Going Downhill.

Once I realised that I was not going to get into anything to do with Apple in Scotland, I knuckled down and started paying off what I had to. I accepted that Hamburg was not going to happen for the time being. Claudia might have known the same before I did. So rather than over-extend ourselves as we may have been tempted to do in taking a punt on Hamburg right in the beginning, we were now hunkering down for a hard struggle. Claudia got a crappy job serving the breakfasts at a nearby inn - one of the 400 Euro jobs that the government had been promoting to try and inject a bit of life into the economy. She was utterly miserable. We spoke daily, but there were times when I could do nothing to cheer her up. She was in tears before any words even came out. It was gutting. I could do nothing to change things. I would get calls through the day while I was in the middle of wheeling barrow-loads of bricks, sand and mortar around a building site. I always stopped to speak to her and I never got annoyed. My employer was very understanding - not a trait one expects to encounter in the building trade. I knew that one of us had to be strong and I knew it had to be me. I tried to sound calm and confident and sure of how things would work out. We would easily exchange a dozen text messages in a day, just silly things to try and keep each other smiling. It was desparate. There would have been few days when we were not talking for at least thirty minutes by mobile phone and then we would talk in the evening by landline. I made suggestions, I tried to push her to be more pro-active in her job-hunting. I kept trying to encourage her, trying to be positive, trying to make her believe that we would get things sorted out, we would be together again, we would find a way to get back into Australia. Shite really! We were not going to have luck on our side again. It was just a completely fucked up period of our lives and it was going to get worse.