Books - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A surprise visit

September 22, 2026 by 0 Comments

On Friday I got a surprise message from my university friend. He said his girlfriend’s parents, who stayed with me two years ago, were coming vaguely my way; they were in the middle of yet another epic trek across Europe. He had no more details than that. This threw me a bit. What if they want to stay with me? This place is an absolute pigsty. On Saturday evening I managed to get in touch with them. They said they wanted to meet up somewhere convenient in town the following lunchtime, specifically so they could eat papanași, that (usually) fried traditional Romanian doughnut-like dessert. Yesterday was a scorcher for the time of year; we must have got close to 30. After picking a few kilos of fully ripe plums in Mehala, I met them at Berăria 700, which I’ve now been to countless times. They were a little late; they didn’t realise that we were an hour ahead of Serbia where they’d just come from. Unlike last time when they travelled in a campervan, this time they were going by a single 1200 cc motorbike and camping. We mostly spoke English, though sometimes I switched to French, their native language. I wasn’t that bad considering how rusty I was (and also my experience of speaking a different Romance language gets in the way). They said how much they liked Timișoara and had been keen to visit again. Having visitors who compliment the city makes me less blasé about living here. We were at the restaurant a long time; the good weather meant it was fairly busy and service is rarely swift at the best of times. Eventually we parted company – they hadn’t actually planned where they were going next, apart from to Decathlon (the sports shop) to buy a new airbed.

Decathlon is where I’ve just been myself. To get swimming trunks. On Friday I got pulled up by (I guess) one of the staff who said I was wearing inadequate swimming attire. My boardshorts, which were all I had, apparently fell foul of some regulation or other. Whether it was hygiene (I could have worn the shorts elsewhere beforehand I suppose) or just aesthetics I have no idea. What I’ve just bought aren’t quite Speedos, though they head in that direction. I went four times again last week. After all of that I was pretty knackered.

My work volumes are still relatively low considering that the kids are now back at school. That’s mainly down to the difficulty in scheduling everyone. The schools are so unprepared that people don’t know what they’re doing when, and that has a knock-on effect on me. It looks like my hours will go up this week, and probably again next week, so I should be fine. The most pleasing thing is that I’m actively trying to increase my hours – a few weeks ago I felt so crappy that I wondered if I’d ever do a full week of teaching again. Tomorrow I’ve got a maths lesson with the A-star girl. These lessons now take place in the back office of a petrol station. Her parents own either that station or a whole chain, quite possibly the latter. We were supposed to meet last Thursday but she was off to see Céline Dion in Paris. As you do when you’ve got loads of money.

I recently finished Flesh, which I found extremely readable if short of amazing. The fact that the protagonist was Hungarian was a plus for me; it felt literally pretty close to home. I’ve just started First Among Equals. It’s my first attempt at reading a Jeffrey Archer novel. This one came out in 1984 and Dorothy lent it to me. Will I be able to get through this? That was my initial thought. It’s all about political ambition. I find certain aspects of politics interesting, certainly. The way elections work for one, but also the psychology of how people vote and the way political outcomes can shape our lives. But the inner workings of the political machine rather leaves me cold. I saw Dorothy today – she’s leaving for the UK very early on Wednesday morning – and she very kindly (!) lent me another political novel, this one written by Douglas Hurd in the seventies. I remember Hurd as a senior Conservative politician when I was a kid. He ran for the Tory leadership in 1990 after Margaret Thatcher resigned. Our local MP John Major beat out Hurd as well as Michael Heseltine to become prime minister. Both Hurd (96) and Heseltine (93) are still alive. I’m sure the Hurd book is very good, but can I really face more politics?

Last week I found myself watching a Wimbledon semi-final match from 1975. The last three sets of Arthur Ashe’s close five-set victory over Tony Roche were on YouTube. What a breath of fresh air it was to watch. They rattled off the points incredibly quickly, taking less time between rallies than I would. Though you could see the players tiring, particularly Roche, the tennis had little of the physicality – bordering on brutality – that you see in the modern game. Instead it was all about net play (which has become virtually suicidal in modern singles) and crafting points. The fourth set was decided on a tie-break, but this was played at 8-8 rather than 6-6. (They did that at Wimbledon from 1971 to 1978.) Roche played a superb tie-break to extend the match, but dropped his serve in the opening game of the fifth set. Still, Ashe played a tight game as he served out the match and could easily have let Roche back in. What impressed me the most was Ashe’s interview after the match. So few clichés. This is a highly intelligent man talking here. He talked about Jimmy Connors trying to sue him for $5 million. Ashe went on to beat Connors in the final and become champion. Sadly he suffered from various health problems. He had a heart attack and underwent major heart surgery. Some years later he contracted Aids. He died in 1993 aged just 49.

