Politics

Family - Photos - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

A flappy board and some grounds for optimism

November 15, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Above is the popular split-flap departure board at Timișoara Airport (5/11/22) showing that my parents’ flight had landed. These clicky clacky things used to be ubiquitous, but they’re now few and far between. Even this bad boy won’t be long for this world, sadly.

I don’t often get emails from Mum, but she sent me a newsy one on Saturday, perhaps from the local library as they don’t have internet access in their flat in St Ives. Yesterday they were going to the Remembrance Day parade. As Mum pointed out, all those years ago when there was still a small band of First World War veterans (!) we all had to wrap up warm. Not so now. They’re going down to my brother’s place on Wednesday, for four days. They’re taking the train which will be expensive. She talked about New Zealand’s dramatic win over England in the women’s rugby World Cup final, and how some New Zealanders are finding the women’s game a better spectacle than the more stop-start men’s version. I’d like emails to and from Mum to become a more regular thing. (I then got a message from Dad saying he really wasn’t feeling well.)

Another Mum thing. When they were here I played tennis; when I got back I saw Mum was following the Paris Masters final between Djokovic and the Danish 19-year-old Holger Rune on her phone. Djokovic had won the first set but was losing in the second. I found a stream for her, and the three of us watched the remainder of the match. What a finish it was, as Rune staved off six break points in a marathon last game (18 minutes?) to pull off a logic-defying 3-6 6-3 7-5 win. Mum was disappointed but I was happy the plucky teenager got the win in the biggest moment of his short career to date.

The newly renovated buildings, including the Lloyd “Palace”, in Piața Victoriei this sunny afternoon

The US midterms. Two years ago the gradual drip-feed of results added to the drama. What’s happening in Washoe or Clark or Pima or Maricopa? When will we get the latest dump? All these obscure-sounding counties that are actually not that obscure because they’re heavily populated. It’s been much the same this time around. The phenomenon of Trump has focused more international eyes on the minutiae of American politics than ever before. And rightly so – it’s all very consequential. I always go back to the 2000 election and the Florida recounts. A little over two years later, my brother was in sodding Basra and we were scared shitless. What if Gore, who (don’t forget) won more votes than Bush overall, had become president instead? The 9/11 attacks may still have happened, but I imagine the world in general would have gone down a less destructive path. Now there’s a chink of light with the Democrats holding the Senate (it would be nice if they could gain a 51st seat in next month’s Georgia run-off) and the Republicans probably gaining just a bare majority in the House. With what happened in war-ravaged Kherson on Friday as well, there is something to be cheerful about at last.

The impulsive and slightly repulsive Elon Musk recently bought Twitter for a barely imaginable sum of $44 billion, and it’s now it’s in some kind of malaise, freefall, meltdown, I don’t know what. A few years ago I joined Mastodon because I liked the name, but never really posted anything, so in the last few days I’ve been on there, trying to understand how it works, in the hope that I can find a social media platform that doesn’t totally creep me out.

My early new year’s resolution for 2023 is to get two books published. One on common mistakes that Romanians make in English (most of the donkey work for that is done) and another about a guy I used to play tennis with. How to make this all happen I’m as yet unsure about, but writing my resolution here won’t do the chances of it any harm.

Films - Life :) - Politics

Sorting me out

November 9, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum and Dad have just gone for a walk, so I’ll write a quick post now, just before my next lesson. I met them at the airport on Saturday, and since then they’ve been sorting me out. Most of their focus has been on my flat, which I’ve been unmotivated to do much with until now, with the exception of my office which is the only room that anyone else really sees. So we’ve been clearing this place out of much of the lime-green dross that the previous owner left behind, and Mum has been busy recupboarding (if that’s a word) – this place has enough cupboard space for a small army, and I’ve struggled to decide (and remember) what should go where. I knew that my eighties bathroom needed replacing, and my parents have helped me decide on the how and the why. I’ll probably get a plumber in here next week.

