Scrabble - Travel: Romania

My trip: a mixed bag

August 29, 2026 by 0 Comments

So I’m back. I got in this afternoon, just after four. My trip was a real mixed bag.

On Monday, the day before I left, I felt terrible and wished I hadn’t booked the damn thing. I made it to my lesson in Dumbrăvita, then met Dorothy for coffee at 11:30. We sat outside. Dorothy told me all about studying Latin and Greek at Cambridge in the seventies. It was the Greek that really grabbed her. I could have sat there all day, listening to her talk about ancient Greek (in ancient Greek would have been fine too) while watching the world go by. Alas I had to go home to pack – a process that felt like torture – and give a face-to-face lesson. My student, just like Dorothy had, told me I needed to see the doctor. I went to the after-hours place but my usual doctor wasn’t on shift and because I didn’t have an emergency (though it felt like one) it got too hard and I came home.

I tried to be off by 10:30 on Tuesday morning. I got away at 10:50 – not bad under the circumstances – and got my battery checked before heading properly on my way. I filled up with diesel – this cost 525 lei, only a little less than the 564 lei I paid for three nights’ accommodation. As I’ve mentioned before, fuel prices have been well and truly Hormuzed. I paid 10.14 lei per litre, equivalent to NZ$3.80. And this is after the recent tax break – when I went away earlier in the month I paid close to 11 lei.

It was just after I filled up that I felt thoroughly awful. Then Dad rang. Ugh. I can’t remember much about the drive apart from the two places I stopped in. I finally got to the guest house and parked around the back, near the pool. A swimming pool. Fantastic. Lugging my bags from the car to the building was a big effort. I felt so weak. My room was pretty cramped, with loose sockets and a loo seat that didn’t stay up and all that stuff I’ve come to expect from Romanian accommodation. It did the job I suppose. The great thing was the almost total lack of other guests. Oh, and the much cooler weather, which was practically the whole point of getting away.

That evening I was able to give an online lesson, thanks to that lack of other people. We read a BBC article about people who (annoyingly for everyone else) change their mannerisms and even their accents after coming back from an overseas holiday. In retrospect, this article was a notch or two above my student’s level. The article gave theories for the phenomenon, but I reckon it’s pretty simple. You’ve had a wonderful holiday where everything’s exciting and vibrant and different, then suddenly you’re back in your grotty fucking housing estate and your pointless fucking job and those parents’ fucking WhatsApp groups. Why wouldn’t you want to pretend you were still in Marrakesh or wherever? (I had something similar after visiting the US in 2015. For a few weeks afterwards I was tuning into Boston-based radio.)

I used the common room for another lesson on Wednesday morning. I felt really groggy – I needed a lie down after breakfast – but I got through it. It was just my second lesson with the 23-year-old guy who’s about to get married. He said they stand to make a 10,000-euro profit on their wedding. Er, what? Well, in Romania the guests all pay, and he reckons all the “donations” will greatly outweigh the cost. If you ask me I think it’s all a horrible practice that encourages people to vastly overspend on weddings: a lose-lose for everybody except singers, caterers, and people like that. At least they’ve stopped the practice of announcing, in turn, who gave how much. The Popescus gave 1000 lei but the Ionescus – shame on them – only gave 500.

After the lesson I looked around the town of Lupeni. An ex-mining town, it was pretty down-at-heel and there wasn’t much to see there. Besides, I had very little energy and, after visiting a fruit stall and a bakery, just sat in a park. I went back to the guest house and decided to make use of the pool. Lovely warm water. As I was lying on a sun lounger after my dip, four cars arrived, all with CT number plates. Constanța. They’d come a long way. Such a big party of people, nice people though they seemed, changed everything. It made me feel I shouldn’t have been there. Fortunately my lessons were done and dusted by then.

