Family - Life :) - Other sports

Just when I thought I was over it…

April 19, 2026 by 0 Comments

I only had one lesson yesterday (from 9 till 10:30 in the morning, with the 25-year-old woman) as the British School kids are still on holiday. And that was just as well: within half an hour of my lesson finishing I had a horrific headache. Pacing, eye shades, lying on the bed, the sofa, ice from the freezer, anything I could do to ease the pain. It didn’t go quickly. At 3pm it eased just a fraction and I tried to eat a bowl of cereal but could only finish half of it. I finally re-entered the world of the living just after four. Conveniently, Mark Williams’ first-round match with Antoni Kowalski started at 4:30. It wasn’t on TV – they had cycling on instead – but I could watch it online. I kept the cycling on (with the sound down) in the background because of the picturesque views of Pontevedra in north-west Spain. The snooker was good. Williams was fortunate to win a protacted second frame and his 6-3 lead at the end of the session flattered him somewhat. They finish their match tonight.

Since then I’ve just been trying to recover and to build up some strength again. This morning – my last morning of being 45 – I sat in the nearby park and read my book. So many dogs. And pigeons. Just two cats. After that I had a Teams call with my aunt and uncle in Geraldine. My uncle, now 84, didn’t talk much, though I had a good chat with my aunt.

Other sports - Politics - Scrabble

Up in the air

April 18, 2026 by 0 Comments

So the Strait of Hormuz is open, maybe, for an indeterminate time, and my parents are coming to Europe next month, maybe, by an indeterminate route. I spoke to them this morning. We discussed the possibility that they get stranded in Europe. Perhaps aviation fuel in Europe will have all run out within a month and the only way I’ll get to see them is if I drive to the UK. A three-day trip.They booked their flights a week or two before war in Iran broke out; there’s no way they’d have booked after.

“I think it’s very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” So says JD Vance, referring to the very first American pope. On one level that’s bloody hilarious. On another level, WTF? I must say I find the way Trump and his gang invoke God to justify thousands of innocent people to be utterly disgusting.

I did get to see a fair bit of those final eight snooker qualifiers on Wednesday. In some ways they were disappointing; six of the matches failed to stretch beyond the 15th frame. Five of them featured Chinese players. Four of them made it, but what drama there was in the match between the fifth Chinese – Xu Si – and Gary Wilson from the north-east of England. Wilson was miles in front at 7-2 and 8-4, but went behind 9-8. At that point he’d basically had it. But he scraped himself up off the floor to win a very tense 50-minute penultimate frame that hinged on an absorbing safety battle on the blue, and then rattled in a century in the decider. The tournament proper starts tomorrow. In the first round, my favourite Mark Williams (who gave me so much excitement last year on his run to the final) plays Antoni Kowalski who I just couldn’t warm to in his interview after he’d qualified.

Scrabble. I’ve finished all my 14 league games, winning half of them but with a negative points differential. Other players are still to finish, and it’s still on a knife-edge as to whether I survive in the division.

We’re having beautiful weather right now. I should be able to make the most of it this weekend, with only one lesson tomorrow. Yesterday I had a super full-on day of lessons, but other than that it’s been pretty light as people are still coming back from Easter.

Life :) - Other sports - Scrabble

Brightening up (and it’s snooker time again)

April 15, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve got a cold so I’m sluggish today, though still positively lithe compared to basically the whole of March. On Monday I went over to Sanda’s place where we had some traditional Easter food including painted eggs and cold meats. Her parents, whom I hadn’t met since Christmas 2018, were there. It was great to meet them. Her mother is the same age as my mum, while her father is in his mid-eighties. Sanda’s uncle, with whom I went to Vienna in 2024, was also there. They’re planning a trip to Belgrade in early June. If we go, it will be the same four of us (Dorothy, Sanda, Sanda’s uncle, and me). But it’s likely to coincide with my parents’ stay in Romania, assuming they make it. Sanda has no flexibility around the date, so it makes things awkward. The other three could go without me, but I’m the only one with a car.

