Oh, and another thing

I drink a lot, and I used to smoke a lot too. But I still think the EU ruling on whether you have to transport your own tobacco and alcohol across borders is likely to be wrong (i.e. it is likely to be that you don't have to).

The reason? Well, obviously the tax regimes in different countries are different, and for good reason - it's generally a national consensus that has been arrived at and is accepted by that country. If it's possible to chip away at the national revenue of a country like the UK, which has lower income taxes and higher purchase taxes on things like tobacco and alcohol, then eventually that regime will be unsustainable and we'll be forced to have a higher basic tax regime.

I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I just don't like being forced into things. And I know that the tabloid gloating and jubilation about it will drive me beserk.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum

Taxis in Romania, as well as being driven by some of the most – ahem! adventurous drivers in the world, are price-regulated only in the sense that they have to display their costs on their door. These vary from 0.9 to 3 lei/km for the various firms, and then there are enterprising individuals who charge up to 10 lei/km. I presume they don’t get much repeat business.

This morning, the (enterprising individual) driver who has picked me up a couple of times was there again. He is a bit more expensive than the standard ones, but he speaks English and doesn’t drive the wrong way up the tram tracks, which counts for a lot in my book. We had the following exchange:

Me: The notice on your door says 1.5 lei per km, but the meter says 2.5 lei…
Him: It’s the cost of fuel. I must come back here after every trip.
Me: But the notice should say the correct price!
Him: But then if I am not in city centre and someone wants a taxi, I can take them for 1.5 lei.
Me: But the notice on the door should say what you charge everyone. It’s a lot more expensive than the companies.
Him: Look, the guys at the companies they don’t pay no tax. Everything is added up to zero! I go to the tax office every three months and I pay my taxes. Anyway we join the EU in one month. Then everything will be change.

I think I’m just amused at his indignation that I should imply there’s anything remotely dishonest about quoting one price and charging another. The difference to me is approximately £1, paid by expenses.

I was thinking that it was a sign of a newish economy where the free market is still not an embedded concept. But then I thought that probably the only reason I have never had this conversation in Greek (for instance) is because I don’t speak it.

In other news, I had breakfast sitting at the next table to an Italian general in full dress uniform. He was covered in medals. I was longing to ask what they were for, just as I always want to know what the Royal Family have won medals for.

Pee po belly bum drawers

For the puerile of mind, Bucharest is a good place to be. I have just walked from the Hilton to my beloved employer's offices: the route included Bulvardul Schitu and Calea Plopi. What's more, it's a beautiful morning, the sun is shining, a friend is arriving this afternoon and I managed to get here without getting lost. Zippety doo dah!

Now, oh yes, I have to do all the work I didn't get round to this week. Bugger. Oh well. I suppose I ought to be grateful that the Guardian talkboards appear to be down at the moment (I'm not, though).

Harrumph Like Humph

I'm in a bad mood. No, make that a filthy mood. My back hurts, I'm 1300 miles from home, I'm 40, with what feels like no secure place in the world. I spend my days telling people stuff they don't want to know.

And I know perfectly well that so very much of this is down to the basics. I haven't slept properly: if I had, I know things would look different. I am annoyed with myself for lolling around on my bed drinking gin rather than going to the gym. Acknowledging these things without beating myself up for them is difficult but I'm working on it.

I had a great weekend and part of the bad mood is because I am just so tired. I don't want to face the fact that at the moment, working abroad, a weekend that includes a drunken party on Saturday and a more sedate trip to a recording of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue on Sunday night is going to leave me feeling shattered.

ISIHAC is my favourite radio programme - the only one I will rearrange things in order to hear. Sample: Humph was talking about the day he was born: "Ireland declared independence, and Mongolia declared war on China. We appreciated the gesture, but really, a card would have done...."

There. I think I may have just cheered myself up enough to look at a spreadsheet.

A Rum Do

I hope everyone raised a glass to the departure of Mr Rumsfeld. I don't understand America. I don't understand the gun laws, the insularity, the complacency. And I don't understand how some of the nicest people I know are American but somehow my idea of the place is so different.

Anyway, for the moment, the less bad guys won. Hurrah.

Wherever I lay my rut, that’s my home

It’s very easy to fall into a routine, so that although to the outsider your life seems reasonably varied and possibly even glamorous, you are in fact just as trapped by it as any caricature housewife in a worthy novel. I think this is what’s happened to me.

