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Family - Photos - Politics - Romania - Writing a book

Good news about the books, an un-election, and some pictures

December 8, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

I see I somehow neglected to mention my meeting with the publishers, so here goes. It was a weird meeting with the mother and daughter that lasted all of two hours. The mother likes to talk. She’s a French teacher, and sometimes she even switched from Romanian to French. Like I said, weird. At the beginning I was presented with a print-out of both the picture book and the A-B section of the dictionary. I started to comment on the picture book – for the love of God, don’t stretch or squoosh Dad’s illustrations as you’ve done here – before zooming out to the big picture. Before we start talking fonts and formats and stuff, can you assure me that this book, I mean these books, are actually going to see the light of day? The answer was yes, which was by far the most encouraging thing in the whole meeting. I was worried that everything Dad and I had done to this point might be in vain. It seemed EU funding will pay for a large chunk of it. (Of course, this is Romania, so until I actually see the books in print I can’t be 100% sure of anything.) Sometimes I struggled to articulate – in Romanian – what I wanted to say, but we managed to flesh out some important details. Surprisingly, I’m in charge of the layout, not them, and I agreed to a deadline of 15th January to get the small book sorted. This won’t be an easy task because the pictures won’t all be the same size, they’ll need varying amounts of explanatory text, and so on. We agreed that both books would be in B5 format, roughly 7 inches by 10, though the picture book will be landscape and the dictionary portrait. I have no plans for Christmas, which means I’ll have time to spend on the books.

Yes, Romania, where you can’t guarantee anything. Even whether elections actually happen. On Friday they (Romania’s supreme court, I think) invalidated the first round of the presidential election, less than two days before the second round was due to take place. (In fact, overseas voting for the second round had already begun.) This was a major shock. A couple of days earlier, documents were made available that showed that Putin supporter Călin Georgescu had been hugely promoted, probably by Russia, through algorithms (and money) on TikTok, which is Chinese-owned. The re-run of the election probably won’t happen until March, and it’s unclear if Georgescu will be allowed to run again. Last weekend’s parliamentary elections are still valid as far as I know, so presumably Klaus Iohannis (the current president) will stay in place, with the new parliament, until March. But really, all bets are off.

I spoke to my parents this morning. Mum had her shiny new crown. She described the space-age process of X-rays followed by scans from every angle that enabled the crown to be 3D-printed. None of this business of having to bite into a mould; it’s all cutting-edge stuff. The price is cutting-edge too. I could see a lovely painting of Dad’s which they’d hung in the kitchen; it was of the fruit and vegetable market in Cambridge. We discussed my brother, who has been pulling out every imaginable stop to complete his latest assignment for his master’s. Master’s. Where on earth has this motivation come from? He called me during the week for help with a spreadsheet. Luckily I spent quite a few years dealing with spreadsheets in a previous life. Only six weeks until I’ll be getting a niece.

I had four lessons yesterday – two English, two maths. Matei wanted to talk about the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a gargantuan American health insurer. Delay, deny, defend: that’s apparently what was written on the shell casings. Matei said that his death was being celebrated all over TikTok. I suggested that celebrating the brutal killing of someone with a wife and family who was just doing his job isn’t really OK, even if the company is as parasitic as the one he headed. But at least this has shed a light on the unforgivable state of US healthcare and insurance. Unfortunately I suspect it will all just blow over like everything else in America. It’s headline news for a week or two, but ultimately nothing happens. Just think of George Floyd. Or the numerous school shootings. Or the 2008 financial crisis where the big banks got bailed out as people lost their homes, and people shrugged their shoulders. They just put Trump back in, after all.

Last Sunday I went out for a spin, visiting Peciu Nou, Cebza, Petroman (which isn’t far off my online name) and finally the decent-sized town of Ciacova which its cobbled streets and square. My brother called me while was in Ciacova, so I gave him a bit of a tour. I still hope one day he will visit me in Romania. After getting off the phone, a dog bit my leg, completely out of the blue. He or she (I didn’t pay attention to that) didn’t draw blood, otherwise I’d have seen the doctor.

On Sunday evening I went into town and saw the parade of army men with torches, for the national day celebration.

