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The year has started all white

January 5, 2026 by 0 Comments

I had a tough start to the day with some pretty bad sinus pain. I’m fine now, but on the odd occasions when I get that (thankfully less often than I used to), I’m tired for many hours after the pain has subsided.

We’ve got proper winter here now. It’s snowed all day, pretty much, and all around is blanketed in white. Great for the kids who have bemoaned the lack of snow in recent years. The temperatures are forecast to plummet into the double-figure negatives late in the coming week.

Yesterday I called Mum and Dad, but I got a lot more than just them. My aunt and uncle (the ones who live close to my parents) were there, and so was my Wellington-based cousin – who has come through a gruelling two years of treatment for cancer in her jaw – and her mother. It was good to catch up with them all. Apart from lack of snow, their weather hasn’t been much better than mine. I did mention that I hope to get over to see them in August.

I watched the darts final last light. Luke Littler, still a teenager but the undisputed king of darts, basically thrashed Gian van Veen, the rather more cerebral Dutchman who at 23 is still very young. The match started out with great excitement. There were big out shots from both players at the beginning, then a tense and nervy deciding leg of the first set which van Veen won. Then Dutchman then went 2-0 up in the second set. Game on, as they say. But from there it was one-way traffic. Van Veen averaged 100, which is pretty damn impressive, but Littler averaged a whopping 106 and was always a step or two ahead. The highlight for me was probably the appearance of a wasp (not for the first time) that took some of the sting out of Littler just momentarily. The end came quickly, before I’d even finished grinding all the coffee beans; Littler’s 147 finish was the final flourish in a 7-1 win. By the way, the G in Gian van Veen’s first name is that guttural sound similar to a Spanish J. I knew a Gerrit and a Margriet – Dutch students from my time in France – and their Gs were pronounced the same.

Since my last post, Kitty has been great. She’s calmly sat on my lap without wanting to wriggle away at any opportunity. Let’s hope she carries on like this.

I can’t even begin to know what to think of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and capture of Maduro. It’s all beyond me.

My break from all those students is coming to an end. I’ll have lessons in dribs and drabs for the next two or three days, then bam!, it’ll be back to normal again.

Update: I’ve just spoken to my brother. It’s hard work looking after the kids. My niece has had a virus; my nephew is full-on whenever he’s not asleep. I think Christmas was probably tough for my brother – he spent a week with the in-laws, whom he gets on well with, but it’s just hard not being in your own home and having to look after the kids. Talking to him puts any issues I have with Kitty into perspective.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - New Zealand - Other sports - Photos - Scrabble

The Year of the Cat

January 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s properly cold now. We’ve had flurries of snow both yesterday and today. When I went off to my lesson with an eleven-year-old boy – my 862nd and final lesson of the year if my records are correct – it was minus six. I drove, when normally I’d cycle. I took a detour after the session, and stopped for sandwiches at Bobda, a place I went to four years ago to the day, that time on my bike. It had just gone 1pm – midnight in New Zealand – so I called Mum on WhatsApp, thinking she may have already gone to bed in which case she just wouldn’t answer, but no, my parents were still up and about. They’d just seen the Sky Tower fireworks on TV. Sometimes they’d go down to Caroline Bay, but not this time.

This extraordinary Catholic church in Bobda hasn’t been divinum or nobiscum for quite some time

I got Kitty at the start of the year. She hasn’t totally wrecked my life as my parents predicted. She’s certainly much more comfortable here than in those first couple of months – the biting-and-scratching-and-cowering phase. But last night I thought, there’s still something off about you, Kitty, isn’t there? Your body is so damn tense all the time. Why can’t you just relax? Sometimes she’ll sit on my lap or I’ll hold her in my arms, but never for more than a minute or two. As I said, her body isn’t relaxed and she wants to wriggle away all the time. That makes it hard to build up much of a rapport with her, which is a shame. I’m trying to play with her more and may even get a harness so she can go outside. I hope that she calms down a bit as she gets older. Here’s Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat.