The trouble is (“the trouble is, that I don’t know how to OAR”, as my nephew said to me, eyeing an inflatable dinghy with suspicion) that this way of living (flying somewhere to work, working, coming home) means that the basics take up so much time that you don’t get to do anything else, not unless you are possessed of superhuman organisation and discipline, which I’m not, or capable of managing on very little sleep, ditto. So the pinnacle of my achievements this week is likely to be if I can arrange to get a massage in the hotel, and perhaps even go swimming. Other than that – frankly, just carrying on breathing sometimes feels like an unreasonable imposition.

And I don’t like this. Temperamentally I need to be ticking things off on a list, and although I can do that at work, the things that I need to do behind the scenes are just too dull to count. Three loads of laundry done? Check. Haircut? Check. Catch up on sleep? Check. See what I mean?

Oh, and just to add to the gaiety of nations, BA managed to lose my luggage yesterday. It’s turned up now, but it’s amazing how discombobulated it makes you feel, like a refugee, trailing your emergency supply pack and desperately feeling the lack of your pyjamas.

Not so much a restaurant, more a way of life...

I kept meaning to post something about last Wednesday evening, but never got round to it. This is unashamedly recycled from what I posted on the Guardian talkboard:

Last week, we went to a traditional Romanian restaurant for someone's birthday. We were asked to remove jackets at the door as apparently people are much prone to stealing the (antique) cutlery.

The main room is huge and square, with a small slightly sunken dance floor in the middle. The menu was fairly esoteric (two colleagues had bear - one smoked, one sausages) and only in Romanian (a language in which carp is rendered crap, to my delight). When the food arrived, each waiter was carrying a flaming torch in one hand and a serving platter in the other. It was ACE.

Then the Entertainment! Oh joy. The MC was a very large Hyacinth-Bucket-Style lady in a sequinned long dress and, bizarrely, wide-brimmed Ascot-style hat. The first act was the Famous and magnificently-moustached Gipsy Accordionist, Mr Viorel Fundament (click on the link http://www.pixton.org/TomsMusiciansGalleryOne.html for a picture of him - he looks like Borat's stouter, more ingratiating brother). He was followed by some very scantily-clad ladies tangoing and cha-cha-cha-ing with some of the waiters: then a very good saxophonist, then some Gipsy Singing. The coup de grace was an octogenarian singing karaoke Tom Jones hits, with a little help from us when he got to Delilah. To bed very late and fairly drunk, but it was SO worth it.

Doing Wells

As the lovely Platypus appears to be valiantly working her way through my meanderings, here’s a new one about last weekend.

I sing in a “depping” choir – one that deputises for various cathedral choirs when the choir school is on holiday. Last weekend it was Wells.

It’s hard to describe why, exactly, it’s such a brilliant experience. Anything you say to describe it makes it sound frightful: you drive miles and miles to a cathedral city, you stay in (and pay for) a succession of dubious hotels, you rehearse endlessly, you finish the weekend exhausted, the singing is always terrifying because it’s never more than four on a part (it was two or three this weekend), the music is difficult, the congregation for evensong is often tiny…..

But, but, but…. You get to see behind the scenes. On Friday we rehearsed in a timber-vaulted room in Vicars’ Close, built in 1348, just (I think) as the Black Death was sweeping across England. On Saturday we were in the tiny Great Hall of the choir school. Between services we were in the Undercroft, a glorious junk room behind the robing room, full of antique sewing machines, obsolete tea urns, boxes marked DIRTY RUFFS and all the paraphernalia of the Church of England.

And we sang a LOT of music. A complete set of Bairstow for one evensong (slushy, but lovely). A Howells Te Deum (fiendishly difficult, a lot of it in the Lydian mode so sounding more like a muezzin than anything Western) and the lovely bouncy Britten Jubilate for Mattins. The Richard Lloyd Hereford service for the other evensong and a Campra mass setting, along with reams of psalms and some jolly good hymns (the last one of Sunday was “Abide with me” which we all enjoyed camping up.

The only thing that was missing was the usual genteel disagreement between our (spectacularly camp) organist and the director over organ registration. This was because, much to Jonathan-the-organist’s disgust, Wells does not have a 32-foot pipe (the one that makes the loudest, deepest, roariest noise) and so he was unable to make his usual efforts to destroy the building with sound.

One of the nicest experiences in my life is an autumn Cathedral evensong, warm and lit in the choir stalls with the chilly, dark bulk of the cathedral all around you, and the Prayer Book words:

Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, o Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night…..

And the Nunc Dimittus:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word.
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

I’ve given up praying for the peace of Jerusalem, though. It hasn’t happened yet, and clearly all that praying hasn’t made a blind bit of difference.