Wu Wei

A full day!

Unexpected last minute call to chat and gossip with ex-colleague Eye (still hopeful for future working together) in from UK. Cosy chat hijacked by Albanian and Bulgarian colleagues, so we tour the tourist areas of Plaka and Monastiraki, till the cold drives us to a café. We avoid several where we feel we will double the average age of the occupants, at the same time wondering why they aren’t at work if they can afford tourist places.

Sitting outside I order a hot drink and am mocked by the others who sign on for the usual Greek iced coffee. After a while Eye borrows the Bulgarian’s heavy coat (leaving him in shirt sleeves --- a hardy man!) and then orders tea to warm up. After the updating on work (not much progress) and the purpose they are in town (no agenda for the meeting) the conversation turns to more interesting topics.

I have to say my impression of Albania as a closed society before “the changes” is changing as I meet more and more officials. The one I know best spent time in China but also speaks Italian and now English. His daughter is studying in Rome. Today’s Albanian admits he is a “young generation” who doesn’t know Russian, unlike the Bulgarian who has been educated with Russian technical materials. He also says that until recently Dostoievsky was banned in Albania, which surprises us all. His daughter is studying architecture in Paris. How do they afford it all? Here’s me struggling to afford to support one daughter in the UK on minuscule home student fees, whereas they have to pay fees and living expenses. Maybe they have scholarships or the fees to study are not large, but on their salaries compared with mine? Perhaps one shouldn’t ask any more but just be glad they are spending it on education for their kids in such good places. Interestingly, the daughter had been surprised that architecture required the study of history of architecture and urbanisation rather than being just about engineering. The students all were surprised and were threatening a protest to the university. I always thought that that was an essential part of the architecture course, otherwise you end up with ever more concrete blocks since that is all the engineers can do. It was always more fun (and demanding) tutoring students at the AA in London who seemed to know no engineering than the students at Birmingham School of Architecture who knew no art.

Somehow we got onto a discussion of Scandinavians and their culture. Eye (an American married to a Swede) agreed with me that although seemingly more tolerant and open, they actually were relatively intolerant of foreigners and even groups at home who were different. Sloph (my daughter who went to school in Denmark) was shocked to find little old ladies in Copenhagen would spit at passing blacks or Afghanis. Eye agreed it was easier to make friends in Bulgaria and Albania than in Scandinavia.

And from comparisons of countries, the (male) conversation turned to which country had the most beautiful women, with the Bulgarian winning the anecdote competition. Eye and I retreated to the bathroom to giggle about this topic of conversation coming up all the time with the home country always being the best. I was tempted to start a competition for the most attractive men. We always used to remark that inevitably the women in Eastern Europe soon became smarter and better dressed, whereas the men (even young ones) made little effort on their appearance. Women were not nearly so patriotic as men. Women in Ukraine and Lithuania would say that any men were better than the local ones, but this was often based on their behaviour as well as their appearance. Personally I would go for the Scandinavians as a group.

Afternoon

One of my favourite “Lithuanian” jobs every year has been to improve the English captions for the annual Lithuanian press photography exhibition before they get printed in a catalogue. The first year I just got the captions and had to guess what the photos were of. That was hilarious, especially the military ones where the military terminology wasn’t part of my usual reading, and my Lithuanian there was nonexistent. Now I get the photos and my Lithuanian was not bad when I left. Almost the first one I opened, mentioned the beautiful girls of Lithuania!

I wish there was a website I could link to, to show the photos. However, in some cases you really need to know Lithuania or current events there to appreciate the photo.

Annual report for 1997

Christmas 1997

I never thought I would write one of these newsletters, but this year has been a year like no other so here goes.

In January when I had just got back to Kiev for a month, J announced by fax he was leaving.  This was not entirely unexpected, or unwelcome, but the manner of the announcement left rather a lot to be desired.

Since then, I have been based mostly at home, which was rather a shock for all of us, as I had been away most of the last two years earning money while J ran his mail-order plant business.  I felt rather lost as I had spent less time in Somerset than in Kiev over the last two and a half years.

In February, J abandoned his business and set up a competing business with more money borrowed from his parents, who have refused to have anything to do with me until very recently.  I tried to help J’s business partners with the business and we have kept it going, though it is not doing very well, and I have now left them to it.

