The Queen's Messenger

My daughter has no passport. I am trying not to panic. Fortunately because of our spontaneous trip to the UK at Easter, we noticed it ran out mid May. Another little marker of the swift fleeing of time. In the passport she is about 3 days old, eyes tightly shut, fat, squidgy, with black bottle brush hair. Nothing like she now looks, but then what 3-day-old baby stays looking that way? It never fails to draw a comment from passport control when travelling. She is now suddenly 5 & needs another 5 yr passport.

I spent a frustrating week queuing, when I didn’t need to queue, being fed wrong information by security guards, finding it closed, going back & forth to the embassy, handing over about twice as much as it costs in the UK & finally waving the passport renewal off to Rome. Passports cannot be issued in Albania from the British embassy, they have to go to Rome. From Rome, they go to London in the Diplomatic bag, only to then be brought to Tirana. Why? Who knows?

They say allow 6 weeks. We allowed 7. Actually it’s all we had - 7 weeks till the end of term. We fly next Friday. 7 days & counting, till we need our passports.

So this week I have been hassling the British Embassy. They were all very apologetic, and told me that Rome had screwed up. Rome said that the earthquake had put them behind with passport applications. Actually Rome admitted they were already behind & this had made them more so… Not sure how earthquakes affect passport applications….

The diplomatic bag arrives once a week on a Thursday from London. It arrives on the one flight (in the evening) as airfreight, so it can get off loaded if the plane is overloaded. Having grown up with the diplomatic bag being sufficient to smuggle the crown jewels in 'Contraband', it's rather disappointing to discover it can actually be offloaded as airfreight.....

So it often doesn’t arrive, it gets bumped. Guess what? This week it got bumped off.

This morning, obviously fed up with all my calls, the buck was passed & I got a call from the British consul himself. He was very apologetic, he said people this last week missed flights because their passport hadn’t come through.

It could still be in this week’s Dip Bag (which hasn’t arrived yet. Did I mention that? ) Or it could be in next week’s Dip Bag, which they open on Friday (that’s if it gets on the flight) We fly on Friday. Evening.

However he said he did have a last card tucked up his crisply starched double cuffed sleeve (I’m making that bit up, it’s just how I imagined it)

He said “‘The Queen’s Messenger’, who comes out once a month, is coming on Monday”. This tripped off his tongue without a flicker of self-consciousness.

The Queen’s Messenger?? I had never heard of this. This never came up as an option at school in my Careers interviews. What messages is he bringing from the Queen?

Perhaps:

“You’re all doing really well”

“Do they have corgis in Albania?”

“I love the fish you have in Lake Ohrid” (that last one is true)

Sometimes I just love being British. Who else in the world would have a Queen’s messenger? Where else could the answer to “And what do you do?” be;

“Oh I’m the Queen’s Messenger”.

I googled it and made even more delightful discoveries. There is a whole corps of Queen’s Messengers, 27 in fact. They hand-carry secret & important documents “from which they must not be separated”, sometimes it is even chained to their wrist. This is fantastic stuff. They are often retired army officers, travelling in plain clothes, occasionally wearing a tie with greyhounds on it, symbol of a QM. They travel business class, & their diplomatic baggage has its own passport & cannot be x-rayed, opened, weighed or investigated by anyone. I bet that would be the career of choice for would be terrorists. It seems so eccentric, old fashioned, with a whiff of cold war & espionage about it, in our world of faxes, skype & email, & yet eminently sensible, especially having had many run ins with customs both here & in Sri Lanka. It’s the way forward I think.

So the British consul says he is going to ask ‘London’ to root around in the ‘back room’ (I'm just using all his jargon, don’t ask me for a translation) for the passport & The Queen’s Messenger himself will carry my little girl’s passport (hopefully chained to his wrist in his diplomatic case) and hand deliver this 'important document’ to the British embassy in Tirana.

That’s if they can find it. The consul reassuringly told me this would be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Failing that, we just have to hope there aren’t too many Albanians flying back to Tirana next week with their luggage of remittance goods from the UK. I can imagine though, I always come back overloaded.

I’m betting on the Queen’s Messenger. Come on Blighty don’t let me down. You’ve been doing this since 1485, it must be quite a good system.

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Choices, choices

When we were in the UK we went to one of those big Tesco Superstores. As usual I wanted to stock up on various things you can’t get in Albania &this was the local supermarket for my In-Laws. The children wanted to look at toys, any excuse to go somewhere that sells toys, particularly ones that don’t fall apart in the car on the way home from a pocket money spree.

Every time we come back to the UK more is available & supermarkets are even bigger. This time it was bike stuff, camping equipment, even horse riding kit. In the supermarket…

This Tesco was not so much a Tesco Metro as a Tesco Metropolis. A whole city sprawl of retail under one roof, piled high, sold cheap.