Yesterday I benefited from my relative lack of work by watching a few hours of the last qualifying round of the snooker. There were eight first-to-ten-frame matches, played simultaneously, with the winners making it to the Crucible. There’s something soothing about watching snooker even when the stakes are high, as they certainly were yesterday. Some highlights were Hossein Vafaei of Iran who rattled off nine straight frames from 4-1 down to book his place (there may be some jokes if he draws Judd Trump in the first round) and 19-year-old Yorkshireman Stan Moody who beat one of the many Chinese players in a deciding frame. In that final frame, his opponent spent an age over a yellow which he missed, then slammed the table in frustration. That gave Moody all the encouragement he needed as he cleared up with a very impressive century. Matthew Stevens (who missed out dramatically last year) beat Stuart Bingham 10-7. Shame they couldn’t both make it. Another close match was 22-year-old Antoni Kowalski’s 10-8 win over Jamie Jones to become the first-ever Polish player to make it through. But when Kowalski was interviewed by the brilliant Rob Walker after his win, I couldn’t warm to him at all. He struck me as Very Online and very Gen Z (which I’m sure he’d pronounce as zee). Spare a thought for Martin O’Donnell who led 8-2, then 9-4 and 69-0 in the penultimate round of qualifying, only to lose 10-9 to Anthony McGill. There are eight more final qualifiers today, including the one involving comeback king McGill, but I don’t know how much I’ll watch of them. I think I’d rather read, and anyway I’ve got some lessons later.

In some excellent news, a long-term deal has been struck which will keep the World Championships at Sheffield’s Crucible until 2045. The venue will be revamped and 500 seats added. I imagined that in a few years it would be off to China or (even worse) Saudi Arabia, so I was very glad to hear that snooker didn’t decide to sell its soul after all. I’ve wondered whether it might be worth getting tickets one year, to either the qualifiers (which this year are just twelve quid; amazing value) or the main event.

Scrabble. This time I’m battling relegation. It doesn’t feel like I should be, seeing as I’ll most likely finish with seven wins and seven losses, but the promotion and relegation zones are enormous and my relatively poor spread (which acts as a tie-breaker) might sink me. It’ll be close.

The sun is shining, the temperature is perfect for me, there’s less traffic than usual (so I can hear the birds for a change) and most of my flat is no longer a pigsty. And Viktor Orbán got booted out. So there are reasons to be positive.

Language teaching - Music - Photos - Politics

Don’t need to cook much this Easter

April 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

It hasn’t been a bad Orthodox Easter weekend. The best part has been only one lesson over the four days. That was with Matei yesterday, on his 18th birthday. I’ve now been teaching him for over half his life, though those days will soon be over – his maths exam is just a few weeks away, and then he’ll almost certainly be off to Germany for uni. I thought about how well adjusted he is at that age compared to how I was.

This morning I went to the park near the cathedral with all the tulips to read my book. I got there on the dot of ten – the cathedral bells were going full-bore – and the place was practically deserted. People would have been up all night for the Easter vigil. I brought a flask of coffee. I hadn’t read for weeks and it was nice to get back into the swing of it.

Piața Operei this morning

Last night Elena (the lady who lives above me) gave me a huge platter of sarmale, drob (very similar to haggis), and various cakes and biscuits. It was like hitting the culinary jackpot. “It’s a pleasure,” she said. Then, in seriousness, “Don’t throw it away”. Why on earth did she think I might throw all that food away? Sanda (someone I met a few years ago but is usually out of the city) has invited me over to her place tomorrow, so I may take some of that food.

Drob

Last week I had two sessions with the 25-year-old woman who has just started a new job. I was lucky to have two evening slots for her. Her job involves hot-desking – having to book a desk via an app every workday – which for me would be the seventh circle of hell. Not that I’d get to work in a place like that at my stage of the game; she said there’s nobody over 35 there. When you get to 35 you age out of those kinds of jobs, and then what? In one of our sessions we discussed AI. I said that for people of her generation, the first thing they do when they have a question is ask AI. She said, no, for me that’s the second thing I do. The first is to ask TikTok. I bet TikTok is largely AI-based anyway. I keep my lessons entirely AI-free to the best of my knowledge. I’m proud of that fact that my teaching materials are produced manually and guess what, I actually enjoy that side of it.