Sleep that night was difficult. There was a pool table in the common room close to my room which had an unshuttable door, and a family (including a boy of eleven or so) thought it would be a great idea to play pool at 11:30 at night. Jeez. The next day I was looking forward to getting back home. I drove down the road a bit and stopped at Uricani, a nicer town than Lupeni. The scenery was great but I was in no mood to appreciate it. I sought out some waterfalls further down the 66A road but a very nice man told me there was no water. Back to the guest house and the pool.

I was glad to leave this morning and let the big group get on with their big meaty breakfasts and dinners without me impeding their progress. On the way back I stopped at a place called Pui (which means Chicken) next to a river called Bărbat (which means Man). From there I called New Zealand. I told my parents that a lady over there had two large melons (she did, in her hands) and that the stonemason across the road provided its services dead cheap. I had lunch at Hațeg, just down the road from there. After that I only made brief stops to get fruit and syrup to give Elena who had been looking after Kitty. I could feel the temperature rising the closer I got to home. Then I was home. Kitty was happy to see me. She’d been well looked after. I dropped in on Elena almost immediately and we had a very nice chat, mostly about her travel experiences in the mid-eighties, when Romania was still under communism. She visited Russia then, both by plane and by train.

There was a lot of news while I was away. Dolly Parton, one of those increasingly rare people liked by almost everybody. An extremely sharp American cookie who did so much good in the world. (I was proud to get the Dolly Parton, aka Moderna, vaccine for Covid.) Then there was the glacial collapse in Nepal and Tibet which reminded me of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Thousands, many of them tourists, must have died. Yesterday Ratko Mladić died in prison. He masterminded the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims in 1995. His name means “young warrior” or something to that effect. Good riddance. And all the while there was the business with Mark Carney (a contender for leader of the free world right now) and Trump (leader of the utterly fucked-up world).

I’ve pulled out of this round of the Scrabble league, by the way. That’s not because of my shocker in the last round (two wins, twelve losses, despite playing decently according to the stats) but because of my general brain fog. It had all become a chore.

After seeing Elena and writing this, I’m starting to feel ever so slightly better. I’ve got two lessons tomorrow morning.

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Hello from Lupeni

August 26, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’m writing this from Lupeni. Or more accurately, a couple of miles up a narrow track and a bit of a hill from Lupeni. Which is just down the road from Petroșani, a sizeable town. At the start of the drive I felt so crappy that I wondered if I’d make it. I was even crawling along the motorway at one point. When I was at my lowest ebb my phone rang. It was New Zealand, obviously. Luckily I could pull into a petrol station. Mum and Dad are both pretty worried about me. Mum even mentioned flying over. Yikes. Very good of her, but what would that even achieve? I did get here in the end. The drive took in some mountain views as well as a lot of post-industrial towns that were coming apart at the seams. I stopped in one of them called Baru, which means “new” in Indonesian but there was nothing remotely new about it. Before that I had lunch in a place called Sacu. I ate in a park full of signs telling you not to stand under trees when there’s lightning. There’s lightning now, here, as I write this. It’s properly chilly – I’m wearing jeans and a jumper which I almost didn’t pack. Packing was utterly exhausting. Even something as simple as that is almost beyond me.

My room is very basic. Right next door, for some reason, is an infrared sauna which would cost me 70 lei to use. I’d dread to think what that might do to me. It’s the opposite of ultraviolet, and UV rays are bad for you, so in theory… The internet is sporadic in my room, but luckily there’s a common room nearby, with an excellent connection, that nobody else is using. I’ve managed to give an online lesson (in which I had to explain the meaning of “bollocks”); I have another one in the morning. I doubt I’ll be doing much in the way of hiking this time.

I’ve just heard that Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80, in Nashville. What a life she had. What an amazing singer. And what a thoroughly good person she was. Very sad.

