Other sports

Family - Life :) - Other sports

Dreary and weary

April 19, 2024 by 0 Comments

I watched my brother’s graduation ceremony this lunchtime – they had a live stream from Lincoln Cathedral, an incredible setting for it. After they got through many dozens of postgraduates who almost all originated in Africa, finally it was his turn. A huge achievement, and not something I could have done. I mean, business management, c’mon. I would have lasted ten minutes on that course. Where his motivation came from is beyond me.

My brother is now staying in St Ives and he asked me what I did with the parking permit. Sorry, what? The parking permit I gave to you and asked to leave in the flat after picking you up from Luton. I had zero recollection of that until he mentioned it, and even then my memory of it was pretty vague. I’m talking a level of memory loss I often had at work. I really should have made a note; without notes my life would be an unholy mess of forgettory. Sure enough I’ve found the permit, right here in my flat in Timișoara. So I guess that means he can’t park there legally and I’m in the shit. Looking back, that trip was a real struggle for me. It was too short and I had nowhere near enough time to myself.

It hasn’t been a great few days because I also managed to drop my phone while on my bike and crack the glass. I often wondered how people ended up with spider-web-looking cracked screens, and now I know. I went into the shop to ask if they could swap out the glass without an expensive replacement of the whole display – it’s still fully functional – but I got a pretty firm “no can do”.

A combination of all this and the weather – now dull and dismal, or mohorât as they say here – means I now feel a million miles from where I did four weeks ago when I drove to Recaș on that beautiful day and just sat in the park.

Last year I watched the final qualifiers of the world snooker, and all the drama that involved, but this year my work schedule has made that impossible and I’m not sure I’d have bothered anyway. I hope I can watch some of the real tournament because it’s a nice relaxing thing to do. There’s also the football. Can Blues stay up? They have three games left. First up is a trip to Rotherham, the worst team in the division by some distance, on Saturday. A win would be massive, but it’s far from guaranteed – Blues’ away record is atrocious.

I feel tired. I can’t wait for the Orthodox Easter weekend, now two weeks away, and a general lack of having to see or communicate with people. The curse of instant messaging means those blissful spells are fewer and farther between.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Other sports - Tennis

Lucky to have him

April 14, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve now heard that my aunt won’t be having a proper funeral service. Instead they’ll have an informal celebration at her house in Earith in the coming weeks before the place is sold. Her ashes will be scattered in the river in Wales, where my uncle’s also were after he died in 2002.

With family members popping off around him, Dad feels like the last man standing. After what he’s been through health-wise, we’re lucky to have him. We nearly lost him in 2005 – he was only 55 – when his heart valve operation in the UK went awry. Then five years ago he got bowel cancer. He’s just had a check-up on his heart – he was supposed to have them annually but because his operation took place in the UK he slipped through the NZ net. A sleeve was placed over his aortic valve to stop it expanding, but a section was left sleeveless (why?) and that’s a potential problem. He said it’ll be OK for now but he’ll get it looked at every year until he’s 85 (they stop caring at that point) and maybe at some stage he’ll need an operation.

When I spoke to my parents yesterday they’d just been to Ashburton. They dropped in on Mum’s mother’s cousin (aged 106) in the home. Imagine that, three whole decades on top of what my aunt managed. Amazingly, she isn’t even the oldest resident of Ashburton. Her childhood friend, three months older, is also still alive. The two of them, still kicking around today, at odds of zillions to one. Mum had been to a performance of The Vicar of Dibley in Geraldine, which just happens to be the vicar’s name. Very well received, even if Alice was too fat. I suggested that Father Ted, which is bloody hilarious, would also go down well there.

Two big stories came out of America last week. One, the total solar eclipse. A student of mine mentioned the 2000 eclipse which was visible all over Europe and at its most extreme (perigee? apogee?) in Romania. I said that in fact it was in 1999, then he “corrected” me by saying that it must have been 2000 because they came out with a commemorative 2000-lei note. I then pointed out that not even crazy Romanians would have produced a 1999-lei note. The most striking aspect of that eclipse, which took place in August, was the plummeting temperature. The other headline was that OJ Simpson died. Like my aunt, he was 76 (trombones). His car chase in 1994 was one of the most-watched events in American TV history, then for the next year he was never out of the news until he was finally acquitted of double murder. I remember the school cricket team instituted an “OJ award” for getting away with murder.