Kitty on Christmas Day

There are still seven hours of 2025 left where I am. I don’t think I can face going into town for the New Year celebrations where it’ll be rammed as Brits say, and any sort of party is out of the question. Spending less time with people over the festive season has been wonderful, and I don’t want that to stop for another few days at least. As for 2026, it feels like a very hard to predict year. There are so many imponderables both on a worldwide level and for my family. The business with their flat in St Ives, their health (which is often hard to ascertain), whether they’ll make it to Europe, so much is up in the air. On Christmas Day I mentioned to Mum that I’ll need to get round to booking some flights. She asked where to. When I said New Zealand, she seemed surprised. It was almost as case of “Why would you want to do that?” Wouldn’t it be really cool if she said, “That would be absolutely lovely.”

I finished the latest Scrabble league with a record of eight wins and six losses. That means I’ll be back in the same division for the third time running. I was pleased with how I played overall. The lady from Palmerston North was one of two weaker players in the division; they will both be relegated. The next round starts tomorrow. I thought if I’m ever going to play a real-life Scrabble tournament (against the clock and with challenges) I should at the very least try an online version, so yesterday I tried my hand at one that was run by someone in Sri Lanka, scheduled for eight games each. It turned out to be a shitshow. It was due to start at 11:30 am my time (3pm for the organiser; India and Sri Lanka are on a half-hour time zone, just like the central third of Australia and a few other places). But most of the entrants didn’t even show up. Blame the ridiculous registration process for that; one click and you were committed, with no way of backing out. The organiser delayed the start for half an hour in a vain hope that more people might present themselves, but they never did. Eventually I played a game. A good game it was too. My opponent drew fantastically and I lost by 50-odd – no shame in that – even though I successfully challenged off his play of DOUG which as I suspected is just a bloke’s name. In the second game my opponent played ANECDOTA. I’d never seen that word before so I challenged, but it was valid. A little while later he said he had an emergency. Could I cancel the game? OK then. Five minutes later the game restarted from the beginning. Emergency over, he said. What the heck is this?! He wasn’t a good player, he was quite possibly cheating, and he definitely seemed to be a complete dick. Thankfully I was able to beat him. In game three I played someone better than me but was fortunate in my draws and ran up a big lead; despite my best efforts to blow it, I hung on to win. Then the organiser mercifully called a halt to proceedings. If real-life competitive Scrabble is anything like that, you can count me out.

Yesterday I watched some of the darts. I hadn’t watched any of this year’s tournament prior to that. One of the matches featured Krzyzstof Ratajski of Poland. I guess Polish Scrabble might be quite interesting. Another match involved a debutant called Justin Hood who remarkably hit all of his first eleven attempts at a double. His twelfth was match dart which he missed, but he completed a 4-0 whitewash over the much higher ranked Josh Rock all the same.

Family - Films - Other sports - Scrabble

Is this really happening again?

November 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

I managed to completely fall out with Mum last night, for the dozenth time this year. It ended up with her shouting “YOU HATE ME! YOU HATE ME!” (it was definitely all-caps) and leaving me no choice but to end the call. Is this really happening again? After that I slept abysmally.

This all came about because Dad hasn’t been well. Last week he noticed his pulse was fast and irregular, and he’ll be seeing the doctor in the coming days. He told me this on Saturday night, just after I’d got back from the cinema. It was Sunday morning for them, so Mum was at church. Mum had told Dad not to tell me, but he told me anyway. This is obviously a big worry; quite possibly it’s come about from all the stress with the apartment sale in St Ives. I called Mum last night just before I went to bed. The first thing she said was, “Dad’s not well but don’t tell your brother.” I replied, “I will tell him. He needs to know. Why do you have to keep hiding these things?” She said he’s got a lot on his plate with the kids so it’s better he remains ignorant. And it all escalated from there. Mum isn’t exactly 100% herself. She’s practically blind right now, though she’s still driving, and on Saturday Dad told me her bowel issue is far from resolved; she sometimes has to change her clothes after what you might indelicately call a shart.

It’s impossible to disagree with Mum. You just can’t do so while maintaining a polite conversation. The moment you show any kind of dissent, a shouting match ensues. The only way to avoid this is to meekly agree. Mum knows best. And that’s exactly what Dad does. He agrees, just to make life easier in the short term, even if the agreement involves something like buying a house that he knows is unsuitable. In fact I can’t remember the last time I had an in-depth conversation with Mum about anything.