I sent this picture of Peciu Nou to Dad, who wants to turn it into a painting. He wanted to see the other side of the street, so it looks like I’ll be making another trip there.

Various pictures of Ciacova

No trains have been down this track for a while

National day celebrations. Eight years ago, this was all so new and exciting, even though my feet froze.

Films - Maths teaching - Photos

A big plus

November 13, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

It’s now grey and properly nippy out there. But that’s immeasurably easier to handle than the hellscape that was summer. We had two and a half months of disgustingly hot weather.

Yesterday I hit a brown pigeon on my bike. Ugh. There are so many pigeons here, I suppose I was likely to do that eventually. I didn’t immediately kill it, but I ran over one of its legs and damaged a wing. An old lady picked it up and put it next to a shop wall, where it would surely die.

Maths. Teaching that in addition to English has been a big plus. Pun intended. I don’t get all that enthused by trying to bump a decent student with rich parents up from a B to an A, but when you get beyond that it can actually be pretty fun. Like last night when I taught an 18-year-old guy that a minus times a minus equals a plus. I’m guessing he was taught that at school a few years ago, but maths at school often does just wash over you. Rather than just teach him that fact, I showed him what would happen if a minus times a minus remained a minus. This would be crazy, right? I gave him a “quiz” as I called it, based on we did in the previous session, then spent the remainder of the two hours scribbling on the whiteboard. Every few minutes he took a picture.

Lately I’ve found a Youtube channel called Combo Class in which maths is taught in a pretty unique way – outside mostly, often with things catching fire or falling over each other. The first time I saw it I wondered what the hell I was watching, then persevered and saw that this guy really knew his stuff and could teach it in a very engaging way. He taught me plenty I didn’t know and got me to think about concepts I did know in a totally different way. He’s a big proponent of using bases other than ten (six and twelve, mostly). Base ten, which is ubiquitous to the point that we can hardly think of any alternative, is far from the best base, mathematically speaking. We use it because most of us have ten fingers and ten toes. But it isn’t a fluke that (in the English-speaking world at least) there’s been a lot of twelve around. Time, money, length, cartons of eggs, and so forth. Twelve splits up much more nicely than ten does. And we even have the special word dozen for it. (Here in Romania, everything is so ten-centric – even eggs are sold in tens – that teaching fractions becomes a major challenge; people can’t conceive of dividing something into thirds or eighths or twelfths.)

On Friday I saw a film at Cinema Victoria with Dorothy. We saw Good Bye, Lenin!, a tragicomedy that came out in 2003. It’s about a woman who fell into a coma just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and her son’s increasingly convoluted efforts to keep the news from her when she woke up eight months later. The film is in German; it was subtitled in Romanian. The soundtrack was composed by Yann Tiersen, who also did Amélie (great film) two years before. Very well done, but I wasn’t in the mood for it. I’d have much preferred some good old simple British comedy. Amazingly, tickets were only 15 lei (£2.50 or NZ$5.50).

Saturday was a full-on work day, mostly in Dumbrăvița. On Sunday I went back to Dumbrăvița to meet Mark for lunch at a burger joint called E10. I wasn’t sure whether to pronounce it in the Romanian way, or if it was an English-language pun (Eaten? Eton?). The burger was fine, if a little pricey. The crappy plastic modern versions of great songs did my head in though, and just being in Dumbrăvița is pretty nasty in itself. A massive, sprawling suburb that just keeps growing, so much of it feels like it was plopped there last Tuesday. There’s the park with the two churches, which is nice, but veer far from that and you’re faced with endless acres of fakeness. And then there are the cars. They keep getting bigger and less Romania-like. The whole place hardly seems to be in Romania. The only positive is a large wooded area near where Mark lives, which is great for walking his two dogs.

Coming back on the bike from Sânmihaiu Român on Friday. You very much feel you’re out of the city.

The Orthodox church in Dumbrăvița. Stop abortion. Don’t kill.

Photos - Politics - Travel: Romania

Buziaș again

November 4, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

I visited Buziaș this morning. It was my second time there – I went there with Mark last winter, before I bought the car. It was wonderful with the sun shining through the autumn colours and the leaves continuing to accumulate in a golden blanket. I didn’t do much but wander through the park – extensive for a small town – and the surroundings. Oh, and go inside a large abandoned building. Buziaș might be my favourite town within a half-hour drive of Timișoara.

