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The warmest everything ever, everywhere

March 8, 2024 by 0 Comments

After a six-week winter we had the warmest February on record (warmest X on record is something we’ve been hearing a lot lately, right?), and now spring has well and truly sprung. Saying that, it’s tipped it down all day today.

A funny week of lessons, and it’s far from over. On Monday I had the 17-year-old mall rat again, though this time she seemed actually human. We had something approaching a chat, mostly about the Ukraine war. After two years, people here have become dangerously blasé about it all, but she was rightly concerned. One oddity was that she’d never heard of the September 11th attacks. I say oddity – for me it’s the where-were-you moment when the world changed at a stroke – but in Romania it had a much smaller impact on the collective psyche than in the English-speaking world or western Europe. And of course she wasn’t even born then. On the same day I had an online session with the senior manager (a 35-year-old woman) who lives somewhere near Bucharest. Saying these sessions are like talking to a brick wall would do a disservice to the responsiveness of masonry. Just an utter waste of time. The good news is that pointless work makes up just 20% of my hours; 15 years ago it was up near 90%.

A student from 18 months ago has also rejoined the fray. He goes by Italian-sounding name of Marco. I don’t know how you get that out of Dumitru, his real name. I’ve had three online “lessons” with him already this week. One of them he spent lying in bed; during another he smoked the whole time. (I recently had a guy vape during a face-to-face session at home; things suddenly got very strawberry-ish.) The sessions with Marco aren’t pointless exactly, but he’s on a different frequency to me somehow, and I struggle to pick up a signal.

It was 10pm when I finished with Marco on Tuesday. With no lessons the next morning, I put on the game between Hull and Birmingham. Hull, predictably, took the lead just after I tuned in – a goal that should have been disallowed for handball. Hull were dominant and it had all the makings of a stonking win for them, but Blues clung on and in the 82nd minute conjured up an equaliser as Lukas Jutkiewicz who had just come on as a substitute headed the ball home. A good point for Blues but they’re still very much in a relegation scrap. (Today I saw a simulation model that gave Blues a 15% chance of being relegated. Having seen a few of their performances, that feels low, even if they do still have a game in hand. They go to Millwall on Saturday, a huge game for them.) When the Blues game was over, I switched over to Ipswich – the Tractor Boys, as they’re affectionately known – at home to Bristol City. It was 2-2 with ten minutes left and the place was rocking. Ipswich were awarded a penalty, and a shocking kick was easily saved, but not to matter. They scored the winner a couple of minutes later, and it’s a wonder they didn’t add to their tally in stoppage time. That was fun to watch.

Not much other news. In my next post I’ll give a run-down of all the vinyl I bought recently. In the meantime, here’s a video from CityNerd on the world’s top ten music cities (by the metric he uses). Very interesting.

I’m extremely proud of my brother for getting his first-class degree. His graduation takes place on 18th April, a couple of weeks after I go to the UK. It’s a shame he won’t have family there for it. My graduation ceremony in 2002, which my parents and grandmother attended, was quite lovely really.

Books - Language learning - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports

Beating the drop

March 4, 2024 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I spent some time in the park near the cathedral, reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. Someone once recommended it to me. Whenever I go there I get a twinge of sadness as the trams and trolleybuses clatter by and the cathedral bells chime four times an hour. Now I just feel the occasional mini-earthquake when a large truck goes past. As for the book, my initial reaction was, I don’t think I can stick this, but now I’ve reached chapter four I think I’ll persevere. I went back via Parcul Regina Maria and sat in the gazebo there. A girl of about 14 was with her parents. Her mother kept quizzing her, presumably for an upcoming history test as school. What happened in Philadelphia in 1774? Poor girl. I found this distracting and went home.

Kaufland has become my go-to supermarket of late. As the name suggests, it’s German-owned, so I get to pick up odd snippets of German there, like erbsen for peas. The signage in the shop (and outside it) is sensibly all in Romanian though.

On the sign above you can see both plural forms of monedă, which means coin. (It’s quite obviously related to the English money.) Should the plural be monede or monezi? From what I gather (and the Romanian academy would agree) the plural should be monede, but people often plump for monezi because most Romanian nouns ending in -dă form plurals in -zi (oglindă – mirror – becomes oglinzi; ladă – crate – becomes lăzi; livadă – orchard – becomes livezi, and so on). Debates about plurals of nouns abound in Romanian. I’ve found an excellent YouTube channel on languages, hosted by somebody called K Klein. Imagine being as clever as him.

