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Excitement ramping up

May 4, 2025 by 0 Comments

I thought I’d forgotten how to get excited. But right now I suppose I am. First and foremost, Mum and Dad are coming in only four days. Just seeing them again will be great. There are still unknowables – how the flight over will affect them and what sort of trip (if any) they’ll be in the mood for. I’ve thought of three options: (1) Maramureș, which I visited last year and earlier, (2) the mountains near Brașov, and Brașov itself which I still haven’t been to, (3) the Danube Delta which would be amazing but would require some serious travel time. The most stressful part right now is what to do with my lessons. I have half a mind to simply cancel everything while they’re here.

Snooker. Damn. I haven’t got this excited by any sporting event in years. Seriously. And it’s nearly all down to one man, Mark Williams, the Welshman, my favourite. What a player, and what a man full stop. He was magnificent in his win over Judd Trump who was none too shabby himself. The first session was cagey and close with plenty of errors on both sides, Trump grabbing a 5-3 lead. Trump stretched further ahead early in the second session. I had a maths lesson at that point. Afterwards I checked the score, expecting Trump to have disappeared into the sunset. But no, he led only 7-6, having been 7-3 up. Williams won two wonderfully tense frames to close the session at 8-8. Yesterday I raced back from a lesson in Dumbrăvița to watch the snooker. To watch Mark. I was fortunate to have that gap in my schedule. Williams was absolutely sublime. He won a crucial frame to make it 10-10 at the interval, then took a 13-11 lead by the end of the session. Then on to last night. Williams took a 16-12 lead to be only one away, Trump hit back in the next two, but the Welsh wonder got over the line, 17-14, with a century. There was a heart-in-mouth moment early in that break as the black wobbled in the jaws four or five times before toppling – thank God – in the pocket.

As well as being extremely talented, Williams’ mindset is just perfect for snooker. Every time he comes to the table, he treats each situation as a puzzle to be solved, independent of the score or what he might have missed or some obscene slice of luck his opponent might have had. Unlike the crash-bang fireworks of Trump or Brecel, he strokes the ball in; the longer it takes to reach the pocket the more I enjoy watching it. Much was made of his failing eyesight (he’s 50) and a planned operation after the tournament, but y’know, I think he can see just fine. I like his dry sense of humour in his interviews; his Welsh accent helps there too. He now plays Zhao Xintong in the final, the Chinese sensation who had to start in the qualifiers after coming back from a ban. Zhao was superb against Ronnie O’Sullivan, whitewashing him in a session. The fourth session of their match didn’t even happen – Ronnie made damn well sure it didn’t happen. He was over it, though he was impressively graceful in defeat. I felt sorry for the spectators who shelled out something like £130 for tickets to that session, only to see an exhibition themed around the famous final from 40 years ago. That’s a lot of money for literally a joke. As for the final, Zhao has been so good that I expect him to win, but just imagine if Williams were to do it. He’s the oldest ever World Championship finalist. It’ll also be the first ever final between two left-handers.

I’d almost forgotten about the football. Birmingham did finish with 111 points. Playing at Cambridge with the scores at 1-1, Lukas Jutkiewicz (the huge fan favourite) came on and scored the winner in the 83rd minute in his last appearance for the club. I haven’t seen any clips, but I’m picturing bedlam.

On Friday I had one of my best lessons with the twins. In my ninth year, I still have to pinch myself that I’m doing this.

The first round of the Romanian presidential election takes place today. The eventual outcome could be extremely scary. The snooker is a blissful escape from this.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Politics

The new religion

April 23, 2025 by 0 Comments

In this morning’s weekly Romanian lesson, the presidential election came up. It is now looming large once more, after it was declared null and void in December. One of the frontrunners is George Simion, from the anti-everything party. He came fourth in November, but the Georgescu business may well have helped shore up his support. Our teacher said that, thankfully, the president has limited powers in Romania, but if Simion were to win it would at least give Romanians a “cold shower”, as she put it, which is probably what they need. A reality check. Electing a Simion won’t cure Romania’s ills. It’s amazing what guff I get from boys of 11 or 12, which of course they’ve got from their parents. Romania has gone to the dogs. We need Simion, or even better Georgescu, to fix it. They may well then mention God. Romania hasn’t gone to the dogs, at all. With all the uncertainty surrounding the election, I’m trying to get my residence permit updated. I’ll go along to the office at 8:30 tomorrow morning, armed with paperwork. God knows if I’ll get to the front of the queue, or whether my paperwork will be adequate if I do. (If it turns out they started an overnight queue like two years ago, I’ll just go home.)

