After giving an online lesson between eight and nine this morning, I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român where I grabbed a coffee and Skyped my parents. They were amazed to see the cloudless blue sky in the background, a far cry from what they’ve been experiencing of late. They didn’t have much news and nor did I. They’ve been cracking on with painting, taking advantage of the poor weather. Then I pedalled back home.
Yesterday afternoon was also sunny, so I went for a walk beyond the lock at the end of the canalised Bega to the wilder non-man-made part that for some reason I hadn’t visited before. I’ll go back there again in the next few days. It’s nice to have a break from lessons and to have very little risk of needing to interact with people.
The darts. The post-Christmas phase started yesterday with a match between Scott Williams of England and Martin Schindler of Germany. Schindler looked like he would win with something to spare, but his finishing let him down badly towards the end, and Williams squeaked it out on a deciding tie-break. In his post-match interview, Williams said “two World Wars and one World Cup” which suggests that he may be lacking something between the ears. I mean, yeesh, I thought we were past that. The female presenter then apologised for any offence caused. I often find myself supporting the non-English players.
Last night I met Mark at the Christmas market. It wasn’t as busy as we expected. Whether it was the prices or the too-loud music or something else, we couldn’t tell. Mark wanted to buy his girlfriend a present, so we visited one of the souvenir shops. An ie – a traditional tunic, embroidered in red and black – caught his eye. It was 550 lei (nearly £100 or NZ$200), so not cheap. Unlike other cheaper versions made in India, this one was handmade in Romania. A ton of work. He got me to ask the sales assistant about washing and the like, and when he was satisfied he made the purchase. We had langoși (deep-fried flatbread) and mulled wine, and talked about how lucky we are to be living in a city as nice as Timișoara. You really can’t beat the three beautiful squares in the city centre, and while it isn’t quite as developed as somewhere like Cluj, that actually adds to the experience. I don’t think I could be me in a city that was all perfect and pristine.
In English, two-letter words are almost entirely restricted to function words: prepositions (at, by, in, of, on, to), conjunctions (as, if), pronouns (me, he, it, we, us), and forms of very common verbs (do, go, am, is). Two-letter content words are very thin on the ground: there’s only really ox and (if you’re American) ax. In Romanian, that isn’t the case at all. Of the top of my head, as well as ie (plural ii), there’s iz (a whiff), ac (needle), șa (saddle), as (ace), in (linen), os (bone), om (person), ud (wet) and uz (use, noun), in addition to a whole bunch of function words. You could imagine a simple Romanian conversation in a shop consisting of only two-letter words.
Having a lighter work week has given me a chance to brush up my Romanian a bit. I’ve added hundreds of words to my Anki deck (a spaced repetition tool), and several cards that aren’t words as such but instructions: conjugate this or that verb, think of all the ways to say this or that, find four words that begin with zg-, and so on. On Monday in our Romanian lesson, the teacher gave us a story to read entitled Puiul, or the chick. It’s a sad story. Although I got the meaning, there were a number of new words for me, and they all went in the Anki deck. I need to start reading properly in Romanian again.
Today at the darts there was a match that went all the way to a sudden-death leg, but the big story so far has been 16-year-old Luke Littler who was out of this world in his first-round victory and won again in round two. He looks considerably older than 16 and has already developed a good paunch; he’s got “darts champion” written all over him. Watching not-so-young members of the crowd swaying and braying to a version of annoying nineties hit There’s No Limit made me think, some of these people must have kids. Imagine if I’d been “blessed” with a dad like that. Just imagine. Watching that, and visiting the mall today to grab some simple presents, made me consider the idea of some super-intelligent species watching humans in intrigue or perhaps horror at their behaviour, and making documentaries on them. “Once a year, they practically fall over each other to buy so-called knick-knacks made in China, without ever wondering why. Look at how this female extends her arm. You can see she is practised in the art.”
Update: Sheer madness in the darts tonight. Florian Hempel, the big German ex-handball goalkeeper, came back from the dead to beat seeded Dimitri van den Bergh. He hit a massive 151 checkout to keep himself alive, then he went ballistic. Two ten-dart legs back to back. Madman mode. It was quite something to witness it. And such great sportsmanship from his much smaller opponent after the match.
I had a strange dream last night about a fictitious sport played in Britain. I visited a centre where this traditional rough-and-tumble sport was played, and talked to a player. The name of the sport began with B and had another B in the middle. Something like burbank but not that. From there I went to a place nearby, where a version of cross-country lacrosse, that also seemed to have elements of golf, was played. I talked to a woman about the game.
