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Crappiness guaranteed

April 19, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday was a Barclays day, so crappiness was guaranteed. I hadn’t slept well, my 8am student had slept in – she’d got back from Lisbon (nice) the night before – and it all got crappier from there. I called the Embassy about the authorisation business but the human I got through to at the third time of asking said they couldn’t help me and I should call a lawyer. Not a notary, the likes of which I’ve already dealt with, but an actual lawyer. I phoned some actual lawyers and they all said to call notaries instead. Great. I had quite a long chat with a notary who was pleasant and helpful but said in no uncertain terms that no notary or other legal person in Romania can legally certify a utility bill or bank statement. Simply put, Barclays will only release my funds if a legal person in Romania is happy to break Romanian law. Isn’t this bloody fantastic?

I felt shattered all day yesterday, a day that was low on lessons. Before getting on the phone, I went into town to visit some lawyers and notaries, including the one who dealt with my flat purchase, but they’d to make their long Easter weekend a bit longer. It was all a giant waste of time. I did grab two small pots of red paint on the way back so I could paint my bookcase before people start coming for lessons at the end of the week. I thought about what else I could paint. My bedroom? The sheer amount of white in that room was starting to get to me.

I’ve been buying some clothes and accessories on a second-hand site based in France. That’s meant communicating with people in French, especially the woman who sold me some cufflinks. (I didn’t have any, but I have a shirt that needs them.) So that’s been good practice. I’ve bought jeans, shorts, shirts, a bag, a jumper, the shirt that Marat Safin wore when he won the Aussie Open in 2005 (well not the exact shirt, but you know what I mean), and more besides. I’ve had to get them delivered to a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris, and with a bit of luck they’ll get forwarded to me as a job lot. I rarely buy clothes these days, so this has been something of an adventure.

On Monday I met the English lady at her place, and we chatted and tried to figure out some more tricky Romanian grammar. She has a Rolls-Royce brain, while mine is more like an old Peugeot. The great news is that from next Monday we’ll be having Romanian lessons with a teacher she knows. I mentioned that I’d been watching the snooker and she said that she found it terribly boring. Lots of people do, and that’s fine. In fact I often have it on in the background while preparing lessons or doing some other task; I’m not always totally engaged in it. That changed though on Monday when this happened:

A woman tried to glue herself to the table I was watching, but the referee manhandled her off it. Then a man jumped on the other table (above) and dumped a bag of orange powder all over it. They were protesters from Just Stop Oil, the same group who threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers last year. Why they targeted snooker for their protest beats me. Play resumed a little while later on the non-orange table, but the orange one had to be re-covered. Some excitement, certainly.

The great thing about the snooker is how much it means to the players. Luca Brecel, the Belgian top-ten player, had never won at the Crucible in five attempts. In his first-round match this time he led 9-6 but was pulled back to 9-9. When he potted the ball that got him over the line in the deciding frame, he banged the table with his fist in celebration, or was it relief? Finally. Yesterday I saw Anthony McGill move 6-3 up on a misfiring Judd Trump; that match resumes today. (Update: McGill won 10-6.) The first round is nearly complete; second-round matches are first to 13 over three sessions.

Today is the my last day of being 42. Last night the doctor asked me if I had any travel plans for the summer. I’ll be going quite a long way, I said. What, Japan? This was a joke on his part, and when I said I’d be going further than that he was taken aback a bit.

Life :) - Other sports - Poker

This age thing

April 15, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I Skyped my aunt and uncle who live in Woodbury, just down the road from my parents. My aunt had just had her birthday and was recovering from a fall at home that had left her with two broken ribs and a punctured lung. My uncle, who is a year older than Joe Biden, has clearly slowed down a lot from when I saw him at my brother’s wedding and then here in Timișoara. His mannerisms and sense of humour were still there, but he didn’t say a lot. My aunt, though she’s aged physically, is still as sharp as ever. I don’t know where they’ll go from here. They’ve got a huge house and many acres of land which used to be (still is?) their business. This age thing, dammit.

