Author: plutoman

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

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.

Family - Language teaching - Music - Photos - Romania - Scrabble

December in Timișoara and being out of my league

December 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

A lot of stuff happens in Romania in December. The first of the month is the national day with all the parades of military and emergency vehicles. I wasn’t able to see the parade this time, but in the early evening I saw the bit where they march through the city carrying torches and stop every few minutes to sing the national anthem. A few days later there’s St Nicholas’ Day where all the kids get goody bags which always include a stick. Then on the 16th and for a few days afterwards there are commemorations of those who died in the 1989 revolution – that gets particular attention in Timișoara because it all kicked off here. Not long after that it’s Christmas, which is huge, though thankfully still not quite at the level of the UK. After a few blissful days it’s New Year’s Eve which is massive. As the clock ticks towards midnight, it’s practically impossible to move in town for people, as I found out nine years ago. (That was only my second night in my old flat.) Through it all and into January there’s the Christmas market which was very exciting to be among that first time with all the lights and smells. Though it seems far less exciting now – it all just feels normal – it’s actually got bigger.

On Saturday I met Mark in town, in the thick of Christmas market action. There were jazz Christmas songs booming from the stage. Things had all been rejigged to accommodate the extra stuff. We decided to get away from the chaos and go to Piața Unirii where the Museum of Banat was looking quite spectacular with all its Christmas lights. We tried a new restaurant. Predictably, it wasn’t worth it. It rarely is. One young waiter seemed to understand neither Romanian nor English. We sat there for over two hours and all I had was a burger and chips and two beers. Mark also had a dessert – some sort of pancake topped with a meringue which was supposedly some Banat speciality, though I’d never seen it before. I didn’t order a dessert and hoped Mark wouldn’t either because I knew it would mean sitting there for almost another hour.

I went to Ciacova yesterday – one of my favourite small towns around here – but the weather was pretty atrocious and I quickly came home. Other than that there’s not much news. Mum and Dad are currently in Moeraki. I’m glad about that because they manage to relax down there in a way they can’t at home.

Last week I had a session with a 25-year-old woman who said that making a lot of money is important to her. I told her that I gave up on that some time ago, and in fact I earned more at her age than I do now, 20 years later. She wants to move on from her job, not just in the pursuit of wealth but because she currently does shift work and the schedule is horrendous.

I had a difficult moment last week with a 17-year-old girl who in her last session with me made it clear that she didn’t believe in evolution. I find that hard, because to me evolution isn’t something you believe in any more than the result of two plus two is something you believe in. Anyway, on Wednesday night at close to eleven when I was halfway into bed, she sent me a message needing urgent help with an online test. At that time of night. Ugh. Reluctantly I agreed to help her. It was a 15-minute reading comprehension test that was part of the application process for an exchange programme in America. The problem is, her English level is well below what they require. She read the text and the possible answers to me but I struggled to understand what she was saying. If I’d had the text in front of me it would have been easy. In the end we ran out of time. I felt bad for her, but what could I do?

I recently joined an online Scrabble league. They split the participants up into eight divisions of 15 players each. I was put in the sixth division. It has a correspondence format in which you have to play the other 14 players in your division in 14 days. You get ten hours per move. Exceed that and you dip into a three-day time bank. If that runs out too, you lose the game. So there isn’t much time pressure. There is however significant pressure from my opponents who are mostly better than me, even in my lower division. You click on their profiles and they’ve played national and world championships, often with great success. So it’s a real uphill struggle for me. I’m currently on three wins and six losses, with five games still outstanding. Because this league is pretty new, they have an aggressive promotion and relegation system – five up, five down – so that people sort themselves quickly into the right divisions. It’s possible I can still sneak into tenth place and avoid the drop, but I may well end up being relegated. Though my play is sound strategically (I think), my word knowledge is my biggest handicap. As luck would have it, a Romanian player – one of the top-ranked English-language players in the country and a participant of two world championships – is in my division. We chatted in Romanian during our game. At one point he played cAEOmAS. Yes, using both blanks, as if he needed that advantage on top of all his others. I have no idea what that word means or how to pronounce it. I ended up getting stuck with the Q and he beat me by “just” 46. One of my other losses was by five points. My last play was MAN, and then my opponent went out with yet another word I didn’t know. I then remembered that NAM was also a word, and I could have played that instead. That would have given me four extra points, so fortunately it didn’t cost me the game.

