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Family - Photos - Politics - Romania - Writing a book

Good news about the books, an un-election, and some pictures

December 8, 2024 by 0 Comments

I see I somehow neglected to mention my meeting with the publishers, so here goes. It was a weird meeting with the mother and daughter that lasted all of two hours. The mother likes to talk. She’s a French teacher, and sometimes she even switched from Romanian to French. Like I said, weird. At the beginning I was presented with a print-out of both the picture book and the A-B section of the dictionary. I started to comment on the picture book – for the love of God, don’t stretch or squoosh Dad’s illustrations as you’ve done here – before zooming out to the big picture. Before we start talking fonts and formats and stuff, can you assure me that this book, I mean these books, are actually going to see the light of day? The answer was yes, which was by far the most encouraging thing in the whole meeting. I was worried that everything Dad and I had done to this point might be in vain. It seemed EU funding will pay for a large chunk of it. (Of course, this is Romania, so until I actually see the books in print I can’t be 100% sure of anything.) Sometimes I struggled to articulate – in Romanian – what I wanted to say, but we managed to flesh out some important details. Surprisingly, I’m in charge of the layout, not them, and I agreed to a deadline of 15th January to get the small book sorted. This won’t be an easy task because the pictures won’t all be the same size, they’ll need varying amounts of explanatory text, and so on. We agreed that both books would be in B5 format, roughly 7 inches by 10, though the picture book will be landscape and the dictionary portrait. I have no plans for Christmas, which means I’ll have time to spend on the books.

Yes, Romania, where you can’t guarantee anything. Even whether elections actually happen. On Friday they (Romania’s supreme court, I think) invalidated the first round of the presidential election, less than two days before the second round was due to take place. (In fact, overseas voting for the second round had already begun.) This was a major shock. A couple of days earlier, documents were made available that showed that Putin supporter Călin Georgescu had been hugely promoted, probably by Russia, through algorithms (and money) on TikTok, which is Chinese-owned. The re-run of the election probably won’t happen until March, and it’s unclear if Georgescu will be allowed to run again. Last weekend’s parliamentary elections are still valid as far as I know, so presumably Klaus Iohannis (the current president) will stay in place, with the new parliament, until March. But really, all bets are off.

I spoke to my parents this morning. Mum had her shiny new crown. She described the space-age process of X-rays followed by scans from every angle that enabled the crown to be 3D-printed. None of this business of having to bite into a mould; it’s all cutting-edge stuff. The price is cutting-edge too. I could see a lovely painting of Dad’s which they’d hung in the kitchen; it was of the fruit and vegetable market in Cambridge. We discussed my brother, who has been pulling out every imaginable stop to complete his latest assignment for his master’s. Master’s. Where on earth has this motivation come from? He called me during the week for help with a spreadsheet. Luckily I spent quite a few years dealing with spreadsheets in a previous life. Only six weeks until I’ll be getting a niece.

I had four lessons yesterday – two English, two maths. Matei wanted to talk about the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a gargantuan American health insurer. Delay, deny, defend: that’s apparently what was written on the shell casings. Matei said that his death was being celebrated all over TikTok. I suggested that celebrating the brutal killing of someone with a wife and family who was just doing his job isn’t really OK, even if the company is as parasitic as the one he headed. But at least this has shed a light on the unforgivable state of US healthcare and insurance. Unfortunately I suspect it will all just blow over like everything else in America. It’s headline news for a week or two, but ultimately nothing happens. Just think of George Floyd. Or the numerous school shootings. Or the 2008 financial crisis where the big banks got bailed out as people lost their homes, and people shrugged their shoulders. They just put Trump back in, after all.

Last Sunday I went out for a spin, visiting Peciu Nou, Cebza, Petroman (which isn’t far off my online name) and finally the decent-sized town of Ciacova which its cobbled streets and square. My brother called me while was in Ciacova, so I gave him a bit of a tour. I still hope one day he will visit me in Romania. After getting off the phone, a dog bit my leg, completely out of the blue. He or she (I didn’t pay attention to that) didn’t draw blood, otherwise I’d have seen the doctor.

On Sunday evening I went into town and saw the parade of army men with torches, for the national day celebration.

I sent this picture of Peciu Nou to Dad, who wants to turn it into a painting. He wanted to see the other side of the street, so it looks like I’ll be making another trip there.

