Author: plutoman

plutoman

I'm an English teacher in mad-as-a-box of-frogs Romania. Hope you like my blog! ✌️

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

A video to watch, some non-competitive word games, and some traditional pics

July 12, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Here’s a 15-minute video of Timișoara that an intrepid American couple recently put up on YouTube. It showcases my picturesque city (I think of it as my city) pretty well. I wouldn’t recommend you come right now because of the searing heat, but in autumn or spring, or even early summer, an enjoyable and relaxing time in this beautiful place is just about guaranteed.

This is what my whiteboard looked like at the end of Saturday morning’s lesson.

I explained that we sometimes use so-called delexical verbs such as get, give and take, where the meaning is taken out of the verb and put into the noun, for example “give the house a clean” as an alternative to “clean the house”. I notice that I mistakenly wrote “give my house a clean” rather than “…the house…”. We love possessives in English, but we wouldn’t normally use one there.

Today I played Bananagrams with a boy of (I think) eleven. This was how it panned out (his effort on the left, mine with excessive wind on the right):

Kids seem to like the game. There’s no scoring, it doesn’t feel competitive, and they I know I’m always there to help them (and say no every time they ask me if AI or PC or any other ridiculous abbreviation is a word). In this game I also had to say no to MICES. Why can’t you have that? C’mon, think about it! By the way, if you ever play Bananagrams, try and make some longish words off the bat – I started with FLOODING and FARMER – to improve your chances of being able to join on later.

Another non-competitive word game I play sometimes with kids is Hangman. I recently watched a surprisingly interesting video about some of the oddities of the game. Yes, you literally draw a decapitation as an education tool for little kids. When I was six, I had a Milton Bradley boxed version of Hangman which was competitive. Both you and your opponent (seated opposite each other) chose a word of up to eight letters; the first to guess the opponent’s word was the winner. At the start of the game you put the letter tiles into slots, facing yourself. You turned them around as your opponent guessed them; this meant you had to insert the letters in reverse. Every time your opponent guessed a letter that wasn’t in your word, you turned a dial that showed an additional limb on a stick figure. When I played with Dad, he’d often forget to reverse the letters, leaving a six-year-old boy hopelessly struggling with complete gibberish.

I’ve watched almost none of this year’s Wimbledon so far. I saw half an hour of an Alcaraz match (not a bad player, that guy) with Serbian commentary, and that’s been it. Last weekend I found myself more interested in the Ashes cricket, for some reason. I listened to two of the players being interviewed after the match. They both invariably appended a –y onto the ends of their teammates’ names. Brooky and Broady and the rhyming trio of Stokesy and Woakesy and Foakesy. No first names at all. What are the rules for this stuff? What if you have a multi-syllable surname? What if your surname already has a –y stuck on the end, like Batty or Hardy? It’s something that smacks of British public schools to me, but maybe I’m overthinking it. (Aussies stick an -o on the end instead: Johnno and Thommo and Deano and Wayno.)

Here are some pictures from the open-air concert on Friday night:

A local group

Remembering the founder who had passed away

A Turkish group

People getting mici or maybe a frigărui

Tomorrow morning I have to go to some depot with the plumber to select pipes and what have you. He’ll start putting my central heating in on 25th July.

Life :) - Music - Tennis

New Zealand: where to go

July 10, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

My brother called me last night. As usual, he had a beer bottle in his hand. He said that his knee operation, scheduled for this coming Thursday, had been put back to 2nd August.

This morning I took the bike to Sânmihaiu Român in a repeat of last Sunday. Once again I grabbed a coffee from the bar, then sat on a bench and read, before moving to the gazebo when the hot sun drifted onto me. Next week will be properly hot; the dog days are now upon us.