I finally made some progress with Barclays yesterday. I got quite a bit out of the Scottish guy on the phone. They’d sent me at least one letter that had gone to my old address. They also sent me a letter earlier that day requesting even more information, despite all my efforts. He assured me that this letter had gone to the right place. The guy was able to tell me what my URN was – this is a clearly vital six-digit number without which I won’t see a penny. I still need to get an authorised proof of address – a bank statement or power bill – but when I ask any of the notaries in town to give it their seal of approval, they won’t have a bar of it. I explained that over the phone, and he said that my other option is to get the British embassy in Bucharest to approve it. Perhaps common sense will prevail and Barclays will bypass this step, but I wouldn’t, um, bank on it. I might well have to trek all the way to Bucharest. I don’t have a car (yet).

The second day of final-round qualifiers in the snooker didn’t quite match up to the first – there were more one-sided matches, and even someone who pulled out due to palpitations supposedly caused by the Covid vaccine. Matthew Stevens (one of the stars back in my day) wasn’t far off making it, but he lost 10-7 to David Gilbert. The real drama came in the match between Joe Perry, who comes from Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, and Mark Davis. As well as both being veterans of the game, they’re good mates. At 9-9, Davis had cleared the first four colours and needed a testing pink to qualify for the Crucible. Because his ranking had fallen, his place on the snooker tour also depended on the win. He missed the pink and left it over the pocket for his opponent. Perry potted it, of course, and then faced a long black for victory. It sailed into the top corner. Perry made it to the Crucible, and in doing so cost his friend his job. Yeesh. The tournament proper, with the all-time greats like O’Sullivan and Selby and Higgins, gets under way tomorrow.

Today I read about a barn fire on a Texas dairy farm that killed 18,000 cows. The sheer numbers are hard to believe. There are no regulations on fire safety in these sorts of farm buildings in America because, heck, cows are just stupid animals. The more I think and read about the treatment of livestock the less I want to consume it. If I didn’t live in Romania, where it’s quite hard to survive without meat especially in winter, I’d consider going vegetarian.

I haven’t mentioned poker for ages because I don’t play much these days. I did have a notable tournament yesterday, however. In the no-limit single draw I finished on the wrong end of a heads-up battle that seemed interminable. Of the 701 hands I played in the tournament, a whopping 347 were heads-up. I made $29 but the payouts were top-heavy and I would have made double that if I’d won.

Life :) - Other sports - Photos

Silver jubilees, good and bad

April 13, 2023 by 0 Comments

My work volumes are way down as we approach Orthodox Easter which is a massive deal here. People here know that “normal Easter” is the week before (at least this year it is; it all depends on moon phases and such like) but they assume that we push the boat out with lavish traditional Easter meals like they do, and are quite underwhelmed when I tell them about chocolate eggs and hot cross buns and, um, not much else. Where I come from, the big attraction of Easter is simply the four-day weekend.

This week has marked the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, one of the biggest good news stories of my lifetime. Although the tensions are still bubbling under the surface, all that senseless violence that I remember growing up – usually accompanied by that bastard Ian Paisley’s rasping voice – came to an end. At the same time as the agreement was signed, we had severe flooding. The water came up our garden, as it had done in 1987 and again in 1992-93, but this time it was literally an inch or two from coming in our house. We had no power for at least a week, maybe two. The people around the corner weren’t so lucky and had to vacate their homes for months. While the flood waters were still receding I went on a field trip to Dorset, close to where my brother lives. I started university a few months later in September 1998, the same month that my brother joined the army. In January 2003 we had more flooding. At that point I was still scrambling around trying to find work after finishing university the previous summer. In March, with great relief, I started a poorly-paid job – a real job, nonetheless – at a water consultancy in Peterborough, and one of their projects at the time was designing an embankment to hold back the flood waters in St Ives where I grew up. The bank was duly built in 2006, although I don’t know if it will cope in the long term with the ravages of climate change. If I could wind back the clock I’d probably choose to stay in Peterborough, and in that job, instead of joining my parents in New Zealand.

The chat with my cousin last Friday was interesting. She said that neither of her two older boys, who are now both at university, drink alcohol, and that’s apparently not unusual. How times have changed. At university in the late nineties the social pressure to drink was enormous. Lad culture was at its peak in the nineties – you saw it everywhere, in football (which had become massively popular), on TV, and especially in comedy. Many young women embraced it; the word “ladette” was even bandied about. Admittedly this was the UK, but I don’t think New Zealand was much different. A less laddish culture is probably something we should celebrate, but its screen-heavy replacement isn’t much of an improvement. By the way, my cousin finds my parents’ latest property escapade even less understandable than I do.

