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If you’re worried about that…

April 15, 2025 by 0 Comments

Yesterday when I called Mum and Dad – I’m doing that a lot at the moment – Dad was pulling his hair out trying to get his Skype transferred to Teams. A good sign, I thought, if you’re worried about that rather than Mum’s health. Conversation then turned to Rory McIlroy’s play-off win in the Masters and a packet of coffee beans that Mum showed me with an annoyingly pointless Māori translation on it (Pīni kawhe; there’s no B in Māori, so they use P, its voiceless counterpart). More good signs. Then they talked about actually booking a flight to the UK for 22nd May and luggage allowances and all that stuff. (They’re scheduled to arrive in Timișoara on the 8th.) Mum was looking good once again, and seems to be more regular now. She still mentioned nausea, and hasn’t played golf (which was always a given in her life) for some time. No guarantees of course, but things are much more positive than two weeks ago when my brother had almost accepted that we wouldn’t be seeing them.

Big news from the snooker qualifying. I mentioned last time that Jackson Page was in line for a bumper payout if he could somehow make a second maximum break. Well, he went and did it in the same match. Nobody had ever made two in the same match before. One of the commentators was left practically speechless. For Page, who is ranked 35th in the world and is just 23, that £147,000 (plus various other assorted prizes) will be life-changing. I stayed up last night to watch two matches (at the same time) that both finished 10-8. In one of them, Matthew Stevens got over the line after the lightning quick Thai player Thepchaiya Un-Nooh went for a kamikaze shot on a red. Today and tomorrow the final-round qualifiers take place. The spectators in Sheffield pay just £12 for a day’s action – such great value. It reminds me of qualifying for grand slams in tennis. I really wish I’d seen Wimbledon qualifying when I was younger. I had no idea of what drama can unfold until I saw Australian Open qualifying one time (for free).

A wet day today. I called Mark’s car mechanic guy but he said he’ll be on holiday until 5th May, so I’ll just leave it until then. There are many reasons to like my car, such as its Frenchness (I’ve always thought French cars are cool), its age (it pre-dates the era when “everything’s computer” as Trump put it), and its incredibly low fuel consumption. I really hope it survives.

Encouraging news on the book front, which I’ve sort of neglected of late. I have a recommendation from somebody Dorothy used to know, and may also have a second one. That should increase the chance that it gets accepted by the Minister of Culture. (I still don’t properly understand all of this.)

Trump called the latest Russian attack on Ukraine “a mistake”. It really is a case now of “make America go away”.

Driving - Family - Life :) - Other sports

Floriile

April 14, 2025 by 0 Comments

Today is Floriile, or Palm Sunday in English – the last Sunday before Easter. When I went to church as a kid, we were all given palm fronds which we made into a cross; here they use willow boughs instead, and this morning I found some willow draped over my door handle. It’s been a beautiful day, sunny and 20 degrees or so. After a 90-minute maths lesson (I try and avoid teaching on Sundays), I met Mark in town. It was heaving, or rammed as people often say these days. A combination of the fine weather, the religious festival, and all the brightly coloured tulips, brought people out in their droves. We wanted to have lunch, but the sheer numbers of people meant service was even more crappy than normal. Mark seemed to fancy eating in Piața Unirii, but I wasn’t prepared to pay the prices you get there. We sat down at the Timișoreana place in Piața Victoriei, but nobody ever came to take our order. We got something kebabby from next door instead. Then we got a beer from some place. They had different sized bottles including an extra large one. Could we get one of those and two glasses, please? Sorry, no can do. Two glasses means two separate bottles. Sorry, that’s bloody ridiculous. Eating and drinking out in Romania just isn’t worth it most of the time. And if you find a rare place where it is worth it, keep going back there.

Yesterday was a monster day of lessons – nine hours of them. Although they were tiring, I didn’t have any of those online ones with young kids that are so often a struggle. Three of them were in Dumbrăvița, which is a different world, and not one I would wish to inhabit. My maths student’s mum noted that a box of chocolates on the desk were eleven days out of date and threw them away. Just imagine doing that. Chocolates. The mind boggles. It also gets me how many water bottles people from Dumbrăvița get through. Vast multi-packs of those half-litre ones. I always fill large bottles from the well, as is common here, but the modern Romanian way is mindless consumerism.