Life :) - Maths teaching

The end of everything

August 24, 2026 by 0 Comments

I felt much better after going away, but this last week I’ve taken a giant leap backwards, to the point where today it’s felt like the end of everything. On Tuesday (or Wednesday, I can’t remember) I ate something that disagreed with me, then Thursday and Friday were so hot that I felt imprisoned in this damn room. I’ve been sleeping terribly. I’ve also had terrible dandruff. It’s been itching like mad. I suffer from seborrheic dermatitis which means it’s not just my scalp that gets it. This weekend I’ve had almost no energy and today I’ve wanted it all just to be over. I have however booked three nights (Tuesday to Friday) in Lupeni, in the Jiu Valley, to the south-east of here. It’s supposedly three-and-a-bit hours but I bet it’ll be more. One thing’s for sure, it’ll be cooler there. My neighbour Elena says she’ll check in on Kitty twice a day while I’m away. I didn’t feel I could leave Kitty at the pet hotel again.

So it’s all an enormous struggle. It’s been a hopelessly unproductive week. The most productive thing was probably on Friday when I got a new mufă for my phone. It cost me a fair bit: 265 lei or around NZ$100. A mufă is what I think we call a charging port in English.

I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. After we talked about the All Blacks’ big win in Johannesburg (which was nice), we discussed my future in Romania. It does feel that I’m far closer to the end of my time here than the beginning. When I picked up some figs and other fruit from the market today I did think, I might not be doing this for much longer. A lot of it is the damn heat. Summers are a right mess for me. I’m seriously considering going back to New Zealand, but I’ll see how the next few months play out.

Dorothy said she’d like to meet up tomorrow but with three lessons and going away the next day and the time taken for me to do anything quadrupled when I’m like this, I don’t know if I can. There have been protests in town against the removal of Dominic Fritz as mayor. I went along on Wednesday – it does seem he’s been treated shockingly – but there wasn’t a huge crowd and you couldn’t hardly hear what the bloke with the megaphone was saying. A far cry from the demonstrations of ten winters ago.

During the week when it got very hot, I thought it would be nice to swim in a pool or a lake or something. Dotted along the Timiș there are things called beaches and I’ve always wondered exactly what they are. On Thursday I tried to go to one, about a half-hour drive from here. I found it despite the typically Romanian lack of signage, but the rusty gate was closed to vehicles. I parked near the gate and walked up to the entrance where there was a guy of my sort of age. He seemed nice, and told me to come back at the weekend. Which I did. Yesterday I tried again. The gate was open. I paid the bloke 15 lei. I wish I hadn’t bothered. You wouldn’t have dreamed of going in the river. Rat pee disease would have abounded, I’m sure. I lay on the grass under an umbrella-ish thing and read a chapter of my book. Or tried to. I couldn’t deal with the music. It was a killer. One dancified song morphed into the next. The rendition of Nik Kershaw’s The Riddle just about did for me. Every now and then it was interrupted to tell you, in English, that you were listening to Summer Vibes 2023. People kept arriving. None of them would have been born before the original version of The Riddle came out. One of the groups started a barbecue. The whole place was designed for younger people to be with other people. I stuck it out for an hour and a half, then gladly went home.

In some better news, my maths student – the one who came in Louis Vuitton and Hermès shoes – got an A-star in her IGCSE exam. I thought she’d either get an A or an A-star – it would be close – so that’s great. It massively helped that she could easily afford all those lessons with me, but she still worked extremely hard. I got a new English student last week. He’s 23 and what I’d call a high flyer.

This evening I made myself walk down to the Bega. It was a very pleasant temperature, but I felt absolutely awful.

Poor Smoc. It’s a rather well-produced poster, isn’t it? I suspect AI was involved. Motan is the Romanian word for a tom cat. Maybe in a few months there will be no more motan or mufă for me.

Cat - Family - Hiking - Scrabble - Travel: Romania

Kitty concerns and trip pics

August 17, 2026 by 0 Comments

I took Kitty in to the see the vet on Friday. It was a regular check, but she’d noticeably lost weight. When I put her on their scales, she was down 150 grams, which doesn’t sound like much but is actually 5% of her weight. I’d love to lose 5% of my weight. I mentioned that she had less energy than before. The vet also remarked that her coat wasn’t as shiny as it could be. She gave me some vitamin “paste” to mix in with Kitty’s wet food, and recommended that I give her some better dry food rather than the supermarket own-brand stuff I’ve been buying until now. When I went to bed last night I let her roam around my flat, which I don’t normally do at night, and she was back to being pretty damn active. A good sign. I’ll have to watch things though. It might be the case that she was discombobulated somehow by the pet hotel. I’m thinking of going away again for a few days, in which case I don’t know what I’ll do with her. I don’t feel I can ask Elena (the lady who lives above me) again.

