Photos

Life :) - Maths teaching - Music - New Zealand - Photos

More sad news, and some happier traditions

June 18, 2023 by 0 Comments

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 Gypsies

The blind pianist

The 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.

I promise I’ll talk about my trip next time.

Language learning - Life :) - Maths teaching - Photos - Romania

Still learning the lingo, why I came here, and some car stuff

May 8, 2023 by 0 Comments

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.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

Take the long way home

April 21, 2023 by 0 Comments

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 turtles

A 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.

Life :) - Other sports - Photos

Silver jubilees, good and bad

April 13, 2023 by 0 Comments

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.

Headaches - Life :) - Maths teaching - Photos - Writing a book

Trying not to get sucked under

February 26, 2023 by 0 Comments

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.

Family - Headaches - Life :) - Photos

A real headache (again)

February 23, 2023 by 0 Comments

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
Environment - Life :) - New Zealand - Photos - Poker - Travel: Romania

Earthquake weather

February 14, 2023 by 0 Comments

At around 5pm yesterday, a 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck about 170 km east of here, at a depth of 15 km. I didn’t feel it, but many in Timișoara did, and I think the recent scenes from Turkey and Syria spooked some Romanians more than normal. Yes, earthquakes are common in Romania, mostly in Vrancea in the south-east. About 1600 people were killed in the 1977 Vrancea quake, which Ceaușescu took advantage of by clearing out swaths of Bucharest to build even more brutalist concrete blocks. There’s often talk of building codes and yellow stickers which is all hauntingly familiar to me.

It’s an absolute mess – once again – in New Zealand’s North Island. The floods caused by Cyclone Gabrielle have displaced thousands, destroyed homes, and cut off whole towns. I worked for a water consultancy company twenty years ago; we produced maps that were fascinating in their way, delineating the extend of flooding at various levels of likelihood: once every 5 years, then 10, 25, 50, 100 and 200. Then there was a “climate change” line that blew everything else out of the water, so to speak. A 1-in-200-year event would be more like a 1-in-2, if the doom scenario came to pass. It already has. I was pleased to see James Shaw, the minister for climate, give such an impassioned speech in parliament.

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos on cities (mostly American and Canadian ones) and public transport. One word that keeps coming up is stroad – a hybrid of a street, which has shops and bars and other stuff that people actually want to visit, and a road, whose purpose is to transport people from one place to another. A stroad tries to be a street and a road, and fails at both. Stroads, with their mega-center malls and drive-thru everything, are all over America and Canada. They’re depressing places if you’re in a car – you’re constantly stopping – and even more depressing if you’re not in a car. When I watched the videos I thought how I often found myself on one of sprawling Auckland’s soul-crushing stroads – Wairau Drive or whatever it was called. Wellington seemed almost free of them. Romania is pretty stroad-free I thought, until I suddenly realised something when I was cycling to my maths lesson on Saturday morning with the temperature hovering around minus 6. I cycled past Iulius Mall, which now has what the videos call a lifestyle centre (ugh), then went down the two-kilometre-long Calea Lipovei until I hit the roundabout at the edge of Dumbrăvița. Hey, now I’m on a stroad. There you’ll find a big supermarket that existed six years ago, and the Galaxy shopping centre that certainly didn’t. It’s already a big choke point, but now they’re also building a drive-thru McDonald’s. Just what we all need.

On Saturday I went back along the stroad again – all of it this time, because I was meeting the English guy Mark who lives at the end of the four-kilometre stroad and down a long, muddy, unpaved road where nothing is more than five years old. I think that would mess me up mentally. We, and the two dogs he and his girlfriend now have, went in his car to a village called Bogda, 45 minutes away. In the village was a camp that was used by schools and had clearly flourished in communist times, but was now abandoned like so much else around here. There was a good walkway and we trekked along and back with the dogs. It was a bit higher up and there was snow on the ground. I struggled with sinus pain, especially as we got back to the car, but subsided and when I got back home I felt much better after all that exercise. In fact I’m a bit better all round now.

I played poker yesterday for the first time in a while, and made $41 thanks to my first ever outright win in five-card draw. Here are some pictures.

The abandoned camp buildings and bandstand

This well is still functional

Some street art

The stroad
Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Winter is upon us once more

December 2, 2022 by 0 Comments

… but right now it’s pretty benign. I’ve just been to watch the parade for Romania’s national day. This time it was outside the cathedral, and from where I stood I looked directly up at the windows of my old apartment. In the past the parade took place outside the Timiș council building, and last year we all congregated in Central Park as the tanks, police cars and fire engines went by in the middle distance. They played the national anthem – one of only a handful in a minor key – and then there was a lot of hanging around as mostly inaudible sermon-like speeches were delivered before all the military vehicles and people in uniform drifted by, and two choppers flew overhead.

