It’s quite cold around the motu today and I’ve finally been to the wharepaku – what a relief that was. I hope my command of Te Reo can attain a solid B2 level by the time I leave. This morning I went with Dad into Peel Forest and down the Rangitata – he was out of things to paint. There was less snow on the Four Peaks than we expected. The road became icy though, so we turned around.
Yesterday we saw my aunt and uncle who visited Timișoara five years ago, and also dropped in my aunt – the third and last wife of my uncle who died in 2014. This morning one of my many cousins popped in briefly on the way to the airport in Timaru. I hadn’t seen her for a decade or more.
Loud drilling is taking place as I write this.
Sixto Rodriguez, star of the wonderful film Searching for Sugar Man, has died at the age of 81.
Mum and Dad’s placePeople playing croquet in Geraldine DomainA sadly deceased monarch butterflyThe Orari RiverThe church at Peel Forest
My parents are staying in Moeraki. This morning (my time) they called me from the hotspot in Hampden to wish me a good trip. The signal was dodgy as ever. They’ll be picking me up in Christchurch on Monday afternoon.
It’s my last full day before I jet off. I’ve made these sorts of trips before without batting an eyelid, but this time it all feels like a bigger deal. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, maybe it’s because I haven’t done anything like this for seven years and the world isn’t the same place now, or maybe it’s the reactions I get from other people. New Zealand is unimaginably far off most Romanians’ mental maps. Few of them could locate the country on a real map of the world, even one that actually shows New Zealand. When it’s stinking hot (like it is right now) and I open up a weather app that says it’s currently one degree in Geraldine, it doesn’t compute. How can it be both winter and night-time? The US and Canada certainly do feature, however, and this morning I dropped in on my neighbour above me, who told me she (or some member of her family) had just booked a flight to Canada for next Friday, and she’ll be gone for five months.
I managed to keep today free of lessons. My last lesson before I go – my 614th of the year – was an online session last night with a woman who broke her ankle two weeks ago playing tennis. The one before that was with a woman I started with way back in 2017. Since then our lessons have been off and on, and two years ago she gave birth to a girl. Last night’s meeting with her was on Skype; she was at her parents’ place in a small town. It was a traditional house that her grandparents had built – the family house, to be passed down through generations, is a feature of Romanian life – and it seemed to be overrun by animals of all sorts. My student is lovely, and easy to build a rapport with, but she lacks the attention to detail required to really improve. She’s been at about the same level for years. For example, the word “freight” came up on numerous occasions last night because she works in logistics. The first time, she pronounced it like “fright”. It could logically be pronounced that way, if you consider height, but it isn’t, so I corrected her, emphasising that “fright” is a different word. But despite my best efforts she kept on pronouncing it “fright” regardless, and I gave up. I expect that if I’m still teaching her in 2029, I’ll still get messages from her saying “I will late 2 minutes”.
Yesterday was Ziua Timișoarei, the 104th anniversary of when Banat – the region where I live – officially became part of Romania. In the gap between my two pairs of lessons I met Dorothy and we chatted for an hour in one of the cafés in Piața Victoriei – inside, to get out of the heat.
My bags are now packed. I’ve used up half my 30 kg allowance and I’m wondering what the hell I’ve missed.
Update: In tonight’s Muzicorama, the big highlight for me was Paul Young.
The Rose Garden this morningA volleyball court, where the European youth finals were played, outside the Opera House
Here’s a 15-minute video of Timișoara that an intrepid American couple recently put up on YouTube. It showcases my picturesque city (I think of it as my city) pretty well. I wouldn’t recommend you come right now because of the searing heat, but in autumn or spring, or even early summer, an enjoyable and relaxing time in this beautiful place is just about guaranteed.
This is what my whiteboard looked like at the end of Saturday morning’s lesson.
I explained that we sometimes use so-called delexical verbs such as get, give and take, where the meaning is taken out of the verb and put into the noun, for example “give the house a clean” as an alternative to “clean the house”. I notice that I mistakenly wrote “give my house a clean” rather than “…the house…”. We love possessives in English, but we wouldn’t normally use one there.