I played pool with Mark on Sunday. As I expected, I was bloody awful. I potted one or two nice balls but really I was just guessing as to where to strike the cue ball. I had a special knack for potting the white, often without contacting any other ball. Mark wasn’t fantastic either, but he was better than me, that’s for sure. It was kind of fun to try something different. We each had a beer and shared a pizza. It’s quite a good set-up there; as well as a few pool tables they have one snooker table, but I think I’ll stick to watching that game.

Yesterday I watched 16 snooker players vying to reach the biggest event in the game. There’s a YouTube channel dedicated to this final qualifying round. There were so many close matches; all eight of them went to at least 10-6, and two of them ran to a deciding frame. The most dramatic of all was the Thai player Noppon Saengkham’s 10-9 victory over China’s Zhang Anda, which was decided on the final black. With only the black remaining, a snooker table seems impossibly large. I was glad Saengkham won because I remember him from last year’s World Championship in which he seemed a thoroughly nice chap. (Zhang might be equally nice, for all I know.) There was also a crazy finish to a match where the pink and black were tantalisingly over the same corner pocket with no other balls remaining; the English player Jordan Brown, trailing 9-7, had to contact the pink without potting the black, or else he was out. Eventually he missed the pink entirely and his Chinese opponent booked his place. The Chinese players obviously couldn’t speak English because they didn’t give interviews. Today 16 more players will go through the ringer.

I went to the local produce market this morning. An hour from now I’ll be seeing the four twins; I feel hopelessly underprepared for that.

Here are some pictures from one of the parks in town on Monday, and also the delapidated stadium next to the market this morning. The local football team Poli Timișoara played at the stadium until it was closed in February 2022; aptly the floodlights failed in the very last game, and Poli forfeited the match.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The new religion

April 9, 2023 by 0 Comments

Where I come from it’s Easter, but in Romania, where the Orthodox church dominates, we have to wait a week.

My teaching volumes were down last week, mainly because of the girl who has gone to Dubai and the 20-year-old guy who told me he “couldn’t see me again”, quite possibly because I argued with him about his favourite topic – cryptocurrencies. (A misnomer if ever there was one. They aren’t currencies at all.) Crypto is nothing short of a religion in Romania, but if you don’t have a willy, or if you do have one but it’s over 35 years old, you’re highly unlikely to be an adherent.

This morning I had a 7:45 start for my online lesson with the woman who lives near Bucharest, then it was off to Dumbrăvița for maths with Matei. My route goes past one of Timișoara’s many second-hand clothes shops – there are always hordes of people outside waiting for it to open at 9:30 – then I pass the tram cemetery full of rusty Ceaușescu-era hulks, then I go over the railway line. The crossing is at the 571-kilometre post but I don’t know what it’s 571 kilometres to. Bucharest, which would make sense, is less; Constanța, by the Black Sea, is certainly more. The crossing is dangerous because often the lights flash and the barriers go down but no train appears for several minutes; drivers often give up and turn back, while bikers and pedestrians go round the barrier. Then of course eventually the train does come. There are flowers outside the crossing.

Yesterday I had a long Zoom chat with my cousin in Wellington. Her two eldest sons are at university. I saw the youngest one (going on 15) who plans to join the police. We talked about the fallout from the pandemic and I mentioned that I used to watch Dr John Campbell’s Youtube channel. In fact I watched it near-religiously in the early headless-chicken days; I found his videos informative, unbiased, and a voice of calm. Around Christmas 2021 I felt I’d gleaned all the information I needed from his channel, so I stopped tuning in. Since then, unbeknown to me, Campbell has gone off at a sinister tangent, peddling misinformation about vaccines and drugs like ivermectin, and falsely saying that Covid deaths have been inflated. What a shame.

