Books

Books - Cat - Language teaching - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Other sports

Back on the (smaller) court

March 17, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning I played squash with Mark and his wife. It was my first time on the squash court since I left New Zealand. We took turns; I got more than my share of court time. It made a nice change to get some intense exercise. That dried up for me when the tennis did last summer. His wife asked me about Kitty. (Since this morning, she’s taken to biting me again.) When we left the sports centre, there was a black and white tom cat prowling around the entrance to the sports centre. It didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Mark’s wife seriously suggested I take it home to give Kitty a friend. Um, no thanks, one is plenty.

Last week I hit 30 hours of lessons for the first time this year. Bugs have been going around, my more well-to-do students have been on ski trips, and so on and so forth, all reducing my hours somewhat. I always think of 30 teaching hours as being a full week (there’s preparation on top of that), with 25 as an absolute minimum. Yesterday I started with Matei. He turns 17 next month; I’ve been teaching him for almost half his life. In my other maths lesson with the younger girl, I explained the importance of division in everyday life. Say you need to split a restaurant bill, for instance. “Won’t you just have a calculator?” I then told her that Romania’s new president is likely to ban calculators following the upcoming election. Even phones with calculator functions, like this one, will be outlawed. It’ll be chaos – utter mayhem – as people resort to the black market to obtain these devices. So you’d better learn to divide! The funny thing is, she believed me. I suppose this is a country where the president banned Scrabble just 40 years ago, so banning calculators might seem vaguely plausible. After my three lessons in Dumbrăvița, I got soaked to the skin coming back on my bike. I still had another lesson when I got home.

Recently I had one of the nicest comments yet from a ten-year-old boy. I’ve been teaching him English for six months. “English at school is boring. I’ve learnt more in a month with you than in three years at school.” I told him that I have a much easier job than his teacher at school.

A couple of weeks ago I weighed myself. I was 78 kilos. That’s more than I want to be. I’m targeting somewhere around 72 or 73; in other words, I’d like to lose two Kitties. (Yes, she’s little.) I’ve cut back massively on carbs and have reduced my portion sizes substantially. It’s already making a difference. A benefit of living by myself and having a limited social life is that it’s easier to make these sorts of lifestyle changes. On Friday I got my hair cut. The woman who did it was very nice. She commented that I had “hair for two people”. Well yes. It felt good to have a more manageable barnet once she’d finished with it, even if my big floppy mop is part of who I am.

I saw that Blues drew 1-1 at Northampton Town yesterday. Northampton are known as the Cobblers. The town has a proud history of shoemaking. All three of my pairs of Doc Martens were made there, I think. (I’ve just checked. They would have been made in Wollaston, five miles down the road from Northampton. Production moved to China and Thailand in 2003, but mine are all older than that.) The Cobblers are one of several trade-based nicknames of English football teams. There are also the Blades (Sheffield United), the Potters (Stoke City), the Railwaymen (Crewe Alexandra), the Hatters (Luton Town), the Saddlers (Walsall), just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are others. Ipswich Town are affectionately known as the Tractor Boys, which sort of counts too.

Today I read something about Sweden and Norway trying to encourage the use of cash for civil defence purposes as the world becomes a more volatile place. Scandinavia has become virtually cashless. For me, a private tutor in Romania, the story is rather different. Last night I realised I had around 50 (mostly low-value) banknotes in my wallet, with another 50-odd in an envelope ready to take to the bank tomorrow.

I’ve just started reading Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. It’s good, but it won’t be a quick read, unlike Shute’s fantastic page-turner On the Beach which I read over Christmas. Whenever I see lots of past perfect – had travelled, had seen, had had – I know I’m in for something more challenging.

No news from Mum yet about her scan. My parents called me this morning, but I couldn’t talk for long because of my squash appointment. They talked about monarch butterflies hatching from chrysalises in their garden. The joys of actually having a garden. These very pretty butterflies are common in NZ but the species originated in North America. Dad described them as “much cleverer than your cabbage white”. The cabbage white was the one we always got in the UK.

No news at all regarding the book. I’m on the verge of giving up.

Books - Life :) - Other sports - Writing a book

Book stuff and the end of the old world

March 8, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today was a searing hot day for early March as we hit 24 degrees. When the calendar flicked over to March, I immediately thought, oh shit, just three months till summer. Last summer practically messed me up. I hung around a bit in Piața Victoriei and Piața 700 before my 1pm meeting at the publisher’s. These were my old stomping grounds back in the old days. The kiosk that sells pleșkavițe in Piața 700 is still there. I remember when they bumped the price of a pleșkaviță up from 5 lei to 6. It’s now 17. Taverna lui Romică, which didn’t exist back then, was doing a roaring lunchtime trade, selling mici and other traditional Romanian food.

