Author: plutoman

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

Family - New Zealand - Romania - Scrabble

It may all fall through

January 23, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. There’s now the very real possibility that the St Ives flat sale will fall through. The prospective buyers haven’t been answering their phone. The system in England (but not Scotland) allows a buyer to pull out of a purchase right up until the moment you have the keys in your hand, and it doesn’t cost them a penny. In 2026 that’s simply nuts. This has caused my parents months of stress already, and who knows how many more months (or years) they will face. If the sale doesn’t happen, they’ll probably rent it out again. I can see them being stuck with the place until they’re 85.

Mum got her eye done on Tuesday. It’s clearly made a big difference, but she might never have 100% sight in that eye. There’s a buy-one-get-one-free offer over there, but under that scheme she’d need to wait till May to have the second eye done. She’s decided (to my surprise) to pony up the extra $5000 and get the other eye done next month. That now means there’s some chance that they’ll make a trip to Europe in spring or summer. I’d put it at 30%. Whether they do or don’t, I’m going to book a trip to New Zealand during my long, oppressive summer. Hopefully I can find a less roundabout route this time.

They’re had terrible weather in NZ, especially up north. I’ve seen the pictures of a landslide above a campsite; two people were killed and several more are missing.

Much closer to (my current) home, a murder took place on Monday in the village of Cenei, right next door to Bobda which is where I went on New Year’s Eve. A 15-year-old boy was killed by two other teenagers who then buried him in a garden. He may have been stabbed to death; the details are still murky. This murder has come up a lot in my lessons this week; the locals are understandably shocked by it.

Scrabble. I finished my latest round of matches with eight wins and six losses, yet again. I’m assuming here that my opponent in my last game logs in sometime before tomorrow afternoon (when his time bank is due to run out) to finish me off. This player is an International Master. I’m far from au fait with these accolades, but that clearly means he’s played at a very high level for several years. I thought I would beat him actually, but his final rack was much more flexible than mine and he was able to set himself up to play a sneaky word that I didn’t even know. This should mean that I’ll play in the same (sixth) division for a fifth straight round.

There have been some developments with the book which I’ll talk about next time.

Cat - Family - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Scrabble

The attraction of a cat

January 19, 2026 by 0 Comments

In family news, today is my niece’s first birthday. It’s also the eve of Mum’s cataract operation on her first eye. She’ll get the other one done next month. I think the bill for both eyes is around NZ$10,000, a staggering amount. In Romania it would cost a fifth of that. Mum is pretty dire need of this surgery (which only takes ten minutes per eye, though there’s considerable faff when you get to the clinic). Her eyesight was pretty terrible when I saw her last May and June, and has deteriorated further since then.

Yesterday was a reasonably busy day for a Sunday. The twins, whom I normally see at their place on Wednesdays, came to my place yesterday morning instead. They seemed to enjoy the lesson because they got to see (and play with) the cat. Kitty has been a boon to my face-to-face lessons at home. Later I met Mark for lunch at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. He tried a few words of Romanian with the waitress but she didn’t understand him. You can see why I hardly bother. It can be like that sometimes. It’s rare for a non-native to speak Romanian, so Romanians aren’t “tuned in” to imperfect, non-native versions of their language. That’s in sharp contrast to us native English speakers who hear imperfect second-language English all the time to the point where we don’t think anything of it, and it creates a barrier for anyone trying to learn Romanian. You have to reach a certain level before you can even cross the start line. The barrier has even been raised somewhat in my time here; Timișoara is fairly cosmopolitan by Romanian standards and as a result more and more people are gaining a command of English, so if you’re not careful you can find yourself dealing almost exclusively in English even after living here for years. That’s especially true of someone like Mark who works at a British school and lives a far more “expat” lifestyle than me. Our lunch was done and dusted in a very swift 50 minutes; quite often it’ll take you that long just to get served.

In the evening I went to Dorothy’s for our monthly English Conversation Club meeting. She managed to start it up again in November. There were ten of us, of whom eight were women. (Language learning – and teaching – can skew pretty heavily in that direction.) I had to cycle home, and by that stage the temperature had plummeted to −6. First thing this morning we were at −10.