My employers in Edinburgh and Rotterdam and colleagues in Kiev have been amazingly supportive, and wanted me to take the children out there till the end of the contract in September, but I decided that was too hard for the children.  We all went out in April for two weeks with my sister and I made another trip in June so I could carry on with my work.

In the meantime, J went to court to get the children back and to stop me taking them abroad with me when I worked.  He seemed to feel that I was overruling the children’s own wishes, but they were both happy to tell the court they wanted to live with me.  Sloph and Bee have both been brilliant, and coped tremendously well.  They see their father each week as he lives 15 mins away.  Fortunately, he was unsuccessful, and I have a rather sweeping court order so I can work where I like. 

I seem to be completely unemployable in the UK, but constantly in demand, even with two children in tow, anywhere in Eastern Europe or the NIS.  My PhD has come in extremely handy, and via a strange route I have become what the EU likes to think of as an expert in energy policy and legal reform.  For the last two years I was part of the EU Tacis Monitoring and Evaluation Team and worked in Ukraine and Georgia.  In June I was “promoted” to deal with general legal and economic policy advice, which I was really enjoying. 

While at home, I decided I would write something vaguely academic about my work and Paul Hare at Heriot-Watt University is publishing my efforts on legal reform and electricity restructuring.

In September I had job offers for monitoring in Kiev and Moscow, but neither team won the contract so I was left high and dry.  As soon as the court case  was settled in August I went to Kiev to finish the last few bits of work.  I was taken ill on the plane as it landed at midnight and rushed to hospital where I was diagnosed as having had a mild stroke.  To me it felt exactly as if I had drunk too much vodka.  The room span for two days, I had double vision and was nauseous.  The hospital, if rather primitive, had really nice doctors and nurses, and my employers sorted out everything so I was as comfortable as could be.  All my friends came to see me, and I recovered quite quickly so it was not a bad experience.

When I came home, all I could produce as symptoms was a drunken stagger.  Eventually my GP “rushed” me off to hospital where they said I had too few symptoms to have a brain scan (it would have been a waste of money).  As a low risk patient I couldn’t have had a stroke, so I was packed off to ENT where they diagnosed middle ear problems, for which the treatment was rest.  So I was left to cope with being unbalanced physically.

Throughout the year I have been going to psychotherapy.  I know this is unlike me, but I was completely lost when I came home and didn’t know who to turn to.  As well as the support in such a dreadful year, it has been a great intellectual stimulus, and given me plenty of ideas for my work, which despite its technical content is usually about the psychology of organisations and how to manage change.  On the personal side, it’s the only learning I’ve ever done where you have to work out on your own what the homework you have been set is, and then account to yourself why you haven’t done it.

Having a rest as prescribed did me no good at all, as my sleep got disturbed and I had a manic episode when I did the predictable thing of imagining I was in love with my psychotherapist.  We made terrible jokes about my being unbalanced mentally as well as physically.  My GP announced my thyroid gland had gone overactive, but sent me to a psychiatrist just in case.  She was very interested in whether I had had erotic fantasies about my psychotherapist.  You could see her thinking stereotypical menopausal woman, but when I ranted and raved about the NHS not being able to afford a brain scan, she knew I was sane!  I’ve now had a brain scan and been pronounced absolutely normal (well in that department anyway).

Since November I have been trying to sort out a job again.  The choice was originally between a two year contract in Kiev, depending on winning a tender, and a bureaucratic job in the European Commission in Brussels managing legal and policy advice in Russia.  The result of the tender is now six weeks late, and waiting for the Ukrainians to pass a law in Parliament (don’t hold your breath).  The European Commission changed the job from legal and policy advice to transport and telecoms before the interview (not so much as an apology just take it or leave it) but gave me the job all the same.  Seven weeks later I am still waiting for any form of written correspondence, though today the Head of Unit got his secretary to send me his best regards and to say they were looking forward to working with me in the New Year!

Luckily, to preserve my sanity, last week I was offered six months in Lithuania managing assistance to revise their energy policy and “to push the law through Parliament”, which will be a first for anyone I should think.  If all goes well in 1998 (hollow laughs all round) we shall be off on January 12 for Vilnius. Lithuania is supposed to be very nice, as it was where many people in the FSU went for their holidays.  We shall see.  The children will go to the American International School which has 42 children of 15 nationalities.  They are very excited at the thought of some real snow.

