Politics

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I can’t breathe

June 3, 2020 by 0 Comments

There was a whole load of Spandau Ballet on Radio Timișoara’s Musicorama show this evening. I’m not a big fan, but my brother is, and it all reminded me of his Spandau Ballet-tinged wedding, two years ago now.

When I spoke to Mum on Sunday, she said she wished New Zealand was still under lockdown. She cherished the peace and quiet. So did I. Here it’s back to queues of traffic and honking horns. I miss being able to hear birds in the park, and trains clattering by in the distance.

If things weren’t bad enough, America has taken yet another upsetting turn in the last week. The brutal crushing to death of George Floyd, captured in a harrowing nine-minute video – how many more George Floyds were never caught on camera? – has led to mass protests and riots, all in the middle of a pandemic. There are endless video clips of police violence. The disease will have spread in these protests and people will die. This strong backlash to police brutality feels like a tipping point, something that transcends America’s dreadful partisanship. Trump has been appallingly inactive and silent, outside of Twitter. If the election were held tomorrow, I would be confident in predicting the end of that vile creature, but it’s five months away, which in these extraordinary times is an eternity. Thanks to the vagaries of the electoral college, he could easily still win.

Britain can’t quite compete with the US, but they’re giving it a jolly good go. For the UK it’s been a perfect storm. After the immature 3½-year faff with Brexit, anyone with an ounce of common sense and humility got elbowed out of power in December’s election if they hadn’t been already, and now you’ve got a government who’d be out of their depth even under normal circumstances. Then coronavirus came along. Now they’ve ditched the remote parliament – the only good political thing to come out of this crisis – and today there were farcical scenes of a ridiculously long queue to vote.

I’ve spent most of the last two days working on a dictionary for problematic words for the book. I’m still near the beginning of the Cs – almost the whole alphabet still to do.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Britain: what’s gone wrong?

May 14, 2020 by 0 Comments

When I moved to New Zealand in 2003, I was proud to be British. All the wonderful music and comedy that appeared on my TV screen made me homesick. I still remember how I felt when I went back to the UK in 2006 – this is a cool country. New Zealand is picturesque and everything, but it’s culturally dead. This place, on the other hand, is humming.

But now I switch on the TV and it’s the UK that seems culturally dead. It’s felt that way for years, long before this pandemic hit. Is Brexit to blame? Is it the internet? Something is missing. It seems the London Olympics in 2012 were Britain’s last hurrah, and since then the UK has become an increasingly inward-looking nation. Perhaps it’s just me looking in from the outside, and if I lived in the UK everything would feel as alive as ever (once you ignore the effects of coronavirus, of course).

I watched bits of Boris in parliament this afternoon. I’ve heard some people say that he’s mad (and the same of Trump). Maybe, but that’s not the right criticism. There’s nothing wrong with being a bit mad. The most interesting, most creative people tend to head in that direction. (The attraction of Romania to me as opposed to, say, Hungary or Poland, was that it would be a bit madder. Things would be faded, rusty, coming apart at the seams. Things might smell a bit. Colours wouldn’t match. My kind of place.) No, the problem with Boris is that he’s massively overprivileged. He hasn’t got to his position by being any good; he’s got there on this connections, on being able to make it up as he goes along, on having far too much self-confidence pumped into him at Eton. In a pandemic crisis like this, you need attention to detail, clarity of message, and bucketloads of sincerity. In other words, Boris is exactly who you don’t want at the helm. He’s potentially dangerous. (He’s still better than Trump, though. With Trump, there’s no potentially about it. That guy is evil. In all 17-plus stone of him, there is not an ounce of empathy.)

I had a sad lesson this afternoon with the woman I once played tennis with. She’s clearly been unhappy in her marriage for some time, and is now having Skype meetings with a psychologist. After the session we had a good chat in Romanian, and I felt I did reasonably well.