The temperature plummeted in the early part of the week. On Tuesday we had unseasonal snow and howling winds. Out of my window I can see an aerial that wobbles if a bird lands on it; in the strong wind it was swaying madly and I wondered if it would come crashing down. I live in one of the blocks in the background of the photo below. The aerial is atop a corner shop (dairy in New Zealand); next to that is some cosmetic place and a popular bar (known as a birt here) where the locals sit outside. On the right is a street with two slightly different names.

Tomorrow I’m meeting up with Mark. Our plan is to play pool or snooker at a hall not too far from where I live. I haven’t done that for ages. I was always so hopeless, and although I liked snooker, I never enjoyed pool very much because it was always dominated by extroverts and drinking and flirting. Right now, the qualifiers for the World Championship are going on – a ten-day do-or-die marathon where players have to negotiate as many as four best-of-19-frame matches to book a place at the hallowed Crucible. I’ve been dipping into some of the commentary-free matches. Stephen Hendry fell at the first hurdle. He was barely a shadow of the young whippersnapper who utterly dominated the game back in the nineties.

The centre of town last Sunday
Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

A few tips

April 3, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching a YouTube video on tipping in the US. It was already way out of hand when I visited in 2015. Waiters, who for some bizarre reason are exempt from minimum-wage laws in states that have a minimum wage, behaving like performing seals, and all that unnecessary time-consuming awkwardness. But at least then I paid cash for virtually everything and didn’t have to cope with the guilt-inducing touch screens that have proliferated since then, often at places where people aren’t providing a service at all – they’re just doing their jobs. My cousin who lives in the US said he was once so appalled by the service at a restaurant that he manually entered a $0.01 tip on one of those screens. The solution to all this “tipflation” is obvious – stop tipping entirely, pay staff what they deserve, and incorporate that into the price of the food or whatever else you’re providing. In an otherwise good video, they got one thing badly wrong: they said the word “tip” stands for “to insure promptness”. No it doesn’t. It doesn’t stand for anything; it’s just a word. Not every short word has to be an acronym. Incidentally, I often use “tip” in my lessons as an example of an English word with several meanings.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open during last night’s snooker, where commentators gave their tips as to whose cue tip would be the steadier and who would be tipped out of the tournament, his career perhaps headed for the tip. The semi-final between Shaun Murphy and Mark Selby went to a deciding 19th frame; I only found out the result (Murphy won) when I got up this morning. After reading and grocery shopping, I met the English lady in town. After a lesson on Tuesday in which I struggled to teach pronouns to a beginner student, because they work differently in his native Romanian, I suggested that we sit down together and get a handle on these damn Romanian pronouns once and for all. Every solo attempt I’ve made so far to properly learn them has ended in failure. So we had coffee in Piața Unirii and we went through the accusative and dative pronouns. The third-person accusative pronouns are gender-dependent but the third-person dative ones aren’t, and that’s just the start of it.

We had mild weather today and it was busy in town. Some tourists are now making their way to Timișoara, perhaps to see what the “Capital of Culture” fuss is about. I was struck by a young couple carrying backpacks and dressed in clothes of every colour of the rainbow; not so long ago that was commonplace, but now there’s a certain drab conformity in what young people wear.

I had a good session of tennis this evening. Domnul Sfâra, now 88, was there. My partner commented on how good his reflexes were for a man of his age. The diminutive Domnul Sfâra was on the other side of the net, and we won 6-2 6-2.

After 32½ hours last week, I’m expecting something lighter this week.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

A life of slime

April 2, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s been a wet, miserable day. After my first outing on the tennis court last Sunday, you could forget it today. It’s been a real mixed bag – only 3 degrees and sleet on Tuesday, but beautiful yesterday.

Life with my sinus problem ain’t a whole lot of fun. I haven’t had one of those excruciating headaches since December, but the low-to-medium-level pain (like I have right now) is unremitting. Blowing my nose eases the pain; often I only have to tap the right side of my nose and a jet of colourless slime shoots out of my left nostril at a rate of knots. Sometimes I don’t even know where the gunk has gone. Dad said it’s in Embarrassing Bodies territory – get on TV and maybe I could be sorted. Whenever I blow my nose during our Skype calls, Mum says, “I hope you don’t do that in your lessons.” I do try to tone it down, but what about me, Mum? She’s more bothered that I might briefly annoy my students than she is about my pain. I shouldn’t be surprised. Dad suffered from terrible migraines when I was growing up, and Mum’s sympathy cable was permanently unplugged. The only emotion she showed was anger. What will they think of me if we don’t show up to Jackie’s party? Or if I turn up alone? Thankfully Dad’s migraines are fewer and farther between these days.

