Cat - Life :) - Other sports

Fantastic Mr Fox

July 20, 2026 by 0 Comments

I watched the final round of the Open golf today. And guess what, a Kiwi won it for the first time since 1963. Ryan Fox. He held his nerve when so many around him didn’t. In fact he played the final holes spectacularly well. He didn’t look a likely winner when his chip shot spun back to where it started, somewhere around the turn – I can’t remember which hole. But there he was, on the final green, standing over a twelve-footer or so. He probably won’t get this… but he bloody well did. Good on him. I called Mum as soon as the putt dropped, because I knew she’d be happy to hear the news. What’s more, Fox shot a record-equalling 62 in the third round. I had to feel a little sorry for Cam Young who hit a superb final-round 64 and spent hours on the driving range and practice green in anticipation of a play-off – he could quite possibly have even won outright – only to get pipped at the last by Fox. And yes, Mum was pretty happy. She said her brother in Palmerston North would have been up all night watching it. (Bob Charles was the winner in ’63. When I lived there he was on TV all the time, selling his Bob Charles deer velvet capsules. He’s still alive at the age of 90.)

It’s been a good day all round, because I feel I’ve made a significant recovery from the last seven days which have been pure garbage, such has been my lack of energy. It’s been absolutely horrible. Thursday was the crappiest day of them all, but every day has been a contender. What really gave me a boost today was catching up with Mark – for the second-to-last time before he says goodbye to Romania – at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. He and his wife had just got back from their epic African adventure where they scaled Kilimanjaro and then went on safari. It was great to hear about it all, after so much negativity coming from all directions. Scaling the mountain was predictably tough. Brutal was the word Mark used. The ascent itself wasn’t all that challenging, but the altitude – nearly 6000 metres – made things pretty damn messy. They didn’t skimp on having properly paid porters, which they tipped as well. It was all a very well-run operation. The pictures of the safari were good too. The highlights were a woman having a picnic oblivious that there was a huge elephant behind her, and a vast herd of wildebeest crossing a river.

The World Cup final is about to start. Dad hasn’t stopped moaning about England’s loss to Argentina in the semi-final. They should have done this or that. Dad knows bugger all about football and never follows it at any other time. And he was still going on about it after England had won an utterly batshit mad ten-goal thriller against France. Yes it was a shame that England lost, but the sky hasn’t fallen in. It would be nice now though if Spain could thrash Argentina.

I’ll write more about my crappy week, and the supplements my doctor has given me, in my next post. As I write this, or try to, I’m being mauled by Kitty in one of her displays of affection. Like me, she’s been avoiding the heat in the last few days. We’ve been up into the mid-30s again.

Family - Other sports - Scrabble - Tennis

Loss of face

July 14, 2026 by 0 Comments

This morning I heard that brilliant New Zealand actor Sam Neill (of Jurassic Park fame, and much more) had died at 78. Those damn Aussies always liked to claim him. I read that his birth name was Nigel but at the age of twelve he started calling himself Sam. A smart move. Sam is a great name. Nigel Neill … isn’t.

Everyone is popping off at about the age of Mum and Dad. Just yesterday I said to Dad that I’m lucky to still have both parents. Not just alive, but in pretty good health. At my age, that must put me in the minority. Just anecdotally, I have a few students of a similar age to me and I think all of them only have one living parent. When I called Dad, Mum was at church. I wasn’t trying to avoid her or anything; I’d just forgotten that it was that time of day and week. That did give us an opportunity to talk about Mum, though. We said that so much of Mum’s stress comes down to loss of face, which a lot of the time isn’t real anyway. It would make sense for Mum and Dad to spend three days or so at my brother’s place (including his birthday on the 27th) just before they go back to NZ. Not much more than that; their previous stay was seriously unfun for both of them. Plus it might end up being far too hot again. But Mum is likely to insist they spend a whole week down there, for fear of upsetting my brother. It’s a similar story with their old friends and whoever else. She feels she has to do this and avoid talking about that so that this or that person won’t think X or Y or Z about her. I mentioned to Dad how refreshing it was to attend those autism groups back in the day, when all that crap went straight out the window. (It certainly flies out the window with Mum too when she isn’t with anyone except Dad or me. So it was a huge relief that my parents’ stay in Romania went as successfully as it did. Mum and I have been getting on well.)