Talking of Aids, I mentioned to my brother the alarming cholesterol reading I’d got from my blood test. It could have been worse, he said. He knew someone who had a routine blood test and it came back with him being HIV positive. This was a married bloke with kids. Um, what?!? Just imagine. He found out six weeks later that there had been some stuff-up and something that was supposed to be reset before the test hadn’t been. Mistakes happen, but this sort of thing can cause people to take their own lives. My brother is right; it could have been a lot worse. Tomorrow I’ll see my doctor and will ask him what I should do.

Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Clogging up as I write…

September 14, 2026 by 0 Comments

On Thursday I got my blood test results back, and apparently I’ve got cholesterol out the wazoo. My LDL level in particular is scarily high. It should ideally be under 100. According to the piece of paper, levels above that are divided into gradations of badness – up to 130, then 160, then 190. Anything above that is deemed very high risk. My LDL is 202. My total cholesterol is 275. In New Zealand and the UK they use a different scale, and my reading is equivalent to 7.1. When I worked in life insurance, we got blood tests thrown in. Cholesterol was what got everyone’s attention. In 2005 my figure of 5.5 (I still remember it) was the second-highest in the office and raised some eyebrows. The only person with a higher reading was the guy I sat next to – he was roughly the age I am now – who farted all the time. My latest figure blows that number out of the water. So what do I do now? It’s tough, because I eat a pretty healthy diet. Plenty of fruit and vegetables. Extremely little of what they now call ultra-processed foods. Not a lot of sugar. I do however eat a fair bit of dairy, so should I cut that out entirely? Naturally I’ve been searching for information and watching YouTube videos, such as this one that explains that not all LDL is created equal and I really need a more comprehensive test which I may or may not be able to get in Romania. I also played around with a UK site where you plug in your personal data and your risk of heart disease pops out. It said that because I’m not overweight, I don’t smoke and my blood pressure is normal, my risk is only just above the national average.

I got the blood test if there was something causing all the fatigue, and instead I found something else. A big something else. I’ve actually been feeling better of late. There’s still the weird back pain, but things have been normal apart from that. Having enough energy to go swimming four times last week means I can’t be that bad. Because it’s a properly laned competition-style pool, I’m forced to do lengths, when it would be nice to just sort of paddle around. On Friday the guy in the lane next to me was probably going at twice my speed. He used the stopwatch on his smart watch and even keyed numbers into the calculator on his phone which he left at the side of the pool. I’m not much better than the dog I saw swimming in the Bega today as I sat by the river and read my book. It’s very pleasant all of a sudden to do that, now that the temperature has dropped. It feels great to want to be in the sun.

I still have the odd night of badly interrupted sleep. Thursday night was pretty dreadful. I made it to the pool the next morning, but things were a struggle. I was glad to have a long break between lessons. A big gap until 5:30. But then a message appeared on my phone. You’re coming at 4:30, right? Oh god, it’s the mother of that new boy I’d agreed to teach. I’d completely forgotten, probably because when I said yes I was feeling terrible. Damn damn damn. The lesson would take one hour, but I wouldn’t be able to get to my other lessons (with the brother and sister) on time. I contacted their mother and was apologetic. She said it would be OK to start a bit later. The new boy’s place was practically impossible to find. His mum had said number 5 of such-and-such street, and I’d envisaged a detached house. Instead there were endless modern tower blocks with either no numbers or multiple numbers and names. I didn’t have a clue. I called the mother. Where are you? How do I even explain? I’m next to a cream-and-red block and just opposite a brown-and-white one, on the corner of a bigger road and a smaller one. There’s also something called “The Ring”. In English. There’s no other information. “Imagine actually living here,” I then blurted out. I wasn’t joking. Even though I live in a block myself, living something like that would be a mental-health disaster for me. Luckily, because she lived on the eighth (top) floor, she spotted me even though I was nowhere near her block. She said the whole area – estate I suppose – was completed in 2018. So when I moved to Timișoara it didn’t exist, or maybe it was a building site. (I read recently that the first wave of communist blocks in Russia each took just twelve days to build.) It was clinically modern inside the flat, with the obligatory Nespresso machine. (My book has just mentioned Nespresso machines. I remember when I lived in Wellington, there was a Nespresso store on my drive home from work. One time we got stuck in traffic outside it. We could see all the coloured pods or capsules or whatever inside. My carpool mate and I agreed that it was vile.) The lesson was fine. The boy seemed really nice, as did his mother. He was a big football fan. I gave him an “About Me” sheet where he had to write about (or draw) the things he liked and give very basic information about himself. In the “age” box, he wrote 8:30. Half-past eight. It had a certain logic to it, I suppose.