Polls have just closed in Hungary where maybe, just maybe, Viktor Orbán will be ousted after 16 years. The opinion polls point that way, but in a country where the media is basically state-controlled and the elections may not exactly be free and fair, we really have no idea until actual results start coming in.

Some music. Our Mutual Friend by the Divine Comedy. It came out in 2004. What a powerful song. The band’s name comes from Dante’s poem (which is all about circles of hell as I mentioned two paragraphs ago).

Update: With 85% of the votes counted, it’s all over for Orbán. Hooray! He conceded impressively early in the night. Crucially, Péter Magyar’s party will win at least two-thirds of the seats, meaning they will be able to reverse Orbán’s constitutional changes. Magyar’s party has similar policies to Orbán, but he ran on an anti-corruption and pro-EU platform. This is great news for Europe. The fact that JD Vance was trying to get Orbán re-elected shows you that that’s really good news.

I’ve just been reading about Hungary’s joke political party, called the Two-Tailed Dog Party.

Family

10/4/76

April 10, 2026 by 0 Comments

Today is Mum and Dad’s golden wedding anniversary. It’s one thing that they’ve both survived this long, but to have stuck it out together for 50 years is some achievement. When I spoke to them a bit earlier, they’d just been out for a meal in Temuka with my aunt and uncle (the ones who came to Timișoara; today is also my aunt’s birthday) and another aunt of mine who lives on her own – my uncle (another of Mum’s older brothers) died some years ago. Today I’ve been thinking of my grandparents; both sets made it past 50 years of marriage. Mum’s parents had a huge event, such was their enormous extended family. It took place when we were living over there in 1989. Dad’s parents’ golden wedding was in Rhayader in Wales during the 1995 rugby World Cup. My grandad by that point had fairly advanced Alzheimer’s.

Today is Orthodox Good Friday. It’s nice to have a short break from work. This morning I went to Utvin on my bike. It’s great to even be able to do something like that again. There weren’t many people out and about. Plenty of sheep (and lambs) though, and there was the pleasant ribbit of frogs in the river.

The market on Wednesday

I now need to (finally) tackle the living room which is hopelessly untidy.

Family - Maths teaching - Politics - Scrabble

Chickening out but feeling better at last

April 9, 2026 by 0 Comments

Finally! After five weeks, I now feel close to normal. I’m no longer ravaged by headaches and mentally and physically exhausted. What a relief. But let’s see how long I stay like this.

Speaking of relief, I went to bed last night not knowing if World War Three might have broken out by the morning. Last night I wondered, are you able to wager on such an outcome? Sure enough, I found a site called simply ww3.bet that allows you to bet on whether or not WW3 will start by the end of April. The site looks legit, but there are a couple of practical problems with a bet like that. Last night the implied chances of armageddon were around one in six. Crazy, but hardly orders of magnitude from reality. This morning, following the ceasefire, they were one in twenty.

Trump’s TACO Tuesday makes it more likely that I’ll see Mum and Dad in the early summer. Had the US followed through on “wiping out a whole civilisation”, the Gulf states would have likely been obliterated too, and no commercial planes would have gone anywhere in the region for some time. I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. Dad thought that the alliance between Europe and the US was still worth holding onto, while Mum didn’t. I agreed with Mum. While the orange turd is in charge (and quite possibly for some years afterwards), America is enemy territory as far as I’m concerned. The other news I saw this morning (reinforcing my view) showed JD Vance just over the border from me in Hungary, cosying up to Viktor Orbán, trying to sway this weekend’s parliamentary election. Orbán is currently down in the polls. Whether that will translate to the election I have no idea, but let’s hope he gets a shellacking.