The book meeting. Four of us were there: both ladies from the publishing house plus Dorothy and me. As always, the older lady didn’t stop talking. She started by asking Dorothy and me if we’d be keen to do a 1050-page (!) translation from Romanian to English on something to do with sociology. We both said no. When we got on to the book, they said they’d probably only do 100 copies in the initial run. That’s a tiny number, and it’s laughably few considering how it could be distributed to schools all over the country if they had the wherewithal to do that, but at least it seems something will happen. The younger woman clearly liked the book; you could see she was suitably amused by some of Dad’s pictures. They brought up the book on their screen. It looked all wrong. They’d set it to a crazy big page size and one of the fonts wasn’t right either. The old lady played with the settings, flailing around, hopelessly guessing. I insisted on coming back the office myself on another day, armed with my own laptop, so we can properly sort it out. At one point Dorothy and I were served strong coffee with some kind of pink ice cream on the top. It was my third coffee of the day. The kid I taught at his home after the meeting usually makes me a coffee, but this time I asked him not to.

Yesterday I had a 57-minute Skype chat with Mum and Dad. It was mostly talk of the imminent apocalypse. We all fed off each other because we all feel that way. If it wasn’t already apparent, what went down last Friday in the Oval Office made it crystal clear that it’s over. The world as we knew it, the shape of it, it’s over, and what happens next could be terminal. Change is happening so damn fast. It reminds me in some ways of this time five years ago, a week into March, where people were milling around Timișoara in denial as to the tsunami that would hit us within a few days. That time it was awful but temporary. This time it could be permanent. I hear parents of 14-year-old kids talking about this or that university and I’m thinking, do you realise that there’s a decent chance (20%? How do you estimate such a thing?) that all that talk will be meaningless?

Before our chat I went to the office adjoining the dreaded immigration centre, to apply for a cazier judiciar, whatever exactly that is. It turned out that I needed one to renew my resident’s permit for another five years. The expiry date is over a year away – 22/4/26 – but I really want to renew it before the rerun of the election which takes place in May. If Georgescu or someone of a similar ilk gets in, there may no longer be a renew. Plus my current permit still has the wrong address on it, so it would be good to rectify that.

Mercifully, I’ve just finished American Psycho. I was a bit harsh last time when I said there were very few funny bits. There are a few sprinkled through the novel, but not enough to compensate for the unremitting gore and torture. The scene with the rat for instance, it was almost too much to keep ploughing on with. And I was well and truly over the designer labels and pretentious restaurant food, even though I know they were necessary to get the vacuity of eighties yuppiedom across properly. All the Trump stuff though, my gosh. The sick protagonist of the novel idolises someone who we now know is sick beyond belief. My copy of the book has an afterword by the author Bret Easton Ellis who mentions the abuse, including death threats, he received by women he describes as feminists. That’s obviously horrifying, but when he says that “I wasn’t a misogynist when I wrote the book but the unearned feminist hysteria briefly turned me into one” I’m thinking, yeah right. I don’t get the feeling that Ellis is a particularly nice man.

On Tuesday night I watched Birmingham fall to a rare defeat at Bolton. They were well beaten, too. After Blues took the lead, Bolton were totally dominant in the second half and ran out comfortable 3-1 winners. The home crowd were on good form. Blues looked lethargic, as if their busy schedule had finally caught up with them. Blues still have a nine-point lead at the top of the league with a game in hand. Surely – surely! – they can’t mess it up from here.

Books - Cat

Can’t wait for the last page

March 4, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

For a while there Kitty seemed positively hostile and I’d got to the point where I’d make jokes with her. I’d get back from lessons and say to her, “I’m back! You must be so glad to see me. I can just tell how happy you are!” But things have improved. Less biting, for a start. Three nights ago I got up at 4:30, went for a pee, then checked up on Kitty. As always at that time she was wide awake. She nuzzled up to me and licked my face and that was rather nice. At the weekend my brother said to me, “Cats don’t care about people. Get that into your head.” He was tired and prone to making sweeping statements. That just isn’t true though, is it? Some cats are clingy to the point of being annoying. On Sunday I met Mark who told me more about Kitty’s start to life. She was born on the street and went nine months before having anything to do with humans. So I’ve got a semi-feral cat who was never going to become my best friend overnight. I must say though that she’s very comfortable here in my flat. In the first few days she’d try and get out but it seems she’s forgotten there even is an out.

It was Mark’s idea to play squash on Sunday, but he cancelled at short notice – he thought his ankle wouldn’t be up to it. Squash is not a common sport in Romania, but it looks like there’s a court somewhere in Dumbrăvița. We were going to rock up there and see. Maybe you had to book or be a member or who knows what. He sent me a message saying that we could go “down the river” instead. I didn’t twig that he meant ride along the bike track to Livada in Sânmihaiu Român, a fair old trek. I had a cheesy pizza, he had bulz. He said that I’d made a good decision to turn down that potential job offer at his school. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it would have been terrible for me. I made it back just in time to see Dorothy at Scârț.