Today I played Bananagrams with a boy of (I think) eleven. This was how it panned out (his effort on the left, mine with excessive wind on the right):
Kids seem to like the game. There’s no scoring, it doesn’t feel competitive, and they I know I’m always there to help them (and say no every time they ask me if AI or PC or any other ridiculous abbreviation is a word). In this game I also had to say no to MICES. Why can’t you have that? C’mon, think about it! By the way, if you ever play Bananagrams, try and make some longish words off the bat – I started with FLOODING and FARMER – to improve your chances of being able to join on later.
Another non-competitive word game I play sometimes with kids is Hangman. I recently watched a surprisingly interesting video about some of the oddities of the game. Yes, you literally draw a decapitation as an education tool for little kids. When I was six, I had a Milton Bradley boxed version of Hangman which was competitive. Both you and your opponent (seated opposite each other) chose a word of up to eight letters; the first to guess the opponent’s word was the winner. At the start of the game you put the letter tiles into slots, facing yourself. You turned them around as your opponent guessed them; this meant you had to insert the letters in reverse. Every time your opponent guessed a letter that wasn’t in your word, you turned a dial that showed an additional limb on a stick figure. When I played with Dad, he’d often forget to reverse the letters, leaving a six-year-old boy hopelessly struggling with complete gibberish.
I’ve watched almost none of this year’s Wimbledon so far. I saw half an hour of an Alcaraz match (not a bad player, that guy) with Serbian commentary, and that’s been it. Last weekend I found myself more interested in the Ashes cricket, for some reason. I listened to two of the players being interviewed after the match. They both invariably appended a –y onto the ends of their teammates’ names. Brooky and Broady and the rhyming trio of Stokesy and Woakesy and Foakesy. No first names at all. What are the rules for this stuff? What if you have a multi-syllable surname? What if your surname already has a –y stuck on the end, like Batty or Hardy? It’s something that smacks of British public schools to me, but maybe I’m overthinking it. (Aussies stick an -o on the end instead: Johnno and Thommo and Deano and Wayno.)
Here are some pictures from the open-air concert on Friday night:
A local groupRemembering the founder who had passed awayA Turkish groupPeople getting mici or maybe a frigărui
Tomorrow morning I have to go to some depot with the plumber to select pipes and what have you. He’ll start putting my central heating in on 25th July.
I just put on Al-Jazeera to see what was going on with the rebellion in Russia, and didn’t imagine I’d see Tom McRae presenting. I remember him as the “Christchurch guy” on Paul Henry’s TV1 breakfast show in New Zealand; he later moved to TV3.
The Titanic sub which dominated the airwaves for a few days has given us another window on human nature. Hundreds die trying to reach Europe on boats, seemingly every week. Just ten days ago, as many as 500 perished on an overcrowded fishing boat as it sank while they tried to reach Italy from Libya. That tragedy did get international coverage, but not nearly as much as the Titan sub which had five people on board. The story of the submersible had everything to draw you in – the Titanic (it’s been the subject of some of my lessons, and who hasn’t seen the film?), rich businessmen (just like on the Titanic itself), and a race against time as their oxygen levels ran out, although as we know, that last factor was irrelevant. I was as guilty as anybody as I watched it all unfold. Then you had some people who thought, you had more money than sense, so it serves you right.
I’ve just started reading Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. It’s extremely funny; I’m amazed how well his humour of 134 years ago works today. On Thursday I finished The New Nomads by Felix Marquardt, a book I picked up at Luton on the way back. It’s an interesting book about the (mainly) positive sides of immigration. The two aspects I really like are that: (a) the author admits he used to be an arrogant dick and is now more humble – how many people actually do that? – and (b) he says that the ultra-connected jet-set elite who attend conferences in places like Davos do more harm than good. The only thing I didn’t like was that of all the great examples of immigrants who made positive differences to both their own lives and the countries they moved to, I don’t think one of them was over thirty.
Tennis got cancelled again today; it tipped it down late this afternoon. This evening the sun came out and I went for a walk by the lock. It was lovely down there. People were milling around in parks and in a bar that I didn’t even know existed. I see beauty – simple beauty, I suppose, everywhere in this place.
I’m feeling better now after the Barclays business. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to buy a car a few weeks ago; getting out on the open road and seeing more of this wonderful country would have been great.
Matei had gone to the loo when I took this picture this morningThe old tram on display in Piața TraianIf I remember rightly, these lilies were on Strada Garofiței, or Carnation StreetThe sign means Bad dog, in the pre-1993 spelling, but which one?The river by the lock this evening
I’ve just had a marathon – 81-minute – Skype call with my parents.