On Saturday I had my first lesson with a seven-year-old boy called Noah. I don’t really like teaching kids that young, but he was very nice and our session went well. Unusually, he was happy to see me. (Most small children have a look of either puzzlement or fear on their face the first time I see them.) The name Noah is very un-Romanian; the Biblical Noah is called Noe in Romanian, while a final h is pronounced here with a guttural sound like the ch inloch.

In a recent conversation with Dad, he mentioned his decision in the late seventies to quit his job as an illustrator for the Ministry of Defence and go his own way as a painter. It takes a lot of courage to step away. As you also did, he said. It would have been so easy to have stayed where I was, he then said, rather than take that leap. Ah, I said, this is where we differ. The idea that insurance was any sort of comfort zone for me is laughable. I simply couldn’t have stayed there; it would have been dangerous to have done so. Staying there might literally have killed me; I had to leave. Moving to the water company was a useful stopgap – it got me away from a lot of that corporate toxicity – before I decided what I really wanted to do. (I was also several years older than Dad was when he made the move.) Talking of the corporate world, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comics, died of cancer last week. Those comics were extremely popular and funny; they did a great job of satirising office life and the practices that came to the fore in the nineties. Sadly in later life he became a Trump-supporting attention-seeking twat. (It’s quite possible he was always a twat, but only with the advent of social media did he gain an avenue for his twattishness.)

Scrabble. I’ve had three wins and five losses so far in my latest round of league matches, but my six outstanding games aren’t looking too bad. I’ve also got a decent tie-breaker this time if I happen to finish on the same number of wins as another player. There has been some controversy this time around as one player in our division has been kicked out, presumably for cheating. Before his expulsion he managed to beat me. Six of his matches were still outstanding, so I’m guessing his opponents in those games will be given walkover wins, but I don’t know if his earlier victims (including me) will be compensated in any way. Last week I had a crazy game on ISC, the other site. I put down a bingo only for my opponent to respond with the huge 158-point triple-triple TIDYTIpS, a word I didn’t know. (It’s a very pretty yellow flower found in America.) But a couple of turns later I put down BURTHEN (an old form of burden that I’d seen in books) for 97. A very close finish ensued, and eventually I won by a single point, 428-427.

I’ve just got one episode of The Queen’s Gambit still to watch. It’s been great so far. Obsession with something like chess can certainly drive one to madness. In addition to the story I’ve been enjoying the sixties music as well as the cars and decor of that time.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Taking a tumble

January 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve just finished my lesson with Matei. Not that Matei, the one who will have maths lessons with me for another few months until he goes to Germany, but another Matei, who wears gallons of after shave and will be doing a Cambridge C1 exam at some point. Kitty scratched me seconds before our lesson, so I had to get a plaster as soon as we started. We did reading exercises. One of them was about Olympic medallists who give motivational speeches at companies, after which the employees think, yeah, that was kind of fun to listen to but how will it help me in the slightest to do my job better?

Yesterday afternoon, when we reached our top temperature of minus 5, I went for a walk. Having got to the river (which was partly iced over) and turned for home, I took a pretty big tumble on the ice. I fell on my back and must have hit my head, though I don’t remember. I got up OK, but I was dizzy and felt absolutely terrible. I was winded and stood up against a window ledge for five minutes before feeling able to carry on. I walked the kilometre or so home very gingerly.

On Friday Elena (the 82-year-old lady who lives above me) got back from Canada. Yesterday she invited me up for coffee. She seemed to be coping extremely well with jet lag. I brought Kitty along; for whatever reason she wasn’t a happy camper.

Last night I had a 55-minute chat with Mum and Dad. They were about to make another trip down to Moeraki, and then on to Wanaka, to retrieve a painting that didn’t sell at an exhibition. I’m not sure any other paintings sold there either. I came away from the call feeling quite worried about Mum, whose digestive issues are still very unsorted, and coupled with all of that she’s now practically blind in one eye. She’s also been full of cold the last few days. She hasn’t been to golf for a while and yesterday she didn’t even go to church. From 11,000 miles away where I can do absolutely nothing, it’s all a bit of a concern.