With just 27 days until I get on the plane, I’m thinking of where I might go when I’m in New Zealand. Much will depend on my parents. They’ll want some respite from the building work in Geraldine, so I’m sure we’ll spend some time in Moeraki. I have a friend in nearby Naseby whom I obviously haven’t seen since I left NZ seven years ago, and I’ll certainly want to catch up with her. Central Otago as a whole is quite magical. I spent a few days with my parents there in the blistering dry heat of December 2014 – we camped at Omarama, where they have the gliders, and then at Omakau. I remember Ranfurly and Wedderburn and lovely Ophir. Maybe one day I’ll do the bike Rail Trail where you can ride from Hyde to Clyde and much more beside. The West Coast could be an option – I don’t think any of us have been there since 2009 – or how about the Catlins in the south? I’ve never been down there. A top priority would have been Wellington, but now that my cousin has cancer I might end up giving the North Island a miss completely.

I went to the very popular Festivalul Inimilor on Friday night – another open-air spectacle of traditional music from Romania and beyond. It was in Parcul Rozelor, next to where we play tennis. There were huge groups from Turkey and Serbia as well as my local Banat region. There was a sombre mood when the local group came on, because the man who founded it back in the sixties had passed away. The festival is free to attend, although there are a lot of food and drink stalls and even some selling traditional costumes. It was on again last night, and provided a noisy backdrop to our game of tennis. In the first set, I played with a woman slightly older than me named Gabriela against two men including 88-year-old Domnul Sfâra. It’s surprisingly hard to play against him, because you have no choice but to go easy on him. After winning a long opening game on my serve, we duly lost 6-1 without ever getting to deuce again. Then Domnul Sfâra exited stage left, and Gabriela and I found ourselves up against two guys both called Florin. We beat them 6-1 6-4 6-1.
Update: I also played this evening, again with musical accompaniment as Festivalul Inimilor entered its final night. This time I played five (extremely one-sided) sets. First I played with Domnul Sfâra, and we won 6-1 after losing a close first game – a repeat of last night. Then I played with one of the Florins against Gabriela and the other Florin, and from our perspective it finished a bizarre 6-0 1-6. Then I teamed up with Gabriela against both Florins, and we won 6-1 6-0.

Books - Environment - Family - Language teaching

The details matter

July 9, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Wednesday I got a phone call from what seemed to be a teenage girl wanting lessons. A few minutes later (this person had spoken very good English in this time) I asked for a name. David. He pronounced it in the English way (the Romanian way is dah-vid). This morning 17-year-old David arrived for a two-hour lesson. He’s been homeschooled since the beginning of Covid; I hadn’t met anybody who was homeschooled before and didn’t even know if it was legal in Romania. He was quite remarkable: his attention to detail – different accents, glottal stops, phrasal verbs, weak forms, the IPA phonemic chart, you name it – was something I hadn’t seen previously. Some of my students show quite poor attention to detail, and that makes them rather difficult to teach. At times I’m forced to say, “Hey, this thing I’m telling you actually matters and you need to pay attention.” Others are much better, they ask questions, they make notes, and they’re always much easier to teach. (I’ve noticed that people who make notes almost always learn faster than those who don’t. Whether that’s the notes themselves, or just that people who make notes tend to be more focused, I don’t know.) Anyway, this David was extremely easy to teach. My whiteboard kept filling up and the two hours went by in no time. We can only have three more sessions before I go away, and he isn’t interested in online learning. I don’t blame him. Perhaps the best thing to come out of the pandemic is the acceptance of working from home. Millions of people are now missing out on unnecessary soul-crushing commutes that add 25% to their working day, and that’s fantastic. But teaching does work better face-to-face: books and all kinds of tactile games and exercises become available, and you dodge all the annoying tech issues. “I can hear you but I can’t see you.” “Sorry, you’re breaking up a bit.” And so on.

Of course there are environmental benefits to working from home too, although the reduction in carbon emissions on the roads must be offset by extra electricity use at home, and I have no idea how those numbers stack up. We definitely need some major shifts in human behaviour after a week in which we broke the all-time record for the world’s hottest day, two days in a row. (I lie. It wasn’t/isn’t an all-time record, just the record since the Eemian which I hadn’t heard of before and ended only 115,000 years ago.)