We encountered the now familiar sensation of ‘choice anxiety’ How to choose between so many brands of one thing.

I also discovered a whole world of new products I didn’t know existed. I went to look for porridge oats and found oat with spelt, oats with rye, oats with millet. What about oats with...just oats?
Onto the peanut butter, here I discovered I could buy Pistachio nut butter, Brazil nut butter, Almond nut butter. Peanut butter is obviously ‘so last year’
Feeling a tad overwhelmed I sought solace in cooking ingredients and discovered agave syrup, & wild myrtle leaves in the herbs & spices (no idea what I might use those for).

Part of me loves the wealth of ingredients because I love to cook and try new recipes; part of me is overwhelmed & rendered incapable of making any decisions.

Mostly I am just flabbergasted that so much of ANYTHING is available.

I must admit we go a bit shopping mad when we come back to the UK. We don’t go near a shop in Albania, except to buy food. So there is a.) the novelty factor & b.) the child let loose in a sweet shop factor. There are always things that need replacing too, we get through electrical goods rapidly, because of the power surges & ‘dirty electricity’, our ‘furnished’ flat doesn’t include things like bedside lights, shelves etc, we have no English language library, we buy Christmas & birthday presents at home, next year’s shoes, next size up clothes etc.

I asked an Albanian friend of mine (who’s been sponsored by the Albanian President to do a Phd at Oxford) where to shop for X, Y or Z. She said ‘in England’. She buys everything there. So much so that there’s not much incentive for her to finish her Phd (& so her global shopping) on time….

In Albania, everything is cheap Chinese imported tat and lasts 2 minutes, or is imported from Europe or America & is hideously expensive. My husband took his office’s broken Krups coffee machine to repairers who said it wasn’t a real Krups, it was a copy, & wouldn’t touch it. And it had been bought from the main electrical chain in Albania.

So I have this strange love–hate relationship with supermarkets back in England, & certainly an element of hypocrisy too. Actually I prefer Waitrose, having done some research on this (NOT 1 of the big FOUR) They offer better deals to farmers, have better relationships with suppliers & are much less ruthless in their approach.

Tescos controls a third of the entire UK grocery market (1 in every £7 spent in all British shops is spent in Tescos), that can’t be good. It’s a dominance that increasingly diminishes our choice of where to shop. BUT I have to admit, I do appreciate the fact that I can get so much under one roof. I spend an awful lot of time scouring Tirana for things not only because shops run out & supplies are inconsistent, but because the fruit, veg, meat & fish is much better quality than in the supermarkets. Actually I prefer supermarkets for all the non-food stuff they produce.

Food in the UK it seems, is seen as a cheap, disposable commodity, but it is not cheap. It takes time, effort, skill & expense to produce quality food. Unless all we want is mass-produced, low quality food (like battery hens) Food now makes up a far smaller percentage of household expenditure than ever before even though financially & materially, as Britons we are fair better off than at any other time in our history.

When it comes to clothes, if a shop sells a pair of jeans for only £3, as Tescos once famously did, then surely any intelligent person would reason that either they are doing so at a loss as a one-off to lure in customers, or a garment manufacturer somewhere is being paid far too little.

The same is true of our food, & should be taken seriously, more so as this affects our health, Britain’s rural infrastructure & our natural environment.

Our farmers are skilled people, who can produce fantastic quality British food. As the recession deepens, & how we do business & generate wealth is reviewed, how we feed ourselves in an uncertain future, with access to certain resource becoming scarcer, is a question, which needs addressing. Just one example, 65% of apples (the same 3 or 4 varieties) are imported. Why, when we grow fantastic, and a huge variety of, apples of our own?

I think there needs to be a far stronger regulatory approach to bring the power of supermarkets under control, & to get a fair deal for farmers for their produce & to stop unfair trading practices.

Tescos (but also Sainsburys, Morrisons & Asda- the big 4) has been found to use aggressive tactics, warning suppliers to reduce their prices to them, or face being axed. Whenever supermarkets get involved in price wars, the supplier, the weakest link in the chain, always pays. Farmers are making huge losses.

Particularly in the current economic climate supermarkets are ditching their focus on food quality & green issues & competing in price wars in order to prevent customers moving to lower price supermarkets. But rather than sacrifice their own profit margins, they demand ever lower prices from the suppliers, the farmers. If it carries on, you wonder if they will have any British supply chain left.

The other visit we paid, after our trip to Tescos, was to visit the dairy farm of friends of my In-Laws. They have been farming all their lives, & are incredibly hard working, what you would call ‘salt of the earth’ people. Intelligent, articulate & very involved in the life of their community. They were delighted to show our children round their farm, including the milking shed, at milking time.