Dreams - Family - Films - Music - Photos - Scrabble

Deep freeze

January 11, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s been bitterly cold. On Friday morning it was minus 16 degrees. As I write this at 9:30 on Sunday morning, it’s −9; the top temperature today is forecast to be −5. Yesterday, when we soared to the dizzy heights of zero, I had to drive to my two maths lessons in Dumbrăvița. The main roads had been ploughed of snow, so they weren’t too bad, but the side roads bordered on treacherous. It was also foggy on my journey out there. (I got all-weather tyres put on my car. A lot of people make a twice-yearly switch between summer and winter tyres, but it’s a real palaver that can take up an entire weekend.) I was very glad to get home. It’s all very reminiscent of my first winter here, nine years ago, when the river froze and there were icicles hanging from the building I’d just moved into. Kids under about 13 have no recollection of a proper winter, but winters like this – and even more extreme – used to be an annual occurrence here. The snow has got the young ones all excited, and we’ve got more coming in the next few days. Apart from driving which required serious concentration yesterday, I have no problem coping with these rather nippy conditions. There’s always something you can do to keep warm. Summer is a totally different ball game though.

On my trip to Dumbrăvița yesterday they played Crowded House’s Weather With You on the radio. A nice touch, assuming it was deliberate. The song immediately before that was Der Kommissar by Falco, which came out at the end of 1981. I still remember when their bigger hit Rock Me Amadeus came out in ’85. The night before I had a dream where I was hiking somewhere in Romania and met a younger British woman. For some reason she showed me an ID photo with her face on it. Her surname was Smith. She then told me she’d changed her surname to Poxam. I attempted to spell it, putting an h after the x, but she said it was H-less. Then she asked me if I’d like to come and see her in the UK, at which point I woke up. I wonder where I got that name from. Poxham is a plausible name for a British village. There is a Poxham out there, and in fact it’s a picturesque hamlet in Austria. The closest name I’ve ever had anything to do with is Moxham Avenue, the main street in the Wellington suburb of Hataitai. I once put in an offer on a flat in a Disney-style block there, but it wasn’t accepted.

Lately I’ve been tuning out of politics and international news. That’s just as well; what’s coming out of America would drive me to insanity if I paid close attention to it. However, the shooting – cold-blooded murder – by an ICE officer of an innocent mother driving her car in Minneapolis was too awful to ignore. America right now seems a lost cause. I sometimes laugh when I hear people intellectualising the president, using adjectives like transactional, when really it’s far, far simpler. He’s a piece of shit who cares for nothing but his own power and ego and has no respect for human life. He enjoys hurting other people. Most of the people around him are pieces of shit too. And 77 million people voted for that, with their eyes wide open. None of what is happening is a surprise.

Scrabble. The latest round of league matches is over, and just like last time I won eight and lost six. That vastly surpassed my early expectations – I had a pretty rough start. So that should mean I’ll stay in the same division for the fourth round in succession. Yesterday I played six games on ISC. I lost the first of them, then won four straight before being hammered 508-306 in my last game. In that game I drew terribly to the point where it was probably unwinnable no matter what I did, but I was still disappointed with my decision making. More generally, my word knowledge keeps letting me down. I’m still totally ignorant of a lot of very useful fours and fives, and even if I do know them, I’m likely to miss them because I haven’t played enough for my brain to properly “zone in”. Missing – or simply not knowing – these words has all kinds of knock-on effects. It makes it harder to sort out a bad rack, leading to lower scores (and fewer bingos) down the line. The tournament in Cluj is six weeks away, on 21st and 22nd February. I don’t know if I could realistically make that. It’s a four-hour drive so I’d have to go up the day before and miss some work. I was hoping there would be a sleeper train but there doesn’t seem to be. So far I’ve watched the first three episodes of The Queen’s Gambit which Mark recommended to me. I didn’t like the ending of the third episode – Beth’s stepmother really needed to tell Beth to “pull her head in” – but hey. So far it’s clear that however scary a Scrabble tournament would be, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as chess.

