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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.

Life :) - Music - Other sports

Going back in time

January 16, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Elena, the 80-year-old lady who lives above me. On Friday she flies back here from Toronto. She told me that the man who lived on the ground floor and had a stroke just before Christmas had passed away at the age of 74. Very sad, though I never knew him.

I got new my record player up and running on Sunday. The 460 lei (£80 or NZ$160) I’d made the previous day barely paid for it. The first record I put on was Chicago’s 18. When I bought it I didn’t realise it was literally the band’s 18th album. So it was all very eighties. Even the brilliant – if cryptically titled – 25 or 6 to 4 had been brought kicking and screaming into the Reagan era. Slightly disappointing, but at least the damn thing worked. Then I put on Leonard Cohen’s greatest hits album from 1975 – before he came out with other hits that were just as great – and that was pure poetry from start to finish. Of the other three albums I bought, the wonderfully ethereal Oxygène by Jean-Michel Jarre is my favourite. I’m now eyeing up a dozen or so other LPs online, mostly from the seventies. I associate vinyl with older music; something like MGMT or Arcade Fire (already both 15-odd years old) on vinyl would feel weird to me.

In this morning’s Romanian lesson, our teacher asked me what time I’d like to go back to if I had the chance. I thought for some time about this. Maybe I could go back almost a millennium to witness the building of Ely Cathedral, just down the road from where I grew up. How and why did they build that? But I settled on something far more recent: the sixties and seventies. My teacher was surprised, but I’ve always thought of that era as an incredible time to be alive. The music, the energy, everything seemed limitless. Born in 1980, I missed out. Go back any further though and I think I’d be struck by the harshness of life, if Dad’s descriptions of the UK shortly after WW2 are anything to go by.

I always have to talk about football with my 14-year-old student. I don’t mind too much, but I’m far out of the loop these days. He’s recently taken a liking to Aston Villa, a side I saw play twice (if memory serves) when I was student. One of those games was a real belter: in the FA Cup against Leeds in January 2000, Villa won 3-2 with Benito Carbone scoring a hat-trick. I remember Paul Merson playing a big part in Villa’s win too. The place was rocking. Villa are now flying high, third in the Premier League. To be honest I preferred their rivals Birmingham City, known as Blues, and saw them more often. (Probably because they were cheaper.) Earlier this season Blues were sixth in the division below when their new American owners decided in their wisdom to sack their popular manager, a local lad, and bring in uber-famous Wayne Rooney. Turns out Rooney was rubbish. Once Blues were brushed aside on New Year’s Day at Leeds, Rooney got the boot after just 15 games (and only two wins) and the fans breathed a collective sigh of relief. In came ultra-pragmatic Tony Mowbray. When my lessons were over on Saturday, I saw that Birmingham were 2-1 down at home to Swansea in Mowbray’s first game in charge. Deep into added time, teenage Jordan James struck a pretty sweet equaliser, and Blues escaped with a point. Tomorrow Blues have another home game – an FA Cup replay against Hull. The cup is nothing like it was, sadly, and they’ll struggle to get much of a crowd.

Life :) - Music - Other sports

Lukes that kill

January 4, 2024 by 0 Comments

Last year it was the two Michaels, this year the two Lukes. They didn’t disappoint. Humphries took the first set and was all set to make it two sets, but Littler smashed and grabbed. One apiece. From there the youngster was in the ascendancy, and Humphries looked a beaten man. Despite maintaining a three-figure average, there was a distinct weariness about him. Every big treble (all those treble 19s!) or big finish by Littler was a gut-punch. In the deciding leg of the seventh set, leading 4-2, Littler needed 112. He can recite his out-shots in his sleep. Treble 18, single 18, double top. His first dart found the intended target, but then his second clattered into it, joining it in the treble. He could still finish – on double two – but he was knocked off his stride. He missed the double two by a whisker, Humphries mopped up to go just one set behind, and from there the “older” Luke (born 11/2/95) never looked back. He won 7-4 to lift the title, pocketing half a million pounds for doing so, while Littler won £200,000. The remainder of the match was hardly plain sailing for Humphries though – there were deciding legs and crisis points with great regularity. Humphries averaged 104, Littler 101. They both hit a maximum 170 finish. The legs and sets zoomed by, such was the standard. The whole thing was done and dusted in under two hours, including seven annoying ad breaks.

