To the Manor Osborne

I know someone who, because of depression, hasn't been able to work for years. Some days he is OK, some days not. There is no way he can hold down a normal job, because there are days he just can't get out of bed. He lives in London and can barely scrape by on the welfare payments he is able to claim. He can't afford to go out with friends or do anything that most of us take for granted. Now Gideon "George" Osborne and the government of old Etonians and assorted other people who have no idea what life is actually like for poor people, have decided that he should lose his right to incapacity benefit (unless he can manage to be classified as "seriously disabled", which sounds like a physical definition rather than a mental one). His story is not in any way unique. In crafting a budget which they claim to be "fair" and "progressive" they have in fact attacked the poor of Britain in a way that even Thatcher might have balked at.

Benefit fraud costs the UK taxpayer something like £1bn a year. Tax evasion is thought to cost in the region of £40-70bn a year. Which one is the government targeting?

I'm sickened by these scum. I urge everyone to read this fantastic and savage piece by Johann Hari in today's Independent. It says everything better than I ever could. This is war on the poor, pure and simple.

Whinging Poms

Or is it whingeing? The Internet seems divided.

Last week some friends and colleagues ran what I can only describe as a fantastic week-long programme here on arts/crafts/folk traditions. Participants from all over Europe attended, met people working on traditional folk arts and crafts, observed them in their work and also participated themselves and practised what they had seen. Among other things this involved weaving, linen work, traditional wood painting, folk dance from all over Transylvania, making (and playing) traditional local musical instruments, riding on horse carts, visiting museums and art galleries, and many more. As a bonus they even got taken bear watching one evening (and saw 10 bears). One Polish guy in the group said he'd always dreamed of driving an old Dacia, so he got that chance too. They stayed in a fabulous local inn which is located in an old water mill, with accommodation in renovated traditional local peasant houses. The food at this place is plentiful and delicious, and is accompanied with lashings of palinka and wine. All in all it was the kind of week that would cost an absolute fortune if arranged through a travel agent/tour operator, but the people in this group got the whole thing completely funded through the European Union's lifelong learning programmes. Including their travel and everything else.

Everybody was incredibly impressed, happy, delighted, overwhelmed, and full of nothing but heartfelt praise for the experience.

Everybody except one person that is. The one English person on the course seemed to delight in moaning about anything and everything. First of all she had an allergy to paprika. Now this she stated on the form before coming, so every meal the group had was absolutely and perfectly paprika free. Timea, the female half of the couple that owns the watermill-pension who does all the cooking made sure of that (and as you can imagine in a Hungarian context cooking paprika free is quite a challenge). But the English woman insisted that she thought she could detect paprika in her food and got very upset and demanded to see the kitchen. Eventually she reduced Timea, who is the sweetest most caring person you could ever meet, to tears. Then she complained that they hadn't seen enough "Romanian" (as opposed to Hungarian) folk culture - though of course they had all received tons of information before coming to let them know what to expect, to talk about the unique character of this region, and to generally ensure that no-one would have unmet expectations. (Obviously if they had been driven to Bacau or Piatra Neamt or somewhere similar where they could have experienced something more "Romanian", she would then have complained about the distance).

But these are fairly small things. The thing that has really made my blood boil is that on Friday evening when I met the group I asked her how everything was going and she said everything was fine, great, it was a wonderful week etc. However, now, via email she is sending in another great litany of complaints. My favourite being that there were things at breakfast that English people wouldn't eat. Now I have eaten breakfast at this place and there are plenty of things to eat, and if you don't want to eat szalonna, for example, you really are not likely to go hungry. I don't eat szalonna, but I manage to put on weight every time I eat there. Plus, when you travel, you get things that you don't normally eat for breakfast. It's normal is it not? And she wasn't a first time traveller by any means.

I think the thing that really pisses me off is that to my face she told me that everything was great and now back in the UK she is shooting off cowardly emails complaining about ridiculous trivia which marred her experience. An experience which to everyone else was a wonderful amazing life-enhancing experience. An experience which was, let us not forget, entirely and absolutely free.

They say we are nation of whingers, grumblers, and complainers. I didn't really think this was entirely fair until now. It's really pissed me off.

[Now I of course, have whinged and griped about her, so I am obviously a product of my culture just as much as she is.]

Who is David Cameron anyway?

Bit busy today so the Hungary section of politics week has been put on hold. However, the UK now has a prime minister and I thought it would be worth highlighting some of the things he has done and positions he believes in, especially as regards foreign policy (which gets less press attention in an election).

Now I could take the approach of going on about what kind of leader I think he will be or whether his background qualifies him to have any say on the lives of normal people, but I'll resist that temptation and just stick to some of the things he has actually said and done:

1. In the 80s he accepted an all-expenses paid "sanctions-busting" visit to apartheid South Africa. (Link here). As far as I can tell from searching the web, despite a lot of pressure, he has not actually apologised for this.
2. He is a member of an organisation called "Conservative Friends of Israel" a lobby group which promotes the occupation and is vehemently anti-Palestinian. (Watch the Channel 4 Documentary - Dispatches: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby)
3. In the European parliament he has aligned the Tory party with a disparate group of homophobes, anti-semites and other extremists (including a Latvian party which celebrates the SS) (Link)
4. He voted for the war on Iraq (though he's not exactly alone in this)

So, from a foreign policy perspective that's the new Prime Minister of the UK. Doesn't look that good does it?

Politics week - Part 2: the UK

It's been a big week in British politics. But I reckon it must look dead weird from an outsider's perspective. Partly because of our weird electoral system through which the number of votes and number of seats are not really linked, and partly because when this system delivers a "hung parliament" (ie no overall majority for any party), this is such a rare event that it seems to send the whole system into craziness. For most countries (in Europe at least) the idea that after an election you have a period of horse trading and coalition talks is so utterly normal that the last few days of frenzy in the UK must seem really bizarre.

Anyway, to sum up what has happened so far. Firstly everyone lost in the election last week. The Labour Party (or New Labour as I still like to think of them in the vain hope that somewhere deep in the party lies the hope that they will one day return to actually sticking up for working people) got summarily kicked out of government and lost a huge number of MPs. The Liberal Democrats, the third party, who suddenly as a result of the introduction of presidential style debates, were thrust into the limelight and briefly saw the possibility of being the second biggest party (at least in terms of votes) slipped back to pretty much where they were before (more votes, fewer seats, go figure). And the Conservative Party who were the primary opposition to a massively unpopular government, with a hugely disliked prime minister, and with vast amounts of media support for their campaign couldn't even get a majority, which goes to show how even now many many people still hate and distrust them (me included). They did get the most votes and the most seats, but frankly in the circumstances it was as bad a performance as Labour had in 1992.