The presidential race appears to be very close now. I woke up this morning to see a shock poll of Iowa from a highly respected pollster which gave Kamala Harris a three-point lead. Iowa is a state that should be firmly in Trump’s camp. But I’ve been here before with promising polls just before voting day. I remember big leads for Remain just before Leave won. I can’t believe that’s over eight years ago. There were also polls giving Biden huge leads in 2020, and he only just won. (Trump supporters were less likely to answer polls. This could happen again this time.)

Apart from the grave danger a Trump presidency poses to America and the whole world, I still find him utterly repugnant. Îmi repugnă, you can actually say in Romanian. His values are diametrically opposed to mine, those that were instilled into me from my parents, my grandmother, and my teachers at primary school.

I was a bit surprised to hear Dorothy voice support for the US abortion bans. I get it, you’re religious and that’s fine, but even if you’re anti-abortion (which you’re entitled to be), actually banning it is horrifically cruel. Iowa, by the way, has a terrifying six-week abortion ban. Last weekend I watched a documentary on the January 6th insurrection. A scary number of the participants invoked God.

Update: Maia Sandu has been re-elected president of Moldova. She won the second round by a solid margin. That’s a relief. Just a week ago Georgia decided to go pro-Moscow in their election.

This sundial was a bit fast. It was 10:35.

To the toilet. It was brand new and clean, surprisingly.

The abandoned building

This hand-painted sign is very Romanian, particularly those Bs

The Romanian elections aren’t far away either

There was once a “first class” restaurant at the bottom of this crumbling block

An old Romtelecom phone box near where I live. The phone no longer works.

Environment - Photos - Politics - Writing a book

Book plans and planning for the worst

November 3, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

A fairly productive Saturday. An online session (I hesitate to call it a lesson) with the priest, then two maths lessons in Dumbrăvița. After doing quadratic equations with Matei, we discussed the US election for the last 10 or 15 minutes. (It would have been helpful to have devoted the whole two hours to the election. So much maths there. The Electoral College, gerrymandering, and all the rest of it.) Matei brought up the site 270towin.com where you can plug in your own predictions.

After my lessons I met Dorothy to discuss the smaller of the books I (and Dad) have been working on. We wanted to meet at Scârț but it was closed for renovation. What kind of renovation, we wondered. Its messiness is kind of the whole point. I hope it’s for something structural rather than any kind of tarting up. The area surrounding Scârț, which has a park, cobbled streets, and architecture from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, might be my favourite part of the city. We ended up having our tea and coffee a place called Viniloteca (as in vinyl records), which I’d previously misread as Vinoteca (as in wine). It was great, with all its proper music. I felt a certain pang when Tonight by David Bowie and Tina Turner came on. I’ll have to go there with Mark sometime. I didn’t buy any of the records or T-shirts on sale, but that wasn’t my focus. Dorothy and I looked at Dad’s 25 pictures, each one demonstrating a common error that Romanians make when they communicate in English. Seeing a whole body of Dad’s work really shows you what an extraordinary talent he has. (I know I’m biased.) On Monday I’ll try and arrange a meeting with the publishers to see what (if anything) will be the next step in getting the book into print. Will it cost me money? I say “if anything” because this is Romania, where nothing is guaranteed.

Yes, the election. I read an article that described it as bearing down on us all. “Bear down on” – an ominous three-word phrasal verb if ever there was one. Mum, Dad and I doomed for half an hour on Skype last night. What a Trump win would mean for Ukraine and the security of Europe as a whole. What it would mean for democracy. What it would mean for the environment which is deteriorating before our eyes. How the fuck the future of so much of Europe depends on a few thousand ill-informed voters in Cumberland County in Pennsylvania who don’t even care about foreign policy. (I know nothing about Cumberland County. It was a name I picked at random from the list of counties. I’m sure the people who live there are lovely. But that’s kind of the point.) The main thrust of our conversation was: how did we get here? When my parents were my age and I was a teenager, this sort of talk would have been unimaginable.