It might be for the best that Littler didn’t win. Call it the Emma Răducanu effect – win an enormous prize when you’re oh so young, then the pressure of expectation is heaped on you and it’s all too much. Littler was extremely popular with the crowd, and got people tuning in from around the world. Even Romania. ln large part it was his extraordinary talent for someone so young, but also it was the way he looked so comfortable on the big stage and how he already had the doner-kebab-eating darts player look down pat. It’s scary that he could still be challenging for big titles in 2060, when I’ll either be pushing up daisies or won’t know a bull’s eye from a cat’s eye. As for Humphries, he was pedestrian in his first match, then stared down the barrel in both his next two, at one point surviving two match darts. From there he put together three sublime victories and was a worthy overall winner. In his speech he cited his battles with mental health problems. Good on him for opening up. It was also referee Russ Bray’s last match in charge. His incredible 180 call will be missed. The whole tournament was a huge success. The international players added a lot of intrigue to the early rounds, and were often victorious. Germany is now a powerhouse in the game. Let’s hope darts, which still reminds me of beer and fags on telly when I was about seven, continues to grow.

The adverts between sets were at times horrifying. The Barclays one gave me conniptions. It gave a litany of financial stresses that modern, economically active people face: school uniforms, gym memberships, phone bills, yoga classes, getting a wonky shed door fixed, swimming lessons, more school uniforms, I can’t remember how it went exactly. Apart from the idea that Barclays could help you with any of that being laughable, it made me consider how far I’ve drifted from normal, mainstream life. And just as well – I wouldn’t bloody cope with all of that. Not even close.

I recently picked up a newspaper called Dilema Veche. That second word means “old”; their house style is to use the pre-1993 spellings – î instead of â, except in the name România and its derivatives. The headline – Bohemianism in Romania – caught my eye. There are several articles in the paper on bohemia and its origins, some of which I’ve yet to read. A bohemian lifestyle, which I partly have now, has always been attractive to me, as long as it is accompanied by a good deal of actual work. That’s really what I wanted 20 years ago or more, but I ended up doing the corporate thing because there was no alternative that I could see. The paper bemoans the loss of bohemia in society, and blames this at one point on conformity caused somehow by woke culture. I’d say the real culprit is hyper-capitalism. A consumer-based society runs counter to bohemian values. So do skyrocketing property values. Devonport in Auckland was a hotbed of alternative lifestyles in ther eighties and early nineties, but seven-figure house prices had put the kibosh on all of that by the time I arrived there. The cost of university education isn’t helping either.

What a start to 2024 in Japan. First a huge earthquake off the Sea of Japan and resulting tsunamis killed dozens. Then on a runway in Tokyo, an Airbus with 379 people on board struck a small coastguard plane which was headed to the west coast of Japan to help victims of the earthquake. Five of the six on the small aircraft died, but miraculously everybody escaped from the burning passenger jet. I still remember as a small boy the grainy TV images from Japan after a domestic 747 crashed into a mountain, killing 520 people. That number felt unthinkable to me then. This was 1985, the deadliest year in aviation to date.

Edit: Talking of 1985, Driver 8 by R.E.M. just came up on my YouTube. It came out in that year. A fantastic train-country-folk-rock song. Did train drivers not have names back then?

