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Shortly after writing my last post, my young student couple decided to cancel all their lessons for the week, plus the following Monday’s ones, ten lessons in all. This was supposedly because of some last-minute tests or assignments at university. Then they gave me another phone call to say they wanted to come over for five minutes for some unknown reason. Right, so they’ll be telling me they want to jack their English lessons in entirely. At 10am on Wednesday the bell went. What are they going to say? They didn’t say an awful lot. Instead they gave me a Christmas hamper containing two bottles of wine, a panettone, and lots of chocolatey and biscuity and nutty things. That will certainly keep me going over Christmas. It is also shows that I’m appreciated for the work I do, and that makes it all feel worthwhile. It’s almost a new feeling for me and a very pleasant one.
In spite of the loss of business from that couple, I’ve had a reasonably productive week. The lessons with the ten-year-old boy are always fun. My friend from St Ives sent me Tim and Tobias, the first in a series of beautifully illustrated short children’s books that were written in the seventies and that I read at school in 1986 or ’87. A magic key formed a major part of the plot, but my student kept pronouncing ‘key’ as ‘kay’. I kept correcting him. Eventually he started shouting ‘KEEEEE!’ every time the word came up. We also played Space Race (my board game, that could still do with the odd tweak) and a bingo game that involves common objects (including keeeees) instead of numbers.

Black flags, as well as Romanian ones, are flying from the cathedral and the lamp-posts outside my flat, because the country is officially in mourning after the death of King Michael (and possibly because it’s also the anniversary of the bloody revolution in 1989). The king was flown to Bucharest from Switzerland on Wednesday. The funeral is tomorrow and Prince Charles will be in attendance.

My Scrabble record on ISC now reads twelve wins, three losses, although your win–loss record by itself is meaningless. It’s all about how good your opponents are. That’s why the rating system works so well. Wins against higher-rated opponents boost your rating a lot more than wins against weaker players, and the margin of your wins and losses affects your rating too. Today I figured out why ISC has a no-play feature. Put some people in front of a computer screen, with the ability to type messages to someone else, and they can’t help but be a complete arsehole. I reckon this guy, who became the first player on my no-play list, was probably an arsehole in his offline life too. I did learn two useful lessons from the game. One, don’t let people like that put you off. Two, not knowing words (or to be more accurate, not knowing the most useful words) is a huge handicap. With the game virtually neck-and-neck, I played TIE, not knowing that I’d provided my opponent with the chance to hook an S in front of it and play a winning bingo (VERITES, which I didn’t know either). I think I’ve just about got the 124 two-letter words down pat, and am now, systematically I hope, trawling through the threes.

I’ve got a job interview just one hour from now. On Skype. In Romanian. What an experience, positive or negative, that will be. It’s for a position where I’d be providing English training to employees at large companies. My interviewer is in Bucharest, hence Skype, although my job (should I get and accept it) will be here in Timișoara. I don’t know whether the role would be full-time; I really don’t want to give up the work I’m doing now and my current totally un-corporate lifestyle. I’m bound to struggle a bit, even if the interview is scheduled to take only half an hour. I mean heck, interviews are hard enough in English. Perhaps the fact that I can speak even a basic level of Romanian will work in my favour. Perhaps not. My biggest minus, I’m guessing, will be my CV: a bunch of mostly unrelated jobs. How can I convince her of the truth, that English teaching and linguistics are my preferred long-term future?

When my ordeal is over, I’ll pack my bags ready to take the train to Alba Iulia, a town not too far from Sibiu with a famous star-shaped fortress. I’ll be staying two nights at (probably) a grotty hotel. But at least it’s cheap.

Until yesterday evening, the women’s tournament at Wimbledon had outshone the men’s in terms of captivating matches, Muguruza’s gripping three-set win over Kerber being a great example. Then Nadal ran into a 34-year-old lefty serve-volleyer from Luxembourg called Gilles Muller who was playing the match of his life. The level of play from both men throughout the fifth set was extremely high, as was the drama. I was so impressed with Muller who never wavered from his game plan, even after watching those match points literally fly by. If anyone thinks after watching that match that tennis should move to first-to-four-game sets and sudden death deuce, they need their head examined. (Linguistic hat on here: when I filled in Muller’s name on my drawsheet I gave his name an umlaut because, well, it always has one, doesn’t it? I mean, even Müller yoghurts have one. But now I’m not so sure.)

Kvitova and Nadal were my picks before the tournament; well so much for that.

I’ve now got a seventh student, a friend of one of my others, and we had our first lesson this morning. She just quit her job because, in her words, the environment was toxic. She was talking literally; she was in close contact with plastics and solvents with absolutely no protection. On Friday I’ll be giving her a mock interview.