We spent the first part of our call discussing the latest shocking news, that my Wellington-based cousin has cancer in her jaw. My parents had noticed something was up when they met her at their tragically young relative’s funeral in late April, but never imagined it was cancer. Googling “jaw cancer” makes for sobering reading. Jaw cancer is rare and doesn’t exist per se; it nearly always starts somewhere else in the mouth and spreads to the jaw, meaning it’s usually in an advanced stage. The prognosis can’t be good. On Wednesday she’ll have an operation to remove flesh from her jaw and replace it, probably from her arm. I must send my cousin a message, but what do you say?
A good half-hour of our chat was spent discussing life admin. It’s making my parents’ lives a misery. They must get rid of both their flats in the UK. They must move to somewhere far simpler as soon as the building work on their current place is finished. They must do things that are financially sub-optimal, just to simplify their lives. Seeing them buckle under the weight of all this crap is upsetting for me, especially at a time when I’ve been overwhelmed by it all myself.
Yesterday I had my pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița. When I turned up for the maths lesson, Matei’s father told me that the British school is hiring a maths teacher. I very much doubt I’d get the job anyway because I have no experience of teaching in a school, but if I did I’d have to Get Involved and coach football and heaven knows what else, and um, yeah, I’d have nice long holidays but no thanks.
After my lessons we were supposed to have the latest edition of the English Conversation Club, this time at my place, but just about everybody was away. Sanda, who ran the club in its previous incarnation, showed up at five. We chatted about wedding traditions and the word “venue”, and I gave her a Kiwi vocab matching game which she was somehow fascinated by. Then at 6:20 another woman, Ramona, turned up. She had lived some time in the US, and spoke English pretty well. At one point we discussed silent-b words: “subtle”, “debt”, “doubt”, and words ending in -mb such as “bomb” and “lamb”. Ramona told me, and I get this a lot, that “You don’t pronounce the b in doubt because you’re British. Sorry, but I learned American English and in America they pronounce it.” No, no, no, no, no. I may be British, but I’m also a teacher and I’ve taken the time to learn about pronunciation in different English-speaking countries, I also watch American films occasionally, and believe me, they don’t.
At seven, Sanda said she was going to the open-air museum to see Festivalul Etniilor, where performers based in the Banat region, but with different ethnicities, sang and played and danced. After tennis was cancelled because of the waterlogged courts, I decided to join her. There were Germans (Swabians or șvabi), Ukrainians, Serbians, Aromanians and Gypsies (Roma). It was a riot of colour as all the performers were dressed in their traditional costumes. The event was free and completely non-commercialised, unlike the much more publicised Flight Festival also taking place this weekend. The star of the show, Damian Drăghici with his group Damian & Friends, came on later. In the past he’s been a supporting act for the likes of Joe Cocker and James Brown. Towards the end he played the nai (a traditional panflute); the last song of the evening was Ciocârlia (the Lark), a very traditional Romanian tune – I much preferred last night’s version to the one in the link. I really enjoyed the evening; well, at least I did after the start – I was starving but grabbed a large langoș from a kiosk quite a way from the stage.
The GypsiesThe blind pianistThe flower stalls at the market, still open at 10:30 last night
I made a summer pudding for yesterday’s club which barely happened, and still have most of it. (We also discussed the word “pudding”. When I was growing up, we never used “dessert”. “Pudding”, or simply “pud”, covered anything that you ate after your main meal. For me, “pudding” sounds about nine times tastier than “dessert”.) The main benefit of yesterday’s “event” was that I made me tidy up the kitchen, living room, and main bathroom.
It’s 24 degrees as I write this – a perfect temperature. Soon we’ll have the strawberries and cherries and big juicy tomatoes and I’ll hardly have to visit the supermarket. Can’t wait.
First thing yesterday morning I worked on my Romanian. I must do this regularly. We’ve had two lessons so far using an intermediate textbook and they’ve been great, but as I tell my English students, it’s what you do outside your lessons that really counts. Learning all the little fiddly bits that you have to weave into your expressions to say who did what to whom is a real challenge to me, probably because of how my brain works. I can remember actual words because they have a shape to them. For instance the word morman came up in our last session. It means a big physical heap of something, and was a new word for me. There are many ways of making a visual or sound-based connection between the word and its meaning: mormânt means “grave” (as in a burial place) in Romanian, there’s Mormon, there’s mammon, there’s marmot, there’s moșmoană (a brown Romanian fruit that you see here in December) and so on. The possibilities are just about endless. But with these little bitty bits, there’s nothing to grab hold of. It’s a bit like the time I tried to learn Chinese – everything there is shapeless utterances – or the 1300-odd three-letter Scrabble words which turned my brain into mush, even though I had an easier time with the longer words. When it comes to Romanian, I’ve just got to keep at it, not shy away from using the fiddly stuff in speaking, and accept that I’ll make mistakes.