Yesterday I was exhausted. I had very little energy. I couldn’t even make myself watch all of the men’s Wimbledon final. The women’s final though unexpectedly burst into life when Linda Noskova led Karolina Muchova 6-2 5-2 and had five match points in the following three games. Games eight and nine of the second set were pure drama. The set slipped through Noskova’s fingers. How does she come back from this? But she did. Noskova served brilliantly on the big points early in the third set, and this time she didn’t relinquish her lead. I was pleased that Noskova, still early in her career, was able to win. A loss in those circumstances may have haunted her for years otherwise. (The butterfly effect was on full display in the women’s tournament. Noskova had been one point from exiting the tournament in the third round. Muchova also faced match point in her semi with Coco Gauff.) The final brought to mind the 2005 US Open semi-final between Kim Clijsters and Maria Sharapova. Clijsters had five match points in the second set, all in a single game, and ended up losing the set. But she won it in three and won her first grand slam two days later. That was an excellent tournament on both the men’s and women’s sides.

Dad asked me if I’d stayed up to watch England in the “soccer”, as he calls it. (The whole soccer-is-American, football-is-British thing is actually pretty new. It’s a bit like the notion that -ize is purely American. Pick up any UK-published book from the eighties or earlier and it’ll likely be full of -ize spellings. Even a lot of modern UK-English books are, especially those published by Oxford.) Anyway, I certainly didn’t stay up to watch it. Kick-off was midnight my time. England though are just two matches from winning the whole thing, so who knows? (I really am clueless about it this time. I haven’t watched a single ball be kicked. Or headed or shinned or anything else.)

I’ve got a couple more days before the Scrabble league starts up again. Learning the words continues to be a painstaking effort. I’ve made some recent progress with the fours, and tomorrow I’ll add a few more sevens and eights. A few people have now been expelled from the league for cheating, and someone wondered why anyone would bother to cheat. This isn’t poker; there’s no money at stake. Then somebody else said it’s all about ego. They’re probably right. As someone with very little ego, ego-based decisions – which can sink companies or even whole countries and more – often baffle me.

This evening a new student will be coming. I never know what I might get.

Cat - Music - Photos - Scrabble - Tennis

Left to my own devices

July 11, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’m now writing this on the new laptop. I still need to install a bunch of stuff and there are endless settings that I need to monkey around with to stop it from driving me mad, but I get the feeling it’ll be decent. Unlike my phone. It’ll now only charge at a snail’s pace and I can no longer transfer photos or videos from it to my laptop – the hole which the charger goes into seems to be buggered, even though it looks fine.

Yesterday I went to Sânmihaiu Român, my first long bike trip for ages. When I was there I got a coffee and called Mum and Dad who had been watching a lot of Wimbledon. They’ve been telling me about thrilling matches and deciding tie-breaks, but it’s passed me by. I also started The Cloud Atlas, a rather complex-looking novel that Dad gave me while he was here. I did actually watch bits of the men’s semi-finals after I got back. Even though Djokovic was well beaten by Jannik Sinner, it is pretty remarkable how he is still able to compete at such a high level at 39. The first match saw Alexander Zverev beat Arthur Fery, the Franco-British wildcard, also in straight sets. Fery collects £900,000 for getting so far.

In the last few days I’ve been listening to Shakespears Sister, a British duo who were pretty big in the early nineties. I remember our English teacher despairing at the spelling of the name – no apostrophe or final e – though Shakespeare himself was very inconsistent in how he spelt his name. Spelling wasn’t standardised back then. Stay was their biggest hit – it was number one in the charts for ages – and I also liked Hello (Turn Your Radio On), a song that mentions the pound “looking weak”. That was a hot topic back in the day.

Bonnie Tyler has passed away at the age of 75. Her rasping voice was instantly recognisable. Plus, she was Welsh. I used to think of her It’s a Heartache whenever I boiled an egg for too long.

I finished third in the end in the Scrabble league. A young woman by the name of Elise who travels around North America and the world to play Scrabble pipped me for second. We both got promoted.