This June-like weather – high 20s most days, 31 forecast tomorrow – will soon end. It’s been a heck of a run. Romanians are used to weather being predictable, and if it’s out of kilter with the time of year – even if that means bluer skies and beautiful sunshine – they don’t like it. As for me, I was brought up in the UK and spent 5½ years in Wellington, so I take what I can get. Yesterday I had only five hours of lessons, all in Dumbrăvița. First up was maths. Circle theorems – not my favourite topic. I learn them, then forget them. And I’m supposed to teach them. If I have time tomorrow I’ll spend an hour on them before I see Matei again in the evening. After that I saw Octavian’s sister who is coming on in leaps and bounds, then Octavian himself. My lessons with him always frustrate me; he’s doing an IGCSE which forces him to study literary devices, when improving his pronunciation and intonation (still nowhere near good enough) would be far more useful.

After teaching I played tennis with Florin. Whether it was a panic attack or a kind of derealisation I wasn’t too sure, but I felt shaky out there in our 90-minute session. In the first set I led 4-1, but felt unsteady in the next game in which I opened with a double fault and dropped my serve to love. Leading 5-3 on his serve, I had two set points at 15-40, then another two, but couldn’t break him down. He was zoned in. After a torturous rally in which I finished second best, I let out an Andy Murray-like screech, to my slight embarrassment. In the following game I was lucky; he had a point for 5-5 and I clipped the tape to keep myself in the game, then closed out the set on my sixth opportunity. I got that same wobbly sensation in the second set, especially on serve, but I won it 6-3. The whole time I was battling the heat and my inadequate-sized water bottle. Florin hardly broke sweat. In a little while I’m meeting him and some of his friends down by the river.

Football. I watched Blues’ home game with Cardiff on Wednesday night. They weren’t terrible but they were uninspiring and lacked creativity. When Cardiff scored midway through the second half, I was done watching it. There were no further goals, and Blues were plunged deeper into the mire. On to yesterday’s game at home to Coventry, a local rival still fighting for promotion and with an FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United in the pipeline. To everyone’s surprise a hungry Blues gobbled up Coventry 3-0 in front of 27,000 fans – a huge result as they try to dodge the drop in one of the weirdest seasons ever. There were fireworks before the game – what relegation battle? If they do stay up, the future is very bright for the club; the new owners have near boundless ambition.

Language teaching - Other sports - The UK

Easter trip report — Part 3 of 3

April 7, 2024 by 0 Comments

I slept well on Tuesday night, but on Wednesday I was shattered. I met my friends again, and we went back to Wetherspoons where this time I had fish and chips and cider. Extremely good value. But really I wanted to crawl into a hole and not see anybody. My batteries were almost flat. I had a short nap, then packed up and got on the bus to Cambridge. During that time I got a message from National Express saying that my bus to Luton would be replaced by a taxi. I called their number – is this true? – and after a long wait I was assured that yes, a taxi would show up at the same time and same place, which it did. There were just two passengers. Our twilight taxi ride through South Cambridgeshire – I liked the name Bassingbourn cum Kneesworth – was very pleasant. I got to the airport at 8:45 and hunkered down on a bench, trying to position myself vaguely comfortably amidst the armrests. (I didn’t book into a hotel. I didn’t feel I could justify the eighty quid.) Later I moved to the floor near the check-in desks which are now dominated by the pinkness of Wizz Air.

I didn’t sleep much. At 4:45 I got myself a coffee from Pret A Manger and accidentally tried to pay with a Romanian coin which the Romanian cashier immediately spotted. We struck up a conversation; she was from Iași and had lived in the UK for 22 years. She asked me if I could speak Romanian but a combination of tiredness and surprise meant the words wouldn’t come out. Feeling embarrassed, I lied that I’d only been living in Romania for three years. I then called my parents from the café. Finally it was time to board. No problems with the flight, though half-way through there was an announcement that the lucky seven millionth Wizz Air passenger to Timișoara was on board and would win a bunch of free flights and have a photo shoot on the tarmac. The winner sat four rows behind me. I was mostly relieved; I must have looked terrible and really I just wanted to get home. Frustratingly I had a 70-minute wait for my bus, but I was home at last, back to the sunshine and the warmth. That felt good, I must say.

The trip was worth it for the time I spent with my brother and his family. Seeing my nephew grow up is a wonderful thing, make no mistake. Also, there was something special about seeing my aunt – I thought I’d never get the chance again. But I needed an extra two days of not going anywhere or seeing anybody or even having to communicate. Without that, it’s not really a holiday for me. I might well go back in the summer, and hopefully I’ll factor that in.