After making up a bunch of Romanian sentences, I had my maths lesson with Matei in Dumbrăvița. He got 81% on the homework I set him the previous week, and that made me happy because I don’t exactly make it easy for him. At one point I explained the different sets of numbers – natural numbers, integers, rationals, and reals – and he wanted to know if pi being irrational meant that you’d eventually get a million ones in a row or, if you convert numbers into colours, the Mona Lisa. I love those questions. I told him that no, pi being irrational doesn’t necessarily imply that, but most people think you will indeed get what he suggests, though there’s no proof as yet.
When the maths was over I had a bite to eat, then a more nondescript two-hour English lesson. Then I met up with Mark, and his two dogs, on the edge of the wood near his home. It’s amazing how much the wood teems with life considering its closeness to a main road. We saw two hawks swooping, you could hear a cuckoo in the distance (you could almost never do that in the UK), and there was the constant satisfying croak of frogs. We stopped for a beer at the nearby bar where we chatted about how cool Romania is, and then I cycled home.
I’ve been thinking about why I chose Romania to live. Some of it was the language. Băieții? What madness is that? I need to immerse myself in it. Now! But a lot of it was the undeveloped nature of Romania relative to other options I might have had, for instance Poland. I knew that Romania would be more raw, it would be rustier and flakier, the markets would be more pungent, the cobblestones would be super cobbley, my bike trips would be bouncy. Romania would engage my senses more than other countries I might have settled in; it would much better for my mental health than somewhere all done up and pristine. And precisely because it was less developed, I’d be almost the only native English teacher here so I could teach how I wanted. I could be totally in charge. My only real disappointment has been how little I’ve managed to travel around the country, and that’s why I’m looking at ads for 15-year-old (or more) Skodas and Golfs and Dacias. To see the country and engage my senses further.
If I do get a car, I’ll have to go through the registration process which means a shedload of paperwork and a new set of number plates. For a small fee you can choose the three-letter combination at the end of your plate; there are 99 plates for each combination in each county, except in Bucharest where there are 999. I often find myself weaving through such delights as FUK, ASS, HIV, and DIE, sometimes all in a row. It seems anything goes here, as indeed it should. I think there are banned combinations, but if you’re willing to pay enough for, say, SEX, you can probably get it. (I did see it one time on the road.) I’ll have to think what I should get, if I don’t decide to just get a random plate. There’s no way I’ll get anything based on my name, even though I like my initials. Yesterday I saw parked car with a local plate that I hadn’t seen before: ROM. I’m sure it’s on the dodgy list because “rom” means gypsy in a load of languages. Some years ago, Romania even changed their official country code (used in the Olympics, for example) from ROM to the nonsensical French-based ROU, because they were fed up with the association with gypsies. “Rom” is still used in a lot of company names, however, and all ROM means to me is Romania, the country that has already given me so much. Heaven knows where I’d be if I hadn’t come here. If I do get a custom combination, it’s certainly on my shortlist.
When I browse cars online, I narrow my search quite substantially, but it’s amazing what comes up that fits my criteria, like a 1986 “Mr Bean” mini, advertised as such. (Mr Bean has a kind of cult following here.) The big surprise was seeing this 1962 beauty, which my brother, an off-road vehicle recognition guru, identified as a Soviet GAZ. (Apparently it’s not a GAZ – it’s Romanian-built, but based on the GAZ.) He said he’d love one. I suggested I buy it and drive it to the UK, and he could pay me back. It’s asking price is €4500, or about £4000. Honestly with how tricky it has become to fly there, that might be my best bet if I want to see my brother and his family.