All in all, it has been an amazing year.  All my old friends from the old Birmingham and London days have rallied round.  I have rediscovered the person I was then, who was re-emerging in Kiev anyway, and am much happier as a result.  Despite my unusual approach to work, I seem to be valued by both NIS people and European contractors (not so much the English, but who cares).  I have got a new interest in the application of psychology and psychotherapy at work, and hope to set up some new projects in this field, with the Tavistock Institute in London.  The children are secure and happy with me and are able to cope with my funny work.  Sophie last week said “Oh Mum, how am I going to going to tell my friends I am going to a country I have never heard of”.  It’s sad that they won’t see much of their father, but they seem more mature than him at the moment.

Hope you had a good year too.  If all this is news to you, please forgive me for not crying on your shoulder at the time.

The best way to keep in touch is to use the email address on the letter head which will get relayed on, as I have no idea how to communicate at the moment.  We shall be home at Easter but visitors will be welcome any other time.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Helene

Daughters and their domestic skills?

Because I have always worked, they have grown up with a team of childminders and cleaners, so it has taken time  for them to learn to keep their rooms tidy and hang up their clothes.  But what’s unusual about that?

Sloph has followed my path, preferring to know nothing of cleaning, washing and ironing until some was forced on her by life in boarding school.  Do schools in Britain still teach domestic science (or home economics as it was upgraded to) and if so can they compete with Jamie Oliver on TV?  Is it assumed that boys and girls in elite boarding schools will still inherit homes with servants? 

Can cooking be included in the Homo Faber syllabus of the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme, now de rigeur in international schools? I have never heard of it.  Is the Latin name still indicative of gender bias towards woodwork and metalwork?  In my Latin lessons at school, I remember translating a menu for a banquet, but it seems there were no real recipes to go with it.  One dish was something like a swan stuffed with a goose stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a quail stuffed with a pigeon stuffed with an olive.  The idea was to eat the olive.  They say that learning Latin was useless for modern life, but this was not quite what they had in mind.

Bee, on the other hand, has demanded to learn to knit, though she has not seen me do it much.  Proficiency has been measured in the length of a scarf knitted on enormous needles in nobbly wool (the dropped stitches are more easily disguised). The products have been much admired by her teenage friends.  Sewing on buttons and mending rips in favourite clothes and turning up hems are still delegated to mother. 

Who provides the new essential “services” of the modern age which support the working mother?  For us, it has become reliable low cost transport (taxi) to transport kids to school, cafe and the local cinema, (wonderful in Vilnius and hopeless in Athens) and the healthy food delivery service (souvlaki from Grandma’s, two blocks away in Athens, reprieving us from a diet of pizza).  And let’s not forget the man who fixes the satellite TV and brings the pirate card.  Or the English speaking student/au pair/cleaning lady/maid who finds you the shoe repairer (needed on a rare occasion these days) or an explanation of a local holiday custom.  In return you acquire her problems:  struggles with college fees, exams (whether to cheat or not) and whether life with a foreign family is more interesting than the possible teaching job in a rural school which seems the only way to get started.

In Athens we have been frustrated by lack of communication with our Polish maid who seems to speak fluent Greek but not English French or German.  Her life remains a mystery to us, though her excellence and common sense as a maid indicate she could do much better in life.  Is this the curse of the Greek education system in which she must have grown up?

How do mothers transmit domestic skills to their children now? Should they even bother to try?  What are the new technical proficiencies one needs for domestic life these days?  Lessons in computers and internet hardly count, since these are as essential as reading and writing.  In our house the most practical technical task needed is finding a spare UK/continental plug adaptor.  Both my kids learned to do this early in life.  And the biggest help for a mother is for the teenager to order the dinner for delivery, when the mother has SMSd her arrival time. And perhaps I should add the ability to read labels in supermarkets in whatever languages are available.

