty terminus necessitated that the driver should reverse his steed back out into the flow of traffic, people eating their evening kebab, and milling, cheese-filled tourists with their Mothers in tow. For all the chaos, there was at least a modern scoreboard, which gave reasonably accurate information about which buses were due in, where they were due in, and where they were going to.

Reasonably accurate? Yes. Consistently? No. We didn’t get on the wrong bus; it’s just that the right bus was in the wrong place, so by the time we boarded it was heaving. No hope of a seat for Mother, so we clung to one another, and such of the fabric of the bus that had survived the decades as we could lay hands on.

Grandson of a bus driver that I am, my first instinct with a cargo rather near to the brim would be to take it fairly easy on the old right foot. Right? No, wrong. The chap absolutely tore off into the distance, once he sense a chance to pull away. Periods of travel at such a speed were quite exhilarating, and they provided the benefit of sort of accidental air-conditioning, because of the jets of air coming through the opened windows as they cut through the night. All that was sort of okayish, although when a bus overtakes stuff, you do worry a bit. The real issue was more to do with getting down from just under the speed of sound to a flat zero – not a process that either the driver or the bus handled well. Chap just banged the anchors on with all his might, and patrons sailed throughout the bus. If you didn’t hang on tight, that was you. Babies, Grannies, pets? No one was safe. There was a very real chance of being forcibly ejected as he unexpectedly pulled into a distant lay-by to let people off the more legitimate way. As an ingénue to all this Maltese madness, I was terrified, but did my best to be strong for Mother. She looked rather less than concerned than me. The locals though? They loved it. Free fairground ride, I suppose. Utter madness. On the plus side, one got home in rather a quicker time from the capital than one had taken in getting to it. And after a time, folk got off, so it became possible to gather a seat, and a little more of a feeling of security in some of the deathlier bends.

After a while, tyres ablaze, we were turfed-out at the Hotel At The Edge of the Universe. A little embattled by the whole experience, I suggest we took a small nightcap at the bar downstairs, where we were to take breakfast the next day. After a time, the barkeep was summoned, and when asked for some local red wine, wielded one of those bottles of roughly the size of the Nebuchadnezzars or whatever they are that they give F1 drivers to spray around after the chequered flag. One harboured some suspicion as to the quality of the vintage. Rightly, as it turned out. The issue was what I can only really describe as a Red Wine Drink. Vowing to try across the road another night, we sipped all we could muster, brushed teeth a number of times and made for bed.

The bus would feature twice more, one further and more infamous evening, but I’ll come back to that.

We settled in over the next couple of days and had nothing short of a high old time of it. Plenty to do, soaked up the sun, nice food and drink. It was completely ace, and I really must take SWK one day. Did us both the power of good.

We were determined to make a couple of guided trips out, whilst we were there. On one day we plumped for a trip on a local cruise boat that took us out to neighbouring Gozo, with its awesome Azure Window, bird life, vineyards and ancient buildings. We stopped at Comino on the way back, at the very famous Blue Lagoon. Alas it turned out to be famous these days more for lager, blisteringly loud and crappy ‘pop’ music, and hordes of screaming teenagers, careering around the water on what appeared to be inflatable farming produce, tied to speedboats. Periodically they would fall in, and presumably were killed on impact and just sank to the bottom as their compadres shrieked in delight at the hedonism of it all. Who knows? Bit of Logan’s Run affair. Got to admit to being a bit British, at that point. Stayed on board with a bottle of water and a crossword. One step away from hoisting up the Argyle socks and knotting a handkerchief over my head. Not my thing, I’m afraid. Or our thing, indeed.

The other trip out was at times beautiful, and periodically studded with intense feelings of embarrassment. This one took us to the South of the main island, and out onto much smaller boats. Little inflatables, in fact, that chugged around the coast and took us to the Blue Grotto, and popped in and out of the undercut cliffs to show us all the extraordinary, phosphorescent blues of the water there. This should give you the general idea:

It was a nice enough international bunch of folk, and we were all scooped up in a minibus and whizzed around in good time to see the various sights on offer, including Qrendi, and attractive little fishing village near the boat trip. But the Grotto was the highlight, and I want to see it again one day. Fresh air, bright sun, cool water and the whizz of the outboard as we darted in and out of the rock formations. We’d been out there snapping, oohing and aahing for a while, when I chanced to look out to sea, and the island enthusiast/nerd in me spotted this, a couple of miles out:

Unusually shaped, and probably, what, a couple of miles from the coast? I had to know more about this, so tapped up our guide for some info.

“Aaaah! Eeeenglish, yes?” he boomed, cracking a grin. I signalled I was.

“Very funny story then. Island is called Fifla. It means, ‘chilli-pepper’ rock. Once it was tall and pointy like a pepper, then your RAF and Navy come and practice their shootings on it for 40 years and, hey, now is flat.”

He seemed gently amused by this. Not for the first time, I found myself looking at my flip flops, during a noticeable quiet pause in proceedings. Apparently we were still knocking the crap out of this innocent island until 1973 (!), until it was declared a nature reserve, and now the flat surface our Services generated during their assaults is populated by as many as 20,000 sea birds. So not all bad; mind you, none of the fisherman of southern Malta are allowed within a nautical mile, lest they should be blown even flatter than the island by any unexploded ordinance we might have left lying around. Rule Britannia, etc.

Our gang was out for much of the day, and by lunchtime a seaside pause saw the temperature dawdle back up into the 90s, as it did most days. No problem. Hat, bottle of water, economy of movement, and even the limpest and whitest of us can survive. However, representatives of other nations are not necessarily given to such modesty. Mother, being a Senior member of the party, was afforded a front seat in the jalopy. I was thrust into the back with the lower orders. Initially an agreeable enough ride, but when we returned to the motor in the afternoon sun, the previously shirted and shorted young Italian men I had been stationed with had done away with their clobber, dipped themselves in some sort of Vaseline and opted for a pairing of sandals and really quite reprehensible choices of budgie smugglers. Aside from the simple business of all that bulging around not doing much for the digestion, one also had to sit calf and thigh next to slippery flesh on either side. And we were rather packed in, I thought. And without seatbelts. In the event of an emergency stop I would have squeezed, slipped and popped out of the sunroof with the ease of a new-born lamb. Probably to the sound of someone making that sound involving the thumb and the inside of the cheek. The sights were great, but the journey not entirely edifying.

Two more things to tell you about, before we end this rather belated epic.

Firstly, I got the taste for something quite rare for me, on Malta. And that was a dessert. Not normally a mad dasher for the sweet trolley. Something called Cassata, we learned (Mother got outside of some of it, too). A remarkable, flattish cake featuring ricotta, green marzipan, hazelnuts, pistachios, candied fruit, sponge, vermouth, chocolate and jam. It was just wonderful, and I think I hoovered-up four big slices in five or six nights. Tried to make it since; good, but not the same. Must Go Back To Malta. I first scoffed it after getting off the bus the evening that followed the day of the events as chronicled above. As I sat there, drinking in enough sugar to bring on a seizure, I remarked to Mother at the late evening runners along the sea front. I think I might have described them as “a bit rubbish”, as they were dawdling along, rather, with the gait of those rather in a hurry for a trip to the porcelain.

I was similarly scathing of another group of well-intended runners the next night, as we went past them on yet another Night Bus Into Hell. This, too, was searing along, but on this occasion there was a little bit of drama playing out inside the bus, too. As it pulled up to take us home, and the door opened, Mother steamed past me and a number of others in pursuit of a seat. I was a bit taken aback, figured she was a bit tired and really needed to rest her plates. We’d had another full day, travelling over to Mdina, another stunning location. I loped in alongside her, holding onto the pole and the straps as our man tested out his nought to sixty time.

We both became transfixed by different things, for much of the duration of the journey. For me, it was the bizarre and slightly chilling coupling sitting opposite us. On the right, a pubescent girl of about 13. Politely dressed, a little bit of the chubbiness of childhood about her, still, with light brown skin, a pile of frizzy hair and, I recall now, a colossally large and quite out of place white leather handbag. Looked quite delighted by life, on the whole. To her right, and my left, was her ‘boyfriend’. And I use the term a bit advisedly, as he must have been the better part of my age (I was 39 at the time). He was tall, thin as a rake, and rather nerdy looking. And uncomfortable, as it was not just my incredulous eyes upon them. But, equally, he was very passive. The child was making all the running, and it was 20-odd minutes of periodic petting and coupley cooing that I would pay money to never have witnessed. But as a short film it burnt its way into the brain, rather. Unavoidable, and six feet away. The atmosphere crackled. They got off together, in the end (forgive the pun) and there was just a sort of general exhalation. Never seen anything like it in my life. Lord alone knows where they are now.

Meanwhile, Mother had found a different object of focus. Whilst I gawped in astonishment at the pairing opposite, she had set her jaw and a taught glare across the bus to the windows and the middle doors. I couldn’t really get much out of her by way of conversation, and at one stop, near Slima, she clearly followed someone with this gaze all of the way off the bus.

We got back, and were free to talk. I asked her what had raised the masterly hackles so, if not the love drama playing out in front of us. And why had she elbowed everyone else out of the way, earlier? Most unlike her.

“Oh it wasn’t everyone else”, she shared. “No, not at all. It was that Bitch from the start of the week who made us move hotel all the way out here. No way was she getting a seat.”

How we laughed. Revenge for the impropriety had come late, but was sweet.

On our final morning, I decided it was time to shift some of the Cake Weight, and so I ventured out at about 6.30am for a run in the morning light along the waterfront. And made an utter fool of myself. And ate my words of the other night. I set out at my typically foolish seven miles per hour, and must have lasted all of the first three hundred yards uphill before hitting the wall. The reason runners just bobble along in Malta is because it’s scorching hot for rather a lot of the year, and to do anything other than longer and slower running is tantamount to suicide. Idiot Brits beware.