I’m two-thirds of the way through American Psycho. The book, not the film. The film, which I haven’t seen, is a source of endless jokes and memes among people half my age. The book though – jeez. It’s well written, but it’s so appallingly horrific that I can’t wait to get to the end of it so I can read something else. It was written in 1991 and set in late-eighties New York, at the height of the Wall Street boom. It’s supposed to be a dark comedy, I think, but moments of levity are thin on the ground. I can only really think of one so far – when he brings a woman home (whom he then mutilates and murders) and she notices he’d hung his oh-so-expensive piece of modern art upside down. On every page Patrick Bateman (the protagonist; it’s written in first person) goes into mind-numbing detail about designer clothes – who each item is by. The very idea of clothes being by somebody is preposterous to me. The book has only got gorier as it’s progressed, and I can’t wait for it to be over. Notably, the story is peppered with numerous mentions of Donald Trump whom Bateman idolises. Half a lifetime later he’s leading the most powerful country in the world. Again. It’s made me think that so many aspects of American capitalism like credit ratings and platinum cards (I don’t even have a credit card; why would I need one?) are really shitty.

Last Wednesday I had a bad morning of severe sinus pain. I was just glad I didn’t have any lessons until the afternoon.

Books - Cat - Driving - Maths teaching - Other sports

Good car news but still none the wiser about Mum

February 21, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Monday Mum saw a new doctor who she seemed to like, but she still doesn’t know “what it is” yet. She has major ups and downs, from severe pain to basically being fine. It’s eleven weeks until they’re due to land in Timișoara, but last night on the phone I heard the dreaded words “if we don’t make it over”.

Good news about the car. I got the new thermostat put in, and yesterday I drove to Recaș (25 minutes) and back without any problems. Fingers crossed it stays like that. They’ve given me a three-month guarantee which I don’t remember ever getting in New Zealand. After that sporadic juddering on the way back from Serbia I’d braced myself for something expensive.

I should take my car out during the week more often. On Sundays, my usual day, all the towns and villages that are otherwise bustling are pretty much dead. I went to Recaș yesterday because they have the barbecue stall on Wednesday. It was certaintly bustling. I got two mici, a pork chop, chips and several slices of bread – I saved half of that for dinner.

When I spoke to my brother on Tuesday, I mentioned my cat’s penchant for biting. He jokingly wished that his cat would give his son a good nip. My nephew has been rather heavy-handed with their cat, as well as with his baby sister.

I had my first session with new maths student yesterday. An hour and a half, not the half-hour her mum said she wanted. It seems nobody in Romania understands fractions. In fact, that’s what we spent our initial session on. This 11-year-old girl showed me she could add a quarter and a fifth, which is nothing to be sniffed at, but didn’t fully understand what a quarter or a fifth actually were.

She didn’t know whether or not the shaded area above represented a quarter.

I bought Diary of a Wombat online, thinking it would be fun for the kids, and it is a fun book, but it’s not that non-native-speaker-friendly:

I got a bunch of other animal-related books, including this one:

On Tuesday night I watched Blues’ EFL Trophy semi-final at home to Bradford. A tinpot trophy, or so they say, but the final is played at Wembley. Blues won 2-1 to give their fans a big day out in April against either Wrexham or Peterborough. (The other semi takes place next week.) A good game, I thought. Bradford, from the league below, gave it a damn good go. Jay Stansfield, the talismanic striker, gave Blues the lead on the stroke of half-time. The main flashpoint came early in the second half. Stansfield was bundled over and Blues surely should have had a penalty, but instead Bradford went straight down the other end and equalised. Stansfield was down for eight minutes before being stretchered off. Apparently he’s OK. Finally it was Lyndon Dykes who scored the winner. There was obviously loads of injury time and the game even kicked off late, so it wasn’t exactly an early finish.

Books - Cat - Family - Life :)

Bad memories

February 18, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

Kitty is currently perched in her favourite spot, atop the cupboard at the end of the living room, looking out the window at a wintry scene – we had light snow yesterday. I’m sure that young, active Kitty would prefer to be out there running and chasing than stuck inside with me. I still don’t know what she thinks of me, if anything. I get contradictory signals. Yesterday she was just lovely, purring away, licking and snuggling up to me, until the evening when she got the sudden urge to bite my hand over and over.

I’m just getting over a cold which I’ve had for five days. Dad had the lump taken out of his leg on Friday. As for Mum, she’s just had the results of her blood tests – they’re all fine. They had an ordeal at A&E in Timaru last week – they waited five hours for Mum not to be seen, then went home. She was due to see the doctor today; she still isn’t right.

In the middle of a maths lesson yesterday I got a message from Dad. But it’s four in the morning there. What’s going on? He couldn’t sleep, he said, because we was worrying about his digital devices that he didn’t understand, as well as one of their flats in St Ives whose annual management fee was due and they might face a fine for late payment. It’s well past time they sold those blasted flats.