Four lessons tomorrow, then a very barren patch until the second week of January. I won’t mind that.
I regularly posted pictures taken out of the window of my old flat, with the view of the park and the square. Not so much this place, though the sky – just before my 8am lesson on perhaps the second-shortest day of the year – made for an interesting shot.
Yesterday wasn’t such a great day. Way back in October 2022 I had a problem with the loo in the small bathroom which I hardly ever use. I went to the UK for a few days, and in that time the cistern ran non-stop. I shut off the valve when I got back, but in that time many thousands of gallons of water had gone through the system. I sent the block administrator my meter readings as I do every month. She misread the reading – 337, when it was actually 377 (an understandable error – how could I have possibly used that much water?) and charged me accordingly, “promising” to correct the mistake the following month. I got a plumber to fix the loo, but the fix lasted about two days. I thought my water bill did get rectified, but obviously not because yesterday the administrator sent me a message, finally asking for the extra money. What’s more, she’s billing me at the current rate (which has gone up in the last 14 months), not the old rate. I’ll pay the bill of course, but only if it’s calculated at the old rate. We’re talking a couple of hundred quid here, which is a massive pain but nothing I have (or had) any control over.
Mum and Dad only made a short stop in their showerless pit in Geraldine, and Skyped me from Hampden this morning. They’re still some way off fully recovered from their bout of Covid. Mum said she’d been sleeping most of the day. No harm in that. Dad used a word – pantechnicon – that I’d never heard before. It’s a British word for a big truck or van used for transporting furniture. I feel I should have known the word, being British and all, but the Pantechnicon company, which the name comes from, ceased trading in the seventies. More often than not these days I’m too old to know a word, not too young, so that made a change. In a previous chat with Dad, we got talking about Auckland for some reason. A city with so much wasted potential. What a disappointment the centre is (or was – maybe it’s magically improved since either of us visited). But there are nice parts, Dad said. I replied by saying, yes, but the nice parts are inhabited only by people who can afford stupidly expensive houses, making for a funny kind of nice that I wouldn’t want anything to do with even if I had that kind of money.
At this time of year I give my students a sheet of paper asking them to write down five new year’s resolutions, then to pick one to focus on. How will you go about achieving it? This afternoon my able 11-year-old student wrote “Make my parents feel proud of me” for one of his resolutions. “Don’t they feel proud of you?” I asked. He replied with a definite no, and that made me feel sad. He also wrote “Be nice”, which surprised me because he’s always seemed perfectly nice around me. He probably feels comfortable around me: a harmless hairy man wearing (today) an orange jumper with a multicoloured llama on it, rather than his classmates. He says all the bullying makes him morose when he gets home.
Earlier today I watched a YouTube video from a guy who goes around decaying British high streets. Once thriving, they’re now struggling up and down the country. Today he went to Slough, which rhymes with now. Not far from Slough are Eton and Windsor, England’s two most famous public schools, and many affluent towns, some of which even (much to their disgust) have an SL (for Slough) postcode. He opens his video by reading a few lines of John Betjeman’s poem that asks for “friendly bombs” to be dropped on the town. Betjeman wrote the poem in 1937, so the bombs didn’t have long to wait. I went through the poem a few years ago in a lesson with a woman who once spent a few months in Milton Keynes, whose reputation is no better than Slough’s.
More drama at the Darts. Matt Campbell, from Hamilton, Ontario, pulled off an upset by beating James Wade 3-2 – he was clearly the better player – and has made it to the post-Christmas stages. Prior to this tournament, he’d never won a match in four attempts. He’s flying back to Canada to spend Christmas with his family. Yesterday afternoon saw a whole host of upsets and wins for players outside the UK – all good for the game. Steve Beaton, someone I remember from my bigger darts-watching days in the nineties, got through his first match. Age is no barrier in this game.
Mum and Dad called me again from Hampden yesterday. It was a relief to see a smile back on Mum’s dial. She’s always more relaxed down there, away from what is now (let’s not mince words) a shithole. Mum seems strangely magnetised to that dreadful place which they should stay away from as far as humanly possible until the building work is completed.
