Still no baby news. I wonder who will be the US president when she’s born. I heard that Trump’s inauguration (ugh) will take place inside because it will – quite aptly – be bitterly cold on Monday. Heck, it’s been eight years since his first one and everything now feels eight times worse.
Elena, my neighbour who lives above me, got back yesterday. I’ve just been up to see her. She seems in remarkably fine fettle after such a trip. Her journey hasn’t affected her ability to talk, that’s for sure.
Mum and Dad have been down in Moeraki since Tuesday. They’re able to call me from there now by tapping into a neighbour’s wi-fi. Before they’d have to use some hotspot thingy outside the fish and chip shop in Hampden, and normally the line was terrible. So far they’ve had a disappointing summer, weather-wise. When we spoke it was unseasonably cold and windy there, despite the blue sky.
I slept better the last two nights. Last weekend and early this week were a total mess. Kitty’s constant darting around was doing my head in too. Seriously Kitty, you can stop this shit now. She’s calmed down a bit since. One of her favourite haunts is the top of the old cupboard in the “balcony” bit of my living room. Another of her favourites is my desk, because of all the pens and other stationery for her to play with. She’s very curious.
Since my self-imposed YouTube ban I’ve been using Spotify a lot more for music. There are two songs I’ve been playing over and over lately. One is Sad White Reggae by British band Placebo. Heaven knows why the song is called that. He talks about being on a train to Scotland (I think I just really like trains) and about every river flowing “back to Dundee”. The song is about loss. And insomnia. It just all seems to fit. The second song is Crowded House’s Four Seasons In One Day. Such a Kiwi expression. The weather could be pretty damn changeable in England too. But in Timișoara we don’t exactly get nor’westers springing up out of nowhere, or cold southerlies, or the river suddenly half-way up people’s gardens. We’re nine hours’ drive from the sea after all. Anyway, the best line of this Crowded House song for me is “Up the creek and through the mill” which is where a lot of us feel we’ve been dragged, a lot of the time. I should also mention the line “The sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the domain”. I bet a lot of people were confused by that one.
After visiting Kaufland (one of the big supermarkets) today, I decided to look around rather than head straight home. Here are a few of the pictures I took:
One of Timișoara’s other train stationsBega-Pam: off to the left is the bread factory. I don’t know if it still operates.A brace of bums. I don’t know how they managed to get BUM on both their cars.The old water towerPopa is the surname and perhaps Romania’s most common.But how do they know?
We’re all waiting for my brother’s second child to arrive. It can only be a few days away now. If my niece is born on Thursday, all three of the numbers in her date of birth (day, month and year) will be square. (That’s with the year as 2025, not just 25 which of course is also square.) That’s obviously the last thing that matters. Her name doesn’t even matter all that much. All that really matters is that she’s healthy.
Kitty. Yikes. She’s so damn active now. After four days of relative calm when she’d happily jump on cupboards and just sit there, she’s now darting through my flat at breakneck speed, often dragging something noisy. Especially at night. I just know she wants to be outside, running around chasing stuff. I hadn’t been sleeping well even pre-Kitty, and my doctor prescribed me Optisomn which has magnesium plus a concoction of other ingredients: melatonin, hops, vitamin B6, and passionflower. But hyperactive one-year-old Kitty isn’t helping me. Last night was pretty much a write-off, sleep-wise. Today I went (for the first time) to Jumbo, a Greek-owned hypermarket near the airport which sells cheap kids’ toys, cheap household stuff, cheap decorations, cheap stationery, and yes, cheap pets’ toys. I don’t know if I’ll go back there in a hurry because the floor was lethally slippery and it has a horrible layout where there’s only one way of getting from any point to any other point and you end up walking miles. I must have spent an hour there, all the time in a complete daze. I did however get Kitty a bed and a bunch of things that go rattle and ding, to go with the scratching post and few toys she already had. With a bit of luck (!) she might stop thinking that plants or flash drives or grout around the bath are toys.
Kitty pics, including the trip to the vet
I’ve had a good week of lessons, including (unusually on a Sunday) one today. No sessions with those “AI bot” young women, that’s probably why. I won’t be so lucky in the coming week. And in between I’ve had some brilliant customer service. The vet was simply a lovely person, the little lady at the pharmacy was extremely pleasant as always, and even at the mall (which I tend to avoid) I got service with a smile. I often lament Romania’s poor customer service, so when it’s the opposite it deserves to be mentioned too.