Cebza

Petroman

Various pictures of Ciacova

40 kg piglets for sale

No trains have been down this track for a while

National day celebrations. Eight years ago, this was all so new and exciting, even though my feet froze.

Maths teaching - Politics - Romania

A manifest danger

December 1, 2024 by 0 Comments

It’s 4:35 and daylight is fading on the last day before winter officially starts. I’ve only had a pair of two-hour lessons today: my 90-minute maths session with the 11-year-old girl got cancelled. I’ve still got one online session to come. Matei wanted to discuss the presidential election with me this morning. Regarding the ongoing recount, he said he thought they’d “put Marcel Ciolacu through” to the next round, overturning the original result in which he was pipped by Elena Lasconi for second place. This comment amused me. Put him through? Is this what Romanian elections are like? A kind of X-Factor, instead of, you know, checking the votes to see who has the most? If the process is above board (big if here I suppose), whoever was ahead originally should win after a recount more than 50% of the time. That’s just basic probability. Like most people, Matei doesn’t have a great handle on probability. His fancy new graphical calculator has random functions where you can toss coins, roll dice, or draw cards. But they aren’t random, he said, pointing to the clusters of heads or threes or spades or whatever. I tried to explain that clusters are exactly what randomness gives you. (His calculator functions in fact aren’t strictly random – it’s impossible to make such processes truly random – but they’re indistinguishable from being random.) A course on probability and statistics would be more practically useful than what we’re actually doing. Matei had been following the election pretty closely, but he said he’d never even heard of Georgescu beforehand. That gives you some idea of how a big a shock the result was. The subject has come up quite a bit this week. At my school we have to learn English, German and French! Soon you might be learning Russian too.

This recount is a logistical pain: there are 9.4 million votes including those from overseas. (Just 98 votes were cast in New Zealand.) The second round is supposed to happen a week tomorrow, and right now we don’t even know whose names will appear on the ballot paper. If the recount does put Ciolacu in second, I don’t know what would happen; he’s already said he won’t participate. Would Georgescu then win unopposed? That wouldn’t go down well. If Ciolacu decides to run in the second round after all, then Romanians have got (as I see it) two total disasters to pick from. Tomorrow we’ve got the parliamentary elections, so it’s all happening. I went through Piața Operei on Thursday night as I came back from a lesson. A protest was starting up. A small one, but who knows where it might lead.

Last time I said that enshittification had been named Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The Cambridge Dictionary gave the honour to the verb manifest. There’s nothing new about manifest as a verb: things can manifest themselves in all sorts of ways. What’s new though is that people are now using the verb transitively: you can now “manifest success”. In other words, achieve success by pure force of will. Maybe if I did that I wouldn’t be the irredeemable failure that my 23-year-old student said I was. This manifesting sounds like total woo-woo to me. Woo-woo is sadly on the rise; astrology is booming, for instance. It goes with all the social media-fuelled conspiract theories. None of this will end well.

Another thing I’ve noticed about the young women I teach: many of them have no discernible sense of humour. As I said last time, it’s like you’re communicating with an AI tool. My Romanian teacher said on Tuesday that Georgescu’s very limited sense of humour is a bad sign. I see what she means.

Tomorrow is Romania’s national day, which should mean a parade of military and emergency vehicles. How it will pan out on a Sunday morning, when so many people are at church, I’ll have to see.

A lovely piece on a Romanian news website today. How Europe is preparing for World War Three. From Poland’s Iron Dome to the awakening of an old military giant.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

Enshittification: it’s pouring out now

November 28, 2024 by 0 Comments

Yesterday some candles suddenly appeared in the stairwell. When Elena (the lady who owns the flat above me) called me from Canada, I found out what they were for. The woman on the ground floor had just died. She was only 68. Her husband died at the beginning of this year.

It’s been looking pretty grim for a while, but 2024 has taken enshittification (Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year) to another level. (How did the en- prefix get there?) At every turn we’re sinking deeper into the mire and I don’t see a way out. We’re now systemically prevented from finding an escape. Most of us aren’t even trying anyway. We’re all ordering up pointless crap on Amazon and sharing memes on TikTok that last about five minutes before the next one comes along. At least I think that’s what people do on TikTok; I honestly don’t know.