Georgia at the Festivalul Inimilor

Kitty yesterday

At 10pm, during the heat wave

Family - Music - Other sports - Scrabble

Georgia on my mind

July 9, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s much cooler now than when I last wrote. Today it even felt autumnal – in early July – and honestly that’s fine by me. Cooler weather makes an enormous difference at night, although last night I slept terribly all the same. It’s warmer in western Europe – Mum and Dad weren’t particularly enjoying the heat in St Ives today. They’d been watching lots of Wimbledon. My brother called me a little earlier. Neither of us had a lot to say. We talked about Nigel Farage and Count Binface, who may be the only candidate to stand against Farage in the farcical Clacton by-election. It was great to see my brother in a much better mood. Finally he has some certainty over his future.

I’ve now got my new Lenovo laptop, which I’m happy with so far, though I still need to change one or two settings and remove even more annoying bloatware. As I type (still on my old machine), I’m in the process of copying all my documents and photos over to the new one using flash drives. I’m not a fan of the cloud. It isn’t taking quite as long as I feared.

Last week – from Wednesday to Sunday inclusive – they had the Festivalul Inimilor in Parcul Rozelor. I went the last three nights. It’s a festival of traditional music from Romania and elsewhere. Some of the performers are literally from just down the road, whereas others have come thousands of miles. When I lived at the old place, I’d see them all parading past my flat in their costumes; it was a great display of sound and colour. This time there were even country singers who had come from the US, which given that the festival coincided with the 250th anniversary celebrations kind of made sense. There were groups from Slovakia, Albania, and even Colombia. My favourite of all was the group from Georgia, which I saw on both Friday and Sunday. The music was just… different. I felt that I was listening to something from a faraway land. A bagpipe featured heavily, as it does in a lot of places (Romania has a type of bagpipe called a cimpoi) and there were instruments similar to a lute or mandolin. After to listening to the music I was thinking it would be interesting to visit Georgia, but then a quick look at the map tells me that it’s rather close to some places I’d prefer to avoid, so I’d have to do some more research. A big part of the festival is the food and drink available on the street. I had a very overpriced pottle of anchovies. I couldn’t complain too much though because watching all the singing and dancing didn’t cost a penny. I may post some pictures next time.

It was good to wake up yesterday morning and see that the US had been thumped 4-1 by Belgium following the overturned red card that stank of the sort of corruption that you expect from FIFA. That must have motivated the Belgians like you wouldn’t believe. Red cards do get overturned occasionally, but usually not after a phone call with the president of the country concerned. There are backhanders all over the show. Just look at the World Cups awarded to Russia and Qatar. This time around it’s all far too big and there’s far too much money involved and as good as the football has probably been, I can’t bring myself to watch any of it. My brother and I agreed that maybe we’ll watch the final if England make it. England haven’t been in the final for 60 years, so we’ll kind of have to in that case. (Like me, he hasn’t seen a single ball kicked so far either.)

I’m getting promoted in the Scrabble, back to the third division, with a record of nine wins and five losses with a healthy positive points spread. I may well finish second in the league. And that’s despite a pair of quite painful defeats by just two and five points. How was I to know that QUARK took an S in front of it (that was responsible for my five-point loss) or that BIRLINGS might be a word (my opponent in my two-point loss landed that on me at the end, after I’d had a huge lead late in the game)? I squeaked by that 16-year-old Australian guy by 25 points after I remembered from somewhere that PYIC was a word. In that game, I played a late bingo of ABETTORS, but apparently that was a huge error and I should have played IT instead (seriously, just IT) and I was lucky to get away with my play. All in all, I was pretty lucky to draw so many Xs and Zs which are simply great tiles and don’t require great skill or experience to make the most of. I will surely face relegation again soon; there are just too many good players. The big question is whether or not I should go over to the dark side and actually play a real-life tournament sometime.

Books - Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Bully boy

July 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s 39 degrees here as I write this. I’m pretty much confined to just the living room, which has air con. At one stage the air con was dripping like a tap but clearing the outlet pipe thankfully stopped that. Nights aren’t easy. The night before last I had Bic Runga’s Get Some Sleep in my head for some reason. She sang of being “stranded in June”. It still is June here. In this part of town the heat has meant that people are out and about pretty late. Even small children. The nearby park was a hive of activity at 10pm on Sunday.