On Monday I managed to catch my brother on WhatsApp when my nephew was up and about. It was great to see him grinning away on his playmat, but my brother and his wife are struggling with lack of sleep. My brother looked whacked. In the middle of my call, my sister-in-law’s parents showed up to provide some respite, but I could tell my brother would have preferred it if they’d stayed away. I don’t envy him one bit. Some time ago he said it’ll be a “one and done”, but we’ll see. This morning I read an article about only children. They’re selfish and spoilt according to the stereotype, but people with siblings can sure as hell be selfish and spoilt too.

Last night I had an interesting lesson with the Romanian guy who lives in London; he now has two sons. He’d just made a trip back to Romania, and said he felt a sense of greyness on his arrival back in the UK. I know exactly what he means because I’ve felt the same thing many times. That journey from the airport; the grey M25 and M11 with an equally grey sky overhead. He said that people in Romania were happier despite being poorer. That was something I noticed on only my second evening in Timișoara. It was a sunny Sunday October evening and I was walking along the road from the guest house to the university campus to grab some dinner. I passed a constellation of ugly communist-era blocks of flats which had a park outside, full of basic play equipment and half a dozen cheap-looking ping-pong tables. Kids were playing, people were walking their dogs, and all the ping-pong tables were being used. I was amazed how happy everybody seemed. I got the same feeling last night – another sunny evening – when I collected my 15 litres of water; not much money but a real sense of community. In contrast, when I have my lessons in well-to-do parts of town where Porsches abound, there’s no sense of community at all.

This afternoon, in one of those well-to-do areas, I managed to convince my 15-year-old student that a haggis was a hedgehoggish creature that inhabits the Scottish highlands. We read an article on Haggis scoticus from the Daily Record. Then I asked him to check the date on the article, which was 1st April 2021.

Last Sunday I had a wander through the woods with Mark and his two dogs. It was great to be out in nature and to hear the hammering of woodpeckers and humming of insects instead of the rumble of traffic. One thing I love about Timișoara is how easily you can escape from urban life.

The culmination of the snooker season is upon us once more. The sport is going through a rough patch with several Chinese players having recently being banned for match fixing. I also wonder where the fresh new faces will come from: it seems to be a middle-aged man’s sport. Is whiling away hours in a snooker hall, rather than on TikTok, even something a teenager would do these days? At the moment the Tour Championship, featuring the season’s top eight players, is in full swing, then later this month it’ll be the big one – the World Championship, the one event in the game that dwarfs all others.

I’m currently reading The Twisted Ones, which (unsurprisingly) is a horror novel. The author is Ursula Vernon, who wrote the book under the pen-name T. Kingfisher.

Life :) - Other sports

They’re all popping off

February 27, 2023 by 0 Comments

It felt good to give this flat a proper clean this morning while listening to the local radio. The rain hasn’t abated, and the main headline was the flood alerts, in all their lurid colours, all over the country. There was also (following our recent shaky spell) plenty of airtime given to all the earthquake-prone buildings in the area. It was as if I’d been transported back to whence I came. They then had a sports programme on. All three local second-division football teams are doing terribly. Even the best of them, the announcer said, may still avoid avoiding relegation.

This morning my parents told me that their indoor bowls club had packed in because so many of the players had died. I suggested that dying isn’t a new thing, but of course there are no new players to replace those who have bitten the dust. My parents couldn’t have given a damn about indoor bowls, but it highlights a bigger problem. All these clubs that used to bring people together are folding. Dad’s model aero club consists of a handful of blokes with an average age of 70-odd. At one time, people came from far and wide to see other people fly their model planes. Even Caroline Bay, which would have been heaving in the summer when Mum was a girl and was even very popular as I remember it, doesn’t attract many people these days.