I stuck with it, walking, wheezing, trotting, walking, sweating, and generally wrecking myself. I was overtaken by cheery pensioners. One of them waved to me. By the time I crossed the hotel lobby I was soaked to the skin. I could almost hear the drips hitting the tiled floor. I was a shocking sight, and had to double bag my kit as it went into the case. As I looked in, and prepared to pull the zip tight, I saw a little silvery flash. A necklace with a Maltese cross, which I had bought on a whim for SWK a couple of days earlier, and would present to her a little nervily on our third date in another week or so. A whole new chapter was about to begin unfolding…

Part One

Welcome back – didn’t take long, eh?

I’ve a bit of time this week before the next interview is to be attended and next lot of applications is to be written. So, August will see me make good on one of my promises – and get up to schedule with 12 tales of silliness in a year, including this two-parter. The running’s coming on… I just need to lose some weight and it’ll all be coming together splendidly. Well, provided I get a job, too!

So, let’s turn to our attentions to my last holiday with my Mother.

2013 was the year my life changed utterly. And wonderfully. And in some respects permanently.

By July, I was a non-smoker, 100lb lighter than was once the case, and I had just over a year of total abstinence behind me. And I was five months into my running career.

Running came to me after quite some time. And features rather later on in this particular tale, where I learned rather a lot. In February, whilst still smoking and losing weight, I decided to go out for a walk, just four days ahead of my 39^th birthday. Before doing so, I downloaded the RunKeeper App onto my iPhone. A bit of messing about with the specifics of it, and I made for the countryside, to go for what is an old fave of a route, through a couple of attractive local villages. It was a cold Winter day, so on went the coat and a pair of boots.

As much as I have always liked walking, I have never taken a competitive attitude to it. Just, you know, a chance for some steady locomotion and the opportunity to look at some nice stuff and take a few pictures here and there. However, on this occasion I said to myself “I’m going to get on with this”. There was the distant prospect of an output from the App in terms of distance, pace, and, importantly for one still dieting; calories.

And so it was, 35 minutes later, I found myself clambering up the hill from Papplewick to Linby. I was gasping for breath, my feet were becoming of roughly the consistency of a steak tartare, and cold sweat rolled like waves down my back. I felt like crap. But, just for once, I persisted. I was going to do this, and, in the end, I did. The ‘phone read five miles, 77 minutes and 3 seconds, and 485 calories. I had climbed 180 feet, and walked a mile in under 15 minutes. Actually, now I look at it, two of them. I lay on the sofa with a ciggie and cooled down. And started to feel rather jolly. This activity was free, and could be repeated, and would generate equally ‘free’ weight loss.

And repeated it was. I walked the last three tram stops home twice a week, and got up just after dawn on Saturday and Sunday morning to do the 5-miler before breakfast. The improvements that came under this regime were astonishing. They were helped by me actually wearing rather more sensible clothing, and popping on a pair of trainers, but the miles had to be done, and done they were.

And then came that day. A bit warmer, probably end of March, beginning of April when I thought, dressed in a pair of tracksuit bottoms (£8 from Tesco – still got ‘em, albeit they are now covered in paint) that, there being no one around, I would jog 100 yards downhill. And I did. A few minutes later, I did it again. And then a third time. On the final occasion I was slightly put off when a solidly-built lady in her mid-fifties flew by me like I was standing still.. but I had started running. All memories of asthmatic childhood wheezing through Cross Country and the like had been banished in the dawning of a morning. My lungs forgot to burn, my breath returned in no time. I was actually getting fitter.

And I never looked back. By the time we reached August 6^th, I was as fit as I have ever been. I weighed what I did when I was 17. My dating profile mentioned I liked running! I even had thoughts of doing some in Malta.

August 6^th 2013, which has just passed us for the third time since, was the day when I met the beautiful, humorous, tolerant and talented SWK. As our wedding guests last Summer learned, I made a nervous arse of myself on the first occasion of meeting. Utterly hopeless, struck by the presence of a pretty girl like I was still 14 or something. But, for all that, once I’d had a couple of glasses of wine I loosened up and managed to talk to her.. even make her laugh. By midnight she joined me in a smiling cuddle by some nearby bins, and we agreed to meet again on Friday of that week. The evening after my last day of work that Summer, and the night before I was due to jet to Ramsgate, via Cambridge, to meet my partner in crime for the Malta venture.

A fine evening it was, too. I had the total fanboy experience of picking up the object of my affections from Stage Door. Like an autograph hunter. She took my arm and we wandered into town for a couple of glasses of wine. In serious mode, she asked me a few pertinent quiz questions about my coming divorce proceedings, my friendship with Sarah the First, etc. etc. It was much like being grilled as to one’s prospects over a fireside whisky by a prospective Father-in-Law. It seems I passed, and before long we had moved pubs and were sat shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh and the questions became lighter, but a bit more personal.  I think I probably said to myself, quietly “I might be in here” but dared not quite to dream.

I need not have worried. An hour later I was being dragged to a late bar, via a cashpoint where SWK appeared to withdraw about £2000. I was bought a whisky which I did not ask for, and then nervily dropped, and then she kissed me. I have never looked back since.

The night drew on. We became closer. Eventually we walked (alright, wobbled) hand in hand back to her digs, in those foothills of a great affection that are so tremendously exciting. I was placed in the kitchen with a glass of water whilst the lady went off to spend a suspicious amount of time in the bathroom, having drunk a number of glasses of wine following little or no dinner. People came and went, asked me what I was ‘in’ that week (mistaking the all-new slimline me for an actor), and I sipped my water until the lady reappeared. Toothpaste fresh. We passed some more time outside on the steps, agreed that it would be best not to spend the night together, given it was 3am and she had rehearsals at 9am and I had, as we know, a drive ahead of me.  She walked me, barefoot, to a taxi. On this walk, I became that combination of bold and idiotic that characterises so much of my existence.

“I’m going away for a couple of weeks” I said.

“Oh?” she replied.

“Yes. Don’t get the wrong idea or anything, but I’m taking Mother on holiday to Malta.”

Not a flicker.

“But if you could bear not to see anyone else whilst I am away, I can’t wait to see you again”

Bit better.

“Fine” she said. And into a taxi I went.

Such exchanges are not uncommon. I guess it was about a month or so later when I stayed the night at her flat for the first time. On waking, during a tender discussion over Sunday morning coffee, we managed to head-butt one another really quite hard. I was mortified – this is not, I believe, the behaviour designed to seal the deal with a new lover? She, of course, giggled, lay back on the bed rubbing her forehead and asked me:

“So… am I in some sort of relationship now?”

Soaked in romance, huh?

“I do hope so” I replied. And promptly asked her, hurriedly, if she would come to my friend’s wedding with me. Always with the dim-witted and panicky response. Still, she said yes, and one way or another we’ve been following one-another through life ever since, and always will. I am the luckiest of men; I really am.

I woke that Saturday morning back in July in a slightly tender, but most excited state. Couple of nervy texts exchanged with my new belle (just wanted to check it wasn’t all some highly unfair dream), and I scraped myself together bit by bit and drove steadily down to Cambridge. There, I picked up the one and only bespoke suit I have ever had made. Wonderful item it is, too. Give me three months and I’ll be able to wear it again.

Realising the time, I called Mother and through a cheesy grin gave her a bit of a precis of why I was going to be a bit late. No problem – off I went.

There followed a nice couple of days catching up. We gradually got to the stage where Mother and I were convinced we could safely leave the Old Man alone for five nights. Essentially made the place safe, cleaned and ironed his clothes, handed over a few quid and ensured there was a spare corkscrew within reach. Crossing fingers, we whizzed up to Luton, to a nearby hotel where we were staying the night before our dawn flight to the island. One way or another, after a 27-point turn, I parked the car and we headed through various subterranean corridors then up to Reception to check in. This was a process that gathered us a couple of slightly long and quizzical looks.

I realised why, on opening the door to our room, and espying a double bed rather than two singles. We thought this was hilarious, particularly when one of us pointed out I probably hadn’t ‘slept in Mummy’s bed’ since I had measles as a boy of 7, just over three decades before. Nonetheless it was not a conventional arrangement, let’s face it. Still, we had a picnic and went down to the bar and shared a bottle of wine, discussed holiday plans, and listened to the strains of a very noisy and very boozy group of Chinese businessmen, laying waste to most of the blended whisky that Bedfordshire could make available.

Eventually we rattled off to bed, making ready for sleep, a comic distance apart. I lay awake, texting SWK about the silliness of it all, as Mother began to cut the night with her snores. Some small time later I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I knew the alarm was blaring the arrival of 4.00am and I was trying to get the hotel kettle under the tap in the standard issue tiny sink, and switching on the shower to warm it up, for I am a Good Son. For the most part, anyway.

We got ourselves together and headed for checkout. Rather alarmingly, our visitors from the Far East were still living it up, which added a certain amount of colour to the procedure. I prised the car from its spot, collect Mother and her baggage and we made for the airport and the plane.

The first major trial of the holiday, for once, did not present itself until we were actually in Malta.

We embarked on the standard issue 1,000 miles per hour taxi ride towards Slima – a town across the harbour from the capital, Valletta. Mother had asked me to book there, specifically, as it was a part of the island she knew well from two previous visits with the Old Man. Given that up until the end of the previous year she had been really very unwell indeed, I was determined that she should get what she wanted and feel comfortable at all times, whilst enjoying feeling fit enough to travel overseas again. With a screech of brakes, we pulled up outside a place that felt really rather grand. I remember thinking, at the time, that we had done rather well for ourselves (I had cashed in a few Airmiles to get us a decent set of lodgings), as we entered from the early heat of the day into a cool and open lobby, with a double-staircase ahead of us and a Reception desk on the right. Top notch stuff. Armed with passports and paperwork I approached the desk to get us booked in, whereupon a pretty hard-nosed lady basically said “no”. I enquired what “no” actually meant and she informed me that they had had a block booking from a Language School and our booking had been bumped to another hotel.