I’ve just finished reading The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. It’s a sort of prequel to American Psycho which was made into a film that lots of young people seem to go on about. (I’ve got that book too.) The Rules of Attraction is set at Camden College, a made-up university somewhere in the north-east of the US, and is story of mostly well-heeled students drinking, taking drugs, and shagging. (Only it wasn’t called shagging. The term used was screwing or simply fucking.) The story is told in the first person, from the perspective of the various students: Paul would write from his point of view, then Lauren, then Sean, then back to Paul again, and so on. My main problem was all the characters were distinctly unlikeable, so I didn’t care what happened to any of them, and because the story was all about the characters (rather than some outside events), I found it hard to maintain interest. However, the book was written and set in the eighties and I enjoyed the constant references to the music of that time. Music was good back then, wasn’t it? It also gave me flashbacks to my first year of uni; I was like a fish out of water. I remember all the clubbing, which did less than nothing for me, and how everyone else except me instinctively knew what to do. Getting changed to go clubbing was serious business. If I remember rightly, all the guys got changed in the same double room. Fifteen minutes before the taxi was due to arrive, someone would put on dance music. This is it, this is game time. It happened like clockwork, always with 15 minutes to go, and it was instinctive. How did they know to do that?

In my recent session with the twins, the boy dragged out that Pelmanism game that I bought them in Geraldine. This’ll be fun! Um, yeah. It’s nice to look at all the Kiwi pictures, but that’s about it. That’s because, compared to them, I’m terrible at the game. It starts off with 72 cards in a non-grid-like arrangement. While I struggle even to remember what cards have come out when there are that many, both the twins can remember where they saw a particular card, even if it came out ten minutes earlier. To me, that’s a superpower. There’s so system or mnemonic, they can just remember. And how would a mnemonic even help? Say I turn over the pohutukawa card, sort of in the fourth row and seventh column. Position D7, if you will. Maybe I could remember that as December 7th, the day the pohutukawas come out. But that would be a heck of a stretch – there aren’t really rows and columns, and cards are disappearing all the time as people (not me!) form pairs. I just have to accept that I lack that superpower and that’s OK.

It looks like I’ve got a new maths pupil coming tomorrow – an 11-year-old girl. Her mum wants just half-hour sessions but three times a week, and that’s something my schedule can’t accommodate.

A couple more additions to the “brand names containing V and ending in A” list. There’s a great big modern apartment block not far from me called Vivalia. Then there’s Nivea, though I’ll let them off because the name has been around since 1906.

I took the car in yesterday. The guy told me it just needed a new thermostat, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. An older guy took my business card – he said his wife was interested in having English lessons. The car should be ready later today, but I’ll have a few questions. Hopefully they’ll guarantee it for three months like they did when I got the brakes sorted last summer.

The nearby park this morning

Books - Cat - Dreams - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

We’re in Deep S***

January 31, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

Kitty. Yeah, she’s pretty good. Especially when she’s asleep, which isn’t very often. The last few days she’s shown plenty of affection, so I think she’s getting used to me. Tomorrow I’m taking her to the vet to her screened, or whatever they do, in preparation for next week when hopefully she’ll have her bits removed. I feel slightly sad about that. I mean, how much does the process hurt?

I had five lessons today instead of my usual seven on a Thursday. My mother-and-son combo got shunted forward a day. When I saw Filip in Mehala, I got the usual. His mum gave me a pair of size-seven slippers to put on as well as a perfectly good cup of coffee. Then I went up to his room where his thermostat was jacked up to 28 degrees. Even when the conditions for teaching aren’t ideal, I remind myself. Life insurance? Open-plan hell? This is orders of magnitude better than that.

DeepSeek. The new Chinese AI app. Even the name scares the crap out of me – X-ray eyes, watching your every move. It managed to knock a trillion dollars off the Nasdaq in a single day. A trillion dollars! I can’t make sense of 2025 at all. $600 billion of that was a single company called Nvidia who apparently make chips. So they must be in the fast-food trade or else they’re some casino outfit. Nvidia joins a long list of bland made-up modern company or product names containing a V and ending in A. Off the top of my head there’s Aviva, Arriva, Aveda, Veolia and, um, Viagra. Nvidia goes one step further though in breaking the rules of English phonotactics – it starts with N followed by another consonant – for increased fakeness.

Maybe that’s why so many people have tattoos now. In a world of artificiality, at least they’re real. You can see them, touch them, and for a time, feel them. (I imagine you can smell them for a time too.) I’m not tempted, because there’s nothing I identify with strongly enough to get it permanently stamped on me. And frankly, being a native English speaker in Timișoara, teaching English and maths, with a beard and a fair old mop of hair, is plenty. Getting inked would be overkill. But the real thing is something that is very important to me. My job feels very real. So does this city, even if certain parts (like bloody Dumbrăvița) are so depressingly fake as to be unlivable for me.

I read something yesterday about how unhappy Generation Z are in the UK. They defined Gen Z as (currently) between 13 and 27. There were comments that said “I remember 1977 and the Sex Pistols. Nothing new here.” Even though I wasn’t born in ’77 I’ve read plenty about that time, and I disagree. Back then, at least young people were united through music, how they dressed, and even their football teams. (Though it could be unpleasant and even dangerous to see live football then, at least it was affordable.) Now society is too fractured for that sort of unity to be possible. Blame smartphones and social media.