On the way back from Kaufland I passed a small market where people (often gypsies) sell old jewellery and other mostly low-value bits and bobs. Two of the stallholders (men) were having a fight. One threw something at the other and hit him in the face. Great.

Saturday was my usual busy day. My final lesson was a two-hour maths session with the 15-year-old girl. After a calculation involving a flight from Bangkok to Melbourne, she told me how much she loved travelling and that she goes on a family holiday to Dubai every year. Dubai. Please make it stop. After our session I checked the football scores. Birmingham were 3-2 down, and a man down, against Southampton. The situation sounded hopeless. But then Blues equalised. A miracle. With ten minutes of normal time left I found a stream for the match. There was wave upon wave of pressure from Southampton. Blues hardly saw the ball. Could they hold out? Nine minutes of added time. Oh lord. After five additional minutes Southampton fired in the winner, and Blues are now in relegation peril. This is what the table looks like from 12th place down:

Rotherham are done. Two of the twelve other teams on the list will join them in the league below, unless something very weird happens to one of the teams above this truncated table. (Blues could well be one of them; they have an extra game to play relative to the teams around them, but their manager being out of commission is a massive blow.) Calling this a relegation dogfight doesn’t do justice to how tight it is. And that’s why the system of promotion and relegation is the best thing about club football. (Much of the rest of it leaves me cold.) Ten years ago Blues avoided the drop by scoring with just moments remaining; a 2-2 draw at Bolton kept them up on goal difference over Doncaster. Most dramatically of all, in 1999 Carlisle (sponsored by Eddie Stobart, a haulage company who had a cult following) were seconds from dropping out of the football league entirely when their goalkeeper scored the winning goal deep into injury time, relegating Scarborough instead. Part of the drama on the last day comes from following scores of other games. In the pre-smartphone age this was quite something: news of goals would filter through the crowd Chinese-whispers-like and you’d see players crowding around radios, agonisingly in some cases, at the end of the game.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Writing a book

Putting a jetpack up my back-end

February 27, 2024 by 0 Comments

A miracle has just occurred. This site had locked me out of making new posts. A critical error has occurred. At work I remember getting both fatal and catastrophic errors. Though this sounded like a notch down from them, it didn’t exactly fill me with optimism. I had visions of being stuck on a help chatline for hours, not getting anywhere, and maybe being locked out for good. Then I read something about a Jetpack, whatever that is exactly. I hit the update button next to Jetpack on my back-end (this might sound like I have an inkling of what I’m doing; believe me, I don’t) and hey presto, it worked.

There’s very little to report since I last wrote. The greatest excitement came on Saturday when I fell off my bike. I’d just bought some speakers for my record player and tried to carry them on the handlebars. Bad idea. The rain didn’t help matters either. There was a fair bit of traffic on the road, so I was lucky to escape with only a few bruises.

This morning I had the Romanian lesson which cleared up one or two things. Most interestingly for me, our teacher said that -iă isn’t an allowable combination in Romanian, after I tried to create a word with that ending. It’s amazing what you miss. After that I had (just) three English lessons, the first of which was with an extremely shallow young woman of 17. We’re talking puddle-deep here. I still think she’s less superficial than the girl of the same age who started with me last autumn and – thank God – didn’t get back to me after visiting Bali over Christmas. It was a relief to get my session with the hyper-competitive mall rat over with, and see the twins before coming home for an online lesson with Alin who is currently reading Michelle Obama’s autobiography. The twins worked through a textbook before I played a game with them called Bedlam which I’d picked up from a car boot sale near my brother’s place. The name of the game tells you all you need to know.

Talking of my brother, his degree results are imminent. I don’t quite get how he’s completed a degree in a little over a year while also holding down a job (will the qualification carry the same weight as a standard three- or four-year degree?) but the way he’s applied himself is very impressive indeed. This is my brother, who could hardly have been less academic as a kid. He made a concerted effort not to learn anything. Lately he’s been going on about assignments and dissertations and bibliographies – is this him I’m talking to? I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets a first-class degree. I got an upper second, by the way, and was delighted with it. In my day, firsts were hard to come by, the preserve of the real high-flyer which I certainly wasn’t. I thought I was destined for a lower second, or 2:2, sometimes known as a Desmond (ha ha), but I was very focused towards the end of my final year and scraped into the level above by a couple of percentage points.