On Sunday we had the first round of the Romanian presidential elections. Călin Georgescu, pro-Putin, pro-dictatorship, anti-NATO and a conspiracy theorist on every matter imaginable, came from nowhere to top the poll with just under 23% of the vote. He didn’t run a traditional campaign, but he was all over TikTok and Facebook. Since I use neither of them, his popularity passed me by. Also, in Timișoara where I live, Georgescu didn’t do very well. But now I know. He’s 62 so he’s been around the block a bit. He got a PhD in soil science 25 years ago and has since been involved in sustainable development and held positions within the UN where he investigated the adverse effects of dumping toxic waste. So it seems he’s got a brain on him and he did some good stuff before rapidly morphing into, well, toxic waste.

Second place was also a shock. Elena Lasconi, a centrist pro-European, edged out Marcel Ciolacu of the PSD (one of Romania’s big traditional parties) by the tiniest of margins, 19.18% to 19.15%. Ciolacu had a big lead over Lasconi on Sunday evening but his advantage narrowed throughout the night. I watched the results from the last few polling places (out of about 20,000) come through on Monday morning. Lasconi finally poked her nose in front with just 18 of them left to declare. Surprisingly there was no recount. I was glad Lasconi made it to the final two. She’s inexperienced, but the PSD are mired in corruption.

Dominoes are falling all around. Lasconi must beat Georgescu in the run-off on 8th December, or else Romania will be the next to tumble. A lot of Romanians don’t even care. Does anyone care about anything that actually matters anymore? On the radio yesterday there was open discussion of Romania being under attack. Hypothetical, but still.

Today I had four sessions between 3:30 and 9pm. A boy of eight, a girl about to turn 18, then a boy of nine, and finally a woman in her late forties. Last night I had a nightmarish session with a woman of 23. We discussed success and failure. She said that success to her means having a family and a good career. Fine. A shallow definition, but not an unusual one. But then I put it to her that I have neither a family nor a traditional career. Does that mean I’m a failure, then? Yes. I burst out laughing at that point. The rest of the 90-minute session was like talking to an AI bot. Last week I asked her to name one thing she thought could improve Romania. More cars, she said. Hmm, there seem to be enough cars here already. In fact when I’m getting around the city, I’d really like there to be fewer cars. Are you saying that if Romanians became richer then people would have more cars? Or that if Romania’s road infrastructure improved, more cars could be accommodated? Her responses are one word, no words at all, or just utterly bizarre. It’s the same story with almost all women I see that were born between about 1998 and 2008. When I saw the older woman this evening, I told her how great it felt to finally talk to someone like a normal human being.

I recently saw some photos my brother had taken of the little one in the snow, with a mini snowman behind him. They’ve had a real cold snap over there; snow in November is highly unusual. We had a few flurries ourselves last Friday.

When I finished work at 9:30 last night I spoke to Elena and then watched the rest of Birmingham’s match at Exeter. A pretty nice football ground, I thought. It’s called St James Park, and often comes up in British pub quizzes. (Newcastle’s ground is, famously, St James’ Park. Which other team’s stadium is called St James Park?) Exeter sounds like a pretty nice city too; I’ve never done more than pass through it on the train. I’ve sometimes thought that maybe Exeter should vote to leave the UK. What would that be called? Blues were already 1-0 up when I turned on the game. They were dominant but couldn’t put Exeter away until they got (and scored) a penalty ten minutes from the end. Two-nil was how it finished.

Books - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - New Zealand - Politics - Romania

Pulling teeth

November 22, 2024 by 0 Comments

A storm ripped through last night at 3am; for an hour and a half I couldn’t sleep. It’s still blowing a gale (or something at around a force 6 or 7 at least) now. And it’s raining hard. Either before or after the storm – I can’t remember – I had my first dream to feature Donald Trump. I was in a small town or village on a sunny day, having been on one of my excursions in the car, when he appeared. There was no rally or anything; he was just there, surrounded by a handful of people. It was all very civilised. He seemed to be at least six foot six. My instinct was to get away from him for fear of being shot. In the same dream, or perhaps the next one, my laptop caught fire.