In the middle of my lessons I spoke to Mum and Dad who had got back from Moeraki. Mum looked good, and the plan seems to still be that they make the trip, but I know that one turn for the worse would probably can the whole thing. Still far from any guarantees at (as my brother called it) t minus three weeks. Then there’s what happens if they do make it. If you’re properly ill, a long-haul flight isn’t a great place to be, and the flight itself (pressurised cabin and all that) can really mess you up if you’re a bit flaky to begin with.

My car. I took it in to another place on Friday. They put it on one of those ramps, then the guy took it for a spin (without me). He told me I’d need to replace the steering rack. Sounds expensive, but I could live with that. I hung around a bit, then he updated his assessment. What about the valve timing? (I think that’s what he meant.) And the shocks. And something else I’ve forgotten. We ought to replace all of that too. I stuck around a while longer as he prepared a quote, which was just over 5700 lei, or £1000 or NZ$2250. The car is only worth about that, so obviously I didn’t take him up on that offer. My spidey senses told me that because I was foreign he was trying it on a bit. Would all of that go wrong at the same time? When I got back I went for a 40-minute drive and, but for a two-second judder, it was fine. I drove it for half an hour yesterday with no problems at all. Mark says he knows a mechanic, so I might try him next. My Peugeot has been my favourite of all the cars I’ve ever owned, so I’d be sad if I had to get rid of it after barely a year. If my parents are coming, it might be an idea to buy the equivalent of AA cover before they arrive.

Football. A surprise in the EFL Trophy final as Peterborough beat Blues 2-0. Posh scored two superb goals in the first half, including one just before the interval, and for all their work it just didn’t happen for Blues. Posh have had a disappointing season, so good on ’em for such a strong performance in the final and a well-deserved trophy. Vast armies of Blues fans descended on Wembley, and they wouldn’t have gone home too happy.

Snooker. Qualifying for the Crucible continues. There have been huge comebacks, at least one final-black decider, and today even a maximum break by Jackson Page. (If he gets another in the qualifying or the main tournament, he’ll win £147,000. You used to get that just for one maximum, back when they were much rarer.) For sheer drama though, I doubt you could top what happened on Friday night. I was trying to follow two matches at the same time: Jimmy White against Ashley Carty and 53-year-old Anthony Hamilton versus Steven Hallworth. When Carty won a close frame to go 9-5 up in a first-to-ten, I switched it off because I had an early start the next morning. Surely it was bye-bye Jimmy. Hamilton, who had been 9-0 up in his match, was still miles ahead, even though Hallworth looked like closing to 9-3. When I got up in the morning, I saw that Carty had beaten Jimmy alright (10-5) and Hamilton had eventually squeaked through 10-8, winning the 18th frame on the black, sometime after midnight. In other words, he narrowly averted the biggest collapse ever in the game. In his post-match interview, he said his eyesight had deteriorated badly, and that had he lost, that collapse would have followed him for the rest of his life. He also said something very British: “It would have been on quizzes and stuff.” I’m glad it didn’t come to that. Hamilton comes from Nottingham, and his nickname is “the Sheriff of Pottingham” which I absolutely love.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The madness of Mum

April 11, 2025 by 0 Comments

Yesterday morning I had a 64-minute Skype chat – surely my last ever – with my aunt and uncle who still (and probably not for much longer) live at their place in Woodbury. It’s up for what they call a deadline treaty, basically a silent auction, and the deadline is just a few days away. I once tried to buy a flat in a similar way in Wellington. (I found the whole thing a bit intimidating, and that made me lowball my offer.) Mostly I spoke to my aunt; my uncle (83) has slowed down a bit. They’ve already put down a deposit on a place up the Downs (they always say up the Downs for some reason) in Geraldine which has something like a third of an acre. Sounds as if it should be ideal for them. (They’d go nuts if they didn’t have a decent amount of outdoor space.) And best they move now before my uncle deteriorates to the point where the move totally throws him.

We spent half our time discussing the move and the other half discussing Mum. My aunt is in regular contact with her. (Even more regular now.) She’s been practically tearing her hair out over Mum’s refusal to see the doctor. She’s been quite forceful with Mum of late, because she knows Mum respects her and won’t get angry with her in the way she does with Dad. Like me, she sees Mum’s recent decision making (the house, and now the business with her health) as a descent into madness.

Mum and Dad have gone to Moeraki for a few days. Mum broke her promise to see the doctor after finally going to the loo for the first time in a week. Crisis averted. Yeah right. I’ve been getting loo updates and tummy pain updates from Dad, which I’ve passed on to my brother. To find out what’s going on with Mum, we all have to basically ignore Mum. I hope she’s managed to get some sleep down in Moeraki – she’s been fatigued a lot lately.