Mum and Dad have just got back from Moeraki – it was their first trip down there since early May. I told them about my cholesterol. We also discussed my potential return to New Zealand. Last weekend my brother said I should consider going back to the UK instead. “It’s not all bad,” he said. I never said it was. I just don’t think I could handle the sheer volume of people anymore. With Google Maps you can home in on places pretty much at random, and a few days ago the little peg man happened to alight on Tobermory on the Isle of Mull. Looks idyllic. A kids’ TV programme was filmed there in the noughties, taking advantage of all the colourful buildings on the seafront. Hmmm, how much would a house be? I’d be pretty damn isolated somewhere like that, but if I ever did go back to the UK to live (extremely unlikely – I hardly know anyone there now) it would need to be well outside the M25.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

No longer out of my depth

September 9, 2026 by 0 Comments

Things are back to normal, for now at least, apart from that weird back pain that feels as if something is stuck there. I was supposed to have my blood test on Friday but I got turned away because I’d eaten in the previous ten hours. So I got it done yesterday instead and I’m now awaiting the results.

I’ve now been swimming three times. As I thought, it’s a 50-metre pool, roped off into eight lanes. There’s no shallow end or deep end; it’s a competition pool which has a constant depth of 1.5 metres. So there’s no diving board. And, oddly, no lifeguard either. Getting set up in the first place was a bit of a hassle. I remember how this membership stuff used to work. You’d give your name and address to the lady at the desk who would then write your name on a card for you to present whenever you wanted to swim. Now it’s all apps and passwords and links and options. Always so many options. And I’m not convinced they’ve improved our lives in any way. I’m hoping that regular trips to the pool, and just being in the water, will be beneficial to me.

Schools went back yesterday, so my hours are increasing again and I’ve got kids’ parents who won’t leave me alone. There’s one annoying mother in particular. In a short while I’ll be having a lesson on a subject I haven’t taught up until now. My student in her late thirties wants to learn how to swear in English. Yesterday I had my first lesson with the maths A-star girl since she did her exam. She’s now doing International Baccalaureate.

On Sunday I watched a football match for the first time in well over a year, if you don’t count a few minutes of that awful World Cup final. Birmingham City were playing Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Championship – the second tier. It was a damn good game that finished in a 2-2 draw. All the goals came in the first half including a comedy own goal that gave Blues their second equaliser. Blues had really been outplayed by Wolves in the first half and were lucky to be level, but unexpectedly they dominated the second half. Blues now have one win and four draws from their opening five games.

Also on Sunday I had a great chat with my brother. I was slightly cheesed off with him the previous time we spoke, but when I think about it I was feeling terrible and didn’t especially want to talk to anybody.

Family - Life :)

Where I’m at right now

September 4, 2026 by 0 Comments

Things are still pretty crappy. Burning sensation in the right side of my back. Numbness in my limbs. And tiredness. So much fatigue. I find myself exhaling deeply when I do even moderate exercise. And then there’s the brain fog. Everything becomes a huge effort. It goes in cycles though, from close to normal all the way down to getting by at only the most basic level, and back again.

I saw the after-hours doctor earlier this evening and told him my symptoms. He did the usual checks and everything was fine. I asked him, so what about some blood tests? He agreed that I should have some, and I’ve got an appointment tomorrow morning. Good that I was able to get one so soon. I said to him that I have no idea how I’ll cope with full weeks of lessons again – schools go back on Monday – and he said that of course I’ll cope. Well, I haven’t bloody been coping up until now, have I? My teaching hours this year will end up being way down on each of the previous three.

