Day 12 Mordor

Tea?

We were coming from the wealthy and lush shires of England. Like Bilbo Baggins our main concerns were relatively trivial: what's for tea? We had a roof over our heads, food in the cupboard and some money in our pockets to indulge ourselves regularly.

If we didn't read the tabloids too much we could open our eyes to realise that we lived in a safe place. The most unpredictable thing that might happen to us today was the weather.

England the only country to have 4 seasons in one day. And what a great subject of conversation it makes!

But how had we arrived at this stage of civilisation?

Exploitation of course.

After subjecting the British work force into waged labour in the fields and factories in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. The Irish, Welsh and Scottish soon followed.
At the same time the slave trade made cities like Bristol wealthy and England prospered. Then in the Nineteenth century we addicted China to opium and subjected India in order to destroy its textile industry just to help Manchester control the production of cotton and reap the huge profits. And at the beginning of the Twentieth century in South Africa we interned the Boers in the first concentration camps to control the diamond and gold mines. Exploitation is not racist!

And today we have been brain washed into taking out 25 year mortgages and accumulate huge credit card debt. It's the best way to keep the workforce tame and subdued! You don't go on strike or leave your job when you have a mortgage to pay off.

We are stitched up and exploited. And we find ways to exploit the rest of the world by demanding cheap goods and selling them dubious financial products. The negative wave of abuse rolls on. Where will it stop?

We had escaped Babylon....

We were welcomed at the Romanian border by beggars and street traders. They tried blackmailing us into washing our windscreen and buying dodgy road tax cards which are mandatory in Romania.

The older men looked gaunt, the women looked desperate. They were shorter, darker skinned and looked weather-worn. It was a long way away from the slick motorways of England, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria and even Hungary and bright roadside service stations where uniformed women smile plastically.

It is even further afield from the polished city workers of Canary Wharf we started our journey. Everyday on their way to work they carry in clothes and valuables the equivalent of several years earnings of these poor people on the Hungarian-Romanian border.

Mordor is the stark cold reality of poverty. A desperate need for basics: food, heating, shelter. Tea and cakes is a luxury. For us it is scary because desperate men do desperate things. And that threatens our idyllic lifestyle.

We had navigated Camila through Europe like a ship on the ocean. She contained the sweet comfort and valuable possessions of our London Hobbit-hole. Now on a cold grey morning we were smacked in the face by the gusty unpredictable winds of our fears.

We had chosen to live in Bulgaria, poorer than Romania and statistically the poorest country in Europe.