Yesterday as I was cycling to Sânmihaiu Român, I got six loud beeps from my Biziday news app. Six beeps mean something major has happened, so I pulled over. The Pope had died at 88. I’d been a supporter of his, I suppose, like many outside the church. As we’ve headed down a darker path, he had been a rare bright spot. He recognised the massive failings of the modern economic system. I’m just looking at some of his quotes now. Here are four:
“Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities.”
“If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‘What are we going to do?’ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.”
“More and more people work on Sundays as a consequence of the competitiveness imposed by a consumer society.”
“You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person.”

Vice-president JD Vance met the Pope on Easter Sunday, just hours before Francis died. How and why?! To force a meeting with someone so gravely ill is just crass and cruel.

There’s a chance that Francis’s successor will send the Catholic church heading in a more sinister direction. As for religion as a whole, its influence has plummeted in most Western countries, but I predict we’ll see a resurgence. There’s some evidence that we’re already seeing it among young men. But I don’t expect it’ll be church as I know it, with a rambling sermon and an aging congregation and that churchy smell. It’ll be a modern version but ultra-primitive at its core, fuelled by social media and money. The new churchgoers may be the same young men who “invest” in crypto – that’s pretty much a religion anyway. Dorothy shocked me on Sunday by saying she donates 10% of her income to the church, and has done since she was 18. Just imagine. Where does that money even go? She even used the word tithe, which I consider prehistoric.

I’m still reeling from Robert F. Kennedy’s comments on autism. In a similar vein, Linda McMahon, the 76-year-old WWE promoter who is for some bizarre reason now the Secretary of Education, gave a speech in which she twice called for more A1 (“ay one”) in schools. She meant AI (“ay eye”), or artificial intelligence. The mind boggles. She really seemed to think it was called that. Apparently A1 is the name of a popular American steak sauce.

Snooker. On Sunday, after doing my church bit, I sat down and watched the concluding session of Mark Williams against Wu Yize. Williams won 10-8. The session took more than three hours, which was great. Late afternoon, into the evening, watching the snooker, drinking a beer, with no immediate obligations apart from maybe feeding Kitty. Wu Yize was brilliant – his long potting was exceptional – but Williams’ vast experience just got him over the line. There was one shot in particular at 8-8 where Williams used the spider and had to contort himself in an almost excruciating fashion to pot a red. Today they’ve had the first session of Ronnie O’Sullivan against Ali Carter. Good to watch; Carter won the last two frames to be only 5-4 down.

Some family news. My aunt accepted the offer on their property in the end. The eventual buyer came up a fraction. Not as much as my aunt had hoped, but I’m pretty sure she made the right call there.

Books - Family - Life :) - Other sports - Politics

Halfway to ninety

April 20, 2025 by 0 Comments

Great news – Mum has booked their flight from Timișoara to Luton in the early hours of 22nd May. So it looks like they might actually come. The only negative is that Mum has broken a tooth. If she can’t get it repaired in Geraldine before they leave, I’ll book her in somewhere in Timișoara. There are loads of dentists here, and they’ll all be cheaper than in New Zealand.

Easter in Romania is huge, so when your birthday coincides with it, it’s a bit like having your birthday on Christmas Day. I did my church bit this morning – hopefully for the last time until Christmas, even if a lot of the churchgoers seem really nice. I remembered the Easter etiquette this time – “Good morning” or even “Happy Easter” is what you don’t say on Easter Sunday, inside or outside church. You say “Hristos a înviat” (Christ has risen); the response to that is “Adevărat a înviat” (Indeed He has risen). The sermon was all about how you deal with death – pets or maybe grandparents dying when you are younger, and fear of death as you get older. A great subject on a birthday that makes me feel pretty old. But the priest told us that death isn’t the end of the story, as the resurrection proves, so there’s nothing to fear. That’s fantastic news, I must say. There were hymns, with the “lyrics” appearing on an overhead projector. I wish they could have chosen a font where the upper-case I was distinguishable from the lower-case l. They both exist on their own as pronouns in Romanian. No problem if you’re a Romanian who regularly goes to church, but I was left guessing. In the middle of the service, ten kids of various ages and levels of shyness each said an Easter-related line. After that, they were each given a Boomwhacker (I’ve just learnt the name) which is a coloured plastic tube that you literally whack against the floor. These tubes are tuned to different notes (they’re different lengths); if each kid whacks their tube at the right time, they can produce a passable melody which they sort of did.

There was some chat outside after the service. The large Australian lady, just a few months shy of 45, shocked me by saying she was pregnant. There was another lady, much much thinner and heavily pregnant, who clearly had problems. Dorothy told me that she was homeless and was having perhaps her fifth child, a daughter this time. Like the others, she won’t be able to keep her; she lacks the wherewithal to look after a child. All very sad. There was a boy of about eleven who spoke excellent English and talked (at serious length) about some game he’d been playing where, weirdly, he built transport links between East Anglian towns like Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds and Harwich.