Probably Mum’s second-biggest driver of stress lately, just behind the apartment sale, has been the church roster. Seriously, the church roster. It consumes hours of her time. Days even. She says she has to put it into a PDF and it’s disappeared from the screen and so on and so forth and if I don’t get it out on time I’ll be shunned by all members of the congregation or something ridiculous. Maybe she even thinks she’ll be banished to the burning flames of hell. So last week she bought herself a new laptop, which at the moment she doesn’t know how to use, just to do the church roster. That’s a small clue as to Mum’s level of rationality.

I seriously have to think about what to do next year. I’d love to make a trip to New Zealand, but spending that length of time with Mum might be too risky. It nearly went horribly wrong last time around.

Yesterday was my niece’s christening. It was a double christening; my niece’s cousin (a six-month-old girl) was also baptised. Mum, Dad and I were able to hook up to the service on Teams. The minister who made it all happen was the same one who did my brother’s wedding and my nephew’s christening; he certainly has the capacity to entertain. My nephew spent practically the whole hour-plus event running.

The movie I saw was All the President’s Men, a 1976 film all about how the Watergate saga was covered by the Washington Post. It starred Robert Redford, who died recently, and Dustin Hoffman. I saw it with Dorothy at Cinema Timiș on a cold, wet Saturday evening. (Dorothy also saw it when it came out.) The star of the show was really Ben Bradlee, the newspaper’s chief editor. It made me realise that democracy, in the US and elsewhere, is indeed slowly dying. A modern Watergate would be met with a collective shrug. Of course Trump did instigate something worse than Watergate, and the only consequences for him have been to sue the BBC for a billion dollars.

Birmingham City’s new stadium was revealed last week after much anticipation. It’s going to have chimneys – twelve of them – and be visible for many miles. They plan to have it ready for the 2030-31 season. It’ll be part of a multi-billion-pound “sports quarter”. Something like this, if they have a top-class footballing side to go with it, really could revitalise a flagging city. Aston Villa have been easily the city’s best club over the years, and they have a fancy-sounding name. They don’t carry the name of the city though – the city of industry with all those chimneys – and that counts for something. Maybe Birmingham will be known as the Chimney Boys or something. (I’m not very good at this.)

The latest report from the UK Covid inquiry is out. Quoting verbatim, the chair of the inquiry said that while government was presented with unenviable choices under extreme pressure, “all four governments failed to appreciate the scale of the threat or the urgency of response it demanded in the early part of 2020.” Yes, absolutely. It was shockingly slow, and thousands died unnecessarily as a result. A common point of view is that it was going to be bad no matter what, and no government could have done anything about it. I disagree entirely with that.

I played six games of Scrabble yesterday, losing five. Not my best day, but I also drew poorly. That happens. Sharted is valid, and off the top of my head it has six anagrams: hardest, hardset, hatreds, threads, dearths and trashed.

A big week of lessons in store. I’ve got 36½ hours scheduled. They may not all happen – I usually get at least a couple of cancellations – but I don’t expect to have much free time.

Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Mum’s good idea

August 9, 2025 by 0 Comments

Mum has always just wanted the best for me, even if she sometimes hasn’t known what “the best” is, which isn’t entirely her fault. Last week she said, wouldn’t it be nice if you were earning a bit more, and couldn’t you do that by giving online maths lessons? To Brits and the like, and be getting three times what you’re making now? That’s actually a very good idea, Mum. One of your best, in fact. Now, implementing it is a whole different matter. Drawing graphs, drawing shapes, writing equations – so much of maths is outside the realm of simple text, making online teaching quite challenging. I’d need a bunch of equipment, such as a stylus pad and a camera that focuses on my desk. That could get expensive. I’d also have the job of rigging up and dismantling all those gizmos as I switch from online maths to face-to-face English or whatever I happen to be doing next. Then there’s getting the students in the first place, and if I do, finding time in my schedule for them. I can envisage some late nights. Finally, if I go down this route, the stakes increase. I’ll probably have to set up my own company. I mentioned this to a student of mine (an accountant) on Wednesday; she said there were two ways of doing this that each come with their pros and cons. It would be fantastic to be earning enough to bomb around Europe for a month every year without feeling guilty about it, but although I’m often busy with work and don’t take much time off, my work life in Romania has so far been pleasantly low-octane, and online maths teaching would certainly change that. The idea is worth considering, all the same.