The nightmare with my apartment in Wellington means I’ve gone eight years without caring about money, except at a basic level. I’d pretty much given up on achieving any sort of long-term financial strength, because that ship seemed to have sailed. And really I’d checked out about four years before I got that awful letter from the council – I still had my career in insurance, but I was going through the motions. Now though, having hit 40, it’s about time I did something. I’ve managed to kill off most of my mortgage, and my immediate goal is to eradicate it completely. With KiwiSaver and the little pots of money I have in the UK and Romania, my financial situation isn’t all that dire when you consider the enormous loss I’ve incurred in Wellington. My almost total avoidance of expenditure on anything I can’t eat has helped.

Radio Timișoara plays all sorts of weird and wonderful music, most of it surprisingly good. I sometimes Shazam the songs when I hear them. Usually (but not always), Shazam tracks down the artist and the song title, and tells me how many people have Shazammed the song to date. These numbers are often in six or seven figures, but with lesser-known Romanian songs they might only be in the dozens or hundreds. On Monday I got a bit of a surprise when I heard a new song by Ștefan Bănică (Junior – his father died some time ago). This song had interesting lyrics, including Ceaușescu and Simona Halep. I was the first person to Shazam the song:

Then a few minutes later I heard a song I liked by a band from Timișoara called All In Green. This time I was a bit tardy and had to settle for bronze:

Contrast that with Master Blaster (Jammin’) on this evening’s Stevie Wonder-themed show. Fantastic song; nearly 1.6 million searches. (The song was made in 1979 and came out in ’80, just like me.)

Coronavirus - Music - Politics - Scrabble

Work slowly picking up

April 17, 2020 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow I should have four lessons. I’ve picked up another student, a woman who is friends with Cosmin, the ex-student of mine who recently contacted me. She called me today and she spoke so fast that I had put all my concentration into understanding her. I was very stuttery in reply. The difference in speed and clarity between people is vast – Cosmin, for instance, is much clearer and more deliberate. This woman said she’ll need to start from zero, which probably means she knows only 10,000 words and seven verb tenses.

Yesterday I switched on the radio and just caught the incredible last minute or so of a song I recognised but couldn’t put a name to. They played it right to the end. Then this morning I remembered it was Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It’s just a beautiful song, and that synthesiser solo at the end takes it into the stratosphere. Hats off to Radio Timișoara for playing it and not cutting it off. I read that Greg Lake wrote the song when he was twelve. Sadly, both he and Keith Emerson died in 2016, leaving only Carl Palmer, the staggeringly dynamic drummer.

This afternoon I bumped into the woman who lives next door but one. She told me to be ultra careful because of all the people heading out to get supplies for Orthodox Easter. She was glad that Romania is not (yet?) at the levels of Spain or Italy, and was open-mouthed when I told her how many people had died in the UK. Yesterday I saw Bogdan, who lives on the second floor. He invited me over for birthday beers today, but I had to refuse.

Some figures from John Campbell’s latest video make the UK situation all the more alarming. There are considerably more additional deaths (i.e. deaths in excess of the average for the time of year) than there are deaths caused by Covid-19. That might be because some people are dying of coronavirus without being diagnosed, but it’s quite possible that people are dying of other causes because they are no longer receiving due care and attention, and if that’s the case it’s terrible. As far as I know, deaths in care homes still aren’t being included in the UK total. Common sense would suggest that the death toll is very high in care homes – they act as a petri dish for the virus.

Mum seems to have fallen out with her younger brother. He came to my brother’s wedding two years ago and then had a dreadful time with a bowel cancer operation that went horribly wrong. He’s also a Trump supporter who watches plenty of Fox News, and that’s where they fell out. When she told him to stop watching that piece of shit, he put the phone down on her. I don’t blame Mum, who after hearing over and over again from her brother how wonderful Trump is, finally snapped. Trump is a total arse, who in a parade of total arses manages to have no redeeming features whatsoever. He is quite simply all arse, and if you’re supporting him right now when far too many Americans are dying, that says quite a bit about you.

Finally, I played a game of Scrabble this evening for the first time since June. I was abysmal (which would have made a nice bingo). In the same vein, I played hangman with one of my younger students on Tuesday, the best we could on Skype. He found a site called something like “really hard hangman words” and gave me yachtsman. I got there, but heck, those five consonants in a row had me, um, all at sea for a while.