The last time I spoke to my brother, things weren’t easy for him. He said he’d like to take the kids camping at some point, but there’s no way his wife would ever go. She prefers cruises or Center Parcs (the name makes me shudder), neither of which are my brother’s cup of tea, and they wouldn’t be mine either. We had great camping trips as kids, and I’m sure my nephew would love camping. With my brother’s line of work, it would be right up his street too. And what’s more, they live in a great part of the country for it. Practically right on the coast, with the New Forest on their doorstep, and a quick hop over to France if they ever felt like camping over there. I hope my sister-in-law can be convinced.

Films - Other sports - Photos

The year has started all white

January 5, 2026 by 0 Comments

I had a tough start to the day with some pretty bad sinus pain. I’m fine now, but on the odd occasions when I get that (thankfully less often than I used to), I’m tired for many hours after the pain has subsided.

We’ve got proper winter here now. It’s snowed all day, pretty much, and all around is blanketed in white. Great for the kids who have bemoaned the lack of snow in recent years. The temperatures are forecast to plummet into the double-figure negatives late in the coming week.

Yesterday I called Mum and Dad, but I got a lot more than just them. My aunt and uncle (the ones who live close to my parents) were there, and so was my Wellington-based cousin – who has come through a gruelling two years of treatment for cancer in her jaw – and her mother. It was good to catch up with them all. Apart from lack of snow, their weather hasn’t been much better than mine. I did mention that I hope to get over to see them in August.

I watched the darts final last light. Luke Littler, still a teenager but the undisputed king of darts, basically thrashed Gian van Veen, the rather more cerebral Dutchman who at 23 is still very young. The match started out with great excitement. There were big out shots from both players at the beginning, then a tense and nervy deciding leg of the first set which van Veen won. Then Dutchman then went 2-0 up in the second set. Game on, as they say. But from there it was one-way traffic. Van Veen averaged 100, which is pretty damn impressive, but Littler averaged a whopping 106 and was always a step or two ahead. The highlight for me was probably the appearance of a wasp (not for the first time) that took some of the sting out of Littler just momentarily. The end came quickly, before I’d even finished grinding all the coffee beans; Littler’s 147 finish was the final flourish in a 7-1 win. By the way, the G in Gian van Veen’s first name is that guttural sound similar to a Spanish J. I knew a Gerrit and a Margriet – Dutch students from my time in France – and their Gs were pronounced the same.

Since my last post, Kitty has been great. She’s calmly sat on my lap without wanting to wriggle away at any opportunity. Let’s hope she carries on like this.

I can’t even begin to know what to think of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and capture of Maduro. It’s all beyond me.

My break from all those students is coming to an end. I’ll have lessons in dribs and drabs for the next two or three days, then bam!, it’ll be back to normal again.

Update: I’ve just spoken to my brother. It’s hard work looking after the kids. My niece has had a virus; my nephew is full-on whenever he’s not asleep. I think Christmas was probably tough for my brother – he spent a week with the in-laws, whom he gets on well with, but it’s just hard not being in your own home and having to look after the kids. Talking to him puts any issues I have with Kitty into perspective.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - New Zealand - Other sports - Photos - Scrabble

The Year of the Cat

January 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s properly cold now. We’ve had flurries of snow both yesterday and today. When I went off to my lesson with an eleven-year-old boy – my 862nd and final lesson of the year if my records are correct – it was minus six. I drove, when normally I’d cycle. I took a detour after the session, and stopped for sandwiches at Bobda, a place I went to four years ago to the day, that time on my bike. It had just gone 1pm – midnight in New Zealand – so I called Mum on WhatsApp, thinking she may have already gone to bed in which case she just wouldn’t answer, but no, my parents were still up and about. They’d just seen the Sky Tower fireworks on TV. Sometimes they’d go down to Caroline Bay, but not this time.

This extraordinary Catholic church in Bobda hasn’t been divinum or nobiscum for quite some time

I got Kitty at the start of the year. She hasn’t totally wrecked my life as my parents predicted. She’s certainly much more comfortable here than in those first couple of months – the biting-and-scratching-and-cowering phase. But last night I thought, there’s still something off about you, Kitty, isn’t there? Your body is so damn tense all the time. Why can’t you just relax? Sometimes she’ll sit on my lap or I’ll hold her in my arms, but never for more than a minute or two. As I said, her body isn’t relaxed and she wants to wriggle away all the time. That makes it hard to build up much of a rapport with her, which is a shame. I’m trying to play with her more and may even get a harness so she can go outside. I hope that she calms down a bit as she gets older. Here’s Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat.