Yesterday I went to Dorothy’s house in Buzad. It was a beautiful sunny day, just like today. It really is a lovely place she’s got there, though the garden (seven-eighths of an acre, full of trees) is a lot of work. Dorothy does plenty of planting and seeding and weeding herself, but employs various men too. We went for a walk around the village. Dorothy knew many of the villagers (being the only foreigner there, she’s semi-famous) and sometimes she’d stop for a chat. One of the women was extraordinarily chatty; she was with her husband who could hardly get a word in. Though the village is beautiful, I don’t think I could live there because I wouldn’t be able to hide. I then drove Dorothy back to her actual home in Timișoara. I drove 100 km there and back without any juddering at all. However, since that guy “diagnosed” all of my supposed issues and gave me that enormous quote, my brakes have been squeaky.

Robert F. Kennedy, the Secretary of Death (as I call him) has made some monumentally stupid comments about autism. He clearly knows nothing about it. “Perfectly normal” kids “regress into autism” at the age of two as a result of “environmental exposure” – it’s sickening stuff. He went on to say that autistic children will never go on a date, will never play baseball, will never pay taxes, and most baffling of all, will never write a poem. What. The. Fuck.

What a match yesterday on day one at the Crucible. I couldn’t stay awake for all of it. Kyren Wilson, last year’s champion, played Lei Peifan, one of the many Chinese. From Wilson’s point of view, the match oscillated from 0-2 to 6-2 (and almost 7-2) to 6-9, then to 9-9. The Chinese player then pulled off the upset in the deciding frame. Quite a surprise. Lei Peifan didn’t miss a thing in the first six frames of the evening session. I see another Chinese is already through and a third – the extremely gifted Zhao Xintong – is well on his way.

Football. On Good Friday, thinking Birmingham’s game with Crawley might be a non-event with so little at stake, I tuned into the Championship match between Norwich and Portsmouth instead. I’m glad I did – it was wonderfully chaotic from start to finish as Portsmouth (whose away form had been terrible) ran out 5-3 winners and have probably done just enough to avoid relegation. Portsmouth (the football club, the navy base, even the town) are known as Pompey. Nobody quite knows why. Fun nickname though.

On Friday I finally finished A Town Like Alice. Great story, brilliant writing, thoroughly enjoyable, even if Kitty mauled the cover of the book to pieces the second day after I got it.

Family - Language teaching - Politics

Busting boredom: not an easy task

March 31, 2025 by 0 Comments

We’ve just switched over to summer time. New Zealand moves to winter time next weekend. The combined two-hour time shift will make it a bit harder to contact Mum and Dad between now and October. In the meantime I should get to see them in the flesh. Still no guarantees there. For Mum it’s very up and down, hit and miss, and she still keeps pretending things are OK. Her sister-in-law, for whom Mum has a lot of respect, has been a big help – it’s largely down to her that she’s seeing the doctor tomorrow. I just know how Mum will be at the doctor’s. Just a bit of pain, nothing much really, I don’t suppose there’s much you can do, I won’t keep you long, I know you’re busy.

I’ve got one lesson today, a Sunday, which should take my total for the week to 28½ hours – just under my target. This lesson is with a woman in her late forties. Yesterday I had lessons with four females aged between 8 and 48, so this weekend is entirely boy-free. On Thursday I had a lesson with an 11-year-old girl that I’d like to forget. I was teaching her directions when I saw out of the corner of my eye that she’d written something on the map I’d given her. Mă plictisesc. “I’m bored.” I told her that writing something like that isn’t very nice and she doesn’t have to see me if she doesn’t want to. In fact I said that if she did something like that again, it’d be over. I’d tell her mum that she’s not to come anymore. She then put her serious face on. When she said she had too much schoolwork and homework and private tuition in other subjects, I sympathised. She’s a victim of Romania’s pretty terrible education system. It means that I can make my lessons as unboring as possible and it’s unlikely to make much difference. A “highlight” of our session was when I gave her (for the first time) a writing exercise. A choice of three options to write about, including a time machine, which she chose. I hoped she’d write about the dinosaur age or flying cars, but she said she’d use her time machine to zip forward to … next week. Tech and social media makes a teacher’s task even harder. Say I’m teaching a girl who’s really into horses. I can include as much horse-related stuff as I like in my lessons, but she’ll still just want to watch horse videos on TikTok.