Update: Some more thoughts about Romania. When I arrived, there was political turmoil: fallout from the Colectiv tragedy and all the business with Liviu Dragnea and the prison pardons which prompted huge numbers of Romanians to take to the streets during my first winter here. Some of what I’ve seen here since then is maddening. I’ll never get used to the indiscriminate dumping of rubbish everywhere. Just ugh. The low vaccine take-up cost thousands of lives and nobody seemed to care. But – touch wood – Romania is extremely safe, especially my city, and mostly the country just goes about its merry way, unlike (obviously) some of its near neighbours.
The word rom in Romanian also means rum, and they’ve taken advantage of the double meaning to name a popular patriotic rum-flavoured chocolate bar:
Here’s the petrol station near me that also has rom in its name:
To illustrate what I was saying about those number plates, this was outside the tennis courts this evening:
And here’s a much nicer picture of the Bega this evening:
I look forward to posting more pictures when I get this car and start travelling around. Sorry this ended up being such a long post.
It’s my birthday, and my first thought when I woke up this morning was, jeez, people are going to want to communicate with me more than usual today and I’m not sure I’ll cope with that. Instant messaging stresses me out like you wouldn’t imagine. I wish I could go back to checking my emails every few days.
Mum and Dad called me first thing, to wish me a happy birthday. Mum was in a shitty mood, and I could hardly blame her because she was facing her own Barclays ordeal. (Mum deals with all my parents’ banking stuff, online and offline.) Then I got an unexpected message from S, whom I met on Tinder (ugh!) in 2018. Heaven knows how she remembered my birthday; my brother doesn’t even manage that. She now has a nine-month-old daughter.
I’ve got a new student who’s having five one-hour lessons with me today, tomorrow and the next day. She’s 22, lives in Cluj, and wants a job in IT just like almost everybody else in Cluj. This evening, during my second session of the five, I realised that I end an awful lot of sentences with “right”. I only knew this because she kept repeating the “right” right back at me. It’s like the time I accidentally recorded part of a lesson and realised how much my head (and not only my head) moves when I talk. I wonder what other (annoying?) mannerisms I might have.
Last weekend I was cycling down the Bega when I saw a whole pod (if that’s the word – I’m sure it isn’t) of freshwater turtles. Soon after that, my back wheel got a puncture. There are now kilometre posts along the river, and this happened at the 108 km point. To go home, I turn at about the 116 km post, and then ride another kilometre to my door. I didn’t have a repair kit, not that it’s easy to repair tyres on this Dutch bike anyway, so that was a decent walk. I did patch the inner tube without removing the wheel, but I got another flat this evening as I was coming home from my 4-till-6 lesson.
Some of those turtlesA long walk home
I wasn’t the only one taking pictures of the flowers in the park yesterday.
Too many lessons now to watch much snooker – that’s a good thing – but this afternoon I caught the tail-end of Joe Perry’s 10-9 loss to Robert Milkins, in a battle of players in their late forties. Perry had led 5-0 and 7-2, but developed a knack for missing almost anything. Fancy coming through qualifying on a black-ball decider only to then lose like that in the first round; that will be a hard one to take. Now they’re showing the fancied former champion Shaun Murphy in a close match with Si Jiahui. It’s the last first-round match; I hope Si wins and I don’t know why. Update: Si did win, 10-9. He led 9-6 but Murphy won the next three. In the decider, Si knocked in a break of 56 but was very unlucky not to be on a red after opening up a cluster, then Murphy ran out of position himself and tried to force the less experienced Si into an error. In the end Murphy couldn’t escape from a snooker and the 20-year-old Chinese player clambered over the line after a gripping final frame.
My work volumes are way down as we approach Orthodox Easter which is a massive deal here. People here know that “normal Easter” is the week before (at least this year it is; it all depends on moon phases and such like) but they assume that we push the boat out with lavish traditional Easter meals like they do, and are quite underwhelmed when I tell them about chocolate eggs and hot cross buns and, um, not much else. Where I come from, the big attraction of Easter is simply the four-day weekend.