My sinus problem isn’t getting any better. Well, in one way it is, because (touch wood) I haven’t had an excruciating headache for months now. But it affects me every day. The pressure builds up and builds up until phew, I’m able to blow out a jet of slime, and the process repeats. Nights are often terrible because the process doesn’t magically stop when I’m asleep. This means my sleep is interrupted, and when I wake up for the final time in the morning I often feel shattered. My energy is depleted; everything feels heavy. I have an appointment with a specialist in Timișoara on 20th September, shortly after I arrive back in the country, and if nothing comes of that, my next step might be a trip to Bucharest and possibly surgery.

The last time I spoke to Dad, he mentioned Alzheimer’s. (By Dad’s age, his own father was in the advanced stages of it.) Dad had read that the onset of the disease is usually marked by a combination of “brain fog” and anxiety. He said that he had none of the brain fog (beyond the usual!) but loads of anxiety, beyond anything he’d experienced before, seemingly brought on by all the life admin and tech stuff. It’s sad that he’s been so affected by that. In the last week, there have been positive signs though. The building work is in full swing and they’re cracking on at a good pace. The sooner that’s done, the better.

It’s been a terrible 2023 for tennis. Rain meant that both of last weekend’s sessions got cancelled. No sign of rain this weekend though, so we should get two sessions in. On Monday I’ve got a jam-packed day of lessons planned – I’m grateful for that because it should be good for my mood, even if it’ll be tiring. I doubt I’ll have any more days like that until I go away.

I finished Digital Minimalism and have started John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.

Books - Life :) - Music

When being bored was OK

July 4, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday morning I got a message from Dorothy to say that she’d left her suitcase on a National Express coach after flying from Timișoara to Luton for a funeral. The case contained her laptop and medication. What a nightmare. I’m always paranoid that I’ll do something like that. She was still able to attend our online Romanian lesson, and seemed remarkably calm under the circumstances. The lesson was on the relative benefits of living in the city and the country. We spent half the session studying the famous 1981 song Vara la Țară (“Summer in the Country”) by the folk rock group Pasărea Colibri; the song is really a piss-take of unsophisticated country living, and was adapted from a late-19th-century novel of the same name which had a far more positive take on rural life.

I’ve now read the bit about “solitude deprivation” in Digital Minimalism. As the author says, as recently as the nineties you often had no choice but to be alone in your thoughts, but first the iPod – just after the millennium – allowed us to be surrounded by constant noise, and then the smartphone gave us constant visual as well as auditory stimulation, often with the added pressure to respond to it. Those born after 1995 – the “real millennials” I mentioned in another post – won’t even know what it’s like to be properly alone. This near-constant smartphone use seems to be responsible for young people’s mental health falling off a cliff.

A massive change I’ve seen is people’s attitudes to boredom. Being bored used to be OK. Expected, even. When I was a kid, we stayed at my grandmother’s cottage in mid-Wales once or twice a year. The 190-mile drive from Cambridgeshire was doable in four-and-a-bit hours if you went the quickest route that skirted around Birmingham. Dad, being a painter and all that, always took the scenic route; the drive through Warwickshire and Worcestershire was really quite lovely. Being a painter, he also liked to make regular stops to take photos of views that would make nice paintings. Once I timed our journey back from Wales at one minute under seven hours, including a stop at a service station. Yes, it was boring, especially from the bit where we entered Northamptonshire, although we probably had fish and chips that time in the picturesque Warwickshire town of Southam. Occasionally I might have had a book or a hand-held LCD game, but most of the time I just sat in the back of the car. Would that even be acceptable today?

Yesterday I dropped in on Elena because I had to sign something central-heating-related and give it to her. She said she walked 18,000 steps earlier that day. (She has an actual pedometer to work that out, rather than a smartphone.)

Today is the fourth of July. Here is Simon and Garfunkel’s wonderful America, from a time when boredom was definitely still OK.