I’ve had six lessons today, all of them with kids. The “highlight” was probably the lesson with ten-year-old Filip. I looked over the homework I’d set him last week. He’d made a few mistakes with the past simple. “Mum told me to write this,” he said. “Well I’m sorry, your mum is wrong.” I didn’t realise his mother had been listening in. At the end of the session she asked me what she’d done wrong. She couldn’t have been too offended because she gave me two Nutella pancakes. Occasional food is one of the little side benefits of my job.

Our beautiful warm weather ended abruptly last Saturday night; it’s been much chillier since then. Not that I mind too much. For one thing, it’s given me an excuse my mustard woolly jumper that I bought second hand a couple of months ago and makes me happy.

Football. Birmingham are promoted following their 2-1 win at Peterborough, aka Posh. Cue wild celebrations. Now they’re aiming for record points. They’re playing Posh again in Sunday’s EFL Trophy final. I’ll try and watch that; it should be fun. Barry Fry, director of football at Posh, was in attendance on Tuesday night. He’d turned 80 the day before. Birmingham’s arch-rivals Aston Villa lost 3-1 at PSG in the Champions League last night, conceding a late goal, but are still not out of the two-legged tie. They’ve done remarkably well just to get this far. Villa have also made the semis of the FA Cup. For all their success, they haven’t won a trophy since 1996, though they’ve had a number of near misses.

Snooker. Now it’s the qualifiers for the Crucible. I hope I can see some of the final-round matches. Two years ago I was able to catch them; it was pure drama. Jimmy White – incredible that he’s still even playing – fell over the line on Tuesday night after coming from a long way back to beat a Ukrainian who played painfully slowly. He won 10-9 in a match that finished at 1:20 am. (That’s British time, not my time. I certainly didn’t stay up to watch it.)

I took my car in yesterday. Somewhat predictably, they found nothing wrong with it. If the juddering only kicks in after half an hour or so, what do you do? What a pain. On Saturday I’ve got a chock-full day of lessons scheduled and I’ll have no choice but to use the car.

Today has seen a record up day on global stock markets. My back seems to have just about come right.

Driving - Life :) - Other sports

Body talk

April 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

Some news about my body (which will be 45 in a couple of weeks) for a change. On the night of 28th-29th March (Friday-Saturday), I had sudden back pain out of nowhere. I couldn’t lie on my right side. The pain abated over the next day or two and I thought it would just go away, but it hasn’t done. I now have low-level burning pain in the right side of my back. It doesn’t stop me from doing anything, but what is it? I’m now icing my back regularly. If it hasn’t gone away by the time I next see the doctor (the 18th I think), I’ll ask him.

My car’s body (19 years old) is playing up too. I got its thermostat replaced in February, but the juddering is back again. The last two times I’ve been out in the car, it’s started to shake after half an hour or so. It’s an intermittent back-and-forth shaking which happens at speed and it’s somewhere between disconcerting and bloody terrifying. I’m taking it in on Wednesday after a video call with my aunt for her birthday. I can manage fine without a car – I did just that for over seven years – but it’s certainly nice to have it, and it’ll be a must when – if – Mum and Dad come over in a month’s time.

Kitty’s diminutive body (just over a year old) is absolutely fine. Too fine. She doesn’t stop.

I’ve been thinking back to my trip to America almost ten years ago. In one of my first posts on this blog, I wrote that the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots was the most noticeable thing about American society. It can only have got worse since then. The word freedom is tossed around like confetti, but it’s all a big lie – freedom is a commodity, like everything else over there, available only to those lucky enough to afford it. And if you can’t afford it, that’s all your own fault. What a country. I’d probably be OK if I visited the US because I’m white and haven’t posted anything anti-Trump on social media – I don’t do social media – and this blog doesn’t have my name attached to it. But right now I wouldn’t dream of it. Nor am I likely to visit McDonald’s or Starbucks anytime soon, or order anything on Amazon. (I didn’t do those things anyway.) I wish I could avoid WhatsApp and even Microsoft. Talking of McDonald’s, I still remember the first time I had McDonald’s in the middle of Birmingham with the other guys from my university hall. I’d only been there maybe twice before in my life, and only had fries each time. The other guys, on the other hand, were fluent in Mac-ish. I ordered a Big Mac because it was something I’d heard of. “Why didn’t you get a meal?” they asked me. Um, I’m not hungry. Oh, I’m supposed to get a Big Mac meal. Good to know. I haven’t had a Big Mac, meal or otherwise, since I left uni in 2002.

