January. Traditionally the most boring month of the year.
Here, the days are short, dark and cold and Bucharest is coated in ice and slush. On the weekends, The History Boy and I have been incredibly anti-social – staying in bed 'til late, drinking tea whilst listening to the radio and watching every episode of 'Gavin and Stacey' from the box set that he bought me for Christmas. We have discovered an old-fashioned cinema across the road and have spent a few evenings there, watching the latest film to have made it to the Romanian screen. I love the quaintness of the place, the fact that the cinema still has an old-fashioned facade, one of those white ones where the letters are slotted in, and that the beige carpet is stained with black marks made from dried up, Ceaucescu-era chewing gum. The two old ladies who run the enterprise are suitably brusque and impatient, and snap at me as they invariably fail to understand my poor, badly accented Romanian. It's almost like stepping back to the 1970s.
After the high energy sparkle of Christmas has faded away, January can be a grim month. But in a strange kind of way, I like it. I must admit, the frantic materialism of the festive season did grate on me on my arrival back to the UK, and it was the first Christmas that I didn't put on a little sparkly number and heels and go out in my home town on Christmas Eve, preferring instead to lie by the fire and chat with my Nana and Grandad. I was exhausted. I was kind of glad when the forced gaiety of Christmas and New Year was over, and I began to feel a deep homesickness for Romania. And for The History Boy.
After a manic weekend with F in London, I arrived back to Bucharest to chaos at the luggage carousel, an argument (in Romanian) with a couple of thieving taxi drivers who wanted to charge me five times the fare to get back from the airport, and part of my flat reduced to rubble where my landlord had decided to rip the bathroom out. Welcome to Romania. Happy New Year.
At least January is an honest month. It's difficult, and it wears it's unpleasantness openly. Here in Bucharest, where the grey concrete buildings loom over the wide boulevards and flakes of snow whirl down from the sky, it is particularly bleak. The red tail lights of the traffic on the road create a multi-coloured picture against the darkness, as if blurrily painted in watercolour. Gypsy flower sellers dressed in brightly coloured skirts under their winter coats shout out their wares and stray dogs trot across the icy crossings, after waiting patiently at the side of the road with the pedestrians. Sometimes, walking home from the Metro, I pause, and realise, in a cold disjointed moment of clarity, that I am living the crazy, colourful, slightly surreal life that I wanted when, back in Oxfordshire, I craved travel and freedom and adventure.
But I don't pause for too long. Because I know that The History Boy is at home, waiting for me. He makes Bucharest the place that I want to be.
Maybe that's why I'm enjoying January this year – having him around makes every the most mundane activity much more enjoyable. Being content with him also means that I'm becoming less impatient. This January, I know that spring is on its way. I am confident of longer days and warmth and sunshine, where before, I could see only winter darkness ahead.
Or maybe I'm just getting old.