Books - Family - Life :) - Music

We’re asocial creatures sometimes, too

July 3, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

The time until I go away has now dipped under the length of time I’ll be away; I generally get excited about a big trip when I hit that milestone.

Yesterday I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român where I called my parents, had a basic lunch, and finished Three Men in a Boat. Dad marvelled at my ability to make video calls to New Zealand while out and about in Romania. If they tried to do the reverse, their data would be chewed up in no time. We agreed that this is an island of great benefit in a sea of toxic tech. I’d only just finished saying how wonderful my internet is in Romania when a message flashed up to say that my phone was getting too hot and the app would need to close (before, presumably, it caught fire). Before that, I told them that they really do need to book some flights to Europe, even if they’re ten months away. Just think how happy my brother will be if he knows they’re coming over.

Last night I spoke to my brother – he’d just got back from his cruise with his wife, the in-laws and the little one. They’d been to Spain and Portugal, not Somalia. My brother had a better time than he was expecting. They’re already planning Christmas. Would you like to come over? I’d love to spend time with my brother, sister-in-law and nephew, but jeez, British Christmas is so depressing. Getting to my brother’s place will be arduous and expensive. I don’t know whether I can face it. I did toy with the idea of flying to England from Budapest for my nephew’s first birthday after I come back from New Zealand, but when I land in Budapest all I’ll want to do is bloody well get home. Going over there and having to talk with family when I’m absolutely knackered would wreck me. I told Mum this, and she recalled the time in 1994 when she and my brother flew into Auckland from London and immediately attended a funeral. She had to make sandwiches and cups of tea and chat with third cousins twice removed, all while badly jet-lagged; it was nightmarish. I asked my brother if we could all meet up in St Ives sometime in October. It’ll be a push with the extra little person, but we should manage it.

The big thing I have to contend with right now is getting central heating installed. Last winter – albeit a mild one – the city heating system was more than adequate. Unfortunately the cost of that is going through the roof, and everyone in this block now has no sensible choice but to install their individual central heating if they haven’t already done so. It’s a major expense (NZ$6000, or £3000) and hassle I could do without. One little benefit, however, is that I’ve got to know Elena, the old lady (she turns 80 later this year) who lives directly above me. Her children emigrated to Canada some time ago and have grown-up children of their own. She said that all her friends in Timișoara have passed away. She seems a lovely lady and we’ve had some good conversations.

Three Men in a Boat is very cleverly written, and amusing all the way through. I was surprised by how little the author’s English of 1889 differs from that of today. He talks of dudes, which I didn’t think existed back then, least of all in Britain. On the other hand, he uses superlatives like pleasantest (which would be odd today) and peacefullest (even odder). He uses five-and-twenty and twenty-five interchangeably, indicating that the switch to the modern version was incomplete at that time. He also says four hours and a half; this is now incorrect and a bane of contemporary learners of English. His tales are peppered with constructions like despite his having seen me, which exists in some people’s modern English – my British friend Dorothy’s, for instance – but certainly not mine. (Dorothy’s English is interesting. She also says “One must do blah blah blah, mustn’t one?” and pronounces suit with the y sound of yes. This is not only a question of age – my parents don’t have these traits even though they’re a few years older than her – but one of education and class.)

I’ve started reading Digital Minimalism, a book all about pulling the plug on unnecessary and pernicious tech. I haven’t read the chapter on solitude yet, but I’m looking forward to it. Almost every day I hear “we’re social creatures!”, with the implication that we all need social interaction, online or offline, all the time. Piss off with that! All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, also need the absence of social interaction sometimes, and now many of us aren’t getting it.

Because my hours are down a bit (it’s summer), I now get the occasional chance to listen to Muzicorama on the radio. Last week they played some tracks from the wonderful War of the Worlds musical that came out in 1978, including the beautiful Forever Autumn.