Mum and Dad will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary on Friday. A few months ago my brother suggested that we all meet up in the UK and have a big celebration there. When I told him that yeah, that’s a nice idea, but it just wouldn’t fly for several reasons (the biggest of which is that there just aren’t the people in the UK anymore to celebrate with), he thought I was being overly negative. Just this morning, Dad joked that they’ll struggle to handle the sheer number of people at their party. (They did think of taking the TranzAlpine train to the West Coast and back, but found it was ludicrously expensive.)

On Monday my brother called me. He was very upbeat about his new job, as well he might be. He said there were six positions available, and he probably just barely snagged the last of them. His very good degree gave him a shot. (His wife didn’t think the degree would be worth it. Hmmm.) He’ll be working for BAE, which I called “British Aerospace” in my last post. It hasn’t been called that since 2000, so that shows how out of touch I am. His job should pay well and provide excellent job security, which is a rare commodity these days. This is a real boom period for the defence industry. I’m really happy for him.

My bike is now fixed, for the moment at least. This afternoon I had a maths lesson in Aradului with an eleven-year-old girl. I’m facing the same battle with her as with almost all my maths students. I’m coming up against an education system that so emphasises methods and procedures – can you remember how to do this trick which will be almost useless in real life? – when their real problems are (1) an inability to do basic calculations quickly and accurately, and (2) a general inability to problem solve.

The next round of the Scrabble league starts tomorrow. The common word “coating” already has a valid anagram: “cotinga”, which is a bird found in Central and South America. Maybe “tacoing” will have made it in by the next update.

Family - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

Energy desert

April 6, 2026 by 0 Comments

I feel a bit better now, but it’s like I’m travelling through an energy desert, both mentally and physically. Friday, for instance, was close to being a write-off. At one stage I was trying to gee myself up for a lesson when my student messaged me with 18 minutes to go. I’m really tired. Can we have the session on Sunday? What about me? And I prefer to keep Sundays free. But as I’d already scheduled a Sunday afternoon maths session with someone else, I agreed to see him at 9am.

On Saturday I had nine hours of lessons (six sessions: three English and three maths). I dragged myself out of bed for an 8:30 start in Dumbrăvița, wondering how I might cope. I stayed almost headache-free, and I survived, even if began to flag during my final maths lesson. I’ve done a lot of teaching by now, and even when I’m below my best I have my own systems and processes (and experience) to fall back on. The highlight of the day was a maths lesson with a girl who had taken a test on volumes and surface areas the day before. Formulas were still clearly visible on her arm. Did they help you in the test? No, it turns out they were wrong.

Sunday. Not Easter Sunday under the Orthodox calendar, but Palm Sunday. My 9am student failed to show up. Ugh. Dorothy had invited me to church (a 10:30 start) and although I’ve become increasingly anti-religion, I reluctantly accepted. Her church is mostly harmless and even benefits people in the community, especially recent arrivals from African countries. There was a huge congregation including a lot of children. The sermon went on, as expected. After the service a young woman of 18 or so was baptised, which at this church meant getting fully (and dramatically) dunked in a swimming pool. Then there was food. Tons of it. Dorothy is heavily involved and was in her element. I wasn’t. We all had to queue up and I found myself in that dreadful situation where someone in front of you talks to someone behind you and you’re stuck. In general there were too many people and I desperately wanted out. At one point someone sang Happy Birthday for one of the kids. “Wow, it’s someone’s birthday,” I heard someone say. With so many people it would have pretty weird if it hadn’t been anyone’s birthday. I’d mentally budgeted to be home by 1:30. I got home ten minutes after that, relieved that I’d be church free for another eight months. Then Mum and Dad called. I kept it very brief. My maths session was coming up and I couldn’t handle conversation with anybody. I had a nap before my lesson which went fine.

Some news from my brother. It looks like he’s got a job at British Aerospace in Portsmouth. Doing what exactly, I don’t know. Getting that degree must have made a huge difference. (These days you’ve got to have the piece of paper.) I expect I’ll talk to him this week and find out more.