I’m now on day two of escitalopram after my vanilla citalopram ran out and all shipments had been halted. No side effects yet, touch wood. I got the results of the tests I had on Monday. My cholesterol is high as it’s always been, and some of my liver enzymes seem to be elevated – hopefully when I see my doctor next Tuesday he’ll tell me what that all means. I’ll also ask him to refer me to a specialist. I continue to be pleasantly surprised by my level of medical care in this country. I could see a doctor at the drop of a hat if I needed to, not like in the UK where I’d be waiting days. I’m baffled by how accepting the Brits are of their increasingly shitty reality. Maybe the easy availability of consumer goods makes them lose sight of the big picture.

I had my latest lesson with the four twins yesterday. They live in the west of the city, a half-hour bike ride away, beyond the road that’s being churned up to lay new tram tracks, and almost right next to the 1000-seater rugby stadium. Yes, rugby is played in Romania; the national side will play in next year’s World Cup. Romanians tend to pronounce “rugby” somewhere between ruby and ribby with no hint of a g, and I try to point them in a more native-sounding direction. The lesson went fine, although the younger boy sat out one of the games, saying he was bored. In the lesson with the single twins on Monday, we discussed what things are supposed to bring good luck in certain cultures, such as a horseshoe, a four-leaf clover, or a rabbit’s foot. We then went on to lucky colours and numbers. What numbers are lucky? The boy said, in all seriousness, 69, without seeming to realise what it meant. Where did you get that from?! “Toma from my class said so.” Tell Toma he’s wrong!

Mum and Dad are back home. Dad said he’d been looking forward to getting back, but felt flat the moment he actually did so. It’s funny how that can work. For him, it might have just been all the chores that they were suddenly confronted with. They told me about the woman they sat next to on the plane. She was Indian, in her fifties, and was clearly far out of her comfort zone. She squatted rather than sat, as if being on a chair was alien to her (perhaps it was in the town or village she came from) and spent the whole journey with a blanket over her head, never eating anything or even taking a sip of water. For ten hours. She had the aisle seat and couldn’t get that she had to move out of the way to let my parents sit down. She didn’t know a word of English. And for some reason she was flying to New Zealand. I found my parents’ account of her fascinating; there’s the basis for a whole novel right there.

The Glass Hotel is great. I’m coming to the end of it. She’s done her research, that’s for sure. I like all the references to shipping, They make me think I’m back in Devonport in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis (which is a major theme of the book). Late at night I’d watch the dockers, lit up like fireflies, from the window of my flat. I became a container spotter: P&O Nedlloyd, Maersk, Hamburg Süd, the occasional Matson. Each colossal container ship carried thousands of these huge boxes, many weighing 30-odd tons, and that made me feel pleasantly small.

Family - Photos - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

A flappy board and some grounds for optimism

November 15, 2022 by 0 Comments

Above is the popular split-flap departure board at Timișoara Airport (5/11/22) showing that my parents’ flight had landed. These clicky clacky things used to be ubiquitous, but they’re now few and far between. Even this bad boy won’t be long for this world, sadly.

I don’t often get emails from Mum, but she sent me a newsy one on Saturday, perhaps from the local library as they don’t have internet access in their flat in St Ives. Yesterday they were going to the Remembrance Day parade. As Mum pointed out, all those years ago when there was still a small band of First World War veterans (!) we all had to wrap up warm. Not so now. They’re going down to my brother’s place on Wednesday, for four days. They’re taking the train which will be expensive. She talked about New Zealand’s dramatic win over England in the women’s rugby World Cup final, and how some New Zealanders are finding the women’s game a better spectacle than the more stop-start men’s version. I’d like emails to and from Mum to become a more regular thing. (I then got a message from Dad saying he really wasn’t feeling well.)

Another Mum thing. When they were here I played tennis; when I got back I saw Mum was following the Paris Masters final between Djokovic and the Danish 19-year-old Holger Rune on her phone. Djokovic had won the first set but was losing in the second. I found a stream for her, and the three of us watched the remainder of the match. What a finish it was, as Rune staved off six break points in a marathon last game (18 minutes?) to pull off a logic-defying 3-6 6-3 7-5 win. Mum was disappointed but I was happy the plucky teenager got the win in the biggest moment of his short career to date.