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

Searching for inspiration

January 3, 2024 by 0 Comments

Today I’ve been working on the book. The book about him. A second crack, after my aborted effort a year ago. (I did do one chunky chapter then, plus I made a load of notes that are extremely useful.) None of this is easy. A novel isn’t a task you can just plough your way through. It relies on inspiration, and sometimes you just don’t have it. And then you write a few hundred words, and think, are you sure this isn’t boring crap that nobody would ever read? Page upon page of self-doubt. One of the fun bits is thinking up names of characters. I’m proud of Felicity Lee, the club vice-president who’s always everywhere all at once. Her name sounds like a butterfly.

Yesterday I did two important things. First I booked flights to the UK around Easter. Leaving on 28th March, coming back a week later. Top priority is seeing my brother, sister-in-law and nephew. It’s a pain that the only flights back are in the early morning, so I’ll have no choice but to stay overnight in Luton on 3rd April. The other biggish thing I did was order a record player. I hope to have a lot of fun with that when it arrives. Buy up a load of old albums, basically go mad with them. I can see why vinyl has come back – the whole experience beats Youtube and Spotify hands down. A more minor thing I did was order a new laptop charger after one of mine got so hot it started smouldering. I still have one, but I rely so heavily on my laptop for work that having a backup is a necessity.

So a new year is upon us. I didn’t stay long in a very packed centre of town on New Year’s Eve. Enough to see the fireworks, and that was it. I’m so glad I avoided the stress of an event. I’ve been thinking back to previous years where a 3 turned into a 4. I saw in 2014 with some friends at Owhiro Bay in Wellington – we lit a fire, saw the stars, and felt rather small. I was going through a rough time with withdrawal symptoms, having recently tapered off my antidepressant. Ten years before that I’d only just arrived in New Zealand. We spent the evening with some family friends, played some volleyball which I was spectacularly bad at, and saw the Caroline Bay fireworks. As for 1993-94, that one involved my grandfather, suffering badly from Alzheimer’s, being all at sea during a game of Skip-Bo. Going back even further, I rather doubt I stayed up to see in 1984, and wouldn’t have known what the fuss was about if I had.

Darts. A couple of barnburners yesterday, as the Americans would say. Chris Dobey stormed into a 4-0 lead against Rob Cross in a race to five sets. He’d been great all tournament and once again he was dominant here. Until he wasn’t. Surely he’ll fall over the line. But he never did. Watching it slip from his grasp was slow torture. Even in the ninth and final set he could have won as he came from 2-0 down in legs to force the win-by-two tie-break, but it wasn’t to be. Professional sport – even darts – can be cruel. In the evening Michael van Gerwen, who had been unplayably good, had an inexplicable shocker against Scott Williams. He was expected to steamroller his opponent, but the juggernaut never got going. Williams was plenty good enough to capitalise, winning 5-3. Luke Humphries, who plays Williams in the second semi-final tonight, had no such problems, and neither did Luke Littler who plays Cross in the first match. Littler, still a child, is now the favourite. The semis are first to six, and I’ll be watching one of them at most. I need to sleep.
Update: Littler produced a frankly ludicrous performance, averaging 106, to beat Cross 6-2.
Update 2 (next morning): There’s no way I could stay up to watch Humphries smash a 109 average in his 6-0 whitewash of Williams. Those numbers from both Lukes are ridiculous. The final (first to seven) is tonight.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Other sports - Writing a book

Grounds for optimism

January 1, 2024 by 0 Comments

It’s already 2024 in New Zealand. The last embers of the old year were still flickering when I called Mum and Dad. I thought I wouldn’t get them – they’d probably be at Caroline Bay for the fireworks and a spin or two of the chocolate wheel – but they’d had thunder and hailstorms and didn’t fancy it. The last time I visited Caroline Bay for New Year was with my brother eleven years ago. He was very subdued, having been through a nightmare few days. The next day we went to Methven – appropriately, it was completely dead – and saw a terrible Australian film at the cinema in Geraldine. Just like now, the darts was on TV. My parents had Mum’s old colleagues from Cairns staying with them; they really could have done without that. This morning Mum talked her elder brother’s daughter, who thinks the world revolves around her, and didn’t want anything to do with her elderly parents over Christmas. Having loving, caring parents hasn’t stopped her becoming a selfish arsehole.