My left sinuses are inflamed again. About time I went back to the doctor.

I’m writing this very short post from a rather cramped hotel room in Băile Herculane, a very picturesque town on the River Cerna. If you ignore the Soviet-era monstrosities, this place is reminiscent of Rhayader, a town in mid-Wales that we visited regularly when I was a kid.

My parents arrived in Romania last Saturday. The Timișoara bit was great, but since then we’ve had our ups and downs. That was to be expected I guess. We spent three nights in Orșova which is just down the road from here. The scenery has been beautiful and next time I’ll write more about that and post some pictures.

The UK is going through a very rough patch. The Grenfell Tower fire was almost unfathomably horrific.

My Skype student has pulled out of her lesson at the last minute again. She’s rapidly becoming a waste of time. Yesterday I put up three posters – yes, just three – and last night I got call from a guy called Cosmin wanting help with IELTS preparation starting this Saturday, but I’ll believe him when I see him. I’m pretty sure Cosmin comes from the same root as cosmic and cosmos, so it’s a pretty cool Romanian name. I’ve yet to have a student called Bogdan, which is one of my favourite Romanian names (and a very common one). So far the names of my students have run the alphabetic gamut from Adelina (who only had two lessons with me) to Zoltan (a Hungarian name; he was my very first student and after 20 lessons he’s still going strong). I need to put up more posters and run the risk of a fine. There appears to be no other way that works. I just want to teach; this promotional stuff isn’t much fun at all. It does make a nice change though that part of my job, the main part of my job, is something I really enjoy.

According to my property manager, somebody might be interested in buying my flat in Wellington. It would obviously depend on how much I could get. In one way I’d love to get rid of it – psychologically it’s been an enormous burden – but it does give me a good rental income that I’m relying heavily on, even if 30% of that money is eaten up by rates and body corp fees. And I quite like having a toehold in Wellington. I talked to my brother about this last night. In my shoes he’d probably flick it off at the first opportunity.

Simona Halep retained her Madrid title in a fantastic three-set final. The stamina she showed in the latter stages of the match was impressive, and it augurs well for the French Open which starts in a little under two weeks. I didn’t bother with Eurovision after that. Romania finished seventh, respectable enough without all the faff and expense of having to host it next year.

The weather improved yesterday and there were multiple long, snaking queues to buy ice cream. Men, old men mostly, were playing four different games in Central Park: chess, cards (with a deck that includes cups and coins), backgammon, and some game that looks like Mahjong but with colours and numbers (Google tells me it’s Rummikub; I’ve never played that). Last Thursday I brought a pack of standard cards to my lesson with the nine-year-old and I tried to play a polite version of Go Fish with him (“no, I’m ever so sorry I haven’t got a nine; unfortunately you’ll have to go fish”) but that didn’t seem to work. I might try Last Card with him tomorrow.

I’ve just read that the extremely talented Sergio García has won the Masters. I don’t really follow golf anymore (do I properly follow any sport anymore?) but I certainly used to, and García has always struck me as being a thoroughly nice guy who for whatever reason (probably bad luck, mostly) hasn’t quite managed to take home a major. Until now, at the age of 37. Good on him. I saw that he won in a play-off. In a way, golf play-offs amaze me. Whenever I’ve tried to play golf I’ve generally lurched from one tree to the next, with the occasional air shot thrown in for good measure. A major tournament comprises four rounds, each of which involves over four miles of golfage. So two players – the two best players – completing a major in the exact same number of shots seems extraordinarily unlikely, a bit like two work colleagues with pedometers who discover they’ve both taken precisely 1472 steps to walk to work.

Just occasionally I see something or read something that has the potential to be amazing, and in the last couple of days I’ve been watching YouTube videos on pronunciation by Adrian Underhill who is truly fantastic. The videos are mostly aimed at teachers. His focus is on the physical processes that go on in your mouth to produce the various sounds. By developing awareness of those processes, you can make your students aware of those processes, and as he puts it, free them from the grip of their mother tongue. From a very early age you’re locked in to a framework of possible sounds; Underhill’s method helps students (and teachers) escape that. It’s really powerful stuff.

I’m flying to London later today. It’s a 2¾-hour flight, about half the distance between LA and Boston. Again that amazes me, because of all the countries you fly over between Romania and the UK, even though the map doesn’t lie. Before the flight I’ve got a two-hour Skype lesson. On pronunciation. So I guess I should pack.

If all goes to plan, my brother and his girlfriend will come to St Ives tomorrow so I’ll spend some time with them. As promised, here are a few photos of Timișoara that I took the weekend before last. I hope you’ll agree that Timișoara is pretty damn amazing. And for me, it’s home.