One thing that came out of that awful Signal group chat (leaked last week) was the US government’s hatred for Europe. If it wasn’t already obvious, that exchange confirmed that they really despise Europe and everything it stands for. That includes the UK. The “special relationship” was always tenuous as best and is now positively dangerous. As for visiting the US, I’m glad I did that ten years ago because I certainly wouldn’t do it now. There’s so much about America now that I find abhorrent. Having read American Psycho (which contained a whole lot of Trump from 35 years ago), I see that America is turning, at a rate of knots, into a crass Batemanised version of itself. Only straight, rich, white males matter. Anybody else is no more than an object. And straight, rich, white males who aren’t unquestioningly loyal to you are threats that must be eliminated.

Cat - Family - Other sports - Politics - Writing a book

Emotional distance

March 27, 2025 by 0 Comments

We’re having a warmish finale to March, but it’s grey and at times wet. Not a ray of sunshine to be seen, even in the long-range forecast. This could be England. (I much prefer this to the hellish temperatures we’re likely to get three months from now, though.)

Last night I had a chat with my brother. Inevitably, we talked about Mum and Dad. Especially Mum. My brother said she has an incredible knack for emotionally distancing herself from her family. We mentioned Dad’s mother who flew to New Zealand in 2005. She was 83 and largely immobile. She flew business class and needed a wheelchair to get to and from the gates. It wasn’t an easy trip, and it came at great expense – business class isn’t cheap and she wasn’t exactly wealthy – but she did it because she really wanted to see her son, even though she knew he’d be coming back to England in a couple of months for his heart valve surgery. That was the operation that nearly killed him and that Mum (emotional distance again) didn’t go over for. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a mum that really wanted to see us (and her two grandchildren)? One major difference between 20 years ago and now is the proliferation of ways to make video calls, but Skyping and Zooming are no real substitute, even if Mum thinks they are.

Mum hasn’t got any worse, so I’m bumping their chances of coming over back up to 80%. I’m concerned though that, apart from the scan, she’s done nothing to investigate a problem that started years ago. Taking a bunch of laxatives doesn’t get to the bottom (ha!) of the issue at all. As for Dad, he’s been in pain because he bit his cheek badly in the middle of the night. He has a habit of doing this – the insides of his cheeks are full of scars – but this episode was particularly bad.

Book news. Not great. Dorothy got in touch with the “publishers” yesterday. They’re now saying they’ll do 500 copies but the book would need to be accepted somehow by the Ministry of Culture and, if that happens, it’ll come at an unknown cost to me. I have no idea how their distribution works, if it works at all. There are a lot of ifs, suddenly. If it’s going to cost me more than a three-figure sum (in pounds), I’m out and I’ll try and find a publisher worthy of the name. They certainly exist in Romania, but the one I’ve been dealing with certainly isn’t it.

More chaos in the Trump “administration”. That leaked Signal group chat prior to the attack on Yemen. I mean, seriously, what a joke. And it obviously was a joke to them, with their use of emojis. This is what we’re dealing with here. A bunch of 12-year-olds. The idea that they’d even discuss something so serious and sensitive over some chat facility is ludicrous. And why did they need to bomb Yemen (and kill dozens of innocent civilians including children) anyway? It reminds me of the Tory ministers’ – and Dominic Cummings’ – WhatsApp messages during the early stages of the Covid pandemic. They didn’t have a clue, nor did they care. How have we sunk so low?

Last time I spoke to my parents, they had a game of cricket on TV in the background. New Zealand were playing, presumably in a Twenty20 match. Mum mentioned that NZ had already qualified for the football World Cup, long before it even happens. Well that’s nice, but that isn’t the achievement it used to be. The 2026 World Cup will feature 48 teams and 104 games. It’s too big. Everything has got too big. That’s half the reason we’re in this mess. What’s more, the group games – all 72 of them – will only serve to eliminate 16 of the teams. Most of the action will take place in the US; all the more reason to give it a miss. I watched NZ qualify for the 2010 tournament (32 teams) by beating Bahrain. That felt exciting and, well, meaningful, especially since NZ gave such a good account of themselves in the main competition. I wish I’d been around to see NZ qualify for the 1982 edition. It was a marathon campaign. The All Whites won in Australia to put them in the final round, then they eventually beat China in a do-or-die play-off. A country of three million beating one of close to a billion. Only 24 teams qualified then, so it was a huge achievement.

There has been a break in domestic football to accommodate international matches. This weekend the final run-in starts. There is talk of Birmingham breaking points records. Most teams in their division have eight or nine games left. Blues have eleven, including the EFL Trophy final. Their packed schedule might be their undoing; we’ll see.