Football. Birmingham lost 3-1 at Ipswich. I’ve always liked Ipswich – they’re fairly local to where I grew up. They’ve got a good shot at automatic promotion now. As for Birmingham, that loss to a better side puts them back in the relegation picture again after other struggling teams surprisingly won. I also watched a few frames of snooker – it’s getting to that time of year again.

Tomorrow I’ll get back to the book once more. I really need to put a jetpack up my back-end as far as that is concerned.

Books - Dreams - Family - Life :) - Other sports

It could have been curtains

February 20, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had an online lesson with a young woman in the final year of university. She’s also working part-time in IT as a tester. She shared her screen and described some bugs to me, saying that she’ll need to ask her colleagues before attempting to fix them. I asked her if her colleagues are approachable. Oh yes. I thought back to the early days of my insurance job in Auckland and how unapproachable they were. Day in day out, I felt unable to ask anybody and had no choice but to guess. For more than two years, until I got shunted off to a different department, I felt terminally stupid. My first real job, dealing with flood maps in Peterborough, wasn’t like that at all. People were happy to help, and guess what, I learnt stuff.

So I spoke to my parents after breathing that sigh of relief. Damn well tell us next time, I said. I was lucky enough to get five minutes of just Dad, as Mum dealt with a delivery man. Dad wasn’t too happy either. He said that Mum had had the lump for bloody ages before seeing a doctor, and if it had been melanoma she’d have been toast. Mum came back on the line to say she’d been back on the golf course, playing in some competition or other, going round in exactly 100. Nice to know she’s got her priorities straight.

On Sunday I had dinner with Mark at the Timișoreana beer factory which is a five-minute walk for me. We both had bulz bănățean – a substantial, very Romanian dish consisting of mămăligă (polenta) with cheese, a fried egg, sausages, mici, pork, gogonele (pickled green tomatoes) and pickled cucumbers. We had two beers apiece. It was busy there, though you’d never guess it from the outside, and as is typical for Romania it took us 40-odd minutes to get served. He told me about his girlfriend’s family, which made any issues I might have with my mother pale into insignificance. She grew up in a poor part of Yorkshire as the middle of three sisters; they suffered constant mental abuse at the hands of their father who committed suicide soon after they left home. Understandably this has left her badly scarred. (If you ask me though, she’s done remarkably well. She’s carved out a successful teaching career for herself.) Now 37, she is unable to have children; he said she will have IVF treatment. Next month (I think) they will get married in a registry office in Scotland. That’s because England requires you to be resident in the country to get married, but Scotland doesn’t.

I’ve almost finished reading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Dad gave me it – an 1896 edition – when I was over there six months ago. Defoe himself was only five when the bubonic plague struck London in 1665, so I wonder where all his facts and (extensive) figures came from. There are clear parallels with Covid, and the good and bad of humanity have changed remarkably little since that time. Just like with Covid, the plague’s long incubation period meant that people transmitted the disease asymptomatically, killing many others in the process. The lack of anything approaching modern medicine made the whole thing harrowing beyond belief. Doctors, such that they were, tried to break the swellings – or buboes – by burning them. Pure torture. In the autumn as the figures improved, people got blasé, thinking they were out of the woods. That brought about a second wave. Sounds familiar. The plague was followed by the Great Fire of London in the following year.

I watched Birmingham’s home game against Sunderland at the weekend. They came from a goal down at half-time to win 2-1 in front of a packed stadium. (The club had put on some kind of promotion.) Once young Jordan James bundled in the equaliser on the hour mark, the home side were galvanised and were clearly the better team. They were lucky though; Sunderland were really sluggish in defence in the second half. Now for the bad news. A serious medical issue has forced Tony Mowbray to step back from his managerial duties. Let’s hope he makes a full and speedy recovery, obviously. Mowbray strikes me as a thoroughly good bloke.