As for me, I’ve made something of a recovery from being in a crippling energy desert. I didn’t know when (or if) I’d bounce back. This is a huge relief, for now at least.

On Wednesday night I had a very brief chat with my brother who was in the garden watching the solar eclipse. His son demanded his attention almost immediately. Chat over. We didn’t get much eclipse here in Romania, by the way. That’s in contrast to the August 1999 eclipse, which Romania witnessed better than anywhere else. It wasn’t far off totality in Cambridgeshire in ’99; it was a pretty big deal at the time. It was the uni summer holidays so I was staying with my parents. My uncle and his girlfriend (who later became his third wife) had come from New Zealand to stay with us, but at the time of the eclipse they were doing a tour of Ireland. They’d forgotten all about the event and couldn’t understand why it had suddenly become so cold and dark on a summer’s day.

I had a proper chat with my brother last night, after the kids had gone to bed. He’s been in his new job (which has something to do with submarines) for two weeks and it’s going well. His colleagues are great, he said. That’s half the battle. You can ask them anything and they’ll help you. If only I could have had colleagues like that when I started in life insurance. He’s working almost exclusively from home. They’ve armed him with a fancy laptop and three screens. He’s put the third one in the attic, he said. I asked semi-seriously if I could have it. Unlike me, my brother is a heavy user of AI and text-to-speech.

Jason Arday ended his life on Friday. What a tragedy this has been, on so many levels. And it would have all been so different if it wasn’t for people on social media, let’s be honest, enjoying Arday’s downfall.

Scrabble. I got a reprieve from relegation after the last round. I finished with five wins, one more than I expected, and I survived because one or two people pulled out. My immediate reaction though was, wouldn’t I rather be relegated? The current round, in the same fourth division, has been a horror show. A steady stream of dross from the virtual bag. Please make it stop! I may end up with just a solitary win, albeit one by 200-odd points. The encouraging thing is that they keep a tally of mistakes each player makes (presumably AI is involved in this somehow), and mine has never been this low. I’ve played enough online poker to know not to be too results-oriented. Sometimes it just won’t happen for you no matter what. I still might want to take a break after this round because – like the poker was – it’s a bit time-consuming.

Visiting the waterfall on the first full day of my trip

Down into the cave on day two

With a storm brewing, I popped into this quite remarkable late-18th-century church on the way back from the cave

Visiting another waterfall on day three following two storms

Up to the Rusty Pit on the afternoon of day three
Travel: Romania

Doing me good

August 12, 2026 by 0 Comments

I got back on Sunday afternoon. I was in no rush. I made a few stops, to take pictures of the view (while still up high) or to pick blackberries, or when down a bit lower, to wander around towns that were practically dead at midday on a Sunday. In Gurahonț, a small town of 5000 or so, the only sign of life emanated from the church in a minor key. It became much hotter all of a sudden, the AB and BH number plates turned into ARs and finally TMs (like mine), and then I was home. The heat. That’s the main reason why I got away. I’m very glad I did. It was beautiful up there. So quiet and unspoilt. And I got to speak a fair bit of Romanian – that’s become an increasing rarity. The great news is that I still feel normal now, despite the heat. It’s 37 degrees as I write this.