I watched the Artemis II launch on Wednesday night. I happened to be awake at 1am, so I got out my laptop and watched it in bed on YouTube. At that point it was still in doubt. It had an eerie feel about it because all I had was the audio from mission control and I kept looking at that rocket, with four astronauts inside, and thinking, this is horrendously complicated. There are many ways that this could go horribly wrong. So far it’s been a success though, and last night they entered the moon’s gravitational sphere of influence, if I’ve got that right. It’s just a real shame that the four occupants of the spacecraft couldn’t have been Trump, Vance, Hegseth and Rubio, on a one-way trip.

I did speak to Mum and Dad properly this morning. We still have no idea whether they’ll make it to Europe. After “Open the fuckin’ strait”, all bets are off. I reminded Dad of a conversation we had immediately after 9/11. Dad talked about how terrible Bush was. No diplomacy, he said. “Smoke ’em out”? How did he ever become president with language like that. Now when they’re bombing a girl’s school to pieces with God on their side, that all seems so tame. There was no social media back then.

Scrabble. Amazingly I didn’t just get promoted in the latest round of the league, I actually won the division. I had ten wins and three losses; the four players behind me all had nine wins. I drew pretty well, it must be said. That result will put me in division three, starting Thursday. To say I’ve exceeded my expectations would be a massive understatement. I’m now going to be facing even more world-class players who know words that I couldn’t even dream of. I’ll have my hands full for sure.

Family - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

Everything else has flown out the window

March 31, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve just looked up “chronic fatigue syndrome”. I fit an awful lot of the criteria. The Wikipedia article mentions four levels, as classified by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK. This is how the least severe category is described: “People with mild ME/CFS can usually still work and care for themselves, but they will need their free time to recover from these activities rather than engage in social and leisure activities.” That sounds like me right now. Working and caring for myself is possible but a struggle, and everything else just about flies out the window. When you reach the second category you can forget about work, and as for levels three and four, they’re terrifying. There’s a paragraph entitled “unrefreshing sleep”: Even a full night’s sleep is typically non-restorative. That’s absolutely the case for me. What I don’t get is the link between what I’m facing now and the headaches. I’ve been headache-free since late Sunday afternoon. If I stay like that for another 48 hours will I bounce back a bit? And what if I don’t?

On Sunday I saw that film with Dorothy. I felt a bit better then, and walked into town. That took me 35 minutes, the same as normal. Before the film we ate dinner at Berăria 700. Dorothy told me about her packed Sunday, full of social activities which were mostly related to the church. “I don’t think you’d have enjoyed all of that,” she said. I wouldn’t have enjoyed it even if I’d been feeling normal, I said, let alone right now. Then we wandered to Studio to see the film. We saw Primavara, an Italian film set in the early 18th century at an orphanage in Venice. It follows the life of young Cecilia, a talented violinist who just happens to have Vivaldi as her teacher. The real attraction of the film is the music, and because we sat in the second row, we had no trouble hearing it. These revamped cinemas – there are now four of them dotted around the city – have been a real boon. Tickets are inexpensive, the website is fantastic, the cinemas themselves are very well looked after, and most importantly you no longer have to go to a mall to see a movie. Last week though an eleven-year-old boy told me of his bad experience at one of those cinemas. You couldn’t get popcorn! I don’t think you’re the target market. Yesterday Dad told me about the old cinema in St Ives and how he saw Tron there. Tron? I thought it had already closed by then. I found out (from someone’s blog) that the Regal Cinema closed in 1985.

When I got back from the cinema, I called my brother. He mentioned the possibility of fuel rationing in the UK, as happened there in 1973. Power cuts, kids skiving off school to see football matches on weekday afternoons (because obviously they couldn’t play under lights). Maybe people will be told to work from home, Covid-style, my brother said. I also spoke to my sister-in-law who seems better now, after going back to work. It’s always hard talking to her because she’s too far away from my brother’s device to hear her well. After our call, I thought about how Mum must have felt coming off the boat in Southampton in ’73, having come from a land of plenty, and being plunged into that.

