Day 45

Monday April 5, 2021

Mark:

Late morning, early morning, we have no idea. We’re back to cancelling time again. But somewhere in there we go out house shopping and buy a few bits and pieces that Sarah has been really wishing she had. Like a really cool set of knives that the kitchen desperately needs, and all in their own knife block. We also buy household items like washing powder and cat food. We’ve really got into that; as we’re paying no rent, only covering bills, we’ve been buying more and more things for the house to help out with this as much as we can. And we love buying things for Sarah, like these knives which we’re thrilled to have found. We were hoping to get out and back before she returned, but she beats us to it. Just. We’re about 10 minutes away when we get a lovely voice message that she’s returned, had an amazing trip that she can’t wait to tell us all about, and that she just loves the changes and improvements we’ve made to the apartment while she’s been away. We’ve been doing little things almost constantly, often with Sarah helping as well. But I guess when you’ve been away for a few days, little changes each day add up and become even bigger, even more visible changes.

We enter the apartment, all proud with our purchases and eager to hear from Sarah and to show her the latest few goodies we’ve found. I go to the bedroom to get a few things put away and organised and Maja goes through to the kitchen. When I leave the bedroom to go and join them down the hallway, I immediately sense that things are not right. No. Things are very wrong. There is no joyous laughter, only quiet protestations of innocence from Maja. What the hell is going on? I walk down the hallway and hear Sarah saying, ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me but I was brought up to not do things like this. It’s just not something I would do. If you were brought up different, I’m sorry about that. I don’t know. Maybe this thing just isn’t supposed to work out. I don’t know how you guys feel.’  Maja looks down the hallway and catches my eye. She looks bewildered. I speed up my walk and get in there as quickly as I can to lend my support and find out just what this could possibly be about.

It’s the rack of clothes that we went through, tidied and moved. For all the talk that this is our place, we can do what we want with it, to the point of being agitated when I checked a few times if we could do this or that, Sarah is now furious that we took her at her word and went and did this thing unsolicited. Yes, right to the point where she says, yet again, that things might not be working out. Here we go again.

It’s fair to say that as soon as this conversation is over we leave the apartment for yet another panic walk. But there is something different about this one. Now we think we really should leave. In the past, especially in the early days of all this, we spoke about not letting Sarah down and taking off on our travels if we thought we were in a position to do so. There’s no talk of letting her down anymore. If anything, we’re feeling let down. Massively. Things are really starting to feel fragile, like they could totally burn at any moment. We’re now talking about having to get ahead of the situation before it takes control and gets ahead of us.

Well, we were already thinking about going off and touring or at least starting somewhere else abroad, although we had no idea where that would be. We decide the time has come to start doing something about that. Why leave here, go to another house in London, and plan to go abroad from there? Might as well just cut out the middleman and go for it. Not to mention the difficulty of even finding another place in London in the meantime.

My first thought, I tell Maja, as we tramp these familiar streets, is that we should call Rick. We might just be able to stay at his place in Madrid. It would only be a temporary solution, but it would be a significant move and, if he’s up for it, we could do it almost immediately.

We get hold of him and he tells us the timing isn’t great so that really isn’t an option. No problem at all. Oh well. With Brexit and all that, it probably wouldn’t have been an option anyway. But with that, he jumps straight into telling us about Thailand and how that could be something for us to think about. He knows people there on the music scene and is confident we would be able to hook up with them through knowing him. One of the guys was in an earlier, Thailand version of Drunken Monkees, the band I was in with Rick in Madrid. So he would almost be a colleague. Rick is convinced we would find somewhere to stay if we told him he could make a call or two on that, and we would also have an almost instant network, or at least an instant opportunity to get in on the network. We really get into the idea of this during the walk and call, both of which go on for well over an hour, possibly reaching two.

As soon as we get back to the apartment we’re on it. I’m researching people’s experiences and seeing what steps have to be taken to go, and what to do when you arrive. In the meantime, Maja is taking care of the practical things. Less than five minutes after starting, Maja urgently asks me to take a look at what she’s found. A perfectly affordable hotel type setup with a pool right in the centre of Bangkok. Yes yes and yes. This could definitely be a place to land. It would give us a destination and, from there we could start to look for something more settled. It’s Monday now. We could get ourselves sorted here and be on our way by the weekend. She doesn’t even hesitate and immediately starts to look at flights. We are really doing this. If she can get flights sorted now, she’ll get onto the hotel online and book us in and that will be that. We’re moving to Thailand this weekend. This is really happening. But we check ourselves just a little, allowing for the reality that, with Covid still very much top of the agenda all over the world, these are not normal times and it’s not so easy to just up and leave as it might have been four or five months ago. So, while she’s planning the practicalities of the move, I’m looking at travel restrictions, both as far as the UK is concerned with being able to book foreign travel, and how policy currently is regarding Thailand.

Oh damn. Maja’s face falls with mine as I start to discover restriction after restriction. First, the UK has banned all travel. We didn’t know that. But then we look at Thailand and see they’ve banned travel from the UK. We’re already on this flow and we don’t want to stop now. So we flip ourselves on the traditional dime and start to consider other countries. Countries outside of Europe and therefore outside of the Brexit bubble. Central America, north America, Asia. We go and look at the official government websites of every country we think could work for us, and one by one they get crossed off our list of possibilities for the same reasons as Thailand. We’re seeing now that this really is not an easy fix. More than that, we just can’t see how it can be fixed at all. 

We can’t go anywhere in Europe. What we thought would be our international alternatives have all been smashed off the table. Maja’s visa for the UK will run out at some point so she won’t be able to stay here and I won’t be able to go to Sweden. And I think we can rule out help from Sarah’s lawyer friend on any of this at this point; we’ve not even had an acknowledgement of the initial email. More immediately, we were already looking for places in London before Sarah handed us what we thought was a lifeline and we know how difficult to impossible that will be. And moving back to the old place? Well, that’s a big no no no. 

We feel trapped. With that, we give up for the night. We’re exhausted and very emotional. Despite the tiredness, sleep comes hard and is uneasy.

The knife block is still unopened in our room. We’ll be keeping this for ourselves. Where it will eventually be getting unpacked, we have absolutely no idea. Has anyone seen that impossible list?