Had it been less hot, and had I not been up for several hours, I might have got rather angry at this point, but it seemed no way to start a holiday. Instead, one opted for a smile and a determination to negotiate. I registered my surprise that something I had booked six months ago should suddenly be bounced out in this way, and enquired as to what the alternative option on the table was, inwardly wondering about travel insurance, and the fluidity of my credit card.

“Don’t worry at all, Sir, we have a lovely Sister hotel for you and your Mother”, I was told. “If you wait there we will call a cab for you to take you there.”

There followed a familial conference. My Mother was very keen to know the hotel was in Slima, for reasons I have already outlined.

“Yes, of course” said the stone-beaked one, a little dismissively for my liking. I was starting to bristle, but managed to score us a cuppa whilst we waited. And waited and waited.

I shot the odd look at the desk, as we poured a second drink, and got assurances that the cab was on its way. We did wonder, at the time, why a cab was necessary. Could we not walk ‘round the corner? Still, when you’re being mucked about you are inclined to cost those doing it a few quid (well, I am). Eventually a taxi arrived. I offered the most unctuous “thank-you so much” to the staff that my energies would allow, and the world’s most talkative and speedy taxi driver burned rubber in a northerly direction.

In only five minutes we were, quite clearly, on some sort of highway, heading away from both Slima and Valletta. Reasoning that the driver was only following orders, we bit down and waited. I asked him, in between tales of the achievements of his children, what the hotel was like and where it was. “Pretty different”, he offered. “Twenty minutes?” he followed up. I started to compose my letter of complaint. My Mother remained stoic behind dark glasses. I felt like a right ineffective git.

What felt like several days later, we drove around the edge of a bay to the front of an enormous hotel. We were in something they call a ‘resort’, I gather. Miles from where we should be. Around us the air thumped, gently, with distant drum and bass. I was dazzled by the number of signs advertising lager. Children screamed from nearby swimming pools and I could feel small shards coming off my teeth as I ground them.

There was more by way of delights to come, however. I presented myself to the second front desk of the morning, leaving Mother, seated, with the luggage. I explained who we were and handed over a hand-written note from Hotel  #1. A nice enough young fellow told me he did not know we were coming, but perhaps one of his colleagues would have more information. A conflab followed ‘round the back’ and eventually a woman came forward to explain to this now rather puce Englishman that his room was not ready yet. Not one room in the enormous hotel, it seemed. Could we come back at 3.00pm?

I look back now and wonder where I got my patience from, frankly, given at the best of times I have near enough none of it in stock. I suppose I thought, as it turned out to be the case, that this place had nothing to do with the first place whatsoever, and as such the staff were blameless – clearly an arrangement had been made ‘behind the scenes’. I pointed out that my fellow traveller and I had now been awake for ten hours, had not eaten and were as yet to actually be able to put our belongings into a hotel room. And that I was not really enjoying my holiday as yet. By way of restitution, we were given a voucher for lunch at the cavernous restaurant across the street and they took our bags into safe keeping.

We crossed the street in the midday heat, and did hungry justice to a not bad pair of pizzas and a bottle of emperkening beer and water each. Finally, the appointed hour came and my latest negotiation with the Maltese hotel industry started. Mercifully it was to prove the last one of the day. A room key, some vague instructions about breakfasting, and information about where to catch the bus.

“How long does it take to get to Slima harbour?” I enquired.

“Only about 40 minutes” the lady said.

I felt another tooth go, and hauled bags to the room, working on some particularly piquant phrases for the second paragraph of my letter. Showers were taken, bags unpacked and, fighting the tiredness, we headed out for our first foray onto the Maltese bus service. By which hang any number of tales of accidents, paedophilia, Angry Maternal Swearing and immodestly dressed Italians.

Of which more, next week.

Part Two (after a bit of a pause.. still, only one behind now!)

We spent four nights in Constanta, and really loved the place. Right up to the hectic final evening, which saw the national Romanian side sadly exiting Euro 2016 at the hands of Albania. Hordes of fans charged down to Ovid Square as we, emerging from our latest Escape Room triumph, attempted to line up a spot of nosebag at a Greek restaurant that one of the two women we’d met on the first evening recommended.

Greek food seems to have become something of our default choice, since last year’s honeymoon on a couple of Greek islands. Indeed, earlier this year during a short break to Luxembourg, we hopped over the border so that SWK could claim to have trodden upon German soil, and we found ourselves scarfing a few Dolmades and whatnot for lunch. With, at least, a drop of German Pilsner for authenticity. That all got a bit awkward, when they didn’t take credit cards, and we proved unable to use the cashpoint in the border village. We finished up sat at the table transferring money across bank accounts just to be able to pay the bill. Better, on balance, to do that than find ourselves donning the marigolds and heading for the washing-up pile, splendid team though we are, of course.

Back in Constanta, arriving at the restaurant, we instantly regretted not booking. The terrace was packed. Properly packed. Couples, families, groups of mates, all scarfing the Souvlaki and watching the game on big screens. We asked if they could squeeze us in, but no dice. We wandered away, disconsolately looking on at the piles of halloumi with not a little envy, until suddenly a couple leapt up and away from their finished plates and glasses. SWK, being, as I call her, The Face Of The Organisation’ smiled winningly at a waiter and we were in.

At which point things slowed down rather. We gave it a few minutes and were wondering what the alternatives might be, but then a lady dropped in with a menu and asked if wanted a drink. Going through the menu at just under the speed of light, herself espied her much-loved Retsina and ordered a bottle.

“Ah, no. Retsina finish” said our girl.

Pah. Bit of a setback. Buy, y’know, at least we were in. And hungry and thirsty, so we persisted. In short order a couple of beers, some water and a very nice Romanian red put in an appearance, and we waded in.

The beer and the water were gone by the time our lady eventually popped back. Indeed, the wine had taken an early hit as well. However, there would at least be a few solids. Albeit probably not south of midnight.

“I’d like to try your Moussaka, I said” taking an appreciative sip of the red wine, picked to accompany it. I was determined to give authentic Greek Moussaka a third and final try; the two experiences I had of it last year were slippery, oily and yuck.

“Ah, no. Moussaka finish” said our girl.

Sake. My stomach growled, audibly. I think I did too. And just about stopped short of asking whether or not everything Greek was “finish”? Happy the gentler one of us hurriedly scoped an order and we eventually pushed it down atop the ocean of wine and beer. Meanwhile, Romania gradually bowed out of Euro 2016. We popped down to the main square for the last 20 minutes of the game, and eventually commandeered a taxi back to chez nous.

And so, the time came to transport ourselves across the country. The day dawned scintillatingly hot. We got ourselves and our luggage down to the local shop and stood in the shade, beaded with sweat, gulping frantically from water bottles. A certain amount of calling cab companies followed. After a time, the right combination of numbers got us through to what purported to be a taxi company and SWK summoned a mercifully air-conditioned ride to the station. We bumbled down into the bowels of the place and stowed our bags away until the evening, and headed out for the day, but not before checking with the nice ladies in the booth the exact details of our initial connection to Bucharest, where we later to pick up our onward sleeper to Bucharest.

Nice day out followed, including a final trip to one of our favoured haunts for a spot of lunch. After a time, we trekked back to the station and got cold drinks, bags, tickets, and awaited our train. Which, once it rolled into town, defied all expectation. It was utterly pristine, in each and every way, and the seat reservations proved correct and well, everything really. We settled in with books and a few tunes and set sail for our 20-minute visit to the Capital. All was in good order, and once we really got shifting there were some moments of genuine excitement, as we headed up and up and up and then traversed multiple level flyover bridges, as the Sun started to wane. Really pretty breath-taking stuff.

And then the customary oddities of a Cox-led journey began. We suddenly became aware of the sound of rapidly flowing water. And then the sound of a fairly large amount of water impacting something. Not a drop of rain in sight, though. Odd. I got to my feet and looked in what I perceived to be the right direction. To the left of the entrance to our carriage there was a locked glass door, and beyond it all that was visible was a pretty-much constant deluge of water sluicing down from the floor above (the train was one of those split-level jobs). After a time, it stopped. Speculation was rife amongst the locals. SWK and I pretty much shrugged it off, but did wonder what the source might be. Back to the old book, then.

Then it cracked off again. One started to dismiss the notion of a movement of stored water from an earlier shower, and reached darker conclusions. Particularly when there were suddenly some squeaks and whispers of shock around us, and the mighty chap to my right reached for his 53786 shopping bags and tried to find elevated areas on which to place them. He looked rather glumly at one, unmistakeably dripping from the bottom. A considerable snake of rather murky water had advanced down the central aisle. We did similar with our own belongings, and indeed moved ourselves upwards, much in the manner of Mammy Two Shoes, the lady of the house inhabited by Tom and Jerry. The base fear was that there had been some manner of eruption in the first floor WC, leading to a crack in the porcelain and something of a gruesome outflow. Ugh.

We met the situation with fortitude, and held on until Bucharest. Left with 18 minutes between services we barrelled down to the concourse and bought a healthy dinner of a large bag of pretzels and two large bottles of cold beer.

Our steed arrived, and proved itself to be of rather less than tip top order. Not a little Soviet, in vintage. I recalled my delight when I had booked tickets online for a First Class double for pretty minimal outlay of £50. Resolving, albeit briefly, to be positive, I led the way onto the train and swung the door of our cabin open, only for it to rebound into my face from an iron structure about three quarters of an inch inside the room.