Coronavirus - Family - Language learning - Politics

In the danger zone (which is most of the world right now)

April 10, 2020 by 0 Comments

I spoke to Mum and Dad again this morning. They’re in New Zealand, one of the few shining beacons in a dark world, where (amazingly) new recoveries outnumbered new infections in the latest figures. They live in a pretty isolated part of an even more isolated country, and they’re coping well with the lockdown. But they’re scared shitless about me.

After talking to my sister-in-law last night, I felt sorry for her. She has to attend two hospitals (in Poole and Bournemouth) and see private patients. Lots of old people, who she could be infecting without knowing it. She can’t get tested unless either she or my brother shows symptoms. For the second day running, around 900 new deaths were recorded in the UK.

Today has been Romania’s deadliest day so far. The numbers have been surprisingly stable to this point, but the coming weeks are scary, in spite of the lockdown which must be helping greatly. I also wonder how many people these official figures might be excluding – Romanians have a habit of avoiding hospital if at all possible, and I imagine many have died at home. One bright spot is a jump in the number of recoveries.

The highlight of today was perhaps the chat I had with the lady who lives next door but one from me. She said my Romanian was “admirable”, then the next minute I said I had barrels of water in my bag. I forgot that big water bottles are bidoane, and said butoaie instead. Too many B-words, in both languages. She expressed a love of British culture, “but I don’t like the French”.

Plenty of political news amid all of this. There’s a new Labour leader in the UK (good), the Democratic nominee has been decided (good, but they all need to get behind him), and in more good news, it looks like Boris Johnson will be one of the lucky 50% who survive their stint in ICU with coronavirus.

The latest graph:

Romania coronavirus 9-4-20
Coronavirus - Politics

Dual nationality, big contrasts

April 7, 2020 by 0 Comments

I just got a message on my phone in Romanian, saying that Boris Johnson has been taken into intensive care. I don’t agree with his politics or his style or that he came from such a privileged background, but I sincerely hope he pulls through. (I’ve now just read that of those taken to intensive care for coronavirus so far in the UK, only half survived.)

Being half Kiwi, and having lived there for 13 years, I’m extremely proud of how New Zealand has handled this whole business. They had huge advantages of time and space, for sure, but other countries had similar advantages and squandered them.

It’s been another beautiful day here. Here’s the latest chart from Romania:

Romania coronavirus 6-4-20
Life :) - Politics

Other Brits exist in this place after all

February 10, 2020 by 0 Comments

In the last few days we’ve had a weird combination of icy gales of Wellington proportions, and beautiful cloudless spring-like weather. In a recent lesson we discussed the topic of travel while a plane carved a four-pronged vapour trail across the blue sky. I told my student it was probably an Emirates A380 like the one my parents hope to take when they visit Europe in May. I say hope because my father still hasn’t had the “answer” to the blood in his urine, and there’s also the small chance that the coronavirus will put the kibosh on international air travel entirely.

Yesterday I met my ex-student who lives in Austria but is back in Timișoara for two weeks. I also met her friends, an English couple of about my parents’ age who have lived in Romania since the late nineties and in Timișoara since 2001. This was my first-ever encounter with British residents of this city. My former student thinks it would be good to run English coffee evenings or something along those lines. A good idea, but wouldn’t it really fly in my apartment – there just isn’t enough space. So I’d need to hire a room somewhere and … everything would get complicated. Lack of complications is one of the best things about my job, and I’d like to keep it that way. The book idea of mine though, that’s something I still want to pursue. I had quite a long chat with the guy, and realising he could speak Romanian at an OK level but with a strong British accent – his vowels were waaay off – made me feel a bit better about my attempts at ă and î.