On Saturday I went to Buzad and drove Dorothy and her friend back to Timișoara. It was such a hot day, not far off today’s temperatures, and when I got back home at nearly four I was basically gone for the day, I was so exhausted from the heat.

Mum and Dad are back in St Ives after their tough time down south. Mum has picked up a cold. The good news though is that my brother’s commanding officer has gone into bat for him and it looks like he’ll be able to leave the army – and start his new job in early August – after all. I spoke to him this morning and he certainly seemed a bit perkier. He said he’s been through a horrible three months, not knowing what the hell was going on. Our chat lasted 20 minutes – much longer than anything we’ve managed of late.

It’s not just the job stuff. His son is incredibly demanding. Probably similar to me and my brother combined when we were little. There’s just no downtime with him. He’s extremely bright, and that poses a problem. My brother is extremely proud of him, and why shouldn’t he be, but I think he’s a bit too proud, to the point where the sun shines out of his arse and he can do no wrong. In reality my nephew is a bully; he often hurts his little sister and enjoys it too. He receives no real discipline from either of his parents. There’s no wooden spoon like me and my brother got. I suppose you just can’t do that these days. In around 14 months my nephew will start school. He’ll be one of the oldest in his class, and inevitably one of the biggest. In contrast to all of this, my niece is lovely. I don’t know when I’ll next get to see them.

I did win that Scrabble game with the 16-year-old Australian, by just six points. I didn’t exactly navigate that endgame in optimal fashion, but I find endgames particularly difficult because I simply don’t know enough words. I finished second bottom of the league, he finished bottom, and we’ll do battle again in the division below, starting on Thursday.

I’ve ordered a new laptop. The mouse pad on this one is starting to hurt my hands after nearly five years of use, and it’s been compromised to some degree ever since Kitty spilled water on it, so really I had no choice. It’s coming on Thursday, which will be quite a busy day. I paid 4850 lei (£800 or around NZ$1900) for it. Far from the cheapest, but I really can’t skimp on a laptop which is vital for my job.

Andy Burnham can do human, which means that he’s halfway there. Whether he can do the other half (and be allowed to do it) remains to be seen, but I’m optimistic. I totally agreed with Dad when he said they should hammer the banks who are making huge, unjustified profits. Especially after my debacle with a UK bank in 2022-23.

I’m glad to got to the end of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, whose title is about as misleading as it gets. It was hard to properly empathise with the author. He was born in 1982, just two years after me, but we’re poles apart in just about every way. He’s also very different from my brother, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, just like he did.

Kitty is great, but the heat is even getting to her.

Books - Family - Life :) - Scrabble

A deep, dark, hot place

June 27, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad called me yesterday. They’re still at my brother’s place, but he was out at the time. They told me what’s been happening with my brother who has entered a deep, dark place. Worse than when he had the business with his ex, I wondered. Yes, far worse, they said. And for the love of God, don’t come here later in the summer.

We all thought it was family-related. His wife, her family (who come over all the time), his son being particularly hard work, and so on. But no, it’s to do with his job. He was very excited to get that job with BAE back at the beginning of April; he’d be starting in early August. I was very happy for him too. But now the Army won’t release him in time, mainly (from what I can tell) because his boss’s boss is being a bastard. He’ll be forced to stay for an extra six months, doing very little of importance, so he’ll miss out on that bright future that he’d studied so hard for. The military is a very weird place, and my brother has no time for it anymore. It’s all so upsetting. Not just that it has happened to him, but that it’s affected him so profoundly. This is my brother, whose mental health has always been unimaginably good. Every disappointment like water off a duck’s back. And now this.

My parents said he is hardly talking to them. Or anyone else. It’s been a crappy week down south for them. The searing heat has left them practically imprisoned in a single room, and they haven’t been able to travel back to St Ives because it’s been dangerously hot for them (especially Dad) to do so. They did go to the cinema on Thursday and see Toy Story 5, a sad film about kids being glued to their screens and no longer playing with toys, but that’s then only “thing” they’ve done. (They took my nephew. It would have all been beyond him.) Tomorrow is Dad’s 76th birthday. The following day, with the temperatures down in the 20s, they’ll finally get away.