The interior of the place was a vision of brown wood. And one of the smallest spaces I have ever cohabited. It made that cabin that Nicholas and I rattled through from Prague to Warsaw in look like a sprawling ballroom. It was, essentially, a pair of bunk beds and a tiny place in which to lay one’s wares. And nothing else. With the window tight shut, and the heat of our bodies added, the heat and humidity was excruciating. SWK leapt to the upper bunk, and we both disrobed immediately. I stood on the ground level, naked except for my boxers, and offered a short piece to camera, which our friends on Facebook are welcome to view. I appear in that short film to have been running for several miles. I have never been in a sauna, but I imagine this was not far off. The experience was slightly painfully added to when the guard appeared, and I had to endure a short exchange with him over the matter of our tickets, dressed and dripping in just the same way.

We were, for a time, not a little hysterical. We opened the beer, and could almost see it evaporating. Storm clouds started to form just under the ceiling. I ventured to the WC, at the end of the carriage (having popped my sodden shirt back on), and made water ahead of the coming night. It had the ring of a recently abandoned abattoir.  Beyond a simple evacuation, touching as small a number of surfaces as possible, nothing was possible. To brush your teeth in there would have been to embrace the cold grip of Cholera, Typhoid, and, indeed, diseases yet unknown. First Class my foot.

I returned, advised my wife to hold it, and turned my attentions to the window, as the temperature rose once again.

Remember those comedy caper films where cars were started with a crank handle? Yes? So it was, that the route to fresh air was by much the same method. One took a sort of outsized Allen Key from a berth on the wall, and engaged it in an aperture on the sill of the window. And turned, and turned, and turned. The window started to open, by the millimetre. I thought I discerned the sound of atmospheric pressures equalising, as my muscles burned. Frankly, that Atlas geezer had it easy.

We clawed eagerly at the moving and cooler air as it burst into our little coffinette. The effect was merciful. Noisy, yes. Oh God it was noisy, but one could at least draw in a full lungful of air. I cast the handle aside, took a closing pull of my beer, crammed in some pretzels for the saline replacement value, and dropped onto my bunk. We made good-humoured talk for a while, musing momentarily about what it would be to attempt anything overtly romantic in such a space – agreeing very much that it would be beyond ghastly, and eventually one or the other of us dropped off.

We clanked North. Now and again one would be wrested from slumber by the train’s horn. But, remarkably, I believe we both cobbled together a couple of hours of sleep.

In seemingly no time at all, we jumped back into wakefulness as mobiles chirruped that we were but 15 minutes from Iasi (pronounced Yash). A desultory application of wet wipes acted by way of a shower, and we used chewing gum to freshen our breath. Clothed once again, SWK made for a morning pee. After a while she returned, sporting a stunned expression that suggested that discussion about the facilities would be unwelcome.

We disembarked. Glad of being back on two feet, and at liberty. It was 6.30am, and so we dumped bags and went out on foot for an early explore. Within minutes we were walking down a marvellous boulevard and generally cooing at an agreeable location. Very nice indeed, sparkling attractively in the emerging dawn.

We were, by now, famished, and so I can report to my shame that we walked back to the station and got ourselves outside of a McDonalds breakfast and a spot of coffee. It had the restorative effect, and we hailed a cab and took ourselves and our belongings off to the hotel. The staff there were a little surprised to see us so early, and could not offer a room until later in the morning. However, they took our heavier luggage behind the counter and pointed us in the direction of local possibilities. As we headed out, we came to an agreement. We would treat the morning as if it were the evening, drop in somewhere for a couple of cooling beers, then come back to the hotel for a doze and go out to explore later on the day. And so the die was, I’m afraid, cast…

It did not take long for us to alight on a place that was up and running. On an upper terrace a bulky and shaved man was enjoying a cold one. No one else in sight, but it was not long until the Face Of The Organisation summoned a young man who was only too happy to supply us with cooling lager. Shoes off, feet up, we relaxed into an impromptu but, we felt, justifiable morning sup. We nattered about this and that, including our concerns about the upcoming EU Referendum, which was only two days ahead of us, and had already involved us in a couple of conversations with some Romanian folk.

Over SWK’s shoulder, I saw the man get another round in, and this time chase it with something cold, small, clear and evidently rather bracing, judging by the way he shivered on a first sip of it. He looked a little troubled when another fellow dropped in on him with some paperwork which he scanned, with furrowed brow, before scribbling a few notes and sending the fellow off with some instructions.

We were just about to head off to our hotel when we heard those words..

“Hello! Where are you from?”

The first words of this fateful day from a man I have come to dub Ovidiu The Rogue. Our buzz-cut man across the terrace. We indulged in a certain amount of small talk, being the friendly citizens we always endeavour to be. All jolly agreeable. SWK fired up another “last quick one” before we headed for sleep, and our new chum ambled over to our table.

Right from the off, one could see there was the glint of mischief and mayhem in his eye. A range of topics were covered. His life, his business, his young Daughter, and, alas, the EU. Fair to say our chap was not a fan, but in fairness he made a number of cogent remarks about foreign ownership and their effect on his ability to make a living. I don’t know how he did it, but, unspeakingly he made two more beers and a glass of the firewater appear.

“You must try this. It is local drink”, he said. I looked at SWK, she looked at me. I gulped. It was about 9.30am. I drew the glass to my lips and poured in a plum-flavoured mouthful of flames. The icy burn that is the Romanian version of Palinka. OTR, as I shall now call him, chortled at my disquiet. SWK did too, the cheeky mare, so I thrust the glass in her direction, suggesting it would only be polite for her to have a little try. The woman is made of iron, it turns out. She didn’t so much as flinch as the burning liquid passed her teeth.

The morning became rather more fluid. We felt it only hospitable to get OTR a round back. With misunderstandings at an all-time high, this round came accompanied with more paint stripper. Oddly once you’ve had a few sips, it becomes rather more potable. We mused that we would, at least, sleep. Fatally, for our prospects later that day, we exchanged telephone number, as OTR said he’d like to show us around a bit. Mrs OTR put in an appearance, after the school run. A nice lady, but bearing something of a thunderous expression for her husband, and not possessed of very much by way of conversational English. The atmosphere became frostier than the drinks. Through the fog, SWK and I realised it was time to beat a retreat. We came to an agreement as to the bill, and weaved down the hill towards our lodgings. We boozily hoisted the bags to the room and crashed out to the strains of air-conditioning.

Skip forward to 5.00pm or so. I jumped back into wakefulness as my mobile registered a text. From OTR..

<I am outside. With car.>

Oh crap. There was a brief discussion between us and we agreed we probably ought to play his game. After all, we had plenty more time, even if we were going to inevitable right off the first day somewhat. Small matter, we were on holiday, after all!

<Give us 10 minutes, to have a quick shower. Meet you in lobby?>

…

<Cool. C U soon.>

It was as I banged my head getting into the shower that I mused that the morning’s largesse may not quite yet have left my system. SWK did not voice them, but she clearly had similar misgivings. But we soldiered on.

Outside, OTR smoked cheerily against a fancy sports car. He introduced his chum, who I mistook as his driver or employee; a notion I could not quite get out of my head for the rest of the evening. We alighted the motor and OTR tore off into town, parking up by a Prosecco bar. In we went, a table was secured, and yet more libations appeared. There was more by way of chitchat, and we moved on to a discussion about wine. Big mistake. The next thing you know, fingers got snapped and a bottle of something white, crisp and amazing arrived in an ice bucket. This, for me, was the fatal blow. I’m just not 21 anymore, I’m afraid.

I nodded off. Sorry, but it’s true. I was woken in time to be ushered into a different vehicle for a ride to OTR’s ‘club’, which it transpired (as I woke again) was a leafy resort just outside the city, with a terrace and a pool. Some other chums were on station by the pool. I collapsed into a deck chair, and was given water. I like to imagine I entertained the gleeful throng, but suspect not. They seemed entirely engaging and cheerful, but there was just a hint of darkness about what ‘business’ they might be engaged in. Who knows, really? SWK fought gamely onwards, and I dropped back into sleep, which, it turned out, was going to be very good for me.

I am told that a further avalanche of ruinous fluids followed. I knew nothing of this, as my snores echoed through the trees.

Having lost some time, I then dimly remember being led to the exit by SWK.. in just a bit of a hurry. She sported a mobile in one hand and, well, a cigarette in the other.

“You’re smoking?” I offered.

“E-cig’s gone dead” she slurred back.

Ho hum. I woozily ensured I had all my belongings, and was delighted to find I did. In the distance, OTR was stumbling around, a confused and really quite broken man, by the looks of him. It was the last glance of him I ever had, as, magically, a taxi appeared and we fell into it and sped away, leaving our host behind. I, true to form, fell asleep.

SWK and I finally compared notes over a late lunch the following day, from behind dark glasses, with sausages and water to rectify the overdose of the first day.

I learned that we had left in a polite hurry as it seemed that as I dozed, OTR had exhibited where he got the R bit from. He had chosen that pause in my evening to take more than a bit of shine to SWK, and had gone as far as, err, ‘unclasping’ her, in an unwanted little clinch. Fortunately, being a pretty but very determined lady, herself managed to shrug off this boozy advance. No doubt she has suffered similar unwelcome attentions in the past. If anything I was far more shaken by this revelation than she was in its retelling. Quite a woman, my wife.

I fumed quietly inside, but told myself to let it go. Not my place to go around defending the honour of my loved one when she could do it herself perfectly well. Still, a cautionary tale all the same, and I think a lesson learned.

It would not do to head for the grave without some tales to tell, and that is the latest of many. The Tale of Ovidiu The Rogue, and my Brushes with Death in Romania.

