Cheltenham

“If that poor girl hadn’t broken her arm, she would’ve gotten silver in the Olympics, but now she got nothing,” an old granny tells me after having stopped me by the entrance to the Town Hall. She looks exactly like the granny from ‘Little Red Riding Hood’’and makes it sound as if our conversation is so natural that I have to almost start feeling like she has been expecting me with a cake in a wattled basket.
“Yeah,” I say.
“So where are you from, luv?”
“How do you know I’m not local?”
“Oh, I can tell by the way you say ‘yeah’, luv.”
“Lithuania.”
“Oh, is that near Russia?”
“Well, it is not THAT far away from Russia…”
“I don’t understand those people in Russia. They got their independence, I don’t understand what they want now, I just don’t understand it”.
“You mean the war with Georgia?”
“That one, luv, yes. I just don’t understand those people, they got their independence.”
“Well, it’s not exactly independence that they want…”
“So how long are you here for, luv?”
“Three months.”
“Oh what a shame! Three months!”
“Why shame?”
“So what’s the weather like in your country, luv?”
“It’s kind of like here.”
“It’s raining here all the time but a few miles away you can see people in bikinis! Unbelievable!”
“So are you saying that the weather in Cheltenham is worse than in the rest of Britain?”
“Oh no, luv! Take care!”

She turns left, crosses the road and I feel like I’ve just taken a computer-based IELTS test, in which further questions are independent of your answers. After a few conversations like that you kind of feel like you’ve been talking all day long cause your tongue has been moving, trying very hard to insert some gap fillers (brilliantfantasticsureluvdarling), but in the end of the day you still feel like you’ve come to this country “to spend some time with yourself”.

So is England for you, luv. A country where sunglasses should seem like an unnecessary invention or a snobbish fashion extreme. Where summer clothes could be on sale all year long cause nobody needs them anyway. Where it only rains twice a week – first for four days and then three days for the second time. Where your boss seems to be trying to squeeze in 10 sugary epithets within 10 seconds while on the phone, at the same time making such faces that you can only hope that the customer does not have some kind of a video-phone. A country where you buy one and get a second one for free.

What is Cheltenham like, then?

“In the 19th century it had the most famous spas in the w…. in the country,” explains the woman to her husband, who is looking at some ‘Chel Ale’ posters in the Cheltenham Art Gallery (the expositions in that gallery seem to have been updated in the 19th century, too).

Cheltenham is a city that can be divided by the thoroughfares for shopping. One for chain stores and another one for specialist shopping: antique, jewellery, porcelain shops and designer studios.

It is chick and famous for ridiculous cost of housing. A town with a great divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, as some reader on BBC’s ‘have your say’ pointed out.

And because it’s so rich and expensive, there aren’t many immigrants, so Brits themselves have to take jobs in fast food restaurants.

There are, of course, a couple of dozen of Poles. An English city cannot do without them. I still haven’t figured out what attracts them so much to this island. Possibly phone shops offering cheap calls to Poland.

And the size of Cheltenham?

A journey from the outskirts to the city centre does not take long. About 150 g. package of ‘Smarties’. Unless, of course, somebody decides to stop you to chit-chat about the Olympics. (Britain has just given up the third place on the medal table.)