In the last few days my parents and I have compared notes, all of us becoming very heatist. Yes, it’s been hellishly hot all over Europe, including the UK, where they broke the 1976 record for June three days running. (Mum can’t stop talking about that freakishly long heat wave fifty summers ago. Even Mark mentioned it last weekend – he’d just started school. Damon Albarn referred to it in one of his songs. It’s certainly part of British lore.) This weekend we’ll hit at least 37; on Monday and Tuesday we could just about melt in 40 degrees. The worst thing about the heat isn’t the days but the nights. Broken sleep, leaving me exhausted. On Thursday afternoon I had my first lesson with the girl who was in the ballet. An hour and a half with her big brother, followed by an hour with her, and that got me a useful 200 lei. Their mum asked me if I wanted to do two sessions each next week, but I couldn’t face the idea of cycling to Mehala in the early part of the week. Maybe on Thursday (when it should be cooler) I’ll ask if we could meet on Friday too. (The 200 lei…) I gave the boy a test, which isn’t something I do very often. He took it super seriously and got 93% – very impressive. His little sister seemed to be excited at the prospect of having me as her teacher; that isn’t something I always see.

What else? I’ve seen the devastating pictures from the already devastated Venezuela following the two huge earthquakes there. You always see the amazing scenes of children being extricated from the rubble, but those are the all too rare exceptions. Tens of thousands are missing.

I’ve been reading Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, which is all about the author’s time as an army officer, first training at Sandhurst, then serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gripping stuff, but a bit too close to home for me, and all the unnecessary pop culture references – look at me, how worldly I am – grate after a while, even if he writes extremely well.

Scrabble. I’m getting relegated again. I’m sure it won’t be the last time. My opponents are just too good. I’ve had four wins and nine losses, with one game still outstanding (and very close in the endgame) against a 16-year-old from Australia who will go down with me. In one game against a guy from Hungary I scoured the board looking for what he could do before playing my final move. Surely this will win it for me, won’t it? But then he stuck a D on the end of QUICHE on his last move to beat me by three points. Really? That’s a word now? I felt well and truly quiched. What’s more, earlier in the game I’d got 102 for BRATTISH and 92 for sATIRIC and I still couldn’t win. In the 14 games my opponents played 33 bingos. (By the way, heatist isn’t valid, but it has two anagrams that are: atheist and staithe, which is a kind of wharf.)

Life :) - Photos - Politics - Travel: Romania

23/6/16 (plus photos)

June 23, 2026 by 0 Comments

Ten years ago today, the Brexit vote happened. I’d expected it to be close, as you can see from my blog posts in the days before the referendum. (My uni mate, who is far more intelligent than me but lived in a kind of bubble, said that Remain would get 60% or more.) I was at work, on a Friday in Wellington, when the results came through. The first two declarations in the north-east were earth-shatteringly bad for Remain. Oh shit. When the next ten or so councils had announced their figures, it was basically all over. (The numbers were very close at that point, but if you had any idea at all of how voting in Britain plays out – rural areas declare later – you’d have known the writing was on the wall. And I’d been through it all a few dozen Fridays before when David Cameron won an unexpected majority, initiating the referendum in the first place.) My boss had scheduled us all to give sodding talks that afternoon, and I had to do mine and half-listen to everyone else’s, when my mind was well and truly elsewhere. I was halfway round the world and very few of my colleagues gave a damn, while there was me wanting to move to an EU country a few months later.

The arguments by both sides in the lead-up to the vote were facile. From the Leave side, it was all emotion, take back control, big unproven numbers on the side of a red bus. The Remain camp demonstrably failed to make an emotional case for staying in. (And it was easy to make! Peace was all they needed to say.) Instead you had remainers talking about falling house prices if they left the EU. I dunno, if I was a 23-year-old with little prospect of ever buying a property I’d have thought, sounds good to me. And then there were the remainers who called leavers stupid. But the whole campaign was just awful from start to finish. It whipped people up into a frenzy, creating divisions that hadn’t previously existed. EU membership just wasn’t that big a deal beforehand.

Then there was the aftermath. It was like an earthquake that nobody had prepared for, and nobody was there to clean up the mess. Cameron announced his resignation within hours of the result. Since then, Britain has gone through a slew of prime ministers including the laughable Liz Truss. They’re about to get another one who I happen to really like, but dammit he’s facing a tough task. Dangerous enemies to the west and east, the enshittification of everything thanks to toxic social media and AI slop, a stagnating economy, and still very much out of the EU where Britain has, guess what, some actual friends.