John Motson, the famous English football commentator, died last week. He was catapulted into the limelight as a young man in 1972 when he covered the greatest FA Cup shock ever, as Hereford beat Newcastle. There are very few of the great commentators left; those distinctive voices beamed into millions of living rooms, bringing people together. (See previous paragraph.) Here is Formula 1 commentator Murray Walker (1923-2021) trying his hand at snooker commentary; it’s hilarious.

Today I’ve been wondering what on earth happened to Matei’s dog. They didn’t really seem to know. Yesterday I saw him with his head poking out of a thick plastic bag, ready to be buried.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

I can gather all the news I need on the weather report

February 6, 2023 by 0 Comments

Edit: I see I’ve used that Simon and Garfunkel song lyric as a post title before. It is one of my favourite songs, so it can’t be helped.

On Friday my UK-based student asked me what “gusts of three degrees” meant on the weather forecast. He said he’d heard it several times. A frost and three degrees, maybe? He insisted that it was gusts. Sorry mate, I’m struggling with that one. But it did make me wonder about weather forecasts. Sometimes they just kind of wash over you, don’t they? If Catriona MacLeod came on Radio NZ and said there’d be “gusts of three degrees, south-westerly fog patches, and moderate to heavy drizzle later in the ranges, rising to 30 knots”, half the listeners wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

Here in Timișoara, the actual weather has been pretty nippy. When I went out today in mid-afternoon, the temperature was zero. Yesterday was one of the windier days I can remember here, with the exception of this day. It was also wet. Getting to my pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița on my bike, worried that my left handlebar grip might fly off at any moment with all the moisture, wasn’t much fun. After my maths lesson I had my 252nd session with Octavian. I feel bad because, although he’s now got a pretty handy command of English, he still has a very non-native pronunciation – he hasn’t got a proper handle on the English r or th sounds, nor can he properly distinguish the vowel sounds in bit and beat, or bet and bat – so I spent almost the whole session on pronunciation drills.

What a horror day last Tuesday was. This blog tells me that 10/8/16 was pretty bad; perhaps 31/1/23 was even worse. I felt so hopeless and overwhelmed by everything, and had lost control of my emotions. When I think about it I’d been feeling anxious for some time, and my memory and concentration had shrunk to comatose goldfish level. It reminded me of the last time I worked in life insurance, when I couldn’t remember what I’d done five minutes earlier, let alone on the previous day. I really need to act on those first warning signs – take a day or two off, whatever – before things spin drastically out of control. Since Tuesday I’ve bounced back reasonably well, I feel. I’m trying to get back to what I did during the initial stages of Covid which, bizarrely enough, were quite a positive time for me because my life became quieter and simpler. I planned each day the night before, went to bed early, got up early, and executed the plan as best I could. Grocery shopping was always first thing on Monday at the exact same place. I’m going back to that routine now. It’ll be harder because of my increased workload and the books – things are bound to get in the way – but if I have to put something off until the next day because of something out of my control, that’s OK. Tomorrow, apart from my four lessons, my list consists of shopping (I’ve made a list), tidying this flat which has become a mess, cooking, booking flights to NZ (I’ve got to bite the bullet on that one, and bugger the cost), calling the plumber, spending an hour on the dictionary, and reading.

Yesterday Birmingham City – Blues – scored twice in the last few minutes to win 4-3 at Swansea, snapping a run of five straight losses in the league. Mayhem ensued when the winner went in.

New Zealand - Other sports - Writing a book

The magic of the Cup

January 30, 2023 by 0 Comments

Near-biblical rainfall, landslides, homes falling into the sea. That’s what Aucklanders have been dealing with in the last few days. Mum said last night that four months’ worth of rain fell in three hours in places. At least four people have died. I had the usual hell-in-a-handcart stuff from my parents, though I keep agreeing with them more and more; we’ve entered what I’ve already called on this blog a post-optimism world.