Amid all this stock market turmoil, there’s one thing people always forget. You can short stocks and shares as well as buy them. In other words, you can bet on them to go down. Some shysters must be making a killing here. For them, they’re loving the chaos. Up equals win, down equals win. What we’re seeing is pretty seismic – a shock on the scale of the ’87 crash, or the financial crisis in ’08, or the start of Covid five years ago. Notice that those four “shocks” have got closer together. (I’m looking right now at a picture of a family picnic in Caroline Bay in the summer of ’86-’87 when the market was rocketing away. Brierleys and all that. My uncle thought he would make a mint. Dad still remembers all that talk – and his skepticism.)

When I went to bed, Mark Selby was 7-5 up on John Higgins and well on his way to 8-5 and seven straight frames. He did make it 8-5 alright, but then Higgins rattled off the last five in a row to win 10-8. What a finish that must have been. It made me think of the role of momentum in sport. You hear the word a lot. My view is that momentum exists, but it’s much less of a factor than people think, and has a smaller impact in team sports than in individual sports like golf, where nerves play a bigger part. In tennis, if your 4-0 lead has been whittled away to 4-3, you’d still rather have (in my opinion) that slender lead than be 4-3 down, even though you wouldn’t feel good about it. The reason being that a 4-3 lead isn’t that slender, especially at low levels of the game where server advantage is small. Win the next game and you’ve got a huge edge at 5-3 needing just one more, and even if you lose it you’re level at 4-4.

Family - Language teaching - Other sports - Photos

Wanting to get at the truth

April 7, 2025 by 0 Comments

I tried calling Dad last night. I hoped to get him in the short interval between Mum going to church and him going to Pleasant Point to fly his plane. With the time changes, this meant calling at midnight. I didn’t get a reply; he’d probably already gone to Pleasant Point, meaning that an interval when I can get him on his own simply doesn’t exist, unless it’s too windy for him to fly. (Normally I’d get a chance on a Tuesday when Mum plays golf, but since she got ill she hasn’t been playing.) I wanted to get Dad on his own because the only time I get the proper unspun news on Mum is when she isn’t there.

I called again this morning my time. Mum was clearly much better. Colour had returned to her cheeks. She looked better, in fact, than any time in the last two weeks. This could easily be a false dawn; we’ve had them before. She’s refusing to visit the doctor. I’d now put the chances of seeing them next month at 60%. (God, it’s gone up and down a bit, hasn’t it?) Encouraging, but still far too low to plan road trips or book accommodation or anything crazy like that.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. Unusually, I had a long gap between lessons, so I sat in the park in Dumbrăvița – the nice part of Dumbrăvița – and read Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. A brilliant read. I’d managed to get half-way, then found I couldn’t concentrate, probably because of all the Mum stuff. I’m nearing the end of it now.

On Thursday I had a good lesson with the “I’m bored” girl. I made the whole thing about animals. Unfortunately I can’t do that every time, and anyway after a few sessions of animals she’d get bored again.

Word of the year so far: tariff. A lot of people still don’t know how many Rs and Fs it’s got. Trump’s tariffs (essentially half of the US’s trade deficit with each country, with a minimum of 10%) don’t make any sense and they may well have been whacked out on ChatGPT. But if we didn’t already know, we know now that the old world, the hyper-globalised world of the eighties onwards, is history. By the way, I’d dread to think how much my KiwiSaver has dropped in the last few days.

I’ve been watching the Tour Championship snooker which is being played in Manchester. The final is between John Higgins and Mark Selby. Higgins leads 5-3 in a first-to-ten, though Selby won the last two frames of the afternoon session. Lots of big breaks surrounding one out-of-character safety-heavy frame which Higgins won in 57 minutes. It’s unlikely I’ll see the finish because I have to make an early start in the morning.

Football. Birmingham hammered Barnsley 6-2 yesterday. Shame I didn’t see it. Barnsley had someone sent off in only the third minute, but at half-time it was one apiece. Then in the second half Blues went mad. With seven league games left, Blues now have a quite ludicrous 92 points.

Tulips in the park near the tennis courts on Friday.

A lovely day to be in town. Big spreads, especially in the US dollar rates.

I used to live in the building on the right. A fifth-floor apartment is for sale.

One of many lizards in the botanic park on Friday.

Dumbrăvița yesterday. My brother assures me that these are African geese.