The dairy farmer told me that he felt dairy farming was in a worse state now than it has been since the 1930s when the milk marketing board was introduced to help the British dairy industry.

They have, through necessity, been diversifying. He now has a farm shop, a children’s activity barn & a café, which opened that day. He says there is lots of money sloshing around for environmental projects& for diversifying, which is not bad in itself, but no money for farming itself, or any attempt, for example to ensure the Supermarket Code of Practice is being adhered to.
He said,

“I just want to farm my land”

Before correcting himself sardonically “Sorry, the bank’s land.”

When we move back to the UK one day, I’m going to try & shop locally, support independent retailers & farmers’ markets. Get a veg box etc. I’ll probably shop in Waitrose as well, (hope I can afford it) but I think I’m going to boycott Tescos who seem to be the worst of the bunch. I’m in training here now, shopping in a less convenient, more time consuming way, but at least I can still choose to go to a little greengrocer’s. Here in Tirana, people perhaps with small holdings, have a little shop which is their livelihood, I’d far rather support them. And I can see, as more & more supermarkets chains move in, they will lose their livelihoods. I guess it’s my Britishness rising to the fore again, wanting to support the under dog.

Meanwhile I’ll just have to quell my urge to try wild myrtle leaves & agave syrup & hope I can live without them…

Not A Drop To Drink...

1. Our sewage pipes are connected. Hurray! (the landlord did it all himself) I can see them, not necessarily a good thing, but at least I can see they all join up - bright orange pipes snaking round the house & across the courtyard. They're above ground, still to be concreted over. So far they are working, even with no gradient, but it's early days. Today we noticed the next door neighbours digging channels & joining pipes in with our pipes through the wall. What has everyone been doing menawhile with no viable sewage system I ask myself??? Actually I'm trying hard not to think about it.
2. Our courtyard is dry & odour free for the 1st time in 3 mths. Swept & hosed down.
3. Water engineer & construction engineer friends advise we need to flush the system with chlorine. Having a tank system means water is sitting around & the micro-organsims are busy multiplying. My son's science teacher has offered to test our water. Our 'professional' friends in this field seem fascinated by our 'problem' & equally astonished that it could have happened at aall. Still they've also been helpful.
4. Landlord agreed to use chemicals. Yesterday he said he had put some down the well.
5. Bath water last night was a pale blue, rather than brown, (it was often brown even pre-sewage debacle) so am presuming chemical story was true & action was taken. Who knows what my children were bathing in. They preferred the colour though.
6. Have added yet another 'string of (partial) knowledge' to my bow. Been reading up on chlorination (gas, sodium hypochlorite & solid calcium hypochlorite) disinfection options. All seem very corrosive, volatile or dangerous, & require pumps, gas chlorinators & diffusers, precise quantities & chlorine has to meet certain standards. Landlord's solution of chucking chlorine in well probably as good as any. Or at least better than nothing..
7. Have been washing up in weak bleach solution, boiling water & showering with mouth firmly closed. I have discovered some bugs take 20 mins of boiling to cop it.(Didn't realise it would be so useful knowing a water engineer) Most it's only a minute though.
8.Husband thinks I am utterly neurotic and has been doing his teeth in the tap water since Wed (sewage water came through pipes on Tues) Verdict "I'm fine. Any microbes will be a million millionth part of the water in the pipes."
9. Discovered our children also never had their Hep A booster, despite several drs in diff countries checking our vaccination sheets & not telling us we needed another a yr after 1st one. Also we are all out of date for typhoid. Not only are typhoid vaccines not available here but a nurse friend who works at the international clinic here said companies who shipped vaccines to them at the clinic used mini lunch box ice packs & the vaccines arrive with a soggy defrosted ice pack round them. She said you couldn't vouch for their viability under those conditions.
So I'm going to carry on being careful(& neurotic.
10. Also got sink leak fixed (my Albanian teacher's husband) & car indicators mended (yet again) by another local contact. AND landlord fixed gate (been broken a month)

That's a pretty good 'To Do' list achieved this week. In fact, I don't think the landlord has achieved this much in a year and a half of us being here. Perhaps Sabotage & Disaster Creation is the way forward to get our landlord to act. Though I have to admit sewage coming out of the taps was a high price to pay for this discovery.

Sewage Works (but nothing else does)

Today, I feel like I’m living in some kind of Mad Max, WallE, toxic dystopia.

First of all, our next-door neighbour has taken to burning his plastic rubbish. We had this in Sri Lanka. Welcome to the developing world. People burn their rubbish. What else can they do with it. Goodness knows how many dioxins I’ve inhaled over the past three and a half years.