This week has marked the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, one of the biggest good news stories of my lifetime. Although the tensions are still bubbling under the surface, all that senseless violence that I remember growing up – usually accompanied by that bastard Ian Paisley’s rasping voice – came to an end. At the same time as the agreement was signed, we had severe flooding. The water came up our garden, as it had done in 1987 and again in 1992-93, but this time it was literally an inch or two from coming in our house. We had no power for at least a week, maybe two. The people around the corner weren’t so lucky and had to vacate their homes for months. While the flood waters were still receding I went on a field trip to Dorset, close to where my brother lives. I started university a few months later in September 1998, the same month that my brother joined the army. In January 2003 we had more flooding. At that point I was still scrambling around trying to find work after finishing university the previous summer. In March, with great relief, I started a poorly-paid job – a real job, nonetheless – at a water consultancy in Peterborough, and one of their projects at the time was designing an embankment to hold back the flood waters in St Ives where I grew up. The bank was duly built in 2006, although I don’t know if it will cope in the long term with the ravages of climate change. If I could wind back the clock I’d probably choose to stay in Peterborough, and in that job, instead of joining my parents in New Zealand.
The chat with my cousin last Friday was interesting. She said that neither of her two older boys, who are now both at university, drink alcohol, and that’s apparently not unusual. How times have changed. At university in the late nineties the social pressure to drink was enormous. Lad culture was at its peak in the nineties – you saw it everywhere, in football (which had become massively popular), on TV, and especially in comedy. Many young women embraced it; the word “ladette” was even bandied about. Admittedly this was the UK, but I don’t think New Zealand was much different. A less laddish culture is probably something we should celebrate, but its screen-heavy replacement isn’t much of an improvement. By the way, my cousin finds my parents’ latest property escapade even less understandable than I do.
I played pool with Mark on Sunday. As I expected, I was bloody awful. I potted one or two nice balls but really I was just guessing as to where to strike the cue ball. I had a special knack for potting the white, often without contacting any other ball. Mark wasn’t fantastic either, but he was better than me, that’s for sure. It was kind of fun to try something different. We each had a beer and shared a pizza. It’s quite a good set-up there; as well as a few pool tables they have one snooker table, but I think I’ll stick to watching that game.
Yesterday I watched 16 snooker players vying to reach the biggest event in the game. There’s a YouTube channel dedicated to this final qualifying round. There were so many close matches; all eight of them went to at least 10-6, and two of them ran to a deciding frame. The most dramatic of all was the Thai player Noppon Saengkham’s 10-9 victory over China’s Zhang Anda, which was decided on the final black. With only the black remaining, a snooker table seems impossibly large. I was glad Saengkham won because I remember him from last year’s World Championship in which he seemed a thoroughly nice chap. (Zhang might be equally nice, for all I know.) There was also a crazy finish to a match where the pink and black were tantalisingly over the same corner pocket with no other balls remaining; the English player Jordan Brown, trailing 9-7, had to contact the pink without potting the black, or else he was out. Eventually he missed the pink entirely and his Chinese opponent booked his place. The Chinese players obviously couldn’t speak English because they didn’t give interviews. Today 16 more players will go through the ringer.
I went to the local produce market this morning. An hour from now I’ll be seeing the four twins; I feel hopelessly underprepared for that.
Here are some pictures from one of the parks in town on Monday, and also the delapidated stadium next to the market this morning. The local football team Poli Timișoara played at the stadium until it was closed in February 2022; aptly the floodlights failed in the very last game, and Poli forfeited the match.
Unusually for a Saturday, I only had one lesson today – maths with Matei. He and his family got back from their trip to beautiful Valencia on Thursday, then yesterday their five-year-old dog died suddenly. At his parents’ request I’d given him a hard test to complete for homework. He got 6 out of 23 but thankfully was unfazed by that. On my way home from the lesson, the rain pelted down and I got soaked to the skin.
Yesterday wasn’t a great day to put it mildly. I didn’t have any lessons until 3pm, but I had plenty to be getting on with. Preparation for Matei’s lesson, the dictionary, cleaning my flat, going to the notary to get yet another authorised copy of my passport so I can maybe retrieve my tens of thousands of quid from Barclays. The only problem was that I was low on both mental and physical energy. I was slow to get going. I decided to work for a while on the S and T sections of the dictionary, then see the notary in Piața Unirii. When I got to the notary’s office, I was met by a sign: “Closed. Back on 6th March.” I thought, this is just like one of those dreams, only there weren’t any tangled weeds, nor was there a year – something like 2098 – appended to the end of the notice. No problem, there are other notaries in the vicinity. I visited another office, but doamna – the notary lady – had popped out. Then I tried a third office, which the sign strongly suggested was upstairs. I climbed the rickety stairs to a courtyard, but there was no notary up there, but then there was an archway and some even shakier wooden stairs leading to the second floor – this was quite beautiful in its way. No, this definitely isn’t it. It was on the ground floor all along, but once again doamna wasn’t there. At the fourth place I tried, doamna was there, but “you need a translator, not us, those are the rules” and with that I went home. On the way back I must have shouted, hit a road sign, and nearly hit several pedestrians. Once again, I was out of control. I stopped off via the market, and that helped calm me down a bit. I bought a loaf of bread, some goat’s cheese, some mandarins and some onions, then went to get some spicy sausage from one of the meat stalls. The youngish woman thought I was pointing to the pork scratchings, and I thought, what the hell, I’ll get them instead. Three hundred grams.