Yesterday Dorothy messaged me to say there was a vinyl and book sale on at Scârț. Sounded good. Sale wasn’t quite the right word though – some of the LPs were really quite pricey. I picked up five second-hand records for a total of 300 lei (just over NZ$100 or £50): Selling England By the Pound by Genesis, Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel, 18 by Chicago, Oxygène by Jean-Michel Jarre, and Leonard Cohen’s greatest hits album. That’s a start; I just need an actual record player now. Oh, and I bought one book for 5 lei: H. W. Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, in Romanian.
Four English lessons today. I started at 8am with my Bucharest-based online student – I found out today that he’s only two months older than me – who wanted help with adverbs of manner and uncountable nouns, among other things. I was in contact with the east of Romania again for my second session, this time with a 35-year-old woman. She said that if her six-year-old son (her only child) doesn’t get what he wants for Christmas, he’ll make his disappointment very obvious. He’s still very little, I said, but by twelve he’ll have learnt to hide it. You can’t always get what you want. She said, no, he won’t do that when he’s twelve because I’ll have told him to fight for what he wants. If he doesn’t like something, even a glass of juice, I want him to make his feelings clear. I still remember at seven or eight telling a family friend that I didn’t like some juice – probably something Ribena-like – and wouldn’t drink it. My grandmother told me I was already too big to act in that way, and I think she was right. Little Vlad (I don’t think that’s his name) has the pleasure of going to intensive after-school classes, which include nine hours of English lessons a week. Right Vlad, I’m going to make you work stupidly hard, and in return you get to be total dick. That’s the modern way, it seems. She earns well by working extremely hard at an investment bank, doing something that I would find utterly pointless.
In between my first two English sessions was the Romanian lesson, which was mostly spent discussing the downfall of Ceaușescu during an unseasonably warm few days in the lead-up to Christmas 1989. Our teacher was 20 at the time; I would have guessed several years younger. Yesterday the song Timișoara, produced by Pro-Musica in the wake of the Revolution, came on the local radio. It starts with a few bars from the Romanian national anthem and turns into something spine-tinglingly powerful. I recommend that you watch the video. My third English lesson was with a 17-year-old girl who came to my place. We went through some B2 Cambridge papers. I struggled to get her to write anything. In the end she wrote about her “happy place”, the mall, but didn’t even say much about that. My final lesson was the twins who live near Piața Verde. Because it was our last meeting of the year we had an extended Bananagrams session, which is always fun.
The World Championship darts. It’s back on again. Though the game is skin-deep compared to the multi-layered wonders of snooker, this tournament can be worth a watch because it’s the pinnacle of the sport. If you can get past the tedious football-style chants, you find an event filled with personality and drama. I’m a big fan of the format which, like in snooker, is a straight knockout and calls for matches of increasing length as the rounds progress. In the pre-Christmas phase, matches are best of five sets. The top players only need one win, and anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, to book their place in the post-turkey stages. Yesterday I saw a great game involving the Canadian player Matt Campbell. He was two sets up and had multiple opportunities to win the match in three. His Filipino opponent Lourence Ilagan took advantage of his reprieve to tie the match at 2-2, only for Campbell to storm through the fifth in some style. After Christmas the matches are best of seven, and in the new year they get longer still, culminating in a best-of-13-set final. Update: I’ve just seen Man-Lok Leung of Hong Kong (he goes by Hugo) win an absolute belter of a game against Dutchman Gian van Veen, coming from two sets down – and missing no end of chances – to win 3-2 in a joyous finale. He fired a whopping eleven 180s and was a very popular winner. A Kiwi by the name of Haupai Puha – he lives in Wellington – is on next, but it’s bedtime for me.
Yesterday I got a phone call from Florin, the guy I play tennis with. They’re seeing in the new year at the same place as last year. They already need numbers. Do I want to come? Of course I don’t, but it’ll only be a few hours and won’t it be good to at least show my face? It couldn’t have been that bad last time, surely? Luckily I have this blog to remind me, and there it is, in black and white and orange. It really was that bad, and I even vowed not to put myself through that again. The difficulty is finding an excuse. A way out. There’s also the prospect of Christmas in the UK. A horrendous time of year to go there or be there. My brother doesn’t particularly enjoy Christmas with his wife’s family because they really go to town with party games and other activities he can’t stand, and I totally sympathise with him. I hope if I decide not to travel there for Christmas and instead go over at Easter, he won’t think I don’t care. Sometimes I really miss Covid.