So no-one won, and now the media is in a frenzy of speculation and, in many cases, blatant attempts to influence the outcomes of negotiations. The vast majority of newspapers in England are rabidly pro-Tory, and they have been flip-flopping madly as things change. Yesterday Gordon Brown was a squatter who needed to resign immediately, and then when yesterday he did announce his resignation this was suddenly a shabby act of treachery of something. In addition the TV is increasingly pro-Tory. Rupert Murdoch's Sky News is extremely biased (and their chief newsbloke Adam Boulton yesterday was hilariously called on his Tory bias yesterday by Alistair Campbell - Blair's former spin doctor/spokesman - causing Boulton to blow up in highly amusing apoplectic rage). It is fairly widely accepted that Murdoch has done a deal with Cameron and the Tories that if they get elected they will savagely cut the BBC thereby leaving Sky with a greater access to the market. Hence Sky and Murdoch's papers - the Time and the Sun being even more rabidly right wing this year than ever before. However, in a perhaps desperate bid to suck up to the Tories and hence not be cut too much, the BBC has also lurched to the right, and their chief political journalist Nick Robinson is unfailingly pro-Tory in everything he says and anti even the prospect of anybody else having a say in government. (His latest disingenuous wheeze, in common with his right-wing brethren, is to suggest that if we end up with a Labour prime minister who is not Gordon Brown, then that's an unelected PM. But the system doesn't actually elect a PM ever, it elects MPs, and the leader of the party with the most MPs is the PM. No-one has ever elected a PM in the UK, despite the new presidential style of the campaigns).

The there are these shadowy "markets" which apparently are going up and down every time anyone sneezes. So ubiquitous have they become in the post-election commentary that one wonders why we even bother to have elections in the first place. Let's let the markets decide, since the media seem to want to let them anyway. Never mind that the markets are a completely indeterminate entity, and that essentially they are made up of a bunch of global gamblers and speculators who spend all day every day betting on stocks and currencies, but who manage (in a really neat trick) to be both gamblers and bookmakers (and yet somehow respected for all that). The only people who care what the markets "think" are the markets themselves and the compliant media.

What the election has delivered is the possibility, however small, of actually having a sane voting system in the UK in the future, one in which everyone's vote counts for something. I am not holding my breath for such an eventuality, but it does now seem to be at least on the agenda.

Aside from the need for a new electoral system, I'm torn on what I think the outcome of this election should be. I am instinctively and deeply anti-Tory. In fact I firmly believe that anyone who was alive and in any way politically conscious in the 80s must for ever distrust and despise them, and never ever vote for them. I cannot ever see myself voting Tory - and I don't believe they have or will ever change. Anyone who remembers the 80s and would vote Tory has either been lobotomised or should be. In the current circumstances with a large budget deficit to deal with, they just be rubbing their hands with glee as (at least in their minds) they have an excuse to make savage cuts in the welfare state. Thankfully we don't have a majority Tory government who would by now already have started dismantling the NHS, education system, and any other troublingly beneficial services.

However, they did get more votes than anyone else, and they ought to be able to have first crack at forming a government. This they have done, and by the end of today they may even have managed it. If they don't and can't put together a workable government then we have to see what other alternatives there are. The press would have you believe that it's Tory or nothing as they are the "winners" in the eyes of most of this band of chancers, but the mainstream press are, for the most part, a bunch of scum who actually care not one jot for democracy, while all the time protesting that they really ONLY care about democracy. From time to time I even get this feeling that from a long term perspective it might even be better for them to form a minority government (or one propped up by the Lib Dems) so they can piss everyone off and get kicked out again when the next election comes round in a few months. But then even that short period of power would result in the destruction of lives, communities and basic human rights, so I can't give in to that one. But then again, I wonder if coalition of Labour and the Lib Dems (with a savage right wing press against them) will not be even more unpopular, and lose even more badly next time round, thus delivering an unchecked Tory government free to launch into its attacks on the country.

It's a quandary and no mistake. But despite the uncertainty (which is not really a big deal, whatever the markets and the press think) actually might make UK politics better in the future.

I really really hope so. Meanwhile if you think that a better voting system is necessary and important, then sign up here: http://www.takebackparliament.com/

This post could be pages and pages longer than this, but I already feel I've rambled way too much.

[Tomorrow's edition of politics week features Hungary. And if you think things are bad in the UK and Romania, then they are nothing compared to that country]

Ash Thursday

So, today I have managed to check off the "get delayed by volcanic ash" item from the "Things I must do before I snuff it" list. It hadn't been very high up that list to be fair, but I thought today was an opportunity too good to miss. Only comes around every 200 years apparently. Bastard has to be today.

However, I feel I have to use an opportunity here to praise Tarom and their rep at Heathrow Catalin Zlota. Now as we all know airlines don't actually have any obligation to help passengers in a situation not of their making, such as weather, and less commonly vast clouds of volcanic ash floating over from Iceland. And in fact nearly all the airlines around basically told everyone to go home and come back tomorrow, whereas Tarom gave us food tokens and actually put us all in a hotel (from where I write this), with dinner and breakfast. I was chatting to a couple of Alitalia staff (it was a long day) and they said that as far as they could tell not only were we the only passengers to get this treatment, but Domnul Zlota was the only airline rep who was out working with his passengers.

I get the impression that Tarom doesn't get much respect in Romania, but it should. I have always found it a reasonable airline (in European airline terms), and the staff are always friendly and helpful, and today's events have reinforced and extended that feeling. No idea whether I'll feel this way tomorrow after the ash has delayed us for another day, but so far, they and specifically Zlota are doing a great job.

Unexpectedly positive post perhaps. Especially in the circumstances where I really really REALLY want to go home.

Whatever happened to the BBC?

These days, thanks to the miracles of modern technology and that, we can get two BBC channels on our TV all the way out here in li'l ol' Csikszereda. (The same technology means we can no longer get the very local channels like Csiki TV and Szekely TV, which is kind of weird, really, but I guess that's globalisation for you)

Anyway, these channels are BBC World (which is the news channel) and BBC Prime, which has recently been rebranded as BBC Entertainment. I'm assuming that the rebranding came because lots of people were asking "is this really your prime output?". It may well of course be, and that all the BBC actually shows these days are interminable shows about antiques, "The Weakest Link", and seemingly thousands of soap operas with "Holby" in the title. Every now and again I flick over to see, but it's always some awful rubbish. The only time it gets watched is in the early morning when Paula watches the kids shows on it. These are actually quite good (at least compared with the alternatives she has available), though all of them seemingly ask her to guess something (which window to look through in Tikkabilla*, which coloured house someone will visit in Balamory, which teletubby will get the TV beamed through their stomach, etc), which is something she's not yet comfortable with. Perhaps it's something that you get along with breast feeding in the UK, but here I try to chivvy her along "Which window do you think it will be?" but she's having none of it "I don't know". "No, I know you don't know, but guess". "I can't know". "No, I know, just guess", by which time the camera has already zoomed in on the square window so she then says "The square one".

