The UK

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - The UK

Lock them up

November 3, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been following the UK Covid inquiry, and all I can say is lock the bastards up. The mishandling of the early stages of the pandemic went well beyond incompetence; these people were actively toxic. They were egomaniacs who behaved like playground bullies and were only in their positions because they supported Brexit. (The pandemic coming right after the brain drain of the December 2019 election was such unfortunate timing.) As senior civil servant Helen MacNamara (who wasn’t blameless herself) said in her hearing yesterday, there was an absence of humanity among the people in charge. For Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock, old people, poor people, and frankly all people who lacked their privileges, were expendable. Dominic Cummings, who gave his evidence on Tuesday, was just as bad. The insults that came from this special – unelected – advisor, mostly in WhatsApp messages, were shocking in their language. Making the right decisions didn’t matter to these c***s (as Mr Cummings would say); they only cared about whether the decisions made them look good. And what were they doing governing by WhatsApp anyway? They cost tens of thousands of lives. They should all go to prison for several years, and be banned from public office or indeed earning more than the national average income when they come out.

On Sunday I met Mark in town. We had lunch at Berăria 700, both opting for bulz – a bowl of cheese, bacon and mămăligă with an egg on top. Not the healthiest meal, but delicious. The funny bit was ordering the beer. Large or small? “Large, I suppose.” We thought that “large” meant a halbă which is just under a pint, but no, we got these great big steins that must have been a litre each. With the food and the sunny weather, getting through them wasn’t a problem. I showed him around the nearby market which for some reason he’d never been to before. He was amazed by the flowers, which are the most sense-engaging part of the whole thing. Just before we parted company, we discussed our good fortune at living in Timișoara – beautiful, lively, genuine, and (touch wood) safe. I played just one hour of tennis after that. Since then, the week has been a bit of a disappointment with so many cancellations caused by the Romanian equivalent of half-term, which only started to be a thing last year. All in all I can’t complain – I’m feeling much more relaxed than a couple of weeks ago. Last night I had a long chat with my friend in Birmingham, which was nice. Like Mum in Geraldine, he’s busy painting walls. I also spoke to Dad yesterday. Seeing his sister every day is leaving him exhausted. Britain is now being gripped by a storm. He’ll be flying back home in eleven days; he wishes it were sooner.

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis - The UK

Maths, newness, and unwanted grub

October 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I went to tennis but nobody showed up. As I was waiting in vain, Dad called me. He’d just come back from my brother’s place in Poole, and was tired after a seven-hour bus journey full of traffic jams. He said he wouldn’t want to live in the UK again. New Zealand is on a human scale, he said. I see what he means. I remember seeing a road sign around Wanaka: “Christchurch 424 km”. In Romania you see signs showing similar distances. But travelling through southern and central England, you rarely see much above 60 or 70 miles, or 100-odd kilometres. Everything is on top of each other – there are no gaps that allow you to breathe. Dad enjoyed seeing the family – he had nothing but positive words for his grandson – but his (and my brother’s) mental energy was taken up with sorting out his email and phone; he’s always got some tech issue. As soon as he got back, he saw his sister who was surprisingly chatty.

Yesterday I made a cottage pie (something British!) and quince crumble to give to Viorica and Petrică, the couple in their late sixties who live on the top floor. Viorica has been so helpful to me. Without her, I’d be having cold showers all through winter. This is too much, she told me, and spooned half of the food onto some plates, leaving me with the other half. A few minutes later my doorbell rang, and she handed me back almost all of the half that she’d originally taken. “I appreciate the gesture,” she said. But not the food, obviously. When I gave her the pie she asked me where the beef had come from. Kaufland, I said. Maybe she sees supermarket meat as poor quality or something. Older Romanians have these ideas, I’ve noticed. Oh well.