Kitty injured her neck on Monday. I don’t know how she did it, only that it must have happened while I was out. There was a raw red patch. Later that day I saw blood on the windowsill in the little room next to my office. As I’d expect with Kitty, she was totally undeterred by this.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Photos - Politics - Travel: Romania

Spring, Mum, and Arad pictures

March 13, 2025 by 0 Comments

No more news from the publishers. I can’t even get through to them. I don’t think they’re malicious in any way (though I might be wrong); I just think they’re hopelessly disorganised, even by Romanian standards.

Mum and Dad just Skyped me from the hotspot in Hampden. (There will be no more Skyping after 5th May when Microsoft are pulling the plug on what has been an extremely handy – and simple – communication tool.) They seemed mostly fine, though Mum had low-level stomach pain. She had her colonography scan on Tuesday. It involved her taking a barium meal and being inflated via a tube stuck up her bum. She should get the results soon after they get home on Saturday. (They’re in Moeraki at the moment. They’re always more relaxed down there.)

On Tuesday I helped Dorothy take a bunch of old electronic bits and pieces to the tip. Her husband was something of a hoarder. One of the contraptions emitted UV rays, she said. The man at the tip was very helpful, as these sorts of people usually are. After visiting the tip, she came back to my place for a coffee and to meet Kitty. We talked about spring. I miss being in my old flat and seeing everything come alive outside my window at this time of year. The green and then the blossom. I could take in three parks and the river on a short walk. A slightly longer walk would take me over to Iosefin – where Dorothy lives – with its beautiful old buildings (albeit unrenovated) and tree-lined streets. I think back to the early days of Covid, this time five years ago. Weirdly it improved my mental health. The quiet, the total lack of expectations, the simplicity of it all. The Monday morning shopping. Mask, gloves, job done as fast as possible. No queues, unlike in the UK. I felt strangely calm then. Mum still talks positively of that time. Nobody cared what I looked like. I could just hide behind my mask.

When I talk to my parents now, 60% of our conversation is about politics and world events. How did we get here? One thing I don’t understand is why we haven’t heard a peep from the Obamas or the Clintons about this utterly destructive shitshow. Is their silence on the matter part of some grand scheme? It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a rather different story north of the border. The Canadians have decided it’s gloves off, and rightly so. I’ve become quite a fan of Canada in the last few weeks. In fact I’ve always liked Canada, ever since I was lucky enough to visit in 1998. Yesterday I read this comment about Trump’s economic “strategy”, which sounded pretty accurate. It takes some talent to even write this:
I don’t see Trump as having even the remotest concept of economic and/or foreign policies. He rules by diktat tweeting out his edicts while taking a dump on his gold toilet with all the forethought, consistency and strategising of a squirrel cranked up on crystal meth. That’s what happens when big money buys the seat of power when it should be left to sober administrators who have a genuine sense of duty for the public good.
This week I’ve realised how little I know about tanks and fighter planes and aircraft carriers and warships and Britain’s (or anyone else’s) defence capabilities. They just aren’t things I think about on a daily (or even yearly) basis. Luckily I have a brother whose job is to know about this stuff, so I can always ask him.

Kitty. She’s changed in the last ten days or so. She’s become more comfortable with me around. I honestly think she was fearful of me. She’s now sleeping noticeably more too. The best thing is that she’s stopped biting me, unless I rub her tummy when biting is a reflex action for her. Due to the warmer weather (I presume), she’s now shedding a lot more hair than she did at the beginning.

Here are some pictures of Arad, where I went on Sunday. In some ways I like Arad more than Timișoara. It sits on a proper river, the Mureș, unlike the piddly Bega we have. Although they have a boat club, I didn’t see a single boat out on the river. Just imagine a river of this size in the UK on a lazy Sunday morning. Boats just aren’t part of the culture here, with the exception of canoes and rowing boats that are used for serious sport.

A plaque on the wall of the boat club showing where the River Mureș got to in 1970

The mishmash of languages in these places is always fascinating. Romanian became the dominant language in these parts pretty recently in the scheme of things. This inscription in Hungarian, from the gospel of Matthew, is hard to read. So the double letters in the first word are zeds, right? No, they can’t be, because that must be a double zed in the second word and these look different. So what are they? Gees? Jays? Does double J exist in Hungarian? Sure enough it does. This says Jöjjetek énhozzám which means “Come to me”. Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be learning Hungarian anytime soon.