On Saturday, the Beatles’ I’ll Follow the Sun came on the radio. Such a beautiful song, and all in a minute and 48 seconds. When I hear something like that (this song is from 1964), I always wonder how older people possibly manage in the modern world.

I’m trying to decide whether I can be bothered to get a Christmas tree. Here are some pictures of Timișoara in December:

The torch parade on 1st December

The Banat museum on Saturday night

Between the two market squares

Family - Music - Scrabble

Keeping the temperature down

December 1, 2025 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow it’ll officially be winter – my tenth in Romania. Winter has a nice cosy feel about it here, all the more so now that I have a cat. Yesterday it tipped it down all day – in my pre-car days I’d have got soaking wet getting to my lessons. We’ve had several days lately with highs of 3 or 4 degrees.

I had an hour-long chat to Mum and Dad this morning. It was all very civil, as if last Sunday’s awful call with Mum had never happened. In the meantime a number of emails bounced around between Dad and me. He talked of Mum’s thin skin, among other things. He said that I can be quite strong in my opinions, particularly when Mum is involved. I don’t think of myself as being opinionated or combative, and I don’t like getting into arguments – if I did, I’d probably lose students quickly – but I appreciate that he said that. In future I will do my best not to react, and to count to ten, even if I think she’s said something totally out of line. (The exception is when she asks me to lie to my brother about her or Dad’s health. I draw the line there. But even then I’ll try to react as calmly as possible. Easier said than done.) That was our fifth verbal bust-up since my parents came here in May, which is far too many. Dad said that over the years he’s learnt not to raise the temperature, as he put it. I totally get that – so often with Mum it’s already baking before you start – but wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a deep, meaningful discussion where you agree and disagree like grown adults? That literally never happens.

Some very good news on the Mum front. She’s been to see the doctor. Properly. The doctor was amazed at Mum’s lack of medical records. They didn’t even know if she’d had children. She was practically a blank slate. On Wednesday she’ll get a full blood test done. This morning she showed me her new vitamin D tablets that she’ll only take once a month. I didn’t know that was possible, but each tablet is 25 times the strength of the ones I take daily. I think Dad’s latest episode was a warning shot across the bow for Mum. They’ve both reached a kind of breaking point. If the apartment sale goes through (and because it’s England, you can never be 100% sure), I really hope that will take the edge off things.

My work week was busy enough, but it wasn’t quite at the level I feared. There were a few cancellations including one really annoying last-minute one. Tomorrow is Romania’s national day – a public holiday – but I’ve got four English lessons anyway, plus the Romanian one.

In the summer I bought a Romanian Scrabble set, and after my lessons yesterday I finally managed to play a game with Dorothy. I won by quite a lot, 392-215, but that was mostly because I drew a lot of high-value tiles which enabled me to score well. I also think my recent games of English Scrabble helped me to see moves over the board. Dorothy got both blanks which are normally a big help, but they came out late and the board was pretty blocked by then. It’s quite a different game in Romanian. The letter values and distributions are different: B is worth five points, G six, C only one. K, Q, W and Y aren’t there at all. There’s no equivalent of a super-powerful S tile: most words can take either an A, E or I on the end, and in some cases all three. Before I even came to Romania, I tried making Romanian words using an English set, ignoring the points, but yesterday’s experience was very different to that. Perhaps the hardest thing was the colour scheme for the premium squares which really messed with my head.

I also managed ten games of Scrabble in English this weekend, winning seven. I’ve just joined a league with a correspondence format – you need to play 14 games simultaneously in 14 days, so you get plenty of freedom as to when you play. It’s split into divisions; the top divisions have some very strong players, so I expect (hope!) I’ll be put in the bottom division. The league starts this Thursday, I think.

Lately I’ve been playing the same song over and over. It’s called Marz, by John Grant. I really liked the ethereal nature of the song and was intrigued by the lyrics. It’s all about a sweet shop called Marz that the singer frequented as a kid, so it touches on childhood nostalgia and that sense of wonder that you have at a young age. Marz is a great name for a sweet shop. I mean, Mars itself is the name of one of the world’s most successful chocolate bars, but then if you really want to attract kids, stick a Z in there. Z means fun and excitement. K has the same effect. Skool looks a lot more kool than school.