On Saturday I only had one lesson – two hours of maths with Matei. He’d just got an A grade in a test, which will allow him to take the extended GCSE maths paper. He only needed a C for that, so in other words he smashed it. That’s obviously great. I still think he can improve though. He’s good at following processes – move this over to the other side of the equation, now square both sides – but still lacks a good understanding of how numbers fit together. When I say numbers, I mean fractions, decimals, percentages, roots, powers, the lot. He reaches for the calculator at the first opportunity. Funnily enough, one thing that helped me with this when I was growing up was a crappy calculator with an eight-digit display, which my maths teacher called a “Noddy calculator”. Tap in 1 + 2 x 3 =, and it would tell you 9, not 7. So I’d learn about the order of operations, which at the time we called BODMAS. My Noddy calculator preferred SAMDOB. Divide 2 by 3 on that same calculator, and you’d get 0.6666666. Multiply that by 3 and it spat out 1.9999998. As the real answer is clearly exactly 2, that taught me something about the perils of rounding. A handy feature was being able to quickly repeat an operation over and over again by mashing the equals button. If you started at 1 and repeatedly multiplied by 2, you’d see that (a) the final digits cycle through 2, 4, 8 and 6, and (b) the numbers get very big very fast – just like the grains of rice on a chessboard – until they got too big for the screen. Dividing by zero was an immediate no-can-do. Why was that, I wondered? On fancier Noddy calculators with a square root button, you’d see that repeating square-rooting brought you closer and closer to 1. Now kids have better calculators – even the ones on their phones are way superior to Noddies – but the old Noddies gave you a better idea of how numbers fitted together. Plus you could tap in 5318008, turn your screen upside down, and have a giggle – this doesn’t work on your phone. After maths on Saturday, I really did play tennis. This was singles again with the other Florin. I lost two games out of the 23 we played.

I’ve now been in Romania for just over seven years. In my head, I split that time into four phases. Phase one was from the moment I arrived (October 2016) until the summer of 2018, when everything was new and exciting. The sights, the sounds, the smells. The regular trips back in time. That proper first winter. Living in the centre of such a beautiful city and trying to build my teaching business (all those phone calls, when I could hardly speak the language!) was like nothing I’d experienced before. I look back at that time with great fondness. Then came phase two. Timișoara and English teaching had become normal. Routine. The newness had gone. That lasted until the outbreak of Covid. Terribly scary, and horrific for many people, but (and this probably sounds awful) at least it was something new. I enjoyed the quiet of the lockdown. The parks in the springtime with the birds and the flowers. The focus on the simple things. That third phase lasted two years until we clambered out of all the lockdowns and restrictions into a world of having to achieve again, and in my case a move and feeling unable to cope. I’d really love phase four to be over. New Zealand – that feeling of newness, of something different – was wonderful, but it was just a temporary respite.

Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Politics - Tennis - The UK

We should leave it at that

October 16, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

The rain is lashing down and I’m grateful for it – I’d have really struggled on the tennis court. I played two hours of singles with Florin yesterday; when time ran out I was up 6-1 6-2 4-6 5-0. That second set score was deceptive – the set was a real battle of attrition, full of long rallies and close games that I somehow won. My efforts left me bereft of energy for the third set, in contrast to the Energizer bunny almost two decades my senior down the other end. I then got a second wind from somewhere. Before tennis I had three lessons – one maths and two English. My 16-year-old English student reiterated what he’d said before, that if Russian forces hypothetically attacked Romania in a couple of years’ time, he’d do all he could to flee the country rather than defend it. He said, “What is there to defend?” Yeesh, where do I start?