Our landlord who lives below us, also recently decided he wanted a wood burner in his kitchen. His kitchen doesn’t have a chimney. No matter. Drill a hole in the wall, stick a pipe through & ‘it’s not my problem anymore’. It will just waft up to the tenants' balcony, & seep in through the children’s window.

But this doesn’t bother us so much, partly because when it’s cold, we’re not sitting outside on the balcony when their fire is on, but mostly because it pales into insignificance compared to other issues. We seem to approach things in this way all the time now.

This morning I was playing tennis with an Albanian friend who lives up in the hills overlooking the lake & she said,
“Have you noticed something funny about the lake?” I hadn’t.
It had a white, oily, toxic-looking substance glinting chemically in the sunlight, all round the edge & in patches in the middle too. She thinks maybe it was a chemical put in to control mosquitoes. (One no doubt banned in the States 20 yrs ago. That’s what was used in Sri Lanka)

Then this morning we turned the taps on brown water came out reeking of sewage. I had, in my early morning stupor stuck my hands under it before realising. I felt like Lady Macbeth trying to get the stench out of my hands.

All afternoon, in a bizarre reversal, I’ve been yelling at my children after going to the loo. “Did you remember NOT to wash your hands?”

So no shower after tennis, a day’s washing up piled up, a laundry bag full of washing
& my hair needs a wash. Oh & our typhoid vaccinations are out of date. What very good timing. And it’s not available in Albania. We would have to get it couriered in.

For the past 4 months our rd has become a lake in the rain, & then sewage water started seeping across the courtyard. The builders, building a new apartment block nearby, had, evidently, broken through the sewage pipe. It has taken our landlord 3 mths to fix it. A friend here, who is a construction engineer, said that either the sewage has backed up into the pipes or (as we have a well for our water) the well has been contaminated. (this happened in Sri Lanka during the Tsunami. The wells got contaminated with sea water & were rendered unuseable. So not sure how ours will recover)….
He couldn't understand how the cold water, which should be a totally separate system to the drains/sewer, could have been contaminated by sewage. Having lived here for a yr and a half now, I have to say I am not in the least surprised. Lack of know-how amongst workmen & the way things are built or mended here is quite unbelievable.

As an aside here to give you an idea, once at my son’s school, the Headmaster looked out of the front window to see one of their gas canisters on fire (used for heating. They should have had some valve thing on them to stop flames going back down into the gas bottle, but….it didn’t have this.) Out the back, it was also discovered that day, that someone had tapped into a substation & looped their cable along the back wire mesh perimeter fence which had somehow got exposed & made the fence 'live’. So the children couldn’t assemble on the front forecourt because of imminent danger of an explosion, nor on the back soccer pitch because of the live fence. They had to be huddled on the floor inside at the back of the building in case the gas canister exploded & blew out the windows. The Head walked out with a fire extinguisher thinking, ’This may be the last thing I ever do.’
Fortunately, he lived to tell the tale(& revise his job description). The firemen arrived as he was tackling the flames…. and stood around smoking. I kid you not!

Another example is a trusted Albanian friend of a friend fixed our starter motor (which a mechanic had caused to ‘blow up’) & discovered all sort s botched wiring, loose wires , short circuiting in our steering column. He told my friend that he hadn’t liked to tell me ‘because I was a woman’ but that there could easily have been a spark, which would have caused a fire or bad shock to me (some of these wires were poking out down by my feet near th accelerator)

You just get resigned to things being shoddy, not done properly or downright dangerous. But it still makes you very tired.

Back to the proverbial poo hitting the fan. The sewage may have seeped down into the well. He said it would need pumping out & all the tanks & pipes cleaned with an anti-bacterial chlorinated ‘flush’. I can NEVER see our landlord doing that. It would be very expensive. He has put a sewage pipe in, dug a trench about 6 inches deep so the pipe is not buried, and then concreted over it. He didn’t warn us of this, so the day he did it, I couldn’t get my car out for 24 hours. My husband said I should have just driven over it to ‘prove a point’. Well, leaving footprints in freshly lain concrete is one thing but 12 inch wide 4 WD tyre tracks??

Today our landlord is at least trying to do something about this ‘emergency’ as I see it. But his pipes don’t slope down hill at all, (1 in 40 gradient on the pipes required ‘normally’) and he has left no drain outside in the rd, just blocked it in, so rainwater has nowhere to drain to. I think the sewage will keep backing up.
At least we’re on the 3rd floor so it will be the landlord’s problem before ours, and so a better chance of it being sorted. I am so keen to pass on this helpful information, but I know better than to do so. When I tried to explain to both him & his plumber what the problem with our sink was & why he hadn’t fixed it, his response was, “your problem is you think too much.”