(*Tikkabilla, by the way, is clearly just the children's programme formerly known as Play School, but rebranded to be more hip for today's web 2.0 generation. New name, dolls and teddies replaced by small purple dragon, etc etc.)

But, anyway, I digress.

So, BBC News, has really gone downhill, and is depressing me. This is the channel that the hard right calls "leftist", but is in fact, as far as I can tell these days very much rightist. Some examples:

1. Yesterday, they invited someone from the Wall Street Journal to comment on the Massachusetts election (and provided no information that the WSJ has over the past few years turned into a hard right wing rag of the lowest order, nor any balancing viewpoints). This guy proceeded to say that the reason Obama was losing popularity was because he wasn't reaching across to the other side, which as far as I can tell is patently false, and if anything his problem is that he's spending too much time trying to appease Republicans. He's not reaching out to the mad Limbaugh/Beck/Palin extreme end of the Republican party, well, because they're all barking mad, and how the hell would you reach out to them? Promise to bomb Iran and jail people for using birth control if they agreed to say not such nasty things about you?

2. Just before Christmas the woman who does the business section on the morning slot was discussing the possibility of a strike by British Airways cabin crew. "It's really important that BA win this" she said (and that's a word for word quote, since it stunned me so much that I can still hear her saying it). Firstly "BA" does not equate to "BA Management" as she implied, and also what kind of reporting is it to say out front that the workers needed to be defeated? I know she's the business correspondent, but still. How left wing is all of that?

3. Today's top story was that the Chinese economy was moving ahead of Japan's. Haiti was barely even mentioned. I know it was a week ago, but it's still a huge story and one that is a bit more important than China moving up to second place in some kind of imaginary world economic league table. Euronews, by the way, has been fantastic on Haiti. Really good reporting, important information (journalists have been banned from the airport now, by the way, which is not something I've heard on the BBC), and great testimonies from people there (Haitians and relief workers).

4. They are really pissing me off with their pro-occupation stance whenever the issue of Israel - Palestine comes up. I mean compared to any US media outlet they come across as balanced, but they're really not. (And in fact an independent report a year or two back, confirmed this feeling of mine that they are more favourable to the Israeli government position than anything else)

So, what happened to the BBC? And what will become of it under the next government? It's all very depressing.

The Last Big Lie of Thatcherism

It's probably apparent where I stand on Thatcherism to anyone who's read much of anything on this blog, so I'll not go into it in any great depth - I'm not a fan, basically. [This shouldn't of course be read to imply that I think Britain had it worse in the 1980s than Romania, for example - obviously we didn't, and compared to Ceausescu, Thatcher and her odious cabinet of scum, were not even in the same league. Nor should it be read to imply that I somehow think that war-criminal Tony Blair was somehow a beacon of positive change. He, after all, is a Thatcherist himself]

However, when one argues about Thatcherism with people who do think that it was all a good thing, there are a number of things which get raised as examples of what she did that was positive. One of the main ones of these was that she (and her team - it's not really all about her specifically) ushered in neo-liberal economic policies, which I personally never saw as "a good thing", but which now has been shown up to be a house of cards that has collapsed in spectacular fashion. That's one aspect of Thatcherism that has, at least, been shown up for its disastrous consequences rather than its supposed benefits (you'll note that, Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, who came to power preaching a Thatcherite economic revolution for France, has been very quiet on this issue since Lehman Brothers went down).

The second argument is that she crushed the unions and stripped them of their power. This required the idea of unions themselves to be demonised, which was accomplished (with the aid of a compliant media) very successfully. However, unions are (and always have been) a vehicle for organised labour, and the concept of the powerless joining together to give themselves a voice seems, to me, to be something that should be celebrated rather than demonised. Do unions have problems? yes. Are unions and the idea behind them problematic in themselves? No. So, yes, Thatcherism disempowered the already powerless. Difficult to see how this was a benefit to anyone, honestly - even "management", for whom organised labour ought to be a partner and something vaulable and helpful rather than an obstacle.

The third and last big lie of Thatcherism was that it ushered in a newly meritocratic Britain. A class-free Britain in which people could rise to success regardless of their position in society. This has been the one enduring "success story" of the Thatcherite ideology.

But look at Britain's next government:

Here they are in all their classless glory. Here we can see David "Dave" Cameron, George "real name something like Tarquin" Osborne, and other members of the shadow cabinet that will almost certainly be elected to lead Britain later this year. In the front row you can also see the cartoonishly bumbling upper-class-twit-of-the-year, and current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Essentially a bunch of people educated at Britain's most expensive public schools and subsequently Oxford. And now we have a meritocracy? I hardly think so. [It should also be pointed out here that Blair also went to some massively expensive and exclusive private school, so this argument was blown out of the water some time ago, but because he was - in theory- a Labour politician, this was overlooked]

And now, "Dave" has come out with his latest statement (on teachers) revealing his understanding of the world and how things work. To summarise, teachers need to have gained high degrees from a "good university" (whatever that is, in Cameron speak). Teacher training in Dave's world is unimportant, and no-one who gets a lower degree or one from a not-so-good university ought to to be allowed in the classroom. Now I do have a professional opinion on this (as a teacher and a teacher trainer), which is that it's absolute fucking garbage, but putting that to one side, lets see what it reveals about this meritocratic society that we've apparently been living in since those heady days of the 80s.

The only people who talk like this, for a start, are those for whom the concept of meritocracy is sort of a nice thing to keep the plebs happy. I remember once overhearing one of my few incredibly snobbish private-school-and-oxbridge-educated acquaintances tell someone that a mutual friend had "a random degree from some mickey mouse university" (that's an exact quote, as despite the fact that this was over 20 years ago, it really stuck with me). That's how these people talk. Anyone not in their exalted coterie, is basically non-existent, and of no real value whatsoever. By revealing his (a) complete lack of understanding of how teaching actually works - and what works in teaching; and (b) "good university" biases, Dave also reveals that despite the attempts to portray himself as a man of the people, he is locked into his own little world characterised by that photo up there.

Does all this mean that he will be a bad Prime Minister? No, though he obviously needs an education adviser very badly. Does his background exclude him from government? No. Does he have any idea how normal people live, what their concerns are, how things could be improved for them? I very much think not.

One could even argue (not that I would, but one could) that he would be a good prime minister, based on the fact that he's been told from an early age that he ought to be in charge of things, and has been prepared for this throughout his education. And that we, those who didn't have his highly privileged background, have been subtly told all our lives that there are a class of people who are better than us and ought to be in charge. But please, let's forget all this shit about meritocracy. The last big lie of Thatcherism is just that - a complete and utter lie.