And then to Lithuania

And then to Lithuania as a family albeit one parent this time.  Shopping was more or less easy, across the road in a tiny supermarket, or by taxis which could be called by telephone.  Cooking was very simple, as the children were only just growing out of their finicky stage.  Restaurants were very cheap for us, so we ate out often.  At first they refused to go anywhere but the Irish Pub, which I got heartily sick of.  We had a wonderful lady called Violeta, who cleaned, shopped, ironed, comforted and generally mothered me.  Worried about latchkey children coming home to an empty home, we had a series of after school childminders, one of which, Sandra, a music student, is now one of our extended family.

Supermarkets enlarged every year from Minima to Maxima, (bigger than many in Athens) to Acropolis, the biggest shopping mall in the Baltic, which opened the year before we left.  In the end we were only missing Greek yogurt and brown sugar, so a move to Athens was an unexpected surprise.

When we lived in a row of five town houses (kottedgy in Lithuanian, maisonetez in Greek, ironically both words mean quite a contrasting style of housing in English) in Vilnius, there were three other families with kids at the international school: American, Indian and Danish families.  Neither mothers worked fulltime, but girls seemed not to be allowed in the kitchen to learn cooking. 

Bee and I found that the girls and the boys would like to come round to our kitchen, as we did “social cooking”.  This meant we cooked dinner together once or twice a week having the “what did you do today” conversation.  The dinners were often pseudo (out of a jar or packet) Indian or Chinese, the emphasis being on quick, and so something a bit different for kids, but basic skills could be demonstrated and learnt during normal conversation.  Bee became famous at school for her muffins and cookies which she would knock up at the drop of a hat.  They were sometimes a little unusual, like the time she forgot to put in the baking powder so sprinkled it on top, and the muffins came out with green froth on top.

At Christmas, or birthdays, or the “in between Christmas and New Year” party tradition we developed, the menu got quite complicated, but preparation was a group activity.  Other mothers seemed to prefer to cook guarding their territory and expertise, excluding their children for the tense preparation of the grand dinner party, if they cooked at all.  But we regarded it as a social activity, one of the few things we did and still do together.

Yet the open plan kitchen/dining living space is popular with modern families, making this social cooking easy to achieve.  The English country house kitchen with Aga stove (even if gas fired!) is still desired by many town based English families.  In Kiev, my friends all crowded into the kitchen to chat and cook, even if dishes were simple.  Is cooking too much of a chore now, or has it become too complex?  Is there only satisfaction from something very grand, with complex ingredients you forgot to shop for? 

And what of the life of working women? My team in Lithuania had two women with children.  Ruta had to juggle taking her daughter to nursery in the morning while her son aged 8 went to school in the afternoon shift and had to be left at home in the morning.  She would go home to her parents and bring back apples and other things from the country.  One Christmas she came back with kuscukiai, the special Christmas Eve cookies which had been banned from bakeries in Soviet times, though her mother had always made them at home.  Jurate struggling on her own with two teenage girls would always manage to bring birthday cakes for us, usually made at midnight after everything else was done. 

Moving to Ukraine

At first this was like turning back the clock.  In Ukraine in the early 90s, where I was living on my own (the family were still in England and I came back for a week every six weeks) life was extremely simple.  Not much in ordinary shops, fruit and vegetables only when they were in season, and a few so-called “dollar shops” with western products, with extremely variable supply.  Definitely no supermarkets, and as I had no car, no way to do bulk shopping. 

I was very wealthy compared with Ukrainians, which was a shock since I took the job after a year of both of us being effectively without any income.  I was provided with an interpreter called Nina who instantly became a firm friend.  She was used to dealing with foreigners and quickly explained my responsibilities, which were to provide as many jobs for her friends as possible.  This I justified as a way to recycle EU money which was supposed to be helping Ukraine but in practice was paid to EU consultants who spent most of it at home in the EU, not Ukraine.

The project quickly acquired a cook/housekeeper Bella, who provided lunch for us everyday and a driver (whose name I forget), as well as a translator Sasha who worked at night as this was his second job.  While the lunch was not essential, it meant that we got regular visit from the Ukrainians whom we needed to work with, the shopping was, as I had no idea where to get most of the shopping list, and supplies were very variable.  The driver had previously driven a party chief around and without that influence had no idea where the masses shopped.  So Sasha on his night shift remembers me from the diet of orange juice (he was always driving) and peanuts, over which we discussed work and life and the struggle for a better life in another country.  He is now well established with his family and a Canadian citizen.