This was my guess on the 270towin website:

Of the seven swing states, I gave only Michigan to Harris. The most likely map is in fact all seven states falling to Trump. That’s because of how correlated the states are with each other. If there’s a polling error of a few points, it’ll likely be reflected across the board. In the last couple of days, things have looked marginally better for Harris, so I’m still hopeful. It’s certainly not a done deal, as Dad called it last night. But it’s best to mentally prepare for the worst, especially when there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Talking of the environment, more than 200 people have so far died in Biblical-level flooding in Valencia.

Crysanthemums at the market yesterday. It was 1st November, the Day of the Dead.

The two pictures above were taken today.

Photos - Travel: Europe

Some photos from Szeged and further afield

October 30, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’m tired. Tons of lessons. Not enough sleep. The end of the world as we know it, fast approaching. Just six days now. At least I’ve been amassing a healthy brick of lei, even though I don’t get as many cash payments as I did in pre-Covid days.

I felt shattered when I got up on Sunday. I still decided to make the trip to Szeged, a city just over the border which like Timișoara is replete with beautiful architecture. Our clocks had gone back an hour the night before, and then Hungary is a further hour behind Romania. So I had four different times in my head all at once: Romanian summer, Romanian winter, Hungarian summer, and Hungarian winter, the middle two of those four being equivalent. (Szeged’s buildings featured many clocks, some of which hadn’t yet been put back to winter time.) Szeged sits on the Tisa which is a major river. I parked by the river and mooched around the city for a couple of hours. Then, because it was still quite early, I decided to go to Kecskemét, the city we visited in early September on the way back from Vienna. On the way I met more pheasants than I’d ever seen before. The autumn colours were stunning. Szeged is a clean, modern-looking European city, while Kecskemét has a very different vibe with its communist blocks crowding out the lovely empire-era architecture that it still has. At the car park a woman tried to communicate with me. Do we have to pay? It’s Sunday. I could tell that was her question, but I had the same question and I couldn’t speak her language. She asked somebody else, then relayed the reply of “nem” (no) to me. I had a tortilla there – this was a bit of a disappointment – and then went back home. In total I did 425 km. Luckily I only had short queues at the border. I noted that they no longer bother to stamp my passport. That’s a shame; all those stamps were a useful memory jogger.

I really liked the design of this phone box. Surprisingly, the phone still worked.

This was on the table of the fast food place I ate at. Hungarian names are always surname first. In Romanian they can go either way, which can be horribly confusing when the surname happens to be a possible first name too.

Back in Romania, at a small lake in Sânnicolau Mare, popular with fishermen. Next to the lake, a couple were roasting a chicken in their back garden.

Environment - Films - Photos

Horror watch

October 15, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

I saw Threads on Saturday night. The last 60% of the film, from the attack onwards, was extremely chilling. I nearly didn’t see it through to the end. It was broadcast on the BBC in September 1984, three weeks after I started school. There were reminders of my early childhood everywhere: football scores, typewriters, cars similar to what we had, and most poignantly an educational TV programme called Words and Pictures. Educational TV was a big thing in the UK in the eighties. Us tiny kids would file into the TV room, then the teacher would wheel out the great big telly on a trolley, just in time for the ten-minute programme to start. Sometimes this was Words and Pictures. Seeing a garbled post-nuclear version of this – which made reference to skeletons and skulls – was haunting. Threads, in its way, was brilliantly done. It was also informative. My only gripe was that those born after the attack spoke a greatly simplified pidgin English; this was unrealistic to me. Tragically, the girl who played Jane died in a car crash in 1990.

Last Wednesday night, just after I wrote my previous post, I found a live YouTube stream of Hurricane Milton. Or rather, it was a stream of the tornadoes that preceded Milton’s landfall in Florida. There was a host – a qualified meteorologist – transmitting a barrage of tornado warnings, accompanied by a younger meteorologist in another room and three storm chasers on the ground. There were brightly coloured maps showing the path of the tornadoes in precise detail. A locality that got disproportionate attention was the village of Yeehaw Junction (what a name) with a population of just over 200. I’ve become skeptical of some modern technology, but they were using fantastic, life-saving tech.