The Hong Kong apartment block fire has been all over the news in the last few days. It’s like seven Grenfells in one, with deaths in the hundreds. Utterly horrific. I was shocked to see bamboo scaffolding still being used. I’ve just had a look at other terrible fires that linger in my memory, such as one in a Honduras prison in 2012 (361 deaths) and one in a Bangladesh clothing factory in the same year (117 deaths). The following year a staggering 1134 people died in Bangladesh when a building housing several clothing factories collapsed. I’ve tried to avoid “made in Bangladesh” ever since.

On Friday I had a chat with Elena, the lady who lives above me. Yesterday was her 82nd birthday. She’s still in Canada and will be back her on 10th January.

Family - Films - Other sports - Scrabble

Is this really happening again?

November 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

I managed to completely fall out with Mum last night, for the dozenth time this year. It ended up with her shouting “YOU HATE ME! YOU HATE ME!” (it was definitely all-caps) and leaving me no choice but to end the call. Is this really happening again? After that I slept abysmally.

This all came about because Dad hasn’t been well. Last week he noticed his pulse was fast and irregular, and he’ll be seeing the doctor in the coming days. He told me this on Saturday night, just after I’d got back from the cinema. It was Sunday morning for them, so Mum was at church. Mum had told Dad not to tell me, but he told me anyway. This is obviously a big worry; quite possibly it’s come about from all the stress with the apartment sale in St Ives. I called Mum last night just before I went to bed. The first thing she said was, “Dad’s not well but don’t tell your brother.” I replied, “I will tell him. He needs to know. Why do you have to keep hiding these things?” She said he’s got a lot on his plate with the kids so it’s better he remains ignorant. And it all escalated from there. Mum isn’t exactly 100% herself. She’s practically blind right now, though she’s still driving, and on Saturday Dad told me her bowel issue is far from resolved; she sometimes has to change her clothes after what you might indelicately call a shart.

It’s impossible to disagree with Mum. You just can’t do so while maintaining a polite conversation. The moment you show any kind of dissent, a shouting match ensues. The only way to avoid this is to meekly agree. Mum knows best. And that’s exactly what Dad does. He agrees, just to make life easier in the short term, even if the agreement involves something like buying a house that he knows is unsuitable. In fact I can’t remember the last time I had an in-depth conversation with Mum about anything.

Probably Mum’s second-biggest driver of stress lately, just behind the apartment sale, has been the church roster. Seriously, the church roster. It consumes hours of her time. Days even. She says she has to put it into a PDF and it’s disappeared from the screen and so on and so forth and if I don’t get it out on time I’ll be shunned by all members of the congregation or something ridiculous. Maybe she even thinks she’ll be banished to the burning flames of hell. So last week she bought herself a new laptop, which at the moment she doesn’t know how to use, just to do the church roster. That’s a small clue as to Mum’s level of rationality.

I seriously have to think about what to do next year. I’d love to make a trip to New Zealand, but spending that length of time with Mum might be too risky. It nearly went horribly wrong last time around.

Yesterday was my niece’s christening. It was a double christening; my niece’s cousin (a six-month-old girl) was also baptised. Mum, Dad and I were able to hook up to the service on Teams. The minister who made it all happen was the same one who did my brother’s wedding and my nephew’s christening; he certainly has the capacity to entertain. My nephew spent practically the whole hour-plus event running.

The movie I saw was All the President’s Men, a 1976 film all about how the Watergate saga was covered by the Washington Post. It starred Robert Redford, who died recently, and Dustin Hoffman. I saw it with Dorothy at Cinema Timiș on a cold, wet Saturday evening. (Dorothy also saw it when it came out.) The star of the show was really Ben Bradlee, the newspaper’s chief editor. It made me realise that democracy, in the US and elsewhere, is indeed slowly dying. A modern Watergate would be met with a collective shrug. Of course Trump did instigate something worse than Watergate, and the only consequences for him have been to sue the BBC for a billion dollars.