Finally, to sign off this angry rant, especially for Dave, who probably thinks this is a good song, though he's also probably never really understood it, is something for him to tap his feet to:


You'll never live like common people,
you'll never do what common people do,
you'll never fail like common people,
you'll never watch your life slide out of view

Debranded

If you do not live in the UK or do not regularly follow the news from there, you are probably unaware of the main story of global significance that is the number one headline in all newspapers, on the TV broadcasts, everywhere.

No, it isn't the US election, and no it isn't the financial crisis. It's not the earthquake in Pakistan or the US attack on Syria. Neither is it the humanitarian crisis in Goma.

It is in fact the moral outrage of the nation's shocked conscience over a prank call on a radio show. I won't go into all the details since it's not terribly interesting when all is said and done, but the upshot of it is that the pages of the Daily Mail are overflowing with outraged blue-rinsed grannies and other moral crusaders calling for the BBC to be disbanded. (These people, with no apparent irony, will also rail incessantly against "political correctness" - ie the attempt to minimise offence caused by language - but obviously making the leap and realising that there is a contradiction is impossible in these small minded little-englanders). This hysteria is being whipped up by papers such as the Daily Mail which is a newspaper of extreme ill-repute, in order to pursue their "demolish the lefty BBC" agenda.

The BBC in its cravenness has bowed to this ludicrous pressure and suspended the two people responsible, one of whom has now quit. I despair of my people sometimes.

How does this effect me, other than there being pages and pages of rubbish that I have to search through on UK based websites in order to find what's actually happening in the world? Well, the weekly podcast of the radio show in question is actually very funny - it has moments of being rubbish, and moments of cringe-inducing stuff, but in the main is a really excellent radio show. I can see how a lot of people can't stand the guy - Russell Brand - who does it, but that's kind of beside the point. Anyway, that podcast will be no more, and the amount of interesting material available from my homeland has been reduced. And all because of a bunch of braindead wankers and sheep led by the braying mouthpiece of vileness, the Mail.

Anyway, if you want to laugh at their idiocy, rather than being utterly infuriated by it, you can indeed still find amusing content from the UK on the internet - in this case at spEak You're bRanes. Highly recommended.

With friends like these

I've recently been perusing English language blogs that have the word Romania in them for research/laughs. It's quite remarkable how many of such things are written by American missionaries. What are all these people doing here? I have no objection whatsoever to people who have their own beliefs and faith, but I think the idea of travelling half way round the world in order to attempt to shove it down someone else's throat is, how can I put this delicately, fucked up.

Anyway, before I launch into my full-on anti-missionary rant, I'll take a deep breath and share one (non-missionary, but possibly just as bad) I came across yesterday. This was not a blog set in Romania, but from a Conservative county councillor from Kent, one Kevin Lynes. I don't have a great deal of time for tories, I have to say (this is a bit of an understatement), having grown up politically in the dark days of the Thatcher government, but that doesn't mean all people who are conservatives are necessarily scum, just deluded :-)

Anyway, Kevin, who seems to like to go by the name Kevin, which presumably is Tory party policy these days, in deference to "Dave" (he might go the whole hog and try "Kev" I suppose, but for now he's opted to sit on the fence between old and new Toryism and gone with Kevin. Probably quite wise. Keep your options open and all that), writes of a meeting he had with Prince Radu, the son in law of "the current King Mihai" (he's not really the king, fact fans, he's just a bloke, but let's not let that interrupt our enjoyment of Kev's insightful comments). Apparently Romania has been robbed of its national identity (as far as I can tell, this means it has been robbed of its monarchy, which I would contend is not quite the same thing). Mind you it can't harm to have people, even people like Kev, looking out for Romania, so while I'm taking the piss a fair bit, the outcome is probably not, in the grand scheme of things, a waste of time. But there were two bits of the commentary which really cracked me up (well one cracked me up and the other made me laugh in that kind of tragicomic-head-in-hands type way).

The laugh out loud bit was this: "I felt compelled this weekend to send an email to the Prince’s office to thank him for taking the time to talk to us and to commend him on his vision document. Within three hours, even with the time difference, he had replied warmly and personally to thank me for my message."

Even with the time difference? It's an email, Kev. It's not affected by time differences. Honestly. It doesn't sit in a queue waiting for the clocks to catch up, it just goes. You're going to have to trust me on this.

The other bit was this "He fundamentally could not understand why the European Parliament can discuss the shape of bananas ad nauseam, yet cannot bring itself to debate the theft of a national identity.".

The old bananas line! I thought it had died out. For those unfamiliar with the Euro-Sceptic arm of British politics and media, there was (is) this obsession with the idea that the EU tried at some unspecified point in the past to define how straight and how curved a banana could officially be. Now, I have asked many people who have said this to provide evidence that this debate actually occurred, but so far none of them have actually done so. Now the EU is very hot on documenting things, and you can be quite sure that if it really did come before the European parliament that there would be very clear and accessible records of such an event. Despite this, I have yet to see any evidence of this incredible, fantastic, self-parodic event. I would like to hazard a guess, just a hunch you understand, that IT NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED.

Aren't you glad, that given the implosion and incompetence of New Labour people like Kev are going to be running the country soon. We'll soon sort those Eurocrats out!

Inglia

In the second of our holidays this year (hark at us, two foreign holidays and owners of an out-of-town estate for weekending. Fancy bastards. But don't be fooled. I'm still, I'm still Andy from the block) we went to England (Or Inglia as Paula calls it). Now I know England is a fancy holiday destination for many people, but you'll have to take it from me that spending a fortnight in August in guaranteed grey skies and sub 20 degree temperatures is not really my idea of a well-used summer. Still...

Good things about England:

• It's got my extended family in it
• Ditto some friends
• Many free museums and art galleries
  
• Indian food
• Excellent beer
• Pubs
• National parks
• Pubs in national parks
• Beautiful scenery and nice villages
• Pubs in nice villages in beautiful scenery
• Public footpaths
• Walking along public footpaths in beautiful scenery in national parks with family and friends and stopping in a nice village for a fantastic pint at a great pub

Possibly there was a little bit of repetition there.

Bad things about England

• The weather
• The prices of everything (except for the free museums and art galleries)
  
• The weather
  
• Traffic
• The weather
• The way that public transport is designed specifically to rip off foreign visitors (you have to buy train tickets weeks in advance in order not to need a second mortgage to travel 5 miles, you have to have an Oyster card in London, blah blah blah)
  [On the other hand, foreigners don't get charged to drive on motorways - why doesn't the UK do what many countries inc. Hungary, Austria, Switzerland do and force visitors to pay a temporary road tax? It's all a bit baffling]
• The weather
• The quality of the food. Now this sounds like I'm out of touch a bit, but it's true - 20 years ago, food in pubs was utter garbage, but then there was this wave of change and food in many pubs became interesting and different and well prepared. Now it seems like things have slipped back again, and pub food is just bland and a bit rubbish again. Obviously you can get delicious food from any country in the world in restaurants, but outside those things have really gone downhill. Why is that?
• Did I mention the prices? And the godawful weather?