Finally, a totally mental dream I had last night. It took place at night in St Ives, the town where I grew up, except the streets were full of LED screens showing animated pictures of every colour imaginable. I met the young guy who ran the show, having learnt the trade from his father. He explained that the animation in St Ives was “three years out of date” compared to what other towns had. I said I preferred the older stuff. Then he invited me into the control room, where for some reason he was also broadcasting images to Mindanao in the Philippines. Where I got that from I have no idea. (This morning I found out that Mindanao is in fact an island, not a city.) I hope I have more dreams like that, not the ones where I trek around the city to do some life admin task, only find the place boarded up and overgrown by weeds.

Family - Maths teaching - Other sports

Kept in the dark (and an update!)

February 14, 2024 by 0 Comments

My friend in New Zealand said I’d been writing more often lately, and it’s true. Because nonsensical shit keeps happening.

After my lesson this morning, I had a longish chat with Mum and Dad. Well mostly Dad, about the geopolitical situation in my part of the world. The medium-term future terrifies me, truth be told. Yesterday I had a 13-year-old boy tell me that the rest of Europe (including us in Romania) should butt out of the Ukraine war and anyway Ukraine isn’t a real country, it’s just part of Russia. We’re on their doorstep, so that’s bloody great. After discussing all this with Dad, I asked Mum if she was playing tennis this week. No. Why? Well I had a lump removed from my back last Wednesday and I’m waiting to get the biopsy. I’m getting the seven stitches removed on Friday, so maybe I’ll know then. Yes, it is cancerous. Don’t you worry your poor little head about it, hahaha. I’d already spoken to her at the weekend, after the op, but she didn’t tell me anything then. If I hadn’t asked her about tennis I’d still be in the dark. I don’t know how long she’s had the lump. Dad said he’s encouraged by the fact that it came out in one piece, with no tentacles, as he put it.

When I got off the phone I messaged my brother. He had no idea (he’d also spoken to them at the weekend) and was incredulous. FFS! Why didn’t she say anything? I felt bad because he was probably mid-nappy change or something, but he needed to know. He said he wished our parents didn’t treat us like we were twelve, but he’s a few years out there. You’d even be open about this stuff with twelve-year-olds. Let’s hope she gets the all-clear from the biopsy and that’ll be the last we hear of it. In the meantime it’s obviously a worry.

In other news, I’ve got a new maths student (a 14-year-old boy called Vladimir – eew) starting on Thursday. He’s from the British school, where parents have money, so I can charge a bit more. His mum said he’s needed extra lessons for a while, which either means he really is struggling or his parents have high expectations. If I had to guess, I’d plump for the latter. It’s good to have another string to my bow – it gives me even more variety in my day as well as some extra income. It’s still fantastically mad that after all that unbearable corporate shite I’m now doing all this. Yesterday my student described her daily team meetings at work. How many people? In my experience, five worked well while eight became unwieldy. Beyond that and these meetings were pointless. Twenty-two, she said. That’s not a team, that’s a platoon.

A few posts ago I mentioned the optimism surrounding the new manager – Tony Mowbray – taking over at Birmingham after the Wayne Rooney debacle. Well they’ve just lost their last three games – all away from home – without scoring a goal, and that’s despite a boatload of chances. They’re now embroiled in a relegation scrap, just three points above the drop zone. Tonight they face Blackburn at home. Edit: Blues won 1-0 and they damn well deserved the win too. Blackburn very nearly snatched a draw right at the end though.

Update: Dad emailed me 20 minutes ago to say that they’d just got Mum’s results, sooner than expected. It’s a basal cell carcinoma – a type that doesn’t spread, so cutting it out should have got rid of it for good. I’ve passed that news on to my brother. A big relief all round. Dad also said they’ll need to get the boiler replaced in one of their flats in St Ives, at a cost of £2800, though that’s small beer in comparison to Mum’s health.

On a very different note, Steve Wright, a Radio 1 DJ who was hilarious to listen to at times, has died aged 69. His most famous show was Steve Wright in the Afternoon which ran during the late eighties and early nineties and included a very funny “Mr Angry”. He’ll be sorely missed.