Yesterday morning I had a lesson with the seven-year-old boy in Dumbrăvița, then it was off to the pet hotel to pick up Kitty. She’s slept most of the time since I collected her. In the afternoon I met up with Dorothy at Berăria 700. We both had an ice coffee. She gave me a bag of vegetables from the village, while I gave her an apple and blackberry crumble. We ended up talking about the Jason Arday scandal, which has somehow travelled around the world, and then got on to the thorny topic of religion. For me it isn’t thorny at all, by the way. I don’t believe in any god, nor in the afterlife. I did allude to this when I maintained that the same thing that happened to her kitten last year, and will happen to Kitty hopefully many years in the future, will happen to her and to me. The idea that us humans are afforded special treatment is utterly preposterous to me. I think Dorothy was shocked. (I remember when my Sunday school teacher – well the classes were actually on Wednesday evenings – told us that we may go to heaven but our cats and dogs never do, and even at the age of seven I realised that was total baloney.) Probably because we’d got on to such a contentious topic, we accidentally forgot to pay. I didn’t even notice until Dorothy messaged me. I went back there this morning to pay and apologise.

I’d never even heard of Jason Arday until a few days ago, probably because I don’t live in the UK. The whole saga reminds me of Lance Armstrong. He’d survived cancer and raised millions for charity through his foundation, so he was obviously a good guy, right? His exploits – seven Tour de France wins – were beyond question. Until they weren’t. Something similar has happened with Arday. All that adversity. He was supposedly autistic, and even non-verbal until eleven, so you couldn’t really question him. And of course he’s black. What made him fabricate so much I don’t really get. The ultra-marathons, the football, his appearances on 7 Up which were clearly impossible given that he was born in 1985. Why do that? As well as depriving someone else of the place they deserved, he (and those who hired him and turned a blind eye) have done racial minorities a huge disservice. From now on, any successful black academic who has reached their position on merit will get certain people screaming DEI, which is a horrible American term. (It was always called positive discrimination in the UK, but everything now has to be Americanised with three snappy initials. I still can’t stand the term ATM for a cash machine.)

I wanted to include dozens of pictures, but it’s only letting me upload these two, from the day I arrived:

Family - Travel: Romania

The great escape

August 9, 2026 by 0 Comments

A few minutes ago the hostess knocked on my door to give me a stack of cheese plăcinte which she had made. These are pancake-like things, in this case in the shape of a quarter-circle. They’re still warm. I’ve eaten a couple, but will save the rest for the trip back to Timișoara tomorrow. I imagine I’ll make several stops on the way. I might get Dorothy a bottle of țuica. She seems to like the stuff, and she’s always giving me vegetables from her garden in the village.

I’ve had a very pleasant stay here. I’ve told my parents that maybe we could come here next year. That’s if they make the trip, which never gets any easier. The best thing about it has been feeling normal. Get some exercise, feel a bit tired as a result. Get some sleep, feel a bit more energetic. Capable of properly exercising. As it should be. Not feel various levels of shattered constantly, regardless of what I’ve done. This morning I even had a stretch when I woke up. For months on end it’s been only Kitty who does that. It’s also been great to escape the heat and to be amongst some more interesting terrain than pancake-flat Timișoara and its environs. The rolling hills and alpine feel to the buildings – there are ski resorts nearby – are very picturesque. Another bonus has been speaking a lot more Romanian. For ages I’ve either been speaking English or nothing at all.

Yesterday morning I visited the Scărișoara ice cave. It’s a half-hour drive from here, on steep, winding roads. I went in a group down a metal staircase to the cave, where you could see and touch the ice cliff. The temperature was just 3 degrees – rather nice at this time of year. On the way back I stopped at the village of Gârda de Sus to have lunch. Then the heavens opened and I had a treacherous drive back to the guest house. The rain was torrential, rocks had fallen, and it was hard to see. We had an electrical storm too. When I got back I fell asleep. When I woke up at four o’clock it took me a while to figure out which four o’clock it was (it was dark after all), or where I was.