So New Zealand has voted in a new National-led government. It was on the cards. I felt sorry for Chris Hipkins, who seemed to me a thoroughly good chap and a very hard worker, leading a dysfunctional party and in the end flailing around trying to make something happen to turn the tide that was rapidly going out on Labour. Because that’s really what that election was – a resounding vote against the incumbents rather than a positive endorsement of National. Indeed, National got a smaller share of the vote than they did in 2017 when they lost power to Jacinda Ardern’s Labour. Crucially this time though, they had some partners to (comfortably) get them over the line. What an opportunity Labour squandered. They won a rare majority in 2020, a mandate for real change, and then they pissed around on fringe issues that didn’t help to make people’s lives better, instead of say, let me see, building homes that people can actually afford. This all serves as a warning to the UK Labour Party. The next UK election is a year or so away, and with the Tories being frankly disgusting right now, Labour should win. But if they don’t use that power to bring about positive change (and boy does the country need it), it won’t mean a thing, and the Tories will likely be back in charge next time around.

On Monday I met a lady from New Zealand (an Aucklander) who lived in Timișoara from 2006 to 2010 and was back visiting the city as part of a round-the-world trip. She was staying with Dorothy. She was pleasant enough, but we just didn’t have that much in common. In the evening I had a new maths student – a 15-year-old girl – who came here for a two-hour session. The following day – the day Dad arrived in London – was a shocker for me. I didn’t quite plumb the depths of 31st January, but at times I got close as I felt overwhelmed. The “emergency” online maths lesson with Matei, which finished at 9:45 that evening, helped to calm me down. Work was going OK; it was just everything else that was a mess. Wednesday was the miraculous day of the Barclays money. Thursday was a weird one. I rode to the north of the city for my lesson with the spoilt teenage girl, but she wasn’t there. I rang the doorbell and called her on the phone. Nothing. I hung around for 20 minutes and went home. Oh dear. Did I offend her so badly that she wanted nothing more to do with me? Did she tell her father and they decided to get back at me? Just after I got home, she sent me a message to say that her phone had died, and we had an online lesson in the evening. On Friday the electrician was supposed to come but he didn’t. Later that day I had an allergy test – 24 pricks on my arms – which confirmed what I thought, that my sinus problems aren’t allergy-related at all. When the receptionist gave me the bill for the test (525 lei, equivalent to NZ$190 or £90), my jaw literally dropped. Now that allergies are out, I’m free to get my prescription for various pills and sprays, which I’ll take until Christmas.

I had a good chat last night with Dad. I usually do have good chats with him. His days are dominated by bus trips to see his sister at a private hospital in Cambridge. He’s able to take advantage of the £2 bus fares that the government introduced earlier in the year, and which I also benefited from in June. My aunt has ups and downs but the trend is clear. She isn’t going to bother with chemo now. In fact she told him that she’d like to pop off in her sleep, sooner rather than later. I spoke to my brother on Friday, and we both sort of agreed that it might be better not to see her. In July he brought the little one over to her place, and it was the highlight of her year. She called me immediately afterwards, and the way she spoke about meeting her great-nephew was quite touching. Perhaps it’s best to leave it at that.

The UK

Making the most of the trip I didn’t want — part 2 of 2

June 21, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Monday I spoke to my parents, then made a trip to Cambridge where this time I had an appointment with Barclays. This was nerve-wracking for me. I noticed that the branch was about to reduce its hours by 20%; in a few years it probably won’t exist at all. (Up until two years ago, a St Ives branch also existed.) I was ushered into a small glass-walled office where I saw the same woman as on Friday. I told her that I had no more documents, despite my best efforts. “We’ll see what we can do.” Some time later, after talking to “management”, she gave me the OK. My power bill would suffice. I then filled in a form to get the funds paid into my New Zealand account. That was a huge relief, though she did say it could take me a ridiculous 12 weeks to receive the money (seriously, how?), and there was no hope of an interest payment or any compensation. My expectations had been lowered to a level where I didn’t care at that point. I did however express my disgust at the way I’d been treated by Barclays throughout the whole saga. The call centre staff weren’t too bad – they were just doing their rather awful jobs – but the organisation as a whole completely failed to help me. I could not talk to anybody at Barclays who dealt directly with account closures, and the whole time I was left guessing and wading through literally impossible bureaucratic treacle. The woman I saw at the Cambridge branch, while competent at the ins and outs of her jobs, showed no empathy whatsoever with what I’d been through. Tomorrow, while I have some time, I’ll write to the Barclays CEO and to the ombudsman. (Ombudsman. What a wonderful word.) This blog is a great help with that. I can just search “Barclays” and find the dates of my phone calls and pointless queuing to create an accurate litany of terrible experiences.