More next week..

Part One

As one of my foolhardy but loyal fans pointed out the other day, my blog has gone quiet. This is the first of three pieces I need to get written up to get back on track with two of my resolutions (only one remains on schedule, right now.. at least it’s an exercise one).

A piece on my time in Malta (Around Malta, with Mother) is still in the pipeline; I got rather sidetracked by a run of applications and interviews before we departed for the wilds of Eastern Europe. The latter being fresher in the mind, off we go with Part One of Two.

I am addressing you, at least initially, from row 20, Seat B, of Tarom Air’s evening service from Iasi to Luton. A cheap and agreeable exercise, free checked bags and they’ve just plied us with a gratis packet of peanuts, a ham and cheese roll and a Snickers. Having drawn the driving straw, I have just sipped a coffee before picking up my ‘phone to write. Mrs K has seen off a glass of Romanian wine on which we respectfully disagree. Which is no bad thing; there’s not a lot of respectful disagreement going on at our final destination, after all, following The Vote. The news from Blighty is baaaaad. Anyway, not too much politics. She thought it a quite potable and freshening glass; from my micro-sip I detected notes of Multi-Storey car park Gents, and a cat that had been out in the rain too long. No matter, she is busying herself combining the view from the window and the plane’s Sat Nav, and I am in a playful frame of mind, before Real Life does its damnedest to set in again on the ‘morrow.

I realised as we had one for the road and bought my Dad some cheap ciggies at the airport that I had foolishly popped my earphones into my hold luggage. Amateur mistake. As we boarded, I espied a baby on the border of toddlerhood. His eyes locked with mine and flashed red, or so I thought. Grump though I can be, I carry no real objection to small ones on flights; just as the secret for them to fly happy is to sleep or be entertained, the secret for me is to be able to drown out their quailing should it threaten to perforate an ear drum or two.

Actually, the threat to a peaceful passage on this occasion comes from the Romanian lady in front. A ‘wriggler’ of Olympic class, with sunglasses and headphones the size of bin lids. Things have settled a bit now, because she has acceded to the attentions of a fleshy and tanned Romanian male who has plopped into the seat next to her (all a bit racy, ’round these parts, my wife and I have barely so much as allowed our knees to touch). However, on boarding she fired up her mobile and had a loud and showy-offy business conversation and had to be prised from her telephone by the flight crew as we headed up into the blue. As we levelled out, she delighted at a row of three free seats and lounged across them at a range of angles, her head occasionally popping up as if she were drowning. After a time she tired of that and instead tore her bag from the overhead locker and made for the back of the plane. After a time she returned, after a full costume change, and started refolding various items. I remarked to SWK that I was unsure what she might take on next.. a spot of laundry, a bit of piano practice?

Well, no. She blasted her bag aloft again (our hand-fired jug better be okay, or there will be Paddington Hard Stares in the queue for border control later), and returned to some lounging gymnastics, and then dined heartily on a glass of both red and white wine. Nothing like getting your money’s worth, eh?

Why do people have to be so blessedly hyperactive on relatively short European flights? Pick up an improving volume? Dabble at the crossword or a Sudoku to a popular beat combo? No, it seems even a short flight (and yes, I know, it’s a confined space to remain in, but you booked it, you clown) has to be undertaken in the most ‘Look At Meeee!’ fashion imaginable. Exhibitionism is the order of the day. When I was a child, the art of sitting still and indulging in polite conversation with “inside voices” marked one down for great things. It could add lustre to a School Report. These days the fact I choose to do it makes me feel pretty much Victorian.

None of which tells you very much about our recent trip to her homeland, does it?

Where to begin… well, perhaps the beginning. Ten nights ago we were sampling the local fayre in a Dunstable pub, near Luton airport. Earlier in the day, England had beaten Wales 2-1 at football. Young folk in the hostelry had been celebrating for some time with short haircuts, Carling Black Label, and salty language. A storm rolled in, and we headed to bed. I lay awake, for a while, wondering what we might be coming back to.

An ordinary enough Wizz Air flight out. Localised infant screaming brushed aside by a few tunes and a brief, headline study of our destinations to come. All was rather well. We sailed through Constanta airport, after a somewhat protracted once-over at passport control (more of that sort of thing later), and eventually got bundled into a cab. Waved the dossier about, some shrugging, some ‘phone calls in terse Romanian and then off towards the suburbs at what proved to be a far from atypical pace: one just under that registered at the sound barrier.

Dear Lord, the wriggler has just scored a *third* glass of wine. I feel sober and saintly, frankly.

So, we rolled down the highway in an air-conditioned bubble, and finally noodled into a new-ish, still-being-built collection of apartment blocks, with a couple of little shops. A left and a right and our man called out the *slightly* steep tab and ushered us out into the day, and to the foot of our lodgings. He pressed the buzzer, and after a time our landlady appeared. During that time, my skin had sprung a number of alarming leaks. The heat was *tremendous*, and I had not experienced the like of it since our honeymoon in Greece last year. Boy oh boy.

Still, we received our welcome, took notes, handed over more money, fired up the air-con and bade our lady and her friendly little daughter farewell. We then scooted ’round to the local emporium for a couple of cold ones (55p each) and some water. Waded back through the heat, hit the balcony to slake our thirsts, and plotted out a period of relaxation and then a first night down at the Old Port…

Which we promptly ballsed-up, of course. It transpired that there was no way of buying official tickets for buses in our locality, so we finished up sneaking aboard a minibus. Cheap though it was (35 pence each) it left us at a confusing location, when we dived off. Yet on we struggled, with Google Maps, and imagined ourselves to be en route to the location we sought. You know you’ve boned it all when you find yourself on a gentle and woody descent. The right way is never, ever downhill, is it? We pulled up at an industrial railway line, with no exit in sight, save for a bridge over to more of the same. Considering an alternative route, we were then suddenly hailed by our first two locals. Charming young women, both of them set for missionary works in the UK, bless them. The unfortunate news was that the alternative route involved ascending in reverse. Terrific. We arrived back at the summit in a boiling sweat and were set upon our way to the environs of the Old Port. Happily a further descent set us out on a cooler route and we enjoyed all manner of seaside prettiness before finally falling upon a platter of seafood and a bottle of awesome Romanian Chardonnay, before gathering ourselves into a taxi for maison nous.

And what a taxi. Oh my. I am the veteran of all manner of wild and inconsiderate driving, not least my own. SWK is smooth as silk behind the wheel, but has the mouth of a navvy when plying her right foot to matters. It was a crazed and varied journey. Either 60 mph or a slow crawl and nothing in between. Various terse exchanges at roundabouts and squeals of brakes. Christ alive. I shut my eyes for the worst of it, as my knuckles turned white from grabbing SWK’s seat. Finally we ran back into chez nous and dropped into our local shop for a couple of nerve-calmers before gaining sleep.

And so we must cut forward in time to my first Brush With Death, a couple of days into our sojourn.

A little while prior to my first BWD, we had gained from the view from our balcony an appreciation of how far we were from a Black Sea resort (and at that stage no appreciation whatsoever of how unbelievably cold said sea is). No bother, in fact, and as my Facebook feed will tell you, we took our first trip over there by a Cable Car. The Telegondola, as it is. Ace, it was, at £3 each to drift in to the land of white beaches and cold beer. As we flew overhead, we realised that, there below us, was a Water Park. A mighty one at that too.

“Have you been to a Water Park before?” SWK asked me.

Well, really, no. The greater majority of my adult life has been spent at the northernmost side of 17 stone. So, really, no. Not for me, schlepping my way around amongst the slim and the lithe. Happily I have enjoyed greater narrowness in recent years, although I could stand to drop a few pounds once again. But, y’know, no. Not at all.

“Let’s go on Monday!” I said. Why? I know not. I suppose I was trying to cheerily embrace new opportunities. I’m told that’s a good thing.

Monday arrived, and so did we, by the ubiquitous Speed Taxi.

We dropped our stuff into a locker, surrendered our bottles of water (in case they were full of Vodka, as if it that’s what you want to drink in 95 degrees) and settled in to our base by the circulating water. It was hot (surprise surprise), so away we went to the cool blue waters, alighting upon inflatables and doing a cooling circuit. 15 minutes drying off in the Sun, and SWK asks..

“Shall we hit the water slides?”

“Yeah.. ‘course.” I replied, through my grinding teeth.

Whoops. A. Daisy. This lark is just not me. I don’t seek to be dull, but when it comes to relaxation time, give me a terrace, a novel and a glass of red wine? I’m yours. Give me downwards at XXXX mph in a tiny tube in my smalls? Well.. no, not really.

However I am, in emerging middle age, not to be beaten. Let’s give it a go, I mused. With characteristic foolishness. And so we clambered up into the Gods. SWK slipped, with characteristic beauty and elegance, straight into the tube, and whooped cheerfully away. I was next. Except I was not next, because I was immediately questioned about my jewellery. The common view was that going down with a couple of bracelets on would likely lead to me having my arms ripped off. Ten minutes of wrenching followed, before the lad in charge finally deigned to help me out of said bits and pieces.

Time to go. Various bracelets and whatnot in my pockets. Ohshitohshitohshitohshit.

Aaaaaaaaaaaggggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!

The very speed you gain? Dear Lord above. It’s all very well at the start, but then the combination of bodily weight and downward velocity take over, in a tiny tube and, well, once again, aaaaaarrrggggghhhh! A left, and a left, and a left, and a left then a right and then up and WHAM! Down to the bottom you go, swallowing litres of water, not remotely prepared for the experience. You float up to the top, coughing it all out, only to look up to your wife merrily filming the whole experience. A film in which you look fat, defeated and tired. The video proves explosive in the extreme. Hurrah for all that then.