This morning I made my way to Pătrăhăițești, which the hostess recommended. It’s just a short drive from here, but hard to spell or pronounce. She said there’s a museum there. Sure, I’ll check it out. The opening times listed on Google were … surprising: 7am to 10pm six days a week; 9am to 6pm Mondays. It turned out the museum was simply an old lady’s house. She weaves and makes bits and pieces out of wood. And makes țuică. Everything was for sale. She’d lived there for over 50 years, she said. Her husband, who died fairly recently (“but that’s life”), had lived his whole life there. I felt I had to buy something, so I bought two wooden eggcups and two tablecloths. That all came to 100 lei. A mile or so from her house was another waterfall which I wandered up to. It was more spectacular than the one on Thursday, probably because of the sheer amount of water following two heavy storms.

I came back, had lunch, then climbed up to Groapa Ruginoasă, or the Rusty Pit, which is a huge ravine in the middle of the mountain, created by erosion. The massive hole is full of layers in spectacular colours, each depending on what is deposited there. The altitude there is around 1400 metres. (On the way back I saw a “1000 metres” sign.) The trek was not without some stress, as a farmer told me I’d gone the wrong way. Or, more accurately, the long way. And there appeared to be another storm brewing. This could get ugly. I got up there eventually (the markers reappeared), but didn’t stay long, beautiful as the view was, because I was concerned about the weather. I went down the short way and the storm never came. On the way down there was a couple looking at some creature or other as they were coming up. It was a fire salamander, maybe six inches long, black with yellow spots. I’d never seen anything like that before. The couple were from the Netherlands – the only foreign tourists I’ve seen on this trip – and they identified the creature using Google.

My parents have called me every day. Slight overkill, but hey. Yesterday Dad sawed down an apricot tree that never produced any edible apricots. They’ve been updating me on the “battle of wills” between my aunt and her daughter.

I’ll pick Kitty up on Monday, which is when I’ll have my next lesson. Next time I’ll post some pictures.

Family - Travel: Romania

Away from the hot, festering room

August 6, 2026 by 0 Comments

They forecast an even chance of a storm this afternoon. The 50-50 shot certainly came in. As I write this from my room in Cabana Bianca in Izlaz, there’s thunder and lightning and torrential rain. The forecast influenced my plan for the day. When I got up it was bright sunshine. After a simple breakfast in the kitchen downstairs, I set off along the track to a picturesque waterfall – Cascada Vârciorog – which was supposed to be 5 km away but it didn’t feel that far. It wasn’t a steep track, though some people took either a Jeep or a horse and cart. The only real wildlife I saw were a huge number of lizards baking in the sun. At the top I read a chapter of my book which I’ll finish later today. The lack of a signal up there was fantastic, though as soon as I started my descent there were missed-call messages – Dad’s name with a damn 5 in brackets after it – then an actual call from Mum. Why couldn’t it be 1986 when if you had parents on the other side of the world you’d talk to them maybe three times a year? I waited till I got a bit further down, where there were tables and benches in the shade, to call Mum back. They’re feeling the effects of jet lag. (I said I’d been suffering from jet lag for months, without the jet bit.) Mum had just had another injection in her eye. Lovely. You’d need a steady hand to administer eye injections, wouldn’t you? My brother started his new job on Monday. After one day in the office in Portsmouth, he’s been working from home. Dad said he hadn’t a clue what his job entailed. When I’d got back down, I walked to the next village (Arieșeni, named after the Arieș river that snakes its way through this area) where I had a penne pollo (chicken pasta dish) and a beer. Thunder was already rumbling in the distance as I walked back to the guest house.

I got here yesterday afternoon. The trip was a bit longer than I said in my previous post – it would have been four hours if I hadn’t taken any breaks. First I had to drop Kitty off at the pet hotel. She vomited as soon as she got there. I suppose I shouldn’t have fed her. The drive was pleasant enough once I was out of the city. I can sort of be in my own little world then – the land of Pom. When I arrived I was met by a very welcoming not-that-young lady who apologised for not having done her hair for ages. She showed me to my room. It’s the cheapest, she said. It’s in a loft and it is pretty basic. It cost 170 lei (£30 or NZ$65) a night. There’s a Romanian scarf-like decoration on the wall, plus the usual terribly translated emergency notice you always get in these places, telling you to “keep your calm down” in a fire and “do not express the fear” in an earthquake. Most importantly, it’s much cooler here than in Timișoara. I don’t feel trapped in a dirty living room, hemmed in by apartment blocks all around me. And I even slept decently last night for the first time in ages, despite a dog that wouldn’t shut up. I’m here for three more nights.