Anyway, we had a very good trip (despite the weather/price thing). My father-in-law came along too, which I knew would be interesting since he is a man who loves to travel, but mostly, it seems, so he can remind himself how good Transylvania is and how rubbish everywhere else is. Erika took him to Barcelona about 5 years ago, and he still regales all and sundry with tales of this terrible "tapas" that he was subjected to there. I jokingly warned my mother that she ought to prepare a couple of soups to keep him happy, but then was surprised to discover that in fact he really was freaked out by a lack of daily soup in the diet (and even when we had soup, even though it was pronounced delicious, it was the "wrong kind of soup"). I'll no doubt hear this Christmas when he starts holding court after a couple of palinkas, what other things the English do wrongly (there's no room for shades of grey, you'll understand).

The second week of our stay we spent in a house in Runswick Bay in the North York Moors - an area of the country I hadn't been to for donkey's years, and one which is spectacularly beautiful (and well endowed with great pubs serving Black Sheep, a truly delicious beer - hence it ticked many of the boxes above). The heather was flowering on the moors, the weather could have been worse (though it could have been much much better, let's not get carried away), my whole family managed to make it, and we had a great time. My father in law was particularly interested in the beach and the tides. There aren't really tides round these parts - the Black Sea and the Med don't have them, and so the idea of the sea coming in and out (a total difference in height of 5 metres between high and low tide when we were there) and the wildness of the beach, was really fascinating for everyone. Also visiting a waterfall called "Falling Foss" which amused the Hungarian speakers of the party. For me it was the roads which had signs warning you of 20%, 25%, 28% and (in one place) 33% gradients which were the real trip. They make the road coming down Harghita towards Csikszereda look flat.

Some pictures:

Multi-punt pile-up.

Most English scene ever - Morris Dancing in the pissing rain
(outside Lincoln Cathedral)

Beer arriving at one of those pubs-in-gorgeous-villages I was mentioning (Beck Hole, N. Yorks)

Whitby - deeply linked through fictional character to Transylvania
(and through non-fictional character to Australia)

Staithes

Arty pic, that was in no way staged. We found the stones looking like that just as the sea washed them ashore. Honest.

Runswick Bay at lowish tide

Heather on the moors

Mad half-English child ventures into icy North Sea

Random thoughts

I'm just back from England, where I attended the annual IATEFL conference in Exeter with Erika and something like 1600 other people. It was a good trip, though I wasn't feeling at my best, since the cough I had a few weeks ago turns out to have been pneumonia (or at least some similar non-specific lung inflammation, of similar levels of intensity). I am waiting today to have another delightful visit to Csikszereda's hospital so that I can work out whether or not more treatment is necessary (this possibly will involve spending a few nights in the aforementioned building while I get regular injections of antibiotics and/or monitoring of rampant blood pressure which has risen in accompaniment of the lung thing. So if I don't post anything here for a while it is likely because I am stuck in hospital and hence offline.

One of the things that I have complained about often in Romania is the fact that people are so incredibly nesh here. If I dare to take Paula out in 20 degree temperatures without a hat, I get older people especially looking at me like I'm inhumane and ought to be arrested. You see people wearing cotton wool in their ears just to keep the draughts out (and also sounds and other such troublesome things). But I think there has to be some kind of happy medium between the approach to temperature in Romania and the approach to temperature in England.

To set the scene we flew into Luton last Sunday in the middle of a raging blizzard. In April. In southern England. No idea what's going on. Anyway, it only really snowed on that day, but the temperature never really got very warm - most nights there was a heavy frost, and the daytime temps never rose much above 7 degrees. But in the midst of this hardly summery weather people walked around wearing not much more than their underwear. Mostly these people were teenagers, and especially teenage girls, it is true, so one can put some of this masochistic lunacy down to the vagaries of fashion, but it is a fashion which seems remarkably long-lasting. Whenever I go back and find myself wandering round an English town of an evening I usually find myself marvelling at the lack of warm clothing on those out carousing. This year, if anything the phenomenon has either got worse, or prolonged exposure to Romania has made me more sensitive to it. Perhaps I am becoming assmiliated and before long I, too, will be tutting concernedly at parents whose children are not buried in a vast heavily-lined, multi-layered, all-over burqa; wearing large clumps of cotton wool in my ears; and furiously closing every window in the train.

Two legs better

There's a famous story, or parable I suppose, which I'm quite sure you've heard before, but I'll repeat it anyway, because I've obviously got too much time on my hands.

So there's this rich successful retired businessman wandering along the beach in some tropical paradise one afternoon. He sees a young man lying in a hammock and goes over to talk to him. I'll tell it in dialogue since it makes slightly more sense that way:

Rich bloke: "How come you're lying around in this hammock and not working?"
Local layabout: "What for? I went out this morning, caught some fish for my family and others in the village, and now I'm relaxing"
RB:"But you could go out and catch more fish"
LL: "Why would I do that?"
RB: "You could sell it"
LL: "Why?"

(from this point onwards the story becomes a bit repetitive so bear with me. There is a punchline. Honest. Do parables have "punchlines"?)

RB: "So you could buy a better net"
LL: "But the net I have is good enough to catch all the fish I need"
RB: "With a better net you could catch more fish, and when you've caught and sold enough you could buy a bigger boat"
LL: "I don't need a bigger boat"
RB: "With a bigger boat you could go further out, catch more and bigger fish and make even more money. Eventually you'd be able to buy a second boat, and employ someone to work for you catching even more fish"
LL: "Yes, yes, get to the point will you? Why would I be bothered with all this? Why would I go to all this trouble?"

(In the original parable he doesn't actually say all that, but I am already desperate for RB to get to the point and allow me to therefore get to mine - which, I'll warn you now, is probably not worth it)

RB: "Well, after you've made enough money, hired enough people to keep your business running successfully for you, you'll be able to retire"
LL: "And what would I do then?"
RB: "Well you could spend your days lying around on the beach"

I'm sure I could have told that better, but you get the general idea.

Anyway, he says, finally reaching the long overdue point of this blog post, I was reminded of this story on our recent trip to the UK. On December 30th we, along with my parents, my brother and his family went along to "Wimpole Home Farm" which is kind of a touristy attraction type thing near my parents' house. Specifically it is a working farm in which various animals are kept and can be viewed/touched/groomed/fed etc, as children tend to like that kind of thing. It was all very nice, and we got to have fun, and eat a nice lunch, and be with the family and all that kind of thing - as well as see some piglets born that day, some goats, sheep, donkeys, horses etc etc. Paula, for whom animals are incredibly exciting and wonderful, was particularly happy.