Ten years later, the Brexit vote is still a common topic of conversation. It came up with my parents when they were here. To my mind, where Brexit has done the most damage to Britain isn’t actually that they’ve left the EU, it’s the way is was done and how divided it has made the country. It was all so terribly unnecessary. And now, many of those who voted to leave are angry that it isn’t working and want an even more extreme option in Farage.

I spoke to Dad yesterday. He was struggling, as he so often does, with the heat. My brother has a conservatory which turns the whole place into a heat trap. He would love to replace it – it makes summer uncomfortable for him too – but doing so would be horrendously expensive. I saw my niece and my nephew who were both nonplussed. That’s your uncle, look at him! My nephew is still an extremely live wire.

As great as Mum and Dad’s visit was, it’s good to have my own space again. Washing and cleaning have gone from being front and centre, as Mum made them, to a gentle drum beat once more. I also no longer have to worry about putting things on shelves that Mum can’t reach (which was quite easy to accidentally do). They said that if there’s a next time they’ll try and come earlier and go straight to Timișoara as they did last year. Coming later though meant that they benefited from all the fruit that they really enjoyed, and even the sweet scent of the lime trees, so there are always pros and cons. When we were in Cluj I said, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a swimming pool? I haven’t swum in a pool for absolutely ages. I might try and go to the ștrand (basically a pool) in the coming days. I just hope I can cope with the music they play.

I just hope I don’t get any more bad headaches for a while. Dad wondered why they’re becoming such a feature of my life at my stage of the game.

The Opera House

Timișoara at dusk

Lipova

The war memorial: the Romanians, Serbs, Germans and Hungarians are on separate sides

A couple of cat pictures

Family - Headaches - Life :) - Travel: Romania

A night at the opera, and more

June 22, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s the longest day here – the shortest in the southern hemisphere – and it’s been an eventful one weather-wise. In late afternoon we’ve had a thunderstorm and driving rain that have sent the temperature tumbling 15 degrees from a high of 34. It’s sheeting down as I write this.

Mum and Dad took the WizzAir flight from Timișoara to Luton very early on Friday morning. Later that day my brother arrived in St Ives, and then the next day Mum and Dad were whisked off to Poole. Great that my brother picked them up, saving them either a bus or a train journey, but they might have preferred a couple of days to recuperate.

Yes, I was really happy with my parents’ stay. I was far better prepared than last time. Fewer lessons certainly helped. After we’d got back from Cluj – I’ll remember that epic journey for a while – I tried to give them interesting things to do and places to go. There was Ciacova last Saturday, with those huge pastries from the bakery, then the following day (Mum’s birthday) we had a meal at Berăria 700 before settling down to a night at the opera. My parents had been before a long time ago, but it was a totally new experience for me. We saw Adriana Lecouvreur, not exactly a well-known opera and probably not the best for a first-timer to see. When I read what it was about before I went, it said that I would be utterly baffled by the plot. Which indeed I was, even though it subtitled in both Romanian and a particularly flowery (though correct) version of English above the stage. Adriana was a real French actress 300 years ago, but her story in the opera was entirely made up. To be honest though, the plot was secondary to the talented singers, all extremely colourfully clad, and just being there in such a beautiful building. The performance was made up of four acts, with intervals after acts two and three, and took just over three hours. The sheer scale of the production was impressive. We sat at the bottom, but I think I’d have preferred being higher up so I could have seen the orchestra pit. The first half dragged a bit, but the dancing brought the show to life in act three. Tickets were 70 lei (£12 or NZ$27) each – extraordinary value.