Cat - Family - Scrabble - Travel: Romania

Scary times in Geraldine and a trip to the mountains

August 5, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad are back home. They arrived early yesterday morning, my time. Their journey was about as good as you can expect when you’re not far off 80, you start at one of the hellishly busy London airports – Stansted in their case, and just part of your trip involves being squashed into a tube for 14 hours straight. My aunt and uncle picked them up in Christchurch and dropped them off at home in Geraldine, and that’s when things got really scary. My uncle (who turns 85 next month if I’m not mistaken) tried to lift one of their suitcases and he collapsed on the ground. There wasn’t much sign of life. Mum gave a few chest compressions and he sputtered back into life. I’m impressed that Mum had the presence of mind to do that. So many people would panic there, especially if they’re dog tired having flown halfway around the world. Mum has always been pretty good in that kind of emergency. My aunt called 111 immediately, the ambulance came, and he was rushed off to hospital. He’s now at home after spending just one night there. The words “heart attack” were never uttered; he has something called stenosis, which means narrowing of the arteries. (Useful in Scrabble, should I ever get three S’s and a bunch of other common letters. The plural stenoses is also valid.)

My aunt, who is eight years younger than my uncle and the same age as Mum, has a lot on her plate. Her husband’s memory is fading fast and he’s got various other complications including this heart problem. She’s also trying to partially write her daughter – a complete arsehole who couldn’t give a toss about her parents – out of the will. Her daughter got wind of this and is trying to contest it, so my aunt is in the process of getting fully lawyered up. Sounds like fun.

So tomorrow morning I’m off to the mountains, mainly to get out of this oppressive heat. I’ll be staying four nights in a village (or maybe hamlet) called Izlaz, in the foothills of the Apuseni mountains. It’s about a 3½-hour drive from here. I have no idea what I’ll do there – there’s a cave I’ll probably visit and I’m sure I’ll go for walks – but that’s not really the point. I just wanted to go somewhere peaceful and most importantly about ten degrees cooler than here. It hasn’t been much fun of late. I’ve been going to bed around 11:30 – there’s no point in turning in any earlier because I know I won’t sleep. Then I watch the red digits on my clock cycle round from the late 23s to the zeros and then the ones, and maybe I’ll try reading or even testing myself on some Scrabble words. I get to sleep eventually, then wake up at least twice during the night. Then I’m shattered for most of the day. Today I got some energy back again, so that’s something.

I’ve just spoken to Elena, the lady who lives above me. Rather than try and impose Kitty on her again, I’m taking my furry friend to the pet hotel just like I did last summer when I went to Poland. That time Kitty didn’t want to come home afterwards.

Yeah, Scrabble. The latest round of games has been really tough, and when I’ve been feeling crappy I haven’t wanted to play at all. My opponents have been too strong and my draws far too weak to give me a chance. I’ll be relegated for the second time running, probably with a record of four wins and ten losses, just like last time.

Family - Life :) - Scrabble

The latest scare

August 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad fly back to New Zealand later today. It’s a 9pm flight, so they won’t have to rush. On Thursday I got a scary series of messages from Dad to say that he still felt terrible, the day after coming back from my brother’s place, and may not be able to take the flight. This was while I was teaching. When I got home I spoke to him. By this stage he was feeling a bit better. He’d managed to see the doctor who gave him the green light to make the long trip back. (The 14-hour leg from Dubai to Sydney would be an ordeal for anybody.) The doctor saw that his heartbeat was irregular – he knew that of course – but the warfarin, which he’s been taking since 2005, should keep it sufficiently in check. Mum and Dad will be glad to get home.