I took this picture, which is on my street, because of the typically Romanian signage.
Family - Life :) - Other sports

Getting Mum unblocked

April 2, 2025 by 0 Comments

Good news from Mum. After a painful day on Sunday that made it likely my parents wouldn’t be flying, she saw the doctor the next day. He said her constipation was a result of her colonography rather than the (still mysterious) underlying issue itself. The doctor gave her a box of sachets, kind of like the ones I put down the bathroom sink when it gets blocked. She took ten (!) of these sachets on one day, and they seem to have unblocked her. Unless something else kicks off, it’s more than likely they’ll make the trip now – I’d put it at something like 85–90%. (It must have been under 50% on Sunday. They were fearing the worst.) They’re due to arrive five weeks from tomorrow.

Around the world and beyond, we’ve had a deadly earthquake in Myanmar, an near-total eclipse, and major political developments such as Marine Le Pen being barred from running in the next French presidential election (for now at least). But as for me, not a lot has happened. The eclipse, which I tried to watch with an eight-year-old girl during our lesson last Saturday, was a damp squib. It all looks pretty normal so far, doesn’t it? And then the came over and that was that. On Sunday I went up and saw Elena, the lady who lives above me. I took Kitty along for the ride. Kitty hasn’t quite been the friend I’d hoped for. She’s just, well, there. And here, and everywhere. I might talk more about her next time.

Last night I watched Birmingham’s match at Bristol Rovers. The first half was great: Blues scored early (a brilliant strike from Keshi Anderson) but Rovers equalised and really dominated the half. They were unlucky not to be ahead at half-time. The second half wasn’t anything like as open. A few minutes from the end, Blues were awarded a soft penalty which Jay Stansfield tucked away, and they snatched a 2-1 win which they hardly deserved. After that result and a 4-1 home win over bottom-placed Shrewsbury last weekend, a colossal points total is still on. I see that Blues have entered a partnership with Birmingham University, my old alma mater. I also noticed the players had “Visit Birmingham” on the lower back of their shirts, before realising it also said “Alabama” in small letters. So they’re palling up with anything called Birmingham, even if it’s 4000-plus miles away. That’s something that their local rivals Aston Villa, far more successful than Blues over the years and with a fancier-sounding name, can’t really do.

One final thing: this morning I got the cazier judiciar which is a document that I’d applied for in early March that should allow me to update my residency permit in time for the upcoming Romanian presidential election.

Cat - Family - Other sports - Politics - Writing a book

Emotional distance

March 27, 2025 by 0 Comments

We’re having a warmish finale to March, but it’s grey and at times wet. Not a ray of sunshine to be seen, even in the long-range forecast. This could be England. (I much prefer this to the hellish temperatures we’re likely to get three months from now, though.)

Last night I had a chat with my brother. Inevitably, we talked about Mum and Dad. Especially Mum. My brother said she has an incredible knack for emotionally distancing herself from her family. We mentioned Dad’s mother who flew to New Zealand in 2005. She was 83 and largely immobile. She flew business class and needed a wheelchair to get to and from the gates. It wasn’t an easy trip, and it came at great expense – business class isn’t cheap and she wasn’t exactly wealthy – but she did it because she really wanted to see her son, even though she knew he’d be coming back to England in a couple of months for his heart valve surgery. That was the operation that nearly killed him and that Mum (emotional distance again) didn’t go over for. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a mum that really wanted to see us (and her two grandchildren)? One major difference between 20 years ago and now is the proliferation of ways to make video calls, but Skyping and Zooming are no real substitute, even if Mum thinks they are.

Mum hasn’t got any worse, so I’m bumping their chances of coming over back up to 80%. I’m concerned though that, apart from the scan, she’s done nothing to investigate a problem that started years ago. Taking a bunch of laxatives doesn’t get to the bottom (ha!) of the issue at all. As for Dad, he’s been in pain because he bit his cheek badly in the middle of the night. He has a habit of doing this – the insides of his cheeks are full of scars – but this episode was particularly bad.

Book news. Not great. Dorothy got in touch with the “publishers” yesterday. They’re now saying they’ll do 500 copies but the book would need to be accepted somehow by the Ministry of Culture and, if that happens, it’ll come at an unknown cost to me. I have no idea how their distribution works, if it works at all. There are a lot of ifs, suddenly. If it’s going to cost me more than a three-figure sum (in pounds), I’m out and I’ll try and find a publisher worthy of the name. They certainly exist in Romania, but the one I’ve been dealing with certainly isn’t it.