Since I got back I’ve given my car a spin (another trip to Recaș) and am planning a longer, cobweb-busting trip tomorrow. Today was a busy day of lessons. In between them I managed to fit in a one-hour tennis session. I was relieved not to experience a panic attack this time; only rallying rather than playing a set helped there I’m sure. A weird thing happened in a two-hour English lesson. My 16-year-old student told me to stop shaking my leg. God, I am shaking my leg and I wasn’t even aware of it. “You’ve been doing it for the past month!” Yeesh, really? I know it is a nervous tic of mine, but it’s alarming that I do it without even realising. In this evening’s two-hour maths lesson I was watching my legs like a hawk.

Blues lost 2-1 at Leicester today after conceding yet another late goal. No disgrace in losing narrowly away to one of the best teams in the league, but other results went against them, and with five games remaining they’re now inside the bottom three.

Driving - Other sports - Tennis

Four wheels good, and a rare chat with Dad

March 20, 2024 by 0 Comments

My neighbour has just given me a chunk of sheep’s cheese. I’ve got very used to sheep’s cheese, with its rich farmy flavour, in my years of living here. I’ve also just had a message from a student who mixed up Tuesday and Thursday. Hmm, are you sure you mean Thursday? I’d better check. I even get people who hedge their bets with the delightful Thuesday. So far two students have actually shown up on the wrong day as a result of this misunderstanding, which isn’t that bad considering how widespread the confusion is.

I called my parents on Sunday night. Five minutes later she was off to Mayfield to play golf, meaning I got the chance (which I get two or three times a year on average) to talk to just Dad. As always on these rare occasions, he talked about Mum’s manufactured stress that profoundly impacts both of their lives without her even being aware of it. When I was over there I didn’t want to be in the same room as her a third of the time. She’d be fine one minute, then the next I’d hear that deep sigh, and that was the only cue I needed. A storm was brewing and I’d have to strap myself in for a bumpy ride. Dad told me about her wish to sell the place in Moeraki – it’s more than doubled in value since they bought it nine years ago. We agreed that selling it would be crazy because she invariably feels calmer when they go there, but then she has close to zero awareness of mental health, including her own. We talked about how sad it is that Mum – one of life’s great winners – can never be content. We discussed other topics like the unstoppable and terrifying freight train that is AI, and what sort of future their grandson will have. When I talk to him I realise how lucky I am to have him; above all he’s a great friend. I’m lucky to have Mum too of course, but I can’t help but be upset at how big a dent she puts in her and Dad’s enjoyment of their later years.

In more Dad news, he should soon get the confirmed results of his heart check-up. In 2005 he had a replacement aortic valve fitted in the UK – the procedure damn near killed him – and was supposed to have regular check-ups in New Zealand but somehow slipped through a bureaucratic net all this time. The initial check looked fine, but it’ll be good to get the final confirmation.

The car. So far I like it. Yes, it was terrifying last Wednesday when I picked it up and had to negotiate a busy city when my brain hadn’t dealt with anything like that for years, but I’ve taken it out for a couple more short trips and slowly but surely I’m getting used to driving again. It’s a 1.6 – right at the top end of what I wanted engine-wise, though smaller than any of the four cars I had in New Zealand. When I tell my female students that I’ve bought a car, the first thing they want to know is what colour it is. I must say I like the blue – anything to get away from the insipid greyness I see everywhere. The registration process is quite a rigmarole here and I went to the mall this morning to kick all that off. Romanians pronounce Peugeot as /peˈʒo/, as if it were written with an é instead of eu.

Tennis is back, much pricier than before. I had two hour-long sessions with Florin over the weekend. The first time we just rallied – I’m a fan of that – but the second time we played a game. I came from 3-1, 30-0 down to win the first set 6-3, then I struggled in the remainder – I missed a shocking number of returns and had trouble with my ball toss – but got to 4-4 when our time ran out. After Saturday’s first session we went to the bar by the river where we met some others for some drinks and mici. That was nice to begin with, but soon I was starving and desperate to get home and eat something more substantial than bloody mici. At least that meant I missed Blues’ football match – despite playing much better this time at home to Watford, they lost 1-0 for the third straight match. It’s a miracle they’re still outside the relegation zone, albeit only barely on goal difference. Today I’ve heard that Tony Mowbray isn’t in a good way at all, poor chap, and they’re bringing in Gary Rowett (he’s managed Blues before) to maybe shore things up for the final eight games.

Recently some students have told me that I’m funny. Comedy funny, not strange funny, though I’m sure I’m that too. I’m taking that as a complement. Last night I had a lesson with the 16-year-old who wants to become a pilot. His head is very firmly screwed on, and he’d rather not spend (waste?) four years at university, as his dad would like him to do, before starting his pilot training.

Under nine days till I fly to the UK. I still haven’t properly thought about it.