Birmingham City’s new stadium was revealed last week after much anticipation. It’s going to have chimneys – twelve of them – and be visible for many miles. They plan to have it ready for the 2030-31 season. It’ll be part of a multi-billion-pound “sports quarter”. Something like this, if they have a top-class footballing side to go with it, really could revitalise a flagging city. Aston Villa have been easily the city’s best club over the years, and they have a fancy-sounding name. They don’t carry the name of the city though – the city of industry with all those chimneys – and that counts for something. Maybe Birmingham will be known as the Chimney Boys or something. (I’m not very good at this.)

The latest report from the UK Covid inquiry is out. Quoting verbatim, the chair of the inquiry said that while government was presented with unenviable choices under extreme pressure, “all four governments failed to appreciate the scale of the threat or the urgency of response it demanded in the early part of 2020.” Yes, absolutely. It was shockingly slow, and thousands died unnecessarily as a result. A common point of view is that it was going to be bad no matter what, and no government could have done anything about it. I disagree entirely with that.

I played six games of Scrabble yesterday, losing five. Not my best day, but I also drew poorly. That happens. Sharted is valid, and off the top of my head it has six anagrams: hardest, hardset, hatreds, threads, dearths and trashed.

A big week of lessons in store. I’ve got 36½ hours scheduled. They may not all happen – I usually get at least a couple of cancellations – but I don’t expect to have much free time.

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching

Well that’s a relief…

November 20, 2025 by 0 Comments

I had a good night’s sleep last night. I had an easier than average work day yesterday. And I still feel absolutely shattered.

Last night I met up with Mark at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. We both had spätzle which Mark had had before but was totally new to me. Spätzle are a kind of German egg noodles; mine were topped with minced beef in tomato sauce, so the dish was very much like bog-standard spaghetti bolognese. Very good though. We both drove there so neither of us could drink anything. Hopefully next time we go there, if there is a next time, we’ll be on our bikes. I say if there is a next time because Mark won’t be in Romania much longer. He and his wife are heading back to the UK. They may stick it out until the summer, but his wife has just applied for a deputy head position at a school in Cardiff; she’d start in three months’ time. Saying goodbye to Mark isn’t going to be much fun.

When I got back from Dumbrăvița I called my parents. Good news. Dad just happened to be closest to the phone when it rang, and he unilaterally accepted the offer of £245,000. A straight accept, no halfway house or anything. I don’t blame him. The risk of having the sale fall through is simply too great. Lately Mum has been attending an exercise class on Thursdays. This meant Mum had to leave in the middle of our chat, so I got the chance to talk to Dad alone. He said that for the past two days he’d had to deal with a permanently angry Mum. Angry with him, mostly. During these spells, which are all too frequent, Mum becomes practically impossible to live with. As I’ve said to Dad before, 80% of blokes wouldn’t put up with it as he does.

Braytim, that slightly weird name for a suburb of Timișoara that I was keen to avoid that I mentioned in my last post, is in fact the name of the Romanian–French construction company that built the development in the nineties. So it isn’t quite as new as I thought. The Bray part of the name comes from Saint-Jean-de-Braye, which is a place in France, while tim obviously comes from Timișoara. There are names ending in (or beginning with) tim everywhere here. I once thought about setting up a teaching company called Verbatim.

I had an interesting maths lesson yesterday with a 12-year-old girl. For a while we went off-topic. At one point I mentioned car loans, saying that they’re generally a terrible idea. She wondered why. They give you ages to pay it off, right? If you take out a car loan for €10,000, I said, how much would you have to pay back? Well, €10,000, of course. No, it might be more like €15,000. Whatever the figure, it’s a lot more than the original price. This is the sort of thing they should be teaching you in maths classes at school. Well of course they’re not going to teach us that! That’s life stuff, and you don’t get taught life stuff at school. Gosh, sadly you’re absolutely positively right on that point, aren’t you?

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Scrabble

Sometimes your principles need to go out the window

November 19, 2025 by 0 Comments

At 8:30 this morning I met Dorothy at the immigration office. She’d being trying to renew her residence permit, just like I did back in April, but struggling with the online process that (like me) she found impenetrable. This time, to her great relief, the man at the desk allowed her to bypass the inscrutable portal and get her permit processed manually. They probably took pity on her because of her age. (I was lucky that the place was pretty much deserted when I went.) She was there for ages behind a sort of curtain. I couldn’t figure out what was taking so long. The problem was in fact her fingerprints. After many decades of gardening, they had worn flat. Whatever she did, they couldn’t get a reading. Finally they let her through regardless. Afterwards we wandered around trying to find somewhere nearby to have a coffee. My cappuccino was, as always, nowhere near warm enough, but we had a very good chat.