More chaos in the Trump “administration”. That leaked Signal group chat prior to the attack on Yemen. I mean, seriously, what a joke. And it obviously was a joke to them, with their use of emojis. This is what we’re dealing with here. A bunch of 12-year-olds. The idea that they’d even discuss something so serious and sensitive over some chat facility is ludicrous. And why did they need to bomb Yemen (and kill dozens of innocent civilians including children) anyway? It reminds me of the Tory ministers’ – and Dominic Cummings’ – WhatsApp messages during the early stages of the Covid pandemic. They didn’t have a clue, nor did they care. How have we sunk so low?

Last time I spoke to my parents, they had a game of cricket on TV in the background. New Zealand were playing, presumably in a Twenty20 match. Mum mentioned that NZ had already qualified for the football World Cup, long before it even happens. Well that’s nice, but that isn’t the achievement it used to be. The 2026 World Cup will feature 48 teams and 104 games. It’s too big. Everything has got too big. That’s half the reason we’re in this mess. What’s more, the group games – all 72 of them – will only serve to eliminate 16 of the teams. Most of the action will take place in the US; all the more reason to give it a miss. I watched NZ qualify for the 2010 tournament (32 teams) by beating Bahrain. That felt exciting and, well, meaningful, especially since NZ gave such a good account of themselves in the main competition. I wish I’d been around to see NZ qualify for the 1982 edition. It was a marathon campaign. The All Whites won in Australia to put them in the final round, then they eventually beat China in a do-or-die play-off. A country of three million beating one of close to a billion. Only 24 teams qualified then, so it was a huge achievement.

There has been a break in domestic football to accommodate international matches. This weekend the final run-in starts. There is talk of Birmingham breaking points records. Most teams in their division have eight or nine games left. Blues have eleven, including the EFL Trophy final. Their packed schedule might be their undoing; we’ll see.

Kitty injured her neck on Monday. I don’t know how she did it, only that it must have happened while I was out. There was a raw red patch. Later that day I saw blood on the windowsill in the little room next to my office. As I’d expect with Kitty, she was totally undeterred by this.

Books - Cat - Language teaching - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Other sports

Back on the (smaller) court

March 17, 2025 by 0 Comments

This morning I played squash with Mark and his wife. It was my first time on the squash court since I left New Zealand. We took turns; I got more than my share of court time. It made a nice change to get some intense exercise. That dried up for me when the tennis did last summer. His wife asked me about Kitty. (Since this morning, she’s taken to biting me again.) When we left the sports centre, there was a black and white tom cat prowling around the entrance to the sports centre. It didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Mark’s wife seriously suggested I take it home to give Kitty a friend. Um, no thanks, one is plenty.

Last week I hit 30 hours of lessons for the first time this year. Bugs have been going around, my more well-to-do students have been on ski trips, and so on and so forth, all reducing my hours somewhat. I always think of 30 teaching hours as being a full week (there’s preparation on top of that), with 25 as an absolute minimum. Yesterday I started with Matei. He turns 17 next month; I’ve been teaching him for almost half his life. In my other maths lesson with the younger girl, I explained the importance of division in everyday life. Say you need to split a restaurant bill, for instance. “Won’t you just have a calculator?” I then told her that Romania’s new president is likely to ban calculators following the upcoming election. Even phones with calculator functions, like this one, will be outlawed. It’ll be chaos – utter mayhem – as people resort to the black market to obtain these devices. So you’d better learn to divide! The funny thing is, she believed me. I suppose this is a country where the president banned Scrabble just 40 years ago, so banning calculators might seem vaguely plausible. After my three lessons in Dumbrăvița, I got soaked to the skin coming back on my bike. I still had another lesson when I got home.

Recently I had one of the nicest comments yet from a ten-year-old boy. I’ve been teaching him English for six months. “English at school is boring. I’ve learnt more in a month with you than in three years at school.” I told him that I have a much easier job than his teacher at school.

A couple of weeks ago I weighed myself. I was 78 kilos. That’s more than I want to be. I’m targeting somewhere around 72 or 73; in other words, I’d like to lose two Kitties. (Yes, she’s little.) I’ve cut back massively on carbs and have reduced my portion sizes substantially. It’s already making a difference. A benefit of living by myself and having a limited social life is that it’s easier to make these sorts of lifestyle changes. On Friday I got my hair cut. The woman who did it was very nice. She commented that I had “hair for two people”. Well yes. It felt good to have a more manageable barnet once she’d finished with it, even if my big floppy mop is part of who I am.