When we got back from the opera, Mum was keen to go back there the next day to see a ballet gala. We booked online, grabbing some of the last available tickets, to sit two floors above the stage. They were just 20 lei each. Before the ballet, I decided to take Mum and Dad out for an excursion. We left at 10:30 and made a stop in Buzad where Dorothy has her house. We did a lap of the village on foot. As always, my parents had a good look at the houses. They marvelled at the sheer number of plum trees everywhere. From there we went to Lipova, which I last went to during the winter. It was slow going with all the road works and potholes. Lipova is a lovely town. We had coffee at the old Turkish bazaar which had furniture made out of old farm machinery. Dad and I wanted to get pastries from the bakery, but Mum vetoed that idea. I thought of going to the fortress at Șoimoș, just outside Lipova, but we didn’t have time. The journey back was long, with constant stoppages. We got back at 4:30; the ballet would start at seven. Inexplicably, Mum then flipped her lid because she’d planned to cook up a chicken for dinner and we might not have time for that. She told Dad and me, “You expect me to produce a meal for you,” when in fact we had no expectations at all, then said, “Most women wouldn’t put up with this.” Yikes. Her behaviour was beyond irrational. Thankfully it all blew over, the chicken did in fact get cooked, and we took the tram into town in plenty of time for the ballet. (Mum got agitated on a number of occasions while she was here, but that was as close as she got to crossing the line. Last time she crossed it twice, and from my perspective that made a mess of my parents’ whole stay.) The gala was basically two and a half hours of girls of all ages doing ballet at all levels. They all went to ballet school in Mehala. One of the girls was the little sister of a boy I teach; soon I’ll be teaching her too.

On Tuesday Mum and Dad went into town by themselves. They came back saying how wonderful Timișoara is now, and I thought, yes, you’re right. So many buildings have been renovated and now look really smart. Because I live here, I get blasé about it all. On Wednesday I’d planned to take Mum and Dad to Recaș – they have a big barbecue there on Wednesdays and Saturdays, as well as the winery – but at around 11:30 I got struck down suddenly by a horrific headache that lasted about four hours. Having my parents here made it harder to deal with. Being in the middle of a bright sunny day didn’t help either; darkness is my friend when I have a bad headache. By the evening I’d recovered sufficiently for us to go out for another meal at Berăria 700. The highlight of that meal were the desserts. We had to wait ages for them. I got papanași which are dumplings with sour cream and a kind of jam, Dad had a stack of pancakes topped off with a kind of meringue (a speciality of the Banat region), while Mum had cremeș which is a puff pastry dessert. They were delicious. And enormous. We took some of it all back in a doggy bag for the next day. On Thursday morning I did take Mum and Dad to Recaș. No barbecue but they still had a good look round the park and the churches, and we got a two-litre bottle of white wine (for just 21 lei) from the tap in the winery.

On Wednesday Dad got an email about roof repairs being needed on one of their places in St Ives – the one on which the sale was agreed ages ago – and that really set things off. If the sale ends up not going through after all – that remains a possibility – I have no idea how my parents will handle that. One thing’s for sure, I don’t want to be dealing with that sort of crap when I’m heading for 80.

Mum struggled a lot with her tummy business; she seems to be perpetually constipated. Because she is rarely keen to visit the doctor, I don’t know how her situation improves.

Mum kept reiterating how appreciative she was of the effort I’d put in to make her and Dad’s stay as comfortable as possible. Mum is a good person and she loves me dearly. I’m very happy with how things panned out with her. And by the way, she seemed to really love Kitty. I shouldn’t have been surprised – she was fond of the cat we had when I was little – but both she and Dad were very anti me ever getting one.

After Andy Burnham winning that by-election by a mile, he’s highly likely to become the UK’s next prime minister. Personally speaking, he’s the most likeable PM (or potential PM) in a very long time. And there have been a lot. He’s not slick, he’s not an amazing orator, he doesn’t have airs and graces, he just talks frankly, which is what you want. Or what I would want, at any rate. If he does become PM, he faces a monumental task. He’s battling a hostile media, endless cynicism around politics, and a highly unstable world over which he has little control. I wish him all the best.

This morning, having slept dreadfully, I met Mark in Dumbrăvița where we played squash for the last time, then had beers outside at the restaurant nearby. He and his wife will be off on their big Africa trip this coming Friday. He’s now done with teaching definitively, and is applying for a cheese-making job (quite a departure) just outside Preston.

Family - Headaches - Life :)

A successful stay

June 19, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad are off to the UK very early tomorrow morning. We’ll have to be up at around four. They’re choosing a good time to leave as the temperature is rapidly rising beyond Dad’s comfort zone. Their stay here has been a success and the highlight of the year so far for me. Since I last wrote we’ve been to the opera and the ballet, had meals out, and been on various road trips. Oh, and I’ve had another terrible headache. That was yesterday. More details next time. And Mum seems to really like Kitty. Whether I see my parents in the UK before they return to New Zealand in six weeks’ time I really don’t know at this stage.