Bella regularly produced a 3 course dinner (salad, soup and meat) for us.  When the kids came out, her staple dishes, herring in a fur coat, and syrniki were adopted as a family favourite.  Round the corner from us in Athens we recently found a corner shop advertising “Russkie produkty” and rushed in to buy tvorog and smetana to make syrniki again.  They never taste as good as hers though.  Herring in a fur coat was presented this year in Athens as one of the Twelve Dishes which make up the Lithuanian celebration of Christmas Eve.

Bella also found time to make vareniki, a Ukrainian version of ravioli or dumplings, though with a variety of fillings both meat, vegetable or fruit.  She made the pastry by hand, pulling it out over the table and then shaping the dumplings using a metal gadget which only Ukrainian shops sell.

Bella did the cleaning, and the washing, made sure I was wrapped up warmly to go out.  I learnt where to put my scarf, hat and gloves so I did not lose them when I took them off:  scarf in the coat sleeve, gloves in the hat, hat in the bag.  She told me to put my lipstick on when I forgot, which was always. In short, she mothered me, as I was a hopelessly badly trained child.  Suddenly I took much more care of my appearance as it was a necessary part of the role. Women were feminine, men were gallant.  Roman Tomovic, my counterpart in the work, would arrive in spring with a tiny bunch of violets or snowdrops.  On other occasions men would arrive with a box of chocolates to show their appreciation, or a bottle, or simply kiss your hand and recite poetry.

Later when the project finished, and on the next project I was unable to employ them all, we used to meet on Saturdays and I would show off by cooking something exotic, usually with the aid of tins or jars I bought from England to give some variety.  This was a way of reviving my cooking skills, but also to give them a taste of a better life.  As Roman Tomovic said when I did “TV cooking” in front of them once, “it’s not often you get Italian tomato soup cooked by an English lady in a Kiev flat”.  But we also had an Indonesian chicken with avocado, (sometimes without the avocado if there was none available in the dollar shop below the flat,) and South American beef with chocolate and walnuts.  I learnt to shop in the markets, the wonderful Bessarabki under the glass domed roof, run by the Georgian mafia, and the more basic one in Podol, and as supermarkets run by Slovenians and Italians appeared, managed to stock up with “local “ products rather than bringing them from England.

Married (and single) life

Married  life

I was very lucky in having two partners who were happy to share all domestic duties and probably did more than me.   

N and I lived in London and moved from student squalor to smartish flat, at the same time as London developed large supermarkets and a much wider variety of food in the 70s.  We got the grandest cook book we could find and worked our way through the recipes, while we were student.  When we started work, we worked long hours and got paid by the hour.  As a result we would often work an extra hour and have dinner at the new Cypriot restaurants which had appeared in Camden Town after the Turkish invasion.  They also transformed the market which was one of the first in London to begin to stock the wide variety of fresh fruit and vegetables required for Greek cooking.

J took over the cooking almost as soon as we met, and though I had been a good cook, I found I was happy to leave him to it.  He refused to have a dishwasher, believing they did not get things clean unless stacked properly.  We watched his brother bicker with his wife over how to stack theirs (a more modern line of control?) and decided not to bother, so I did the washing up.  J had a tendency to clean frantically when he was worried.  At first I thought it was just because his mother was visiting, but much later it seemed he was trying to clean up his internal life as well.

Single life

In between, from 1977-84, I had a house in Birmingham which housed a variety of students and other transients.  Notable for that time for their domestic skills were:

Heather: a lively philosophy student who played hostess to her friends and the philosophy lecturer down the road

Mano: an Iranian refugee from the Shah, who would make delicious food for 10 people he invited once a week; notable for the mountain of rice in a cake, which is the way I always cook rice still.

Judy Batt: now Professor of Central and South-East European Politics, remembered for a recipe of rabbit with prunes, recycled with hare for Christmas dinner this year in Athens;

Rob, last heard of in London, an engineer with no culinary skills at all, but excellent at emptying the rubbish bin and listening to my grumbles while I cooked.

Rima: who insisted we had baked potatoes at parties but always forgot to take them out, only to find the cinders the next day; remembered also for the lack of housework. Her partner Alan Rickman visited once and complained about the layer of the dust on the television.  This was long before he was a famous film star.