This morning I went to the market in Mehala on the off-chance that there might be a cheap second-hand record player, but no such luck. There were quite a few records, though I didn’t buy any. It was nice to browse all the same, and take in the sights and smells on a sunny morning. The beer, the mici, the vehicles, the signage, the haggling. I had a particularly greasy langoș and then went home.

“You’ll find us on the street, between the langoși and the police station.”

A new footbridge being built over the Bega in the west of the city

No lessons today. Yesterday I had my 945th to 948th sessions of 2023, including my usual battle to get Matei to understand fractions. If you don’t know fractions, you’re screwed when it comes to calculating probability, and much else besides. Next weekend I’m going to spend the whole session on fractions. It’s what he needs. (His cluelessness about fractions is hardly his fault, as I’ve mentioned before here. He missed out under the Romanian system, and now he’s at the British school where they just assume he has all that knowledge.) After him I had the brother-and-sister combination. I normally spend two hours with him and one hour with her, but the boy said he had to meet some friends in town, so could they do 90 minutes each? She’s six. That’s an eternity with someone so young. Luckily I had a secret weapon: a rather tricky dinosaur maze (see below). I printed it off before our session, not realising how T-rex-like it actually was. Impressively to me, she persevered. (At her age, I think I’d have given up.) I tackled the start, she worked backwards from the end, and eventually we met in the middle. That ate up a good chunk of time. I had an online session with the guy in England when I got home.

The darts. There were three matches last night. First up was Brendan Dolan, the Northern Irishman who started as an underdog against Gary Anderson, winner of two world titles. Dolan, who uses Dropkick Murphys’ I’m Shipping Up to Boston as his walk-on song, raced into a big lead against Anderson who was misfiring at the start. Anderson then kicked into gear and went 3-2 up in the first-to-four-sets match. Dolan then made it 3-3 before hitting double three to pull off a dramatic and fully deserved victory, his third knife-edge win in a row. His wife’s face at various points throughout the deciding set was a picture. Next up was Raymond van Barneveld, an old hand who has been a top player since the nineties, against Luke Littler who is at the other end of the scale (though you wouldn’t think it by looking at him). Littler, who turns 17 next month, has been a sensation. The Dutchman played very well but Littler was unstoppable. The youngster won 4-1. I couldn’t stay up to watch the last match. Snooker, yes, but I draw the line at darts. A pity in a way, because it was one heck of a finish, with Luke Humphries beating Joe Cullen in a sudden-death leg, hitting the winning double at his tenth attempt. (Those outer slivers are pretty skinny, and even the best players miss them more often than they hit. All those misses ratchet up the tension.)

I managed to get the adminstrator to recalculate my catch-up water bill at the old rate, so this month’s bill ended up being a monster 983 lei instead of a gargantuan 1470.

I plan to see in the new year in town, where there will be fireworks and music. I’ve found 2023 to be quite stressful, with the exception of the period around Easter and (in grounds for optimism) the last couple of months. The early part of the year was bloody terrible. Simply put, I couldn’t cope. My “big thing” this year was spending a whole month in New Zealand. Stunning beauty around every corner. The stress my parents have been under became apparent when I was over there, and I’ve found it upsetting. I hope things become less fraught when their building work is done.

The word of the year for me is a depressing one: billionaire. I remember when billionaires were few and far enough between to be ignorable with the exception of Bill Gates and his Mr Clippy. Not any more. Every other article I read is about the antics of some mega-rich egomaniac fucking up the world for the rest of us just because he can. He, of course. Next year, with massively consequential elections taking place all over the world, their influence is unlikely to wane.

A couple of new year’s resolutions, both about writing. Firstly, this blog. I’d like to get back to more free-flowing writing such as I produced right at the beginning eight years ago. Hopefully being more relaxed will allow me to do that. Second, the book about my tennis-playing friend. I made progress last January, then things stalled badly. It needs to be a top priority again.