Off we went to the next choice, once my lungs cleared and hearing returned. SWK had the sense we should have a bash at this chap (captured from a couple of days earlier on the Cable Car):

Now here we have my first proper brush with death. On the face of it looked the most agreeable thing. Clamber up about 70 or 80 feet or so to an overhead station. Cross arms and legs, head into the tube and it whooshes you down into that ‘dish’ below, where you do a few circuits and drop into a plunge pool below. On the face of it, even I could see the potential for gay and giddy excitements. And in the event, excitements there were, but not strictly those as designed.

I’m just clumsy. Remember my tales of coming down a zip wire, that time? Just a pile of swearing, arms and legs? Much the same was to occur. It’s all so unfair, looking back. I watched others whizz down and around, happy of heart. I even saw SWK slip backwards into the bottom, all smiles, before I slotted into the tube and let go.

A shorter ride this time, but the steep elevation meant one went twice as fast as before. I am not ashamed to tell you that I just screamed. And not a manly cry of warlike determination, either. A shrill sequence of screams in, for me, a rather high register.  As I type this, SWK has Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ on the telly; you can think of me as somewhere in between the Queen of Night Aria…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqBwe9BCj4A

.. and a rambunctious four-year old girl, who’s just fallen off her tricycle and skinned her knees. As displays of visceral, vital and vainglorious butchness go, it was not one.

I hurtled into the dish at a speed even the taxi drivers would consider unwise. Rather than corkscrewing gently inwards to go ‘plop’ into the pool, if anything I seemed to gather momentum even further. To the outsider, it must have appeared as if I was attempting to ride the wall of death without a motorbike. The circuits seemed interminable.

However, even I have not yet perfected Perpetual Motion, and from somewhere I gathered some friction. My face, I think. My odyssey was coming to a close, and I slid out like an upside down Manatee, into the pool below.

It’s fair to say I was more than a little giddy. I felt like a particle that’s just done a few laps at CERN whilst smoking a joint. So I was not at my most aware, which led itself to a poor performance when I plunged into waters. In point of fact, I made a stinking great hash of the whole thing. I thrashed, choked and attempted to haul myself onto my back, there to stroke my way gently to the side, and the distant prospect of terra firma. Amidst the chaos, there came the sound of someone diving with elegance and confidence into the water.

Yep, the lifeguard had taken the decision I needed fishing out. How utterly depressing, and embarrassing. I mean, thanks very much and all that, old boy – clearly I wasn’t looking to check out, but I am inclined to think I might have come through it by myself in the end. Nevertheless, strong arms enfolded me, and directed me to a sodden tramp up the steps. To the sign of my good lady wife, well, how can I put this? Pissing herself laughing, in consort with the other thoroughly chiselled and white-toothed lifeguard. In a word? Bollocks.

Now, after two rather rollicking rides, you’d think old grumpy guts here would go rather into his malcontented shell and make for the bar and his sun lounger, wouldn’t you? No, damnit, I thought. Other people are doing this, therefore so can I. Third time lucky, and all that. I could almost hear the celestial hollow laughter ringing out from above, as they switched the bright lights on, and readied my wings. God himself relighting his pipe and musing on how very determined young Cox appeared to be to cash in his chips, this sunny afternoon.

On balance, I thought I might do rather better on a traditional and open slide. Straight down, plenty of wind resistance, so a smoother ride and splash. Yes, of course it would be. I would master all of this yet. Yeah.

Once more, I assumed the position, and pushed myself away. And yet again I attained a horrifying velocity. As the thing flattened out, near to the water, I foolishly attempted to predict the moment the slide ended and pool began. Which went drastically wrong, of course. I broke from the accepted and safe pose, which led to my being thrown into the air off the bottom. I entered the water head-first, with my legs otherwhere above. Momentum sent me straight down to the bottom, and I smacked my bonce into the bottom of the pool, just on the bit where my bald patch is.

It hurt. A lot. Tears in my eyes, and a feeling of not inconsiderable nausea. I rubbed my head, faintly wished my Mummy was somewhere nearby, and worried about getting in trouble lest my blood or vomit should find itself intermingled with the chlorinated H2O.

Reunited with a beaming SWK, I declared myself retired from the more high-octane chutes and slides and other devilments. I had given it a solid go, and had escaped with my life. I spent the next hour or so faintly concussed. Eventually I was led into the shade, and plied with a little rejuvenating lager by my loved one. Some semblance of a non-aquatic reality started to find its way into my bruised noggin.

But as we shall see, some 500km away, another dangerous episode was to come. Travel with us next time to the wilds of Iasi, via a small oven, there to meet the fruity disaster area that is Ovidiu The Rogue…

Part Two.

Crikey, it’s been a bit of a three weeks or so, hence the delay in finishing off this latest ridiculous tale. I have not, as yet, secured employment in BARCELONA, but SWK and I did take in a few days in charming Luxembourg (country number 47, with Romania and Moldova coming up in June), and I am, as I type this out, celebrating the fact I now have two interviews on the horizon. Been a ‘nothing doing’ three months, so this is most welcome news. I suppose I may have got them on merit, but I reckon it’s been my decision to grow a Lucky Bushy Beard. I shall have to maintain it well, so I look all ponderous and wise come the big days. Hope I get one of these gigs, so I can blow some of the remaining redundancy on a trip somewhere, and hopefully generate some more raw material for the old blog.

So, back we go, those five years in time, and I came to in my mega room with the customary dry mouth and dizziness that I find accompanies going to sleep for a bit in the afternoon. Perhaps it’ll be for the best if I don’t move everyone off to Spain, as it does seems to be rather the expectation there. Sleeping in the afternoon has never sat well with me. Wholly discombobulating experience. I’ve known many other people, Sarah the First included, who could pretty much go into shutdown at the drop of a hat. I’m jealous of the capacity to go to sleep on demand, however, as one who often finds himself digesting the darkest corners of Wikipedia on his iPhone at 3.00am.In fact I would probably make remote-controlled narcolepsy my superpower.

It was an uneventful evening. Sorry, but it was. Can’t be bathed in lunacy every day, and I’d already had more than my fair share. Sweated in the heat, sat out with a couple of beers and read my book. Got a bit lost walking through the park on my way back, as I failed to find any food. So, I dragged myself back up the room, ate the mints, drank some water, sorted out my whistle for the next day and fell asleep.

The next day dawned. Things livened up a bit. Breakfasting on the terrace, rather conspicuously reading my way through the order of service, I met a guy from the University of Worcester over coffee. Nice chap, talkative, bit of a twinkle in the eye; I always manage to fall in with a fun crowd at things like this. 50-odd, he was, and a curious doppelganger for a different chap who once tried to teach me C++ Computer Programming, when I got landed with a training course whilst on the dole for a bit. Quite famously, by way of a brief diversion from our main theme, the training centre went bust two days before our assessments – we arrived mid-morning to find the bailiffs had taken away all of the computers, which rather slowed up the endeavour.  I looked at the trainer, he looked at me, there was a mutual shrug and we went to throw down a few cold ones across the road in front of the coverage of the cricket. That was a fun day.

Anyway, back to the present. Or past, rather. Breakfast done with, we travelled up to the meeting point, where our whole ‘Euro Gang’ had been promised an audience with the Mayor of Šiauliai (bet you’d been wondering when he would turn up, eh?) before we cracked off on our cultural tour of the city and surroundings. The square was packed with folks. Clearly I was not the only pen-pusher who knew when he was on to a good thing. It was a mighty deputation of Estonian farmers, small creepy men from Portugal, and a few token, sweltering Brits sprinkled through the many nations there.  I trailed off to sneak a ciggie and a couple of photos, and before I knew it we were being squired ’round to City Hall. Our crocodile went up hill and ‘round dale, through doors, up in lifts and eventually we all emerged in an office roughly half the size needed to house all off of us tourism-hungry liggers. And over in the distance, by the screen, was Boss Hogg, from the Dukes of Hazzard.

Or so it appeared, anyway. It soon transpired that the second lookey-likey of the day was in fact the town’s Mayor. I wondered, idly, if anyone amongst his acolytes had ever considering playing on this in a marketing campaign. Effusive in his greeting, he was on us in a moment, shaking hands and booming out a welcome in a language very few of us in the room could understand. He laid hands on everyone and then, all of a sudden, a mighty cart was wheeled in, exacerbating the crush further. On said wagon? Tea, coffee, fruit juice, pastries and, er, well, some sort of local champagne/cava creation. It was about 9.30am.

I figured it was warm out, the aircon was pretty weak and, well, it’s me, isn’t? In for a penny, in for a pound and all that. It didn’t occur to me to remember my experience of drinking Belarusian fizz three years beforehand, but happily this was a rather more agreeable drop. I sank a couple of glasses, taking care to drop in a coffee and an orange juice as well. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Smiley Mr Worcester swanning around with some bubbles, so refused to feel guilty.

Figuring that a frightening UN game of musical chairs was shortly to follow, I decided to make for a seat before any fear of a stand-off. Only to promptly be ushered back out of it, to join a queue to be photographed by Boss H, er, the Mayor. I popped my glass out of sight, fearing opprobrium back at the ranch; let’s not forget I was on thinner ice than was ideal.

So, piccies done, I dived for a different seat, cheered by the photo shoot and the breakfast tipple. I wondered if there might come next a rendering of the National Anthem, or a parade of flower girls, but, disappointingly we went direct into business mode. Down went the lights, and up came a slide detailing the events for the next two days. I’ll not spoil it, read on.