Richard Sakwa: now Professor of Russian and European Politics, then excellent opener of wine bottles. Always remembered for his Russian wife Rosa’s non-stop window shopping when she first arrived from Moscow: 

“I went out at 9am and there were lemons in the shops.  I came back at 5pm and there were still lemons in the shops”. 

In Moscow in that period, supplies of lemons were always rare and were bought up instantly.

J: who then lived across the road and would complain about that his lot of students never cleaned or paid their bills.

At the summer house

From 1972 N and I shared a summer house in the Brecon Beacons.  In 1985 J and I went to live in it, and both children were born there.  But in the late 70s and early 80s groups of my friends would come to help me and/or the builders do improvements.  The deal was always that they got fed.

In the very early days when there was no plumbing we bravely ventured there in winter.  We chopped wood outside then rushed inside to thaw ourselves and enough water to make tea to warm up.  By then the water refroze and we rushed out to chop more wood to put on the fire to thaw ourselves and the water…. It was a long time before we went again in winter.

Later, the house had electricity and rainwater, but no drains or a road.  The roof was in progress.  On one occasion, the builder Loopy had his birthday and we promised him exactly what he wanted to eat.  He asked for steak and kidney pudding.  Three of us women (architect, engineer and builder) slaved all day to produce this, and it lives on in my mind as the seven-hour steak and kidney pudding, reinvented after the war, to get women out of the factories and keep them in the kitchen.

At my mother's knee

Looking at pictures of women’s lives at the end of the 19^th century, a book acquired at the height of my feminist period, I remember being struck how little had changed even by the 1950s for a family in a village in Lancashire where I grew up.  True we had electricity for lights, the radio, the sewing machine and the vacuum cleaner but that was all, in the 50s. But attitudes had not changed, it was all women’s work.

Mother’s housekeeping

Growing up was a series of firsts, (for the families of friends, not me):  the first in my avenue to get a TV, a car, a washing machine.  And yet this was the same family where the mother had still boiled her washing and pounded it with a dolly using dolly blue to get things white, in the early days.  My mother must have washed clothes in the sink. I can remember frequent injunctions to mind the fingers in the hand-turned mangle which appeared on washing day to get rid of water in the clothes, and the difficulties of folding frozen sheets to bring them in to dry on a wooden clothes rack in front of the open fire.  Even in her 70s, struggling with a bed-ridden husband, my mother refused a washing machine, preferring, as she put it, to get the exercise of standing on her head, scrubbing the washing in the bath.  She did concede early on, however, in favour of sending the sheets to the laundry. 

My grandmother had been housekeeper for a family of gentry, while my grandfather was the gamekeeper.  When my grandmother died (before I was born) it was automatic that one of the three unmarried daughters kept house for their father.  Since the other two sisters were in service, it was convenient that my mother kept house for my father, us three daughters (two years apart) and her father, who died when I was 10.  My mother had left home early and always lived in a nursing home, without having any domestic duties, so housekeeping was something new, and something she did not take nearly as seriously as educating us.

She hardly cooked, even before she went back to work in my teens. The only things I can remember she cooked could be listed on the fingers of two hands: roast chicken for special occasions, with soup from the carcase afterwards, rock cakes for visitors, mince pies at Christmas, spaghetti (exotic foreign stuff) for my father when he was working, boiled eggs on Sundays, Yorkshire pudding and gravy for Sunday dinner and Yorkshire pudding with jam afterwards, and pancakes.  I definitely remember the pancakes from one Shrove Tuesday when there was (it seems) a metre of snow blocking the road and we made an igloo in the garden. 

When N and I visited later on, she would always make chicken casserole and boiled potatoes, there was never any choice.  She would always give him a big piece of meat.  Thinking about this now, it seemed that until we were teenagers, the men usually had their meals separately from us and had different food, meaning they had meat.

Cleaning the house was maybe an annual event, though I never noticed the dirt.  I remember cleaning the “silver”: rubbing the silver plated knives and forks with a cloth soaked in “brasso” which left your hands black.  Occasionally we cleaned the oven, after we finally bought a new modern cream electric cooker to replace the (pre-war gas?) stove we had before.  My father made his own coffee on a percolator which frequently boiled over and so the cooker quickly developed a burnt coffee layer.  The kitchen was tiny, with a stone sink and practically no cupboards, but with a separate pantry for storing dry goods, and our ginger beer plant.  There was still a weekly routine of washing on Monday and baking on Friday, when I was young.  I finally persuaded them to have a fridge by the time they were pensioners, but only after birds learnt to open the milk bottles and the next door cat started eating the eggs left outside on the doorstep by the milkman.  But really they used it just as another cupboard. 