On Thursday I had a new student of English, my first for a while. He’s 16 and wants to do the B2 Cambridge exam in November. He was a nice enough guy, though I couldn’t help look at his tattoos. He had two Roman numeral dates (day, month and year in full), inked conspicuously just below his knees. They were dates in the seventies I think, so I’m guessing they were his parents’ birthdates. I have no idea why you’d want to do that, but each to his own I suppose.

This morning I picked some plums from the trees in Mehala. I picked a fair few from outside the cemetery, because they clearly didn’t belong to anybody. (Last year one lady complained that I was stealing them.) As well as the usual purple plums, there was also a greengage-type variety. They’ll mostly go into a crumble. I also went to the market there for the first time in ages – it was like stepping back in time in a nice way – then bought some eggs from a vending machine on the way home. I won’t be going anywhere for the rest of the day. It’ll simply be too hot. As for tomorrow, forget it.

The football is back up and running again. Birmingham and Ipswich were two divisions apart last season, but last night they faced off in the opening Championship fixture. I didn’t see the game, but Ipswich scored from a last-minute penalty to eke out a 1-1 draw after Blues had dominated. I don’t know much about footballers these days; I often just go by their names. Blues looked likely to sign a striker, currently at Ajax, called Chuba Akpom, which I thought was a great name (it even has pom in it), then Ipswich looked like they would get him instead. Maybe they still will. (That’s one reason why last night’s game was fairly high-profile.) Blues did ending up getting someone called Marvin Ducksch, which is a pretty fun name too, if hard to type. I doubt I’ll be watching much football this season. It’s too much of a time sink. And then next summer there will be the World Cup, now bloated to the max. It’ll never stop.

Last night I played Scrabble online for the first time in ages. I was strangely nervous; there were some crazy people on there the last time I tried. I just played one game and won by 130 points. I put down one bingo: SLATERS, another name for woodlice. (I just looked it up. It says the word “slater” is only used in that sense in Scotland, Australia and New Zealand. All that time in NZ made me think it was a universal name for the little bug.)

I’ve had a good few weeks on the weight-loss front. I’m down to 72.5 kg, or eleven stone six. I’ve dropped twelve pounds since March.

On Thursday there was a national day of mourning after Ion Iliescu, the controversial first post-revolutionary president of Romania, died at 95.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Romania

Roll on September

July 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

Last week I was having a discussion with the 11-year-old girl in Germany when she asked me what my favourite month was. When I said September, she thought I was crazy. End of holidays. Back to school. Homework. Tests. Getting up far too early. That’s what September means to her. But for me it means no more infernal heat for nine months. And yes, back to (hopefully) a full suite of lessons, without which life can feel purposeless.

Last summer messed me up mentally. The heat was relentless. So far (touch wood) this summer has been more manageable. Yes, we’ll be well into the 30s every day until Saturday, but then we’ll get a break. That’s just as well, because I’ve been feeling a bit down ever since my parents came over. Lots of talk about their properties and plans, lots too about my brother (his kids, his house, his career plans, his master’s degree), and then there’s me, stuck out here on my own, my life rather meaningless in comparison. Then there’s the sudden realisation that Mum and Dad are properly old and I’ll have to play a more active role in their lives. Having Kitty is certainly a positive amid all of this.

On Monday I saw a survey in which the majority of Romanians thought that Ceaușescu was a good president and would prefer to return to communism. Anybody under 40 has no memory of that time so wouldn’t know first-hand how awful things got, especially in the final years. He’s become something of a cult figure on social media. A cartoon character. I was shocked to see Ceaușescu fridge magnets for sale when I visited those monasteries four years ago. Older people fondly recall being young and pretty, with lives largely free of hard decisions. It’s still striking to see a poll like that though. People have frighteningly short memories. And we got pretty damn close to going back there in May’s presidential election.