There was an interesting moment in my lesson with the 14-year-old twins on Thursday. They played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in a joint effort. For the £8000 question, I asked them what Concorde was. A very fast what? Plane, train, car or boat. They used their 50/50 lifeline which gave them just plane and train as options. They went for train and it was game over. While I was in the middle of explaining what Concorde actually was, the boy said “who cares”. Seeing my face, he then said “only joking”. Ah, but you’re not really joking, are you? You actually don’t care. And that isn’t your fault. It shows that when you move 20 years forward and 1000 miles east, something culturally pretty damn important (there was the crash in 2000 too which was a massive news story at the time) becomes a total nothing.
Football. Birmingham beat Lincoln 2-1 in the FA Cup. They took the lead after just 30 seconds, then with 15-odd minutes to go, Lyndon Dykes rifled home the sort of volley they use the word “exquisite” for. It was a brilliant strike. Lincoln got a late penalty that probably shouldn’t have been a penalty, but Blues held on for the win. They’ll be at home to Newcastle in the fourth round. Quite a fun draw. Another game that caught my eye was Tamworth against Spurs. It was 0-0 after 90 minutes. Up until last season, that would have meant a replay at one of the best grounds in the country, a heck of a day out and a nice big windfall for plucky little Tamworth. But no, replays have been scrapped. The game proceeded to extra time, and Tottenham won 3-0. In a few years, they’ll probably ditch extra time too. Everything just gets that tiny bit more crap, doesn’t it?
In my head I can split my time in Romania so far into four stages. The fourth stage has been the longest, starting at around the time Russia invaded Ukraine. But I’ve just had the feeling in the last few days that phase five has begun. The books, the cat, tuning out of the news, thinking about what the hell I’ll do if and when I leave Romania, and even maybe studying again.
I’ve just got back from my lesson with ten-year-old Filip. (They don’t mess around with ph in Romanian, let alone poncy French spellings like Philippe.) We had our session in his little sister’s room, which was full of shelves piled high with books that obviously weren’t for her immediate benefit. There were novels that would have been bought in the seventies, travel books, and medical books including a fat tome all about excretion.
Yesterday my brother called me on WhatsApp. The little one was still up and about. I had my first-ever verbal interaction with him. I picked up the word Christmas and a whole load of babababa-sounding words which my brother translated for me; he was talking about family members.
Because I had a cold (and still do), I drove to Dumbrăvița on Saturday for my pair of two-hour lessons, instead of cycling there as I normally do. It’s my only work destination where driving is a significant time-saver. I came back via the mall, because my doctor’s clinic is now attached to the mall and I knew he’d be there. (I wanted to pick up my monthly allocation of pills.) But being a Saturday between Christmas and New Year, the multi-storey car park was a nightmare. I entered through the barrier, drove up and down and around in circles for ten minutes, then decided the whole thing wasn’t worth it and headed through the exit. They give you an hour’s free parking. My doctor’s next stint is New Year’s Eve so I’ll see him then instead. I got flashbacks of the Park Street multi-storey car park in Cambridge, which was even worse. When I was little, Mum went shopping in Cambridge on a Saturday (she often brought me along) and parked in that horrible car park which was built in the sixties, as so many architectural monstrosities were. Its levels were called “decks” which were denoted by letters going up to L, if memory serves. She mostly parked on Deck F. Then we walked down the staircase which stank of pee. I don’t remember Mum being all that stressed by it; she must have got used to it. I’m happy to report that a wrecking ball was taken to that hellhole a few years ago. (I once read a book that was partly set in a different Cambridge car park, sometime in the nineties. This was the Lion Yard car park, which no longer exists either.)
Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. I was born towards the end of his only term, so obviously I have no memory of him as president. But it’s clear to me that he had more compassion and integrity in his little finger than the thought-free, morality-free president-elect has in his entire body. Carter was a victim of circumstance and America’s celebrity culture. America boomed under Reagan, and later Clinton, but you have to wonder at what long-term cost.