I saw that Blues drew 1-1 at Northampton Town yesterday. Northampton are known as the Cobblers. The town has a proud history of shoemaking. All three of my pairs of Doc Martens were made there, I think. (I’ve just checked. They would have been made in Wollaston, five miles down the road from Northampton. Production moved to China and Thailand in 2003, but mine are all older than that.) The Cobblers are one of several trade-based nicknames of English football teams. There are also the Blades (Sheffield United), the Potters (Stoke City), the Railwaymen (Crewe Alexandra), the Hatters (Luton Town), the Saddlers (Walsall), just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are others. Ipswich Town are affectionately known as the Tractor Boys, which sort of counts too.

Today I read something about Sweden and Norway trying to encourage the use of cash for civil defence purposes as the world becomes a more volatile place. Scandinavia has become virtually cashless. For me, a private tutor in Romania, the story is rather different. Last night I realised I had around 50 (mostly low-value) banknotes in my wallet, with another 50-odd in an envelope ready to take to the bank tomorrow.

I’ve just started reading Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. It’s good, but it won’t be a quick read, unlike Shute’s fantastic page-turner On the Beach which I read over Christmas. Whenever I see lots of past perfect – had travelled, had seen, had had – I know I’m in for something more challenging.

No news from Mum yet about her scan. My parents called me this morning, but I couldn’t talk for long because of my squash appointment. They talked about monarch butterflies hatching from chrysalises in their garden. The joys of actually having a garden. These very pretty butterflies are common in NZ but the species originated in North America. Dad described them as “much cleverer than your cabbage white”. The cabbage white was the one we always got in the UK.

No news at all regarding the book. I’m on the verge of giving up.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Other sports - Writing a book

B is for bombshell

March 9, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a WhatsApp video chat with my brother. He called me. His son, not so little anymore, was still up and about. My brother is very proud of him, and why shouldn’t he be? He’s been teaching him letters of the alphabet using wooden blocks. D is for daddy, O is for orange, X is for … he struggled a bit there. I showed him Kitty and asked him what he thought of his little sister. My brother and I got onto the weird subject of how many stillbirths Mum’s parents had in addition to the seven live births. We think that, from talking to other family members over the years, it’s between three and six inclusive, including a set of twins. Mum has never broached the subject.

Late last night Dorothy dropped a major bombshell on me. She said, you realise you’ll probably have to pay for the book publication? What? They’ve been talking about distribution and EU funds and all sorts. If Dorothy’s right, then I’m just about out. Get them to run off two dozen copies or so, pay them whatever that costs (not much, hopefully), pick them up in a box, and give them to my students. Then try and find another publisher who’s actually serious and draws up proper contracts and stuff. Self-publishing, or vanity publishing, does not interest me in the slightest, especially if the self-publishers are then going to sell on the copies that I’ve previously paid for! If she’s right, this “publisher” is even shittier than I thought. She also thinks this is somehow normal. She’s been in Romania too long.

That potential crappiness and subsequent lack of sleep made for a strange Saturday of work. Matei’s mother didn’t have enough cash to pay me after our maths lesson. Look, pay me next week, it’s fine. She insisted on going to the cash machine that obviously wasn’t just round the corner. This almost made me late for my next lesson and deprived me of the bite to eat that I would normally have. (I ended up eating during the lesson. My student didn’t seem to mind.) While I was waiting, I saw Matei’s mum had flowcharts from her job sitting on her desk, all full of pompous language that just about killed me. Their huge TV was tuned to an American version of the Living Channel. They were redesigning the interior of a house that looked perfectly fine to me as it was. Just before the lesson I’d given Matei’s mother a bouquet of nine roses. Even numbers are unlucky, for some reason. March 8th is International Women’s Day, which has really become a thing.

When I got home, the Six Nations rugby match between Ireland and France (being played in Dublin) was on TV. The last time I watched that, it still would have been the Five Nations. France led 8-6 at the interval. I saw the second half – a veritable barrage of tries, mostly by France who were (using a word that commentators like) rampant. They won 42-27. I thought, hmmm, this is actually pretty watchable. I found the TMO (video replay) confabs quite amusing – the Aussie referee said maaate a lot. When that was over, I saw what was left of Blues against Lincoln, with the commentary almost a minute behind the picture. On 70-odd minutes, with the score at 0-0, Blues were awarded a penalty. Up stepped Kieran Dowell (not Jay Stansfield who normally takes spot-kicks). Straight into the top-right corner. I half-expected the commentator a minute later to say that he’d missed, with all the nonsensical stuff about the book still going around my head. That was the only goal of the game. The football was a lot less interesting to watch than the rugby.