Sunset over the Bega on Sunday

Kitty sleeping next to the giant mirror in my teaching room

Cat - Maths teaching - Other sports - Photos - Politics

Can’t ignore Kitty and terrifying developments

March 1, 2025 by 0 Comments

If Kitty was an antidepressant, I’d probably ask my doctor if I could taper off her. She’s not doing me any harm as such (apart from the biting, though she doesn’t draw blood or anything), but after living by myself for so long I was really hoping for a loving companion and she hasn’t exactly been that. From the start I could see she was very curious, and she’s a cat after all, so I never thought I’d be her top priority all the time, but I kind of thought I might occasionally make her top twenty. The ignore experiment didn’t quite work, because it’s hard to ignore her and I don’t want to anyway. Young Kitty is an incredible athlete (that’s been mindblowing, honestly) and I want to play and engage with her. On Wednesday when she bit me over and over, I gave her gentle (I hope) slaps around the head every time. I was hesitant to do that. I mean, imagine as a human a 50-foot monster slaps you on the head and you don’t know why. Will Kitty understand why? Will she even remember the next day? Yesterday she only bit me once. I gave her the customary slap and she was bite-free from then on, so maybe it’s working. I’m amazed by how little sleep she gets. I read that the average cat gets 13 to 16 hours sleep. If she could get half of that, it would be bloody amazing. I hope that over time she’ll warm to me. I’ve just got to be patient.

I saw these six kitties in Recaș on Wednesday (my latest trip there)

Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with Trump and Vance at the Oval Office was sickening. And terrifying. How the hell did we get here? I spent a half-hour talking about it with my parents last night, just after it had happened. Zelensky was at a disadvantage from the start: it was two against one and not in his native language, but he couldn’t have expected Trump to be quite that appalling and for Vance to be just as bad. “You’re gambling with World War Three,” Trump said. Well, sorry mate, you’ll be the one starting WW3 at this rate. As for Putin, he would have cheered on Trump’s win in November, but even he couldn’t have imagined things would go so well for him (and so quickly) in the few weeks since Trump took over. More than a dozen European nations have come out in support of Ukraine since last night’s horror show, but Viktor Orbán inevitably did the opposite, and I haven’t heard a peep out of Romania yet. I was worried that Mum’s health might mean I won’t see her and Dad in May. That is still a concern. But that might not be the only reason.

I had several maths lessons last week. I’m always fighting the same battle. Getting them to actually think what they’re doing and not just blindly applying procedures. Crank the handle, out it comes at the other end. Yesterday I had one fairly bright girl add a half and a quarter to get six-eighths. Well, technically it is 6/8, but if you get that answer you clearly don’t have a clue what a fraction even is. “You see, I timesed the top and bottom of the first fraction by four, then I timesed the top and bottom of the second fraction by two, then I added the top numbers to get six over eight.” Maddening stuff, and of course not her fault, but the fault of the education system. (Cue my pizza diagrams.) In another of yesterday’s sessions, the kid was faced with this problem: “The first term in an arithmetic sequence is 30. The first 16 terms add up to 960. What is the difference between each pair of successive terms?” An arithmetic sequence, by the way, is simply an ordered list of numbers that go up by the same amount each time. He got out his formula booklet and busily cranked the handle. The formula had letters like S and u and subscripts. I took him a while. It would have taken me a while too. I told him my method. Think of the numbers in pairs. First and last, second and second-last, and so on. Each of these pairs must add up to the same thing. There are 16 numbers, so 8 pairs. If all the numbers add up to 960, then each pair must add up to 960 divided by 8, which is 120. If the first number is 30, then the last number (which pairs up with the first) must be 90, which is 60 more. Since there are 16 numbers, there are 15 jumps, and since all the jumps add up to 60, each jump must be 4. That’s your answer. He said, “That’s cheating.” He was joking, but in fact that’s exactly how people need to be thinking about problems like this instead of applying some magic formula.

Edit 24/3/25. There’s an easier way of solving the problem above. If you’ve got 16 numbers and they add up to 960, their average is 960 divided by 16, which is 60. Since the first number is 30 and they increase by the same amount every time, the last number has to be 90. To get from 30 to 90, you go up 60, and because there are 15 jumps, each jump has to be 60 divided by 15, which is 4.

Football. Blues beat Leyton Orient 2-0 on Tuesday. It was a match spoilt by an Orient player receiving an undeserved red card in just the 12th minute. Blues are now on course for promotion as league champions and with a massive points total. The other match that piqued my interest was Hollywood-backed Wrexham at home to Peterborough in the semi-finals of the EFL Trophy. Blues would play the winner in the final at Wembley. Wrexham were 2-0 up late in the game, but Peterborough (who go by the rather cool nickname Posh) clawed back those two goals and then won on penalties. Blues against Posh will be a fun match-up in the final. The two sets of fans actually like each other, from what I can tell. They have a connection through Barry Fry who managed Blues in the mid-nineties and, after getting the sack, took over at Posh. Barry Fry was a crazy guy and something of a cult hero. I remember when he suffered multiple heart attacks. But three decades on, he’s still chugging along. In fact he’s now Director of Football at Posh. He’ll turn 80 a week before the final.