Yesterday Dad and I talked about the upcoming Artemis II launch. It took just 66 years to get from the first manned flight of any sort to putting men on the moon, with the aid of computers far less powerful than the ones in everyone’s pockets today. Almost as long has passed since then, and look at us! We agreed that if and when a human walks on Mars, it won’t be the Americans who make it happen. Most likely it’ll be the Chinese. Dad also mentioned Rocket Lab, New Zealand’s space company. It’s pretty incredible that NZ even has one (though I think it’s partly American-owned). Rocket Lab launches off Mahia Peninsula, that little triangular-ish bit that sticks out between Gisborne and Napier.

Mum and Dad seem a lot better now. Having one really good eye all of a sudden has helped Mum immensely. With the ever-changing global situation, nobody knows whether they’ll make it over in May, and that’s OK.

In a lesson last week I had another young woman who, despite being highly intelligent, didn’t know about 9/11. She was born in 2000. I showed her the pictures of that fateful day when she was a baby. Romania wasn’t in the EU at that point, and few people would have had the internet. It didn’t have anything like the impact here that it did in the UK and much of the west. She grew up in a railway house at Cicir (pronounced chee-CHEER: it even sounds like a train’s whistle) just outside Arad. We’ve had a lot of productive sessions since she started in November, but she’s just got a new job. Great for her, but that will make it much harder for us to meet.

I need to stop watching YouTube. I’ve been watching a lot of late, mainly because I’ve had less energy to do anything physical, but it doesn’t help me mentally. Two recent videos I watched were about an ill-advised water slide in Kansas that cost a ten-year-old boy his life in 2016, and Balloonfest, the release of 1.4 million balloons in Cleveland in 1986 that (depending on who you listen to) led to unforeseen circumstances. At the very least, I need to stop watching videos about America.

In a post on 3rd November 2024, just before the last US election, I said how crazy it was that the votes of a few thousand poorly-informed people in Pennsylvania will have a massive impact on billions of us throughout the world. We’re seeing that play out now in devastating fashion.

Scrabble: I’ve drawn well in the latest round of matches and am sitting on four wins and one loss. That defeat was by just four points; I’m still incapable of nutting out an endgame properly. I managed to beat that Romanian guy at my third attempt. I picked both blanks and found a bingo each time. He stormed back with a bingo scoring in the 80s, the board got blocked, and I didn’t particularly fancy my chances until I got down VAPOURS (hooking the A onto the front of JAR) for 97. In the end I won 476-387. There’s a chance I could win promotion but it’s still too early to say.

Life :)

I want to hibernate until further notice

March 30, 2026 by 0 Comments

On the off-chance I do actually get better and this whole month is happily erased from my memory, I’ll leave this here: March 2026 has been absolutely bloody terrible.

I wrote my last post on Tuesday evening following a productive day by my recent standards. Things seemed to be coming right. On Wednesday I drove to Recaș for lunch. It’s a 25-minute drive. This was the place I went to on a sunny day two years ago just after buying the car; I remember how great that felt. Though it was overcast this time, it did feel good to be on the road. Wednesday is barbecue day in Recaș – I think they do it on Saturdays too – and I got a spicy sausage, two mici and chips. That all came to 41 lei – our inflation which has been high for years shows no sign of easing, especially not now. I bought a pair of two-litre bottles (red and white) from the winery, then I quickly headed home for a 1:30 lesson with a young girl – I’d done no preparation. After that I had two lessons, both in the Aradului area. On the way home my front tyre got a puncture – that damn sharp-edged valve hole in the wheel rim cutting the valve. I was lucky I suppose that I got the puncture after my lessons and I had just enough time to walk home before my evening session started. I locked it to the bike rack at a large hardware store two-and-a-bit kilometres from home.