Driving - Other sports

Wheely scary

March 14, 2024 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I had a look at the bright blue 2006 Peugeot 307. A diesel, which I’ve never had before. Diesels get a terrible press from all the ghastly shite they pump into the atmosphere. The guy I met outside the cash-and-carry was young. It was registered in his mum’s name – she was born in 1973. It only had 133,000 km on the clock – I hope that’s genuine – and both the car and its vendor were the least dodgy I’ve come across so far. It had air con, an absolute must here, plus a load of fancy computery stuff that looked beyond me even though I’m sure it’s already old hat – every car I’ve ever owned before was built last century. Its warrant (or ITP as they call it here) runs out in July. So today I bit the bullet. It was going for €2250, I offered €2000, he bumped that up by €100 and we had a deal.

This morning I met him back at the cash-and-carry, armed with the 21 green euro notes I’d just withdrawn from the bank. (He said he’d accept either euros or lei; I had €2800 in my euro account – that I rarely use – after buying this flat and receiving the odd payment for lessons with the German girl.) On the way I met the mother of the 12-year-old boy I’d be seeing this afternoon. I was early and nervous as anything. I popped into the store to use the loo. Near the entrance were a variety of football tables for sale. I think my parents still have the one I had as a kid. I wondered why table football always uses a 2-5-3 formation. Then he turned up and we drove to the village hall in Sânandrei where I met his mother – they made copies of my residence permit and I had paperwork to sign – and blow me down (as my mother would say) I saw the mother of my 12-year-old student again. What on earth are you doing here? The business at the village hall was only the start of all the bewildering bureaucracy I’ll have to contend with now that I’ve bought a car. This took nearly an hour, then I was free to go.

But my god, It had been seven years since I last properly drove, and I was in a completely new car. The Sânandrei bit wasn’t too bad – take it nice and slowly, no rush – then I hit the city. Roundabouts and lane changes and bugger me, can I even do this again? I got hooted at just once. I wish I had an L-plate on the back (here it’s an exclamation mark) or a great big neon poo to tell everyone just how out of practice and shit-scared I was. For some of the way I was behind a car whose number plate was TM 13 DIE. When I finally parked just round the corner from my block, I breathed one hell of a sigh of relief.

In theory this will be good, and I’ve always been a fan of French cars after living in France in 2000-01 and seeing all manner of shapely jalopies on the roads, but driving again will take some getting used to and I’ve just injected another layer of life admin which I could do without. I won’t get the chance to drive again until Sunday because I’ve got a packed schedule of lessons until then. And no I won’t drive to lessons in the city. Not yet anyway, that’s for sure.

Last night I watched bits of Blues’ home game against Middlesbrough. In a far cry from their win over Sunderland last month in front of a full house, the crowd – sparser this time – sounded nervous. Panic had set in; the spectre of relegation with a capital R was hanging over the place. Middlesbrough scored the only goal – a very good one – in the 16th minute, while Blues were dire from what I saw. Since Tony Mowbray’s serious illness forced him to step down, the stuffing has been knocked out of the team. Keep playing like they did last night, or the two games before that, and they will be relegated.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Music - Other sports - Tennis

Panic stations

March 12, 2024 by 0 Comments

I didn’t sleep well last night and got up at 7:30, half an hour after I meant to. After breakfast I reviewed some Romanian words – there’s a few I can never bloody remember – before our lesson that started at nine. It was an enjoyable lesson – probably the highlight of the day. Then I called Mum and Dad. During the pandemic (it’s now four years since everything went mad) we became closer, but now our lives and experiences have drifted apart again. I have to feign interest in their building project, while the novelty of their son teaching English in Romania has long since worn off. During our chat, they said they might come to Europe in 2025. Might. Jeez.

After the chat with my parents I felt on edge. Can I face another online lesson with that damn woman? Following a surprisingly normal chat, she read screeds of corporate shite from Harvard Business Review. Doubling down on robust penetration capability to achieve superior resilience in a crowded landscape. The more I stare at that sentence the more lewd it gets. She read at 100 miles an hour – her typical Romanian monotone (and the subject matter) made it seem even faster. Slow the eff down. Please. Then it was the 17-year-old girl. We talked about music festivals. I’ve never been to one; she’s already been to three. Have I missed out? Yes, she said. I’m not convinced.