Kitty on Christmas Day

There are still seven hours of 2025 left where I am. I don’t think I can face going into town for the New Year celebrations where it’ll be rammed as Brits say, and any sort of party is out of the question. Spending less time with people over the festive season has been wonderful, and I don’t want that to stop for another few days at least. As for 2026, it feels like a very hard to predict year. There are so many imponderables both on a worldwide level and for my family. The business with their flat in St Ives, their health (which is often hard to ascertain), whether they’ll make it to Europe, so much is up in the air. On Christmas Day I mentioned to Mum that I’ll need to get round to booking some flights. She asked where to. When I said New Zealand, she seemed surprised. It was almost as case of “Why would you want to do that?” Wouldn’t it be really cool if she said, “That would be absolutely lovely.”

I finished the latest Scrabble league with a record of eight wins and six losses. That means I’ll be back in the same division for the third time running. I was pleased with how I played overall. The lady from Palmerston North was one of two weaker players in the division; they will both be relegated. The next round starts tomorrow. I thought if I’m ever going to play a real-life Scrabble tournament (against the clock and with challenges) I should at the very least try an online version, so yesterday I tried my hand at one that was run by someone in Sri Lanka, scheduled for eight games each. It turned out to be a shitshow. It was due to start at 11:30 am my time (3pm for the organiser; India and Sri Lanka are on a half-hour time zone, just like the central third of Australia and a few other places). But most of the entrants didn’t even show up. Blame the ridiculous registration process for that; one click and you were committed, with no way of backing out. The organiser delayed the start for half an hour in a vain hope that more people might present themselves, but they never did. Eventually I played a game. A good game it was too. My opponent drew fantastically and I lost by 50-odd – no shame in that – even though I successfully challenged off his play of DOUG which as I suspected is just a bloke’s name. In the second game my opponent played ANECDOTA. I’d never seen that word before so I challenged, but it was valid. A little while later he said he had an emergency. Could I cancel the game? OK then. Five minutes later the game restarted from the beginning. Emergency over, he said. What the heck is this?! He wasn’t a good player, he was quite possibly cheating, and he definitely seemed to be a complete dick. Thankfully I was able to beat him. In game three I played someone better than me but was fortunate in my draws and ran up a big lead; despite my best efforts to blow it, I hung on to win. Then the organiser mercifully called a halt to proceedings. If real-life competitive Scrabble is anything like that, you can count me out.

Yesterday I watched some of the darts. I hadn’t watched any of this year’s tournament prior to that. One of the matches featured Krzyzstof Ratajski of Poland. I guess Polish Scrabble might be quite interesting. Another match involved a debutant called Justin Hood who remarkably hit all of his first eleven attempts at a double. His twelfth was match dart which he missed, but he completed a 4-0 whitewash over the much higher ranked Josh Rock all the same.

Family - Life :) - Music

A quiet Christmas

December 26, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s been a very uneventful Christmas Day which I don’t mind at all. The living room looks halfway decent now so I attacked the bathroom. Then I made a salam de biscuiți – well two of them, actually – and a salată de boeuf to take to Dorothy’s tomorrow. I’ve had a lot of Merry Christmas messages with a couple of Marry Christmas ones thrown in. No Mary Christmas ones yet, but there’s still time. A bit earlier I had a chat with my neighbour Elena who is still in Canada bit will arrive back in Timișoara on 9th January.

I haven’t spoken to my brother today, though we had a chat last night. I imagine it’s pretty full-on for him, with his son now three and a quarter and amped all of a sudden by Christmas. Mum and Dad had a stress-free Christmas Day which I’m very happy about. They had dinner at Mum’s older sister’s place in Timaru; my cousin, her husband, daughter and son were also there. My cousin is simply a nice person with a great family, so that would have made everything way easier. My parents had been invited to go out somewhere on Christmas Eve, but Mum did something out-of-character (and utterly brilliant): she said no. She had stuff to do for the church and desserts to make for Christmas Day and all the rest of it, so hats off to her for uttering that very handy two-letter word.