While I was out, Dad had tried to call me on Teams. I didn’t hear a thing; it just flashed up with a message. By the time I got back it was a bit too late, and honestly I was afraid of how the conversation might unfold. Yesterday our aunt emailed my brother and I to inform us that Mum and Dad’s prospective buyers – their current tenants – who had already agreed to buy the place for £250,000, had lowered their offer by £5,000. The English “system” is crazy. You sign, you agree, that’s final, if you then back out you lose your 10% deposit. That’s what sensible countries do. It’s even what Scotland does, as far as I know. But not England. The tenants mentioned something about wear and tear and renovation costs. My aunt said our parents should meet the tenants halfway and come down to £247,500. I entirely agreed with her – that’s exactly what I would do in their shoes. My brother though said that the tenants are in a weak position, the talk of renovation costs is ridiculous, and our parents should stick to their guns on principle. As I see it, Mum and Dad have basically just won Lotto here and to risk losing the sale for the sake of 2% or even 1% of the asking price would be terrible. Any future sale, if there is one, would likely have horrendous chains attached (that could break at any moment) and could involve untold time and stress. I’m meeting Mark for dinner tonight – I have an extremely rare early finish of 7pm – and maybe I’ll call Mum and Dad when I get back and find out what they’ve decided to do.

I’ve got an easier day today and boy do I need it. My recent schedule has been exhausting. On top of the teaching there are lesson plans and debriefs so I don’t simply forget what I’ve done. The scheduling itself is a headache as it’s a struggle to fit everyone in. Online lessons can be particularly tiring because of all that screen time. The biggest problem is not having two free days at the weekend (or even free evenings) to recharge my batteries. I’m not complaining – after nine years this is still the best thing ever – but at times in the last two weeks I’ve felt absolutely shattered.

Yesterday I had my second lesson with the Dubai woman. The latest Dubai woman, I should say – there are so many. She lives in Braytim, a new development in the south of Timișoara. I don’t know where the “Bray” part of the name comes from. Y isn’t even part of the Romanian alphabet. I had a look at a couple of flats in that area and was put off immediately because it all seemed so soulless. I’d have gone stir-crazy there with all the unremitting newness. Plus the flats were all in that open-space format which is hopeless for teaching. I also wouldn’t have Kitty if I lived in a place like that. She’s lovely, but she’s so active that I do need to restrict her access at night. Last Friday I had a two-hour lesson at home with two boys who were blown away by Kitty’s agility.

On Monday my 37-year-old student in Slatina said something I found extremely sad. We were discussing photos. Do you take many photos? Are there lots of photos of you? She said, “I hate people taking photos of me because I’m ugly.” That’s very sad, I said. “It’s not sad, it’s just the truth.” Yikes. I almost cried.

Last week the world Scrabble championship took place in Ghana. It only happens every two years. Over 120 players each played 32 games; the top two then met in a best-of-seven final on Sunday. I caught snippets of it at best until the final games on Saturday and then the final itself. Adam Logan of Canada had already clinched a place in the final with games to spare, while New Zealand’s Nigel Richards, the undisputed best player of all time, won his last three games to sneak into second place and make the final. The final was streamed on YouTube. In a game largely dominated by nerdy young men, it was good to these two old geezers in the final. Every game was drama-packed, not least game four in which Nigel incredibly misplaced two tiles, forgoing 100-odd points, but won the game anyway. Top mathematician Adam took the lead, Nigel came back, but Adam – who completed a stunning fightback in the third game and had slightly better luck, particularly in game six – toughed out a 4-2 win. You could see at the end what it meant. I was fascinated by the fact that neither player had a phone. Scores are normally submitted via phones, but when perhaps the only two phoneless players met in the final, this obviously wasn’t an option. Both players are reclusive, as far as I can make out, and they hardly said a word throughout their battle. The sad thing for me is that Richards – clearly the best player ever in a very popular board game – gets virtually zero recognition in his native country. Maybe if he had to unscramble tiles with his head up other blokes’ arses as in a rugby scrum, he’d get more attention. (That’s unfair I know. NZ has moved on a lot from the rugby-racing-and-beer days. Also, Nigel moved to Malaysia in 2000.) During the stream they put up a poll. If you’re watching this, how old are you? Under 20, 20–29, 30–39, 40 or over. What an ageist poll! I’m firmly in the geriatric category here. But then, look who made the final two.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - The UK