Here’s a map of the weather warnings that were put out yesterday. The combination of high winds and (in higher terrain) blizzards has made for quite a complex picture. I’m in the orange zone:

Last night I had a chat with Mum. What’s happened to your tooth? A crown had fallen out. She’d already been to the new gleaming-white state-of-the-art dental practice in Geraldine; in ten days she’ll get a replacement crown at a cost of $1800. Dad then came on the line to say he’d just sold a painting for the same amount (I don’t know if that was net or gross). It took me three days to do that! As if three days was a long time. I immediately thought, just imagine being able to make $600 a day doing what I’m doing. I told Mum that if she could hang on for six months (!), she could get it done in Romania for a fraction of the cost. Coincidentally I’d just been reading David Walliams’ Demon Dentist with a very bright girl of almost eleven before this talk of dentistry with my parents. After the dental talk, conversation turned to the various haka and hikoi that have been going on lately in New Zealand.

In a lesson on Tuesday my student went through a long article about career choices. The author of the article likened career decisions to an octopus where each tentacle needs to be fed and accommodated. Tending to your “practical” tentacle too much can mean you neglect your “social” tentacle, and so on. It mentioned that as your salary increases, your expectations increase likewise. You’ll never be properly satisfied. Reading this sort of thing emphasises how atypical my own experiences have been. In January 2008 I went to Melbourne for eight days to attend the Australian Open. And to see Melbourne, which I liked a lot. Then when I got back to work everything got pretty crap pretty quickly. I’d muddled along for a few years as one of the young guys, but all of a sudden a bunch of actual young guys and girls joined the department and I was 28, supposedly a level above. The others at my level were suddenly doing life stuff like buying houses, getting married, having kids, and spending proper money on cars. They were progressing. It became obvious, within the space of a few weeks, that it wasn’t going to work for me. So I actually cut down on my spending, squirrelling away $500 a week for the rest of ’08 and the whole of ’09, until the end finally came in December. When I was in New Zealand last year, I stumbled upon some old payslips from 2007. Oh really, that much? That was the last year, in fact the only year, that I was at least somewhat into my corporate job. I was part of a team of just five. That all felt an awfully long time ago.

Tuesday was when some of the more notable lessons happened. In the morning I asked a 28-year-old what he thought the worst (or most destructive) invention in modern human history was. He quickly shot back: social media. There are several other contenders: leaded petrol, cigarettes, landmines, nuclear weapons (though they may have prevented destruction), and plastic. But all of them were invented even before my parents were born, in some cases centuries before. If you’re talking about the worst invention in the last 75 years, social media must be it. It’s destroying the fabric of our society like nothing else, and it’s horrifying to watch this destruction unfold in real time. That evening I had a 90-minute session with a 23-year-old woman. Teaching women of that age is invariably hard, but this session was excruciating. I got one-word answers from her, if that. Look, this isn’t working. I’m saying five words for every one of yours. (I was being generous.) I was getting a real Demon Dentist feel about the whole thing; it was like pulling teeth.

It’s been a slightly frustrating week, with an above average number of cancellations. I’ve tried to make the most of the annoying downtime by making new games and exercises, for both English and maths. I made a set of cards with the numbers 1 to 100, to help with understanding factors, multiples, primes, and all the rest of it. I’d planned just to go up to 40, but then thought I may as well go the whole hog. I’m happy with the system I came up with. Black for odd, red for even (like the suits of a normal pack of cards), a purple border if the number is prime, squares in the corners to denote a square number, and a small triangle on the right if the number is triangular. It was important not to make it too busy. On the back of each card I wrote the prime factorisation and all the factors of the number.

I’ve been playing my Primitive Man LP by Icehouse (an Aussie band who were big in the early eighties) a lot lately. Icehouse came on Radio Hauraki a lot back in 2007, that one year when my job was meaningful. It was usually Great Southern Land, or sometimes Hey Little Girl. But there are other very good songs on that record too, like Goodnight Mr Matthews. A lot of the tracks remind me of Split Enz who were big at around the same time.

I gave up on Honey & Spice in the middle of the fifth chapter. Whoever the target market is for the novel, I’m as sure as hell not it.

It’s an important time for Romania right now. Citizens (i.e. not me) go to the polls three weekends running. This Sunday is the first round of the presidential election. The parliamentary elections follow on 1st December, which happens to be Romania’s national day, with the second round of the presidential election taking place on the 8th. The far-right anti-everything-except-Trump-and-Putin party will surely increase their vote share. If they gain power, Romania could go the same way as Hungary. Let’s hope not.

I’ve got an important meeting this evening regarding the book(s) I’ve been writing with the help of Dad. More about that next time; it’s been a long post.