America. What a joke their so-called democracy is. They don’t even allow witnesses at the Trump impeachment trial (seriously?), and then at the Iowa caucuses (which are stupidly undemocratic anyway) they don’t seem to even care about counting the votes properly. Things are going backwards there – even human life expectancy is – and again nobody in authority really cares as long as their team is winning. Yesterday my dad described the potential Democratic nominees as a bunch of has-beens. Yep. Of the six candidates with a realistic chance, four are over 70 and three aren’t far off 80. Pete Buttigieg (37) is the big exception, but he might struggle to expand his base due to his lack of experience and, um, gayness (sadly; I know it’s 2020). Please, please, please, not Michael Bloomberg. If you’re going to vote for this megalithic media magnate you might as well vote for Trump.

Language teaching - Politics

An uplifting day, and election resignation

December 12, 2019 by 0 Comments

I had a lesson this morning with the English teacher who has plans to do the Cambridge exam in April. Those reading comprehension questions. Dammit, they’re hard. Even I was pretty much clueless half the time. You need to be primed for this stuff, and I’m just not. She said she hasn’t given up on me and will come back on Monday.

Yesterday I had a jam-packed day, with nine hours of lessons. I’ve been ticking along OK in recent weeks and months, but how I’ve missed days like that. Biking here, there and everywhere, and back home. Having to think on my feet. Hopefully helping people. And a wad of notes featuring the likes of Ion Luca Caragiale and Nicolae Grigorescu by the end of it. All in all, it’s a pretty bloody awesome feeling. I’m thankful that the snow has so far stayed away – this time last year we were blanketed in the stuff, and I had a hard time staying on my feet, let alone thinking on them.

On Monday morning I listened to the 7am news on the radio. I hadn’t quite woken up properly and they speak pretty damn fast, so all the Romanian politics at the start of the bulletin went over my head. Then I heard Noua Zeelandă and my ears pricked up. There had been a volcanic eruption on White Island less than four hours earlier, and it was obviously serious or else it wouldn’t have made the news in Romania. Apparently, and it makes sense, eruptions of steam (like this) happen without warning, and dozens of tourists were in the firing line. The death toll is currently eight, and sadly more are likely to die of their horrific burns.

The news this week has been crappy all round, with more devastating bushfires in Australia, and a Chilean Hercules crash with 38 people on board. And, though the results aren’t yet in, the UK election.

During the campaign all I’ve seen is Boris. Boris dressed as a milkman. A builder. A baker. A butcher. Probably some other alliterative occupations that for now escape me. Just big, friendly, cuddly Boris, no Priti Patel or Jacob Rees-Mogg. I’ll tune in at midnight to see or hear the exit poll results, but I’m almost resigned to five years of Boris, only fifty more days of Britain in the EU, and as for me, my days in Romania possibly starting to tick down. The polls (on average) point to a 30-seat Tory majority, and FPTP can be sensitive to small changes if they happen in the right or wrong places, so a hung parliament can’t be entirely ruled out. But neither can a big stonking Tory win. I can almost hear it now. Seventy-two seats. Eighty-eight. A hundred and four. If they break the wall of traditional Labour-voting working-class areas that voted Leave in the referendum, the sky’s the limit. But even a narrow majority would (as I see it) turn the UK into a backward, inward-looking Dismaland.

Update: The exit poll has just come through, predicting an 86-seat Conservative majority. A thumping victory (see above). Romania is looking increasingly attractive.

Photos - Politics - Romania

Pics from Romania Day

December 6, 2019 by 0 Comments

Three years ago today I was living in a loft on the other side of the river, trying to find somewhere more permanent. I remember it being a good deal colder than today. Things had become quite urgent, and I was struggling to make headway through a forest of dodgy agents. Christmas was just around the corner and that only made things harder. I was forced to make phone calls in a language I could hardly speak at all, and some of the apartments I looked at weren’t even finished. Had I been ten years younger I might have just taken the first thing I saw. I particularly remember the main website I used, where apartments were advertised as having 2 or 3 or 4 camere, meaning rooms, or specifically rooms for living and sleeping in, not bathrooms or kitchens. Some places said they had “O cameră”, which I honestly thought meant “zero rooms”, i.e. some sort of storage space. It took me days for the penny to drop: “O” was the Romanian feminine indefinite article, meaning one, not zero. That seems really silly now, but anything seemed possible then, even flats with no livable rooms.