Because there was no way to carry bulk shopping home without a car, shopping was a daily trip mainly done in the “Coop”, the nearest thing to a supermarket, or a trip of four miles by bus to the market in the nearby town of Preston.

In theory, we learnt to cook, sew and knit as well as general housekeeping from our mother.  In practice, I learnt most housekeeping skills except knitting and sewing from or together with my husband, when we were students.  Domestic science lessons at grammar school taught me how to make a sandwich, apple crumble (luxury dessert in Lithuania), pickled herrings, how to iron shirts (a lesson to be remembered for its usefulness long afterward it was rediscovered the hard way).  Endless hours in elementary school spent knitting thick cotton dishcloths and sewing needle cases are not missed.  Hemming, buttonholing and cross stitching (for future folk embroidery?) are not quite forgotten.

We sewed until it was cheaper to buy clothes (in the 70s with the coming of a shopping mall and C and As). Knitting lasted longer, as smart designer knitting patterns from Kaffe Fassett and Patricia Roberts appeared in the 80s.  In fact I only gave up knitting when it trespassed into an area of competition with my second mother-in-law.  It was simpler to leave the field clear for her. 

Generally, house decorating was a man’s job.  Neither my father nor my grandfather was practical about the house (I suspect they competed to see how little they could do). It was my mother who blocked up the holes with newspaper or our plasticene to keep out mice, or draughts.  Once her father had died, my mother would occasionally redecorate rooms, which meant she bought odd lots of wall paper, usually enough for just one wall, so all rooms were rather variegated.  My mother also seemed to do upholstery.  I remember one occasion when the vicar called, that we were all trying to get a kitten out of an upended armchair she was re-covering. 

Another job was bringing in the coal and emptying the ash from for the single open fire which heated the house and the hot water.  We all learnt to roll newspaper firelighters, stack kindling and to broddle the fire.  I’m not sure whether “broddle” is a real word, or just one of my father’s Flemish/German/Romanian/Ukrainian words which became a private language at home.

When J. and I moved to live in our Brecon cottage in the 80s without any heating, and it seemed he had no firelighting experience, I was astonished.  But he had always lived in a centrally heated house, showing the difference in our backgrounds (him middleclass and southern, me working class and northern) and age (seven years difference), plus the speed of progress in the 60s in UK.

When my father became ill, and had to be dependent on my mother in a way he found intolerable, the fire became the “line of control” between men’s and women’s work and frequent sorties were made across it by both sides to gain and subsequently lose territory.  In the 70s when we finally persuaded them to have central heating, we were concerned that they would have nothing to fight about, and might both fade away.  But they managed successfully to transfer the battle to the thermostat setting.

When in doubt read a book

After the disastrous trip to the school library yesterday, I took a trip to the big English language bookshop in town and spent the morning in an armchair with a selection of computer book.  As always no individual book was best and some could be rejected out of hand.  Price and weight was no guide to usefulness. 

As usual, I learnt more than was in the book:

• There are programmes to help you write web pages!   Duh, where have I been?? When did I ever want to learn to program when someone else has already provided tools (even if it is Microsoft). 
• I probably don’t have the latest version of Word which has more bells and whistles for writing web pages
• And why wasn’t I writing my blogs in Word as webpages already? 

Definitely a case of going back to school.

Bearing in mind that Bee also needs a book I chose the one with pictures (even though it had a dedication to God) over the one with jokes about Bush, and in the end it came down to the one with the best section on colour codes, tables and CSS stuff.

Now to research the software upgrades, freebies and heavy duty webprograms.  I liked the idea of something that matched up beginning and ending tags (or the lack of).

Where do you come from?

This question always fazes me.  The assumption is that I am temporarily dislocated from somewhere else and will go back there soon.  Maybe dislocation is an indication of my state of mind and what I should mean is relocated.  Somehow there aren’t enough prepositions in English (or adopted Latin or Greek) to explain this.  The nearest word I can think of is “uprooted” and then I should be going back to be “rerooted” in my home country.