Lately I’ve been reading a post-apocalyptic sci-fi book called A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was written in the 1950s by Walter M. Miller Jr and has strong religious themes. I’m two-thirds of the way through it. Having got this far I’ll stick with it, but in my fairly simple brain I’m filing it under the “too clever for me” category. Some of the themes resonate today, in particular the anti-intellectualism, called the Simplification in the novel. (Right on cue, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved their “Doomsday Clock” forward to just 89 seconds to midnight.)

I had a strange dream last night which involved a game of cricket in a park in Timișoara. Several games, in fact, and I had great difficulty walking through the park without being hit by a ball. (Nobody plays cricket in Romania, as far as I’m aware.) Games come up a lot in my dreams. A few nights ago I had a dream involving my aunt (the one who passed away last April) and the card game bridge. I know next to nothing about bridge. I only know that it’s a trick-taking game that involves bidding, compass points and 13-card hands. This dream probably came about from something my aunt once said about endless parties and games of bridge in the RAF officers’ mess. She tried to make it sound glamorous, but I thought it sounded awful.

Earlier this week I wrote my first proper letter since 2009. When my friend from St Ives surprised and delighted me by sending me one, I decided to reply in kind. It would be wonderful if she and her husband could make a trip to Romania (they came in 2017), but they’ve got so much stuff going on and he narrowly escaped death in 2022. I don’t know how feasible it would be.

A football score from the Cypriot league that caught my eye earlier this month:

“Have you heard about Jim?” What’s happened? “He’s only just got over his omonia, and now he’s come down with a terrible case of anorthosis.” Poor Jim. I hope he pulls through.

I’m pretty sure the name Anorthosis has the same ortho- root as in orthopedic, orthography and orthogonal: it means straight ahead or correct. But at first glance it looks like something I’d want to steer clear of.

Some pictures from Sunday:

I had a bit of time on Monday before my lesson. I hadn’t noticed this chimney before:

Books - Cat - Films - Other sports - Writing a book

Stress-free so far

January 8, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

Kitty has spent most of today sleeping. So far she’s been pretty stress-free. My student was quite taken with her last night as she wandered into our maths lesson. He’s 18 and lives with his parents. I’d definitely want to have a pet if I lived on my own, he said. Yes, the companionship is rather nice. (I’ve lived on my own for almost as long as he’s been alive.) I really was taken aback by that barrage of negativity I received from Mum and Dad. As my brother said, I’m in my mid-forties (!) so surely I can do what I like at this point.

I watched all two hours of that Michael Moore film called Sicko from 2007 (still the Bush era) which was recently released for free on YouTube. It was hard to watch it and not get angry and upset. And to think that the American people have voted to make things even worse. I had to laugh though when the US healthcare system was rated 37th in the world, “just ahead of Slovenia”, as if that was really terrible. I went to Slovenia last summer; I bet their health system is way ahead of America’s now. It isn’t the only aspect in which the film hasn’t aged well. “Look how wonderful the British NHS is.” Well, it kind of was back then. It’s sad to see how much Britain has regressed since. My aunt might still be alive now if it was in its former state. (Covid is partly to blame, but only partly.) Another thing: for three years (2011 to 2014) I worked for an American insurance company that featured (damningly) in the film. If I’d seen the film beforehand, who knows, I may never have applied for the job and my life might have taken a different turn.

Luke Littler. World darts champion and a phenomenon. Still not 18, though he looks more like 28. The final didn’t go that long, so I stayed up and watched the whole thing. Scoring-wise, there wasn’t a whole lot in it between Littler and Michael van Gerwen, but by the time the Dutchman figured out how to finish, he was 4-0 down. Littler was too good (also too confident in his ability and unbothered by the occasion) to let that lead slip. He was especially strong when he threw first in a leg, not giving van Gerwen a chance to break his throw. He could rack up a dozen or more world titles, he’s that good, but you never know – van Gerwen himself was practically unbeatable for a while, but he’s “only” won three world titles so far. Darts players can have such long careers that Littler could still be competing when I’m a very old man.

After my three two-hour lessons on Saturday, I tuned in to watch the second half of Birmingham City’s game at Wigan. Blues were already two goals up at half-time. A player called Ethan Laird ran riot and they scored again, running out comprehensive 3-0 winners. Blues are now top of the league with 53 points at the exact half-way stage. Last season (in the league above) they managed 50 points in total and still nearly survived. I noticed Wigan had someone called Aasgaard. To go with your shin guards and mouth guard. By the end of the game, the home stands were deserted, while the away fans applauded the winning team and cheered and chanted and all the rest of it. When I see something like that, I’m reminded of how incredible English football can be, especially outside the top echelons. Those away fans. Birmingham to Wigan isn’t that far, but you get fans of clubs like Plymouth or Carlisle trekking up and down the country to follow their hometown team. I always think it must be a whole load of fun. The trips at least as much as the games. Part of me wishes I’d grown up in a football supporting family with strong ties to my home town, instead of being the sort of person who can up sticks and move somewhere where they don’t even speak my language. (I doubt the travelling is as much fun as it used to be. It’s got so damn expensive now. And cup competitions – which can take you to some surprise locations – used to be massively exciting, but the Champions League and the ridiculous sums of money in football have sucked the life out of them.)