Another of my twenty cousins, the one who lives in New York state, is over in New Zealand with his wife. Just before Christmas they went to Stewart Island with my cousin’s parents. My uncle is 84 and is suffering from memory loss, so I’m not sure what the trip would have been like. My cousin is a keen golfer and recently got a super-rare two on a par-five, known as an albatross. Holes-in-one are ten a penny when compared to an albatross. I’m impressed he was even able to drive the ball far enough to reach the green in two. Yes, I have exactly twenty cousins, just two of whom are on my father’s side.

Yesterday I ended up watching a YouTube video about the 1996 Ethopian Airlines flight that was hijacked. Not long after the plane took off from Ethiopia, three men stormed the cockpit (as you could do in pre-9/11 days) and attacked the pilots with an axe and a fire extinguisher. They beat up the co-pilot, then ordered the pilot to fly to Australia, which was impossible – the plane didn’t have nearly enough fuel for that. Eventually the plane ran out of fuel and ditched off Comoros Islands, near a beach resort. The ditching was spectactularly caught on amateur video – whoever shot the video initially thought it was some kind of air show. Fifty of the 175 people on board survived, including both pilots. I had no recollection of this incident, even though I could remember two other crashes from the same year.

On Monday when I was at Mark’s, they had some music playing. I can’t remember who, but I commented that it sounded rather like Tracy Chapman. Mark’s wife then put on all of her first album, which I much appreciated. I never imagined she’d be a fan. Today I’ve been listening to a few Christmas songs including Chuck Berry’s Run Rudolph Run which I don’t remember hearing before.

I’m still a bit hazy about Dad’s health. Mum’s too, to be honest. Dad told me he was disoriented when he flew his model plane last Sunday. When the plane is flying away from you instead of towards you, left becomes right on the controls and vice-versa. He said he was momentarily confused with that, even though he’s been flying these planes since the late nineties. I can see worries about my parents’ health dominating large chunks of 2026.

Family - Life :) - Music - Scrabble

The game is rigged (and a health update)

December 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

Firstly, Dad sent me a video entitled How to Get Rich. It’s a must-watch. The game of accumulating wealth is increasingly rigged against young people (and even not-so-young people) unless they happen to have rich parents. And upsettingly (and “coincidentally”), people’s self-worth became synonymous with wealth in the eighties, just when the rigging clicked into overdrive. My solution to the rigged game was to walk off the pitch entirely, and I say that as as someone who does have well-off parents, if not exactly rich ones. Honestly I gave up chasing wealth in my late twenties, well before I even thought about living anywhere near Romania.

I spoke to Dad on Sunday night (Monday morning over there). Mum happened to be at the supermarket. Dad looked terrible. He felt dizzy and spoke of an attack of some sort, less than an hour before we spoke and just before Mum went out. His symptoms sounded akin to a mini stroke. While we were talking, Mum came home looking as happy as Larry. She asked me why I looked so worried. Dad later emailed me to say that he and Mum had managed to go for a walk, which was good to hear, and other than that he’d spent the rest of the day working on a painting in the studio. Mum, for her part, hasn’t been great either.

I’ve been on a go-slow today. I just felt so tired. Yesterday I only had a single two-hour lesson and then had a Christmas dinner of sorts in Dumbrăvița with Mark and his wife. Our last one – they’re moving back to the UK, probably in June. Mark, who (unlike his wife) enjoys cooking, made a risotto, while I brought over both my leftover cottage pie and a salată de boeuf I’d made earlier in the day. We had some interesting conversation, a lot of it (inevitably) about teaching because we all do so much of it. Mark’s wife at one point commented that eating out in Romania has got so much more expensive, saying she’d recently been out for sushi with one of the other teachers; it cost the equivalent of £80 each. What?! I said that I’d never spent eighty quid on a meal out in my life, which was certainly no lie. Unexpectedly, the three of us ended up playing Texas Hold ’em poker. Mark busted out early, then his wife won heads-up against me. Really I just wanted to get home by that point.