Tomorrow I’ll probably take the car to Arad. The last time I went there was in January 2024, which already feels a world away.

I now realise that when I feel shitty, it’s rather nice having Kitty.

Books - Life :) - Other sports - Writing a book

Book stuff and the end of the old world

March 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

Today was a searing hot day for early March as we hit 24 degrees. When the calendar flicked over to March, I immediately thought, oh shit, just three months till summer. Last summer practically messed me up. I hung around a bit in Piața Victoriei and Piața 700 before my 1pm meeting at the publisher’s. These were my old stomping grounds back in the old days. The kiosk that sells pleșkavițe in Piața 700 is still there. I remember when they bumped the price of a pleșkaviță up from 5 lei to 6. It’s now 17. Taverna lui Romică, which didn’t exist back then, was doing a roaring lunchtime trade, selling mici and other traditional Romanian food.

The book meeting. Four of us were there: both ladies from the publishing house plus Dorothy and me. As always, the older lady didn’t stop talking. She started by asking Dorothy and me if we’d be keen to do a 1050-page (!) translation from Romanian to English on something to do with sociology. We both said no. When we got on to the book, they said they’d probably only do 100 copies in the initial run. That’s a tiny number, and it’s laughably few considering how it could be distributed to schools all over the country if they had the wherewithal to do that, but at least it seems something will happen. The younger woman clearly liked the book; you could see she was suitably amused by some of Dad’s pictures. They brought up the book on their screen. It looked all wrong. They’d set it to a crazy big page size and one of the fonts wasn’t right either. The old lady played with the settings, flailing around, hopelessly guessing. I insisted on coming back the office myself on another day, armed with my own laptop, so we can properly sort it out. At one point Dorothy and I were served strong coffee with some kind of pink ice cream on the top. It was my third coffee of the day. The kid I taught at his home after the meeting usually makes me a coffee, but this time I asked him not to.

Yesterday I had a 57-minute Skype chat with Mum and Dad. It was mostly talk of the imminent apocalypse. We all fed off each other because we all feel that way. If it wasn’t already apparent, what went down last Friday in the Oval Office made it crystal clear that it’s over. The world as we knew it, the shape of it, it’s over, and what happens next could be terminal. Change is happening so damn fast. It reminds me in some ways of this time five years ago, a week into March, where people were milling around Timișoara in denial as to the tsunami that would hit us within a few days. That time it was awful but temporary. This time it could be permanent. I hear parents of 14-year-old kids talking about this or that university and I’m thinking, do you realise that there’s a decent chance (20%? How do you estimate such a thing?) that all that talk will be meaningless?

Before our chat I went to the office adjoining the dreaded immigration centre, to apply for a cazier judiciar, whatever exactly that is. It turned out that I needed one to renew my resident’s permit for another five years. The expiry date is over a year away – 22/4/26 – but I really want to renew it before the rerun of the election which takes place in May. If Georgescu or someone of a similar ilk gets in, there may no longer be a renew. Plus my current permit still has the wrong address on it, so it would be good to rectify that.

Mercifully, I’ve just finished American Psycho. I was a bit harsh last time when I said there were very few funny bits. There are a few sprinkled through the novel, but not enough to compensate for the unremitting gore and torture. The scene with the rat for instance, it was almost too much to keep ploughing on with. And I was well and truly over the designer labels and pretentious restaurant food, even though I know they were necessary to get the vacuity of eighties yuppiedom across properly. All the Trump stuff though, my gosh. The sick protagonist of the novel idolises someone who we now know is sick beyond belief. My copy of the book has an afterword by the author Bret Easton Ellis who mentions the abuse, including death threats, he received by women he describes as feminists. That’s obviously horrifying, but when he says that “I wasn’t a misogynist when I wrote the book but the unearned feminist hysteria briefly turned me into one” I’m thinking, yeah right. I don’t get the feeling that Ellis is a particularly nice man.

On Tuesday night I watched Birmingham fall to a rare defeat at Bolton. They were well beaten, too. After Blues took the lead, Bolton were totally dominant in the second half and ran out comfortable 3-1 winners. The home crowd were on good form. Blues looked lethargic, as if their busy schedule had finally caught up with them. Blues still have a nine-point lead at the top of the league with a game in hand. Surely – surely! – they can’t mess it up from here.