Robin Ashenden

I’m off to South Italy for a few months having recently sold my late mother’s house and, if I can find a nice immigration lawyer, perhaps longer. This means my home is now full of cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, marker pens and panic. It’s a feeling I’m perfectly familiar with, having changed my living space (and country) more times in life than I care to count. The boxes won’t be going with me abroad. Instead, I’ll be renting local accommodation for my worldly goods: a storage space. Such austerity’s strictly for saints or lunatics, and most of us don’t make the grade as either The buildings that house storage spaces are nearly always the same. They’re plonked down in industrial estates and look faintly like car-showrooms without cars or windows.

We have finally found a buyer for my late mother’s Suffolk house, but I’ve fallen into something of a trap. After the money’s divided and the bills are paid, I shall have a lump sum but nowhere near enough to buy a home. I’m 54 next month, not much more than a decade off official retirement age. Having taken a year off to do up the house for sale, I have little salary to show any mortgage-lender that won’t make them call security or simply giggle. Completion date is in February, and I have nowhere concrete (quite literally) to go to. I spent 2022, having grabbed my two cats and fled from a Russian suddenly-at-war, staying at a series of dirt cheap, pet-friendly hotels in the Caucasus and Southern Italy (where I have a daughter).

One small but significant loss to culture that streaming sites like Netflix or Amazon Prime have ushered in is the slow death of the DVD commentary. Usually given by a film’s actors or director (or both), they could be played over the film and were packed with insights on filmmaking, the artists’ take on life or simply acute observations of human psychology. Masterclasses from people like Tarantino, Scorsese, Gary Oldman or Sharon Stone, DVD commentaries were, as Alexander Larman (of this parish) pointed out in a 2020 essay, often fascinating and ‘far cheaper and even more comprehensive than a film school degree.’ Their emergence, in fact, softened the blow of programmes like The South Bank Show and Arena (and what they represented) being sidelined so much in British cultural life.

My mother passed away last year and it fell to me to sort out her house. Returning from four years in Russia and the Caucasus, I moved into her Suffolk home to get it ready for selling. There was a huge amount to do. Alongside organising my mother’s headstone – no small or hasty business – there was an entire house and a life to sort through. This involved going through endless knick-knacks, glasses, crockery, clothes – and 15 or more rubble sacks of papers and old letters. The last was both cathartic and disconcerting. These are written relics of a life that existed before I came along, one that may well have been richer and more hopeful.

A couple of weeks ago, I made the dish I always make at this time of year. It’s a Hungarian gulyás – or more correctly, a pörkölt – a mixture of beef, onions, peppers, tomatoes and paprika, stewed very slowly and served with plenty of sour cream. It’s appropriate this dish should be from Hungary, as no season suits the country better. Come to that, no country suits the season better either. It isn’t just that the Buda Hills look ravishing once the trees start to turn rust and golden or that the city’s bridges look more graceful and melancholic than ever. It isn’t even the mist – not to say fog – that comes off the Danube, suspending buildings like their majestic parliament house or Citadella fortress in ghostly silhouette.

The digital world, I’m realising, is a bit of a racket. Recently most of my iTunes library disappeared from my iPhone, and I just don’t know if I can be bothered to go through all the different hoops, portals, queueing systems and long forgotten passwords to get them back again. I’ve also had the repeated experience of trying to view a film I’ve downloaded on Amazon, only to get that little square in the middle of the screen telling me that the player’s having issues at the moment, and would I, could I try again later? Meanwhile, the CDs and DVDs reproach me from my shelves like an abandoned spouse. ‘We were once your rock,’ they remind me, ‘And you traded us for tech-tinsel, a piece of cyber-skirt. How are you feeling now?

Having a child growing up in Italy means regular flights there and back from Stansted airport. This is unfortunate, as I find nearly any other form of transport preferable. It isn’t so much the flying itself – I lack the imagination to envisage what it really means to hover 38,000 feet above the earth in a fragile aluminium tube – but the malarkey which surrounds it. I am talking about airports: getting to them, getting through them, getting out of them. The tunnel of trauma, the concentrated drudgery, the dismal, dehumanising price you must pay for your place in the sun.

They say that, against all expectations, after the age of about 50 you actually get happier, and that much of this happiness is tied in with the merciful death of your dreams. Once over the hill – and I can vouch for this – you feel unrealistic visions that have guided you your whole life simply exit the stage, albeit with a few well-aimed parting kicks. You don’t lament their passing – young people may want an emotional switchback, but in maturity (well, relative maturity) you’ll happily (well, relatively happily) swap it for solid ground under your feet and a little stability of mind. Hope, thankfully, doesn’t always spring eternal. After your first half-century, it’s more like the stubborn dripping of a wonky tap.

Summer is now officially over and who laments its passing? Some may rhapsodise about the period between June and September, but for many of us, it is a hiatus and trial, the period of the year we most dread. It’s the bill for autumn and winter, the season we’d live better without.   The pavements of cities seem to fizz and reek, your feet balloon in work shoes, the underground turns into a cattle truck I cannot understand why so many people like summer. It unites some truly awful things: nocturnally whining mosquitoes, hot, sleepless nights, oozing sweat, high blood pressure, and above all, bright, unforgiving light, so you feel you’re constantly being observed in some bizarre lab experiment by hostile scientists.

It started as a fairly pleasant train journey. A woman with a half-shaved head and multiple tattoos got on pulling a French bulldog on a lead. We got to talking about dogs, and breeds, and whether Staffordshire Bull Terriers had an unearned bad reputation, and about her cats too, and was she a dog or a cat person? She said she was both, and I agreed it was hard to choose, and soon we were swapping pictures of our cats and discussing different Norfolk villages, and was Swaffham a nice place did she think or not? Both of us, I suspect, enjoyed connecting on the topic of animals with someone so unlike ourselves. In fact, we were chattering away so cordially that we didn’t notice that 15 minutes had gone by and our train – usually punctual - was seriously late leaving the station.