Family - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports - Romania

Family contact

February 12, 2024 by 0 Comments

Good news – my brother and his family are going to New Zealand in August for three-and-a-bit weeks. They’ll come back just before my nephew turns two and the fare whops up. I spoke to my sister-in-law about it on Friday, just after they’d booked the trip. (She’d had to get the green light from her boss.) She was apprehensive about flying so far with her son, a placid little chappy though he is. Will the trauma of it all mess him up? I was roughly the same age as him when Mum took me – and my tiny brother – to New Zealand in 1982. The mind boggles. My parents are paying for the trip (“well I hope so,” my brother said, “because we can’t afford it”). That’s what living in the UK in 2024 with a sodding great mortgage does to you. Mum made the trip in ’82 (a similar cost in real terms) without batting a financial eyelid. They were living – pretty much – on just the unpredictable income of my father. Crazy, isn’t it?

They should have a nice time. The house will – I hope! – be finished, so Mum won’t be worn out and highly strung and miserable (let’s be honest) like she was when I was there. At any rate, even if she was under stress, she’d take great pains not to show it, unlike with me. I get the real deal. They’ll see a lot of Mum and Dad – if my parents had come to the UK, that might not have been the case – and there will be happy times as the little one is passed around various aunts and uncles.

A fairly standard week of lessons for me. On Saturday I had eight hours, including four of maths. With both my maths students it was the same story. Determine what the problem is and how to solve it, then do your calculations, not the other way round! There needs to be a maths equivalent of “aviate, navigate, communicate”. And jeez, when you’re 15 years old, dividing 35 by 7 doesn’t require a calculator. I wish someone would invent the shockulator, a calculator that administers electric shocks that increase in voltage the easier it gets to do the problem in your head.

On Wednesday I saw the ENT specialist again. We did the whole thing in Romanian this time. He put that probe up my nostrils. Stop flinching! Stop tensing up! Well I’m trying, but it bloody hurts! After then sucking the wax out from my ears (plenty of it), he gave me a prescription for some nasal spray that will last me two months, if that. I’ll probably wait until the long hot summer when I’ll need it the most.

Yesterday I went a different way on my bike. The wind made it slow going. I rode past the factories, some still in operation, others not, to Moșnița Nouă. When I went there six years ago for a lesson it was a village. Not any more. I wouldn’t want to live there.

Muzicorama – the nightly music programme on local radio – sadly finished last September, not that I got many chances to listen to it. The host, Bogdan Puriș, still does his show on a Sunday morning, and yesterday there was certainly an eclectic line-up. Four consecutive songs (saved on my Shazam) were Hey Matthew by Karel Fialka (1987), Bats by the Scary Bitches (2009) (because the lyrics mention Transylvania?), Come Down Jesus by José Feliciano (1971), and This Wheel’s On Fire by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity (1968).

Lately I’ve been listening – a lot – to David Bowie’s 2002 album Heathen.

I’ve just read that Kelvin Kiptum, marathon world record holder (2:00:35) died in a car crash yesterday. The Kenyan was only 24. At such a young age for a marathon runner, he would have had many chances to go under two hours. Tragic news.

Spumotim, which I think is still up and running. They make polyurethane foam products. (Spumă is Romanian for foam.)

As much of this colossal abandoned factory as I could get in the camera lens
Family - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports

Not this year, maybe not ever

February 4, 2024 by 0 Comments

Not a terrible week, if a fair few cancellations. Two or three times this week I’ve had to check myself. This will be nice for Mum and Dad when they come over. Ah. I’d been looking forward to it for months. But they won’t be coming this year, maybe not next year either, maybe not ever. I avoid the subject with them on the phone now. When we last spoke, they’d just been to Washdyke to do something housey. Mum talked about the importance of flow. Heck, they had all the flow in the world back at the other place.

Three sessions today, including a marathon 2½-hour maths lesson this afternoon. When I saw Matei this morning for our usual two-hour stint, his parents – they both have senior positions at a big supermarket chain – showed me photos of their recent team building. His father was up on the dance floor. An extrovert’s dream. When we were upstairs in his room, Matei – less extroverted than his father – said he dearly hoped he’d never have to do that. We spent most of the session on quadratic equations, which he can just about do in his sleep. He has an enormous world map on his wall. It’s fun to stare at. Spratly Islands popped out at me today. Sometimes I can even use it to explain concepts, like when we were doing bearings and I happened to have watched a video of a 1989 flight between the Brazilian cities of Marabá and Belém which went horribly wrong, partly because someone had keyed in the wrong bearing. On the way to Matei’s place I stopped at Kaufland to get a coffee from the machine. A homeless man who must have been there all night asked me for the time.

