We are home in Edinburgh again. It is quite nice being at home. And Jem made a big effort to be in Edinburgh to meet us off the flight from Kaunas. Which was great. He is not long back from running the Frankfurt Marathon. See below. Susie was a bit nervous in advance about the return flight; as, when you travel with Passenger Assistance on Ryan Air, you are invariably allocated a window seat. Apparently on the grounds that, if there were to be an emergency, you wouldn’t be holding up able-bodied passengers trying to evacuate the aircraft. So they say. But squeezing into a window seat post-op [or even pre-op] can be quite tricky. I found my seat 32A extremely uncomfortable and spent much of the flight standing up at the back of the plane.
Kaunas was generally a positive experience. The professionalism and the post-op physio sessions, and the communication and the customer service generally, at the Nord Orthopaedics Clinic was excellent. As satisfied customers fall over themselves to tell you on the Nord Clinic Users’ Facebook page. We enjoyed sharing experiences with other Clinic patients over breakfast and in the reception rooms at the Kaunas Hotel. Those we spoke to came from Edinburgh, the Scottish Borders, Brighton, Oxford, South Wales, Anglesey, and various parts of Canada. Everyone is willing to share their stories; of the post-op lollipop, and of the Day Three/Four dip in morale. But I do draw the line at looking at people’s photos of their post-op scars.
While Susie was taken off for daily physio at the Clinic, I shuffled round central Kaunas with a single walking stick. The town centre feels quite affluent. There was no begging. And no litter. And people on the streets are predominantly young. There are a lot of attractive young women with long hair, usually tied back, and long legs. A lot of the young men look like basketball players. People are almost universally dressed in black; padded jackets, padded coats, and parkas. And most people wear thick-soled boots and shoes, suggesting that winter brings plenty of rain and snow.
There is a profusion of coffee shops, offering soups and cake as well as good coffee. We ate spicy soup and grilled prawns in a kind of fusion restaurant. And enough ice-cream to feed a family of four, sprinkled with a whole packet of M&Ms. In a Georgian restaurant an enormous television showed an interminable programme of Georgian folk music, a kind of Georgian River Dance. I kept expecting to see the two Ronnies on the end of the chorus line. It was the kind of ethnic show that they sent up mercilessly. In the bar across the road, which offered excellent soup and home-brewed beer, the television was usually basketball and occasionally German football. We were late to discover the Italian restaurant, Il Piccolo Ristorante, just round the corner from the hotel.
On a Sunday afternoon I went to a service at the International Reformed Church of Kaunas. It was planted in 2022 by the Evangelical Reformed Church of Lithuania to reach out to a growing number of internationals in Kaunas, mainly but not entirely students. The service was in English, led by the pastor who is from New Zealand. He preached from 1 Peter 5 on the activity of the devil, ‘prowling round like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour‘. It transpired very quickly that the pastor’s wife knew people whom we know at church here in Edinburgh. Over an informal meal after the service I enjoyed talking to Frank, the pastor, and to Thomas, a Frenchman from Cherbourg, who taught both in a school and in the university in Kaunas. I really enjoyed being back in an international church.
I read my first ever book by a Lithuanian, a novel called Shades of Grey. It might be best described as Anne Frank meets Danny Finkelstein’s Mum and Dad. The narrator is a young Lithuanian girl who is deported from Kaunas by the Russians in 1941. She is separated from her father, who we presume to be dead, and spends time with her mother and her younger brother in appalling conditions on a farm camp in Siberia before being moved on to a desolate gulag within the Arctic Circle. The author. Ruta Sepetys, is a Lithuanian-American, born of Lithuanian parents in Michigan in 1967, the author of several acclaimed books of historical fiction. I found Shades of Grey rather simple, or simplistic, but I now see it was originally written for children and young adults. It is considered a roman à clef, and she has clearly mined a lot of Lithuanian survivors’ stories.
I have also started to read David Smith’s new book, God or Mammon: the Critical Issue confronting World Christianity, which has been lying fallow in our sitting room for a few months. It is an ambitious book, which starts with the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt, and then explores the way in which their distinctive concern for social justice is eroded throughout the Old and New Testaments by contact with the surrounding kingdoms and imperial states. What Dennis Lennon used to call ‘the urge to merge’. What follows is a wide-ranging survey of movements in Christianity which reflect the church’s struggle to counter a pervasive, materialistic world culture. It is a big book and [for me] a slow read. More about it later.
These are transitional days back here in Edinburgh. There are a lot of soggy leaves down in the garden. We didn’t get to church on Sunday, but watched the Remembrance Ceremony at the Cenotaph, which I always find very moving. Susie is trying to establish a daily routine of exercises, icing, and some gentle walking. I had an appointment at the Orthopaedic Clinic at the Lauriston yesterday. Sadly it didn’t advance any intervention. But it was with a programme called Prehab, whose task is to prepare the elderly and the infirm for surgery. I came away with much good advice about Exercises, and Healthy Eating and Weight Reduction, and Mental Wellbeing. Some of the advice may have come a bit late. I am currently in charge of cooking, and we now have a retro diet of shepherd’s pie, and carrot & ginger soup, and baked potatoes. And a few estimable Charlie Bigham ready meals. All just right for November !
November 2025
Through a glass darkly 