Yesterday I cycled to Utvin in the morning. The village is larger than I imagined, with around 3000 people. Then in the afternoon I went for a drive. I ended up in the north of Timiș, not far from where Dorothy has her place. At one point, two kestrels flew overhead. Another time six or seven piglets ran out alongside me. There’s something quite wonderful about just being in rural Romania. I was a little too early to fully catch the full array of autumn colours.

Just three weeks until the US election. I’ve got a horrible feeling about it.

Family - Life :) - Photos - Romania

Eight years in this crazy place

October 8, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

As my work hours are getting longer again, my posts are getting shorter.

This morning I had a Skype chat with my aunt and uncle in Woodbury (the ones who visited me in Timișoara). She had a lot to say; he didn’t. She said they’ll be putting their property on the market. Time to pull the plug. Though with my uncle starting to lose his memory, I wonder how much a totally alien home might mess him up.

Today marks the eighth anniversary of my arrival in Romania. I’ve spent 18% of my life here. Yesterday I met Mark in town. We talked about a lot of teaching, mostly. But also his three children. And how much we both still like Timișoara. If only it wasn’t so hot in summer, this place would be just about perfect for me.

This was from Saturday. I still haven’t been invited to a Romanian wedding. The more I hear about them (400 guests? Lasting three days?) the more grateful I am.

A statue of Adi Bărar, guitarist for Timișoara band Cargo. It was put up just three weeks ago. Bărar died in 2021 after getting Covid.

Glory to God. Read the Bible every day. In Recaș yesterday.

This dog just wouldn’t budge, no matter what. I even took a video of cars swerving around it. At Bazoșu Nou yesterday.

Family - Photos - Travel: Europe

Photos from Vienna

September 6, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

Tomorrow we’ll know whether my nephew will get a little brother or sister to terrorise. Mum and Dad are still recovering from their extended family time. I’m sure all five of them would have had a better time if my sister-in-law had stayed at home.

Now for some pictures from my Vienna trip.

The view from our apartment. Red squirrels abounded.

Above: Pictures from Schönbrunn Palace. The bottom photo is from the Gloriette.

The Gloriette: a display of strength and power

The next day: Walking to the Albertina, and below: some paintings I particularly liked.

Rudolf Wacker. This might have been my favourite of all. Dorothy and I spent considerable time perusing it.

Franz Sedlacek. At first glance you think they’re birds.

Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, painter and scupltor

Marc Chagall. I could have stared at this one for hours.

There was a whole room of Picassos that I didn’t take photos of, then we saw the extensive collection of American photographer Gregory Crewdson which was well worth it. Each photograph included a frozen figure; the small-town America setting only increased the creep factor.

This little girl was transfixed by the violinist

These newsstands add colour to a city, but they’re thin on the ground these days

The Belvedere

Cities need more buildings like these. The height and general appearance make you feel good.

Photos - Travel: Europe

Maribor trip report and photos

August 27, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

After three days in which things were getting dangerous (the day before I left was really shitty), I desperately needed to press the reset button. My short trip to Slovenia had that effect, so I’m putting it down as a success.

Maribor is hardly just up the road; it’s roughly the same as going from Auckland to Wellington. My outward journey weighed in at 645 km, almost entirely on motorways, and took me 8 hours and 50 minutes including breaks and two hold-ups – a queue at the Romania–Hungary border (the Hungarian border guard couldn’t speak a word of anything non-Hungarian, so that was fun), then a traffic jam around Budapest. I went back a different way, taking a slightly more countrified route through Hungary. That cut the distance to “just” 622 km; surprisingly I had no delays to speak of, and got back ten minutes faster despite going on slower roads. Coming back I stopped at a town called Balatonlelle, which is on Lake Balaton as its name suggests. I picked it practically at random, expecting to find a sleepy village by the lake, but instead it was a bustling tourist destination. Over the border into Romania, the motorway was eerily quiet.

