Blog been very quiet for over a week as first I recovered from this year’s nasty cold-and-chest, and then we recalibrated our trip to drive round Romania rather than tandem, with a view on return to pedal round Lake Balaton instead.
So this is from Bucharest, a return for me 36 years after covering the 1989 revolution and the end of both communism here and of the odious Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena. For Jutta, hat first time.
It was an assignment which proved a personal turning point ultimately out of journalism into psychotherapy, where I hope I’ve proved to be a more competent practitioner than ever I was a writer.
Back in Hungary, the lovely doctors at Kiskunhalas hospital comfirmed, quickly and for free, that the chest was nothing worse than aftermath of a long-lasting bad cold, so careful not to make things worse, we ditched Belgrade plans, parked Daisy and drove on down to Bucharest through Ceausescu’s home village of Scornicesti.
Where Bill Mitchell (then off the Detroit Free Press) and I as BBC Central Europe correspondent were briefly detained by the Securitatae in 1982, and subsequently both denied reporting visas for Romania till the fall of communism meant we didn’t need them.
This time, Jutta and I did get to see both the town centre, its traditional housing bulldozed away under Ceausescu’s policy of “systematisation” and replaced with now-rotting appartment blocks, and the absurd and now derelict 30,000-seat football stadium built to flatter Ceausescu with a capacity for three times the town’s entire population.
And then on to Bucharest itself, with a mixture of photos below of both then (1989)and now.