But it occurred to me that the whole concept was kind of peculiar, and that anyone from a Transylvanian village (for example) would find it laughable that people in England would pay money (and we did pay money in not-to-be-sniffed-at quantities) to wander round a farm looking at animals. Since this is precisely what normal life offers for free here. [Another example comes from the time that Erika and I first met, which was in the town of Brattleboro, Vermont, USA. She happened to be there - where I worked - attending a course which took place during the weekend when Brattleboro offered up its annual "strolling of the heifers" festival - the local tongue-in-cheek response to Pamplona's "running of the bulls". When offered the chance to go downtown and watch a bunch of cows walk through the streets she laughed disbelievingly saying she could do that any day of the week here. And she was right.]

So is economic development like the parable of the rich industrialist on the beach? You slowly get rid of all your small scale agriculture, swallowed up and sold off to agribusiness so that vast warehouses full of battery chickens, concentration camps full of pigs, and factory farmed cows hyped up on steroids and antibiotics can supply your food needs cheaply and efficiently, and in this way your country/region becomes more and more "developed", until such time as you have enough money that you can set aside smallholdings where you can revive the lost art of animal husbandry and charge tourists large sums to come and groom a donkey or collect eggs from real live free range chickens? Your fresh food tastes like rubbish and is full of chemicals and hormones, but at least you've entered the 21st century.

Sorry

I have been busy which is the reason why this blog has seen nothing but lots of tumbleweed spinning across it for an extended period. Since I'm freelance, this is a good thing, but I do miss the actual writing every now and then (I still compose blog posts in my head while I do other things, but they're now all stacked up and mixed together).

However, I do have the time to mention this shop which has opened up round the back of our flat. It advertises "English clothes" with the names of various English clothes shops on the outside (Next, Marks and Spencers, etc etc), and the note "second hand clothes from England". What's particularly interesting about this shop (since nothing I've told you so far is), is the business model it uses. You see they get a load of these second hand clothes in over the weekend, stick them all in bins all round the shop and then sell them for 11Lei per kilo. On Monday. Then on Tuesday the price drops to 9 Lei/kg. On Wednesday it's 7, Thursday is 5 and Friday it's 3. So if you want the pick of the stuff you have to go on Monday and pay more, and if you just don't care you can pay next to nothing on a Friday. No idea what happens on Saturday when the shop is closed. I hope they give what's left to charity, but I fear that they just send it on to another shop somewhere else in Romania to go through the system again (I'm fairly sure that this shop is not unique to Csikszereda).

We went in once (on a Monday), just to have a look, and it was mayhem, but the clothes were pretty pants. And I don't mean that literally. They also hadn't seemingly been washed at all, which meant rooting through the bins was even less appealing than it might normally have been. What really intrigues me is where they get the clothes from in the UK. Are they just stuff that has been left over after jumble sales, or stuff that has been given to charity, or do Oxfam shops clear out their shelves after a while and sell truckloads of clothes to this company for them to drive across Europe and flog to the Romanian public? I'd love to know. I really hope that there isn't someone making a tidy profit on what people have given away for charity, but some part of me fears this is the case.

From Székelyföld to Sheffield

At opposite ends of Europe dramatically different weather conditions. Romania sweltered yesterday in +40° temperatures (not here as such, but it did get well above 30), with the news showing that in the sun in Bucharest it was over 60°; with news reporters, from all stations it seems, frying eggs on parked cars (can't somebody find a new and creative way to illustrate the concept of really really fucking hot?); and with (again on all stations) high heeled shoes sinking into pavements.

Meanwhile back in the UK, it's really raining. And I don't mean it's just raining in the traditional daily English sense, I mean raining in the apocalyptic noah's ark sense (I may have mixed my biblical references there, but who really knows).

Here, for example, pictured yesterday, is a place in which I have spent many happy hours (and, let's face it, a fair few miserable ones too):


For those unfamiliar with this most beautiful of locations (not that there should be that many people that applies to, since being unfamiliar with this place is a bit like being unfamiliar with the Taj Mahal), this is not some expensive water polo arena, but in fact, a football stadium. Or THE football stadium to be strictly accurate.

(I believe "Time to bring on the subs" is the humorous caption you need here)

Crime Scene Interruption

On my recent trip to the old country, I arranged to meet some friends in a London pub on the lunchtime of the day I arrived (taking the early flight from Bucharest meant I was able to maximise my time spent imbibing some real beer for a change). Anyway at the appointed hour, I located the pub, and wandered up to it, lifting up an annoying piece of tape that was strung across the entrance to the small street it was in, and stepped inside. I breathed in the aroma of London pub, and then noted that the place was pretty empty - there were two staff and two blokes in suits, all of whom were looking over at me quizzically. London's a fairly anonymous place, so you don't usually get that "everybody stare at the new person" vibe that you do in smaller places, plus because London is so big you also don't get empty pubs at 12.30. So, with my unerring nose for these things, I surmised that something odd was going on.

"Errm, are you open?" I asked to generally in the direction of the four starers.

"No, it's not" replied one of the blokes in the suits, coming towards me, "and you've walked straight through a 'Crime Scene' tape" (so that's what that was). He escorted me from the pub and called over the two uniformed police standing at the other end of the street from the way I came in, telling them to gently eject me and to make sure no other wandering thirsty people followed my lead.

After I was safely on the other side of the "Crime Scene: Do Not Enter" tape (I actually bothered to read it this time round), I asked one of the aforementioned coppers what was going on , to which he (somewhat patronisingly I felt) responded "I can't tell you, but let's just say somebody is very very ill in hospital". I don't really know why he didn't go the whole hog and use the word "poorly" really.

It was a stabbing, I discovered later, which is not something that often closes down streets and bars in Csikszereda, I have to say. Especially not at that time in the morning. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose. We miss out on, you know, stuff going on and that, but we gain on the people not being stabbed that much front.

I did manage to spend the entire afternoon sampling delicious beer though, you'll be relieved to know. I imagine you may have been concerned.

S-i-z-e of a toddler

(title to be read in the voice of the bloke on the cartoon in the Banana Splits. If you don't get this reference, don't worry, that's a good thing)

I was briefly in the UK last week, and while there I decided to pick up a few clothes for Paula (they are seemingly both cheaper and better quality than the stuff you can get here). However, on returning I have come to the conclusion that toddlers in the UK are huge mutants. Paula is more or less 18 months old, and knowing, as I already did, that the sizes there are massively overstated (or that there is this aforementioned race of giant toddlers crushing rusks in their bare hands, and stamping all over cars) I elected not to buy clothes that were advertised as being suitable for "18-24 months", and instead got some that were quoted at 12-18 months, reasoning that she might be at the lower end of that inflated scale by now. But no, they are still way, way too big for her. She'll probably fit into them by the time she reaches about eleven (at which time little body-suit things may even be fashionable for the pre-pubescent girl). And she's not that small.