I long sometimes with every fibre of my being for a safe, secure, predictable environment. Sometimes I just want to go home. I keep telling myself;
‘This is what we signed up for, if we want to help the poor & work in development then we should expect this’. But it’s hard to make the words out through my gritted teeth sometimes. Other people, most people in the world, have to put up with this. I know.

The third world doesn’t have a reliable electricity supply, safe water to drink, rubbish collected, dangerous substances safely disposed of, law abiding traffic with safe, well maintained cars, access to good health care, things ‘done by the rules’. And it sucks, it really does.

I know, I know I’m a privileged westerner & I used to take all these things for granted ‘back home’. Not anymore. I know (Ernest before you post another comment) that I’m a wimp & I should just stop whinging. I just didn’t realise how hard I’d find it. Several Albanian friends, & I agree, say that the problem is I am not used to this. I am used to things working, and so it’s more frustrating. I also know how things can be in a developed nation. And boy do I miss them. So I have to adjust downwards. It’s a lot easier to adjust to having clean water, on tap, a regular power supply, a centrally heated home, well-stocked shops, a garden, & a fully functioning sewage system, which stays in its pipes. Now those changes I could accommodate. Oh so easily.

Questions, questions.

I have been tagged by Nappy Valley Girl & Potty Mummy. It’s nice to be tagged, but personally I don’t think they make very interesting reading. Also most of the 8 people I am supposed to tag next, have already been tagged, & I don’t feel comfortable tagging blogs I hardly know. So my compromise is I’m doing the tag but not passing it on. Hope this is ok folks.

So below are the 20 questions:

What are your current obsessions?
Finding extra curricular things for my children to do after school here.

Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often?
My jeans. Having NOT worn jeans for 2 whole yrs in Sri Lanka, WAY too hot, I haven’t yet got over the novelty of being able to wear them again.

What's for dinner?
What ever I decide to make with the left over roast chicken, followed by Victoria sponge with marscapone & orange curd filling, also left over, from tea with friends yesterday.

Last thing you bought?
It can only be food. Shops are abysmal here for anything. It was wonderful juicy Greek oranges from my local shop.

What are you listening to?
100s of frogs croaking in the lake next door to us. They croak from now till September. But are particularly vociferous at the mo. It’s Spring you know…..

If you were a god/goddess who would you be?

Domestic Goddess. Not because I’m particularly domesticated but because I love baking.

Favourite kids' film?
Toy Story 2

Favourite holiday spots?
Seychelles, Peru, Argentina, Malawi. South Africa. Oh I can’t decide!

In UK; North Devon, Pembrokeshire & The Lakes.

What are you reading right now?
Just finished White Tiger. About to start whatever I can scrounge off people. English language novels hard to come by here. Best book I've read recently was "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson.

Favourite author. Thomas Hardy & George Elliot when younger. Modern author Rose Tremain.

Four words to describe yourself?
Reliable, loyal, chatty, energetic

Guilty pleasure?
Massages, though I don’t get to feel guilty that often.

Who or what can make you laugh until you're weak?
A friend who’s Head of Sixth Form at a school in London. The Prince George Blackadders are pretty funny too.

First Spring thing to do?
Walking through a bluebell wood. Not the 1^st flowers but for me the definitive sign of English spring.

Planning to travel to next?
South Africa

Best thing you ate and drank recently?
In Albania, it has to be coffee. Definitely not wine. Best meal was at a restaurant called Vinum in Tirana. We went there 2 mths ago J

Favourite ever film?
Shawshank Redemption

Care to share some wisdom?
Kindness is severely underrated. And it’s the little things in life that often make a difference

What new blogs are you reading?
I found a completely different one called Threads of Loveliness via Millennium Housewife. It’s a craft site. I just love the pictures! And in partic the little mug warmers she made. Bit pointless, but looked very sweet.

Biggest regret. Not being able to have more children.

Almost American has also tagged me, with a different meme, so I’m doing it all in one go.

Six things that make me happy, unimportant things . . . this is quite difficult. It’s easier to think of the important things, which make me happy.

So here we are, trivial things which make me happy:

Friends replying to emails

Blue-sky sunny days

Hitting a good shot in tennis

People remembering my birthday

Comments on my blog

A really good cup of coffee/glass of wine/G&T

That's it. I think I prefer the idea Iota came up with of suggesting blog posts & getting people to vote on which one she should write about. Perhaps I'll do that... Oh dear need to resurrect Technoblonde again.