In the last couple of days an Iran peace deal has been signed; all reputable news sources have reported the deal using loads of inverted commas. And tonight Andy Burnham might win that by-election in Manchester. If he does, he may well become the UK’s next prime minister.

Family - Photos - Travel: Romania

Cluj trip report — Part 2 of 2 (and other stuff)

June 14, 2026 by 0 Comments

Today is Mum’s birthday – she’s exactly three years younger than the orange man – and tonight we’ll be going to the opera. The performance will last three hours and I’d be very surprised if any of us has the foggiest idea of what’s happening. But the novelty factor and just being inside the beautiful building will surely be worth it.

Yesterday (after my two lessons) we went to Ciacova, that fascinating small town with the big square in the middle and the 14th-century fortress. You’re stepping back in time there. We had enormous pastries from a bakery on the square – these little places still all have proper bakeries – and then had coffee at a bar two or three doors down. Three cappuccinos. But these weren’t normal cappuccinos. I could smell the Tia Maria, or whatever it was, a mile off. They were very nice (we sat on barstools that were far too high for the table), but when I asked the bartender what she’d put in, she dodged the issue. With Romania’s nil alcohol limit for driving, I was a bit concerned. Mum paid for our coffees by card – not all places even let you do that – and was surprised to check her bank app and see they had come to NZ$6. You wouldn’t get a single coffee for that in New Zealand. In the evening we had a longish walk along some of the pleasant tree-lined streets near me (including Strada Inocențiu Micu Klein which I always find interesting) and down to the river. The sweet pungent aroma of the lime trees was combined with the smell of mici being barbecued. Mum and Dad commented on the power lines going straight through the trees and all the foliage. That wouldn’t exactly fly in New Zealand, but OSH hasn’t yet made it to Romania. You’re living in Cowboyland, Dad said to me. I suppose I’ve got used to it.

Cluj (or Cluj-Napoca to give it its full name) has a similar population to Timișoara, but it’s got a whole lot of stuff that my home city doesn’t have. Concerts, music festivals, and big swanky football stadium which sits right next to a modern events centre. It’s way better for young people than Timișoara; it has a far bigger student culture, even though Timișoara has a large student population in its two universities. Then after you’ve studied at Cluj, you can stay there and get a well-paid job in IT (you can become an ITist, as the Romanians say), though the market may be getting saturated now. Cluj is also very tourist-friendly – even signs like “Centru” and “Aeroport”, which needed no translation, were translated into English. Car parks were FULL, not OCUPAT or PLIN as you might have expected. It’s a better maintained city than Timișoara and the streets are impressively leafy. The two downsides of Cluj are: (1) it’s expensive by Romanian standards, and (2) all the traffic in the centre of town gets to you after a while.

My parents called my brother when we were in Cluj. He looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. We didn’t know whether it was his wife expecting too much of him, or her parents being there far too often, or Mum and Dad not having visited him yet, or some combination, or just feeling low for no real reason. He’d been like that the last few times I’d spoken to him; it reminded me of all the business with his fiancée all those years ago. It certainly put a bit of a damper on things. At least this morning he looked more alive as he called Mum for her birthday.

The drive back from Cluj was fascinating in many ways exhausting. I really felt it the next day. There was all the congestion on the way out of Cluj, then the winding roads that seemed to go on for ever, then the potholed surface after we had our meal, and finally the deluge.

I haven’t fallen out with Mum (yet!) which is great. She does get stressed, but unlike last year we haven’t reached that tipping point. If anything I’m more worried that I might fall out with Dad. I really wish he’d delete that damn Daily Mail app.

Above are some assorted pictures of Cluj, from the airport to the city centre (the church where everything inside was a mosaic was quite striking) and the Botanic Gardens which were a great place to relax in on a hot day.

They still have old display technology at the train station in Cluj. These boards are now thin on the ground. Timișoara airport got rid of its flappy boards a couple of years ago.

Cluj on day two

The trip back. I don’t know how that Antonov plane ever got up there. The last picture is one of the many poles with stork nests atop them. There were four storks in this one.