Perhaps the UK, being that bastion of progressiveness that we know it to be, has actually, unbeknownst to me, altered its measurement system of time. Perhaps a British month is now actually made up of 64 32-hour days or something. Why do all measurements there have to be different? Why can't we, as a people, get over this clinging to the past, and get on with things? It must cost everybody a fortune to constantly have to provide conversions everywhere.

I acquired a new nephew this week and on being told of his birth had to convert his weight into a standard one in order to tell people how big he was (he checked in, prematurely, at "5 lbs 14 oz", which, in normal language, is 2.7kgs give or take a few grams). Anyway, welcome, Henry. This may be your first internet mention. I hope one day you, too, will not understand "imperial" measurements.

Then, I was at a shoe shop with my other nephew and was asked what size Paula's feet were. "20 or 21" I replied confidently. "What's that in English measurements", I was asked (I had no idea, and still don't)

And another (entirely unconnected) thing - the trouser press. What's up with that? In hotel rooms in Britain you nearly always find a trouser press. But nowhere else - I've never heard of anyone actually owning one privately, or ever seen them on sale anywhere. So why is it de-rigeur for hotels in the UK to have one in every room? And, for that matter, what is a trouser press anyway? It's like a very very big iron for lazy people. I tried to use one once, in the name of research, and it was really useless. An iron would have much easier. And more flexible because you do other stuff like shirts and that in them. But no, somewhere in history, someone decided that the trouser press is the way to go for hotels.

I feel better now I've got all that off my chest.

A short but harrowing tale

A small story with a happy ending (followed by a bit of liberal hand-wringing and analysis - well you didn't think I'd skip an opportunity to be self-absorbed did you?)

On Saturday 14th April, I arrived at London Gatwick Airport, after a 10-ish hour flight from Karachi via Dubai. I was, as the vernacular would have it, buggered. My luggage arrived, I loaded it all onto the trolley and headed off to the Gatwick railway station from where I would be heading to my parents' house near Cambridge. I had one massive and very heavy suitcase (since I was on a 4 week trip all told), a couple of small bags courtesy of duty free and a Pakistani carpet neatly wrapped into a hessian holdall, and my laptop, which I hung on that little hook on the back of the cart. When I arrived at the station, via the formerly cutting-edge little monorail thing that connects the two termini at Gatwick, the next train for London was due to leave in three minutes. I hurriedly bought a ticket, grabbed my bags off the trolley, went down the escalator to the platform and jumped (or lumbered) onto the train, breathing a sigh of relief. I deposited the big suitcase in the relevant place and sat down with the rest. Within seconds we had pulled away from the station and I could sit back and relax for half an hour until pulling into Victoria.

After a couple of minutes, having recovered from my exertions, I decided to retrieve my book from my laptop bag. It was then that I discovered the awful truth. I had omitted to pick that bag up from the back of the trolley when I had left it at the top of the stairs. I think I actually said the words "Oh, FUCK" out loud, as I buried my head in my hands (I had thought burying ones head in ones hands was a figure of speech, but I have now discovered that it isn't).

With the Gatwick Express being a non-stop hermetically sealed service, I had 30 minutes to come up with a plan - there was no way of jumping off at the next stop and heading back down with a vague hope in my mind. I first called ahead to my folks, and asked if they could call the station, just on the off chance. Then I set about convincing myself that (a) it would be handed in; and (b) even if it wasn't the world would still turn and I would survive somehow - I could buy a new laptop, and while I'd have lost a certain amount of valuable data, I could probably piece it together somehow. For (a) I worked out a complex percentages system (this mental activity being preferable to self flagellation or just outright despair). 95% of people upon finding a laptop would hand it in, I convinced myself. This didn't of course mean that there was a 95% chance of it being handed in, because while the 5% who would see it as an opportunity would probably be on the look out for such an opportunity or would certainly pick it up if they noticed it, the 95% would consist mainly of people who wouldn't notice the bag, or if they did would figure that they didn't have time to find someone to report it to, and possibly be forced to fill out a form. 20% of those 95% would actually notice it, pick it up and hand it in, I reasoned, without the slightest shred of scientific or even anecdotal evidence to back up this statistic. This still left me looking at a better than 70% chance of getting my bag back. (Thankfully, I hadn't at this point factored in the fact that at airports especially, rogue bags tend to be blown up in controlled explosions just in case)

The upshot of all this desperate mental arithmetic was that by the time I arrived at Victoria station I was feeling quite sanguine about the whole thing, despite the fact that by now I had talked to my mum and heard that it being a Saturday night, all the offices at the station had proven to be closed. It was then, just as I was detraining (or whatever the new word would be), that I realised that not only was my laptop in that bag, but also my money, my tickets and more or less everything I needed for the next week or so excepting my passport. Once again, I was more or less physically winded by the realisation, actually stopping in my tracks as I walked down the platform. Could I have been any more cack-handed?

I located the lost property office, and (without much hope) asked if I could fill out a form. This entailed a lot of explanation as the guy tried to insist that I needed to report it to the Gatwick Express company, while I kept telling him that I had lost it at the station, not on the train, and thus it would be to his office that I should report it (The privatisation of the railways in Britain has pretty much been an unmitigated disaster, and this lack of coordination between different private companies is just one very small part of the wider chaos). Eventually he relented and let me have one of his precious forms to fill in, which I was doing when my phone rang. It was my mum to tell me that they'd got a call from a security bloke at Gatwick who'd come into possession of my bag and had found their phone number in it. I called him straight away, my voice possibly cracking with emotion, as he told me he had my bag and had looked through it with a colleague and found the money and stuff, and would I like to come back and pick it up.

The upshot, obviously, is that I went back down to Gatwick (for free as he spoke to the ticket collector on my behalf), got my bag, gave him a hefty tip (which was as a drop in the ocean compared to what I had been on the verge of losing), and once again resumed my journey - even more tired, but now oddly, extremely awake. I didn't get "home" until getting on for 1am, but after that I really didn't care.

Upon relating this story here, I have been told by everyone that it would be absolutely impossible to imagine that I'd ever have got it back in Romania. And, despite myself, I have to concur with that opinion. I know the chances that I'd ever have seen it again would have been practically nil here. So why is that? (I asked myself). After all, I sincerely don't believe that Romanians are any more or less honest/dishonest than Brits.