Writing about away football supporters has also jogged my memory of a book I read in 2002: A Season with Verona by Tim Parks. The author was a Brit who lived in Italy and was mad about Hellas Verona. He’d cover vast distances on overnight buses to away games. I remember his trip to Bari for the first game of the season; Bari in the deep south is practically a different planet from Verona in the north. His tales made for good reading, but he revelled in the racism and insults and tribalism a bit too much for my liking.

As for my first book, it’s pretty much done now. Dorothy pointed out one or two errors and omissions, which I have now corrected. Only one typo, surprisingly. I still have to write an introduction, and then (in theory at least) it should be ready to go.

Books - Family - Life :) - Writing a book

My un-Christmas

December 27, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s Boxing Day here. The day after my un-Christmas and the 20th anniversary of the tsunami that killed nearly 230,000 people.

Last Thursday, the 19th, I had a video call with my friend who came to visit in September. He was about to travel to Normandy to spend Christmas with his girlfriend’s family. I told him that seeing him in Timișoara was a real highlight of my year, which was the truth. He surprised me slightly when he said that it was a major highlight for him too. I suppose I’m just not used to people saying that seeing me is a highlight.

On Sunday, straight after I wrote my last post, I went to Dorothy’s church. Unlike a lot of churches, this one seems harmless. The service lasted 1¾ hours and included a few carols, including one with a verse in French. I quite enjoyed the mini-detour into French. But gosh, that sermon. When will this thing ever end? He was tireless, not even taking a sip of water. Mercifully, at last he said (in Romanian), “As I come to the end…”. He spoke for 45 minutes. I was subjected to some pretty bad sermons as a kid – the priest mumbled so much that you couldn’t make out what he was saying – but at least none of them lasted 45 minutes. Afterwards there was food – good food and plenty of it – and chat, which I wasn’t really in the mood for, though I did talk for a while with the Aussie lady. Before I left, Dorothy gave me an old map of Timișoara, printed in 1983, as a sort of Christmas present. The cathedral, which was completed during the Second World War, was conspicuous in its absence. The government thought it could deny the existence of a major religious landmark by simply leaving it off maps. How bizarre.

The following day I had three lessons, all of them with boys, then later I had dinner with Mark and his wife in Dumbrăvița. It had started to rain just before I got on my bike, and I very nearly wimped out and took the car instead. I took my salată de boeuf and other bits and pieces. Whenever I go to their place at the far end of Dumbrăvița I think that I could not live there. No little bars, no market stalls, no ornate cast-iron doorways, in fact nothing at all more than a few years old. It would do my head in. When I got there, I was immediately greeted by the less placid of their two big dogs. (The one nice thing about where they live is the wood nearby, which is great for the dogs.) We sat down and shared a meal. Ambient music, the sort that I never choose to listen to in any circumstances, emanated from their smart TV. They were mostly very good songs, but annoyingly “ambientised”. We talked a lot about teaching, which makes sense – we all have that in common. We also talked about religion. It isn’t taught at all at their school, when really it should be. We all wondered how a very high IQ doesn’t stop a person having very staunch – and sometimes dangerous – religious beliefs. I only drank one glass of wine, because I knew I’d need to be alert the next day. After we ate, they taught me how to play the card game Shithead. I do remember playing it in France in 2000, but couldn’t remember a thing about it. Mark’s wife gave me a whole load of information without ever telling me that suits didn’t matter. Finally I twigged. So suits don’t matter?! That was the first thing you needed to say! I mastered the rules eventually, but as the game relies pretty heavily on short-term memory and mine is pretty bad, I can’t imagine I’d ever be any good at it. The rain had stopped by the time I left, though I still got pretty muddy. When I got home the darts was still on – this was the last session before Christmas, and the best of the tournament so far, but I couldn’t watch much of it because I needed to be up the next morning. I did however see Florian Hempel lose out in a close match; I’d really wanted him to get through.

The next day was Christmas Eve. A work day. Ten hours on the book, in five two-hour chunks. No interruptions. At one point my doorbell went. Almost certainly carol singers who had tailgated through the front entrance. I ignored it. This reminded me of when I studied for my final university exams. I spent the day writing explanations for the 25 pictures that Dad drew. Some were simple, others much more complicated. There’s probably still some tweaking to do, and then there’s the business of getting the layout right. Neither the pictures nor the explanations are a uniform size.