Books - Family - Life :) - Politics

And the band played on

November 18, 2024 by 0 Comments

Scârț, the place that has all the communist memorabilia and also houses the theatre I went to last December, reopened today, so I met Dorothy there for coffee this afternoon. They had records and books for sale, but I didn’t buy anything. Tracy Chapman’s first album would be amazing to have on vinyl, but I wasn’t going to fork out 160 lei for it. We sat inside – the renovation was still under way – and had tea and coffee. We met an Australian guy of sixty or so who had a long white beard and had that general bushman look about him. He also had his cat with him. He talked at length about his cat, including how he nibbled first his fingers this morning, then his dick. He said he lived a two-minute walk from Scârț. He settled in Timișoara ten years ago. In the meantime he tried to return to his native Sydney but couldn’t afford a place to live. Dorothy and I talked about all manner of things including Balinese first names.

Chats with Mum and Dad now revolve around two things. Their house (see later) and how irredeemably screwed we seem to be as a species. Things weren’t looking too rosy even a decade ago, but as I see it we’ve recently entered a new dark age, a cultural desert, devoid of meaning and substance and most of all, hope. Too few of us care because we’ve been conditioned not to care. We’ve all got six-inch rectangular shiny things in our hands that distract us from anything that really matters. And most of us are pretty busy working, in some cases just to make ends meet, but in other cases so we can afford pointless shiny shit that we’ve been conditioned to think we need. The biggest story of the weekend was a geriatric ex-champion boxer (who was massively famous when I was about eight) losing to some YouTuber who is supposedly massively famous now. Both trousered millions just for showing up. There’s also some conference going on in a petro-state where they won’t do anything to solve a climate crisis that many in power deny even exists. Bitcoin has hit US$90,000, a new record high, on the back of Trump’s re-election. How that’s supposed to be a good thing for anybody, apart from the bros who have bitcoin, I have no idea. Elon Musk has even named a new government department after a crypto coin. It feels more and more that as we go about our daily lives we’re like the band that played on as the Titanic sank, though worse, because the band didn’t actually make the ship sink faster.

The House. It feels worthy of a capital H now. On Wednesday I called Mum and Dad. After a few minutes with Mum, she went to an exercise class, so I got to talk to Dad alone, which meant a certain calmness and frankness. Their place is irretrievably bad, he said. “I’m embarrassed to have people round, especially if they ever saw our old place.” Yikes. He’s doing a whole load of DIY now, including doing up a big old shed, a process my brother called “polishing a turd”. Is all this work really worth it? Mum is in denial, he said. The only good news is that the house and renovation have set them back (so far!) around $900k, when I thought the figure was more like $1.1 million. It was confusing – there were so many quotes floating around before (and as) the work got started. Dad wants to be out of there in two years. Sounds like a good plan. They should be challenging their energies into finding a suitable next place, rather than, you know, polishing turds.

I’m reading a book that I picked up at Luton Airport in (I think) June 2023. It’s called Honey & Spice, by Bolu Babalola. I chose it mostly because of the enticing red-and-yellow cover and the author’s name. (The author is a woman.) The modern themes and language (words like mandem which looks kind of Portuguese to me; it’s actually multicultural London English or MLE) make me think I’m too old for this book. It’s like the opposite of a historical novel; I’m reading about a time after my own time. Wikipedia gives the author’s date of birth as 24/2/91, so yes, she’s quite a bit younger than me, but I would have guessed even younger. I’ve so far read just four chapters, and well chapter three was great, so even though the rest of it has left me cold I’ll persevere a little while longer.

Two months, give or take, until I have a niece. Apparently within two hours of my sister-in-law finding out she was having a girl, her mother had bought a whole load of new pink shit. Because that’s what we now do.

Environment - Politics

Time to wake up

November 11, 2024 by 0 Comments

Mum shares a birthday with Donald Trump. Dad shares a birthday with Elon Musk. I share a birthday with Adolf Hitler. When it was over without yet being officially over over, we three sharers of villainous birthdays chatted for a good half-hour about what how we got here, how we’ve been asleep at the wheel for so long, and what further horrors are around the corner.