The UK Covid inquiry resumed this week. Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Advisor, spoke unflatteringly of Boris Johnson. The former prime minister didn’t get the concept of exponential growth, or a heck of a lot else by the sound of things. In Vallance’s words, he was bamboozled. I liked Vallance’s comment about the heavy bias in government towards people with humanities backgrounds at the expense of science and maths. He said that it should be a 50-50 split, emphasising that a bias towards science and maths wouldn’t be a good thing either. Next week should be an absolute doozy – twat-in-chief Matt Hancock will be making an appearance, among others. The inquiry, or the bits I’ve seen so far, have thrown into sharp relief how dangerous the ministers and senior advisers were. The contrast between them and the general public, who were extremely compliant, could hardly be starker.
Maths last night. Plenty of bamboozlement there, as I started teaching my 15-year-old student the basics of probability. There are very few things in this world that I get, or that I’ve come somewhere close to mastering. Probability might just be one of them though, so you’d think I’d be on pretty firm ground. But there was one snag – this is Romania, and probability involves a whole ton of fractions. She really doesn’t get fractions, even at the most basic level. A half plus a quarter? Huh? I learnt about basic fractions when I was six or seven, before I ever touched decimals, but Romanians obviously didn’t, so when they join a British school where fractions abound in their maths classes they face an uphill battle. I’m in the middle of making a fractions worksheet (or workbook, as it might end up being). These things are all over the place online of course, but they’re (understandably) targeted at rather younger age groups.
Romania won their final qualifier against Switzerland 1-0 to finish their group in first place, with an impressive haul of 22 points from 10 games. It’ll be Romania’s first appearance in a major tournament since I arrived here. It was funny to watch the game against Israel on TV, where the local commentators didn’t even attempt to appear impartial.
A nippy start to the day as I had my lesson with the boy on the fifth floor. The lesson went well, though. Next week I’ll be starting lessons with her husband (a total beginner, she says, but I’m always skeptical about that).
I managed 32 hours of lessons last week. I was my first time over 30 for a while. I always think of 30 as a good benchmark for a full, productive week, but cancellations had kept me below that level. After I got home from Dumbrăvița on Saturday I emailed Mum a logic problem about odd and even numbers that I’d given to Matei. She replied with the right answer. (It wasn’t immediately obvious to Matei that if you multiply two whole numbers and you get an odd number, both the numbers must be odd.) I thought about the night classes in maths she took when I was little, half her lifetime ago. She’d show me her book full of xs and ys. It would be nice if she could do something similar now.
At the weekend I read an article about the rise of English. It is undoubtedly the dominant language in the world, and is likely to remain so for some time. Most of this is down to American culture. Just look at Romania. As the country develops, slices of America keep popping up everywhere, with “Drive-Thru” and “Wash & Go” spelled out in English. Twenty-year-olds grew up on Cartoon Network. Teens (and even pre-teens) are all over TikTok – Chinese-owned but loaded with American popular culture. There were plenty of comments on the article, and some people said that the dominance of English isn’t only due to America, but also because it’s simply easier to communicate in than most other languages. “Me no like the cats” is very wrong but perfectly understandable to a native speaker. They’re partly right – English has few inflections, it lacks grammatical gender, and English text takes up less space than most other languages that use the Latin alphabet. But that’s only a small part of the story. Bad English is easy for us to understand precisely because we’re used to non-natives speaking English, or attempting to. We even simplify our language in return. I remember in Bali 30-plus years ago, where the locals often knew English but at a very basic level, Dad would say things like “Many motorbikes here” or “Takes long time?” It’s not the same with less widespread languages. If I utter a very bad Romanian version of “I don’t like cats”, my Romanian listener won’t have heard anything like that before in his life. He’ll be thinking WTF? So that puts a barrier in place to anyone trying to learn Romanian – you have to get to some kind of reasonable level before you can even start using the language. Its very pervasiveness is what makes English one of the easier languages to learn; in 2023 you’d have to be living under a rock to not know like or love or stop or OK. You get a lot of English for free, and that gives you a heck of a head start.
I don’t often watch football these days, but on Saturday I watched Romania’s Euro 2024 football qualifier against Israel, played in Budapest. It was originally meant to be played in Israel, but got moved for obvious reasons. If Romania avoided defeat, they’d qualify for next summer’s competition in Germany. Israel took the lead in only the second minute, then Romania equalised in the tenth. That dramatic start set up a very watchable game. Romania took the lead midway through the second half and held their advantage until the end. They probably should have won by more – a player by the name of Mihăilă missed a sitter and then got himself sent off just before the end. Romanian football, and sport in general, has been in the doldrums for a while, so it’s nice that they qualified. Beneficiaries of a pretty easy group it must be said, they’re unbeaten in nine games (five wins, four draws) and if they can get at least a draw against Switzerland in Bucharest tomorrow night they’ll top the group and in theory have an easier ride in the final tournament.