And then, the video. A 15-minute blockbuster that detailed the history of the City, the pulling power that coming events would have, the ambitions for Higher Education, and lots and lots and lots about Basketball, of which, whilst I am a big sports fan, I know nothing much about. I can only piece that together for you because they made up for the narrative soundtrack being in the local tongue, by pausing every 45 minutes to narrate what had been said. The good production values notwithstanding, this did cause things to drag on, somewhat. Eventually the lights went up again, to rapturous applause. And back out into the now blazing sun we went.

Our gently tipsy regiment were taken on a march to the town Cenotaph/sundial. I fired off a couple of bemused texts back home to Sarah I, and had a bit of an explore, including the rather nice local church. Then, we were back to Basketball. Or, more precisely, a tour of the local stadium that was soon to host a European Championship tournament. All jolly impressive, chaps, but, as they say, WTF?

A substantial fleet of buses swung into the square, and we were issued with a couple of tourist guides and a packed lunch. My first Lithuanian crisps, a sandwich of mysterious meats and cheese, a fairy cake, an apple, and, saints be praised, a bottle of lovely cold water. To a man and to a woman we were all sweltering. The lunchboxes were placed on the floor and we all tore into the water, as the convoy headed off to our two afternoon haunts.

Now, as much as I am taking the mickey here, and only gently, I hope, the first stop was something quite remarkable. Here it is:

The Hill of Crosses. A devotional site and a memorial to the fallen dating from 1831. Very, very moving it was too. I took some reflective video, which I sincerely wish I could still find, but I am sure YouTube would repay your visit well. When we visited, there were reckoned to be at least 125,000 crosses there. During the years of Soviet occupation, the military would, periodically, bulldozer the site. Warm-hearted totalitarians that they were. Whereupon, quietly but effectively, local folk would rebuild it bigger than before. It was quite a marker for the indomitable human spirit and the power of faith. It rose up out of nowhere, across from the road and stunned us all. Some things have a quiet, universal effect.

The emotion of it all had given every one quite an appetite, so as we wended our way back towards the city, the sound was that of the pop of plastic boxes and the tearing of cellophane. Satiated, the wagon train pulled in to the “quite new but lovely” University Botanic Garden”.

As with so many things in life, we had spiralled from the sublime to the ridiculous. Naturally, full marks to anyone for a green initiative and the drive to create something attractive for the rest of humanity to enjoy. But perhaps it might have been better to let it grow a bit? The place had the appearance of the lovechild of a pitch and put course, and a lightly-tended, stubbly Yorkshire allotment. There were, spread around, some alarmingly mature plants amongst the seedlings, that my new pals and I agreed, sotto voce, had evidently been planted whilst we’d been watching the video. I do have a tendency to fall in with a somewhat ribald, piss-taking crowd on occasions like this – never mind the language barrier, or the hurdles of internationality; anyone can spot a bit of dark humour going on. Still, I am sure it’s a sprawling and verdant delight by now. I do hope so. They’d put up an awning with the makings in it so we could all create and then brew up our own herbal teas. That was just lovely, so I stopped sniggering and enjoyed it.

Back to town, for the closing event of the tourism day. A buffet of local delights and a talk on local history (English, this time, but I can’t give you the rundown, as another pantechnicon of fizzy wine was summoned, and I felt the need to rehydrate). Small talk followed. Something that they insist on calling networking. I learned only yesterday that one can now attend ‘How to Network’ courses. Money for old rope, if you ask me. Have a snifter, wander around a bit and see what happens. In this instance? Not much. I chucked a few business cards around, and found myself on the end of the gentle but sweaty advances of a diminutive Polish chap. All in all, it was time to beat a retreat. Mr Worcester and I had a beer in the dying of the day’s fierce sun, and made for our lodgings. Sensibly to bed, to fall asleep with my book.

So to day 2. The point at which some actual work was going to be needed. And the scene of some fancy footwork I remain quite proud of. The art of pure, confident bullshit. Some days, I excel at this.

So, after a more temperant breakfast than had become the norm, we ambled back up into the City Centre to the venue for the conference. The room itself was high up in the University registry, and surrounded on all sides by floor to ceiling windows. As a consequence, we were bathed in lovely sunshine. And sweat, as was de rigeur in those parts. The crowd grew, as I sipped coffee and water and thumbed through my notes, fingering my pocket at all times for my memory stick, like an edgy Best Man.

After a mixture of performances, including something rather good from the lady in charge of the whole gig (who I complemented in a break – she was charm itself, as she had been on the ‘phone), I was called up to speak late morning. Nervelessly, I held forth on the subject I knew a lot about, with slides, a few little gags, and everything. The definition of professionalism and not a bad job, I thought. Without dripping with sweat, I’d have given myself at least a nine. After 20 minutes or so, I got to questions. The vast crowd seemed, well, a trifle bewildered. A member of the throng asked tentatively about what had happened about my presentation on a completely different topic. No one came to help, at this point so I made a show of reaching for my water for a deep lug, and rustled through my papers, only to discover that, yes, I had been billed as talking about Mystery Subject X. I don’t actually know what had happened, but just for once I think I may have been blameless. So, failing to see what else I could do, after all the fizz, crosses, seedlings and buffet I had soaked in, I just said

“Ah, yes, thank-you for asking about that. As I see we have a little more time, perhaps I could go on to that and give you a few more thoughts by way of an extension?”

Grins, expectant nods, etc. So, I simply made up another presentation on the spot, cobbling together bits and pieces I knew, speaking with unflappable confidence so as to not crack the veneer and expose my near-total ignorance of the subject at hand. I took examples from the audience, and pontificated merrily away. I was in the zone and, a further 15 minutes later was greeted with rapturous acclaim. Phew. No one seemed to have noticed the join, or that I was patently wearing the Emperor’s New Clothes. I’m hoping my capacity to do this now and again might see me back into employment soon…

Lunch followed. I sweated my way through that and dashed out for a cig. The afternoon session was rather shorter and at the teatime close we were told about ‘special plans’ for  a social event in evening.

So I strolled back to hotel for a freshen up and a change into alternative, dry kit. I met new pal in a bar for a sharpener (he was most amused, having seen through the whole façade entirely, but we both agreed that, as raw and complete bollocks, it had been worth its weight in gold) and we ventured into the venue, once we found it (it was in a totally anonymous concrete block behind a car park, that we circled several times). Down we went to a mercifully cooler basement. We were handed the ubiquitous local fizzy wine (UK conference organisers should take note, I think) and took a seat whilst there was an interminable display of folk singing and then a welcome speech. I’m pretty much certain someone, somewhere, was playing the saw to accompany the former, but can’t swear to it.

In closing, our hostess told everyone there would now be a buffet and local wine tasting (music to my ears; by now I was considering a move for citizenship) and a local dancing lesson (not music to my ears – I am rarely seen exhibiting my snake hips). Once again, I handed out a few business cards to some friendly and rather less lusting Poles, nattered about my “fascinating presentation” to a chap from Portugal and drank some wine and tried to hide behind the mountain of comestibles. However I was soon hauled into a mega circle on the dance floor comprised of 40 or so folk, and indulged in a considerable amount of what I am going to call Walk-walk-walk, Hoy! Hoy! Hoy! Manoeuvres, to the farts and squeaks of an oompah band. This was as excruciating as it was exhausting. Sweat sprung down my back once more.

The whirl over with, I was greeted afterwards by VC who also said she loved my presentation(s), wanted very much to work with my University and would be taking me back to the airport herself the following day ( I guess Silver Lurch had the weekend off?) I pointed out this meant leaving for the airport at 5am (I actually had no clue about how I was going to get back), but she did not care a bit! I accepted with alacrity.

Smiley and I leaked out, found a bar for cold beer and chatting with some other pals of his. I weaved home eventually, a little later than might have been ideal, and stuffed things into a case and set the alarm.

Day 3 dawned. Too early for breakfast, I added some water to the belly full of wine, beer and vol-au-vents, and pressed myself out into the dawn. And home we did go. Our girl was on time and very charming indeed. We chatted about this that and the other, with me obfuscating like a fool, because I know virtually nothing. It was utterly lovely, barrelling through the countryside in the morning Sun. I adore moments like this with folk from overseas. Get the work stuff knocked off and learn all about them and you get to tell them all about yourself and your home. Always learning. Great stuff.

Kaunas airport appeared. We bade farewells, hugged and I awaited my homeward flight. I picked up some ciggies… and passed on a bottle of Suktinis.

Alas, I never heard from her, or Smiley again. But I have the memories, and now so do you.

Next time, once I have a couple of job interviews out of the way, I shall take you to Malta, with my Mother. Thanks for reading.

Part One (this goes on a bit, but stick with it)

I have, quite recently, applied for a job overseas. This is, of course, an exciting if rather distant prospect. Were it to come off, we’d be looking at living in Barcelona for the next couple of years. On the face of it, this might be an intriguing change of pace, and offer all sorts of interesting new things to us.  Life is short, after all. In the ‘causes for concern’ column,  I have written that I am unsure about what Milo The Wonder Dog will make of having his passport photo taken, with a 1,000 mile car journey to follow, and, secondly what SWK will make of piloting a Right Hand Drive Nissan Juke through the uphills of Andorra. Unusual times, eh? I mention all of this for bloggardly lustre, but I’ll probably finish up working in Northampton, having jinxed it. Still, news to follow, no doubt.

Working overseas has always attracted me. I have been doing it in shorter spells for some years, and in some not uninteresting places. As a result I have dabbled, before, with the notion of a longer-term gig. And, indeed, I was offered a job in Egypt that I finished up not taking, and thencame within an ace of a wonder job in Mauritius. Perhaps this will be third time lucky, eh? Occasionally, under the banner of internationalisation, I have had the chance to visit a place I have been to before, as a tourist, which always adds new impressions.