Christmas Day. I felt a cold coming on. In the morning I spoke to my brother who was up early sorting out his son and about to sort out the turkey too. Then I called Mum and Dad who were already done with Christmas dinner which they had at their place. Mum’s brother and sister-in-law had been, along with Mum’s niece with her (I think) third husband. We talked about a potential name for my little niece. My nephew has a five-letter, one-syllable first name, which follows all the rules of the English language, right down to a magic E to prevent it from being the plural of something sticky. My brother chose that, as far as I’m aware. But we have a feeling that my sister-in-law is less conservative than him (or me, for that matter) when it comes to names of humans, and it’s probably her turn this time. We’ll see what they come up with.

After the video calls, I read the whole of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach yesterday, with the exception of the first chunky chapter which I’d already read. Imagine if that could be a regular thing. No work, no having to see anybody or deal with any ghastly instant messages, just sitting down and reading almost a whole novel. On the Beach, written in 1957 and set in Melbourne following a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere, really was a compelling read. I read it with a map of eastern Australia open; at times he would refer to places as they were gradually “taken out” by radiation as it spread southward. I read the final chapter in bed, still not knowing what would happen. As always with an older book, there were a lot of interesting language aspects. One, he uses ‘ld as the contraction for would, instead of the now standard ‘d. Two, he uses directly as an adverb of time, to mean “as soon as”, as in “I went home directly I finished work”. That threw me the first time I saw it. Three, he calls a fridge a frig, which means something very different to me. Frig is also one of the two Romanian words for cold, the other being rece. I suppose fridges were still pretty new in 1957, and the spelling hadn’t been standardised. I’m glad we settled on fridge rather than frig. On the same theme, I remember when mike was used as the short form of microphone. Then mic took over, which is nowhere near as good in my book. Mic goes against English spelling rules, and the c ending makes the verb forms mic’d and mic’ing clumsy; miked and miking worked just perfectly. Imagine if we called a bike a bic. Ugh. Four, he uses the ligatures æ and œ in words like anæsthetic and manœuvre, which you rarely see these days. As for manoeuvre, that’s such a messy word. Yes I know it’s from French. The Americans spell it maneuver, which I prefer, but ideally I wish we’d all just go with manoover and have done with it. And five, he calls babies it. Yes, we still do that sometimes today, but not usually when we know the gender, which is the case when he says it.

Wow, this has been a long one. I went for a brisk walk this sunny morning after taking a Lemsip. Here are some pictures:

Big Ceaușescu-era apartment blocks on the other side of a large vacant section

This bar was once open from 8am to 11pm, but has been closed a while. The patio area next door now looks to be a car wash. This is on Strada Mătăsarilor, or Silk Merchants Street. The Mătăsarilor cemetery is nearby.

I don’t know what the story is of this writer who is seemingly still alive (yes, they erect gravestones in advance here).

A rather nice gravestone and poem; this young woman died during WW2.

I must have been past this large building several times without really noticing the designs on the top.

Books - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - New Zealand - Politics - Romania

Pulling teeth

November 22, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

A storm ripped through last night at 3am; for an hour and a half I couldn’t sleep. It’s still blowing a gale (or something at around a force 6 or 7 at least) now. And it’s raining hard. Either before or after the storm – I can’t remember – I had my first dream to feature Donald Trump. I was in a small town or village on a sunny day, having been on one of my excursions in the car, when he appeared. There was no rally or anything; he was just there, surrounded by a handful of people. It was all very civilised. He seemed to be at least six foot six. My instinct was to get away from him for fear of being shot. In the same dream, or perhaps the next one, my laptop caught fire.

Here’s a map of the weather warnings that were put out yesterday. The combination of high winds and (in higher terrain) blizzards has made for quite a complex picture. I’m in the orange zone:

Last night I had a chat with Mum. What’s happened to your tooth? A crown had fallen out. She’d already been to the new gleaming-white state-of-the-art dental practice in Geraldine; in ten days she’ll get a replacement crown at a cost of $1800. Dad then came on the line to say he’d just sold a painting for the same amount (I don’t know if that was net or gross). It took me three days to do that! As if three days was a long time. I immediately thought, just imagine being able to make $600 a day doing what I’m doing. I told Mum that if she could hang on for six months (!), she could get it done in Romania for a fraction of the cost. Coincidentally I’d just been reading David Walliams’ Demon Dentist with a very bright girl of almost eleven before this talk of dentistry with my parents. After the dental talk, conversation turned to the various haka and hikoi that have been going on lately in New Zealand.

In a lesson on Tuesday my student went through a long article about career choices. The author of the article likened career decisions to an octopus where each tentacle needs to be fed and accommodated. Tending to your “practical” tentacle too much can mean you neglect your “social” tentacle, and so on. It mentioned that as your salary increases, your expectations increase likewise. You’ll never be properly satisfied. Reading this sort of thing emphasises how atypical my own experiences have been. In January 2008 I went to Melbourne for eight days to attend the Australian Open. And to see Melbourne, which I liked a lot. Then when I got back to work everything got pretty crap pretty quickly. I’d muddled along for a few years as one of the young guys, but all of a sudden a bunch of actual young guys and girls joined the department and I was 28, supposedly a level above. The others at my level were suddenly doing life stuff like buying houses, getting married, having kids, and spending proper money on cars. They were progressing. It became obvious, within the space of a few weeks, that it wasn’t going to work for me. So I actually cut down on my spending, squirrelling away $500 a week for the rest of ’08 and the whole of ’09, until the end finally came in December. When I was in New Zealand last year, I stumbled upon some old payslips from 2007. Oh really, that much? That was the last year, in fact the only year, that I was at least somewhat into my corporate job. I was part of a team of just five. That all felt an awfully long time ago.