When I got back from Cambridge I dropped in on my family friends who were back from their traffic-jam-ridden trip to Southampton, and we went to Wetherspoons. This is a massive chain of pubs run by a famous (or infamous) Brexiter, even though all of us voted seven years ago (that long?!) to prevent that outcome. We plumped for Wetherspoons because of the price; they’re the cheapest option around. They save money by buying up kegs of beer in bulk just before their expiry date, knowing that they’ll still shift them. I had a steak and kidney pie, a beer, and a chocolate fudge cake, all for £15.

On Tuesday I had an evening flight back home, and met my university friend in London on the way to the airport. After dealing with a broken-down train and being told off for then boarding a train from a different company (why is it so complicated?), I met him at a bar at St Pancras. Surprisingly for me, the bar was almost empty. We had a chat about his girlfriend’s upcoming cancer treatment and his ongoing battle with the cladding on his apartment block and the other (unmotivated and uncooperative) owners. A double nightmare. He, and his girlfriend for that matter, have a great attitude to these kinds of setbacks, but they’re in for a very trying second half of the year regardless. We ambled down the river, past Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace, the very centre of London which I saw often as a kid and seemed magical back then. (Dad had galleries and exhibitions in London, so made regular trips there.) We parted ways close to Victoria Station where I got the coach to Luton Airport. I had plenty of time to kill there before my flight. I arrived home at 2:30 in the morning and was relieved not to have any lessons until the afternoon.

The weather in the UK was extraordinarily warm when I was there – 30 degrees every day – and without a hint of rain. While I was away I got phone alerts warning of torrential storms in and around Timiș. People thought it was funny that by visiting Britain I got away from British weather.

The UK

Making the most of the trip I didn’t want — part 1 of 2

June 21, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

The sweet aroma of tei – lime – is now permeating the whole city, as it always does in June. It’s now 46 days until I really go away – this summer will be a short one for me.

As for my mini-trip to England, it wasn’t much of a holiday. I’d been struggling with sleep all week, and then on Friday I had to be up just after four to catch the plane. When I called the taxi at that ungodly hour, it was here in under a minute. The flight to Luton was as about as fine as it can be when you’ve hardly slept a wink. I took two comfortable buses to Cambridge and I was happy that they took a while. I arrived in Cambridge just before midday, and my first stop was – ugh – Barclays. The lady at Barclays didn’t accept my Romanian power bill as proof of address, so she asked me to provide a Romanian bank statement with my address at the top. Slight snag: my bank statement didn’t show that information. Oh god, what do I do now?

I took the guided bus to St Ives. The small market was on, and in a very British conversation, two stallholders were discussing the amount of jelly they liked in their pork pies. Up to the flat. Cup of tea time. Alas, no water. My brother had turned it off. I scrabbled around and eventually found the tap. Phew. A cup of tea and then off to the library. I needed online access to my Romanian bank, but I couldn’t receive text messages. After an enormous amount of faff, and two separate payments, I had roaming access. Whatever I did though, I couldn’t find anything on my online bank account that gave proof or even the merest inkling of my address. My only option was to phone my bank and hope they could email me something. Phone calls to Romania didn’t work, so I used Skype. I was on hold for ages but got through to a woman who said that, yes, they could email me something. After complimenting me on my Romanian she said she’d need to put me through to a colleague. While I was on hold for a second time, my Skype credit ran out, and after two hours in the library I left, defeated.