Home Thoughts From Abroad

We escaped to England for Easter. The whole family. We had got some cheap flights, husband was in desperate need of a break & we all needed a breather from the country, the culture etc. We also wanted to surprise my father-in-law who had had a hip operation & hadn’t been able to come out & visit at Christmas. It worked brilliantly & wasn’t too much of a shock to the old ticker.

I had been to a talk a month ago about ‘Acculturisation’ which talked about one’s tolerance levels plummeting after 2-3 months, when living in a stressful, alien culture. Particularly a developing or very different country. He said you find yourself experiencing childish emotions & getting absurdly angry about little inconsequential things. This he said was perfectly normal & happens EVERY 2-3 months. He reckoned it lasted for 2 yrs in a new culture. Friends here say it never stops completely. Phew, so I’m normal. It’s not that I can’t cope. Or that I’m peri-menopausal. At least I have an excuse now…

In the midst of gloomy, old, credit-crunch Britain, it was a pleasure to see that spring wasn’t affected by recession. The green shoots, not of economic growth, but of nature’s round, were oddly reassuring to see, and just the tonic we needed.

Woods were awash with bluebells, bobbing in the lime green light, so redolent of spring, also, white wood anenomes, cheery yellow celandines & even a sprinkling of pink campion. Wild cherries were in blossom & the candles on some of the horse chestnuts were in full flower.

Hedgerows were bursting with stitchwort, May & frothy blackthorn. On one walk we came upon a field of cowslips, their presence jauntily contradicting their rarity.
On another visit friends had them in their garden & allowed our daughter to pick bunchfuls of them (which she probably would have done anyway living in Albania, where there are no rules about wild flowers or conservation. One wit observed that the blue plastic bottle is the national flower of Albania…)

But let’s not spoil the picture. The fields obligingly had lambs in them, and on the Isle of Wight we hid in a hide & were rewarded by a red squirrel coming & nibbling nuts on the hide windowsill inches from us. He stayed for 10 minutes & then kept popping back for more.

The birdsong too was startling, so loud. Again in Albania you don’t hear much birdsong. Most of the birds have been shot & those still alive are living dangerously. People shoot them, not sure if this is for sport, food or just ‘for fun’. My husband once biked past an old boy with a rifle, on the dam near where we live. He was aiming at a sparrow. Hubby deliberately jogged his arm to spoil his aim. One sparrow lived to see another day, or maybe another half hour…. there are lots of old boys around with rifles here. My husband took off on his bike very quickly….

I have to admit I agree with Boris Johnson who said that nowhere in the world is as beautiful as England in the spring, though he hardly has original copyright on such sentiments. Two poems, one by Hopkins’ “Spring” “Nothing is so beautiful as spring” & Robert Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad “Oh to be in England now that April’s there” have come into their own for me since living abroad. You miss it, you appreciate what for years you have taken for granted & you realise just how lovely it is, even without the rose-tinted specs, it looks pretty special.

For the children England is about grandparents, cousins, & re-establishing routines & rituals, revisiting familiar places; the chance to walk a favourite dog for our son, trips to the beach near my In-Laws’ home, seeing how many stones from the beach one grandfather has polished (lots….), checking the special child’s bunk under the eaves is exactly how they left it, visiting the brook and cheating at pooh sticks.

For us adults it was also a bitter-sweet time. I went to church on Easter Sunday & saw a friend there who has a brain tumour, discovered 2 months ago; “the worst possible sort” the consultant said. She has 2 children, & is so brave, so amazing.

“I’m holding hope in one hand & reality in the other” she observed. In this modern age we are walking through the experience with her as she keeps us up-to-date on Facebook, with her treatment, with humour, candidness & pictures.

She was the first person I saw when I walked in. I went over to give her a hug and say hello. Her legs were up on the chair in front of her. I asked what the matter was. She dissolved into tears explaining that the steroids she was on were now affecting her legs badly. The side effects of pain, sleeplessness & discomfort, as well as the indignity of suffering radiation sunburn & hair loss makes it so hard on a daily basis, never mind the ordeal of having one’s hope for some sort of future lying in shards at one’s feet.

Yet she does have hope. She has a vibrant, real faith, forged in the fire of this ultimate test. And she has a peace & strength, which is beyond earthly understanding.

Then there was a visit to some friends, actually just the husband, who (it turns out) had been left by his wife 6 months ago. We had thought their emails very infrequent & sketchy always hinting at bad times but no detail. Turns out they were still sharing the same email so couldn’t say anything. They are friends we have known for 20 years. Our first uni friends to marry.

They have been through so much; their oldest has been bullied much of his school life (& had it ignored by the school), their 2nd son has had various mystery illnesses which have left him at times in a wheelchair, their 3rd boy has very severe asthma & endless ENT problems, requiring operations, consultations, medication etc. Their 5th child, a little girl was sexually assaulted by a boy in her class, aged 4. The headmistress wouldn’t do anything about it, because she admitted she was afraid of the father.