Life :) - Music

Fade to grey

June 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I read an article by Adrian Chiles – I remember when he presented the business news on the BBC – about how everything is turning grey. “Why has the world been drained of colour?” he asks. The comments were almost unanimous in agreement with him. With the exception of undies and socks, I never buy actual new clothes from actual clothes shops, one because I want to save money, but two because I want to avoid all the drabness. And cars. When I looked at cars before giving up, I didn’t want a grey (or “silver”) one. It didn’t use to be like this. Go into the men’s section of H&M in 2003 and you’d find clothes with every combination of colours and patterns you could imagine. Go back another decade and mad dayglo ski jackets were all the rage among blokes whose idea of piste was something else. I really wanted one, but I was still a kid then – “you’re not having that” – and I ended up with something frustratingly tame, though probably still much brighter than what just-teenagers would wear today. One theory for the modern world being sapped of colour is all the in-your-face advertising and blinking screens we get at every turn; perhaps we all just want to dim the lights. Another theory, relating mostly to our homes, is that we’ve become so obsessed with viewing a home as an investment rather than a place to live that we don’t dare inject any colour it lest it affect its resale value.

Ten percent of fifty shades of grey – this afternoon

This morning I listened to the whole of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium double album. It took me back to early 2007 when I regularly put it on while studying for professional exams. (Music and study didn’t usually mix, but that was an exception for some reason.) I took those two exams – the latest in a long line – in April, then I fell out with my Japanese flatmate and I moved into a place by myself, and (with a couple of exceptions) I’ve lived alone ever since.

Mum and Dad just gave me a surprise Skype call at 11pm their time. It was 3 degrees there and soon to go negative. (I’ve got that to look forward to.) The call was all about their banking and power bill craziness. Their building work is now in full swing – Dad showed me a photo of the impressive long arm of the cement mixer truck.

We’re half-way through 2023 – Timișoara’s reign of supposedly being the cultural capital of Europe.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :)

You can’t win ’em all

June 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a longer walk than I planned this evening, making it to (and beyond) a cemetery I didn’t know existed. The cemetery is called Mătăsarilor; it’s on a street with the same name, which means “silk workers”. (There are a lot of streets in the city named after industries or workers, and there used to be even more before their names were changed to those of local figures.)

My hours are down as people start to go on holiday. I don’t mind that too much. I can work on the book I’ve neglected for months and brush up on my Romanian. Our last session on Tuesday was pretty good, although both Dorothy and I said that the game our teacher devised for us – guessing things you find in a city, based on clues – was a bit easy. The information about the imperfect tense was extremely useful though. Also on Tuesday, I had my first (and almost certainly last) lesson with a nine-year-old girl. Her elder brother has been coming since last autumn, but this week he was away on a camp, so his mother suggested his sister have a lesson with me instead. Fine. I chatted with the girl and tried to make her feel at ease, then gave her some sheets to colour in, as well as a few exercises where she had to count coloured stars and match farm animals. She smiled the whole time and did pretty well with all the exercises, so I thought the session had been a success. “Did you like it?” No. “You don’t want to come again, then?” No. “Was it boring?” Yes. But don’t worry, Mum does English with me sometimes too, and it’s boring with her as well. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

Dad turned 73 yesterday, and is now back to just one year behind Mum again – her birthday was two weeks earlier. I can’t get my head around them being that old. They certainly don’t seem it or feel it, even if all their stuff has been dragging them down in recent months. As I’ve said so many times on this blog, they’ve got to extricate themselves from their life admin mire, and that means selling their UK properties as a first step. At this point, who cares if it’s the “wrong time” to sell? If I’m still hearing about meter readings and property managers as they approach 80, my sympathy will start to wear thin. (Earlier this week they got an estimated monthly power bill of £3300 for one of their UK properties.)

Books - Life :) - Photos

Human nature, and some pictures

June 25, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I just put on Al-Jazeera to see what was going on with the rebellion in Russia, and didn’t imagine I’d see Tom McRae presenting. I remember him as the “Christchurch guy” on Paul Henry’s TV1 breakfast show in New Zealand; he later moved to TV3.

