White out

A six inch fall of snow is a rare event in England. I remember in 1969 being stuck at school and returning home late at night past hedges transformed by the blizzard into fantastic sculptures. Maybe it was more memorable because the strict gender segregation on the bus was forgotten in the excitement. The next real snow I remember was ten years later when London was blanketed. Two years ago a Christmas holiday visit to London coincided with enough snow to toboggan on Parliament Hill Fields. In between my memory of snow in England is of cold, damp anticlimax. Welcome then to winter in Romania. Yesterday's first real snowfall persisted for over 20 hours and left six inches of soft white icing on cars, trees, hedges and roofs. Vehicles turned the snow on the roads into the familiar black mush and dogs left their yellow signatures wherever they could but the Christmas card feeling is unsupressed. Snow scenes are beguiligly photogenic and can be surprisingly colourful. Even the hard work of clearing the pavement and roadway does not dispel my schoolboy enthusiasm. The forecast for Monday night is -18C. Let's see how long Romania's sustained snow climate holds its charm.

Birds in black and white

The promise of snow seemed to bring gulls and crows to join the usual mallard ducks onthe Somes river in the middle of Cluj. The almost completely white gulls are all confusingly blackheaded gulls. The grey and black crows are hooded crows and the occasionalall black ones are rooks. There were also some jackdaws on the bankside, recognisable by their grey hoods. The crow family are the cleverest of birds when it comes to tool using and problem solving. They have been seen to use twigs to draw ants from underground nests and I have seen them soaking dry bread in birdbaths to make it easier to break up and swallow. On a cold day it is the gulls that show the most enterprise though, out mobbing ducks and crows to get to bread thrown into the water.

Nailing the apple

A medieval anaemia remedy that may date back almost to the iron age involves putting nails in an apple. You leave them there to corrode for a couple of days. They are then taken out and the apple eaten by the patient. The citric acid in the apple combines with the iron in the nails to make ferric citrate, an efficient way of delivering iron to the anemic person. You need a good size apple and ten four inch nails acording to the Romanian traditional healing pundits. be careful to avoid steel nails or galvanised ones as these will not corrode properly. Anaemia may have made you weak but if you are prepared to follow this cure you are certainly not faint hearted.

New boots and mince pies

Tonight is December 5th. Children in Romania clean their boots and leave them on the windowsill for St Nicholas to fill them with gifts. I years gone by these would have been small tokens, fruit, nuts and a decorated branch. The branch has stayed but the expectation of a significant gift has grown. High streets and malls are full of anxious flustered parents trying to outdo fellow parents of their offsprings' school mates. In England children have to wait until the 24th when they pin their stockings to the mantlepiece over the fireplace for Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas) to leave them their presents. To encourage him to stop by on his rooftop round they traditionally leave him a mince pie and a glass of something warming and perhaps some milk for the raindeers that pull his sleigh. Romanian children are lucky, they now get to celebrate Christmas on the 25th as well. More presents to buy.

Home barn

The barn is the prime agricultural building whatever the size of the farm. The most modest smallholding needs a dry space for working with produce and storage. The basic barn design has remained unchanged for centuries right across Europe. My reference book was written and published in England (JEC Peters, discovering traditional farm buildings, Shire publications, 1981, ISBN 0 85263 556 7) but describes a typical barn in rural Transvlvania perfectly. The village barn in Turnu Rosu has a central threshing floor between two bays, each with a loft. It is stone built so dates from before 1950 and has a small door opposite a wide one. This door layout is supposed to imporve the draught across the threshing floor. The familiarity of a Transylvanian barn to an Englishman is a reminder of how broad is the stamp of Europeaness in our souls.

Vlad or Dad

The guidebooks might say 'Sighisoara sits at the top of the Saxon region at the ancient heart of Transylvania. It has medeival fortifications protecting a hill top church and a citedal town of brightly painted houses dating anything from five hundred years ago to a version of modern times untouched by familiar progress.' They would miss the gothic heaviness that descends with the night to shroud cobbled paths in shadows and turn trees and steep roofs into eerie grotesques. Aptly enough as this town is reputed to harbour the birthplace of either the dreaded Vlad the Impailer or his father. The adjoining house is now used to entertain important visitors, none more so that Vlad's direct descendant, heir to the British throne, Charles, Prince of Wales. The area to the south of Sighisoara is dotted with fortified churches, most now disused since the local German population abandoned villages and their Saxon churches and fled after the fall of Romania's more recent tyrant at the end of 1989. What remains is wonderfully preserved history, timeless and defying the passage of time.Almost like the fictional vampires that owe their appeal to Vlad's bloody reputation and something more chilling and real in the Sighisoara night.

Pains and needles

You know when you get back to Cluj or I guess anywhere in Romania. Not only are there as many superstitions as there are churches, which is a lot; there is also as much alternative medicine as there is mainstream health care. I went to an acupuncture session with a friend. As I also had a sore knee doctor Edi gave me a quick diagnostic once over as well as treating my friend. He looked at my tongue, found some pressure points that were agonisingly painful and told me that the root of my problem lay way back in my youth. Not only a wayward family relationship that needs to be remedied but an important decision that took the course of my life in one direction when my instinct told me something else. My instinct is starting to say 'enough' apparently, hence the increasing frequency of my knee getting sore. This style of history taking and diagnosis feels more like a repeat of the session I once had with an ayurvedic healer in India than anything I ever got from the UK's National Health Service. I can't fault the precision of the insight. I just wonder what my tongue actually looked like to tell such tales.