The darts. On Friday I saw Damon Heta hit a nine-darter, the second of this year’s tournament. (Christian Kist earlier got one.) Unlike a 147 in snooker, a perfect leg of darts happens in the blink of an eye. Heta got £60,000 for that, Prostate Cancer UK benefited to the same tune, and someone in the crowd also took home sixty grand. Unfortunately for Heta (just like Kist before him), he didn’t win. When I started my maths lesson, he was 3-1 up against Luke Woodhouse in a race to four, but he proceeded to lose the final nine legs of the match. One match that stood out for me was Ricardo Pietreczko, a German who appears rather awkward in interviews, against Scott Williams, who looks for all the world like someone who I’d have avoided like the plague at school. Maybe I’ve got him completely wrong and he was the shy and retiring type, but I doubt it. No wonder I wanted the awkward guy to win. Which he did, 4-1, after a very solid performance. Another match I had my eye on involved Ricky Evans. A cartoonish figure, his face is a picture every time he throws, which he does at lightning speed. He was beaten yesterday by Robert Owen of Wales, 4-2. I was glad to see Chris Dobey get through, but the real story must be last year’s champion Luke Humphries who lost 4-1 to Peter Wright. Update: I’ve just watched a dramatic match between Dobey and Dutchman Kevin Doets. Dobey was looking good but it almost slipped away from him. He scraped through in a deciding set to make the last eight. Both players missed a plethora of doubles, adding to the drama.
The book. Lots of monkeying around with fonts and formats, but it’s coming together.
Standing on the new footbridge over the Bega, with the old one just in front of me.
On Monday I found out that Petrică, one of the guys I used to play tennis with, had died at the age of just 57. He died a month ago of a heart attack. When I first played with him he leapt around the court. I remember partnering him in a set of doubles which we lost 6-1. If you’d just let me take my shot occasionally, maybe we wouldn’t have got thrashed. The next thing I knew, he’d developed kidney problems and was on dialysis. He still played tennis, but was limited to half an hour at a time. I’ve been in touch with a female friend of his; she said she’s in no mood for anything Christmassy. Petrică is the second of the tennis group to pass away: Domnul Ionescu, who was 70 or so, died of cancer at the beginning of 2022.
In other sad news, yesterday I had a lesson with my London-based student. I asked him if he had any news. Looks like I’m getting a divorce. He’s 35, with two boys aged five and two. I get the impression they got married nine years ago (in Romania, before moving to the UK) because it was just what you did, and now they’re facing a divorce which is just about always stressful and traumatic. With divorce rates hovering close to 50%, I often wonder whether getting married is ever really worth it. I mean, getting married is pretty damn stressful in itself, not to mention expensive.
This morning I opened a letter from my family friend in St Ives whom I spent considerable time with in August when I visited. Getting a letter these days is really quite something.
On Sunday I met both Mark and Dorothy in town, one after another with a longish break in between. I met them both at Berăria 700 which has reasonably priced food and drinks. Mark is almost ten years older than me, and I like to ask him about his memories of the seventies, growing up as he did in Tamworth, which isn’t far from Birmingham. This time he talked about people driving bubble cars. Being born right at the start of the Thatcher–Reagan era and growing up in Cambridgeshire rather than say the north of England, I sadly have no memories of a time before money was everything, except perhaps when I was really little and rampant capitalism hadn’t fully kicked in. I’m thinking of the funny little shops that still existed in St Ives back then, or the local auction in which Dad would scout around for antique furniture. (There’s still an auction in St Ives now, but the bottom has really dropped out of the antique market in the last 40 years.) Being born in 1980 means I can remember nothing that came before, but everything that came after.
I could really see the stark difference between the beginning and the end of the eighties when I read two of Garrison Keillor’s books, one published in 1981, the other in 1988. In the space of a few years, money had morphed from being a tool for buying useful goods and services and providing security, to being a thing in itself that fairly ordinary people wanted to acquire. Share prices were suddenly read out on radio bulletins as if they were things that mums and dads ought to know about, rather than being hidden away in tiny font in some obscure section of the paper.
Music. Lately I’ve been listening to Joan Armatrading. She was born in St Kitts and Nevis, as it is now called, but moved to Birmingham at a young age. She came out with a number of hits in the seventies and eighties. Love and Affection (1976) is wonderful; Drop the Pilot (1983) isn’t bad either.