Last week was a bad week for cancellations. It was half-term, or the Romanian equivalent of that, so some people were away skiing as Romanians with money like to do at this time of year, then others got sick, and a few cancelled at the last minute for some unknown reason. Not much fun for me, because it’s really my work that’s keeping me from going under right now. I thought going back to my old antidepressants might have steadied the ship, but yesterday was another shocker.
Though I now have a diagnosis of sorts for my “sinus” problem, my nose runs like a tap and I have a lot of low-level pain, so even when I don’t have one of those debilitating migraines, my quality of life takes a hammering. Monday’s diagnosis didn’t do much to solve that.
I don’t mind if this dreadful weather continues tomorrow, because after my early lesson I really have to tidy this place up. On Tuesday I bumped into Bogdan – the guy who lives in my old apartment block. He asked why I moved out of there. I sometimes wonder the same thing. He was heading home – via yet another pub – to watch the snooker on TV. I said we should try and meet up for a drink this weekend. It might be nice to spend time with someone who isn’t coping with life either but doesn’t care. I called him this morning but got no reply.
Nothing much has changed since I last wrote. I’m managing fine with work (and now have a stash of cash that I haven’t had since pre-Covid), but all the life admin stuff is still giving me nightmares. Literally. I’ve had dreams lately where I’ve trekked across the city to find that the bureau (or wherever I’m supposed to go) closed years ago and is now overgrown with weeds. Silly me. I really can’t cope. Last night I woke up at half-three and thought, shit, where did I put all my ENT stuff? Mad panic, then I found the envelope, popped it in a file, and took ages to get back to sleep.
The ENT stuff. I saw the neurologist on Monday. He was in his mid-thirties and spoke near-fluent English and French. I wasn’t at my best that day, and he seemed aggressive and sarcastic. I had to cycle home and back to get information that I hadn’t brought with me because I was too disorganised because, well, everything. At least he was still willing to deal with me at that point, and I got used to his manner. I started speaking Romanian but switched to English when his command of the language became apparent. On my trip home and back I collected some snot, then he read my recent MRI scan and my CT scan from four years ago, and concluded that I almost certainly didn’t have a fistula or anything of the sort, but instead had migraines. I was one of the 90%-plus of patients complaining of “sinus headaches” who actually have migraines. All the symptoms are there – fatigue, nausea, sensitivity to light and sound – plus I’m dripping with family history. He gave me advil, or ibuprofen, saying there was only a 30% chance it would do anything for me. Dad reckons I should take a triptan, one of a class of drugs that does have a fairly high success rate at treating migraine pain.
My brother called me on Saturday night. When are Mum and Dad coming over? He was upset that they’d made no firm plans to visit him again. His son will only really have one set of grandparents, he said. My take on it is, yes it’s sad, but making the trip is harder for my parents than my brother thinks. Apart from the bits where they saw family, including the excitement at seeing the new addition, they really didn’t enjoy their trip at all. Flying, travelling within the UK, breaking down and getting parking fines, sorting out stupid stuff like a mix-up with power meters in their flat in St Ives – it was all a chore. Now they’ve got their overly ambitious building project on their hopelessly impractical house to deal with, so making a trip over is even harder. Between the time Dad’s mother died (early 2012) and when Dad got cancer (mid-2019), they did toy with the idea of spending six months in the UK every year, but that A380 has well and truly departed. My brother put the cost of a trip to New Zealand (he, his wife, and the little one) at £3500 which he said was unaffordable.
Here is some of the newer street art in Timișoara. Much of it is on the university campus. I wonder if the residents of Pac-Man Heights or Rubik’s Block have a clue what their enormous murals represent.
This one from 2013, near all the campus fast food outlets, is nice and familiar
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