In the meantime, we’ve been visiting the markets (as well as the big hardware stores) and I’ve had lessons. This afternoon I’ll be breaking new ground: four siblings – two sets of twins – at the same time. I’ll have to cycle over to the west of the city to see them; in future perhaps they could come to me. Then later I’ve got another new student – a woman – who will have a 90-minute session with me. Four lessons in total today.

My parents fly back to the UK tomorrow evening; they’ll have two weeks in the country before heading back home. My brother wants them to pay him another visit before they leave; Mum is keen to go down there but Dad less so.

When the whole world seems to be going to the dogs, I try to find crumbs of comfort. Bolsonaro’s narrow defeat last week was most welcome. Victory, we can only hope, for actually giving a shit. Overnight the Republicans fell short of expectations in the midterm elections. They’ll probably take the House but maaaybe the Democrats will cling on to the Senate. That would be a result considering the 40-year-high inflation rate and near-record gas prices, and Republicans’ structural advantages in all branches of American politics. In particular, Trumpy Republicans did worse than less Trumpy ones. A rough night for the orange turd.

All in all, it’s been great having my parents here. I’ll write again at the weekend.

Family - Poker - Politics - The UK

Four years and a magical piece of life — Part 2

October 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Liz Truss had resigned from her disastrous seven-week stint as leader on the day I arrived in the UK, and the latest (abbreviated) race, which Boris Johnson mercifully pulled out of, dominated the news. Rishi took over from Lizzie, and suddenly everything was going to be fine and dandy once more. Yeah, right.

I gave a lesson on my last morning in that country I called home half a lifetime ago, then we looked at some old slides of my brother and I when we were little, and even before then when Mum and Dad had barely met. The ones from our early childhood were incredible to look back on; I think we’d forgotten how primitive things were back then in our largely run-down house before it all got done up, or perhaps we were just too young to remember. Then it was time to go. Mum and Dad took me to the coach station in Poole. On the way, we got a call from my brother to say that I’d left half my laptop charger there. It was too late to turn back. Bugger. That put a dark cloud over the next 24 hours for me. The station wasn’t in an obvious place either, but a helpful lady directed me to it – down the underpass and past all the local buses – and I was on my way.

I had to take two buses to get to the airport, first from Poole to Victoria Coach Station in London, and then to Luton. Almost six hours including the short gap in between. I searched for laptop cables using the National Express wi-fi, and considered ordering one to arrive in the following day or two, but figured with a bit of luck I might somehow get by until my parents come to Timișoara on 5th November. Fortunately my first bus arrived at Victoria Station on time. A youngish woman who had one arm was in the Luton queue (gate 10); she was concerned that her return destination was blank on her ticket, and she really needed to get the bus to Luton to avoid missing her flight, but I couldn’t help her. She asked a woman in uniform who has no help whatsoever. Finally a much more useful uniformed man told her she had to go all the way down to the desk at gate 0 to get a new ticket printed. (British bus and train authorities love the number zero for some reason.) She had to jump the queue there to get back before the bus left. On the bus I had a good chat with her. It turned out she was a Paralympic triathlete who had been in the UK in a vain search for an obscure medicine. She competed for Hungary in last years Paralympics in Tokyo, and was flying back to Budapest. She started off as a swimmer, and attempted to qualify for Athens as a teenager, before finally making it in her thirties. When we get to Luton I’ll only have an hour so I’ll have to run. You should be good at that, I said. I got her name out of her, but no phone number, and that was that.

I touched down in Timișoara just before two in the morning, as scheduled. Unlike at Luton, my mini suitcase appeared on the carousel almost immediately, and a taxi soon whisked me off back home. Like everything else in Romania, the cost of taxis has shot up. It felt good to be back, though the laptop business was eating away at me. I tried charging it via USB-C, but no luck. After almost giving up (will one of my students have a charger that works?), I saw my old HP charger out of the corner of my eye. It was so old it still had a New Zealand plug on the end of it. But I have adapters for those, and it worked. I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. I can hardly function without my laptop.