Yesterday I watched this YouTube video on Luton. Yikes, that hotel. A reminder that I’ll have to stay a night in Luton in two months’ time. The one positive from that video is the local football team: yes, Luton Town play in the Premier League. At a ground with entrances inside a row of Victorian terraced housing. Last season they went up through the play-offs in dramatic fashion. Their final against Coventry stood at 1-1 with moments left in extra time when they scored. Delirium. Only for the goal to be chalked off for handball following a video replay. Then they somehow kept their nerve to win on penalties. This afternoon Luton had a ridiculous 4-4 draw at Newcastle; they sit one point above the relegation zone.

On Tuesday I had my first haircut for ages. The place opposite me closed a few months back, and it’s now a trek to get it done. A middle-aged woman did it. I apologised for my dodgy Romanian. It doesn’t matter. I was hoping she might say it wasn’t actually that bad, but hey.

I’ve now ordered eleven records, the latest being Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue, and a few books. I’m getting them sent to a single location near Paris, and from there I’d get them delivered as a job lot rather than in dribs and drabs.

Tomorrow I’m going over to Mark’s place, and from there we’ll go to Buziaș, a town 30 km from here.

Family - Films - Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

Kill the lot

January 30, 2024 by 0 Comments

It’s been a long day. Five lessons, including one with a 35-year-old woman who works for a big investment bank. The purpose of my lessons with her remains a mystery; whenever I point out anything language-related, she pays zero attention. Today’s other sessions were rather less pointless. Before all that, I had the weekly Romanian lesson, and before that I went to the supermarket. Nobody on the checkouts at all. Self-service only. Everybody had a problem, including the one woman tasked with dealing with customers’ problems, though she’d clearly become institutionalised and thought that the shitty checkouts were fine and the customers were the problem. Shit is becoming the new OK everywhere. That all slowed me down and I was in a mad dash to get back for Romanian, carrying a backpack and a large carrier bag over the handlebars.

In our recent Romanian classes, the teacher has been asking us what we would do in various hypothetical situations, as a way of teaching the conditional. Last week she asked me what three things I’d change about the world, top of my list was killing social media. “Facebook, Instagram, the lot?” She was surprised how far I wanted to go. And Whatsapp. The bloody lot. (I nearly included YouTube.) Case in point, I WhatsApped Mark on Saturday morning to ask if he wanted to meet up the day after. Maybe, I’ll get back to you. Not a problem. The evening came and went and I was off to bed. Nothing from Mark. Right, in that case I’ll go for a walk in the morning and then watch the Australian Open men’s final. I get up in the morning and at about nine I look at my phone. There’s a message about meeting up in the morning. Sent at 12:20 am. Crap. Just why? Sorry mate, you’re a really nice guy and someone I enjoy spending time with, but I’ve made my plans now. Not Mark’s fault; it’s just the new normal.

Last night I saw Oppenheimer at the cinema. After missing the chance to see it in Geraldine, I thought it would pass me by for good, but Dorothy saw that Cinema Timiș were having an Oscars night, so I joined her. This was the cinema that I used to live above; I saw a film there in its dying days seven years ago. It was sad to see it go. Recently it underwent a revamp, and together with its sister Cinema Victoria, there are now places to see a film without setting foot in a mall. Fantastic, and bucking the trend of everything turning to custard. Timiș seats 500-odd; we sat in row T, one from the back. (I noticed there was no Q – a deeply foreign letter to Romanians.) Oppenheimer is a three-hour epic, but it didn’t seem that long. The stakes were so heart-stoppingly high, and all interwoven with a tale of an extraordinary man. I must have changed what I thought of him about eleven times during the course of the film. Cillian Murphy (apparently he’s famous or something) played the part of Oppenheimer so well. I’m glad I saw it, and all for just 20 lei (NZ$7 or £3.50). Such good value. Dorothy (nearly 70) filled me in at the end on what the cryptic “fellow traveller” meant; I had no idea that it meant a sympathiser and enabler of communism.

On Saturday I helped my sister-in-law’s friend with some maths, then after sending my scanned pages of working I gave them a call. They showed me my nephew who was half in the bath, then called me back post-bath. Two months now till I see them all – something to look forward to. My brother was unimpressed with our parents. He reckons they might never come to Europe again. I pointed out that Dad did visit his sister; my brother said that’s about where the bar is – you have to be dying for them to bother. Lately I’ve heard a lot about politicians “reading the room” – or not. It’s a phrase that’s in vogue. Mum and Dad have misread the room here in spectacular fashion.