Unlike 2020 when the map of voting shifts was a mishmash of red and blue arrows and was described as a Jackson Pollock painting, this time it was one-way traffic. Only two states out of fifty didn’t move in Trump’s direction. Trump gained among men and women, irrespective of age or race. In other words, Kamala Harris (who ran a good campaign, I thought) faced an impossible task. Biden should have got out much earlier. In fact he should have been a one-term president from the start and the Democrats could have picked Harris or whoever else through a proper primary process. I can’t see the Dems nominating another woman in a hurry. Two of the last three elections they’ve failed to elect one to the White House, and in between they nominated an old white guy. Who won.

I listened to one commentator who complained of a “failure of imagination” as to how bad things could get under Trump and his minions. Best case scenario is their egos and lack of organisation keep the level of damage to a minimum. This is hard to imagine, now that the traditional Republicans have left the scene. It’s full-on MAGA now. Worst case is the US ends up like Hungary, or even Russia. For us in Europe, you can forget about the best case. Ukraine is fucked. There will be some “solution” whereby the Donbas is ceded to Russia, and then what? And forget anything to help the environment. “Drill, baby, drill”, which sounds like something out of Don’t Look Up, will be the mantra for the foreseeable future. They’re likely to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. A third of the area of Romania, this refuge is home to polar bears and other large mammals. It has already seen its ice melt, making sea levels rise, causing more ice to melt due to the albedo effect and so on, so this will be one catastrophe piled on another.

I spoke to my cousin earlier today on Skype. He lives just out of Albany, New York. Good luck for the next four years, I said. Two, he shot back. The midterms. But how can you be so sure the Democrats will gain, even if Trump wrecks everything? Then he talked about good old checks and balances and all the guardrails holding firm. Which they do, until they don’t. I asked him eight years ago if he was going to stay up and watch the election coverage. No, there’s no way that idiot will win. But he did. You wouldn’t think a rapist, a felon and the instigator of a deadly insurrection could run for the presidency a second time, let alone get over 50% of the vote, because that’s obviously fucking ridiculous. But he has. My cousin has a PhD and is very switched on, but I came away from our chat thinking, I dunno man, you might be asleep at the wheel here too. His wife later came on the line. It was great to chat to her. She said she cried when the election results came through.

Yesterday I had maths with Matei. We discussed the election. He talked about all the TikTok memes, making fun of Harris’s laugh and her “working-class family”. And her lies. She’s such a liar, isn’t she? Heaven help us all. Trump lies practically every time he opens his mouth. And are you aware that he tried to violently overturn the 2020 election? He wasn’t. He was twelve at the time, so I suppose I’ll let him off, but it’s interesting that there was no TikTok about that. As I’ve said many times on here, social media is destroying us. Then we moved on to talking about bridges and cathedrals and maths.

Politics

Devastating

November 8, 2024 by 0 Comments

Unlike the previous two US elections, I didn’t get up at 2am to watch the results. But I couldn’t sleep. This will probably be seismically bad. Eventually I got up at 6:30, when it might reasonably have still been in electoral limbo. It wasn’t. I saw North Carolina had already been called for Trump, a bad sign, then flicked over to the New York Times needle. It showed Trump with a 90% chance of winning the election, but just by eyeballing the figures from the swing states, I could see this was a conservative (ha!) estimate and his chances were more like 97%.

Not a surprise – I was out by one state in that map I posted last weekend – but utterly devastating. I’ve had eleven lessons since the election was called, and I’m knackered. Tomorrow is a lighter day and I’ll probably post properly then. And get some damn exercise.

Photos - Politics - Travel: Romania

Buziaș again

November 4, 2024 by 0 Comments

I visited Buziaș this morning. It was my second time there – I went there with Mark last winter, before I bought the car. It was wonderful with the sun shining through the autumn colours and the leaves continuing to accumulate in a golden blanket. I didn’t do much but wander through the park – extensive for a small town – and the surroundings. Oh, and go inside a large abandoned building. Buziaș might be my favourite town within a half-hour drive of Timișoara.

The presidential race appears to be very close now. I woke up this morning to see a shock poll of Iowa from a highly respected pollster which gave Kamala Harris a three-point lead. Iowa is a state that should be firmly in Trump’s camp. But I’ve been here before with promising polls just before voting day. I remember big leads for Remain just before Leave won. I can’t believe that’s over eight years ago. There were also polls giving Biden huge leads in 2020, and he only just won. (Trump supporters were less likely to answer polls. This could happen again this time.)