I went over to my parents’ friends’ place. They were working in the garden. He had improved since his I saw him last summer following his near-death experience, though he was still underweight. She was now quite frail. They let me use their laptop, and on my third Skype call (I got disconnected after 25 minutes on both my first two attempts), I got through to the bank. Yes, we can send you something, but it won’t be a statement as such, and anyway you won’t get it until you’re back in Romania. Fantastic. (Unlike the UK, where it’s a legal requirement for bank statements to show addresses, in Romania it’s a legal requirement for them not to show addresses. I was in something akin to a Catch-22 situation.) I didn’t want to outstay my welcome with my parents’ friends because they were heading down to Southampton the next morning for a surprise family birthday party.

That evening, and most of the next day, I felt shattered and didn’t want to do anything. The sinus pain wasn’t helping. I read and tried my best to complete a puzzle book that Mum had started in 2017. I could see that Mum had struggled to fill in the names of celebrities, and I was no better on that score. In the afternoon I forced myself to cycle to my aunt’s place in Earith, six miles away. I knocked on her door. No answer. The back entrance was unlocked, and I tapped on the window. My overweight, hobbling aunt appeared in a pink dressing gown. This was 3pm. As usual, she was aware of what was happening in the world but showed little interest in other people’s lives. She did however give me a beer while she smoked and drank, and then gave me a pizza to take home.

On Sunday I went for a longish bike ride to the Godmanchester nature reserve, and otherwise just read and hung around St Ives; the area around the river where I grew up, and away from the housing estate to the north, is very nice indeed. My brother would like to move back there, to the place where he grew up, and I could see why. I recently read an article about the other St Ives, the more famous tourist hotspot in Cornwall whose numbers swell every summer, and someone left a comment saying that people would have a better time in the less renowned (but just as interesting) historic Cambridgeshire town.

Life :) - The UK

Approved, finally!

June 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m back in Timișoara after my flying visit. I got home at 2:30 last night, but luckily I didn’t have any lessons until this afternoon. I called Mum this morning for her 74th birthday.

The big news: on Monday, Barclays approved my ID – eventually – so I should get my hands on that money after more than a year. That’s a massive weight off my mind. I’m not counting all my chickens yet as it could take twelve weeks to arrive (why?!?!), but after what Barclays have put me through it’s a jolly good start.

It was only a short trip, but even so it felt good to be back today. I visited the market on the way to my first lesson with the two sets of twins. They’d been recovering from chicken pox, and one of them was still in bed. They were fascinated by my British coins, mainly because they had the Queen on them; I happily donated a few. With the chicken pox and my market purchases (what do you call this?), there was plenty to talk about at the session went by quickly and easily. In the garden their mother was picking marigolds so she could make tea from them.

I’ll write a proper trip report, at the weekend probably.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - The UK

One man’s obsession, and travel hassle

May 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

After I heard what had happened to my friend in Auckland, I wanted to find out more. He was bipolar and had a horrific time with that before I met him, though he seemed to have it under control. Sometimes during our Skype chats he’d come out with “I don’t know if I can be bothered with life”, but in a surprisingly upbeat way; I didn’t for one minute think he’d actually do it. I emailed the author of that blog, and he quickly got back to me. This guy mentioned my friend’s obsession with the two Malaysian incidents, and his delusions about the book he was writing on the subject. This book, jam-packed with conspiracy theories, was going to be a bombshell to rock the world of civil aviation. He said he had video conferences around the world and around the clock with the real movers and shakers. The reality was that only a handful of other conspiracists might have wanted anything to do with his book which he’d spent years on, and maybe the realisation of that sent him over the edge.