It’s weird how I sporadically get interested in various sports. Now it’s FA Cup football. I watched bits of Birmingham’s entertaining 2-2 draw at Blackburn on Saturday – Blues opened the scoring in just the third minute, were 2-1 down immediately after half-time, but 18-year-old Jordan James equalised in the 91st minute, just after he came on as a substitute. What a moment for him and for the supporters who are going through an ugly spell right now – they’re struggling in the league and everybody hates the current owners. The end of the match was marred by racial abuse towards Neil Etheridge, Blues’ Filipino goalkeeper. The replay is tomorrow night at St Andrew’s, Birmingham’s home ground which I visited a few times more than 20 years ago. Yesterday I dipped into Brighton’s 2-1 win over Liverpool, which featured a stunning late winner, then saw a marvellous match between Wrexham (currently outside the league) and Sheffield United (in the second tier), which finished 3-3. The Welsh club were recently taken over by a pair of Hollywood actors. Their kit sponsors are TikTok. I remember Wrexham’s run to the quarter-finals in 1996-97; back then they were sponsored by Wrexham Lager. Alcohol sponsorship has now been banned, so instead we’ve now got endless betting firms, big banks, and the likes of TikTok – collectively they’re doing at least as much harm as booze.

When I watched those games yesterday, my attention wasn’t squarely focused on them – I was working on my dictionary, adding entries and tweaking them here and there. It’s a big effort that I know might be for very little. I’ve had no choice but to my other book – the novel – on the back burner for now.

Language teaching - New Zealand - Other sports - Politics

Knowing when to go

January 19, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had another online lesson with that boy who cried. It was hard work – he rarely uttered anything apart from “yes”, “no”, and “I don’t know” – but at least he didn’t cry this time. Later I’ve got that maths lesson again. Yesterday I had a terrible session with the four twins. Having already exhausted all topics with them, I tried a printable domino-style words-and-pictures game that I found online – lots of painstaking printing and sticking – but the game descended into farce because there were too many cards and they were unable to read the words on them; none of them can read in English beyond words like “cat” and “dog”. The rest of the session turned into a load of nothing. It didn’t help that my mood was terrible and my enthusiasm at rock bottom.

Jacinda Ardern has resigned as prime minister of New Zealand. Good decision, I’d say. Most leaders are ego-driven, desperate to retain power at all costs, and they outstay their welcome by years. She dealt admirably with the horrors of the Christchurch mosque shooting, then the initial stages of the pandemic. Had National retained power in 2017, I imagine thousands more New Zealanders would have died of Covid “to keep the economy moving” or some such tripe, and the economy wouldn’t have moved any faster. Quite the opposite, in fact. Set against chaos of Trump and the like, her leadershup was a beacon of calm. Latterly, though, her star has fallen. The disappointment, as I see it, is that Labour won a majority in 2020 – almost unheard of in the MMP system – but have totally failed to use it. Housing is a zillion-dollar disaster. Mental health for many Kiwis continues to be a mess. (Mental health provision got noticeably worse in my time there; here was a chance to reverse that.) My parents are always telling me that local farmers can’t get workers from overseas to do the jobs that Kiwis won’t. I don’t know anything about this Luxon bloke who may well be prime minister by the end of this year, except that he’s probably less of an arse than Judith Collins.

On Tuesday night I watched a football match for the first time in ages. Birmingham City, a.k.a. Blues, a team I saw several times at university, were playing Forest Green Rovers away in the third round of the FA Cup. Forest Green are based in Nailsworth, a town of 5000-odd in the Cotswolds, and the smallest town in England ever to host a league football club. They’re owned by renewable-energy business moguls and everything at the club is fully vegan. During the game, flashing advertising hoardings counted up the number of plastic bottles thrown away, millisecond by millisecond, and other depressing environment-killing stats. Forest Green took the lead with a stunning goal in the eighth minute. Birmingham were terrible in the first half, though I liked their young player Hannibal, mostly because of his name. Their manager must have dished out a bollocking at half-time because they sprang into action and equalised just after the break. The big moment came at 1-1, when Blues’ keeper pulled off a scarcely believable double save. Though the atmosphere was mostly flat – the magic of the FA Cup is nothing like it once was – it was worth watching the game just for those ridiculous saves. Blues soon took the lead and saw out the remainder of the match. Forest Green were unfortunate not to at least force a replay; Birmingham now go to Blackburn in the next round.

Yesterday, before my bad session with the four kids, a fresh breeze blew, and as I was sitting at my desk hundreds of helicopter seeds hit my window before slowly twirling to the ground. At first I thought they were insects. This isn’t normal for mid-January, is it?