Ozzy Osbourne has died at the age of 76. A legend. And like so many other icons of heavy metal, a Brummie. He held a farewell concert at Villa Park just two and a half weeks before his death. He had a horrific quad bike accident in 2003 that almost did for him. (Those things are bloody lethal. The following year I came off a quad bike on my cousin’s farm on the Coromandel. Not far from Thames. I got my leg trapped underneath it. I wasn’t hurt but it was certainly scary.)

Last week Felix Baumgartner died in a paragliding accident; he probably had a heart attack while he was still in the air. He’s the daredevil who jumped from the edge of space in 2012. I remember that well. There was Chuck Yeager with his “Attaboy” just before Baumgartner leapt into the void. Obama was about to be re-elected. We’d just had the London Olympics. The Queen’s diamond jubilee. Gangnam Style. I felt pretty crap about my own life, but at least the world still made some kind of sense. But within a year, social media had swallowed the lot and spat it out, and here we are. Because of his Romanian girlfriend, Baumgartner’s death has received a lot of attention where I am.

The golf. Scottie Scheffler, easily the best player right now, won the Open easily too. There was just the one slight bunker-based brain fart which resulted in a double bogey, but he soon put that behind him. But for that mishap, he didn’t have any single bogeys in the entire weekend. Best name of the tournament went to Chris Gotterup (‘e’s got ‘er up onto the green); he finished third. Runner-up was Harris English. I kept thinking his first name was Johnny. There were so many vying for second place that if it hadn’t been for Scheffler it would have been an absorbing afternoon and evening. Never mind.

Mum and Dad are off in just 48 hours. I still haven’t worked out where (or even if) I’m going between now and September.

Books - Cat - Family - Language learning - Other sports - Politics

The too-hard basket

July 20, 2025 by 0 Comments

I just took Kitty out for a drive. She spent one hour in a large cardboard box, 70 by 50 by 30 cm, with holes cut out of it (obviously) and an absorbent blanket at the bottom. (Lately I’ve put her food in the box to get her used to it.) She clearly didn’t love the experience, but she wasn’t traumatised by it either, so I’ll try it again in a few days. When I was little, our cat would be let loose in the Allegro or the Mazda on our five-hour-plus trips to and from Wales. With Kitty, that would be beyond dangerous.

Three weeks since I left my brother’s place, I’ve still got the cold I picked up from (probably) my nephew. He picks up a bug from nursery, infects his mum and dad and anyone else he comes into contact within, then three days later he’s as happy as Larry while everyone else is suffering for weeks. Mum and Dad have still got it too. Mum didn’t look great at all when I saw her on WhatsApp yesterday. They leave in only five days. I hope their trip back goes smoothly, or as smoothly as something like that ever can. At least this time they’ll break up their journey with a stopover in Singapore. I never want them to go direct again. Despite none of us being 100%, we had a really nice chat which made me feel good. Mum had been to meet up a few of the teachers from her school in St Ives, for the first time in about a decade. She was struck by how hard they had found the Covid period. We were pretty lucky in NZ, weren’t we? No Matt Hancock, who really should be behind bars. I was lucky too. Romania was at times riddled with virus, but my personal circumstances allowed me to dodge the worst of it.

The night before last I slept terribly. Yesterday I just had one lesson – maths in Dumbrăvița in the morning – and when I came back I lay on the sofa, washed out, where I finished Ella Minnow Pea (a fun read) and watched round three of the Open golf. My yearly golf watching. I like the Open visually: the dunes, the crags, the ever-changing skies, the squalls that come out of nowhere. I enjoy seeing top golfers battle near-horizontal rain and brutal rough. I particularly enjoy it when there’s a packed leaderboard on the final day and half a dozen potential winners as they turn for home, and a previously unheralded player keeps it together through all the mayhem to win – to make history – with a score of maybe three under par. This year’s tournament is taking place at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. Barring the heavy shower I saw on day two which added to the drama, the conditions have mostly been benign. Scottie Scheffler – number one in the world and a brilliant player – has taken a four-shot lead going into the last round, which might be a procession. A shame if so. World number ones haven’t won many Opens in recent times. Tiger Woods was the last to do it, I think. Rory McIlroy is six shots off the lead. He’s from Northern Ireland and a huge star in the game, so it’s no surprise that the crowd went nuts throughout his round of 66 yesterday.