Thursday was a trying day. Mentally it took me ages to get going. Plus I had a headache. I bumbled through my lessons and that was about it. Oh, and I got hopelessly confused when trying to pick up a package from an Easybox. I got to the place, then had to come home empty-handed because my PIN (or whatever) had been sent somewhere I couldn’t locate on my phone. It was a beautiful sunny morning and I didn’t want to be locating any fucking thing on my phone. Just like I wouldn’t have to do if it was 1996. Or even 2006. I sorted it out at home, then went back there to pick it up after my lesson, but jeez. Friday, on the other hand, was surprisingly productive. I did all my lessons, cleaned two rooms including the office which was strewn with paperwork and cat fur, learned a bunch of Scrabble words (or tried to), prepared for the next day’s lessons, and even had a 45-minute chat with Mum and Dad. My energy was back and things were looking up. Then on Saturday – yesterday – I woke up with another headache. It was at a manageable level – a 4 or 5 out of 10 – but still enough to exhaust me. I had no functioning bike and it was tipping it down anyway, so I drove to Dumbrăvița. During maths with Matei, I couldn’t stop yawning. Sorry mate, I’m struggling a bit here. Because Matei has known me for literally half his life, I could get away with functioning well short of capacity. After Matei I had a useful break which I spent in the park. Spending time in the park in the old part of Dumbrăvița relaxes me. Following another maths lesson, it was home time. Just as well: I felt gone.

But I had two jobs to do on the way home: wash the car and pick up the bike. Sounds simple enough, right? Er, no. Once I’d found my car wash card I put it in the slot of the big central machine, then inserted a 10-lei note. Nothing happened. Isn’t it supposed to spit out tokens? Suddenly I heard “Come here.” Cut out the English, would you? So I take it you understand how this thing works. “Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?” At least he was speaking Romanian now. How come you do? How come anyone does? How come you aren’t all finding life so fucking impossibly hard like me? I think they’d stopped the token thing. Or maybe the token thing and the card thing were now either/or. I really don’t know. Or particularly care. I did get the car washed and rinsed and it was off to the hardware store where I’d left my bike. It was still there. I’d managed to get it in the car before without removing the wheel, but this time I simply didn’t have the strength. I shouted at the top of my voice in a busy car park on a Saturday afternoon, not caring that dozens of customers could hear me. I’d lost control of myself. A man turned around and helped me get the front wheel off, which is what I would have done myself if I’d been thinking at all clearly. The wheel would have needed to come off anyway. “Thank you, and sorry. I’m actually quite ill at the moment.”

I got home, unpacked all my teaching stuff, and took the bike up to my flat. Phew. It’s now 4:15 pm on Sunday. The clocks went forward last night. I’ve only just got rid of yet another headache and I feel beyond washed out. I’m seeing Dorothy a bit later for dinner and a film at the Studio cinema. I have no idea what the film is, but I know that meeting somebody is probably a good idea, even though all I want to do is curl up into a ball.

Cat - Life :) - Photos - Politics - Scrabble

Entering the world of the possible again

March 25, 2026 by 0 Comments

Today I’ve got a bit more energy. I’m even responding to messages. (I’d just about gone incommunicado for a while.) The trick is to get up at my normal time, even if I don’t have lessons. The lessons themselves, assuming I don’t have a splitting headache, are to my benefit too. I got 18 litres of water from the well today; that certainly felt a lot easier than the last time I did it.

Late last month I tried to pay my rates bill at the post office – you can do that there – but they had the wrong address for me. I was sent to the city hall. There I had to fill in various forms and make a small payment, then I needed to wait days or weeks for an email confirmation. That email came two weeks ago. Yesterday morning I went back to the post office. I was feeling like crap and couldn’t handle the length of the queue so I gave up. In the afternoon I returned – almost no queue – and they still had the wrong address. You’ll need to go back to the city hall.