Here are a number of possible explanations: (1) Romanians are an awful lot poorer than Brits (on average) - the temptation to see what monetary advantage could be gleaned would be much greater; (2) Romanians tend to assume that most people in positions of authority are corrupt (for fairly good reason) - in such circumstances, handing in a found laptop would not likely guarantee that it would get back to its owner, more that it would be siphoned off by the person who received it; (3)Years of privation and hardship (in the 80s particularly) have left many people very conscious of opportunity and seizing the moment. I mean I don't regard the number of apartments which have balconies that have been enclosed using stolen train carriage windows as being indicative of a general national propensity to thievery - more of a general national intense poverty and desperation which existed here in those spectacularly lean years. I reckon that's a hard habit to break. And finally (4), I realised that I wasn't mentally comparing like with like. I couldn't reasonably compare what would happen at Gatwick Airport station to what would happen at Gara de Nord in Bucharest. Aside from having railway platforms, there's very little that the two places have in common. In fact there are no Romanian railway stations that would be a fair comparison in the possible-light-fingered stakes to Gatwick, at which station, the only people getting on and off are people who have been to the airport, which tends to be relatively well off demographic. Thinking about it, I realised that the closest comparison in terms of wealth and general well-being of potential finders within Romania, would be if I had left it at Otopeni Airport in the departure lounge. And if I had done that (and it hadn't been treated as a suspicious package and detonated), I reckon I'd have got it back.

I'm not about to test this theory out though. Not if I can help it.

Ice, Sun, and Shopping

We won! When I say "we" of course, I mean Sport Club Miercurea Ciuc, who finally triumphed in the Romanian ice hockey championship last Friday, winning the final best-of-seven-game playoffs against perennial rivals Steaua Bucharest 4-1. The town is buzzing with excitement, or to be more accurate, there is a faint barely detectable low grade hum, which those attuned to the usual lack of excitement in Csikszereda can just about pick up. It's been a very good season for the team - they also won the Romanian cup, and finished third in their first season in the Hungarian league (I don't know if that makes them the third best team in Hungary - since they're obviously not in Hungary - but that's by-the-by)

Apologies for my lack of posts of late - I have been extremely busy seemingly juggling about 5 balls, and it doesn't promise to get any less busy any time soon. Last week, I was supposed to be in Tashkent, for example, but it got called off at the last minute for unspecified political reasons (quite possibly related to the very recent publication of this book in paperback), and instead I was whisked off to London. A city which I imagine looks much like Tashkent. It was a sunny week and I (as I do when it's sunny in London) was thinking how much I like the city. Of course, it's normally grey and miserable and that's the problem with the place. Still, maybe global warming will solve all that and it will become the Rome de nos jours. Except it would be a Rome in which every other building housed a sandwich shop.

One thing I did find myself moved to comment upon while there was shopping. Now it has come to my attention that shopping has become a leisure pursuit of sorts, a hobby, if you will. Why? What possible pleasure is there to be had in wandering through crowded shops desperately trying to find the one or two things you know you want, with thousands of other harried people, getting in each others way, surrounded by unhelpful shop assistants, people who stop at the moment they get off the escalator, bright neon lighting, and general rampant materialism? It's baffling to me. I mean truly baffling. There are few things I really can't get a handle on, and the enjoyment of shopping is one of them. And I was doing it in the cathedral of English shopping, Oxford Street. Browsing in a small out of the way second hand book shop or record shop, I can understand. Looking for specific items in the heart of London, I cannot.

Things you learn at school

In England, instead of having a tree at Christmas, they hang a large bunch of mistletoe on the ceiling.

That's what I learned last night at Bogi's class Christmas "show" (them singing songs and reading out facts like the one above).

Still, we got mulled wine when it was done, which is something that we never got when she was at kindergarten - school is obviously much more serious.

The kids also all got large presents, which consisted of boxes full of various toys, soap, and stationery all of which came from places like Sainsburys, Asda, and Superdrug (British shops, basically). When I investigated the source of these parcels it turned out that one of the kids' parents is Baptist and the parcels had come from some kind of international baptist church charity project. I have this image of well-meaning and caring people in the UK somewhere, shopping madly to try and put together a box of treats for children in poor isolated desperate Romania (that soon-to-be EU member). Still, the kids were delighted with them.

4 tier Europe?

I remember a few years ago there was talk of having a two tier EU. There would be the countries that believed in it and wanted to work together for some undefined glorious European tomorrow in one tier, and the countries that didn't believe in it but were too scared to be left on the outside in the other tier. The UK of course was one of the latter.

Since 2004, we've effectively had this two tier Europe, but it's slightly different from what was first thought up. This is down to Europe admitting a series of buffer states to protect it from the perceived terrible ravages of immigration. These buffer states (look it up on a map if you don't believe me) form a thick barrier of cabbage, sour cream, and beer from the Baltic coast of Poland in the north, through the former Czechoslovakia, Hungary and down to the Adriatic in Slovenia. This cabbage curtain effectively allows the Western end of the continent to limit immigration from further east (though they clearly need to set up some kind of floating buffer states between north Africa and various Spanish and Italian islands, to really make sure they've blocked off all the avenues.)

In admitting them, existing European states made choices as to whether to allow citizens of those nations (now to be EU citizens) should actually be allowed to live and work anywhere they liked in the Union - what the EU was supposed to be all about in short. To its credit, the UK opened its doors, unlike many of the nations which were supposed to be all about EU integration and the like. This was often talked up in comparing the relative economic performance of placeslike the UK and Ireland which opened up and France and Germany which didn't.

So for a while we had a three speed Europe - countries who were actually making use of the idea of the union to gain ground economically; countries who were not doing that, but were "old Europe" and hence more powerful in the grand scheme of things; and the countries being stripped of their human resources to fuel the UK's economic growth.

Now, however, cowed by tabloid scare headlines and racism towards gypsies, the UK and Ireland have decided to close the door to Romanians and Bulgarians, thus creating an underclass of Europe within the Union itself. It's fucking disgraceful. Is my country run by the Daily Mail? It certainly feels that way.

Now Romania could respond to this with reciprocity, making life hard for Brits who want to live and work in Romania, and in fact that would be a good idea (despite the fact that it would be a pain in the arse for yours truly). But the fact is that there aren't that many of us who want to be here, and most who do come work for large multinationals who can afford to jump through bureaucratic hoops. Instead, what the Romanian government should do is to make it hard for Brits to buy property here. The UK press is full of articles about the advantages and benefits of buying property in Romania and Bulgaria, and a policy denying Brits the right to own property in this country would upset a lot of people over there (and the kind of people who are likely to be having dinner parties with politicians and journalists). So, Calim and Traian, what do you say? Give New Labour something to think about, the xenophobic scumlords that they are.

Here are the most recent comments of the BBCs Europe editor on the subject of Romania and emigration 28th September (the comments section at the bottom is worth a read, if only to get all steamed up about people such as the cretinous "Steve H, of Littlehampton"), and October 26th (ie today - hence not many irate comments yet from Little Englanders (Littlehamptoners?))