On Friday my parents left Poole and drove down to St Ives, only to break down at a service station on the M25. According to my brother they were already an hour late, at waiting for the AA to come and get them up and running again added another two hours. I’d dread to think what state Mum would have been in. On more than one occasion when Mum wasn’t around, Dad told me that Mum’s stress levels had been through the roof on their trip. The funny thing is that Mum keeps her real stressed-out self such a guarded secret that even my brother doesn’t know what she can be like. I wonder what version of her I’ll get when they come over next weekend. I’m guessing it won’t be the epitome of calm and cheerfulness – besotted by her grandson – that my brother and sister-in-law saw. We’ll see. As for me, I don’t know when I’ll next return to the UK. I’d love to play a part in the little one’s life, however fleeting.

The next few days will be taken up by lessons and getting ready for Mum and Dad. I might try and book a ticket for a play or a concert – I think they’d like that. This weekend I’ve given two lessons, played some reasonable tennis, and played five poker tournaments including a second place this morning.

Poker - Politics - Tennis - Travel: Romania

The intrigue awaits

September 7, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I haven’t really been following the US Open, but early this morning I saw the end of the quarter-final betwen Nick Kyrgios and Karen Khachanov. Kyrgios dominated the fourth-set tie-break to take the match into a rip-roaring fifth – these two players don’t mess around – but he dropped serve in the opening game of the decider after playing a tweener, and Khachanov was able to cling onto his service games despite a low first-serve percentage. The Russian, who was allowed the compete under a neutral flag, won the final set 6-4 to make the semis of a grand slam for the first time. The match finished at 1am local time. With Nadal and Medvedev out, there will be a new men’s grand slam champion no matter who wins. Kyrgios said he was devastated at losing; the draw had really opened up for him.

I didn’t have a great time at the virtual poker tables last night. I bombed out of the WCOOP single draw after an hour and a quarter. I’d been hovering at or just above my starting stack for a while, but then called a huge bet, which I probably should have folded, with my big but sub-monster hand. I was shown 85432, the fifth-best hand in the game. That all but ended my participation. My saving grace was that I’d qualified via a satellite, so it only cost me a dollar or so. I’ll hopefully try my hand at a couple more of these WCOOP thingies.

As I mentioned last time, Britain now has a new prime minister. It’s surely a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. In Boris Johnson’s leaving speech he compared himself to Roman or Greek gods, one or the other. It was all about him. He’s an egomaniac, pure and simple. He became more and more Trump-like during his time in office. Like Trump he was desperate for the power but had no interest in using it in a positive way, and he seemed totally devoid of empathy. And just like Trump, we might not have seen the last of him. But now, Liz Truss. Seriously. She appears to know bugger all about anything, and has already filled her cabinet with sycophants who know the same amount – a bunch of I’m-all-right-Jack climate-change deniers. A torrid winter is around the corner, and Britain will probably muddle through it and come out the other end in one piece, but it will be despite the country’s politicians, not because of them. I hope this lot get dumped out at the next election.

I’ll be off into the mountains, or sort of, just after lunchtime. Călin, one of the friends of the tennis crew – he works as a taxi driver – will pick me up. The drive will take about three hours. I’ll be staying three nights in a village called Blăjeni, near Brad. All the pictures I see of the area look extremely bucolic and beautiful. I’ve been given a list of food not to bring; yesterday I made a plum crumble and a pizza to take along. There are a load of unknowns around cooking and eating and sleeping and whatnot, but that all adds to the intrigue, I suppose.

Environment - Politics - The UK - Travel: Europe

The records keep tumbling

July 21, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

First, my brother got Covid last week. When I spoke to him on Saturday he was still getting a faint second line on his test, and his wife – seven months pregnant – was giving him a wide berth. He’s since had the all clear.

So the records – which in the UK go back a really long time – tumbled yesterday. An infernal 40 degrees, with firefighters in London dealing with their busiest day since the word firefighter came into existence. I still use fireman with my students, because I’m not woke enough. (The real reason is that it’s easier for them.) Then today I heard one of the stallholders talk about our upcoming heatwave. “Forty-three on Saturday,” she kept repeating in disbelief, “and you can add two more on to that. Vai de capul nostru.” That last phrase is almost untranslatable: it means something like “have mercy on us”, or perhaps in this case “holy shit”. Presumably she’ll have to work in those temperatures, which presumably will be a new record. We already broke the June record last month. Obligatory Google screenshot:

New Zealand is currently facing one deluge of rain after another, as Australia did recently. This climate change lark is so much fun, isn’t it?