Apart from the grave danger a Trump presidency poses to America and the whole world, I still find him utterly repugnant. Îmi repugnă, you can actually say in Romanian. His values are diametrically opposed to mine, those that were instilled into me from my parents, my grandmother, and my teachers at primary school.

I was a bit surprised to hear Dorothy voice support for the US abortion bans. I get it, you’re religious and that’s fine, but even if you’re anti-abortion (which you’re entitled to be), actually banning it is horrifically cruel. Iowa, by the way, has a terrifying six-week abortion ban. Last weekend I watched a documentary on the January 6th insurrection. A scary number of the participants invoked God.

Update: Maia Sandu has been re-elected president of Moldova. She won the second round by a solid margin. That’s a relief. Just a week ago Georgia decided to go pro-Moscow in their election.

This booth was phoneless

This sundial was a bit fast. It was 10:35.

To the toilet. It was brand new and clean, surprisingly.

A squirrel

The abandoned building

I wonder what happened in 1980

This hand-painted sign is very Romanian, particularly those Bs

The Romanian elections aren’t far away either

The Catholic church

There was once a “first class” restaurant at the bottom of this crumbling block

An old Romtelecom phone box near where I live. The phone no longer works.

Environment - Photos - Politics - Writing a book

Book plans and planning for the worst

November 3, 2024 by 0 Comments

A fairly productive Saturday. An online session (I hesitate to call it a lesson) with the priest, then two maths lessons in Dumbrăvița. After doing quadratic equations with Matei, we discussed the US election for the last 10 or 15 minutes. (It would have been helpful to have devoted the whole two hours to the election. So much maths there. The Electoral College, gerrymandering, and all the rest of it.) Matei brought up the site 270towin.com where you can plug in your own predictions.

After my lessons I met Dorothy to discuss the smaller of the books I (and Dad) have been working on. We wanted to meet at Scârț but it was closed for renovation. What kind of renovation, we wondered. Its messiness is kind of the whole point. I hope it’s for something structural rather than any kind of tarting up. The area surrounding Scârț, which has a park, cobbled streets, and architecture from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, might be my favourite part of the city. We ended up having our tea and coffee a place called Viniloteca (as in vinyl records), which I’d previously misread as Vinoteca (as in wine). It was great, with all its proper music. I felt a certain pang when Tonight by David Bowie and Tina Turner came on. I’ll have to go there with Mark sometime. I didn’t buy any of the records or T-shirts on sale, but that wasn’t my focus. Dorothy and I looked at Dad’s 25 pictures, each one demonstrating a common error that Romanians make when they communicate in English. Seeing a whole body of Dad’s work really shows you what an extraordinary talent he has. (I know I’m biased.) On Monday I’ll try and arrange a meeting with the publishers to see what (if anything) will be the next step in getting the book into print. Will it cost me money? I say “if anything” because this is Romania, where nothing is guaranteed.

Yes, the election. I read an article that described it as bearing down on us all. “Bear down on” – an ominous three-word phrasal verb if ever there was one. Mum, Dad and I doomed for half an hour on Skype last night. What a Trump win would mean for Ukraine and the security of Europe as a whole. What it would mean for democracy. What it would mean for the environment which is deteriorating before our eyes. How the fuck the future of so much of Europe depends on a few thousand ill-informed voters in Cumberland County in Pennsylvania who don’t even care about foreign policy. (I know nothing about Cumberland County. It was a name I picked at random from the list of counties. I’m sure the people who live there are lovely. But that’s kind of the point.) The main thrust of our conversation was: how did we get here? When my parents were my age and I was a teenager, this sort of talk would have been unimaginable.

This was my guess on the 270towin website:

Of the seven swing states, I gave only Michigan to Harris. The most likely map is in fact all seven states falling to Trump. That’s because of how correlated the states are with each other. If there’s a polling error of a few points, it’ll likely be reflected across the board. In the last couple of days, things have looked marginally better for Harris, so I’m still hopeful. It’s certainly not a done deal, as Dad called it last night. But it’s best to mentally prepare for the worst, especially when there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Talking of the environment, more than 200 people have so far died in Biblical-level flooding in Valencia.

Crysanthemums at the market yesterday. It was 1st November, the Day of the Dead.

The two pictures above were taken today.

