My dad is quite old, he’s 81. My mum’s about 15 years younger. I have two brothers. Nigel, who is seven years older than me, is a computer programmer, or he does something with computers, I’m not sure what exactly. His main interest is music, and he plays the guitar very well, and the piano. He’s married to Nikki, who is an artist. She’s half Swiss, and paints pictures for a living. They live in London, and have two children. My other brother, Chris, is a stockbroker, and he lives with his family in Hong Kong because the firm he works for sent him out there. They send him all over the world. He met his wife Leslie in South Africa, when he was working there. Leslie doesn’t work – she’s a housewife and she brings up the children. They’ve got four children. So, I have six nieces and nephews, which means I have quite a lot of presents to buy at Christmas! I come from quite a big family. I worked it out once that I’ve got 25 cousins, because my dad’s dad married twice, and my mum’s mum married twice, so I would have had three sets of grandparents if they had all been alive at the same time. However, I only remember one grandparent, my grandmother on my mother’s side, but she died when I was very young, so I only have very vague memories of her. My mum has two brothers and sisters, and she has three half-sisters. And my dad has four brothers and sisters and two stepbrothers and sisters.

My two brothers are a lot older than me, so I didn’t see them much when I was little because they weren’t at home that much. There are seven years between each of us, so one brother is seven years older than me and the other is fourteen years older than me. However, my auntie Patty lived with us in the country for a while, and she has four children, and the two girls, Catherine and Sarah, were around my age, so it was like having two sisters. This was nice, because we went to school together and we could play together, and it was nice having people of my age around.

My parents live in the country, in the south-west of England. When I lived in England, I used to go to visit them maybe every month, but now of course it’s much more difficult, and now I go about twice a year. Normally I go at Christmas, although not this year, and some time in the summer. They live in the middle of the country and it’s really nice. There is a river, and you can go for long walks and get some peace and quiet after living in the city. My brother Nigel who lives in London goes home quite a lot to visit them with his children, but my older brother Chris can’t go that often, of course, as he’s always very busy working in Hong Kong.

In England, the stereotypical family is husband and wife and 2.4 children, so they say, and a dog and a cat. We have two cats, by the way. They were my cats, but when I left to come and live in Hungary, I took them to my mum, who wasn’t overjoyed at the time, but now she quite likes them. We used to have a dog, a big golden labrador, but he had to be put down ‘cause he got very sick, so that was quite sad. The English stereotypical family of husband and wife is, I suppose, changing now because there are a lot of one-parent families. A lot of people get divorced now and live on their own and bring up their children on their own. What about my parents? Well, my mother never worked, she was a housewife, and she and my dad lived in Sri Lanka and India for much of their married life, ‘cause my dad was a businessman. He’s retired now but used to import, I think it was whisky and fertilizer, from England to Sri Lanka. My mum brought up two children there, so both of my brothers were brought up in Sri Lanka and India. They must have had a very idyllic childhood – I heard stories about them swimming in tropical seas and going on expeditions to tea plantations, and it sounded really nice. I was born a year after they moved back to England, near London, so that’s a bit different from exotic Asia. I suppose in a way we conformed to the typical stereotype of a family, in that my father was the breadwinner and the head of the family, and my mother was a housewife and brought up children. Nowadays in England, most women seem to want to go out to work, and even if they have children, they send them to a nursery or a crèche at a very early age and go back to work to resume their careers. Also, quite often now just the immediate family live together, and a lot of old people live on their own, not usually with their children and their grandchildren as used to be the case.

Vivien

I live in Budapest, in a flat in the centre of town, on the third storey, the third floor, of a building. It’s a typical Hungarian building with a courtyard and a big stairwell. There’s no lift, unfortunately, which means I have to stagger up three flights of stairs every day, a couple of times a day. It’s quite a small flat – I don’t remember how many square metres it is but it’s pretty small.

There’s a living room, where we sleep, which I share with my flatmate, who is a Hungarian student. It’s her flat, so that’s quite good. I pay her rent, but fortunately I don’t have to pay any of the electricity or gas bills, although I pay the phone bill because I’m always calling England, which makes it very expensive. So, in the main room there’s a huge old brick stove, which keeps us good and warm and is very efficient, and as the flat’s quite small it’s not expensive to keep it well-heated in winter. This makes a big change from some other flats I’ve lived in, like in London where I was freezing cold in the winter with no fires or heating of any sort. Then there is a bed and also a sofa-bed, where I sleep, which you can pull out and change from a sofa into a double-size bed. There’re two huge cupboards. One of them is quite modern, and the other one is an old-style white cupboard with a large oval mirror built into it. We also have a desk, where I work. We’ve got a colour TV, which is nice, with about 29 or 30 different channels. Then we’ve got about four blocks of shelves, which are mainly full of language books and books on Hungarian literature.

The other room used to be a kitchen, but my flatmate’s dad has converted it into a kind of study room. There’s a big table in there where we usually eat breakfast and supper. There’s quite a strange setup in the room really, because it has tiles on the floor, so it looks like a cross between a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room. It’s also got a lot of shelves with books on them, and some plants which I brought from the last flat that I lived in – oh, and there are also quite a lot of plants in the living room as well. Then we’ve got a kind of kitchen – well, it’s a little cupboard really – which has a stove, a washing up basin, a couple of little cupboards and some shelves.

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