Last night I made my monthly trip to see the after-hours doctor. I mentioned my ongoing runny nose (left nostril only) and sinus pain, and he gave me a spray that will last a month. It should help (I’ve used it before), and when I get back from my trip I’ll look for a more permanent solution. The worst part of it all is fatigue; I’m always tired to some degree. He also told me that I need to wear a mask when I travel, so I’ve just ordered a set of proper FFP2 masks rather than those crappy cloth ones. Last night was a warm one, and at 10:45 there were still people milling around Piața Traian where the ramshackle non-stop shop was doing good business. When I got home I had a fly in my bedroom and the smell of fly spray reminded me happily of summer 2020 when my old place was host to flies and various other insects. I was more relaxed then, despite the more pressing threat of Covid and everything that might have meant.

Only six days till I go away. I’ve been organising my trip, trying to get all my ducks in a row. (Do people still say that?) A few years ago Mum gave me a blue folder full of plastic wallets, where I can put every piece of paper in the order that I’ll need them. It’s extremely handy. When I get to St Ives, I hope to see my friends who came to Romania in 2017. They’ve both been quite ill lately.

The Tories in the UK are about to get down to the final two. It has been a perversely fascinating contest. Much has been made of the diversity of candidates in terms of gender and race. The opposition should be glad that Kemi Badenoch has been eliminated. She clearly meant business, and unlike the three survivors in the race, would have been hard to attack. I dearly hope that whoever wins (maybe Rishi Sunak with his net worth of £750 million, but likely Liz Truss) gets booted out at the next election.

My new student is gradually improving. We’re currently having lessons every weekday. Recently he mentioned a possible reintroduction of Covid restrictions, using the word “mafia”. I nearly asked him which vaccine he got, but thought better of it. He then said that “nobody loves the current president”. That might not be far off the truth, and it’s no bad thing. When people love political leaders, that’s when things go horribly wrong.

Family - Politics - Tennis

He must be on the spectrum!

July 12, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I saw yesterday’s Wimbledon final. Or rather I saw about 85% of it, because I watched it on Eurosport which has ads during changeovers, and a lot happens in the changeovers when Nick Kyrgios is playing. He played very well and in entertaining fashion as always, but Djokovic started to zone in on the return of serve, made Kyrgios move, and wore him down in the end. There wasn’t much in it though. I find it interesting that some people say Kyrgios is on the autistic spectrum. I see no sign of that – it’s become fashionable of late to say that anyone who behaves unusually is on the spectrum. He certainly does have demons that are not entirely within his control, not least an ego as big as his serve. He hasn’t matured enough to accept genuine defeat. He always has to fall back on the support crew or the umpires or the line judges or a drunk woman in the crowd or his opponent taking too long, so he doesn’t have to suffer the pain of really losing. It’s hard to say if Kyrgios will kick on from this success (reaching the final of Wimbledon and losing a close match to maybe the greatest of all time absolutely is a success) because he’s so inconsistent. Even in this tournament he almost lost to an unknown Brit in the first round. (Paul Jubb nearly jubbed him, going down 7-5 in the fifth set.) As for Djokovic, he’s now won four Wimbledons in a row and seven overall, tying Sampras who was the undisputed master of grass in the nineties.

During the third set of yesterday’s final, my tennis partner called me to say that it was raining at his place, 3 km from me, so we’d have to cancel. There wasn’t the merest dribble of rain here. Yeah, you just want to watch the end of the match, don’t you? This morning I went down to the courts and hit against the wall for an hour. A few years ago my father got somebody in Timaru to copy the family cine film that my grandfather took between 1963 and 1983 onto CDs. It starts in Italy when my grandfather was stationed there, but most of the footage is from the UK; my brother and I make cameo appearances right at the end. After my wall session I took my copy of the CD, which I can’t play, to a copy shop and the man put it on a flash drive for me. It’s great to have it, even if the film quality isn’t the same as the original cine film. My only complaint is the music which is a total mismatch with the film; I have to turn it off.

Going back to autism, my UK-based student said that one of his colleagues is almost certainly on the autistic spectrum. His home is apparently a menagerie of birds, bats and squirrels, and he has a habit of saying the first thing that comes into his head, offending people in the process, to the point where he’s been moved to an individual office. Now that sounds like somebody on the spectrum.

Boris Johnson. Is he on the spectrum? I doubt it. He is – was – just desperate to hang on to the job that has been his divine right since he was about eight years old. He has dealt well with the war in Ukraine, but everything else has been a mess. His resignation speech showed no contrition whatsoever. Good riddance. But who’s to say his replacement won’t be as bad? We might soon have a new name to learn to pronounce. I’m guessing Tom Tugendhat’s last name, which looks German, isn’t pronounced “tug end hat”. Penny Mordaunt’s surname is intriguing; it surely means “biter” and has kept an old spelling. Does the pronunciation of the final syllable follow the pattern of “daunt”? Or is it like “aunt”? It’s neither; apparently it’s just a schwa, so Mordaunt rhymes with “concordant” or “discordant”, whichever might be more appropriate.

I thought Japan was almost gun-free, but no, Shinzo Abe was assassinated last Friday with a homemade gun. He was a great leader, whatever you thought of him, and he was about the only leader who could make some sense of Donald Trump.

International travel - Life :) - Politics

Getting away

June 30, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just booked some flights. Four of them, in fact. It wasn’t a simple process. “Oops, something went wrong.” Important yellow buttons disappeared from my screen at will. There were endless pop-ups asking me to tack on this or that, and I wasn’t allowed to just ignore them. Sometimes a circle just went round and round and round and never did anything. After booking Ryanair flights from Timișoara to Bergamo and then on to Stansted, I’d planned to return directly to Romania with Wizz Air, but it was cheaper to go back via Italy with Ryanair. If I’d realised that, I’d have booked two return flights rather than four one-way ones and cut out some hassle, even if there’s no price difference. So I’ve got northern Italy to look forward to, not just the UK (where I’m likely to get caught up in airport hell). I’m flying out on 26th July and coming back on 9th August. My brother will have some time off work then, and hopefully I can also see my friend in Birmingham.

Ferdinand Marcos Junior has been elected as president of the Philippines, replacing the tyrant Rodrigo Duterte. How could the son of a dictator, who was removed in a revolution, get elected in a landslide? As the reporter explained on the news this morning, it’s a combination of endless horseshit being pumped out on social media, and the country’s shockingly low education level. A deadly concoction, literally.

There was a time when I’d grab the old small TV with the bunny-ears aerial from my room and take it downstairs so I could watch Wimbledon on two channels at the same time. It was the most important thing going on in my life, and I wasn’t even involved. Now it’s just there, going on in the background. There have been some great matches already, but for whatever reason I can’t quite get into it.

My two teenage students had just got the results of their “national evaluation” Romanian and maths exams when I saw them yesterday. One of them got an average of 9.4 out of 10. The other got 9.95 in maths, but seemed almost dumbstruck to only get 8.3 in Romanian, and has already lodged an official appeal. They’re the “haves” of the Romanian education system, and are under pressure to succeed, to go to the best liceu, from their parents and the society in which they live. It would be interesting to meet some of the have-nots.

One of my new adult students has just started a job at Ikea, after a long stint with Renault. Last time he read out Ikea’s mission statement to me. “To create a better everyday life for the many people.” Sorry, what? For the many people? Is that supposed to be English? How did that ever get past the first round? Type “for the many people” into Google, and all I get is Ikea.

I’m trying not to melt today.

Life :) - Politics - The UK

Struck down

June 26, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve had a bit of a crappy time of it the last few days. On Wednesday night I had a piercing sinus headache on my right side – one of those “screwdriver rammed up my nose” ones – and although it eased at around four in the morning, it destroyed my sleep and my energy for the next day. Yesterday was an improvement, but the pain returned last night and I’ve reverted to go-slow mode today. I was grateful for the storm that put paid to this evening’s tennis.

The first half of the week wasn’t too bad. I got good feedback from the two teenage boys about my new skyscraper-building board game. The first one said something like “isn’t it amazing that you’ve actually made this?” which was nice to hear. I was on solid ground with them; after a combined 400-odd lessons, they probably weren’t going to say they hated my stupid game and didn’t want to see me again. (Someone basically did tell me that once, though it wasn’t a game I’d created.) The timing was good because they’d just had their high-pressure exams in Romanian and maths that will determine where they go for their final four years of school, so there was a good chance they’d be receptive to some kind of game.

Lots of politics this week. The US Supreme Court have made abortion illegal in something like half the states. Even if you are anti-abortion, actually banning it is monumentally stupid and evil. Thousands of women will die because of this ruling that has been handed down by half a dozen ultra-extreme religious loons whose concern about a child’s life seems to evaporate once it is born, if their attitude to guns is anything to go by. And where will they stop? Will abortion soon be outlawed nationwide? Homosexuality too? Who was it who said that America shouldn’t fear Islam, but fundamental so-called Christianity instead? They’ve been proven right. This latest ruling will have repercussions that go beyond America’s borders; I could see abortion laws being tightened in religious countries like Romania. The whole political system in the US so utterly messed up. It would be good it could burn to the ground.

In happier news across the pond, the Conservatives lost both the by-elections they were contesting on Thursday, the sixth anniversary of the Brexit referendum. In the next general election, voters absolutely all-capital-letters MUST vote tactically for whatever party is most likely to beat the Tories. Labour, Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, it doesn’t matter. If Labour don’t win a majority, that doesn’t matter either. In fact it’s better if nobody wins a majority. The more chance there would then be of the terrible electoral system (albeit not nearly as egregious as the American one) changing.

I called my sister-in-law last night. I knew she and my brother had gone up to St Ives, but was very surprised to see her in the church by the river. She said she was at a “Booze in the Pews” event. After the news from the US yesterday, I was glad to hear that so few people in the UK now use churches for their original purpose that they hold drinking sessions there. My sister-in-law, six months pregnant, wasn’t partaking.

I plan to travel to the UK in a month’s time, but I’ve been unable to book a flight because I still haven’t got a replacement debit card after I nearly got scammed two weeks ago. I’m getting just enough cash payments to tide me over from week to week. What a pain.

Life :) - Politics - Tennis - The UK

A mix of old and new (including pictures)

June 7, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a phone call. It was a woman from the mattress company. She spoke so damn fast at the beginning that I almost blacked out. After all this time, Romanian on the phone can still be a real challenge for me.

Right now I’m living in a near-permanent state of fatigue. I don’t know if it’s the heat, the stress related to the move, the regular bike rides, or some combination. I don’t feel refreshed even after a full night’s sleep. Maybe I really need this new mattress.

I had a chat with my brother on Sunday. They still had the bunting out for the jubilee. It’s obvious that he’s had enough of life in the army. All the early starts and pointless trips are getting to him. Amazingly he’s started a correspondence university course in – I think – business management. He says he’ll finish it in 18 months. My sister-in-law, who is expanding, was more upbeat. Mum keeps referring to her future grandson as Herbie, which was the name of a guinea pig we used to have. (We don’t even know what it’ll be yet. It’s still an it.)

After being booed at the jubilee, Boris Johnson survived his confidence vote last night, but a whopping 41% of his Tory colleagues voted against him. His supporters – a bunch of overgrown schoolboys – banged their desks in unison on learning the result. A good result for the country, Boris said. In the medium and long term, I hope he’s right. A divided party with a lame-duck leader that staggers on to the next election, then gets well and truly stuffed. The UK ends up with a coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems, and the SNP. They introduce proportional representation. That would be good for the country.

Shortly before the jubilee celebrations, the British government announced that pounds and ounces and other imperial measurements could be making a comeback, not that they’ve totally gone away. I’ve always quite liked imperial measurements because they’re batshit mad and much more fun to say than the metric versions. I recently got one of my students to read a simplified version of Alice in Wonderland in which Alice’s heights had been converted into metres and centimetres, and it felt like we’d been transported to a lab. I still remember Dad (“you can’t even see those silly millimetres”) ordering sheets of glass for his paintings in inches, one by one, over the phone. “Twenty-four and five-eighths by seventeen and three-quarters.” The person on the other end would repeat the dimensions back to him, and the whole thing took on a poetic quality, a bit like the BBC shipping forecast. But, after being taught in metric and living all those years in New Zealand, and now Romania where non-metric is almost unheard of, it’s obvious that metric is far superior for doing actual calculations and when you’ve got to, you know, do business internationally. Going back to imperial would quite clearly be crazy.

The shipping forecast, read four times a day on Radio 4, has a place in British culture. It follows a strict format that hasn’t changed in decades, running through the evocative names of the shipping areas – 31 in all – always going round the British Isles clockwise in the same order: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, and so on. I liked listening to it as a kid, and I still remember the warnings of “hurricane force 12” in the storm of October 1987. It’s still popular today, even if it’s far less in demand, thanks to the internet. It reminds you that you’re part of something far bigger, that there are people out there exposed to the high seas, not in air-conditioned offices. Regular listeners get to know the announcers. I tuned in over the weekend and listened to a forecast read by Neil Nunes, who has quite a wonderful deep voice. He comes from Jamaica and started at the BBC in 2006. Apparently some rather bigoted listeners complained at the time that his voice wasn’t British enough. The late-night forecast is preceded by Sailing By, a beautiful song. (YouTube comments are nearly always awful, but the ones for Sailing By are delightful.) Other maritime countries, like New Zealand, have shipping forecasts too, but they don’t have the cultural signficance of the British one. The shipping areas are rattled off in a great 1994 song by Blur called This is a Low. Damon Albarn, whom I’ve seen live, likes referencing the sea in his songs.

After Saturday’s washout, I played tennis on Sunday. It was a hot one, and I was relieved to be playing doubles and not singles. They had some kind of party on the beach volleyball courts next door, with music that I found almost unbearable. I partnered a 14-year-old girl against two men, and we played a heck of a set lasting roughly an hour. Following numerous deuce games, we got to 6-6 but then fell 6-1 behind in the tie-break. We saved four set points but my error on the fifth was the last shot of the set. We had to call it a day at 2-2 in the second set. After that we picked sour cherries from the laden tree next to the courts. It’s a great time for fruit right now.

As promised last time, here are some pictures.

I took this picture on Saturday night. Magda, on her 58th birthday, with Domnul Sfâra, 87.
A last picture of Piața Victoriei on the day I left for good.
A game of backgammon at Piața Lipovei. You can also see the egg and coffee machines.
A law firm. The two names are identical, just that one (Kovacs) is written in the original Hungarian way while the other (Covaci) has been Romanianised.
An old, and small, Pegas bicycle at the supermarket yesterday. This dates from communist times when these were virtually the only bikes around. In the last few years, modern Pegas bikes have come on the market, though they’re no longer made in Romania.
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How exciting!

September 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My uncle – another one – is celebrating his 80th birthday today. He and my aunt visited Timișoara after coming to the UK for my brother’s wedding. A retired (or semi-retired) farmer, he still does a ton of physical work. The idea of slowing down is alien to him. I guess he’s been lucky – he’s lived ten years longer than either his older or younger brother, who both died of cancer. Ten years ago I went to his previous big birthday bash – in the middle of the rugby World Cup, and we watched the All Blacks’ first match against France. Israel Dagg (what a name) was probably man of the match. The world has spun off in an altogether darker direction since then.

Mum and Dad are now in their new place. It was weird seeing them on FaceTime with the new backdrop. So much wood everywhere, including on the ceilings. Dad described parts of the new house as “horrendous” and in dire need of renovation, but his horrendous is my kind of meh. I would just about kill to have their new place, as long as I could transport it out of Geraldine. Just before the definitive move, they had a horrendous day where their lawnmower broke down and my uncle’s (birthday boy’s) trailer, which Dad had borrowed, also needed expensive repairs.