This song popped up on YouTube – Sleeping Satellite, Tasmin Archer’s one-hit wonder. It came out in 1992 and was the very first song on Now 23, one of the first tapes I ever had. A complex song, unique in many ways, with levels of rhyme adeptly woven into the lyrics. It brings back memories of a more optimistic time.
Last night I watched the first episode of the new series of Charlie Ottley’s Flavours of Romania. It’s on Netflix; I thoroughly recommend it. I hope to get a few ideas for road trips, for when I finally do own a car. I also watched Noel Philips’ trip from Amsterdam to Paramaribo (the capital of Suriname) – a nine-hour flight on an Airbus A340.
My brother called me on Saturday. My nephew was bouncing around, on the verge of walking. A very happy chappy. He’s fascinated by the cat, though the cat seems less fascinated by him. I’m thinking of going over there for Christmas, but can I face it? What I’ll really want are about four days with little risk of having to see or communicate with anyone.
Ugh. What a disappointment that was. Not just because the All Blacks were unfortunate enough to lose by a single point having played most of the match with 14 men, but because the game itself was almost unwatchable. Every other minute it was up to the TMO – a slightly creepy surveillance-style booth with about two dozen screens – destroying any semblance of flow to the game. If it was your first taste of rugby, as doubtless it was for some people, you wouldn’t be coming back for more.
I had a nice chat with Mum this morning – she seemed glad to have missed most of the game. She was part of a church congregation that was even tinier than usual, and got back in time to see the last four minutes. Mum was fine, but a little tired after spending many hours painting walls. While I was talking to her, there was a pungent whiff of peppers being roasted in one of the other flats.
Look at Wellington in the top-left, um, blob. I talked about this just before I left the city in 2016. Complaining about Wellington’s weather was practically a national sport, but I found the lack of temperature extremes to be a big plus, even with all the wind and rain. Timișoara would be somewhere close to Boston and New York – it probably just misses out on being in the bottom-right blob because although we get scorching summers, it’s normally a dry heat.
Update: I’ve just spoken to my aunt on her birthday. She’s currently in a care home in Cottenham, a few miles from Cambridge. When I wished her a happy birthday, she said “Well, it’s not a happy one, is it?” although she appreciated my call. After that it I said it was a shock to learn of her diagnosis (though, in truth, it wasn’t) and we talked about her regular meetings with Dad. I then said I might manage a trip over for Christmas, and after six minutes that was it.
It’s the last day before the clocks go back, and the last vestiges of not-winter.
I played singles tennis tonight with the “good” Florin. After this morning’s rain the court was slippery – dangerously so – and I didn’t enjoy it one bit. The wet patches made it worse than if it was fully wet. I started out at the greasier end. Florin made a fair few unforced errors and I led for large parts of the set, but we landed in a tie-break which I lost 7-3. When that was over I told Florin what I thought – that playing singles on a slippery court and risking a broken ankle is bloody stupid – but he didn’t seem bothered. After the changeover (we only switch sides after each set) I moved to the less horrible end, but still slid in the tramlines and almost fell twice. I won the second set 6-2 and led 2-1 in the third when our time ran out, but amazingly Florin moved around the court at the (to me) lethal end as if nothing was amiss, at one stage even retrieving a deep lob. I was handicapped down there. I asked him how he managed it (was it the shoes?), and he said the secret was being brought up in north-eastern Romania, close to the border with Ukraine. Harsh winters back then, so he soon learnt how to move in the snow and ice. I can see that two years ago I had the same problem.
I’ve been reading Wild Wales, George Borrow’s account of his trek on foot through Wales in the middle of the 19th century. Back then, Wales really was wild and outsiders rarely ventured there. Unusually, Borrow could speak Welsh at a decent level. He liked to show off his intellect (this grates after a while) in his conversations with the locals he met along the way, which were surely embellished. My grandmother had a cottage in mid-Wales which we often stayed in when I was a kid, and necessitated a long car journey which I’ve talked about previously on this blog. In my teens I viewed that part of the country as dull and grey and remote, but really it was beautiful. I haven’t been there since 2001, and I’d like to go back.