The Australian Open. On Friday morning I switched on the TV, not even realising that Djokovic’s semi with Jannik Sinner was taking place, and saw the score: 6-1, 6-2 for Sinner. I did a double-take. I sat through set three which Djokovic eked out on a tie-break after saving a match point, and thought, you’ll bloody go on and win it now, you bugger. At that point I had to leave for a lesson. I was surprised and relieved to see that Sinner won in four sets. Yesterday was the final between Sinner and marathon man Medvedev. The Russian, playing flagless, was impeccable at the start and led 6-3, 5-1. Sinner was flat; maybe it was simply nerves in his first grand slam final. But the tide turned. More than a whole day on court in the tournament caught up with Medvedev. He did go two sets up but rather hobbled over the line in the second, and from there the far fresher man took over.

I also watched two full matches in the FA Cup fourth round. The first was hard to believe. Ipswich huffed and puffed but couldn’t blow Maidstone’s house down. Maidstone United, in the sixth tier of English football, only had two attempts on goal in the match, both of which went in. (One of them would have been chalked off for a foul had video replay been available.) Ipswich had 38 shots, a number that hardly seems possible, but thanks to heroics by Maidstone’s keeper and huge dollops of bad luck, scored just the once. Maidstone are the first team at that level to get this far in the Cup in my lifetime; the last was Blyth Spartans in 1978. Then I watched Leicester play Birmingham. The visitors dominated the first half but didn’t score; Leicester then ran out 3-0 winners. Blues’ defending for the third goal was terrible but by that stage it hardly mattered.

Not so many lessons tomorrow, so back to the book.

Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

The kings of clay (or not)

January 21, 2024 by 0 Comments

She’s back. Elena, the lady who lives above me, after a long stay in Canada. The walls and floors of this Ceaușescu-era apartment block are so thick that no sound permeates them. Except her voice. I’ll pop up and see her later today.

Last night I played tennis with one of my students – Lucian, who’s almost certainly gay. He’s had 146 lessons with me so far. We played on an indoor clay court. It wasn’t cheap, but for a one-off I can handle it. (He’s got one of those proper job thingies, and plays there all the time. He even gets coaching.) I come from a land of virtual claylessness, so the dusty orange stuff feels quite exotic to me. Like me, he’s left-handed; that always adds an extra dynamic. (Presumably he also writes with his left hand. I don’t. In that respect (only), I’m just like Rafael Nadal.) We knocked up, then started a game. I won the first game, then led 0-40 on his serve thanks to some double faults, but he came back in that game and was soon all over me. Yeah, he’s too good, isn’t he? He could accelerate through the ball like I could only dream of, and sometimes he imparted sidespin – his coach had probably taught him the technique – that left me floundering. He led 3-1 and had a point for 4-1. But I somehow found a way back. Early on I struggled with my range, often hitting long. When I located my radar I was suddenly in business. I led 5-3, then dropped serve, but from 30-0 down in the tenth game I won the next four points for the set. The second set was bizarre: I won it 6-0, but it was a close 6-0 if such a thing exists. The majority of games went to multiple deuces. In truth I fed off his mistakes, of which there were many. We started another set – I won the first two games, then he reeled off the next three before the clock ran out on us. After the game he said that he focuses on producing “nice shots” and found my shots unusual and hard to read. Though I’m not a very competitive person, I’m not big on aesthetics; I select strokes that give me the best chance of winning points and games. We spoke mostly in Romanian; that’s always a bonus for me.

On Friday I had a new student. I got him through word-of-mouth, which is my most common method these days. His mother had contacted me; he was a 16-year-old named Peter who goes to the British school. Hmmm. In Romania you’re called Petru or Petrică, not Peter, so what’s the story here? At 7pm a message flashed up on my screen, asking me to let Zhong Mao (or something similar) into the meeting. Peter and his mother had come over from Nanjing, a city of nine million, a few months ago. I’m still not sure of the full story of how they ended up in Timișoara. He’s a nice guy. Fairly serious, I suppose – the unremitting Chinese education system practically forces you to be like that. Suddenly having the odd break from intense study was a revelation to him. When I asked him what he likes best about Timișoara he said the food. Kebabs in particular. Ha! He said he knew just one Romanian word – ciao – which doesn’t exactly count. (Ciao, sometimes Romanianised into ceau, is the go-to word in Banat where I am. In the east of the country you hardly every hear it.) I was impressed with his English. Tomorrow it looks like we’re having a face-to-face lesson.