Here are some pictures of town on Sunday evening:
Then and now. We might be going back to “then”.The third old-style cinema to have opened in the city
Today I made another trip to Peciu Nou and Ciacova. (Pictures below.) The biggest benefit of having a car, after seven-plus years of not having one, is being able to easily see these beautifully rustic towns and villages. I rarely use my car to get around the city; when I’m in a rush (to get to a lesson, for instance) I find that massively stressful, and my bike is just as fast anyway.
In recent months I’ve been reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s famous quote, when he said that he went bankrupt “two ways: gradually, then suddenly”. I’ve felt a gradual societal decline over the last decade or so, but lately the process has kicked into an entirely different gear. Perhaps I’m in a better place to feel it than most, because unlike most people, I’m not busy playing the game. I walked off the pitch a long time ago, and now I can sort of sit back and observe. From my vantage point, things now look very ugly indeed.
On a similar theme, a couple of months ago I discussed childlessness with Dorothy, who never had children herself. It was a hot topic in the US presidential campaign: vice president-elect JD Vance basically said that if you don’t have children, you don’t have a stake in the future of the country, or I suppose the world. I imagine that’s quite a popular viewpoint: if you have kids, you care more about future generations. But if you think about it for five seconds, you’ll realise that it’s actually bollocks. Most parents aren’t really that bothered about the success of future generations; rather, they’re extremely bothered about the success of their own specimens of future generations, which isn’t the same thing at all. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that; it’s simple human nature to want your own kids to succeed. But maybe that means that if you don’t have kids, you’re able to invest in future success in a more dispassionate way.
This weekend I watched a two-part BBC documentary on autism. Presented by the British naturalist Chris Packham (who revealed his autism diagnosis a few years back), Inside Our Autistic Minds showcases four autistic people, all under 30, though all very different. One of them is the son of Ken Bruce, the radio DJ, who is highly intelligent but non-verbal. Chris Packham teams up with animators and other creative people to produce short films to help illustrate their autistic lives better. Very well done (Britain tends to be really good at this stuff), though I’d have liked one or two of the participants to have been older. Naturally I compare myself to these people. On more than one occasion I thought, I’m more extreme than you. When it comes to avoiding social situations and generally keeping out of people’s way, I’m pretty damn extreme.
Yesterday many parts of the UK were buffeted by storms. When I got back from my lessons in Dumbrăvița I tuned into the match between Barnsley and Birmingham, thinking it might have succumbed to the elements. But no, it was on. At times the corner flags were near-horizontal, such was the wind. The first half was mostly uneventful. Barnsley dominated the early stages of the second half and took a deserved lead, only for Blues to hit back immediately with a screamer from Jay Stansfield. Later Barnsley had a player sent off for a second yellow card, and then Stansfield scored what proved to be the winner for the away side. Barnsley were a bit unlucky not to at least get a draw. Thanks to the copious added time, the game was still going on when my online lesson started. I make it the fifth time already this season that Blues have come from behind to win a league game. That’s a lot.
Two weeks ago, or was it three, I decided to self-block YouTube, thinking all those videos are a huge time-waster. I only applied the block to weekdays, but I’m finding I have no desire to watch it at weekends either.
I hope that in the coming days I’ll take delivery of the batch of books I’ve ordered. I’ve missed having a good book to read.
Here are today’s pictures from Ciacova. I’m not sure how that Cadillac ended up there. The guineafowl (bibilică in Romanian, plural bibilici) were all tightly bunched in a corner before I disturbed them.
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.
CebzaPetroman
Various pictures of Ciacova
40 kg piglets for saleNo 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.
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.
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 booth was phonelessThis sundial was a bit fast. It was 10:35.To the toilet. It was brand new and clean, surprisingly.A squirrel
The abandoned building
I wonder what happened in 1980This hand-painted sign is very Romanian, particularly those BsThe Romanian elections aren’t far away eitherThe Catholic churchThere was once a “first class” restaurant at the bottom of this crumbling blockAn old Romtelecom phone box near where I live. The phone no longer works.
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.
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.
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.
SzegedI really liked the design of this phone box. Surprisingly, the phone still worked.Kecskemét
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.
Just outside Szeged
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.
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