I’m now writing this on the new laptop. I still need to install a bunch of stuff and there are endless settings that I need to monkey around with to stop it from driving me mad, but I get the feeling it’ll be decent. Unlike my phone. It’ll now only charge at a snail’s pace and I can no longer transfer photos or videos from it to my laptop – the hole which the charger goes into seems to be buggered, even though it looks fine.
Yesterday I went to Sânmihaiu Român, my first long bike trip for ages. When I was there I got a coffee and called Mum and Dad who had been watching a lot of Wimbledon. They’ve been telling me about thrilling matches and deciding tie-breaks, but it’s passed me by. I also started The Cloud Atlas, a rather complex-looking novel that Dad gave me while he was here. I did actually watch bits of the men’s semi-finals after I got back. Even though Djokovic was well beaten by Jannik Sinner, it is pretty remarkable how he is still able to compete at such a high level at 39. The first match saw Alexander Zverev beat Arthur Fery, the Franco-British wildcard, also in straight sets. Fery collects £900,000 for getting so far.
In the last few days I’ve been listening to Shakespears Sister, a British duo who were pretty big in the early nineties. I remember our English teacher despairing at the spelling of the name – no apostrophe or final e – though Shakespeare himself was very inconsistent in how he spelt his name. Spelling wasn’t standardised back then. Stay was their biggest hit – it was number one in the charts for ages – and I also liked Hello (Turn Your Radio On), a song that mentions the pound “looking weak”. That was a hot topic back in the day.
Bonnie Tyler has passed away at the age of 75. Her rasping voice was instantly recognisable. Plus, she was Welsh. I used to think of her It’s a Heartache whenever I boiled an egg for too long.
I finished third in the end in the Scrabble league. A young woman by the name of Elise who travels around North America and the world to play Scrabble pipped me for second. We both got promoted.
Georgia at the Festivalul InimilorKitty yesterdayAt 10pm, during the heat wave
Ten years ago today, the Brexit vote happened. I’d expected it to be close, as you can see from my blog posts in the days before the referendum. (My uni mate, who is far more intelligent than me but lived in a kind of bubble, said that Remain would get 60% or more.) I was at work, on a Friday in Wellington, when the results came through. The first two declarations in the north-east were earth-shatteringly bad for Remain. Oh shit. When the next ten or so councils had announced their figures, it was basically all over. (The numbers were very close at that point, but if you had any idea at all of how voting in Britain plays out – rural areas declare later – you’d have known the writing was on the wall. And I’d been through it all a few dozen Fridays before when David Cameron won an unexpected majority, initiating the referendum in the first place.) My boss had scheduled us all to give sodding talks that afternoon, and I had to do mine and half-listen to everyone else’s, when my mind was well and truly elsewhere. I was halfway round the world and very few of my colleagues gave a damn, while there was me wanting to move to an EU country a few months later.
The arguments by both sides in the lead-up to the vote were facile. From the Leave side, it was all emotion, take back control, big unproven numbers on the side of a red bus. The Remain camp demonstrably failed to make an emotional case for staying in. (And it was easy to make! Peace was all they needed to say.) Instead you had remainers talking about falling house prices if they left the EU. I dunno, if I was a 23-year-old with little prospect of ever buying a property I’d have thought, sounds good to me. And then there were the remainers who called leavers stupid. But the whole campaign was just awful from start to finish. It whipped people up into a frenzy, creating divisions that hadn’t previously existed. EU membership just wasn’t that big a deal beforehand.
Then there was the aftermath. It was like an earthquake that nobody had prepared for, and nobody was there to clean up the mess. Cameron announced his resignation within hours of the result. Since then, Britain has gone through a slew of prime ministers including the laughable Liz Truss. They’re about to get another one who I happen to really like, but dammit he’s facing a tough task. Dangerous enemies to the west and east, the enshittification of everything thanks to toxic social media and AI slop, a stagnating economy, and still very much out of the EU where Britain has, guess what, some actual friends.
Ten years later, the Brexit vote is still a common topic of conversation. It came up with my parents when they were here. To my mind, where Brexit has done the most damage to Britain isn’t actually that they’ve left the EU, it’s the way is was done and how divided it has made the country. It was all so terribly unnecessary. And now, many of those who voted to leave are angry that it isn’t working and want an even more extreme option in Farage.
I spoke to Dad yesterday. He was struggling, as he so often does, with the heat. My brother has a conservatory which turns the whole place into a heat trap. He would love to replace it – it makes summer uncomfortable for him too – but doing so would be horrendously expensive. I saw my niece and my nephew who were both nonplussed. That’s your uncle, look at him! My nephew is still an extremely live wire.
As great as Mum and Dad’s visit was, it’s good to have my own space again. Washing and cleaning have gone from being front and centre, as Mum made them, to a gentle drum beat once more. I also no longer have to worry about putting things on shelves that Mum can’t reach (which was quite easy to accidentally do). They said that if there’s a next time they’ll try and come earlier and go straight to Timișoara as they did last year. Coming later though meant that they benefited from all the fruit that they really enjoyed, and even the sweet scent of the lime trees, so there are always pros and cons. When we were in Cluj I said, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a swimming pool? I haven’t swum in a pool for absolutely ages. I might try and go to the ștrand (basically a pool) in the coming days. I just hope I can cope with the music they play.
I just hope I don’t get any more bad headaches for a while. Dad wondered why they’re becoming such a feature of my life at my stage of the game.
The Opera HouseTimișoara at duskLipovaThe war memorial: the Romanians, Serbs, Germans and Hungarians are on separate sidesA couple of cat pictures
Today is Mum’s birthday – she’s exactly three years younger than the orange man – and tonight we’ll be going to the opera. The performance will last three hours and I’d be very surprised if any of us has the foggiest idea of what’s happening. But the novelty factor and just being inside the beautiful building will surely be worth it.
Yesterday (after my two lessons) we went to Ciacova, that fascinating small town with the big square in the middle and the 14th-century fortress. You’re stepping back in time there. We had enormous pastries from a bakery on the square – these little places still all have proper bakeries – and then had coffee at a bar two or three doors down. Three cappuccinos. But these weren’t normal cappuccinos. I could smell the Tia Maria, or whatever it was, a mile off. They were very nice (we sat on barstools that were far too high for the table), but when I asked the bartender what she’d put in, she dodged the issue. With Romania’s nil alcohol limit for driving, I was a bit concerned. Mum paid for our coffees by card – not all places even let you do that – and was surprised to check her bank app and see they had come to NZ$6. You wouldn’t get a single coffee for that in New Zealand. In the evening we had a longish walk along some of the pleasant tree-lined streets near me (including Strada Inocențiu Micu Klein which I always find interesting) and down to the river. The sweet pungent aroma of the lime trees was combined with the smell of mici being barbecued. Mum and Dad commented on the power lines going straight through the trees and all the foliage. That wouldn’t exactly fly in New Zealand, but OSH hasn’t yet made it to Romania. You’re living in Cowboyland, Dad said to me. I suppose I’ve got used to it.
Cluj (or Cluj-Napoca to give it its full name) has a similar population to Timișoara, but it’s got a whole lot of stuff that my home city doesn’t have. Concerts, music festivals, and big swanky football stadium which sits right next to a modern events centre. It’s way better for young people than Timișoara; it has a far bigger student culture, even though Timișoara has a large student population in its two universities. Then after you’ve studied at Cluj, you can stay there and get a well-paid job in IT (you can become an ITist, as the Romanians say), though the market may be getting saturated now. Cluj is also very tourist-friendly – even signs like “Centru” and “Aeroport”, which needed no translation, were translated into English. Car parks were FULL, not OCUPAT or PLIN as you might have expected. It’s a better maintained city than Timișoara and the streets are impressively leafy. The two downsides of Cluj are: (1) it’s expensive by Romanian standards, and (2) all the traffic in the centre of town gets to you after a while.
My parents called my brother when we were in Cluj. He looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. We didn’t know whether it was his wife expecting too much of him, or her parents being there far too often, or Mum and Dad not having visited him yet, or some combination, or just feeling low for no real reason. He’d been like that the last few times I’d spoken to him; it reminded me of all the business with his fiancée all those years ago. It certainly put a bit of a damper on things. At least this morning he looked more alive as he called Mum for her birthday.
The drive back from Cluj was fascinating in many ways exhausting. I really felt it the next day. There was all the congestion on the way out of Cluj, then the winding roads that seemed to go on for ever, then the potholed surface after we had our meal, and finally the deluge.
I haven’t fallen out with Mum (yet!) which is great. She does get stressed, but unlike last year we haven’t reached that tipping point. If anything I’m more worried that I might fall out with Dad. I really wish he’d delete that damn Daily Mail app.
Above are some assorted pictures of Cluj, from the airport to the city centre (the church where everything inside was a mosaic was quite striking) and the Botanic Gardens which were a great place to relax in on a hot day.
They still have old display technology at the train station in Cluj. These boards are now thin on the ground. Timișoara airport got rid of its flappy boards a couple of years ago.Cluj on day two
The trip back. I don’t know how that Antonov plane ever got up there. The last picture is one of the many poles with stork nests atop them. There were four storks in this one.
It hasn’t been a bad Orthodox Easter weekend. The best part has been only one lesson over the four days. That was with Matei yesterday, on his 18th birthday. I’ve now been teaching him for over half his life, though those days will soon be over – his maths exam is just a few weeks away, and then he’ll almost certainly be off to Germany for uni. I thought about how well adjusted he is at that age compared to how I was.
This morning I went to the park near the cathedral with all the tulips to read my book. I got there on the dot of ten – the cathedral bells were going full-bore – and the place was practically deserted. People would have been up all night for the Easter vigil. I brought a flask of coffee. I hadn’t read for weeks and it was nice to get back into the swing of it.
Piața Operei this morning
Last night Elena (the lady who lives above me) gave me a huge platter of sarmale, drob (very similar to haggis), and various cakes and biscuits. It was like hitting the culinary jackpot. “It’s a pleasure,” she said. Then, in seriousness, “Don’t throw it away”. Why on earth did she think I might throw all that food away? Sanda (someone I met a few years ago but is usually out of the city) has invited me over to her place tomorrow, so I may take some of that food.
Drob
Last week I had two sessions with the 25-year-old woman who has just started a new job. I was lucky to have two evening slots for her. Her job involves hot-desking – having to book a desk via an app every workday – which for me would be the seventh circle of hell. Not that I’d get to work in a place like that at my stage of the game; she said there’s nobody over 35 there. When you get to 35 you age out of those kinds of jobs, and then what? In one of our sessions we discussed AI. I said that for people of her generation, the first thing they do when they have a question is ask AI. She said, no, for me that’s the second thing I do. The first is to ask TikTok. I bet TikTok is largely AI-based anyway. I keep my lessons entirely AI-free to the best of my knowledge. I’m proud of that fact that my teaching materials are produced manually and guess what, I actually enjoy that side of it.
Polls have just closed in Hungary where maybe, just maybe, Viktor Orbán will be ousted after 16 years. The opinion polls point that way, but in a country where the media is basically state-controlled and the elections may not exactly be free and fair, we really have no idea until actual results start coming in.
Some music. Our Mutual Friend by the Divine Comedy. It came out in 2004. What a powerful song. The band’s name comes from Dante’s poem (which is all about circles of hell as I mentioned two paragraphs ago).
Update: With 85% of the votes counted, it’s all over for Orbán. Hooray! He conceded impressively early in the night. Crucially, Péter Magyar’s party will win at least two-thirds of the seats, meaning they will be able to reverse Orbán’s constitutional changes. Magyar’s party has similar policies to Orbán, but he ran on an anti-corruption and pro-EU platform. This is great news for Europe. The fact that JD Vance was trying to get Orbán re-elected shows you that that’s really good news.
I’ve just been reading about Hungary’s joke political party, called the Two-Tailed Dog Party.
Today I’ve got a bit more energy. I’m even responding to messages. (I’d just about gone incommunicado for a while.) The trick is to get up at my normal time, even if I don’t have lessons. The lessons themselves, assuming I don’t have a splitting headache, are to my benefit too. I got 18 litres of water from the well today; that certainly felt a lot easier than the last time I did it.
Late last month I tried to pay my rates bill at the post office – you can do that there – but they had the wrong address for me. I was sent to the city hall. There I had to fill in various forms and make a small payment, then I needed to wait days or weeks for an email confirmation. That email came two weeks ago. Yesterday morning I went back to the post office. I was feeling like crap and couldn’t handle the length of the queue so I gave up. In the afternoon I returned – almost no queue – and they still had the wrong address. You’ll need to go back to the city hall.
This morning I did just that. When I got to the end of the short take-a-number queue, the lady told me I needed to visit the Direcția Fiscală which, according to a poster she pointed out to me, moved to Iulius Town in early 2023. Oh god, you’re telling me I have to go back there?! Iulius Town is the same dystopia I found myself in last week. Elevated fakeness, surrounded by soulless tower blocks, none of which existed when I moved to this city. Though it is no more than a few years old, I feel I’m in eighties Bedford or Milton Keynes. On one side you look down on abandoned factories and silos that really are from the eighties. So it was back on my bike to Iulius Town. I had no trouble locating the Direcția Fiscală where people were queuing out the door. There was somebody all securitied up who kept whizzing by on a kind of Segway, as well a policeman controlling the entrance and smoking, just like half the people in the queue. It took me a while to get inside, then it was take-a-number time again. I was 18th in line. The woman told me to make a written declaration (Can you do this in Romanian?), then commentated on my surname which was the same as someone famous-ish 35 years ago. Only I was born with it, he wasn’t quite. She said my address would be updated within 45 days. That means that when I come to pay my rates I’ll face a (very small) fine or interest payment.
Getting that done (assuming it is actually “done”) was encouraging. A few days ago, or even yesterday, I couldn’t have handled it. Physically and (in recent days) mentally, this month has been a right mess. I haven’t had a bad headache since last Thursday. I hope that on Friday, as long as I stay largely headache-free, I’ll be able to tackle the cleaning. Last night I went back to the doctor’s surgery and got my blood pressure checked again. It had gone down: it was 140/80.
Earlier this morning I had a lesson with the English teacher in Slobozia. She told me the latest chapter in her life with her 15-year-old son, who has turned into a monster. “He bit me,” she said. Sorry, what, he isn’t a cat. Oh, beat. Romanians fail to make the distinction between those two vowel sounds, short and long. Live and leave, fill and feel, to say nothing of pairs that involve beach and sheet. “But in the past he has bitten me too.” I gave her a quick test at the start of the lesson. I showed her Trump’s latest all-caps social media post where he talks (lies, probably) about recent conversations with the Iranians. Can you spot the mistakes in lines one and nine? She could. I remember as a very little boy our teacher telling us the difference between the witch that flies on a broomstick and “which one”. The fact that he can’t spell basic words or use caps lock properly is the least of our worries, but once again, how did we get here? (That post on Truth Social, if that’s where it was, was likely just to manipulate the markets. Trump doesn’t understand a whole lot, but he does understand financial markets.) When I asked my student if she’d been following the war, she asked “What war?”
I read something funny at the weekend about “Strait-of-Hormuz guy”, the sort of guy you meet at the pub who, a month ago, wouldn’t have known how to spell or pronounce Hormuz or locate it on any map, but now knows its every nook and cranny and knows about all the ramifications of West Texas crude hitting one-fifty a barrel.
On BBC News yesterday I saw an ad for the Burj Azizi tower in Dubai, which when completed will be only a little shorter than the Burj Khalifa. Oh yes. The second-tallest building in the world. Can’t wait to visit once it’s topped out.
Yesterday I bumped into Lili (who lives on the first floor) as I was collecting a package from one of those Easybox things nearby. The package contained eye shades which I’d ordered online. Lili asked me if my nephew and niece will ever come to visit. I’m sure they’d like to play with your cat, she said.
I met Dorothy at Scârț on Sunday. We sat outside and played Scrabble in Romanian. I won 354-234 after putting down SCAPATE for 92 and DOBOS for 54. (Doboș is a very delicious cake that comes from Hungary but is also popular here, just over the border.) Mainly it was just nice to be outside.
Doboș
I took the picture above by the Bega yesterday. This is recent abandonment. When I arrived in Timișoara it was full of purple bikes which you could unhook (with a card and PIN code) and rehook at another station when you’d finished with them. Now it’s just for pigeons and their poo.
I managed to get Kitty mid-yawn this morning. I know how she feels.
It might not look like one, but this is certainly a restaurant. It has opened in Iulius Town. And they called it that?!
Update: This evening I had a lesson with a man in his mid-thirties and his 16-year-old niece. He’d had his teeth professionally whitened. “Bleach 4”, apparently. They were very white. And as for her, she wanted to know how to spell “which”.
I’m writing this after two full days without a headache to speak of. I’m still tired, but I slept well last night and got up this morning feeling something in the vague vicinity of normal. I had a long chat with Mum and Dad earlier, and last night I spoke to my brother on WhatsApp for the first time in a while. He commented that it seemed unusually dark where I was, and I told him that my headaches have made me want to cut the lights. I even have the contrast turned down on this laptop. Here I am in Romania, turning into a vampire. I’ve kept my phone on silent for several days too.
On Wednesday, when I wrote my last post on here, I had another splitting headache. The pain began to intensify at around 6pm while I was in the middle of a maths lesson in another part of the city. When I got home I had another maths lesson which I muddled through somehow. Luckily she only stayed for an hour; normally our lessons are an hour and a half, sometimes even two hours. Then the pain, like a screwdriver being rammed up my right nostril and into my eye, became unbearable. The only saving grace was that it was night-time, so relatively little light got in. The pain subsided just after eleven. I got to bed at 12:30.
The next morning I had a Romanian lesson at eight with Dorothy and our teacher, who didn’t show up. (I probably shouldn’t have shown up either. I was so tired.) I talked to Dorothy for over half an hour, then mooched around until my lessons started in the afternoon. Just three of them. Then it was Wizard of Oz time. Dorothy was back. In almost ten years in Timișoara, I’d never been inside the Opera House. What a beautiful building on the inside. I’d have preferred to have been on my own, perusing the interior, rather than being among a load of schoolkids and parents. I managed to get in without anything resembling a ticket. What other performances at the Opera House might I be able to gatecrash? As for the performance itself, I’d give it maybe two and a half stars. Dorothy herself was fine. The lion – a girl – didn’t look anything like a lion; this detracted from the experience somewhat. Neither was the scarecrow scarecrowy enough. The tin man, on the other hand, had made his costume himself and was very convincing. I had to keep reminding myself that, even though these teenagers go to a (really expensive) British school and have their lessons in English, they were still performing in a non-native language. Their command of spoken English varied wildly. Another thing – the set was far too sparse. Most of the time they cheated by projecting a backdrop onto the back wall. Seeing “TheatreBackdrop.com” in big letters in the corner of the wall didn’t do much for me. A lot of the time I wished I was watching the excellent original (colour!) Wizard of Oz movie from the 1930s – a superb film – instead. My general negativity probably came from another intense headache (but not as bad as the one the previous night) which started halfway through the play. I just wanted to get home.
On Friday morning my parents called me from Hampden. They’d just had fish and chips. As usual, the line was dodgy. When I got off the phone I felt beyond washed out. I felt gone. I knew at some point that day I’d have to force myself to do a big shop at the supermarket because I was starting to run out of things. When I finally made myself do, it, what an effort it was. Where did I put the trolley? It would need to be a big shop because who knew when I’d get to go back there. It reminded me of the shop I did at the start of Covid after coming back from an ill-advised trip to the mountains. Even the business of carrying it all in from the car wasn’t much fun. I only just had time to put it all away before my lesson started. My lessons have remained possible, but only because I’ve done so many of them by now and even if I mess up badly, it’s not like anyone can sack me.
I had four lessons yesterday, all in Dumbrăvița, from 8:30 till 4:30. Two English and two maths. Between my last two lessons I had a break which I spent in the park. That was nice and relaxing. Feeling I could really do with the exercise, I cycled rather than drove. Just like in March 2020, in those early days of Covid, we’ve had some beautiful spring weather.
When I spoke to my parents this morning, we (inevitably) discussed whether or not they’d be able to make it over in May. None of us has a clue. Donald Trump – what an irredeemable piece of shit – certainly doesn’t. His latest tweet (bleat? excrete?) followed the death of Robert Mueller who investigated Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” Now Mueller was a good man and a highly decorated war veteran. Where do you even start with this? It’s worth watching this too: the glee on Trump’s face when he announces that a congressman (a Republican congressman!) would be dead in three months following a terminal diagnosis.
Scrabble. It’s taken a back seat in my mind, even though I’m still studying words. In the latest round of the league I survived with a decent record of eight wins and six losses, despite my spread – points scored minus points conceded – being negative. (I lost one game by a whopping 300.) So, starting on Thursday, I’ll get another crack at division four. I think I’ll get to battle that Romanian player again.
The Opera HouseI was surprised to see her using her bedAn extra digit: fancy diesel was well over 10 lei per litre yesterday; normal diesel was only just under.
It’s been a pretty challenging two weeks now. We’ve had beautiful spring weather but the headaches haven’t stopped (sometimes the pain is on one side of my head, sometimes the other) and the perpetual fatigue has made me want to curl up into a ball. Just when I’m beginning to recover, or sometimes well before that, I’m crippled by another bad headache, so as well as having to deal with the pain I feel permanently exhausted. It’s like chronic fatigue syndrome or what they used to call ME. Maybe it’s what long Covid would feel like. Yesterday morning I managed to walk to Karlsruhe Park (named after one of the places that Timișoara is twinned with). When I got there it was already quarter to twelve. I read my book for a bit in the sunshine, then dawdled home via the supermarket. When I got to my shamefully untidy home I was exhausted. Kitty, who has been lovely of late, was all meeaa-eeeaa-yyeeeoww and in my face. Seriously, just piss off, would you? She then scratched me on my hand there was blood everywhere. Great.
I need to stop watching YouTube. It isn’t helping. I saw a podcast at the weekend in which two youngish anti-Trump Americans mentioned Trump’s message to Keir Starmer. We don’t need your help because we’ve already won. One of the podcast hosts said, “If I’m Starmer, I’m like, fuck you man.” Too right. And then a few days later Trump sent a message urging several countries including the UK (and China!) to send warships to free up the Strait of Hormuz. Not enough has been made of Trump’s tweet (or whatever it was) saying that they might bomb an Iranian island again “just for fun”. Dear God.
When I last filled up with diesel, the price was somewhere in the upper sevens (lei per litre). At the weekend, diesel prices nudged over nine. Fancy high-octane diesel (if that’s a thing) has reached the mid-nines, so some of the stations are now getting pretty close to running out of digits.
So yesterday I spoke to my brother – only for five minutes, because he had to put his daughter to bed. Before that he gave his son a mug of something greenish-yellow to drink; my nephew asked if it was wee-wee. My brother had been talking to Dad: a rare conversation with only Dad – a rare encounter with the truth, in other words. “It’s depressing over there, isn’t it?” my brother said. Dad is worried about the sale of the flat. Worried about Mum’s health. Worried that his later years have been irreparably wrecked. My brother and I both expressed quite a profound sadness at it all. In the next week or two I’ll hopefully book some flights to New Zealand. It’s highly unlikely that Mum and Dad will make it to Europe in 2026 – perhaps they never will – and I know Dad would like to see me over there, even if Mum is probably indifferent to the idea. At least I can make the trip. For my brother it’s much harder. And he’s going through a tough time himself because my sister-in-law is struggling to cope with the kids and may (reading between the lines) be suffering from depression.
Yesterday I took the car to Lipova which is about 70 minutes away. I hadn’t had a decent drive for a while, but the snow and ice had pretty much melted, and even though it was an overcast day I thought, why not? It’s a pleasant, typical provincial Romanian town that sits on the substantial River Mureș. Not a lot was going on there on a Sunday morning. The architecture was nice, even if (as it so often the case) it was in need of some TLC. Because it’s provincial and time moves more slowly there, a lot of the eighties signage has still survived. I think you can eat there quite cheaply.
Today I achieved something quite remarkable: I managed to track down some NBT (normal bloody tea). Earl Grey in fact. Lidl only had three boxes of the stuff and I bought them all. Sixty tea bags, or a fortnight’s worth. A couple of weeks ago I saw Profi had just one box of NBT left. I didn’t buy it – it didn’t seem right to take the last box. A few days later that same box was still there – I could tell it was the same box because it had a dent in it – and I bought it. Early last week, with my supplies running low, I went back there to find an “out of stock” sign. On Friday I ran out completely. I even tried in Lipova, but no luck. I had the same problem when I arrived in Romania – after a month I finally found a packet of NBT which had a picture of Big Ben on the front.
I finished watching The Queen’s Gambit. The ending was a bit predictable, and in the end I found Beth Harmon a little hard to root for, but the series as a whole was a good watch all the same. I noticed that Harmon’s name appeared as XAPMOH in Cyrillic during her Moscow tournament. Hmm, that looks familiar. Oh yes, it’s an anagram of that Poxham name I came up with in my dream.
Talking of anagramming, yesterday I got accused of cheating in a game on the old site. Really that amounted to abuse; I may give up playing on there entirely and play exclusively on Woogles, the new site where the leagues are.
The Mureș at Lipova, with a handsome building looking out onto itSurviving eighties signageUmbrellas like in Timișoara, only they don’t take them down in winter, and patriotic park benchesOrthodox Church on the left (service in full swing), Catholic on the right, and an ex-market in the middleI liked the hand-painted road signs. I remember when New Zealand used to have them.This banister was amazingThe church at Zăbrani on the way back. Surprisingly, the clock was working.
I’ve just finished my lesson with Matei. Not that Matei, the one who will have maths lessons with me for another few months until he goes to Germany, but another Matei, who wears gallons of after shave and will be doing a Cambridge C1 exam at some point. Kitty scratched me seconds before our lesson, so I had to get a plaster as soon as we started. We did reading exercises. One of them was about Olympic medallists who give motivational speeches at companies, after which the employees think, yeah, that was kind of fun to listen to but how will it help me in the slightest to do my job better?
Yesterday afternoon, when we reached our top temperature of minus 5, I went for a walk. Having got to the river (which was partly iced over) and turned for home, I took a pretty big tumble on the ice. I fell on my back and must have hit my head, though I don’t remember. I got up OK, but I was dizzy and felt absolutely terrible. I was winded and stood up against a window ledge for five minutes before feeling able to carry on. I walked the kilometre or so home very gingerly.
On Friday Elena (the 82-year-old lady who lives above me) got back from Canada. Yesterday she invited me up for coffee. She seemed to be coping extremely well with jet lag. I brought Kitty along; for whatever reason she wasn’t a happy camper.
Last night I had a 55-minute chat with Mum and Dad. They were about to make another trip down to Moeraki, and then on to Wanaka, to retrieve a painting that didn’t sell at an exhibition. I’m not sure any other paintings sold there either. I came away from the call feeling quite worried about Mum, whose digestive issues are still very unsorted, and coupled with all of that she’s now practically blind in one eye. She’s also been full of cold the last few days. She hasn’t been to golf for a while and yesterday she didn’t even go to church. From 11,000 miles away where I can do absolutely nothing, it’s all a bit of a concern.
It’s been bitterly cold. On Friday morning it was minus 16 degrees. As I write this at 9:30 on Sunday morning, it’s −9; the top temperature today is forecast to be −5. Yesterday, when we soared to the dizzy heights of zero, I had to drive to my two maths lessons in Dumbrăvița. The main roads had been ploughed of snow, so they weren’t too bad, but the side roads bordered on treacherous. It was also foggy on my journey out there. (I got all-weather tyres put on my car. A lot of people make a twice-yearly switch between summer and winter tyres, but it’s a real palaver that can take up an entire weekend.) I was very glad to get home. It’s all very reminiscent of my first winter here, nine years ago, when the river froze and there were icicles hanging from the building I’d just moved into. Kids under about 13 have no recollection of a proper winter, but winters like this – and even more extreme – used to be an annual occurrence here. The snow has got the young ones all excited, and we’ve got more coming in the next few days. Apart from driving which required serious concentration yesterday, I have no problem coping with these rather nippy conditions. There’s always something you can do to keep warm. Summer is a totally different ball game though.
On my trip to Dumbrăvița yesterday they played Crowded House’s Weather With You on the radio. A nice touch, assuming it was deliberate. The song immediately before that was Der Kommissar by Falco, which came out at the end of 1981. I still remember when their bigger hit Rock Me Amadeus came out in ’85. The night before I had a dream where I was hiking somewhere in Romania and met a younger British woman. For some reason she showed me an ID photo with her face on it. Her surname was Smith. She then told me she’d changed her surname to Poxam. I attempted to spell it, putting an h after the x, but she said it was H-less. Then she asked me if I’d like to come and see her in the UK, at which point I woke up. I wonder where I got that name from. Poxham is a plausible name for a British village. There is a Poxham out there, and in fact it’s a picturesque hamlet in Austria. The closest name I’ve ever had anything to do with is Moxham Avenue, the main street in the Wellington suburb of Hataitai. I once put in an offer on a flat in a Disney-style block there, but it wasn’t accepted.
Lately I’ve been tuning out of politics and international news. That’s just as well; what’s coming out of America would drive me to insanity if I paid close attention to it. However, the shooting – cold-blooded murder – by an ICE officer of an innocent mother driving her car in Minneapolis was too awful to ignore. America right now seems a lost cause. I sometimes laugh when I hear people intellectualising the president, using adjectives like transactional, when really it’s far, far simpler. He’s a piece of shit who cares for nothing but his own power and ego and has no respect for human life. He enjoys hurting other people. Most of the people around him are pieces of shit too. And 77 million people voted for that, with their eyes wide open. None of what is happening is a surprise.
Scrabble. The latest round of league matches is over, and just like last time I won eight and lost six. That vastly surpassed my early expectations – I had a pretty rough start. So that should mean I’ll stay in the same division for the fourth round in succession. Yesterday I played six games on ISC. I lost the first of them, then won four straight before being hammered 508-306 in my last game. In that game I drew terribly to the point where it was probably unwinnable no matter what I did, but I was still disappointed with my decision making. More generally, my word knowledge keeps letting me down. I’m still totally ignorant of a lot of very useful fours and fives, and even if I do know them, I’m likely to miss them because I haven’t played enough for my brain to properly “zone in”. Missing – or simply not knowing – these words has all kinds of knock-on effects. It makes it harder to sort out a bad rack, leading to lower scores (and fewer bingos) down the line. The tournament in Cluj is six weeks away, on 21st and 22nd February. I don’t know if I could realistically make that. It’s a four-hour drive so I’d have to go up the day before and miss some work. I was hoping there would be a sleeper train but there doesn’t seem to be. So far I’ve watched the first three episodes of The Queen’s Gambit which Mark recommended to me. I didn’t like the ending of the third episode – Beth’s stepmother really needed to tell Beth to “pull her head in” – but hey. So far it’s clear that however scary a Scrabble tournament would be, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as chess.
The last time I spoke to my brother, things weren’t easy for him. He said he’d like to take the kids camping at some point, but there’s no way his wife would ever go. She prefers cruises or Center Parcs (the name makes me shudder), neither of which are my brother’s cup of tea, and they wouldn’t be mine either. We had great camping trips as kids, and I’m sure my nephew would love camping. With my brother’s line of work, it would be right up his street too. And what’s more, they live in a great part of the country for it. Practically right on the coast, with the New Forest on their doorstep, and a quick hop over to France if they ever felt like camping over there. I hope my sister-in-law can be convinced.
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