Some better news on the book front. It looks like we might be meeting next week.

Politics - Writing a book

Latest book news and a spot of politics

February 25, 2025 by 0 Comments

This morning I thought, jeez, everything is turning to shit, isn’t it? I’ve got a cat that might never like me, two books that might never get off my hard drive, and parents who might never make it out of New Zealand. I plucked up the courage to call the woman from the publishers-in-name-only on WhatsApp. She was in a car, on the way to Peciu Nou she said, as if her destination was of vital importance. (I’ve been there. It’s a half-hour drive from here.) Call back this afternoon, she said. She couldn’t hear me at all. At half-four, between lessons, I called her back. Our seven-minute call, which she ended rather impolitely, was at least somewhat encouraging. I was more insistent this time. Yes, we’ll meet up again at some time yet to be determined. Yes, your book will actually happen. Now bugger off. She didn’t say the last bit but she implied it.

The German elections took place yesterday. It looks like they’ll have a Chancellor Merz. The extreme-right AfD did well. But at this point, all talk of left or right is by the by. There’s a dangerous piece of shit in the White House who is taking a sledgehammer to democracy in the US and elsewhere. It’s a real shame he wasn’t taken out last summer. If only the golf guy could have done it. The piece of orange crap, aided by the giga-turd who owns Tesla, will further empower Putin and tear Europe apart, unless we in Europe stand up to him. If Europe’s biggest economy elects someone who can do that, I couldn’t give a damn where on the political spectrum he comes from. European solidarity will be absolutely vital and we need to act fast. My fear is that Europeans won’t accept being materially poorer, which is probably what it will take. I certainly would, but I can be content with very little. (That’s one thing I loved about Covid, especially the early days of the pandemic. Consumption, and expectations, went way way down.) Oh, and of course, I’m pretty damn close to the front line where I am.

Everyone needs to stop theorising and philosophising about the orange turd. There’s nothing there. No master plan. No depth. Basically no thought. He’s just an egomaniac who enjoys hurting other people. That’s all there is. Sure, write books to your heart’s content about how modern society has enabled him to get to where he has, because that’s actually worth exploring, but don’t bother writing about him.

No more news from Mum. She’s got a scan on 11th March.

Family - Language teaching - Other sports - Photos - Politics

Darts and car parks

December 30, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve just got back from my lesson with ten-year-old Filip. (They don’t mess around with ph in Romanian, let alone poncy French spellings like Philippe.) We had our session in his little sister’s room, which was full of shelves piled high with books that obviously weren’t for her immediate benefit. There were novels that would have been bought in the seventies, travel books, and medical books including a fat tome all about excretion.

Yesterday my brother called me on WhatsApp. The little one was still up and about. I had my first-ever verbal interaction with him. I picked up the word Christmas and a whole load of babababa-sounding words which my brother translated for me; he was talking about family members.

Because I had a cold (and still do), I drove to Dumbrăvița on Saturday for my pair of two-hour lessons, instead of cycling there as I normally do. It’s my only work destination where driving is a significant time-saver. I came back via the mall, because my doctor’s clinic is now attached to the mall and I knew he’d be there. (I wanted to pick up my monthly allocation of pills.) But being a Saturday between Christmas and New Year, the multi-storey car park was a nightmare. I entered through the barrier, drove up and down and around in circles for ten minutes, then decided the whole thing wasn’t worth it and headed through the exit. They give you an hour’s free parking. My doctor’s next stint is New Year’s Eve so I’ll see him then instead. I got flashbacks of the Park Street multi-storey car park in Cambridge, which was even worse. When I was little, Mum went shopping in Cambridge on a Saturday (she often brought me along) and parked in that horrible car park which was built in the sixties, as so many architectural monstrosities were. Its levels were called “decks” which were denoted by letters going up to L, if memory serves. She mostly parked on Deck F. Then we walked down the staircase which stank of pee. I don’t remember Mum being all that stressed by it; she must have got used to it. I’m happy to report that a wrecking ball was taken to that hellhole a few years ago. (I once read a book that was partly set in a different Cambridge car park, sometime in the nineties. This was the Lion Yard car park, which no longer exists either.)

Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. I was born towards the end of his only term, so obviously I have no memory of him as president. But it’s clear to me that he had more compassion and integrity in his little finger than the thought-free, morality-free president-elect has in his entire body. Carter was a victim of circumstance and America’s celebrity culture. America boomed under Reagan, and later Clinton, but you have to wonder at what long-term cost.