Yesterday I went to the 50-metre swimming pool a ten-minute bike ride from here. I was feeling a bit better then. A session would cost me 60 lei, or alternatively I could buy a month’s membership for 200, which would allow me to go any weekday before 4pm (and I think at some specific times at weekends too). I wasn’t allowed to swim there and then though, because I didn’t have a hat. I remember swimming at school when I was about eight and we were made to wear hats – I hated wearing one. I did buy a hat yesterday as well as stationery and a thick roll of duct (or is it duck?) tape so I can deal with Kitty’s fur a bit more easily.

The sale of my parents’ flat in St Ives is just about there. They’re now grappling with a load of online forms for capital gains tax. They haven’t made much on the property so I imagine they’ll pay negligible CGT, but it adds a layer of life admin that they could do without.

Books - Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Not much respite (and he doesn’t give a damn)

August 31, 2026 by 0 Comments

So I got a brief respite – a day and a bit – from this thing, then yesterday it came back with a vengeance. Everything was suddenly back to being a gigantic struggle. Talking to my brother didn’t help, even if I got to see his kids. (My niece is well out of the baby stage now.) His level of self-confidence grated on me. Plus he couldn’t have given a damn about anything I do here – the only thing he cared about were Russian drone incursions. Since I moved over her, he never has given a damn. If he had, he might have made the effort to see me in all this time. (Yes, there was Covid, but that still leaves eight years of never even entertaining the idea of coming over.) It would be nice if one time he could at least ask me something simple like how my cat is. I have huge admiration for my brother, but often wonder what the hell he thinks of me.

On Saturday, while I was beached on that island of normality, I went to Parcul Rozelor to see a production of the musical My Fair Lady. It was free. How all the cast and period costumes and everything were financed I don’t know. EU money? Dorothy came too – she had something else on but it got cancelled. The performance started at 8pm and went on (and on) until 11:30, with two intervals. It didn’t drag, in spite of the length. It was a tough one to carry off in Romanian, as so much depended on accent and pronunciation. There isn’t exactly a Romanian equivalent of Cockney. I thought they did a good job there, but what do I really know? I didn’t realise how many very well-known songs come from the musical. Dorothy saw the film version when it came out in 1964. I must have seen it on TV over Christmas when I was a kid; I’d like to see it again if I can find it.

Yesterday I gave up on reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, about 40% of the way through. Right now, something that complex and unrooted in reality is beyond me. It started off great, but soon I no longer knew who was who or what was what. I’ve started reading Flesh by the Hungarian author David Szalay instead. I haven’t had much luck with books lately. Dad gave me Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, saying it was brilliant. That novel is effectively six books sandwiched into one; they are very different from one another and (at best) loosely connected. You got the first halves of books 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in order, then all of book 6, then the second halves of 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. By the time you get near the finish, it ends up being a test of memory. When you have significant brain fog, that’s a problem. It was a very clever book and I got the impression that the author damn well knew it. I got through it, but I wasn’t exactly in the mood for clever. Then before that I read Patrick Hennessey’s army officer book – very readable but his writing style did my head in.

I was thinking more about my latest trip. You forget things. Like the funeral procession I met on the way – everyone dressed in black. Or how good the shower was, in a room where things were otherwise falling apart. Or what Elena said when I got back about her trips to Russia, buying and selling goods. I was even thinking about the fire salamander that I saw (and the Dutch couple identified) on my earlier trip.

On Saturday, before seeing the musical, they showed a live Scrabble game on YouTube between Mark Nyman and (if I’ve got his name right) David Shenkin. It was the first round of a major tournament in Derbyshire in England. I remembered Nyman because he was in Dictionary Corner on Countdown back in the day. A young man then, he had bags under his eyes 30 years later. (He’s about to turn 60.) His opponent, incredibly, was 91. Just as amazingly, after the game swung this way and that, it finished in a draw.

I’ve got an online lesson very soon. I feel underprepared for it. Today, officially the last day of summer, we’re forecast to reach 36 degrees.

Update: My lesson was with a ten-year-old boy. He spent almost half the 90 minutes reading from one of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. I needed to follow his reading, so I found a PDF version online. However, he was reading from a bowdlerised version while the PDF was (I think) the original. It was funny to hear things like “a spanking” changed to “a good talking-to”.

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: