Good news from Mum. After a painful day on Sunday that made it likely my parents wouldn’t be flying, she saw the doctor the next day. He said her constipation was a result of her colonography rather than the (still mysterious) underlying issue itself. The doctor gave her a box of sachets, kind of like the ones I put down the bathroom sink when it gets blocked. She took ten (!) of these sachets on one day, and they seem to have unblocked her. Unless something else kicks off, it’s more than likely they’ll make the trip now – I’d put it at something like 85–90%. (It must have been under 50% on Sunday. They were fearing the worst.) They’re due to arrive five weeks from tomorrow.
Around the world and beyond, we’ve had a deadly earthquake in Myanmar, an near-total eclipse, and major political developments such as Marine Le Pen being barred from running in the next French presidential election (for now at least). But as for me, not a lot has happened. The eclipse, which I tried to watch with an eight-year-old girl during our lesson last Saturday, was a damp squib. It all looks pretty normal so far, doesn’t it? And then the came over and that was that. On Sunday I went up and saw Elena, the lady who lives above me. I took Kitty along for the ride. Kitty hasn’t quite been the friend I’d hoped for. She’s just, well, there. And here, and everywhere. I might talk more about her next time.
Last night I watched Birmingham’s match at Bristol Rovers. The first half was great: Blues scored early (a brilliant strike from Keshi Anderson) but Rovers equalised and really dominated the half. They were unlucky not to be ahead at half-time. The second half wasn’t anything like as open. A few minutes from the end, Blues were awarded a soft penalty which Jay Stansfield tucked away, and they snatched a 2-1 win which they hardly deserved. After that result and a 4-1 home win over bottom-placed Shrewsbury last weekend, a colossal points total is still on. I see that Blues have entered a partnership with Birmingham University, my old alma mater. I also noticed the players had “Visit Birmingham” on the lower back of their shirts, before realising it also said “Alabama” in small letters. So they’re palling up with anything called Birmingham, even if it’s 4000-plus miles away. That’s something that their local rivals Aston Villa, far more successful than Blues over the years and with a fancier-sounding name, can’t really do.
One final thing: this morning I got the cazier judiciar which is a document that I’d applied for in early March that should allow me to update my residency permit in time for the upcoming Romanian presidential election.
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.
This morning I played squash with Mark and his wife. It was my first time on the squash court since I left New Zealand. We took turns; I got more than my share of court time. It made a nice change to get some intense exercise. That dried up for me when the tennis did last summer. His wife asked me about Kitty. (Since this morning, she’s taken to biting me again.) When we left the sports centre, there was a black and white tom cat prowling around the entrance to the sports centre. It didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Mark’s wife seriously suggested I take it home to give Kitty a friend. Um, no thanks, one is plenty.
Last week I hit 30 hours of lessons for the first time this year. Bugs have been going around, my more well-to-do students have been on ski trips, and so on and so forth, all reducing my hours somewhat. I always think of 30 teaching hours as being a full week (there’s preparation on top of that), with 25 as an absolute minimum. Yesterday I started with Matei. He turns 17 next month; I’ve been teaching him for almost half his life. In my other maths lesson with the younger girl, I explained the importance of division in everyday life. Say you need to split a restaurant bill, for instance. “Won’t you just have a calculator?” I then told her that Romania’s new president is likely to ban calculators following the upcoming election. Even phones with calculator functions, like this one, will be outlawed. It’ll be chaos – utter mayhem – as people resort to the black market to obtain these devices. So you’d better learn to divide! The funny thing is, she believed me. I suppose this is a country where the president banned Scrabble just 40 years ago, so banning calculators might seem vaguely plausible. After my three lessons in Dumbrăvița, I got soaked to the skin coming back on my bike. I still had another lesson when I got home.
Recently I had one of the nicest comments yet from a ten-year-old boy. I’ve been teaching him English for six months. “English at school is boring. I’ve learnt more in a month with you than in three years at school.” I told him that I have a much easier job than his teacher at school.
A couple of weeks ago I weighed myself. I was 78 kilos. That’s more than I want to be. I’m targeting somewhere around 72 or 73; in other words, I’d like to lose two Kitties. (Yes, she’s little.) I’ve cut back massively on carbs and have reduced my portion sizes substantially. It’s already making a difference. A benefit of living by myself and having a limited social life is that it’s easier to make these sorts of lifestyle changes. On Friday I got my hair cut. The woman who did it was very nice. She commented that I had “hair for two people”. Well yes. It felt good to have a more manageable barnet once she’d finished with it, even if my big floppy mop is part of who I am.
I saw that Blues drew 1-1 at Northampton Town yesterday. Northampton are known as the Cobblers. The town has a proud history of shoemaking. All three of my pairs of Doc Martens were made there, I think. (I’ve just checked. They would have been made in Wollaston, five miles down the road from Northampton. Production moved to China and Thailand in 2003, but mine are all older than that.) The Cobblers are one of several trade-based nicknames of English football teams. There are also the Blades (Sheffield United), the Potters (Stoke City), the Railwaymen (Crewe Alexandra), the Hatters (Luton Town), the Saddlers (Walsall), just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are others. Ipswich Town are affectionately known as the Tractor Boys, which sort of counts too.
Today I read something about Sweden and Norway trying to encourage the use of cash for civil defence purposes as the world becomes a more volatile place. Scandinavia has become virtually cashless. For me, a private tutor in Romania, the story is rather different. Last night I realised I had around 50 (mostly low-value) banknotes in my wallet, with another 50-odd in an envelope ready to take to the bank tomorrow.
I’ve just started reading Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. It’s good, but it won’t be a quick read, unlike Shute’s fantastic page-turner On the Beach which I read over Christmas. Whenever I see lots of past perfect – had travelled, had seen, had had – I know I’m in for something more challenging.
No news from Mum yet about her scan. My parents called me this morning, but I couldn’t talk for long because of my squash appointment. They talked about monarch butterflies hatching from chrysalises in their garden. The joys of actually having a garden. These very pretty butterflies are common in NZ but the species originated in North America. Dad described them as “much cleverer than your cabbage white”. The cabbage white was the one we always got in the UK.
No news at all regarding the book. I’m on the verge of giving up.
I’ve just had a WhatsApp video chat with my brother. He called me. His son, not so little anymore, was still up and about. My brother is very proud of him, and why shouldn’t he be? He’s been teaching him letters of the alphabet using wooden blocks. D is for daddy, O is for orange, X is for … he struggled a bit there. I showed him Kitty and asked him what he thought of his little sister. My brother and I got onto the weird subject of how many stillbirths Mum’s parents had in addition to the seven live births. We think that, from talking to other family members over the years, it’s between three and six inclusive, including a set of twins. Mum has never broached the subject.
Late last night Dorothy dropped a major bombshell on me. She said, you realise you’ll probably have to pay for the book publication? What? They’ve been talking about distribution and EU funds and all sorts. If Dorothy’s right, then I’m just about out. Get them to run off two dozen copies or so, pay them whatever that costs (not much, hopefully), pick them up in a box, and give them to my students. Then try and find another publisher who’s actually serious and draws up proper contracts and stuff. Self-publishing, or vanity publishing, does not interest me in the slightest, especially if the self-publishers are then going to sell on the copies that I’ve previously paid for! If she’s right, this “publisher” is even shittier than I thought. She also thinks this is somehow normal. She’s been in Romania too long.
That potential crappiness and subsequent lack of sleep made for a strange Saturday of work. Matei’s mother didn’t have enough cash to pay me after our maths lesson. Look, pay me next week, it’s fine. She insisted on going to the cash machine that obviously wasn’t just round the corner. This almost made me late for my next lesson and deprived me of the bite to eat that I would normally have. (I ended up eating during the lesson. My student didn’t seem to mind.) While I was waiting, I saw Matei’s mum had flowcharts from her job sitting on her desk, all full of pompous language that just about killed me. Their huge TV was tuned to an American version of the Living Channel. They were redesigning the interior of a house that looked perfectly fine to me as it was. Just before the lesson I’d given Matei’s mother a bouquet of nine roses. Even numbers are unlucky, for some reason. March 8th is International Women’s Day, which has really become a thing.
When I got home, the Six Nations rugby match between Ireland and France (being played in Dublin) was on TV. The last time I watched that, it still would have been the Five Nations. France led 8-6 at the interval. I saw the second half – a veritable barrage of tries, mostly by France who were (using a word that commentators like) rampant. They won 42-27. I thought, hmmm, this is actually pretty watchable. I found the TMO (video replay) confabs quite amusing – the Aussie referee said maaate a lot. When that was over, I saw what was left of Blues against Lincoln, with the commentary almost a minute behind the picture. On 70-odd minutes, with the score at 0-0, Blues were awarded a penalty. Up stepped Kieran Dowell (not Jay Stansfield who normally takes spot-kicks). Straight into the top-right corner. I half-expected the commentator a minute later to say that he’d missed, with all the nonsensical stuff about the book still going around my head. That was the only goal of the game. The football was a lot less interesting to watch than the rugby.
Tomorrow I’ll probably take the car to Arad. The last time I went there was in January 2024, which already feels a world away.
I now realise that when I feel shitty, it’s rather nice having Kitty.
Today was a searing hot day for early March as we hit 24 degrees. When the calendar flicked over to March, I immediately thought, oh shit, just three months till summer. Last summer practically messed me up. I hung around a bit in Piața Victoriei and Piața 700 before my 1pm meeting at the publisher’s. These were my old stomping grounds back in the old days. The kiosk that sells pleșkavițe in Piața 700 is still there. I remember when they bumped the price of a pleșkaviță up from 5 lei to 6. It’s now 17. Taverna lui Romică, which didn’t exist back then, was doing a roaring lunchtime trade, selling mici and other traditional Romanian food.
The book meeting. Four of us were there: both ladies from the publishing house plus Dorothy and me. As always, the older lady didn’t stop talking. She started by asking Dorothy and me if we’d be keen to do a 1050-page (!) translation from Romanian to English on something to do with sociology. We both said no. When we got on to the book, they said they’d probably only do 100 copies in the initial run. That’s a tiny number, and it’s laughably few considering how it could be distributed to schools all over the country if they had the wherewithal to do that, but at least it seems something will happen. The younger woman clearly liked the book; you could see she was suitably amused by some of Dad’s pictures. They brought up the book on their screen. It looked all wrong. They’d set it to a crazy big page size and one of the fonts wasn’t right either. The old lady played with the settings, flailing around, hopelessly guessing. I insisted on coming back the office myself on another day, armed with my own laptop, so we can properly sort it out. At one point Dorothy and I were served strong coffee with some kind of pink ice cream on the top. It was my third coffee of the day. The kid I taught at his home after the meeting usually makes me a coffee, but this time I asked him not to.
Yesterday I had a 57-minute Skype chat with Mum and Dad. It was mostly talk of the imminent apocalypse. We all fed off each other because we all feel that way. If it wasn’t already apparent, what went down last Friday in the Oval Office made it crystal clear that it’s over. The world as we knew it, the shape of it, it’s over, and what happens next could be terminal. Change is happening so damn fast. It reminds me in some ways of this time five years ago, a week into March, where people were milling around Timișoara in denial as to the tsunami that would hit us within a few days. That time it was awful but temporary. This time it could be permanent. I hear parents of 14-year-old kids talking about this or that university and I’m thinking, do you realise that there’s a decent chance (20%? How do you estimate such a thing?) that all that talk will be meaningless?
Before our chat I went to the office adjoining the dreaded immigration centre, to apply for a cazier judiciar, whatever exactly that is. It turned out that I needed one to renew my resident’s permit for another five years. The expiry date is over a year away – 22/4/26 – but I really want to renew it before the rerun of the election which takes place in May. If Georgescu or someone of a similar ilk gets in, there may no longer be a renew. Plus my current permit still has the wrong address on it, so it would be good to rectify that.
Mercifully, I’ve just finished American Psycho. I was a bit harsh last time when I said there were very few funny bits. There are a few sprinkled through the novel, but not enough to compensate for the unremitting gore and torture. The scene with the rat for instance, it was almost too much to keep ploughing on with. And I was well and truly over the designer labels and pretentious restaurant food, even though I know they were necessary to get the vacuity of eighties yuppiedom across properly. All the Trump stuff though, my gosh. The sick protagonist of the novel idolises someone who we now know is sick beyond belief. My copy of the book has an afterword by the author Bret Easton Ellis who mentions the abuse, including death threats, he received by women he describes as feminists. That’s obviously horrifying, but when he says that “I wasn’t a misogynist when I wrote the book but the unearned feminist hysteria briefly turned me into one” I’m thinking, yeah right. I don’t get the feeling that Ellis is a particularly nice man.
On Tuesday night I watched Birmingham fall to a rare defeat at Bolton. They were well beaten, too. After Blues took the lead, Bolton were totally dominant in the second half and ran out comfortable 3-1 winners. The home crowd were on good form. Blues looked lethargic, as if their busy schedule had finally caught up with them. Blues still have a nine-point lead at the top of the league with a game in hand. Surely – surely! – they can’t mess it up from here.
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.
I’ve just come back from having lunch with Dorothy at the brewery which is a five-minute walk for me. (When people ask where in town I live, I say “near the brewery”.) I had a large chicken salad; she had chicken and chips. We were talking (briefly, thankfully) about politics, when I said “She’d done her dash.” Dorothy said, she’d done what? Turns out I used an antipodean expression without even realising it. I’ve done that before with “spit the dummy” and I’m sure others besides.
After days of scratching and biting, and weeks of very limited affection, I’m trying out a new strategy with Kitty. Leave her alone. Let her do her thing – climbing and jumping and sticking her head down the loo and zooming around at 20-odd miles an hour – while I do mine. She’s got plenty of toys to keep her occupied. Just watching her is fascinating in a way; cats are incredible animals. So far this experiment is working out because I’m not getting scratched or bitten. After putting her on ignore for a week (which isn’t easy; her coat is so lovely and soft) I’ll go back to gentle stroking and tickling, and kicking a tennis ball around. No picking her up. If that doesn’t work, I’ll revert to ignore. On Friday I took Kitty up to meet Elena, the lady who lives above me. After a few minutes, Elena said, “I don’t think she likes me.” I wouldn’t worry about that, I said, I don’t think she likes me either. I should be glad that on a practical level, Kitty is fine. She seems happy enough in my flat. She isn’t wrecking my furniture and she’s peeing and pooing where she’s supposed to. She also provides entertainment value. Emotionally though, she’s not really there, I’m sorry to say. I suppose I just have to be patient.
Ice hockey isn’t a sport I follow closely. You can tell, because I call it ice hockey. But when Canada beat the US in overtime in Boston last week, that was bloody brilliant. In this new world order, America is enemy territory. I’ve generally been anti-American when it comes to team sports (apart from football, where the US team was more likeable because they were less successful), but that’s just because of their competitive brashness rather than any dislike of America itself. Suddenly my feelings are far more visceral, however, and I’m sure millions of people feel similarly. About ice hockey, I regret that I never persuaded my parents to take me to see the Peterborough Pirates when I was a kid. The game seemed a lot of fun, if you could get past the brawls. Seeing live sport, or live anything, wasn’t a thing we did though. Just like eating at restaurants. The idea of eating at an actual restaurant would have been laughable, but now kids grow up eating at restaurants every other week.
Birmingham drew 0-0 at Reading yesterday, on a crappy pitch against decent opposition. That’s Blues’ seventh draw in the league in 30 games this season. They’ve lost just two and won all the rest. Reading play at Select Car Leasing Stadium, in the middle of a retail park just off the M4. A bloody awful place to have to go (at least) 23 times a season to watch your team play.
An important day tomorrow. I’m going to call Ana, the woman from the publishing house. If she isn’t prepared to arrange a meeting, this could very well be the end of the line. That would be an enormous shame.
On Monday Mum saw a new doctor who she seemed to like, but she still doesn’t know “what it is” yet. She has major ups and downs, from severe pain to basically being fine. It’s eleven weeks until they’re due to land in Timișoara, but last night on the phone I heard the dreaded words “if we don’t make it over”.
Good news about the car. I got the new thermostat put in, and yesterday I drove to Recaș (25 minutes) and back without any problems. Fingers crossed it stays like that. They’ve given me a three-month guarantee which I don’t remember ever getting in New Zealand. After that sporadic juddering on the way back from Serbia I’d braced myself for something expensive.
I should take my car out during the week more often. On Sundays, my usual day, all the towns and villages that are otherwise bustling are pretty much dead. I went to Recaș yesterday because they have the barbecue stall on Wednesday. It was certaintly bustling. I got two mici, a pork chop, chips and several slices of bread – I saved half of that for dinner.
When I spoke to my brother on Tuesday, I mentioned my cat’s penchant for biting. He jokingly wished that his cat would give his son a good nip. My nephew has been rather heavy-handed with their cat, as well as with his baby sister.
I had my first session with new maths student yesterday. An hour and a half, not the half-hour her mum said she wanted. It seems nobody in Romania understands fractions. In fact, that’s what we spent our initial session on. This 11-year-old girl showed me she could add a quarter and a fifth, which is nothing to be sniffed at, but didn’t fully understand what a quarter or a fifth actually were.
She didn’t know whether or not the shaded area above represented a quarter.
I bought Diary of a Wombat online, thinking it would be fun for the kids, and it is a fun book, but it’s not that non-native-speaker-friendly:
I got a bunch of other animal-related books, including this one:
On Tuesday night I watched Blues’ EFL Trophy semi-final at home to Bradford. A tinpot trophy, or so they say, but the final is played at Wembley. Blues won 2-1 to give their fans a big day out in April against either Wrexham or Peterborough. (The other semi takes place next week.) A good game, I thought. Bradford, from the league below, gave it a damn good go. Jay Stansfield, the talismanic striker, gave Blues the lead on the stroke of half-time. The main flashpoint came early in the second half. Stansfield was bundled over and Blues surely should have had a penalty, but instead Bradford went straight down the other end and equalised. Stansfield was down for eight minutes before being stretchered off. Apparently he’s OK. Finally it was Lyndon Dykes who scored the winner. There was obviously loads of injury time and the game even kicked off late, so it wasn’t exactly an early finish.
When I went for a walk around the block today, two of the houses had traditional music coming from them. The second of the songs was beautiful and I tried to Shazam it but (just as expected) I didn’t get a reading.
The best thing I did today was say no to the head of maths at British school. My mental health is always fragile and such a massive change might well tip me over the edge. It wouldn’t be worth it at all. The fact that I know people who work there would only make it worse.
I spoke to Mum last night. She was miles better. Not perfect – she hasn’t been properly well since my brother and his family visited six months ago – but good enough to play golf tomorrow. She still needs to get her upset stomach thoroughly investigated, but as this is Mum I’m talking about, I doubt she will. Dad was out; it made a nice change to speak to Mum by herself. Dad gets his lump taken out on Friday; let’s hope the biopsy gives him the all clear. It sounds similar to the lump Mum had a year ago.
I could only watch the second half of Blues’ FA Cup match with Newcastle. What a half I missed. Blues scored in the first minute, Newcastle equalised midway through the half (controversially – did it cross the line?) and went ahead a few minutes later, then Tomoki Iwata’s spectacular strike made it 2-2 just before half-time. The half I saw was far more stop-start from all the fouls and injuries. Newcastle’s spell of pressure eventually told, and they wound up 3-2 winners. No shame in that from a Blues perspective. Last night they battered Cambridge (one of my local teams I suppose; I was born there after all) 4-0 and they now sit firmly atop the league table. Blues have also made the last four of the EFL Trophy, a competition for teams in the third and fourth tiers. A lot of supporters treat that as a joke, but if you make the final you get a day out at Wembley. Blues will achieve that if they beat Bradford next week. They would then face either Peterborough (another local team of mine) or Wrexham (with all the Hollywood connections) in the final in April.
Simona Halep. After losing her first-round match at the Transylvania Open, she hung up her racket for good at the age of 33. I very much enjoyed following a top Romanian player when I knew I’d be coming to Romania and after I arrived. The disappointments, the victories from the jaws of defeat (and vice-versa), the near misses, and the triumphs. She played four grand slam finals after I arrived here. To see her finally get over the line against Sloane Stephens was quite special. Then there was the Serena final at Wimbledon, which Simona won 6-2 6-2 in 56 minutes. She was practically flawless that day. Her doping ban was a massive shame and though it was (basically) overturned, she’d tumbled way down the rankings having hardly played. But while it lasted, having a Romanian (and a throughly good person, from what I could tell) doing so well in my favourite sport while living in Romania was pretty damn cool.
A few pictures from my trip to Novi Sad (and a couple of Kitty):
House for sale (NOT beware of the dog)Abandoned 80s YugoGuild of Craftsmen: five languages including RomanianName of Mary ChurchRemembering those who died in the railway station roof collapseThe name of this restaurant means Old SongDanube Park, close to the riverThe river and fortress
Kitty is recovering from Wednesday’s ordeal. She vomited twice at the vet’s; anaesthetic even does that to humans. When I picked her up that evening, the vet said she’d been “talkative” (no surprises there), then gave me a list of dos and don’ts. Don’t remove her collar for 12 to 14 days was the big one. Fine, I won’t. I got her home, then locked her in the small bathroom while I gave an online lesson. For the first few minutes I could hear her yowling, then she stopped. When I went back in there, she’d ripped her collar right off. She must have been pretty determined. I tried to put it back on, but she got so angry that I gave up. I’ll have to risk it. Since then she’s been very subdued and has hardly eaten anything. She hasn’t licked or bitten the wound, thankfully. This morning I had a scary moment when, after locking her in the bathroom, she seemed to have disappeared when I went back in there. She was nowhere to be seen. How? I heard a squeak but couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Then I saw her little head poking out of a hole in the tiling in the side of the bath. I didn’t even realise there was a cat-sized hole there. Are you stuck? Will I have to smash the tiles? She came out, eventually. Phew.
Monday was a crappy day. What’s going on with the book? I contacted the older woman from the so-called publishers – the only person from there I can contact. We had a three-minute phone call. No, we can’t arrange a meeting, she said, because of X, Y and Z. It’s all about you, isn’t it? I’m not sure she’d even looked at the text of the book that I’d sent her. In fact I’m pretty sure she hadn’t. At the end of the call she said how nice it would be to meet up with Dorothy and have a glass of wine. You can take your glass of wine and shove it, was what I wanted to say. Everything about the publishers (and they’re really just printers, if that) stinks of unprofessionalism. At this stage I’d say it’s 70-30 that the book will see the light of day. In other words there’s a fair chance that it won’t. And of that 70%, a large chunk involves shitty production quality and next to no distribution. I’ve got a long list of things to do with the second book, but I’m not touching that again until I’m sure that the first one will actually happen.
I spoke to my parents yesterday. They talked a lot about my brother. It’s easy to forget that he was just about incommunicado with my parents for years. He had no time for them, honestly. They mentioned how upset they felt in 2007 when they watched TV and saw the British troops reunited with their families after being in Afghanistan, and they didn’t even know he’d got back. My brother felt, and still feels, a certain bitterness about them emigrating to New Zealand in 2003. That wasn’t helped by them spending the year 2000 in Australia as well. (I never felt that way. We’re grown men. If they want to move to where Mum was born, that’s up to them. In fact I was glad they moved because Mum would have been particularly unhappy if she’d stayed in the UK and carried on teaching. Of course I made the move myself.) Mum and Dad could easily have broken all ties with my brother, but they didn’t, and now they’re in contact with him about twice a week. There’s a lesson there.
This week I’ve watched a Romanian film called The Death of Domnul Lăzărescu, which came out in 2005. It’s an excellent film, both funny and very sad, which highlights the problems in Romanian healthcare (and wider society) that existed back then and haven’t exactly gone away. Look at Colectiv, or the two fires that took place during Covid. Domnul Lăzărescu, the patient who was dragged from pillar to post through various Bucharest hospitals, died in real life only two years later. Mioara, the paramedic, died three years ago. I really wanted to punch the doctors who verbally abused Mioara in one of the hospitals towards the end of the film. Annoyingly, the film had un-turn-off-able English subtitles – I covered them up with a piece of paper.
Birmingham play Newcastle at home in the FA Cup tomorrow. The two teams have had some real FA Cup battles in the not so distant past. In 2007, they drew 2-2 in Birmingham before Blues pulled off a shock 5-1 away win in the replay. That won’t happen this time – replays have been axed – and I fully expect Newcastle to win comfortably. They’re in the upper echelons of the Premier League, and the gulf between that and even the top of the third tier is immense. I doubt I’ll see much of the game because I’ve got a big day of lessons scheduled – eight to nine hours. Then on Sunday I’m planning a trip over the border into Serbia to take a look at Novi Sad, the country’s second city. It’s been in the news lately. Three months ago a roof collapsed at the train station, killing 15 people, and protests have since erupted.
Before I go, I should mention something about Simona Halep’s retirement. A great ambassador for Romanian tennis who, it seems, is calling it a day. I’ll write more about that next time.
by 