Yesterday I had my usual suite of lessons, minus the one at 8am. The most interesting one came at the end. My student (a 15-year-old girl, or is she 16?) had to write a 500-word article about anything. No pointers at all. We homed in on a subject pretty quickly though. She’s travelled a fair bit in Romania, and decided to write about the Danube Delta which she visited when she was ten. I’d love to visit that area of natural beauty, preferably with my parents if and when they ever come this way. We nearly finished the article in the time she was with me. This brainstorm was pretty handy; I think she was able to decipher my writing.

When I finished that lesson I saw that Stoke had just scored, reducing Birmingham’s lead to 2-1 in their away game. But Blues clung on to the win, and Tony Mowbray’s revolution continues.

Dad sent me this 14-minute YouTube video from Neil Oliver, a Scottish ex-presenter on matters historical and archeological. It started off fine. The idea of personal money having restrictions and an expiry date isn’t that far-fetched; in China it might already be happening. (Only I wish he hadn’t said it was a fact. It’s just a prediction.) Then he went down the rabbit hole by talking about the Kennedy assassination, and just as I thought he might avoid Covid entirely, there it was. Lockdowns. Bloody masks. Please make it stop! My biggest issue with all these people – and there are no shortage of them – is that they bang on about being silenced. No you’re bloody not! Social media gives you an audience for your stinking fact-free horseshit like never before. At least Dad agreed with me.

I’m about to brave the outside. It’s minus four.

Family - New Zealand - Other sports

A degree in emotional detachment

January 18, 2024 by 0 Comments

The above is a quote from my brother. When I spoke to him on Monday, he said that’s what our parents have. Not a bad turn of phrase from someone who’s been doing a degree himself. (His results are imminent; I expect he’s done very well.) He was referring to their coming over to Europe. Or not. Yes, it’s a major undertaking, but you’d think there’d be some enthusiasm, some modicum of desire to want to see your own kids and your only grandson in their own world, that would trump all the reservations about the journey. The fact that this doesn’t exist has shocked both of us. We shouldn’t be too upset, we said to each other. Compared to a lot of families, we have it pretty good with all the Skyping and WhatsApping. My brother is now serious about making a trip to New Zealand, with his wife and son, during the southern winter. His aunts and uncles would love to see the little one, I’m sure.

Birmingham played their FA Cup replay against Hull last night. It wasn’t televised, so I listened to it on Radio WM, the local station. I thought it might have been geoblocked, but thankfully not. Listening to football on the radio was something I used to enjoy many moons ago, so this brought back good memories. The ground was three-quarters empty, it was bloody freezing, and the players came out to the rousing Feel It by The Tamperer, just like they did way back in ’99. Hull scored early and were the better side in the first half. Blues, still a goal down, made an extraordinary quintuple substitution after an hour. Changing basically half the team paid immediate dividends as Blues equalised straight away and bossed the rest of the game. They couldn’t find a second goal though, until right at the end – extra time was just moments away – when Blues found the winner via the Japanese player Koji Miyoshi. They now face Leicester away in the next round. A tough task. Tony Mowbray has injected a bumper dose of optimism into the club overnight; scoring last-minute goals in two straight games doesn’t do any harm either. When the game was over, the coverage switched to local rivals Wolves – they were in extra time. I was momentarily confused by the commentary – “Jensen passes to Mee”. That Abbott-and-Costello name reminded me of the Arthur Mee children’s encyclopedias.

I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. Yes, we talk pretty often. They’d been to Wanaka to collect a painting, then to Moeraki where they stayed the night, then back via Kurow and Waimate (I think). A long drive. They were telling me about a Green MP who had been caught shoplifting (high-end jewellery) on multiple occasions. We were all puzzled as to just why? She came into the country as a refugee and found herself with the world at her feet. Is the buzz you get from the act so great that you’re willing to risk your career, your reputation, your freedom, pretty much everything? It’s hard to fathom.