The darts. On Friday I saw Damon Heta hit a nine-darter, the second of this year’s tournament. (Christian Kist earlier got one.) Unlike a 147 in snooker, a perfect leg of darts happens in the blink of an eye. Heta got £60,000 for that, Prostate Cancer UK benefited to the same tune, and someone in the crowd also took home sixty grand. Unfortunately for Heta (just like Kist before him), he didn’t win. When I started my maths lesson, he was 3-1 up against Luke Woodhouse in a race to four, but he proceeded to lose the final nine legs of the match. One match that stood out for me was Ricardo Pietreczko, a German who appears rather awkward in interviews, against Scott Williams, who looks for all the world like someone who I’d have avoided like the plague at school. Maybe I’ve got him completely wrong and he was the shy and retiring type, but I doubt it. No wonder I wanted the awkward guy to win. Which he did, 4-1, after a very solid performance. Another match I had my eye on involved Ricky Evans. A cartoonish figure, his face is a picture every time he throws, which he does at lightning speed. He was beaten yesterday by Robert Owen of Wales, 4-2. I was glad to see Chris Dobey get through, but the real story must be last year’s champion Luke Humphries who lost 4-1 to Peter Wright.
Update: I’ve just watched a dramatic match between Dobey and Dutchman Kevin Doets. Dobey was looking good but it almost slipped away from him. He scraped through in a deciding set to make the last eight. Both players missed a plethora of doubles, adding to the drama.

The book. Lots of monkeying around with fonts and formats, but it’s coming together.

Standing on the new footbridge over the Bega, with the old one just in front of me.
Dreams - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports - Politics

Dodging a bullet and getting up my nose

December 15, 2024 by 0 Comments

Last night I had two strange dreams. In the first, I was piloting a small plane and was in trouble (though I was surprisingly calm) until my brother got me out of it. I communicated with him via text or something. Soon after I had another near accident, which made me nervous about flying in small planes again. (In that dream, flying in small planes was a normal part of everyday life.) In the second dream I was in trouble at work for playing some kind of ball game (that I’d invented) during office hours. My boss seemed to quite like the game though, and thought I should market it. In fact he talked enthusiastically about a business opportunity. I was embarrassed about the whole thing and began to skulk around the office.

The “invented game” dream might have come from the board game I played with some of my students last week. This is the one Dad came up with back in 1993 or ’94 – racing cars around a three-lane track, where the fast lane gets you round faster, obviously, but requires more fuel. I refined his idea and a quarter of a century later started using it in my lessons. My 13-year-old student wanted a copy of the game that he could print out and play at home, so I sent him soft copies of the game board, the dashboards (showing fuel and completed laps), and the cards that you have to draw if you land on certain spaces.

On Monday night I started getting pain in my sinuses that continued through Tuesday and Wednesday. I also seemed to pick up a bug of sorts. I was devoid of energy for two days. On Thursday I was back to some sort of normal which was just as well – I had seven lessons that day. The pain hasn’t entirely gone away and I’ve had no choice but to take painkillers. Fatigue has been a major issue for a while; it isn’t helped by my waking up multiple times virtually every night.

On Monday morning I had my weekly Romanian lesson. Inevitably we talked about the election, or un-election. I suggested that Georgescu was similar to Viktor Orbán. Oh no, my teacher replied. Far worse. Cancelling the election so close to the final round was very clumsy and looks antidemocratic on the face of it. Oh shit, it looks like we might elect an anti-establishment figure that we don’t like, let’s cancel the election. But the truth is the election had been manipulated in a big way on social media. Georgescu’s assertion that he spent “zero lei” on his campaign was quite clearly a lie. And his credentials that I mentioned before – that’s he’s a scientist with a PhD – are probably made up too. Invalidating the election may have been cack-handed, but in the short term at least, Romania has dodged a major bullet here. Since I arrived here, the country has been moving, albeit slowly and unevenly, in the right direction. It is less poor than it was eight years ago. It came very close to throwing that progress away. By the way, Romania and Bulgaria have now been fully admitted to the Schengen area. That will mean that I won’t have to queue at the border to get into Hungary, whether in a car or on a bus or train, and more importantly, trucks won’t be held up for hours. There might still be checks until June; I saw contradictory information on that.

I had six maths lessons last week. In one of them I estimated pi using a round bowl, a tape measure and a piece of string. I got a value of 3.129, which was a lot closer than I expected.

The darts World Championship starts in London tonight. There’s a lot to like about the format, the colourful characters, and the fact that it takes place over the festive season. Last year I got fairly into it. This year I expect I’ll watch rather less: I really have to get the picture book finalised.