The Titanic sub which dominated the airwaves for a few days has given us another window on human nature. Hundreds die trying to reach Europe on boats, seemingly every week. Just ten days ago, as many as 500 perished on an overcrowded fishing boat as it sank while they tried to reach Italy from Libya. That tragedy did get international coverage, but not nearly as much as the Titan sub which had five people on board. The story of the submersible had everything to draw you in – the Titanic (it’s been the subject of some of my lessons, and who hasn’t seen the film?), rich businessmen (just like on the Titanic itself), and a race against time as their oxygen levels ran out, although as we know, that last factor was irrelevant. I was as guilty as anybody as I watched it all unfold. Then you had some people who thought, you had more money than sense, so it serves you right.

I’ve just started reading Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. It’s extremely funny; I’m amazed how well his humour of 134 years ago works today. On Thursday I finished The New Nomads by Felix Marquardt, a book I picked up at Luton on the way back. It’s an interesting book about the (mainly) positive sides of immigration. The two aspects I really like are that: (a) the author admits he used to be an arrogant dick and is now more humble – how many people actually do that? – and (b) he says that the ultra-connected jet-set elite who attend conferences in places like Davos do more harm than good. The only thing I didn’t like was that of all the great examples of immigrants who made positive differences to both their own lives and the countries they moved to, I don’t think one of them was over thirty.

Tennis got cancelled again today; it tipped it down late this afternoon. This evening the sun came out and I went for a walk by the lock. It was lovely down there. People were milling around in parks and in a bar that I didn’t even know existed. I see beauty – simple beauty, I suppose, everywhere in this place.

I’m feeling better now after the Barclays business. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to buy a car a few weeks ago; getting out on the open road and seeing more of this wonderful country would have been great.

Matei had gone to the loo when I took this picture this morning

The old tram on display in Piața Traian

If I remember rightly, these lilies were on Strada Garofiței, or Carnation Street

The sign means Bad dog, in the pre-1993 spelling, but which one?

The river by the lock this evening


Autism - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Real millennials

June 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a lesson with a 22-year-old university student who, when she ties her hair back, looks like Martina Hingis. She also has a part-time job in IT testing; she has ambitious plans for a career in that field. At the end of the session, she said she wanted to drop from two meetings a week with me to just one. I wonder how long before she plumps for zero. How ever hard I try, I find it hard to connect with her. I get a lot of people of around her age – the real millennials, those born around 2000 – and they’re the hardest to build a rapport with. Older adults are easier, as are kids, but with these real millennials we’re often transmitting on different wavebands. It doesn’t help that this particular student is very normal for someone of her age, and I’ve always found very normal people hard to relate to. (I’ve always thought that Normal People Scare Me, a 2006 documentary about autism, is one of the best titles of anything ever.)

My cousin had her eight-hour cancer removal operation on Wednesday. Apart from the extraordinary length of the procedure, I haven’t had any news about how it went.

Tomorrow my brother, his wife and their son are going on a one-week cruise. When I spoke to him on Tuesday he clearly didn’t want to go. (He wife wasn’t there.) When I asked him where he was going, he said he didn’t know. “How do you know it isn’t Somalia?” I asked. He had been to Somalia, or at least past it, on one of his army excursions or missions or whatever the right word is. I do know that at some point he’ll need to attend a black tie dinner. Not his thing at all, nor mine. His wife would dress the little one up in a black tie too, given the chance.

This week I’ve sent two letters to Barclays, first to the CEO, and then (changing the wording slightly) to their complaints team. Each letter ran to 2500 words, so it was a big effort. I’m glad to get that out of the way.