Their 4th child, a boy, Daniel, died ‘in utero’ at 26 wks. The husband had a nervous breakdown around the same time. He was the Number 2 in the foreign office in a country which suffered a high profile terrorist bombing. The stress & tension of living & working in that situation proved too much, coupled with his child dying.

He contracted ME & has not now worked for about 4 years. He is still trying to get a settlement from the Foreign Office. He was one of those typical candidates for ME, highly driven, 1st class honours, extremely intelligent, very hard working etc. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever work again.

We think his wife just couldn’t cope any more. You can understand her world-weariness & sense of hopelessness that anything would change. She asked him to leave. Somehow she felt life would be better without him. He will be utterly ruined by the divorce. He can’t work, a court will hardly find much in his favour in the way of sharing childcare when he has ME, & he probably won’t be able to afford to live near them either.

This brings the tally to 5 couples we know who have now divorced. Of the previous 4 if I had to name 4 of our friends that would be most likely to divorce it would have been them, but these latest friends…. It was inconceivable, unbelievable, and, it seems, irreconcilable.

At times like this you wish you weren’t so far removed & unable to help.

But unfortunately we had to return to Albania.

The 1st indication of being back comes before you are even off they plane. The mild anarchy, that is Albania’s attitude to rules of any kind, is represented in microcosm as the plane lands & taxies to its stand. As soon as you have touched down, most of the cabin is on its feet removing bags from lockers even as the plane is hurtling across the tarmac & despite repeated requests from air-stewards to sit down. On one occasion the pilot even came on the sound system to tell people to sit down.

As always seems to happen after a holiday of any kind, & always happens to us on re-entry to our adopted country, in the 6 days since being back, we’ve had 2 ½ days of power cuts, 4 days with no internet (our landlord neglected to pay the bill for 6 mths, even though we’ve been paying him for it), the broken sewer outside our gate is only half built (after 2 months) but at least the smell has gone (though I’m not sure where…) Our car has broken down yet again. Our ‘new’ mechanic, we thought we’d finally found a good one, short circuited our indicator & horn in order to fix them. In so doing it has caused the starter motor & lots of fuses to blow. Oh for a reliable, honest garage….

And I spent an hour queuing in the wrong queue for a passport renewal, because that was where I was told to queue, only to discover the security guard, when I got to the front of the queue didn’t know what he was talking about & put me in the wrong queue.

The effect of the ‘Easter English tonic’ wears off all too quickly when coming back into such circumstances. There are times when I really intensely dislike this place. However, I guess it’s spring here too, the park is full of buttercups, a small owl has taken to visiting our roof terrace, & house martins are nesting under our roof. And having seen the sorrows of people dear to us back in England, how can I not be grateful for all I do have?

My Cinderella Moment.

Sometimes I wonder where I fit in. In the blogging world there are Mummy Blogs, Ex-pat blogs, Travel blogs. Which am I, I wonder? Should I be targeting a certain readership? I am all these, but not one exclusively.

Of course we all have multiple roles & identities: e.g wife/mother/career woman/daughter/sister.

These identities are true & defined. I am all these things, they fit. I like to think I slip seamlessly between roles, but in this new blogging world I slip through the cracks of these different identities & in my new ‘living abroad world’ I sometimes feel like Harry Potter on Platform 9 3/4, slipping through into another world & back again, seemingly effortlessly, yet left wondering where I belong. Trailing spouse/NGO wife/Third Culture Kid Mother.... these roles are more blurred, more slippery & equally angst inducing.

I ‘joined’ the blogging world to write about my experiences, observations & frustrations of being wrenched up from the safe herbaceous border of home, & family, & thrust, raw roots still oozing, into a parched desert, not a friendly flower in sight, trying not to think of the rich pastures of friendships left behind.

And in my overseas world. I am an ex-pat in as much as I live abroad. But that's about as far as it goes; I'm not married to an Albanian so not permanently here, not here longterm like most of the missionary community. I am not part of the Embassy/ex-pat crowd, though I suppose I should be grateful that I could choose to fill my time with Tuesday morning coffee, Wednesday evening dining club, Thursday’s lunch group, Friday Afternoon tea, Monday art gallery visits. There are also daytrips but I can’t do those with a child still not at school full time. Most of these women are older with no children or grown-up children. And what do you talk about when most of your week is filled with little more than sampling different beverages……?

Then I am an NGO wife, but there are only 5 or so NGOs here (more to do with corruption problems than lack of need here I imagine) so there isn’t an NGO crowd as such to ‘run with’.