Since the bit I wrote last time about council tax, I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to get these kinds of things right. Coming up with a fair and workable system is oh so complicated. Countries like New Zealand benefit here from being small, with relatively few working parts. What you don’t do though is hold your hands up and say it’s too hard. That’s exactly what the UK government is doing. We know this is unfair and absurd, but we’ll keep it the same (which in reality means making it worse: it will only become more unfair and absurd over time) because it’s too politically hard to change anything. And that’s just one aspect of tax policy. It’s the same thing with immigration, healthcare, housing, energy, infrastructure, the lot. Education isn’t too bad in the UK and they’ve made some progress on the environment. But everything else is going backwards because of a lack of political will to do anything. It’s the same all over the western world. The only people who do have the balls to change anything are those who aren’t interested in a fairer world and just want to make their mark. So they make things more shit. As I keep saying, how did we get here? When I was over in the UK recently, I watched an episode of Newsnight. They had ex-policitians (with opposing views) on the programme to discuss Labour’s climbdown on benefits. Adults, talking about a serious topic in a civil manner. This would no longer happen in America, I kept thinking. For the UK at least, there is still hope.

Next week’s challenge: for seven days, everything I read or listen to must be in Romanian where at all possible. I will also write something in Romanian every day. My Romanian has stalled and I can’t not do anything about it because it’s too hard.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Bro no-go

June 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

This morning I played squash with Mark in Dumbrăvița. We just rallied rather than playing a game and it was good fun. Though we worked up a sweat we were in the indoor cool, which is a real bonus at the moment.

On Friday I had a chat to Mum about my trip to the UK. Mum’s idea was that she’d book a hotel in London for two nights and I’d catch a train from Luton Airport to meet her and Dad. On one of the nights we’d see a show. Great idea, I thought. The theatre is something they rarely do and I practically never do. Then we’d all go down to my brother’s in Poole for three days, taking us up to the 29th – Dad’s 75th birthday is on the 28th – before heading up to St Ives where I’d stay until 3rd July when I fly back from Stansted. Very well sussed out by Mum I thought, and I was keen to tell her that. But then Mum called me last night to say that my brother has to go to Portsmouth for work during that time, making it pretty much pointless to go down to Poole. So it looks like I’ll miss him and his family. I’ll probably book another trip to the UK in August after Mum and Dad have gone.

Before this morning’s squash session I watched a YouTube video by the wonderfully deadpan Patrick Boyle on American consumerism. He started by saying that in the last 40 years the average American has gone from buying 12 items of clothing a year to 68, an unimaginable number for me. But in the same time the average American’s expenditure on clothes in real terms has halved. People have this idea that being able to buy new jeans for ten bucks a pair is a good thing, when really if they’re that cheap something must have gone wrong. Consumer spending in the US is crazy though. I read that Americans buy 40% of all the world’s toys despite only being 4% of the world’s population. I find it sad that many Romanians see America as the holy grail – what they should aspire to.

I managed to see most of yesterday’s women’s final at Roland-Garros. Coco Gauff was mentally stronger than her opponent Aryna Sabalenka, and that was a big part of why she won a close match. Sabalenka dominated the early running and did eventually win a marathon first set in 77 minutes, but her unforced errors – a whopping 70 of them – caught up with her in the end. The men’s final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz is later today. I don’t know how much of it I’ll see because I have an online lesson scheduled.

Grand slam tennis isn’t immune from the saminess that permeates modern life. When I watched the French Open on TV in the nineties, I felt it was being played in a faraway land even though it was only a few hundred miles away. People were still smoking their Gauloises in the stands; it just looked and sounded wild compared to the lawns of Wimbledon. Now Court Philippe-Chatrier looks tame in comparison; it could be anywhere. There are also signs of dumbing down. The scoreboards now flash up “Ace” or “Balle de set”, when I’d have thought sophisticated Parisians wouldn’t need to be informed like that. That sort of thing is fine in New York, accompanied by the waft of hot dogs, but it’s out of place in Paris.