I need to move away from this flat but I don’t want to. That’s the situation I’m in. Again, I’m having flashbacks to 2011, although then I didn’t actually need to move. It’s just that society had told me that someone of my age should buy a property – you’re a failure if you don’t – and my job, which gave me the licence to buy, was a ticking time bomb. And yeah, I thought it might actually make financial sense. But there was no excitement then, and neither is there now. The phrase “How exciting!”, as it relates to buying property, drives me mad. My biggest worry with this move is that it could kill my mental health, which has been so much better ever since I moved to Romania.

Last Monday I did have a look at a place in the Bucovina area, near where I once had lessons. The agent led me up to the fourth – and top – floor of a Ceaușescu-era block. Pinned to the walls of the staircase, bizarrely, were pictures of islands and beach resorts with golden sand and deep blue sea. It was something you might have seen in a prison cell. At the flat I was greeted by an elderly couple who had lived there for 35 years, and a very yappy dog. Everything in the flat had a seventies or eighties feel about it. There was even an old typewriter. The flat was easily big enough, but it would have needed serious work. I mean, it would have been OK for me, but potential students would have found it a turn-off. No lift either (again, I would have coped), and perhaps the biggest minus was a lack of any sort of view.

Then on Thursday I tried to visit some agents. This isn’t like New Zealand or the UK; they’re not really interested in dealing with the public. The first place had an intercom system which nobody answered. They didn’t answer their phone either. Fantastic. Just round the corner was another agency, located in a modern fourth-floor office. It was the same company that I rented this place from when I arrived. A woman took down my details and we had a chat. She told me that the young employee who had just two lessons from me in 2016, but honestly changed my life by tipping me off about the flat I’m in now, had left the company to train as a psychologist. I told her about some of the areas I liked, then inevitably she started peddling brand new apartments in the south of the city. I’ve been to that area, and nothing is more than five years old. I’d worry that living there, even if it might be good for business, would leave me depressed. Maybe not, but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

What else? There’s a Hungarian festival on in the city, perhaps the last thing that’ll be “on” before the plug is pulled. Last night we had country music at Piața Operei and there was even a re-enactment of a battle. They’re selling various bits and bobs, Csiki Sör beer, and overpriced food.

I played singles tennis last night, again with that super-fit near-60-year-old. We only booked the court for an hour, and at the end I was up 6-4, 4-2. I lost the first three games. The first game went 16 points but was almost devoid of rallies. In the third game I had a break point, and hit a shot I thought he might struggle to return, but he ripped a cross-court forehand that was out of the top drawer, and the next two points slipped from my grasp too. It was all happening too damn fast. I made sure I had a good sit-down before coming up to serve. The games had been close, and there was no reason why I couldn’t come back. It was overall a good game with plenty of winners from both of us, although he lost concentration in the middle.

Poker. Back-to-back second places, and big comebacks, on Friday, though I made such bad starts to both tournaments that I couldn’t get many of those damn bounties. After blanking all three of last night’s attempts, my bankroll is $979.

Work. It’s OK but I could do with more of it. (Someone called me wanting only face-to-face lessons. Um, there’s like this thing on the news that you might have seen.) Thursday was a good day, however. One boy in particular has come on so far in his English since I started with him that it blows me away. He’s gone from a kid who knew a few words and didn’t say boo to a goose to an intelligent teenager who has a bloody good command of English. It’s so pleasing to see.

Justin Trudeau has been re-elected prime minister of Canada despite his party losing the popular vote. Their system isn’t nearly as awful as the US one (stupid amounts of money, stupidly long campaign, stupid everything basically) but it still ain’t great. The Germans are going to the polls right now.

Boris Johnson resorted to his schoolboy Franglais shtick again last week. “Prenez un grip”, “donnez-moi un break”. Mildly amusing to an Englishman for whom mumbling pointless French phrases for five years was an iconic part of his upbringing, but it would have fallen flat elsewhere.

It might just be me, but I can’t see how we’ll ever escape from the environmental mess we’re in. Humans are just terrible at dealing with problems that happen incrementally over periods of time greater than a lifetime. We still think we can consume our way out of this. We can’t.

Sorry for making this post so long.