My time in Lithuania is a prime example of this. In fact, as I think about it, I had even met Lithuanian University boffins almost ten years before even going there. My boss at the time was one of those nice old chaps who manages to know someone almost everywhere. He announced to me, one day, that he had a couple of research fellows from Kaunas coming to stay, and he would appreciate it if I could “lend them a hand with a few little things?” Hmm. Charming though they turned out to be (still can’t work out if they were actually a couple), it turned into a full week of work as PA, chauffeur, secretary, and general dogsbody-in-chief. Kind of fun its way, but it only just stopped short of me taking their laundry home. My reward for this cheery slavery was a not unlikely, but certainly unusual one. We pulled up in my rattling Maestro at Stansted Airport and Mr Lithuania leaned over to me and placed a bottle of honey-coloured liquid in my hand, with a label in some sort of Gothic red ink typeface, revealing the name Suktinis.

“Is man drink”, he whispered conspiratorially. O-kay.

Breaking the habit of a lifetime, I didn’t drive home and crack it open. I eyed it warily on the passenger seat, and tootled back to my flat. These things are not always best taken lightly. The bottle went on a dusty shelf and was forgotten about, even though in plain sight. It was months and months later when my friend Nicholas (you’ll recall him from the Bear and Prostitute tales) came to stay. As chaps like us do, after a day on the pop in Cambridge, we nervously freed the cork from my gift in the late hours of a Friday night. No water, no ice, just a little sniff to test the aroma and down went the first shot.

It was an uncompromising sledgehammer of a drink. SWK will occasionally make noises about the agonising effects of the bottle of Bekerovka that sits menacingly in our garage (a gift from some Czech chums; you tell people you like wine and they give you Death Booze), but this was an unholy amalgam of petrol, woody herbs, a little honey and vintage antifreeze. The walls melted, night turned to morning and we woke, fully clothed, on my bed , with the empty bottle lying between us. Suktinis had not made men of us. It had made us most unwell. Still, no good being boring, eh?

Fast forward a decade, and Sarah the First and I went to Lithuania as part of our epic four country trip, some of which has already been chronicled here. Arrival in Vilnius (albeit after a lot of X-raying of my bag at the border with Belarus, the only bag on the bus that drew the use of the machine) came as a sublime relief after the ghastliness of the getting caught short incident at Minsk’s most unsavoury bus station loo. The nostrils cleared, and Vilnius proved itself a beautiful city indeed. Very friendly, everywhere we went, and pleasingly affordable. My wife tucked into the local delicacy that was Beaver stew (those were some fun texts back home) and we had the best breakfast coffee in a long while. Remind me to write a bit about hotel and guesthouse coffee, sometime. I’m a real picnic when it comes to the morning cafetiere.

The return visit to the country was a right ligger’s job, if I’m totally honest. Coming to the end of my days in what was, now I think of it, NOT my last job, I was feeling a bit down on the place. So, quite by accident, I came upon the opportunity to go to a European conference on HE development in Lithuania. Saw a few e-mails flying around and just sent one on to the guy who controlled the funding for such visits. He asked me to submit the title for a presentation, and Bob was, as they say, my Mother’s Brother. In some ways l almost fancied a break, so once it had the green light from Central Command I didn’t give it the most thought. Having submitted a brief, and received what seemed like free money, I then didn’t tell the boss and buggered off to the Baltic sun for three days after talking to the Vice-Chancellor of the hosting University. She was charm itself, and seemed unfathomably delighted that I was going to visit and tell her guests about my work. Go figure. I was sat on the other end of the ‘phone line pretty much high-fiving myself in disbelief. I’m always a bit like that when asked to speak or to give a view on anything; I don’t see it will ever change, to be honest. I sort of want to tell them I was born in Margate and struggle a bit with my shoelaces (true), by way of inviting them to reconsider. Still, off I went. As I recall, one or two enquiries did pop up on e-mail from home base once I was out there but a) I was having too much of a laugh to care and b) my line about “international profile building for us” seemed to be swallowed. Result!

Come the time, I had the singular joy of leaving Sheffield at 3am to rag it down to Luton for the early flight to Kaunas. So far so good, although I always find I suffer with an odd nausea when I have to get up that early to fly somewhere. No doubt I will in a couple of weeks when SWK and I fly at ohmygodoclock to Luxembourg (I am yet to fully reveal how early we have to get up, as it will not win me many husband points). With the jalopy safely stowed away, I arrived at the airport. It occurred to me I was being transported the other end, and was on the company dollar, so I mowed a bacon sarnie and a couple of pints of lager, and promptly felt marvellous again. This turned out to be a splendid tactic, as the flight was only 2/3 full, so within 15 minutes of take-off I was driving them home like a trooper, gathering energy for the day ahead. The only downside was that I came to with an alarming, stewardess-trolley-shaking snort about half an hour from touchdown, to a chorus of titters all around me. Embarrassing, yes, but so it goes – I was refreshed, reasonably sober and ready to crack on.

So, I had arrived. I stumbled around a bit and found the main concourse, and what I assumed to be the meeting point. Fired up a gasper and hoped for the best. This was to be my first ever experience of having a car sent for me. I realise this is a commonplace experience for many people, as you see the signs being wielded in all airports, all the time. But, you know, it’s me. I assumed it was a joke and wondered how on earth I was going to get to Šiauliai, my final destination.

However, my prayers were to be answered, on this occasion. The crowds parted and towards me marched a man at least 95 years old and at least eight feet tall. He had the aspect of Lurch, from the Addams Family. Cheerfully enough now drawing his pension, and doing a spot of driving on the side.

I drew myself upright and stared him square in the navel, whereupon he boomed:

“COX!”

“Er, yes”, I replied. “Chris is fine though, it’s nice to mee..”

“DRIVER!”

A brief pause, as the ringing in my ears came to a stop.

“Oh, right, well thank-you, I’m looking forw..”

“ENGLISH”

I was without words.

“NO!”

The situation became clearer. He had been given a four word script by his employers, sufficient to inveigle me into his motor without further questions. In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought. I reached for my bags, waiting to follow, whereupon the mighty old man plucked them from my fingers like they were a selection of ladies’ purses. He then set off at what was, for him, an easy stroll, and what was for me, even after three years of running now, an impossible pace.

Outside, it was about 90 degrees in the old money. We arrived at his wheels with him cheerful and me sweating uncontrollably, fighting to breathe. I was patting myself down with a hankie as he swung the door open commandingly. I got in, strapped up, and he tore off into the traffic at the sort of pace that would part your hair. Our odyssey to Šiauliai was underway..

I’d estimated three hours at a steady potter. In the end, I was proved right, but not by own design. It was an attractive countryside journey, dipping into the occasional small market settlement as we headed North. Silver Lurch settled at a Sunday driver’s pace on the sections of A-road in-between. I guess about 70-odd kph? Very steady, not that I was about to argue, as I was in no hurry and was in his massive hands. However, he became very hurried indeed every time we dropped into one of the aforementioned small towns. Each time we alighted upon one, his pace shifted up several gears, and we tore through them like we were on ‘Police Camera Action!’ Rows of houses blurred by. On one occasion he took the wrong exit by driving straight through a roundabout, only to then correct the erroneous manoeuvre (the acknowledgement of which  he marked quite charmingly by bumping his fist against his forehead, cartoon-style) three or four miles down the road, by doing a dramatic u-turn on the main carriageway.

And on we went. About halfway in, he dropped the windows and sparked up a ciggie. Fearlessly, I did the same, and received a beneficent smile. I smiled back. So far so good.

A few miles up the road, smokes exhausted, his country pace slowed, as a windmill appeared on the horizon. We stopped in the middle of the road, and he grabbed my sleeve and pointed towards it. I was at a bit of a loss and wondering what might be coming up the road behind us, when he did the international sign language for eating. You know? A sort of whirring fork and knife movement in a cyclical fashion? Yes, that one. He grinned warmly and patted his stomach. My interpretation remains that it was one of his favoured restaurants. Onwards we dawdled, until a city drew up, and he started to go into chase mode again, until we arrived in a big square, with University-like buildings in it.

The tyres cooled, and I enquired, gently, “hotel?” A shrug and an inquisitive stare met me.

“Wait here” I said, bravely, and mimed pulling up a handbrake. He seemed unconcerned, and I alighted into the sun once again. I staggered around for a bit, as I do (I’m an Olympic-standard staggerer, as it goes) until I saw the University Library. I meandered in there, with one eye on Silver Lurch, and was redirected to the Registry, next door. Once in there, I pleaded my case as an idiotic foreign delegate, and the young woman behind the desk lit up through her faultless and elaborate make-up with apparent recognition. News travels fast, it seems, when you are the sweaty new Englishman in town.

“I come with you now” she grinned. I wondered what Sarah 1 would make of all of this. I held open the door, and she was on Silver Lurch in a breath, barking out instructions in a way that left the poor old retainer rather cowed, I thought. Silence fell, and we noodled off to the suburbs. I kept vague track of the route, and we eventually pulled up at a row of imposing-looking houses, opposite a park.

“I go back now”, she said. And disappeared off at Lithuanian Regulation Pace. Bugger.

So, once again, I blundered off up the path, and ascertained that the building was a hotel. I headed back to Silver Lurch, with thumbs aloft. He leapt into action, slammed the door, and hoisted my bags back up into the small of his palm, and made for the door. He dinged the bell like a guest at Fawlty Towers and launched into cheery and avuncular conversation with the young fellow at the desk. Before long, he patted me in fraternal fashion on the shoulder and left the chap to lead me to my room. I arrived into my new base, which was roughly the size of the ground floor of my current house. Complete with an en-suite, it also oddly featured an entirely superfluous sink in the main body of the room. Of course.

On the bed, a basket of random welcoming stuff. I ate the biscuit, drank the water, and got my head down for a bit, ahead of an evening of exploring.

End of Part One..