On the other hand, I had a new city to explore, I’d found somebody to play tennis with, and I was even starting to get the odd lesson here or there. It was through one of my very early students (who responded to one of my ads featuring President-elect Donald Trump) that I found the place I’m writing this from. I was extremely fortunate. The chances that I ended up right here must have been pretty slim.

After my last blog post, where I put the chances of a hung parliament in next week’s UK election at roughly one in three, I’ll now revise that downwards to 20-25%. A few more days have passed, the polls haven’t really changed, and the passing of time leads to greater certainty.

I didn’t mention the Romanian presidential election in which Klaus Iohannis was re-elected by a hefty margin of about two to one. My students were happy with this, and I took that as a good sign. Plus he appears to me to be cool, calm and collected, and he’s somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. I found the map of Romania showing the results by county to be particularly illuminating. In Timiș, Iohannis topped 75%. In Cluj he was in the eighties. But in the south where people are poorer and less educated, Viorica Dăncilă was either roughly equal or in some cases ahead.

On Tuesday I finally got my hair cut, and a good conversation in Romanian. (My hairdresser could speak some English – he’d spent some time in the UK – but no thanks.)

Sunday was Romania’s national day and the square was packed. I tried some mulled wine and it put me to sleep. The fireworks were set off from the park that reopened in August, so I got a ringside seat from my window. Here are some photos.

Moș Nicolae (St Nicholas) stick sellers
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Not cutting it

December 1, 2019 by 0 Comments

The final month of the decade, which I still haven’t got to grips with at all, is almost upon us. In New Zealand it already is. I feel firmly entrenched in 2005, or perhaps a few years earlier. I feel grateful that Romania, in some ways, has let me step back in time.

It hasn’t been a bad week of lessons. Before my usual 90-minute session with the teenage boys, I had a half-hour “taster” with their mum, who told me she could understand English but couldn’t speak it. Then I asked her to at least have a go at speaking it, and of course she could. “I have forty-four years,” she said. Well OK, that’s not perfect, but it gets the point across, and for any of you reading this blog now, just you try to say your age in Romanian. Bet you wouldn’t have a clue. Yesterday I had the session with the two younger boys, and their mum is now happily hands-off; she knows I don’t need a translator.

I made an appointment for 2pm on Thursday to get my hair cut. The place I went to the last two times has closed down, so I thought I’d try this new place. But when I got there, they weren’t having any of my shoulder-length hair. They told me that either it’s a number 4 or whatever, or it’s no can do. My hair is part of who I am now, so I walked away. I’ll try another place next week.

I had a long chat with my dad on Thursday night. We talked at length about my aunt, whose tale is a rather sad one. In her (much) younger days she had the fortune (or misfortune, perhaps) to be handed everything. The looks, the brains, the lot. She was on all the sports teams, received a string of top grades in her O-levels, and so on. Then she met an RAF officer while still in her late teens, and she was married before her 22nd birthday. She trained as a physiotherapist, but never practised. In fact she’s never had a job at all. Her husband earned enough to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, and being married to the RAF was her job. Mindless lunches and parties and balls. She had two children, who were conveniently shipped off to boarding school at the age of eight, and neither of them now have any time for her. They see her at Christmas, but it’s a chore. Her adult life has been dogged by a complete lack of purpose. Everything she’s done has been play. And probably as a result, she’s suffered from ongoing depression. Unfortunately she’s never listened to anyone – as Dad says, she transmits but doesn’t receive – and has lacked the presence of mind to think, oh shit, if I carry on down this path things are going to turn to something pretty custardy pretty damn fast, so I’d better do something to arrest the slide.

Sometime in the nineties my aunt developed a drink problem, to go with her smoking habit, and that hasn’t exactly helped. She used to shop till she dropped, to give her a high about as temporary as the alcohol did. Her husband, an intelligent, kind man who at least provided some semblance of stability, died of lung cancer in 2002. When I saw her in 2008 on a trip out from New Zealand, she seemed positively evil and more than a little mad, and thankfully she isn’t like that anymore, but her world has gradually shrunk. She’s now almost completely isolated. Both my brother and I get on perfectly fine with her (unlike her children, she doesn’t perceive us as a threat) and I’d have been happy to spend Christmas with her, or heck, bring her out to Romania, but anything along those lines is a total no-go.