Without a doubt, my friend had a high IQ. He was eloquent, both in speech and in writing. He was also generous, often offering to pick me up or drop me off somewhere or other in his latest big swanky car. (His expensive cars riled the facilitator of the men’s mental health group. No job. Disability benefit. You’re gaming the system, mate.) The no-job thing was a biggie, as it is so often. Even a crappy job forces you to interact with people, it keeps you grounded, it keeps you in touch with the real world to some extent. I suggested that given his interest in aviation he should look for a job at the airport, but he never did. My aunt – Dad’s sister – married young and could afford not to have a real job, so she’s never had one. In fact she often childishly mocked people who had real jobs – “he does data, how boooring” – much to my annoyance. I’m sure her joblessness has come at a huge cost to her wellbeing. Anyway, I sometimes visited his house in a modern estate on the North Shore – not somewhere I’d like to live. His place was well looked after, but he’d put up weird signage everywhere, and he had about eight landline phones. In later years he bought a scooter, and I found a 2017 article about him patrolling the streets on his new vehicle. He was a nosy bugger, that’s for sure. He would come along to the mental health group tuned to police radio.

The author of that blog is a full-time conspiracist too – his posts are chock-full of anti-vax diatribes and lies about the 2020 US election being stolen – so I’ll give his little slice of the web a pass. Still, I appreciated him getting back to me so quickly.

I’d planned to visit the UK in July for my nephew’s christening, but the trip is becoming less doable by the day. I can’t find a flight back to Timișoara for much under £200. Before then I’ll have to get down south, somehow, probably taking a ludicrously expensive train. I’ll have to stay at least one night near the airport in Luton because the plane gets in so late. Then I wanted to get across to Birmingham and back to St Ives … it’s all just too bloody hard. I feel bad because I’d basically promised my sister-in-law that I’d be there, but what can I do? My best bet now is to stay two or three nights in Budapest when I come back from New Zealand in September, then go to the UK for my nephew’s first birthday.

On Wednesday I had my medical check-up for my driving licence. This included standing on one leg with my eyes closed and repeating whispered Romanian numbers with my hand over one ear. In all I had to visit six specialists in clinics on two floors. The whole process took 90 minutes including a fair bit of hanging around in a waiting room. I got the green light, so my next step is to go to Iulius Mall for the conversion. When I eventually get my hands on a Romanian licence I’ll buy a car, and that won’t be an easy task either. Registering a car is such a bureaucratic process, even for Romanians, that there are middlemen all over the city who you pay to do it for you.

The coronation is tomorrow. I’m not a monarchist, I’m not a republican, I have no strong feelings on the matter. For me, the royal family have always just been there. Still, I’m a little disappointed that I have to work and won’t be able to watch all the proceedings. From a pure visual perspective, it would have been great. I’d have enjoyed the talk of ampullas and sceptres and cherubs and tritons. Oh well. I’ll watch the highlights, or just wait until the next one.

The snooker. Yippee, it’s over! That was my first thought; it was enthralling, but such a time sink for me. What a final, though. Luca Brecel thoroughly deserved his victory, which almost nobody was expecting. Before arriving at the Crucible this year, he’d never won a single match in five attempts. Then he cleared up. A crucial moment of the final came in the last frame of Monday afternoon’s session. With the balls in extremely awkward spots, Brecel compiled one of the best breaks I’ve ever seen, and that put him 15-10 up going into the evening session. At that score, an awful lot needed to go right for Mark Selby and it nearly did. He won a tense scrappy frame to close to 16-12, then when he cracked open the reds in the following frame it was clear he meant business. Brecel hardly had a look in until the 32nd frame when Selby missed a black and then a brown, but finally the Belgian player was able to close out the match. I hope his win will help grow the game in continental Europe.

Letters of the alphabet sometimes rise to prominence in my lessons, Sesame Street style. Yesterday was brought to me by F and W. I’d like to do a series of posts on the alphabet because, unlike most normal people for which it’s incidental, letters and words have always been very meaningful to me.

Yesterday the mother of one of my students gave me ten eggs from the countryside, including a duck egg. In return I gave her two slices of pizza that I’d made. When I make pizza I follow Mum’s recipe – she’s always had a knack for making very tasty pizzas. I make the dough rather than buying the base – there’s something therapeutic about kneading it.

After two overcast days, it’s a beautiful day today.