It’s so hot again now. You only have to look at the news for five minutes to see that Europe is burning. We could easily hit 40 by the middle of next week, and at night-time it remains in the 20s, meaning I sleep even less well than I do normally. Though I’m better than I was, I never feel fully rested and ready to tackle, well, anything of real significance. (As I write this, Kitty is zooming around like a mad thing. She makes me feel old.) At least I rarely have to go out for lessons at the moment. If I do, it’s best to go by bike, as long as I don’t have to stop.

I’ve been thinking of getting away for a few days, probably to the mountains, to escape the heat. But that takes a certain amount of planning – what do I do with Kitty? – so my best bet might be to hunker down (or bunker down) here. I’m still toying with the idea of going to Moldova (the country – Moldova is also a region of Romania) towards the end of August.

The Scrabble league is in full swing again. I started my games pretty well but yesterday I ran into some heavy weather and, despite my best efforts and learning a bunch of four-letter words, a second straight relegation my be on the cards (or the tiles, to be more accurate). I have to keep reminding myself that the standard of opposition has improved considerably since the early days of the league (last winter). These people literally jet around the world to play Scrabble. It’s mental, really.

Family - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

Dad’s tumultuous journey

July 30, 2026 by 0 Comments

Dad called me last night but I had an online lesson so I couldn’t answer. I called Mum this morning on the off-chance she’d answer – I expected them to be on the train, making an early start, so I was alarmed to see her still in my brother’s living room. Our train is at 10:45. Damn. That means they’ll be travelling in the heat of the day and it’s forecast to break 30. Getting through the underground in London will be a nightmare. If there’s a delay they may even hit rush-hour traffic in Cambridge. “You’re going to have a shitty trip back,” I said to Mum. She didn’t seem to like that. I don’t think it’s because I’d used the S-word and my nephew might have heard; she just wanted to pretend (to nobody in particular) that it would be fine. She was still at my brother’s place, so her image was of prime importance. I can’t be seen to have problems. Then Dad came on the line and said he’d been up all night worrying about the trip. (They got a later train because it was much cheaper.)

Then a couple of hours ago I got a Teams call from Dad. He was shirtless. They’d just got back to the St Ives flat. Dad said he felt “very strange” during the underground bit and thought he might not make it. (I’ve just got an email from him saying that he was “very scared” and “I felt it would take very little for me to collapse on the floor and become a hospital case.”) The trains themselves were air-conditioned and not a problem, but it’s all a huge worry. And I’m not sure Mum cares all that much. For instance, when I told her about my tiredness and lack of energy, she may as well have had “NOT MY PROBLEM” spelt out in dazzling neon above her head. (A few days later, when she could see on the video calls that I wasn’t right, she was more sympathetic. Dad may well have said something in the meantime too.) Mum and Dad have two full days before they fly back to New Zealand. Mum is stressed because someone will be staying in the flat, maybe for months, soon after they leave.

As for me, there’s been an uptick in my energy levels. I’m no longer huffing and puffing just walking up (or even down) the stairs. That’s excellent news – I didn’t know when (or if) I’d ever come right. I just hope I don’t get messed up again by the searing heat we’ll face in the coming days. Today it reached “only” 33: the last day before the inferno.

Andy Burnham. He’s acting fast. As he must do. Labour have a majority of 160-plus and even the back-up of the Lib Dems (with over 70 seats) if absolutely necessary. In other words, Burnham’s got all the ammo he needs to effect real change. But under three years to do it. His big thing today was reform of the elderly care sector which is iniquitous as it currently stands. You go into a care home for any length of time and you’re bled dry of all your savings. (My grandmother was “lucky” that she didn’t last long there. Her intestinal problem came back and that was that.)

The next round of the Scrabble league starts tomorrow morning. I’ll be in division four. As ever, I’ll have my work cut out. The word KAT is valid. You can put an I either before or after KAT to make a valid four-letter word. TAKI and TIKA are the other two anagrams of that set. LIPA (as in the singer Dua Lipa) is valid. Its four anagrams all begin with P: PALI, PILA, PAIL, PIAL. B is the only letter you can put in front of LET to make a valid four. And so it goes on.