I’ve picked up a few words of Welsh while reading Borrow’s book. My grandmother’s cottage was in the small town of Rhayader, a semi-Anglicised version of rhaiadr, meaning waterfall, though in fact there hasn’t been a waterfall there for centuries. The word for “not” or “without” is dim, which has a certain logic to it. People in Borrow’s book are always saying “Dim Saesneg”, meaning “no English (language)”, the word Saesneg literally meaning Saxon. For a while I was dim dŵr poeth (without hot water) and dim arian (without money – arian is literally silver) from Barclays, but those dim days are hopefully over now. Last week I called the complaints team to accept the £200 compensation they offered me, derisory though it was. Getting it all over with has a value.
Dad’s sister has bounced back better than he or anyone else (including her) imagined. He’s been seeing her almost every day. Her children, realising she’ll hang on a while longer, have stopped bothering to see her. Of course, her prognosis is still poor. Tomorrow is her 76th birthday and I will make the effort to give her a call, difficult though that will be.
Yesterday Dad caught up with his friends (and mine too – they visited me in Romania six years ago). The couple are in their mid-70s, similar to my parents, and although he was at death’s door in early 2022 before staging a recovery, they’ve managed to cut out most of the stress from their lives while still travelling and pursuing interests. I wish my parents could do likewise.
The Rugby World Cup final is about to get under way between the All Blacks and South Africa, the historical heavyweights of the competition with three wins apiece. (Two wins for Australia and one for England, so the Southern Hemisphere is going to make it 90% whatever happens tonight.) I vividly remember the 1995 final between the two nations – one of the most famous rugby matches ever because of what the occasion meant. There have been some good matches in the knockout stages but I haven’t watched any of them. My mind has been elsewhere. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the Irish fans’ use of the immensely powerful Cranberries song Zombie as an unofficial anthem. Not long till kick-off, and I guess I might actually watch it.
I’m half-way through my time in New Zealand. It’s flying by.
We’ve just been out to give a birthday present to Mum’s sister-in-law, and found ourselves locked out. The key didn’t open the thing the label said it did. Luckily we could climb in through the window. But despite that “phew” moment, Mum is upset and angry. I have no idea why.
Earlier we visited the gallery in Geraldine where Dad exhibits – and quite often sells – his paintings. The gallery takes close to half the sale proceeds in commission. The prices to me are unimaginably high. There were two similar large abstract paintings by different artists on display. In fact I think they had identical titles – Oil on Canvas. The prices weren’t identical, however – one was $8000, the other $2000. The reason for the difference escaped me. It reminded me of a time in Auckland when I was with a woman and we went in an art gallery. She asked how much a particular painting was. “Seventeen,” came the reply. Seventeen what? For her it was obvious, but I didn’t dare ask. Today the Geraldine gallery owner said that business was bad across the board – low dairy yields (farmers are large part of the clientèle), uncertainty due to an upcoming election, and the increased cost of living in general.
Last night I spoke to my cousin in Wellington. She said her diagnosis came from a check-up after discovering a lump behind her ear, and a nine-hour operation ensued. She’s just started daily radiotherapy. The C-word doesn’t pass her lips. I told her that she’s one of the strongest people I’ve ever met, and if anyone can get through this, she can. I would have liked to visit her in Wellington, but there’s no way that’s an option this time around.
On Sunday I joined Dad again at the model aero club. This time he didn’t crash; in fact engine trouble meant his plane didn’t get off the ground at all. There was some interesting conversation. A 91-year-old man (!) who coincidentally was born and bred in St Ives, founded the club in the early nineties. He had travelled extensively as a young man. Another flyer said that his late father was a beekeeper south of the Waitaki, and harvested up to 20 tons of honey in a single year. They were interested in my experiences in Romania, and liked the 50-lei note I happened to have in my wallet. The note features Aurel Vlaicu and his plane – he was Romania’s version of Richard Pearse. The flyers spent some time comparing injuries; propeller blades had lopped off fingertips and left huge scars – I had no idea model flying was so dangerous.
Later on Sunday the three of us went to the final showing of The Miracle Club at Geraldine Cinema. I’m glad I convinced Mum to go; a film all about Lourdes and women in sixties Ireland would be right up her street. Tickets were just $12; they didn’t do special rates for seniors because everyone would have been eligible except me. The mirror ball was sadly taken down ten years ago for safety reasons. Before the film they played the British national anthem, and pumped out early-sixties music to complete the retro feel. The film was funny and made Mum happy. It starred Maggie Smith – I’ll try not to forget that lest it comes up on the Chase.