Scrabble. I’m back playing the Romanian guy again. He says he wants me to play real-life Scrabble. There’s a tournament in Cluj (which is where he lives) in February. Just weeks away. Playing serious Scrabble over the board would be a pretty nerve-wracking experience for me. Top players don’t just put down words, they also do admin stuff like tile-tracking so they can later figure out the endgame, which is something I’ve never done because when you play online that’s all done for you. Plus I might just be too busy for something like that. I’ll have to think about it. Overall I haven’t done badly in the league this time around. I had two surprise narrow victories (by ten and five points) which have certainly helped me.

I never mentioned the Bondi Beach shooting that happened last week, killing at least 15 people including a ten-year-old girl. I stayed at Bondi Beach in 2000, a few weeks before the Olympics, while my parents were living in Cairns. I think of Australia as being a safe haven of sorts, but it’s just as vulnerable to terror attacks as anywhere else; there have been a number in the last decade or so.

I heard that Chris Rea has died. He’s most famous for Driving Home for Christmas which is an excellent Christmas song, though I really like his Road to Hell and especially Auberge.

We’re losing pop and rock stars at a rate of knots now. It’s hard to believe that nearly ten years have passed since David Bowie died. Lately my go-to song has been his Sound and Vision.

Tomorrow will be my cleaning-up day.

Cat - Films - Life :)

The absence of people

December 22, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’m absolutely desperate right now to not see anybody. Gagging for the total absence of people, and as such, to recharge my batteries. From the 27th to the 31st I might have one or two online lessons, but apart from that I will not see anyone over that period.

I get about 95% of my recommended daily human contact from work alone. I hardly need anything else. Dorothy invited me to church today. Not just the service, but also lunch afterwards. That meant I had to make something. There would be people of all nationalities, so people had to bring something from their home country. I made something British – a cottage pie. As I was making it last night, I felt exhausted. Making sure I have all the ingredients, buying those few ingredients I didn’t have, then making the pie which nobody was going to bloody eat (let’s face it), then going to the service and the lunch and getting there and back – all in all it was nearly six hours. Six hours that I’ll never get back. During the service itself, I felt pretty out of place. And very tired. I ended up next to a large man who told me his first two names were Cristian and Emanuel. Very Christmassy, I said. “If there’s anything in Romanian you don’t understand, let me know.” “I’m sure I’ll manage.” Eventually we came to the sermon which of course was in Romanian. (At 80-something minutes, the service was shorter than I expected.) The moment the sermon ended, Cristian Emanuel asked me in English, “So what were the three truths?” Oh god, you’re literally testing me?! Don’t you realise that I’m simply going through the motions here? The food bit wasn’t so bad, but I was still dying to get away. The Australian woman was there. She’s virtually my age and incredibly now has a three-month-old son. We talked about Antipodean expressions. She brought a pavlova which was very good. It reminded me of all my Kiwi Christmases. (Well, Mum made a lot of pavlovas even when we were still all in the UK.) A young woman from Ethiopia showed me how to type in Amharic on her phone. They have an alphabet (or really a syllabary) that works rather like Japanese hiragana but with far more symbols (over 200), presumably because the language has a larger inventory of sounds than Japanese.

I got away. Earlier this evening there was the English conversation club which meant yet more talking. Yesterday the 17-year-old girl wanted her third maths lesson of the week with me. I was seeing Matei at ten, then I had lunch with the tennis people at one, so I agreed to meet her at four. I got back home with a few minutes to spare and the bell went immediately while I was having a pee. Oh jeez, give time to have a pee will you, and preferably make a cup of tea and feed Kitty too.

Water, a two-year-old cat and a laptop really don’t mix, as I found out on Friday morning, ten minutes before I was due to start a lesson. Kitty jumped up and knocked a glass of water, mostly over me and the sofa, but a small amount went over the laptop keyboard. I wiped the keyboard – surely it’ll be fine – and quickly got changed, then bugger. This keyboard really isn’t working. For a while the digits were stuck, then M gave me H and G gave me V and the space bar wasn’t working properly. It still isn’t quite right now. The forward and down arrows aren’t working, and neither are some of the keys on the numerical keypad, but at least all the normal keys (if you like) are fine. Maybe those other keys will come right after I next shut down. I have no idea how any of the circuitry, or what have you, works. What a pain though, and for a while on Friday I was worried I’d have a keyboard that was completely out of action – a huge problem when my work relies so heavily on it.