Relieving my parents’ burden, I hope

November 14, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ll start with some very good news. The people currently renting one of Mum and Dad’s St Ives flats want to buy it. In fact my parents have already accepted their offer. A flat £250,000. Outright, so none of those god-awful chains you get over there that break at a moment’s notice and send you back to square one. I wonder how the renters are suddenly in a position to buy. There’s still legal stuff to get done, and it looks like they’ll get a bill for a couple of thousand to fix the roof, but wow, if this goes through it would be huge. I’m very happy Mum and Dad immediately accepted rather than hanging out for an extra five or ten grand or whatever. This all kicked off when they got a call on their home phone at three in the morning from their property manager. Shit, what’s this? Oh really?

I’ve been pretty busy of late with lessons. I’m having a tough time fitting them all in, to be honest, and it’s been tiring. The biggest problem is that my “client base” has become increasingly kid-heavy, and most of them are only available between 3pm and 7pm or thereabouts. On Wednesday I had a lesson with the 15-year-old twins, boy and girl, who live in a ground-floor flat whose lack of daylight would mess me up entirely. They’d just had an English test. The girl (who now has a very good command of English) got the maximum grade of 10 while the boy got a 7, which is still certainly a pass. They both talked at length of their stress of homework and tests and exams, and that’s even though they’re in the ninth class which is supposed to be less stressful than the one they completed last June. (At the end of eighth class, they have two high-stakes exams in Romanian and maths. The scores they receive in those exams determine what school they go to for the final four years. The scores are decimal numbers out of ten like 7.8 or 8.3; the best schools require averages well into the nines.)

It was clear the boy was disappointed with his English grade, and sure enough the next morning I got a message from his mum. Quoting verbatim: “Please be more demanding with [boy’s name]. I’m disappointed in him. He doesn’t study, otherwise I don’t understand how, after so many years of English, he gets a 7 on the test. Please give him homework. He only learns when you do it with him. And I want him to be able to get his Cambridge. Thank you very much!!” His mum wrote this in English. In the past she’d make lots of mistakes in English, but this was perfect, so quite possibly she used AI. I wanted to write back: Leave the poor chap alone! He’s got so many other subjects; just give him a break. He also happens to be on one of the country’s best robotics teams. I did reply, saying that in future I’ll let the girl get on with her work, mostly from a textbook, while being a lot more hands-on with the boy. The fact that they’re at quite different levels does create a problem in our lessons; she’s liable to blurt out an answer before he’s even had time to understand the question. By the way, “get his Cambridge” refers to a Cambridge English test, which you can take at various levels. It doesn’t mean getting into Cambridge University, though his mum probably has that in mind too.

On Tuesday I had a new student, a woman in her mid-thirties who works as an ear-nose-and-throat specialist. I’ve seen a few of them over the years. We met online; she was smoking a cigarette as we started the session. She had plenty of make-up and jewellery and what I’m sure was a fake tan. At one point I asked her if she’d travelled much. Oh yes. Where have you been? Given what she looked like and the fact that she must be on good money, I knew what was coming. Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Dubai. Of course Dubai. She’s at a beginner level so the lessons won’t be easy at all, but I’m sure I’ll manage.

I saw a video pop up on my YouTube entitled “Why you shouldn’t trust confident people”. I don’t. People who appear very confident and don’t ever say maybe and use very few filler words have always set off alarm bells in me. I was thinking about this when I saw Michael Gove interviewed recently. He was minister of education in the UK from 2010 to 2015 and is partly responsible for the maths GCSE over there being a lot harder now than it was 30 years ago when I did it. When I heard him speak I thought, gosh, you’re using all these big words and speaking oh so authoritatively, but I don’t really think you have a clue. And as a result, you’re dangerous.

When I spoke to Mum recently, she interrupted our conversation twice to visit the loo. She’s still not right down there, is she?