Back in the Cooler

Ok, now here's an interesting question; can I strictly speaking get away with continuing a blog called thefullmontenegro when I'm not actually in Montenegro any more?

I reckon I can, if only because for once - and it might seem difficult to believe - things are continuing to happen on our project even if we're no longer there to supervise. Plus, we've had a pretty eventful last month or so. And lastly, it's always nice to get a little bit of "what-happened-next" text at the end of a film based on a true story.

Returning back to the life we had intended to leave behind has left us hopelessly out of touch. Who knew that shiny leggings were back in fashion along with 80s comb-overs? What’s happened to New Labour? Can I really drive my scooter in bus lanes now? What on earth is all the fuss about Susan Boyle? And do I really have go back to office work?? We’ve also missed out on a lot of things we’d gotten used to taking for granted. People! Electricity that works! TV! Drizzle!

Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my telly?

Even in the midst of a global depression, London life doesn’t seem to have changed very much. It’s still the same sort of thing we were trying to get away from and every bit as consumer orientated as ever. Financial Crisis? What financial crisis? Fifteen years ago, Montenegrins were queuing around the block just to be able to buy flour as the old dinar got struck by hyper-inflation and the economy properly collapsed - and this was just after the end of the bloodiest conflict Europe had seen since WW2. That’s a financial crisis. Granted, Woolies may have gone bust and lots of people may have lost their jobs recently, but it in no way compares to the kind of economic disaster that saw the German people burning banknotes in the early 30s or modern day Zimbabweans dealing with an inflation rate of 230 million percent. In fact, the only visible differences in UK’s capital city have been people keeping the same address for more than two years as property prices return to normal levels and an increase in supermarket profits as the middle classes react to recession by staying in every other Saturday night and panic-buying breadmakers. Some – gasp! - have even decided to start growing their own fruit and veg, something that Montenegrins have been doing as a matter of course for decades. Whatever the media says, it just isn’t as bad as has been painted. Prosperity is all relative. While your average Virpazar resident tootles around in a rusty Yugo or a 20 year old VW Golf, yesterday I counted Porsches on my commute into work. In a 40 minute journey, I passed thirty four of them. Very nearly one a minute. Perhaps all the gloomy city analysts might like to take a statistic like that into account before they use words like “full-blown recession” to describe the state of Britain’s economy...

Is Britain in the grip of a financial crisis? Hint - if you're still seeing plenty of these on the roads, the answer is no

Anyway, those of you not distracted by my little “get-a-grip” rant will have already clocked the true news concealed within that last paragraph. Commuting? Work?

Yep, you read that last bit right. I’m commuting again – which means that, yes, I have managed to find myself a job, even in these supposedly difficult times. After a long drive back that saw us leave our Renault Espace on Vis in favour of coaxing our newly repaired Honda back to the UK we arrived back on the Thursday, I had an interview on the Friday morning, got hired 90 minutes later and courtesy of a very fluky upgrade was sitting next to Carolina Kluft (the Olympic and World Heptathlete champion) in Club Class on my way to New York the following Wednesday for the annual American Bookfair. My life has become utterly surreal.

"You'll never believe this, but I flew to New York and ended up sitting alongside Ben Heywood..."

There I was, thinking I’d have to sign on or work in a pub for a few months. Instead, I spent most of my first couple of weeks out of Monte in the US! My crowing didn’t last long, however. Not to be outdone, Emma also segued smoothly back into city life, proudly trumping me by scoring a job without even having to go through an interview at all. Now there’s only two conclusions I can draw from this; either we are somehow supremely employable and hugely well respected despite torpedoing our stagnant careers a year ago, or getting a job’s still not that hard if you’re reasonably qualified, give a good interview and aren’t massively bothered about earning a high salary.

So, we may well have fallen on our feet, but the one thing we don’t quite have yet is a place of our own. With our London flat let out long-term, we’ve had to get creative, Emma wangling us a succession of flat/house/cat sitting gigs that might just take us all the way up to the end of August before we have to find somewhere to rent full-time. Our friends have of course rallied round us and declared that they’re delighted to have us back, but I can’t help feeling a little like Steve McQueen. (in that we made a brave bid for freedom from the UK rat race, got a long way towards escaping for good but ultimately couldn’t quite jump that barbed wire fence). Instead, we’ve had to settle for returning home for another spell in the cooler, reunited with our friends/fellow prisoners, but still ruefully wondering what it might have been like to see them all again having made it over the border. A brave but heroic failure is how some might choose to see it, and they’d be half right. I console myself with the thought that at the end of The Great Escape you just know that it won’t be the last time Virgil Hilts tries to break out of the POW camp. He just has to spend a little more time bouncing baseballs against the wall first...

The happy news is that at least we will not want for motivation. Zlatko Vujotic’s team have been as good as their word – on 5th June they got in touch to say that the plastering, rendering and stonework on our house was all complete. Two days later they sent pictures to prove it.

That, Bolimir, is how the real pros roll.

Now we just have to pool our salaries over the next few months so we can get Zlatko’s team started on phase 2 in September (or thereabouts): cladding the terrace, adding balcony and terrace barriers and coming up with some solutions for garden steps, perimeter walls and that troublesome, continually postponed septic tank. Once that little lot’s been sorted, we’ve got the minor matters of finishing the second phase electrics and plumbing, a lot of tiling and painting...the list remains a lengthy one! Fortunately, we do at least know now that we’ll have the wherewithal to do it – at least until we suffer the next inevitable setback.

For now, though, we’re relaxed, relieved and sitting pretty. Much like the Sir William Hoste Kriket Klub from Vis, in fact. I turned out for the island side just prior to heading to NY as they were in Cambridge for their first ever UK “tour”, and I’m delighted to report that after a breath-taking comeback against Split CC the previous weekend, Vis CC won both their matches in style. Check out www.viscricket.com for brief match reports and pictures from Jesus College!