Family - The UK - Writing a book

The book, and a lack of pommy pride

November 19, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I made some progress today. First, I got my passport notarised and sent of a load of bumph to Barclays which might mean I can get my money back. Second, the chance that the plumber comes over to look at my bathroom went up. Third, I had a video call with my friend from Birmingham. At the end of a long chat, I mentioned my book idea and my need of a English–Romanian translator. His girlfriend works as a translator, and although she certainly can’t translate anything into or out of Romanian, she might know someone who can, so I’m going to have a video call with her on Sunday morning.

Yesterday I spoke to Dad who for various reasons was on his own at my brother’s place. “It’s bloody cold,” he said. Meaning inside. My brother and sister-in-law are very sparing with the heating because it’s got so expensive. Two people with decent incomes. And a baby. Crazy shit. My parents had gone down on the train. Return tickets were over £100 each. What are you even paying for? Dad used the word “grim”, just like Mum had done, to describe the current state of the UK. He said that if I were to leave Romania, moving back to New Zealand (rather than the UK) would be a no-brainer. I look back to my early days of working in NZ, around 2004-2006. I’d get all the jokes about “you poms”, but I could tell there was really a grudging respect for Brits and all our rich history and culture and music and comedy and pragmatism. I was proud to be a pom. But not now. It’s going to take a long time to turn the oil tanker around. Turfing out the current lot at the next election would be a good start.

I watched the Artemis I launch on Wednesday morning (weirdly, it took off in the middle of the night in Florida). The will-it-or-won’t-it-actually-go added to the drama. I missed out on the thrill of the space race that my parents lived through, so to see a new space age dawn in real time was an exciting moment. The first human moon landing since 1972 is planned for 2025.

Life :) - The UK

A flashback to nineties dickdom in the UK

November 2, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m not into cars at all – I don’t even have one at the moment – but I’ve just watched a 1993 documentary about company cars, and oh boy. Depressing, fascinating, and hilarious, all at the same time. It’s part of a series called From A to B, and I remember watching bits of it when it aired nearly 30 years ago, but not this particular episode. It features men – only men – and they’re all weapons-grade dickheads practically jerking off over their company cars that are so incredibly mundane. It’s got to have the right trim and the right badge in the right conspicuous place because I deserve it. It was all about the letter i, which meant fuel injection – a billboard at the start of the programme punningly proclaims “The i’s have it.” And coat hangers, for fuck’s sake, so everyone can see that you’re the man in the suit. Imagine if this was my dad, I kept thinking. In the whole 48 minutes, there’s not a tinge of irony to be seen, and no one moment stands out. All the drivers are equally odious, and there’s line after line of unintentional comedy gold. I often think of the first half of the nineties as some golden age for Britain – optimism, freedom of expression, but most of all sanity, and it’s easy to forget that there was some mindnumbingly shallow shit too. I’m guessing they didn’t even have to hunt that far to find the protagonists.

After watching that window into nineties Dismaland, the 2022 version of Britain that I fleetingly visited last week doesn’t seem that bad. The owl to-whooing outside my brother’s place at night, the rich autumn colours, the fish and chips followed by sticky date pudding – there were moments to like. But so much of everyday life seemed grim. I arrived back in Romania to a feeling of comfort and relief. (By the way, actual Dismaland, Banksy’s theme park which popped up in south-west England in 2015, is something I would have loved to visit. I was in New Zealand at the time, and at any rate tickets were dismally difficult to obtain.)

I’ve had a sore throat and other cold symptoms since Sunday, and yesterday I took a Covid test which was negative. (I really wouldn’t want my parents catching Covid from me when they arrive here on Saturday.) I’m also in a bit of a bind because my antidepressant is no longer available. Thankfully I’ve got some stashed away, but it looks like I’ll need to switch from citalopram to the similar escitalopram very soon. (Discontinuing a drug at the drop of a hat like this is bloody dangerous, but this is Romania.)

Yesterday was Halloween, and today was Day of the Dead, where people visit graveyards. Yesterday, therefore, the markets were full of pumpkins and chrysanthemums.