I noticed on the official Roland-Garros website something called “excitement rate”, a percentage which goes up and down during a match. Near the conclusion of yesterday’s final it reached 97% with a burning flame alongside the figure. I mentioned this to Dad who thought it was silly because it depends on who’s watching: the average Serbian will get more excited during a Djokovic match than the average Spaniard, for instance. But it clearly isn’t measuring that: it’s a measure of how crucial the upcoming point (or maybe few points) are based on the current situation in the match. At 8-8 in a deciding tie-break there’s way more riding on the next point than at 6-3, 6-2, 4-2, 40-15, and hence far more “excitement”. I still think it’s silly though for a whole raft of reasons. One, “rate” is the wrong word: it should be “index” or “level”. Two, “Get excited now!” doesn’t add anything. Three, I never saw it drop below 60-70% when it should be able to drop to practically zero; the “marketers” are never going to say their “product” is boring. Four, it’s really just a crappy way of promoting a data company, in this case InfoSys – I’ve seen these pointless promotional stats and indices in tennis for ages.

I had a funny online lesson yesterday with a boy who was keen to show me his farming simulator. He plays Roblox and Fortnite and Minecraft, but the farming simulator (which is in English) is his go-to game. He’s not the first boy I’ve taught who – refreshingly – wants to be a farmer when he grows up rather than a footballer or an online influencer. His grades in English are shocking, but this game is at least boosting his vocab in a specific area – combine harvester, enclosure, crops, slurry. It has given me ideas for future lessons.

Cat - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

A little rascal

June 7, 2025 by 0 Comments

Today I had a free morning, giving me the chance to cycle to Sânmihaiu Român before it got too hot. But really it was already too hot. I was sweating like a pig and jumped into a cold shower when I got back. The sweet smell of tei – or lime – has now taken hold. Not helping matters was another bout of sinus pain – though not as bad as the one before, it sapped me of energy as always.

Yesterday I didn’t start till ten – unusually – but it was a busy day. It started with a two-hour lesson with a lady in her late forties in which I partly took on the role of a shrink, then I had four more one-hour sessions with kids aged 10 to 13. One of them meant trekking across the city on my bike. In between I took Kitty to the vet to get her latest jab, then got my car back after getting the air con fixed. They put freon in it and also replace a switch that had been playing up. That was an absolute necessity and it only set me back 700 lei (£120 or NZ$260). I’ve also had the battery replaced on my laptop. It’s been a good week for that kind of thing. I’m still waiting for someone to pick up my colour printer which has packed in well within its guarantee. With only a black-and-white printer, my options with kids are limited.

It was interesting talking to Mum and Dad after their trip down to Poole. They really took to their granddaughter. Their grandson on the other hand is proving to be a real live wire. Super intelligent (my brother wonders how he could possibly be so good with numbers and the alphabet) but pretty conniving with it. My brother could be a pain in the neck at that age – I can remember – but there was never any malice in him. So watch this space, I suppose. My brother has been extremely good with his son when a lot of fathers would lose their rag. They were relieved to get back to St Ives and not have to do very much for really the first time since they left New Zealand. (I’d wanted their time in Romania to be a relaxing one, but it didn’t quite pan out that way.)

When my parents were with me, Dad sometimes said “I don’t know how you do it” in relation to my work. He thought it was surprising that I have a job that has a large social element when socialising has never been easy for me. To be honest, the sheer amount of talking I have to do can be exhausting. Sometimes I’m not even talking in my own language. But the social aspect isn’t too bad – it’s hardly going to some packed trendy bar where socialising is the primary goal, I rarely have to interact with more than one or two people at a time (I’ve always been terrible in large groups), and I’m safe in the knowledge that after 60 or 90 or 120 minutes it’ll be all over. And I’m actually helping someone in the process, which is something most humans derive satisfaction from. The social side of an open-plan office is far, far harder for me, even if it involves less actual talking. So much fakeness and playing the game. And don’t get me started on Christmas parties.

It looks like Elena, the lady who lives above me, will feed Kitty during my nine-day stay in the UK. Dorothy just happens to be acquiring a kitten in the next week or two, so that wasn’t an option. I was worried that I’d be forced to find a shelter for her. As for my planned road trip to Poland, I may well end up taking Kitty with me. That thought made me think of the song Me and You and a Dog Named Boo by Lobo. It was a number-one hit in New Zealand in 1971 and they’d sometimes play it on classic hits stations. It makes life in those days seem pretty simple.