Often, anyway, this crowd is young, very hard working and full on party-ers. I can understand this now. When dealing with so much hardship, tragedy & poverty it needs an escape valve. But doesn’t really work for a 40-something stay at home mother of two….

Then there is the missionary crowd. These wives/mothers mostly work too so aren’t around during the day; they are mostly (not exclusively) American conservative fundamentalists, who I struggle to relate to, despite my own faith. Then there is the fact that whilst my husband is putting in 12hr days & gets 20 days leave a year, these missionaries have about 12 wks a yr & seem to have incredibly flexible schedules. Hence we do not overlap much.

I am learning Albanian, but once I have asked the shop assistant for 400 grams of mince, asked after your health, explained that, yes my children are at school, & commented on the weather, then I grind to a small talk stop. So much for Albanian friendships.

This weekend was another reminder of the worlds I inhabit. I spent one afternoon at the hand made card project I help with, which provides a job/income for ladies who literally dig for iron to sell to earn money. Mangava is a micro enterprise project to help these women. Then I went to the International Women’s Group meeting in the evening. Everyone dresses up to the nines for this monthly meeting. I always feel a bit slack turning up in my jeans. We watched a film by an Albanian about the many problems in Albania today. I was very glad to find, after Albania’s own ‘cultural revolution’, that art & free expression are thriving (though the latter does not thrive in the media it has to be said).
The chairwoman’s response was “Well, that was quite a heavy film. Thank you” And it certainly was unusual for this group.

Then, on Saturday, in rather abashed, full ex-pat mode, we went to the first ever British Embassy Spring Ball in Tirana, raising money for the Sue Ryder Foundation. We were going with a group of friends, amongst whom were 4 guys who had completed a charity bike ride from North to South Albania. So everyone was in the mood for celebrating. My husband ran their training mountain bike trips in the hills behind our house every Sunday. But of course he didn’t have enough leave to just ‘take off’ across Albania on a bike for 9 days.

So, on Saturday afternoon I went with two friends to get my hair done. I have only ever done this twice before. Once for my wedding, once as a bridesmaid. Felt quite decadent & an indulgence, but for $20 an affordable one. (My friends' 'hairdos' only cost $14. was my lack of Albanian the reason, did I seem 'more of a foreigner than my 2 foreign friends' thus meriting a higher price??)
This is one of the things that is weird about living abroad (in a developing country) You can afford to get your hair done just for going out to a party, you can have ‘help’, even gardeners & drivers if you really want, live-in housekeepers etc. I know a lady her who has her hair & make-up done every day at a salon (No, she doesn’t have children) You can live the sort of life that in Britain only the rich live. But it is doubly uncomfortable because you are living in a country, no doubt, where there is a lot of poverty. And I just don’t want to be living that sort of life.

Anyway it was great fun to peep into this embassy world, amazing to be a voyeur at an auction where ex-pats (& rich Albanians) were paying 400 euro for a bottle of cognac, 1400 euros for a night in a London hotel etc. When you are not bothered about fitting into a particular world, then it is simply fun & amusing. The rub comes when you want to fit in somewhere & there doesn’t seem to be anywhere you fit.

On Sunday, my husband was feeling very rough (more from age, overwork & the roughness of Albanian wine than over indulgence I think), so after lunch he had a sleep. I do not begrudge him this in the slightest. He works very hard, and I'd had my girly afternoon on the Saturday at the hairdresser.

While he slept:
1. I washed up the children ‘s supper from the night before, & the lunch stuff.
2. I made the supper.
3. I wrapped a birthday present for my 8 y-o to take to a party the next day.
4. Found a spare birthday card for him to write.
5. I made an Easter project with 8 yr old involving plaster of Paris. (He won 1st prize!)
6. I supervised my son defrosting the freezer (chipping ice away with v sharp knife)
7. Loaded & unloaded the washing machine twice.
8. Iced fairy cakes with my 2 children.
9. Washed up cooking stuff.
10. Hung the washing out.
11. Tidied the kitchen.
12. Made afternoon tea for everyone.
13. Checked my email (well I am an ex-pat…).

I felt like Cinderella. Ball, posh frock, chic hairdo one day, washing dishes & mopping the floor the next.

My husband woke, looked around at the serene scene & said “oh good, tea!” He didn’t seem to notice the fairy Godmother had visited in his absence.

And do you know I felt strangely content. I am the sum of my parts. I enjoyed being Cinderella & going to the ball. I enjoy having different worlds to observe & participate in (& write about). I am grateful for the privilege of being a wife & mother, for all its mop & bucket moments. Perhaps I should stop looking for one place to fit into. After all, we women are supposed to be complex creatures aren't we?