In between I stayed three nights in Maribor, the second city of Slovenia, a country of only 2.1 million people. It sits on the Drava river, a tributary of the Danube (which I’ll see very soon) but a major river in its own right. My motel (that’s what I’d call it) was 4 km out of the city. Once I’d checked in, I drove into town (after I’d been convinced by a passerby not to walk) and was struck by how beautiful and peaceful it was. The river, the bridges, the buildings, the people milling around, the perfect temperature, it was all uplifting. I sat outside and enjoyed my pizza and Sprite, which I felt I’d earned after nearly nine hours on the road. (The pizza was very yummy indeed, come to think of it.)

That evening I called New Zealand. I hadn’t told them I was going to Slovenia. The line was terrible, as was the general mood, caused by everyone’s illnesses. The worst sufferers have been my sister-in-law and my father. Dad wrote to me in an email that my brother and his family have had a nightmare “holiday” in NZ and will never come back. Mum has escaped virtually unscathed, but her stress levels must have been way up there.

The next morning I took the bus into town and wandered around. Some cities look happy, others look sad. Maribor looked happy. The only negative was that all the touristy stuff like the museum and wine tasting were beyond what I was prepared to pay. I’d been looking forward to trying some Slovenian wines, but when a severe young lady at the entrance said it would be €20 to try three wines or €25 for four, I declined. (I bought a cheap bottle of Slovenian red at the supermarket instead.) Yep, Slovenia uses the euro; unlike some other ex-Yugoslav states, they’ve gone all-in on the European project. On the evidence of what I saw, it’s been to their benefit. (By the way, after the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early nineties, Slovenia adopted the tolar as its currency. It was replaced by the euro in 2007.) The only vaguely touristy thing I did was visit the aquarium/terrarium, which I didn’t expect to find in the city park. The aquarium wasn’t exactly Kelly Tarlton’s but the terrarium bit was rather good. I had another pizza – I’ll give kebab pizza a miss next time – and walked back to the motel.

What to do on my second and last full day? It was Saturday. Probably the worst day of the year if you want to avoid plagues of tourists, which I always want to do. The lakes, Bled and Bohinj, were out for that very reason. I set off for Ljubljana but the motorway was chocka – rammed as everyone says in the UK now – and I couldn’t hack it any more. I got off the hellscape of the south-westbound A1 and decided to visit the town of Ptuj (a short way downstream of Maribor on the Drava) instead. The name is fun to say: think tui, as in the native NZ bird, with a p sound immediately before it. There were lovely old buildings, you could walk (or cycle) alongside the river, although when I visited it was wedding day. At least three of them. It had a castle which I chose not to take a tour of because it was just too hot.

The motel was quiet and had a simple balcony; it was nice to just sit out there and have a beer. One more night before the long trek home. I had €99 in cash when I went. This will do me. I came back with €3, and that’s after buying stuff like washing powder that I saw was cheaper over there. All in all, the trip cost me around £400 or NZ$800.

It’s incredible all the places I can see, now that I have a car. (It has added complexity and expense to my life too though, so I’d say it’s been neutral to my wellbeing.) Just think, Mum and Dad could come over next spring, or heck, next month, and we could go travelling for three weeks or more. What wonders could be in store for them. You can but dream.

Now for some photos of Maribor:

The Plague Column in Maribor, built after the plague of 1680. Ptuj had one too. Timișoara has one. Vienna apparently has a famous one. And when monkeypox really takes off…

I’ve mentioned these Roman numeral “puzzles” before. These were everywhere in Maribor. This is a modern one which was inscribed when the plague column was renovated (in 1991, if I’m not mistaken).

Supposedly the oldest grapevine in the world

What’s the mata mata with you? A freshwater turtle from the Amazon basin

Ptuj:

Lake Balaton:

Photos - The UK

Cambridgeshire commentary and plenty of pics

August 12, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

My brother is now a few hours from landing in Christchurch, but for a minute there it was doubtful they’d get to New Zealand at all. On Friday I spoke to my brother who was in a panic (I don’t blame him) because he’d just found out while trying to complete an online check-in that his wife (and probably the little one too) needed a sort of visa to enter NZ. It would take days – which they didn’t have – to come through. But somehow they got themselves sorted. I think if you’ve applied for the visa thingy you’re OK, even if you haven’t got it. These nasty surprises are common now in the no-travel-agent book-and-hope era.