Off-the-pitch football news. Birmingham City’s already ambitious plans are going gangbusters now. They plan to build a 62,000-seater stadium in the middle of a sports quarter with transport links to the city. Potentially this could be huge. Blues are already a big club in terms of support – it’s a big city after all – but on the pitch they’ve been very much in the shadow of Aston Villa. This massive investment could turn the tables. They’ve got one trump card up their sleeves that Villa lack – having Birmingham in their name. A successful Blues team could really put the city on the map, giving it a real shot in the arm, as well as revitalising a pretty impoverished part of it. I just they hope they don’t totally down the Manchester City route; I stumbled upon one of their home matches on TV recently and I switch it off – I couldn’t handle the sheer scale of all the advertising.

Continuing the football theme, I had a dream on Tuesday night about a Championship (second-tier) club that lacked decent support or even a decent song. As a joke a supporter composed a song: “Keep the cat flying along” (whatever the hell that was supposed to mean; I think it was a mishmash of other football songs) that ended up becoming not only the club song but a major hit.

I’m currently watching the Roland-Garros semi-final between Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic, though it’s uncomfortably hot in the kitchen where the TV is. Sinner took the first set 6-4 and Djokovic leads 3-2 (on serve) in the second. There was an extraordinary point early in the second set in which both players scrambled to reach near-impossible balls. The winner will play Carlos Alcaraz in the final.

On Sunday I’m playing squash with Mark, and maybe his wife too.

Life :) - Other sports - Politics

The big break from life is over

May 7, 2025 by 0 Comments

Well, the snooker’s over. Seventeen days of blissful escape, and now I’m back down to earth with a bump, or rather a beep – I’m getting regular phone alerts to tell me the latest terrifying developments in Romanian politics.

Mark Williams’ run to the final had been mad, uplifting, at times exhilarating, and I’d have loved him to have won his fourth world title, but alas it didn’t happen. Zhao Xintong, who became China’s first world champion (surely the first of many), could pot anything from anywhere, as he had all tournament. Williams wasn’t a patch on the player who had beaten Judd Trump in such gutsy fashion. He looked weather-beaten after four close matches, the balls didn’t exactly run his way either (he would pot great long reds but could never get on a colour), and he ended the first session 7-1 down. He shaded the second session 5-4 to give him a faint glimmer. Maybe, just maybe, the dream is still alive. I didn’t see the third session, apart from one frame in which Zhao fluked both the green and the blue. It didn’t go well. Williams only just took the match into the final evening session; he (quite preposterously) needed all ten frames while Zhao wanted just the one. Then came a glorious cameo, four frames of Williams brilliance. His break of 73 in the fourth frame – jam-packed with very difficult shots – was superb. With the pressure off, he was having fun out there. Then Zhao won the following frame to complete the victory that he richly deserved. Coming from the qualifiers, he’d had to win nine straight matches. He’s 28, but looks much younger. An immense talent, he displayed an almost Williams-like attitude to playing the game. He seemed a thoroughly nice guy too.

George Simion got 41% in the first round of the election. Nicușor Dan, mayor of Bucharest, squeaked into the second round on 21%, just ahead of Crin Antonescu. Dan, who is also an accomplished mathematician, would have been my pick, but I can’t see how he wins the run-off. The government has also collapsed. The parties who could have united to oppose Simion and his mob are instead fighting each other. The leu has dropped to less than a fifth of a euro. Most people I’ve spoken to in the last couple of days – people who have brains – think this is all very bad news. Romania has made very real progress in the time I’ve been here, but now runs the risk of throwing that all away – and more – in the blink of an eye. So sad, and in the long term who knows what it will mean for me.

This morning I took Dorothy to Buzad. No car issues. She gave me some elderflower and herbs from her garden to take back, while I gave her some pizza that I’d made. On the way, there were an impressive number of storks up lamp-posts, and not all nesting.

Mum and Dad’s arrival is just a day and a half away. They’re flying from Christchurch to Singapore, then to Munich, and finally a short hop to Timișoara. I can’t wait. I wonder what they’ll think of Kitty.

Family - Other sports - Politics

Excitement ramping up

May 4, 2025 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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