Накануне – On the Eve of Departure

Well, this is nearly it, and for the third year in a row (after 5500 km round Germany in 2023, and 4000 km round France last year) , Jutta and I are about to head off on our now-regular spring/summer cycling adventure, this time driving first to Hungary then on with Daisy2 round Romania and back, with a solo dash home for me (Mark writing here) before Brexit turns me into a 90-day pumpkin.

I’ve put a map of our/my very rough intended route at the top of the post, and hope to include lots of photos as we travel, reconnecting not just with Belgrade, Bucharest, Brasov and Budapest (all the Bs), but with offbeat places like Scornicesti, birthplace of Romania’s late and very unlamented leader Nicolae Ceausescu, reporting from which in 1982 for a Radio Four From Our Own Correspondent got me declared persona non grata until Nicolae’s and Elena’s rule ended ignominiously and deservedly in 1989.

We might also (though it’s very hilly and rural) tackle parts of the rather wonderful Via Transylvanica through the Carpathians, watching out for bears and wild dogs in one of Europe’s least spoiled landscapes.

Getting my Hungarian speaking skills up to sort-of speed ready for the trip has been an enormous – almost visceral – pleasure, with thanks to Dávid Király (David King in old money) in Tompa close up against the border with Serbia for being my by-far most effective teacher in more than 40 years of trying.

Next week the plan is to test my fluency pretty intensely with a personal presentation in Hungarian to David’s students and colleagues at Szeged University, covering Cold War, journalism and psychotherapy before Jutta and I climb aboard our traditionally heavily-laden tandem-with-trailer to pedal first to Timisoara where the 1989 revolution began against Ceausescu, then down to Belgrade and on down the Danube to Bucharest where I covered his demise and the immediate aftermath over that Christmas and New Year.

Memories. Life-changing stuff, and as we and I travel these next six weeks together and then back solo (hopefully perhaps even through a sliver of Western Ukraine, should there be by then a messy and intensely unsatisfying peace) I’ll no doubt muse occasionally on how these places contributed to where and how Jutta and I, heading into our fourth quarter centuries, now find ourselves still working as EMDR psychotherapists.

Our tandem Daisy and her solo stablemate Nomad, both now electrified and separated front from back (thanks to S&S couplings), are tonight safely packed ready for departure and Harwich-Hoek ferry into the back of our new (to us) VW Touran – flat on their sides in bits as the original hope to be able to stack them upright came up hard against measurements done far too late of the car’s interior.

And why the Russian in the headline? (Means “on the Eve”, by the way, title of a rather lovely Turgenev novel).

One of my later-life dreams has been, madcap enthusiast that I am for learning languages, to be able to deliver training in the attachment-informed EMDR in which Jutta and I specialise not just to fellow therapists in the English-speaking world but in their native tongues to colleagues in Russia and Hungary.

I therefore depart this year in the glow of having, with thanks to Olga Nalivaeva in St Petersburg, just delivered just such a workshop fully in Russian, 12 hours in all including live EMDR sessions with a rich back-and-forth of questions and answers how this form of EMDR actually works (rather well and powerfully, since you ask).

Next stop? Though it might take a couple of years yet, yes, in Hungarian, grammatically one of the world’s toughest languages for a foreigner to learn. And I’m beginning to think it might actually happen.

Never too late, but first, some cycling.