I haven’t been that active since I arrived in St Ives; in other words, things have gone according to plan. On Friday I didn’t do a lot apart from look at the lots for sale at the auction (the bottom has clearly dropped out of the antiques market) and go for a bike ride around the Hemingfords and Houghton.

St Ives high street and its pleasant mix of three- and four-storey buildings

The only bank left in St Ives. Having the bankiness set in stone has probably helped it survive. It has the same beehive motif that we see, on a larger scale, on a bank building in Timișoara.

Merryland. Great name for a street.

Back in 2002, this sandwich bar on Merryland did a range of so-called “barmy sarnies”. I think (hope!) this flood was isolated.

This early-18th-century house is on the market for £895,000

Bugingham Palace is a cute name for this insect “house” in this wild area by the river, but the lack of another G has been bugging me ever since I saw it.

Yesterday my family friend decided she fancied doing a tour of Houghton Mill, but when she saw it required an advance booking, she decided instead on a tour of Lucy Boston’s manor house by the river in Hemingford Grey. Would I like to come? Sure. We walked through the St Ives meadow and past a large house and colourful garden that was once the site of a waterside bar where my friend had a summer job in the sixties. She caught sight of the owner; they had a longish chat which involved much reminiscing on her part. Soon after that, we went past the manor house and saw they had a tour at 2:30; she made a booking for the two of us. We stopped at the Axe and Compass pub in Hemingford Abbots where we had a pint each and a shamefully tiny portion of chips that cost £4, or roughly 15p per chip.

Then it was time for the tour. Lucy Boston was the world-famous author of the Green Knowe series of children’s books. I never read them but I did see some of the TV adaptation. She died in 1990, aged 97. When I was at Hemingford School – this would have been in the spring of 1988, I’m guessing – our teacher (Mr Wright, my first male teacher) gave us all an outing. Half the class were lucky enough to go inside the house and meet the most famous resident of the village and perhaps the oldest too, while the other half (including me) got to draw cows by the river. Other than being the home of Lucy Boston, the house is renowned for supposedly being the oldest continuously inhabited residence in the country. It was built during the Norman period, almost 900 years ago. Diana Boston, Lucy’s daughter-in-law, lives in the house, and it was she (now in her mid-eighties) who gave us the tour. I loved how expressive she was as she showed us all the church-like windows and arched doorways and the changes that were made between the Norman and Tudor periods, and pointed out the features that gave Lucy the inspiration for her stories. In the early 18th century the whole frontage was replaced, and not very well it seems, but a fire at the end of that century did for that. Lucy’s patchwork quilts also became famous, so we got a good look at them as well. Surprisingly, Diana even gave us a tour of her own bedroom. At the end of the tour, we (there were about a dozen of us) sat in a fantastical-looking room which WW2 airmen used twice a week to listen to gramophone records. The colossal gramophone is still working; she has a collection of 150-odd boxes of records. She played us the airmen’s favourite, Abide With Me.

This barn next to Lucy Boston’s house wouldn’t be out of place in Romania

I only took limited photos of the manor house

The tour cost £12 per person; that wasn’t terrible value (unlike the chips). My friend and I then spent some time in the garden, which is itself impressive with its chess-piece topiary and bright colours. It is home to some of the world’s oldest roses. Then we walked back to St Ives. We discussed her daughters, my parents, and a potential trip to Romania.

Today I went to Cambridge. I spent a good chunk of my time on Mill Road; I was born at the maternity hospital there, just like Douglas Adams was. (The hospital closed in 1983.) I’d never explored Mill Road before, and I wish I had, because it’s absolutely fascinating. More than a mile long, it’s made up of two distinct parts, with a railway bridge separating them. The western end, where the hospital used to be, is in the suburb of Petersfield, while the eastern end is in Romsey. Mill Road is brimming with independent eateries, international food shops, bike shops, and community centres of one sort or another. I went into a couple of the food shops to see if there was anything Romanian in there, and sure enough there were tripe to make soup out of (no thanks), trays of mici, and even cans of Ursus and Timișoreana beer. Outside these shops were watermelons, costing about twice what I’m used to paying. It was 28 degrees, unusually warm for here, so I felt right at home. (Tomorrow it’s forecast to reach 33.)