The UK election isn’t far away now. Right now I’d say there are three broad scenarios: (1) a sizeable overall Tory majority of 50 or more; (2) a smaller Tory majority, perhaps even just a working majority; and (3) a hung parliament. And I’d attach roughly equal probabilities to all three scenarios. (A Labour majority would require a massive shift from where things currently stand, and is highly unlikely.) I’m pinning my hopes on scenario 3.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Take the money and run

November 24, 2019 by 0 Comments

After a no-show this afternoon (there’s nothing more annoying than that), I finished my week with 29 hours of teaching. It felt more than that – there was a lot of biking to lessons this week, and maybe that tired me out. I didn’t put an end to my lessons with that slightly weird woman after all. She told me yesterday that she’d kept pages of notes in pencil about me (what?!) and in particular she wanted to know what was going with my face. She asked me if I was a drug addict. What a question. (I’ve had flaking skin on my face for the last three weeks or so. How being a drug addict would cause that I don’t know.) After yesterday’s session I figured she was strange but ultimately (hopefully) harmless.

On Thursday I had my second lesson with the English teacher. She was marginally better this time, but now says she’d like to do two sets of exams, IELTS and Cambridge, both in the spring. She asked me how long it would take to get her up to her desired C1 level. I was honest – I said nine months at a push. This week I had – yet again – somebody who said her dream destination was Dubai. Women seem to really home in on that furnace of flagrant fakeness. I just don’t get it. For me, it would be way down at the bottom of any list that didn’t include war zones.

A popular discussion topic with my older and younger students is something I’ve called What If?, where they have to imagine what they’d do in certain situations. One of these hypothetical scenarios is where they find a package containing a large sum of cash. A majority tell me, unashamedly, that they’d take it. One of them even said, “well, I’d buy a car,” never considering an alternative to taking the money. There’s been a story in recent days of mystery bundles of £2000 turning up at random in a small town in north-eastern England, which was discussed on local radio today. The host was amazed that people were really handing the money in to the police.

Duolingo. I’m beginning to see its limitations now. A lot of intricate grammatical concepts are introduced too early, without any real explanation. In contrast, many very important words and phrases come into play too late, if at all. The Romanian course has fewer resources put into it than more popular languages do, and I don’t think the English sentences have ever been sense-checked. Some of them are worse than bizarre, they’re just meaningless non-English. At the higher levels the sentences often comprise ten or more words, and can be translated in many ways, but only some of the possible answers are marked as correct, so you’re forced to play a frustrating guessing game. The Italian course is better than the Romanian one. I’ll continue with both languages for now; the Romanian exercises have already been useful for drilling pronouns that I struggle so much with.

One of the best resources for learning Romanian I have at my disposal right now is the local radio station, Radio Timișoara. My favourite programme, when I get the chance to listen to it, is between six and seven on weekday evenings, where they play lots of older pop and rock music. This morning I listened to the sport show, even though I hardly follow sport these days. There were slightly amusing regular updates from Timișoara Saracens’ rugby match in Constanța, which the Saracens won 111-0. I heard the surname of their kicker (who must have got lots of practice in today’s match) is Samoa. The Saracens are perhaps the best team in the country, and they often make the European competition, but they’re no match for British and French teams.

Tomorrow is election day in Romania: the second of two rounds which will determine the president for the next five years. Klaus Iohannis is the incumbent, and he is facing off against Viorica Dăncilă, who was prime minister until the government fell last month. My students have quite strong opinions about Dăncilă. They aren’t flattering. They think she’s stupid and she’d be a disaster for Romania if she became president. From what I’ve seen of her, I can hardly disagree. But she came second in the first round, mopping up votes in rural parts of the country where people have lower levels of education on average.

Dad’s stunning sales in Geraldine have given him a shot in the arm. It’s great to see him (and Mum) so positive. Thinking he’s found the winning formula, he’ll be churning out rhododendron paintings like nobody’s business.