Family - Poker - Politics - The UK

Four years and a magical piece of life — Part 2

October 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Liz Truss had resigned from her disastrous seven-week stint as leader on the day I arrived in the UK, and the latest (abbreviated) race, which Boris Johnson mercifully pulled out of, dominated the news. Rishi took over from Lizzie, and suddenly everything was going to be fine and dandy once more. Yeah, right.

I gave a lesson on my last morning in that country I called home half a lifetime ago, then we looked at some old slides of my brother and I when we were little, and even before then when Mum and Dad had barely met. The ones from our early childhood were incredible to look back on; I think we’d forgotten how primitive things were back then in our largely run-down house before it all got done up, or perhaps we were just too young to remember. Then it was time to go. Mum and Dad took me to the coach station in Poole. On the way, we got a call from my brother to say that I’d left half my laptop charger there. It was too late to turn back. Bugger. That put a dark cloud over the next 24 hours for me. The station wasn’t in an obvious place either, but a helpful lady directed me to it – down the underpass and past all the local buses – and I was on my way.

I had to take two buses to get to the airport, first from Poole to Victoria Coach Station in London, and then to Luton. Almost six hours including the short gap in between. I searched for laptop cables using the National Express wi-fi, and considered ordering one to arrive in the following day or two, but figured with a bit of luck I might somehow get by until my parents come to Timișoara on 5th November. Fortunately my first bus arrived at Victoria Station on time. A youngish woman who had one arm was in the Luton queue (gate 10); she was concerned that her return destination was blank on her ticket, and she really needed to get the bus to Luton to avoid missing her flight, but I couldn’t help her. She asked a woman in uniform who has no help whatsoever. Finally a much more useful uniformed man told her she had to go all the way down to the desk at gate 0 to get a new ticket printed. (British bus and train authorities love the number zero for some reason.) She had to jump the queue there to get back before the bus left. On the bus I had a good chat with her. It turned out she was a Paralympic triathlete who had been in the UK in a vain search for an obscure medicine. She competed for Hungary in last years Paralympics in Tokyo, and was flying back to Budapest. She started off as a swimmer, and attempted to qualify for Athens as a teenager, before finally making it in her thirties. When we get to Luton I’ll only have an hour so I’ll have to run. You should be good at that, I said. I got her name out of her, but no phone number, and that was that.

I touched down in Timișoara just before two in the morning, as scheduled. Unlike at Luton, my mini suitcase appeared on the carousel almost immediately, and a taxi soon whisked me off back home. Like everything else in Romania, the cost of taxis has shot up. It felt good to be back, though the laptop business was eating away at me. I tried charging it via USB-C, but no luck. After almost giving up (will one of my students have a charger that works?), I saw my old HP charger out of the corner of my eye. It was so old it still had a New Zealand plug on the end of it. But I have adapters for those, and it worked. I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. I can hardly function without my laptop.

On Friday my parents left Poole and drove down to St Ives, only to break down at a service station on the M25. According to my brother they were already an hour late, at waiting for the AA to come and get them up and running again added another two hours. I’d dread to think what state Mum would have been in. On more than one occasion when Mum wasn’t around, Dad told me that Mum’s stress levels had been through the roof on their trip. The funny thing is that Mum keeps her real stressed-out self such a guarded secret that even my brother doesn’t know what she can be like. I wonder what version of her I’ll get when they come over next weekend. I’m guessing it won’t be the epitome of calm and cheerfulness – besotted by her grandson – that my brother and sister-in-law saw. We’ll see. As for me, I don’t know when I’ll next return to the UK. I’d love to play a part in the little one’s life, however fleeting.

The next few days will be taken up by lessons and getting ready for Mum and Dad. I might try and book a ticket for a play or a concert – I think they’d like that. This weekend I’ve given two lessons, played some reasonable tennis, and played five poker tournaments including a second place this morning.