The biggest news story of the week has probably been the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible near the wreck of the Titanic, killing its five occupants. They were all super-wealthy men, aged from 19 – tragically, a boy really – to 77. Because it operated in international waters, the Titan could bypass all safety regulations. (It was controlled using a modified game console.) If you ponied up US$250,000 and signed a long waiver that mentioned death three times on the first page, you were good to go. This incident reminds me of conversations we had when I worked in life insurance. As well as administrative cost savings for larger policies, people who insured themselves for larger sums were wealthier and, on average, in a better state of health. We priced our policies accordingly: $1 million of life insurance did not cost five times what $200,000 did. However, when you got to really large amounts – say, $10 million – you were into the realms of Learjets and adventure tourism. Also, rich people often get into that position by taking risks that pay off. They’re risk seekers by nature.

It’s hot. A top temperature of 35 is forecast for today. I went to the market before my lesson with the real millennial, and that will be my only venture outside.

The UK

Making the most of the trip I didn’t want — part 2 of 2

June 21, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Monday I spoke to my parents, then made a trip to Cambridge where this time I had an appointment with Barclays. This was nerve-wracking for me. I noticed that the branch was about to reduce its hours by 20%; in a few years it probably won’t exist at all. (Up until two years ago, a St Ives branch also existed.) I was ushered into a small glass-walled office where I saw the same woman as on Friday. I told her that I had no more documents, despite my best efforts. “We’ll see what we can do.” Some time later, after talking to “management”, she gave me the OK. My power bill would suffice. I then filled in a form to get the funds paid into my New Zealand account. That was a huge relief, though she did say it could take me a ridiculous 12 weeks to receive the money (seriously, how?), and there was no hope of an interest payment or any compensation. My expectations had been lowered to a level where I didn’t care at that point. I did however express my disgust at the way I’d been treated by Barclays throughout the whole saga. The call centre staff weren’t too bad – they were just doing their rather awful jobs – but the organisation as a whole completely failed to help me. I could not talk to anybody at Barclays who dealt directly with account closures, and the whole time I was left guessing and wading through literally impossible bureaucratic treacle. The woman I saw at the Cambridge branch, while competent at the ins and outs of her jobs, showed no empathy whatsoever with what I’d been through. Tomorrow, while I have some time, I’ll write to the Barclays CEO and to the ombudsman. (Ombudsman. What a wonderful word.) This blog is a great help with that. I can just search “Barclays” and find the dates of my phone calls and pointless queuing to create an accurate litany of terrible experiences.

When I got back from Cambridge I dropped in on my family friends who were back from their traffic-jam-ridden trip to Southampton, and we went to Wetherspoons. This is a massive chain of pubs run by a famous (or infamous) Brexiter, even though all of us voted seven years ago (that long?!) to prevent that outcome. We plumped for Wetherspoons because of the price; they’re the cheapest option around. They save money by buying up kegs of beer in bulk just before their expiry date, knowing that they’ll still shift them. I had a steak and kidney pie, a beer, and a chocolate fudge cake, all for £15.

On Tuesday I had an evening flight back home, and met my university friend in London on the way to the airport. After dealing with a broken-down train and being told off for then boarding a train from a different company (why is it so complicated?), I met him at a bar at St Pancras. Surprisingly for me, the bar was almost empty. We had a chat about his girlfriend’s upcoming cancer treatment and his ongoing battle with the cladding on his apartment block and the other (unmotivated and uncooperative) owners. A double nightmare. He, and his girlfriend for that matter, have a great attitude to these kinds of setbacks, but they’re in for a very trying second half of the year regardless. We ambled down the river, past Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace, the very centre of London which I saw often as a kid and seemed magical back then. (Dad had galleries and exhibitions in London, so made regular trips there.) We parted ways close to Victoria Station where I got the coach to Luton Airport. I had plenty of time to kill there before my flight. I arrived home at 2:30 in the morning and was relieved not to have any lessons until the afternoon.

The weather in the UK was extraordinarily warm when I was there – 30 degrees every day – and without a hint of rain. While I was away I got phone alerts warning of torrential storms in and around Timiș. People thought it was funny that by visiting Britain I got away from British weather.