Language teaching - Other sports - Politics - Tennis

Pretty vacant

October 26, 2024 by 0 Comments

Seven lessons yesterday. It’s rare to have that many. All that talking gets quite tiring, especially when it’s online. I’m hoping to keep Sunday free (unlike last weekend) and hop over the border to Szeged in Hungary. I’ve heard good things about the city. I may even make a detour on the way there or back to take in the beautiful autumn colours.

When I spoke to Dad this morning, I mentioned the difficulty I have in connecting with young women aged between 15 and 25 or thereabouts in my lessons. Dad said that’s to be expected on account of the age gap between us, but I disagreed. There’s a certain vacancy there. The lights are on, but nobody’s home. Eight hours a day on Instagram, with its laser focus on image, will do that to you. When my university friend came to stay we talked about this. He reckoned that 10% of young women will suffer long-term damage – they’ll be confined to a (permanent?) zombie state – as a result of their social media use. Yes, boys and young men have their own issues, mostly around gaming. They’re up half the night and can’t stay awake in class. But I get the feeling that it’s something they’ll grow out of. They also do normal stuff like go out on their bikes or play football. One teenage boy had just been to football practice before our lesson. I got him to do an exercise where he had to choose between two verb tenses. Sometimes he wanted to use a different one. “Sorry mate,” I said, “You’re offside!” I raised my arm as if I was a linesman. He thought that was funny. With most girls, that sort of interaction just isn’t possible.

Talking of sport, Mum was pleased that Team New Zealand had won the America’s Cup. I think of it as an obscene waste of money. In other sporting news (from probably two weeks ago now), Rafael Nadal announced his retirement. The extraordinary two-decade-long rivalry between three titans of the game is now over; only Djokovic still remains. I also saw that Wimbledon is doing away with line judges in favour of automated line calling. I’m surprised they didn’t do this back in 2021 for the first tournament after the Covid cancellation; the tech certainly existed then. I read an article by an ex-line judge at Wimbledon. It’s something I wouldn’t have minded doing. As for being a ballboy though, bugger that. I’d have been terrible anyway. As a kid, trying to coordinate myself with other kids just wasn’t going to happen.

I should also mention football for the second time in this post. Earlier this year I wrote regular updates on Birmingham City’s eventual tumble through the trap door into the third tier of English football. A lot had to go wrong for that team to be relegated. A lot did go wrong. In their first season in such a low league since 1995, Birmingham have so far played eleven games, losing one, drawing one, and winning all the rest. They spent big over the summer and getting sell-out crowds to watch some pretty exciting football. There’s a sense of optimism around the club not seen in more than a decade. It’s funny how things turn out.

Just eleven days until the US election, and I have a strong sense of impending doom. (I wonder if anything else but doom can be impending. I never hear anyone talk of an impending root canal, as frightening as it must be.) This morning I saw two polls, one showing a tie nationally, and another showing Harris with only a three-point lead in New Hampshire, a state outside the “swing zone” which Biden won by more than seven points in 2020. Just two polls, but there have been several now that depict a race inching slowly but surely in Trump’s direction. My gut feeling, and that’s all it is, is that Trump will win the seven swing states 6-1 or even 7-0, perhaps even taking a “non-swing” state in the process. He may even win the popular vote or at least come very close. In that case (or any other of the many scenarios that see Trump elected again) I’ll want to log off from global news for my own sanity, keeping just my Romanian news app. I don’t think I could bear to see that grotesque excuse for a man day after day. Dad said that Harris hasn’t been charismatic enough, and charisma is all that matters over there, but what would “acceptable charisma” in a woman even look like in the US? A very “charismatic” woman would be perceived as too boisterous or not feminine enough. No matter what she does, she’s facing an uphill battle in those swing states simply because she’s a woman.

Last Sunday an important pair of votes took place in Moldova, Romania’s baby sister, which I would like to visit one day. (My first introduction to Moldova came from reading Tony Hawks’ Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, a funny but thought-provoking read.) The first round of the presidential election saw pro-European incumbent Maia Sandu come top with 42%, but she now faces a second round in nine days’ time against Alexandr Stoianoglo who is pro-Russia. There’s no guarantee that Sandu will win. There was also a referendum on amending Moldova’s constitution to include a path towards EU membership. The vote passed, just: 50.4% voted in favour. If Sandu doesn’t remain president, I expect that will be knocked on the head.

Any way you look at it, we’re living in fragile, unpredictable times.