Borrowed Time

Claudia was exhausted when she arrived. She had to sit next to someone smelly and fat the whole way and there were noisy and drunk people on the bus to make the experience worse. We retired to the hotel and clung to one another, so very thankful that we had not missed each other. It was so close to complete disaster, for Claudia especially. It would have meant that the bus trip was in vain, those days in Adelaide would have been spent alone and trying to re-arrange a flight to Cairns. It did not bear thinking about.

We were more relaxed and less frantic for our next week together. We walked around the city, through the parks and galleries. Our bodies had got close, now our minds got closer. We made plans for the future. When my visa was up, I would go to Germany and we would be together again. It was something I was happy to do. I had previously lived in Holland for a year and I was confident that I would settle in.

We learnt more about each other. Claudia had finished an affair with a doctor where she was the third-party being fed a regular diet of lies about when he would leave his partner and how he had stopped seeing her. She was passionate in her determination never to be involved in something sordid and demeaning like that again. Funny now how that sticks out in my mind. It must have hurt.

Claudia had a degree in Pedagogy and was uncertain what to do with it. In the mean time, she was living in her own flat in Dortmund and working at an institute that was closely associated with the scientific community and the publication of results, papers, statistics etc. An assistant to the secretary and a little dull and demeaning for someone with her qualification and young aspirations. Still, she did not really know what to do with her degree and work experience, which involved time spent at various rehabilitation clinics on teams that worked to rehabilitate adults who had suffered brain trauma as a result of accidents, strokes etc. Humbling for anyone and depressing for those not suited to it. Her dilemma is shared with many thousands of European graduates. So many have studied so hard for something that, only after qualification do they realise has no equivalent salaried post in the real world and, at best, is only seen as proof that they are not blue-collar material. Even this is questionable when one sees how many now retrain as trades-people. As the world's elitists throw increasing amounts of money at giving increasing numbers of their children increasingly useless degrees, we all curse at the dregs that are left in the trades charging increasing amounts for a deteriorating quality of service and workmanship. And then we question our leaders as to why the country is filling with foreign workers. Go figure! - increasingly!

Rant aside, the two of used the time to seal our commitment to each other. Photos show the two of us sitting on the grass in parks, relaxing in the morning sun on our hotel balcony and we both have that fresh happy look of contentment, a touch disheveled from the cuddling! When the time came for Claudia and I to part, we both knew that we would see each other again. We knew it.