Then it was off to the twins. A quick turnaround. They wanted to talk about their diarrhoea travel experiences and Adolf Hitler. Then a third of the way through our 90-minute session it happened. A panic attack, just like I had regularly in 2001. Or at least that’s what I think it was. A sudden jolt, my heart seemingly skipping a beat, and I felt as if my lower body was giving way from under me. The twins wondered what was happening. Shaken, I recovered and made it through to the end, then did some breathing exercises on my bike trip back. My final lesson of the day was with the extremely pleasant guy in his late forties. He read from Michelle Obama’s autobiography – a fascinating window into her early life, with no end of words and expressions to challenge even an accomplished English speaker such as my student. At one point she mentioned the Muppets. I asked him if they got the Muppets here in Romania. Yes, he said, but only right here because being close to the border meant they could access Serbian TV. He was lucky to live in Muppetland, he said.

Last week I felt terribly demotivated. Heck, I’ve got to do something. Two things. Sort out a car for myself and write that damn book. I had 32 hours of lessons despite a number of cancellations. I doubt I’ll ever get the money from Marco, the bugger. Two and a half hours, then I don’t hear from him. The smoking in bed and his unwavering religious devotion rang alarm bells, though this is Romania, a country of many false alarms. On Saturday I had the most incredible lesson with the girl who has just turned seven. Two hours. How will I cope? Or more to the point, how will she cope? She managed phenomenally well. Several worksheets and colouring exercises on clothes, then a bingo game (she knows her numbers up to 60 upside down and backwards), then I read her a few tactile books before we played a 20-minute game of Kiwi-style Last Card which incredibly we didn’t even finish. She sat there the whole time in rapt attention.

Yesterday I met Mark at Scârț, the place where they have the museum of communism. It was packed there because there was a vinyl sale that I wasn’t even aware of. Then I found both Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Cosmo’s Factory and David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, both of which I’d been looking at online just an hour earlier. At 220 lei between them, they weren’t cheap, but I snapped them up. As Mark said, you’ve got to have a hobby. I’ve now got 18 records, most of them older than me. The texture of the sleeves, the artwork, the smells, it’s all pure happiness and that’s before I even start playing them. Mark and I had a good chat as always, though 14 lei for a lukewarm coffee was a rip-off. I love that area of town so I then hung around in the park on Romulus and Remus Streets with all the blossom out and hardly anyone else around. My next trick was carrying the records home on my bike (I was unprepared, obviously) without falling off it again. Then in the evening I met Dorothy in Piața Unirii. She’d just got back from a trip to the UK where she slept in six different beds and then got bumped off her flight home but got put up in Luton and received $400 in compensation.

Football. Following any kind of sport can be a heck of a time sink. After work on Saturday I watched Birmingham’s game at Millwall, direct rivals in the battle to avoid relegation. It wasn’t easy on the eye. Blues were shocking in the first half but improved somewhat in the second. The game was petering out to a goalless draw, but then Millwall scored from a corner in the 90th minute – a real sucker punch – and that was that. With ten games to go Blues are teetering, there’s no doubt about it. Since their manager was forced to take a back seat, they’ve taken just one point in four games and sit a single point above the drop zone. The good news is that five of Blues’ next seven matches are at home, including tomorrow night’s catch-up game with Middlesbrough. Straight after that run, they travel to Rotherham who were long ago cut adrift at the bottom of the table. If they can garner four wins in those eight matches, they’ll very likely stay up. Even three with the odd draw would give them a good chance. Less than that though and they’re in deep doo-doo.

Dorothy and I even talked briefly about football last night. Mostly we discussed the evocative names of the clubs. Um, OK, not Birmingham City, but rather those named after a girl or a weekday or the Far East or three successive letters of the alphabet. We didn’t talk about the names of the grounds, but those can be quite lovely too. I used to love Burnden Park and Upton Park and Roker Park and the Baseball Ground, none of which exist today. I remember a game from the 1995-96 season in which West Bromwich Albion drew 4-4 with Watford having been way out in front. West Brom’s ground was, and still is, called the Hawthorns. As Watford equalised, a reporter said “it’s four-four at the Hawthorns!” and I remember thinking how poetic that sounded.

In tennis news, Simona Halep’s doping ban has been greatly reduced and she’ll be back on the court later this month. Great news. It’ll be interesting to see how well she does after such a long time away. And this morning on TV they showed the most extraordinary rally between 37-year-old Gaël Monfils and eighth-ranked Hubert Hurkacz. Monfils won the point, and eventually the match. As for my tennis, our season is about to resume but the cost has risen from 40 lei an hour to 70 – why such a huge increase I don’t know – so my court time is bound to come down. That’s a real shame.

Tomorrow morning I’ll have a look at a blue Peugeot 307. I’ve got to get this sorted, as scary as driving again might be.

That was a very long one, I’m sorry.

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

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.