But it is complicated by the fact that the UK is a big country, or even four countries. In small countries it is assumed that a foreigner must come from the capital of “England” ie London, and my explanations that I have lived in several places in the UK, including up a mountain in Wales are met with polite disbelief.

In Eastern Europe, there are few universities and students often live at home whereas my aim was to escape.  In Britain interesting jobs are available in four capital cities and many similar sized towns, especially now that many civil service jobs are decentralised to the regions to save money and create jobs. 

In many European countries it would not be normal to live in the country and commute to an office job, even it was possible with good enough transport.  The norm is to have a flat in town and a summerhouse in the country, or relatives back in the village where you came from.  Connections with the village (or in Greece with the island) are often still strong, whereas in Britain they were lost already a century again.

Ideas like dropping out to live off the land or in a hippy commune are not practical or even ideals for most people when they often still need more that one job to survive, or earn better money in town without using their education.  Even the idea of telecommuting is unattractive or impossible when the countryside is just a backward place to escape from, apart from the touristic spots which have their own drawbacks for life all year round.

So perhaps this question is better phrased as “where have I lived and why did I move so much?”  Even this question surprises me, since I did not think of myself as moving much compared with others, as I only started to live abroad in my 40s.  I have still lived in “England” for twice as long as I have lived abroad.  On the other hand my children especially the younger, have almost the opposite experience and the question “where do you come from?” is even harder for them.

So where have I lived?

A chronology first:

1947 to 1965 aged 17:  the “family home” a rented two-bedroom (and a box room) house with my parents, two  sisters and maternal grandfather.  In Lancashire village in the flat agricultural plain north of Liverpool.

1965-68 in college hall and rented rooms in London while at the university

1968-74 in various rented flats and finally our own flat in London with N. my first husband; in 1972 bought a “second home” (summer house) in Wales before we bought our first home; bought my parents’ home in Lancashire so they didn’t have to worry in their old age.

1974-76 single again and back in rented accommodation in London, while working in London and (for the last year) studying in Guildford (a 45 min reverse commute from London); made a disastrous purchase of a falling down house, then decided to move to Birmingham without it;

1977-83 Birmingham, first year in rented flat then one year later into own house when fulltime job appeared;

1984-1988 moved with J., second husband to “summer house” in Wales now repaired and almost civilised; did weekly commute to job in Birmingham and then daily commute to job in Cardiff;

1988-91 did weekly commute with all the family from “real home” in Wales to “second home” and jobs in Birmingham.

1991-3 did weekly commute with all the family from “real home” in Wales to “second home” in Birmingham; two monthly “commute” to Murmansk for a week each time to earn money; while trying to sell houses and move to France.

In June-October 1993 sold houses, finally escaped Birmingham and moved to the Lot valley in France to buy farmhouse with land and set up campsite.  Failed to find farmhouse and came back to England.   Stuck pin in warm parts of the map to decide where to go.

Nov 93-Oct 94 (After staying in three different places in two months, paid cash for large house in need of large amount of repair built in 1820 in Somerset with 5 acres. No job no money.  Second husband set up business, despite lack of business skills.

Oct 94-Jan 1997 commuted to Ukraine to earn money;  six weeks out one week in; eventually felt more at home in Kiev in rented apartment; not surprising as had lived longer in Kiev than in Somerset.

Jan 1997-Jan 1998 catapulted back home to Somerset when husband moved out to house in neighbouring village; house at least comfortable now;

Jan 98- Jun 03 we all moved to Lithuania for six months as a trial and stayed more than 5 years; after going back home for holidays for two years decided to sell house in Somerset before roof fell in and moved everything to Lithuania: rented various flats and houses in centre of town

Jun 03 – Jun 05 moved to Greece and rented house in northern suburbs of Athens with one hour commute to job in centre of town. 

Jun 05 want to move to Vienna, but might be Moscow for job, or if Greek Ministry delivers might even stay another year. Even possibility of moving back home(?)

I can see that this makes me a gypsy especially as this conceals moving most years in London, Kiev and Vilnius as well.  It’s not surprising that the house in Wales came to represent stability and security.  Now my home is on my back.