This morning I did just that. When I got to the end of the short take-a-number queue, the lady told me I needed to visit the Direcția Fiscală which, according to a poster she pointed out to me, moved to Iulius Town in early 2023. Oh god, you’re telling me I have to go back there?! Iulius Town is the same dystopia I found myself in last week. Elevated fakeness, surrounded by soulless tower blocks, none of which existed when I moved to this city. Though it is no more than a few years old, I feel I’m in eighties Bedford or Milton Keynes. On one side you look down on abandoned factories and silos that really are from the eighties. So it was back on my bike to Iulius Town. I had no trouble locating the Direcția Fiscală where people were queuing out the door. There was somebody all securitied up who kept whizzing by on a kind of Segway, as well a policeman controlling the entrance and smoking, just like half the people in the queue. It took me a while to get inside, then it was take-a-number time again. I was 18th in line. The woman told me to make a written declaration (Can you do this in Romanian?), then commentated on my surname which was the same as someone famous-ish 35 years ago. Only I was born with it, he wasn’t quite. She said my address would be updated within 45 days. That means that when I come to pay my rates I’ll face a (very small) fine or interest payment.

Getting that done (assuming it is actually “done”) was encouraging. A few days ago, or even yesterday, I couldn’t have handled it. Physically and (in recent days) mentally, this month has been a right mess. I haven’t had a bad headache since last Thursday. I hope that on Friday, as long as I stay largely headache-free, I’ll be able to tackle the cleaning. Last night I went back to the doctor’s surgery and got my blood pressure checked again. It had gone down: it was 140/80.

Earlier this morning I had a lesson with the English teacher in Slobozia. She told me the latest chapter in her life with her 15-year-old son, who has turned into a monster. “He bit me,” she said. Sorry, what, he isn’t a cat. Oh, beat. Romanians fail to make the distinction between those two vowel sounds, short and long. Live and leave, fill and feel, to say nothing of pairs that involve beach and sheet. “But in the past he has bitten me too.” I gave her a quick test at the start of the lesson. I showed her Trump’s latest all-caps social media post where he talks (lies, probably) about recent conversations with the Iranians. Can you spot the mistakes in lines one and nine? She could. I remember as a very little boy our teacher telling us the difference between the witch that flies on a broomstick and “which one”. The fact that he can’t spell basic words or use caps lock properly is the least of our worries, but once again, how did we get here? (That post on Truth Social, if that’s where it was, was likely just to manipulate the markets. Trump doesn’t understand a whole lot, but he does understand financial markets.) When I asked my student if she’d been following the war, she asked “What war?”

I read something funny at the weekend about “Strait-of-Hormuz guy”, the sort of guy you meet at the pub who, a month ago, wouldn’t have known how to spell or pronounce Hormuz or locate it on any map, but now knows its every nook and cranny and knows about all the ramifications of West Texas crude hitting one-fifty a barrel.

On BBC News yesterday I saw an ad for the Burj Azizi tower in Dubai, which when completed will be only a little shorter than the Burj Khalifa. Oh yes. The second-tallest building in the world. Can’t wait to visit once it’s topped out.

Yesterday I bumped into Lili (who lives on the first floor) as I was collecting a package from one of those Easybox things nearby. The package contained eye shades which I’d ordered online. Lili asked me if my nephew and niece will ever come to visit. I’m sure they’d like to play with your cat, she said.

I met Dorothy at Scârț on Sunday. We sat outside and played Scrabble in Romanian. I won 354-234 after putting down SCAPATE for 92 and DOBOS for 54. (Doboș is a very delicious cake that comes from Hungary but is also popular here, just over the border.) Mainly it was just nice to be outside.

Doboș

I took the picture above by the Bega yesterday. This is recent abandonment. When I arrived in Timișoara it was full of purple bikes which you could unhook (with a card and PIN code) and rehook at another station when you’d finished with them. Now it’s just for pigeons and their poo.

I managed to get Kitty mid-yawn this morning. I know how she feels.

It might not look like one, but this is certainly a restaurant. It has opened in Iulius Town. And they called it that?!

Update: This evening I had a lesson with a man in his mid-thirties and his 16-year-old niece. He’d had his teeth professionally whitened. “Bleach 4”, apparently. They were very white. And as for her, she wanted to know how to spell “which”.