Robin Ashenden

When, after three years of living in Eastern Europe, I came back to the UK, I found myself acutely nostalgic for the post-communist world. Life over there had a charm and directness that London seemed to lack. Luckily, I discovered that even in the capital you can find the best of Eastern Europe all around you – if you know where to look. A lovely place to walk into on a winter afternoon, or to visit at Orthodox Easter, as people teem outside and priests scatter holy water about I was aware of course, even in my teens, of Polish London. There was the restaurant Daquise in South Kensington which, before its 2012 refit, was one of those places you couldn’t imagine the area without.

Who honestly has the time or inclination to finish long novels these days? I yearn for a serene period when I can read The Red and the Black or The Raj Quartet each night before bedtime, but I seem to be imagining someone else’s life. When new content, cool and engaging, is flooded onto YouTube daily, when you have subscriptions to four different websites, and the telephone regularly pings (or rather, zhuzzes) with WhatsApp messages, entering the world of Julian Sorel or the British in India is a struggle. I used to read two or three books a week, very cheerfully, but since around 2016 we’ve lived in a world so swirling and volatile that literature has at times seemed like its shadow.

Shropshire is a strange county, little known by those beyond its border, and perhaps that’s part of its appeal. It not only has no coastline, but no city officially either. Phone cover is shaky and transport links sparse (at some times in the day, only one bus every two hours will leave my market town, and they cease abruptly around 6 p.m.). But what it does have are medieval towns, lush green landscapes, and enormous numbers of farm animals – cows, sheep, and horses (for someone coming, as I do, from relatively arable East Anglia, this has a certain H.E. Bates charm to it). The town I’ve moved to, built on a canal, has a livestock auction house on the outskirts, the lowing of cows-for-sale emanating through the carpark outside.

Two photos from the youth of Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance have recently surfaced and are filling his opponents with glee. In one of them, he’s dressed as a woman, with shoulder-length golden hair, a look of yet-to-be-plucked wistfulness, and three days of teenage stubble. The other shows him loitering in a men’s bathroom, a faint aura of The Munsters about him, as three smiling young women (fellow members of his Ohio school’s student government) pretend to relieve themselves standing up into a row of urinals.

To finish or not to finish? The dilemma of whether to give up on books we aren’t enjoying or plough on to the end lasts a lifetime, but as we grow older it gets easier. We not only have less time, but also the increased confidence to decide that if a great novel isn’t engaging us, it’s possibly the book’s fault. What does it really matter if Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain defeats us, or Finnegan’s Wake sends us to sleep? We’ve survived much worse than that.  But in youth, such things torment you, and the more highly regarded the novel, the greater your shame in abandoning it.

When you live abroad for long periods of time, you get accustomed to certain foods which, returning home, you can’t find anywhere, and the sense of a habit unwillingly broken is acute. If the foreign country is Thailand or Italy, you stand a good chance of finding dishes approximate to those you’ve left behind in a local restaurant. But if your working life has been spent in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and you live well outside London, you must learn to make them for yourself or do without. In the warm hotel restaurant, after freshly brewed black coffee, I was given a glass of heated honey vodka The first foreign country I lived in was Estonia.

When I was a child I had a dream, as most kids do, of entering a toyshop and being told I could carry away with me as much as would fit in a large shopping trolley. In would go every kind of Action Man, every game of Buckaroo or Operation, and enough Star Wars figurines to people a small planet. There would be no discriminating and no sense of moderation – just a great tottering tower of swag. This is to say nothing of the house-arrest constant deliveries impose on you Later though, as I got into my thirties, I took a more spartan approach. I wished for a slimmed down, uncluttered life in which everything counted. Without necessarily knowing it, I agreed with William Morris’s adage: ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.