The newly renovated buildings, including the Lloyd “Palace”, in Piața Victoriei this sunny afternoon

The US midterms. Two years ago the gradual drip-feed of results added to the drama. What’s happening in Washoe or Clark or Pima or Maricopa? When will we get the latest dump? All these obscure-sounding counties that are actually not that obscure because they’re heavily populated. It’s been much the same this time around. The phenomenon of Trump has focused more international eyes on the minutiae of American politics than ever before. And rightly so – it’s all very consequential. I always go back to the 2000 election and the Florida recounts. A little over two years later, my brother was in sodding Basra and we were scared shitless. What if Gore, who (don’t forget) won more votes than Bush overall, had become president instead? The 9/11 attacks may still have happened, but I imagine the world in general would have gone down a less destructive path. Now there’s a chink of light with the Democrats holding the Senate (it would be nice if they could gain a 51st seat in next month’s Georgia run-off) and the Republicans probably gaining just a bare majority in the House. With what happened in war-ravaged Kherson on Friday as well, there is something to be cheerful about at last.

The impulsive and slightly repulsive Elon Musk recently bought Twitter for a barely imaginable sum of $44 billion, and it’s now it’s in some kind of malaise, freefall, meltdown, I don’t know what. A few years ago I joined Mastodon because I liked the name, but never really posted anything, so in the last few days I’ve been on there, trying to understand how it works, in the hope that I can find a social media platform that doesn’t totally creep me out.

My early new year’s resolution for 2023 is to get two books published. One on common mistakes that Romanians make in English (most of the donkey work for that is done) and another about a guy I used to play tennis with. How to make this all happen I’m as yet unsure about, but writing my resolution here won’t do the chances of it any harm.

Family - International travel - Photos - Poker - Tennis

Countdown mode and memories of Singapore

October 17, 2022 by 0 Comments

It’s only three days till I go away, so I’m on full don’t-forget mode now. I will forget something, though, I always do. I’ll be taking my laptop with me so I can give lessons when I’m away. Which lessons, I’m still not sure at this point, because Friday is normally a busy day for me but I don’t know what time my parents plan to get to my brother’s place on that day. Perhaps after this length of time I should prioritise family rather than work, I don’t know.

Last time I mentioned that my parents had spent two nights in Singapore on the way to the UK. In January 1987 we spent four nights there on the way back from our six-week stay in New Zealand. Back then I got very excited by anything big and futuristic and technological, so Singapore was fascinating to me. We stayed on the 20th floor of the 21-storey President Merlin hotel, Mum and my brother in room 2014, Dad and I in 2015. In the morning we would phone each other. There were malls everywhere, rising to six or seven storeys, full of shops selling gadgets that were unimaginable back home. Sports shops were everywhere, and we picked up my first proper tennis racket. I remember a cheap hand-held LCD racing car game where nobody could ever get more than 13 laps no matter how hard they tried. As for the food, my memories are hazy, but I clearly remember the time Mum ordered bee hoon for us all in a massive ground-floor food court, not having the foggiest clue what we’d be getting. It turned out to be some noodley dish which we all had great difficulty physically eating, and two Chinese girls had a good laugh at us from an upper-floor balcony. I remember Chinatown, where my parents bought various figurines that they probably still have today. It was a few days before Chinese New Year – the Year of the Rabbit was coming up, as it will be again in a few months – and there were parades with dragons. Most of all I remember the durians – large spiky smelly fruit. Like really ponging something nasty. On one day we took the boat over to Sentosa Island, but apart from the cable car I don’t remember that too well. All in all we had a great time because it was all so different from what we were used to. I visited Singapore once again in 2008 but it had changed. Obviously I was no longer a kid, so that sense of wonder had gone, but the malls seemed to have been taken over by designer clothes stores, the sort that you find at airports. Travel is going in that direction in general; with globalisation, places become more and more samey.

Chinatown, 2008 (including durians)

I played reasonably decent tennis at the weekend. The 18-year-old lad was there for both sessions, and he’s improving at a rate of knots. Mindblowingly fast. Two weeks ago he was playing cricket shots, had no backhand to speak of, and could barely get a serve into play. All very standard for someone who had hardly held a tennis racket before. Now he can reliably get his serve in, can rally from both wings, and is very tactically aware. All from just a few hours on the court. He’s clearly an all-round natural sportsman. To get to his level took me many many hours on my own, hitting against a wall, or rallying with my parents in the garden. Being anywhere near an actual tennis court would have been disastrous for me initially.

Poker. Another win on Saturday night, and this one (pot-limit badugi) kept me up until after two in the morning. I ran well and crucially collected bounties with regularity along the way. As we got short-handed I amassed a huge stack and was able to run over the table. Heads-up lasted two hands. My reward for winning and collecting so many bounties was a rare three-figure payout; I made $101 for my evening’s work – that was very nice indeed.