Scrabble. The latest round of the league started on Thursday. It’s tough. My opponents are just too good. They’ve played proper tournaments – nationals and even world championships in some cases. The top divisions feature a world-class line-up. Last time I was fortunate to eke out enough games to escape the bottom five, but this time I don’t think I’ll be so lucky. As well as the Romanian again, there’s a New Zealander in my division this time – she’s from Palmerston North – as well as some Australians.

On Friday I went with Dorothy to Cinema Timiș to see The Yellow Tie, a film all about the Romanian conductor Silviu Celibidache. A brilliant film, and I realised how lucky we now are to have these proper cinemas in the city that don’t necessitate going to the mall. The acoustics were great, which for that sort of film you absolutely need. And at just 25 lei, it’s frankly a steal.

This flat is a complete mess. Christmas Eve will probably be my tidying-up day. I’ve got nothing planned for Christmas Day. On Boxing Day there’s something going on at Dorothy’s place. Then after that all I’ve got planned is a whole load of not seeing people.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Music - Photos - Scrabble

Loads of lessons — time for a break

December 15, 2025 by 0 Comments

I took Kitty to the vet on Friday for her latest round of flea treatments and a general warrant of fitness. As I suspected after changing her food, she’d put on a smidgen of weight: according to their scales (which have 50-gram precision) she was exactly three kilos. She’ll always be a little kitty.

Last week was a very busy one with 35 hours of lessons. That’s a lot of contact time. A lot of talking. When you add in all the preparation, it was a pretty draining week. I’m now staring at my diary for tomorrow; after my early-morning lesson with the Romanian teacher I’ve got six sessions, finishing at 9:30 pm. I’m seriously looking forward to the Christmas break, in particular the days between Christmas and New Year when not a lot happens. This morning I bought an artificial Christmas tree from the supermarket. In some ways I’d have preferred a real one – I like their smell – but I had a look at them at the market and decided they weren’t really cost-effective for a single person. I’m glad I got to the mall this morning at nine, before it became impossibly busy for me. (Only the supermarket is open at that time; the other shops don’t open till ten.) I wondered what the heck was going on with the decorations you could buy in beige and other pastel shades. “Billy, I’ll put the oatmeal candy cane on this side just above the pale lilac Santa hat, and you can put the taupe reindeer over there. There’s a good boy.” Is it because it looks better on Instagram?

Mum and Dad went to Moeraki last week. They called me from outside the fish and chip shop in Hampden, which is the only place they can get a signal. They enjoyed themselves down there, as they usually do. Mum slept a lot. They plan to spend a few days there straight after Christmas.

My first round of the Scrabble league finished last Tuesday. To my surprise, I narrowly avoided relegation with a record of six wins and eight losses. That might not sound great, but I was delighted with the result. It all came down to my final game – with four of the five relegation spots already taken, it was a straight shoot-out, with the winner avoiding the drop. The correspondence format, where you often have to wait hours between moves, made for some nerve-wracking moments. I’d built up a handy lead in that last game but, partly thanks to my total lack of experience in these sorts of situations, did my best to blow it. My last two tiles were Q and J, and I could only play one of them. I decided to play the Q, but that allowed my opponent to play MEOW which a J play would have blocked. (I really should have seen that word.) He then played one tile at a time to maximise his score while I was stuck with the J. I just had enough of a buffer though, and I won in the end by 19. It’s possible they’ll rejig the divisions and I’ll be relegated anyway, and if that happens I’ll be pretty peeved – eking out those six wins took a real effort. The next round starts this Thursday.

On Friday I met up with Dorothy and another friend in town for coffee. And three-way Romanian Scrabble. The café has an upstairs bit, so we took the Scrabble up there. Our friend hadn’t played before, so despite playing in her native language, she wasn’t tuned into triple word scores and the like. In the end I won, finishing just seven points ahead of Dorothy. At one point I had a bunch of vowels and I queried whether AIOLI was valid in Romanian. Our friend asked the waitress about the validity of AIOLI. Unsurprisingly, this was met by a Huh?

A song I’ve been playing a lot in the last few days is John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels, one of his last songs before he was murdered.

It really does feel like time for a break.