On Sunday night we watched the women’s World Cup final. It was a belter of a first half, and Spain ran out well-deserved 1-0 winners. They were hungrier, faster, and more accurate in their passing, not that England were bad. On another night England could have forced extra time or even nicked it inside the 90 minutes; on still another night Spain could have won by three or four. There’s plenty of luck in football, or soccer as Dad calls it – Spain’s one-goal victory was in the meaty part of the distribution given by the shape of the game.
The TV isn’t on yet, so I’m listening to Radio NZ right now. They said it was Tori Amos’s 60th birthday today. I went through a Tori Amos phase many years ago.
Two double six in the daytime; seven double nine at night
Yesterday morning was bright and sunny, and while Mum went to church and her after-mass coffee meeting, I joined Dad at the Model Aero Club near Pleasant Point. It’s a nice drive out there. I saw that the Pleasant Point taxidermist had sadly closed down. Dad was one of six flyers at the club, all aged between 60 and 80. Dad and one either guy make their planes painstakingly from balsa wood – for Dad, that’s the whole point, and having spent decades honing his fine motor skills, he’s pretty good at it. The others use ready-made planes, often made from foam. Unlike Dad, their focus is servos and resistors and diodes and all that technical stuff. (I was impressed that Dad had got a sufficient handle on all of that, because it isn’t his thing at all.) Dad’s blue plane was up and away, then after two minutes the engine cut out. Not to worry, he should be able to glide it in … but he was flying into the sun which blinded him, and the plane nosed into the ground. He says it’s fixable, but for that particular morning it was game over. I had a chat with one of the guys about Windows 10 and 11 (don’t upgrade to 11!) and Covid in Romania. One (British-born) bloke had a smart Commer van that his in-laws bought new in 1965; he regaled me of his road trips around Europe in it as a young man. (Commer vehicles were used in WW2. One time the comedy writer Frank Muir was driving a Commer which spluttered to a halt; he famously said over the radio, “The Commer has come to a full stop.”)
BeforeAfterTo my mind, the most impressive of the planes on show, but engine trouble prevented it from flyingThe Commer van
We went home via Hanging Rock. I hadn’t been there for ages. I probably swam in the Opihi there during our 1986-87 trip. When we got home, Mum opened an official-looking letter that had been sitting there for a couple of days. Dad had been hit with an $80 speeding fine. She took it pretty well; had she opened it the previous day when she was in an especially vile mood, she’d have hit the eleven-foot-high ceiling. I showed Dad a picture of the damage his Piper Cub sustained when it crashed when I came to the club in 2009 – he’d forgotten about that. I’m a jinx, it seems.
Hanging Rock
The day before yesterday Dad and I tried to sort out my crap in the garage. Boxes of books, mostly. I’ll take a few back with me, but I was happy to see most of them go to a charity shop. I’d also accumulated a surprising number of shoes that were all in a blue sack. Many of them will go too.
On Saturday night I watched my first rugby match for decade or so. It was a provincial game between Tasman and Auckland, played in Blenheim. Mum was particularly interested because the Tasman team – who ran out quite comfortable winners in the end – included both her sister-in-law’s nephew (if I’ve got that right) and someone she used to teach at Waihi, back when she still did relief teaching. What a weird game rugby is. Scrums and lineouts are really quite bizarre, when you think about it. Tasman’s star player in the first half – a heavily tattooed battering ram – was almost neckless. Auckland’s forward pack weighed 919 kg, or 115 kg per man. After that, England played Colombia in the women’s football World Cup. An end-to-end first half finished with a quick exchange of goals; England won 2-1 to make the semis where they’ll play Australia.
Also that evening we played the card game Skip-Bo. I’d found a pack in the garage; Mum must have bought it in 1993 after her brother in Auckland showed us how to play. It’s mostly (but not entirely) luck-based. While we were playing, I reminded Dad of a five-handed game of Skip-Bo we played on New Year’s Eve ’93, involving his father. He was a couple of years younger than Dad is now, and had quite advanced Alzheimer’s. He needed considerable help with the game. I remember that whenever my grandad had a lot of a particular numbered card, he’d say “I’ve got eights (for example) up the ying-yang.”
Tonight I’ll be taking a Romanian lesson and giving an English one.
by 