Tuesday was when some of the more notable lessons happened. In the morning I asked a 28-year-old what he thought the worst (or most destructive) invention in modern human history was. He quickly shot back: social media. There are several other contenders: leaded petrol, cigarettes, landmines, nuclear weapons (though they may have prevented destruction), and plastic. But all of them were invented even before my parents were born, in some cases centuries before. If you’re talking about the worst invention in the last 75 years, social media must be it. It’s destroying the fabric of our society like nothing else, and it’s horrifying to watch this destruction unfold in real time. That evening I had a 90-minute session with a 23-year-old woman. Teaching women of that age is invariably hard, but this session was excruciating. I got one-word answers from her, if that. Look, this isn’t working. I’m saying five words for every one of yours. (I was being generous.) I was getting a real Demon Dentist feel about the whole thing; it was like pulling teeth.

It’s been a slightly frustrating week, with an above average number of cancellations. I’ve tried to make the most of the annoying downtime by making new games and exercises, for both English and maths. I made a set of cards with the numbers 1 to 100, to help with understanding factors, multiples, primes, and all the rest of it. I’d planned just to go up to 40, but then thought I may as well go the whole hog. I’m happy with the system I came up with. Black for odd, red for even (like the suits of a normal pack of cards), a purple border if the number is prime, squares in the corners to denote a square number, and a small triangle on the right if the number is triangular. It was important not to make it too busy. On the back of each card I wrote the prime factorisation and all the factors of the number.

I’ve been playing my Primitive Man LP by Icehouse (an Aussie band who were big in the early eighties) a lot lately. Icehouse came on Radio Hauraki a lot back in 2007, that one year when my job was meaningful. It was usually Great Southern Land, or sometimes Hey Little Girl. But there are other very good songs on that record too, like Goodnight Mr Matthews. A lot of the tracks remind me of Split Enz who were big at around the same time.

I gave up on Honey & Spice in the middle of the fifth chapter. Whoever the target market is for the novel, I’m as sure as hell not it.

It’s an important time for Romania right now. Citizens (i.e. not me) go to the polls three weekends running. This Sunday is the first round of the presidential election. The parliamentary elections follow on 1st December, which happens to be Romania’s national day, with the second round of the presidential election taking place on the 8th. The far-right anti-everything-except-Trump-and-Putin party will surely increase their vote share. If they gain power, Romania could go the same way as Hungary. Let’s hope not.

I’ve got an important meeting this evening regarding the book(s) I’ve been writing with the help of Dad. More about that next time; it’s been a long post.

Books - Family - Life :) - Politics

And the band played on

November 18, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Scârț, the place that has all the communist memorabilia and also houses the theatre I went to last December, reopened today, so I met Dorothy there for coffee this afternoon. They had records and books for sale, but I didn’t buy anything. Tracy Chapman’s first album would be amazing to have on vinyl, but I wasn’t going to fork out 160 lei for it. We sat inside – the renovation was still under way – and had tea and coffee. We met an Australian guy of sixty or so who had a long white beard and had that general bushman look about him. He also had his cat with him. He talked at length about his cat, including how he nibbled first his fingers this morning, then his dick. He said he lived a two-minute walk from Scârț. He settled in Timișoara ten years ago. In the meantime he tried to return to his native Sydney but couldn’t afford a place to live. Dorothy and I talked about all manner of things including Balinese first names.

Chats with Mum and Dad now revolve around two things. Their house (see later) and how irredeemably screwed we seem to be as a species. Things weren’t looking too rosy even a decade ago, but as I see it we’ve recently entered a new dark age, a cultural desert, devoid of meaning and substance and most of all, hope. Too few of us care because we’ve been conditioned not to care. We’ve all got six-inch rectangular shiny things in our hands that distract us from anything that really matters. And most of us are pretty busy working, in some cases just to make ends meet, but in other cases so we can afford pointless shiny shit that we’ve been conditioned to think we need. The biggest story of the weekend was a geriatric ex-champion boxer (who was massively famous when I was about eight) losing to some YouTuber who is supposedly massively famous now. Both trousered millions just for showing up. There’s also some conference going on in a petro-state where they won’t do anything to solve a climate crisis that many in power deny even exists. Bitcoin has hit US$90,000, a new record high, on the back of Trump’s re-election. How that’s supposed to be a good thing for anybody, apart from the bros who have bitcoin, I have no idea. Elon Musk has even named a new government department after a crypto coin. It feels more and more that as we go about our daily lives we’re like the band that played on as the Titanic sank, though worse, because the band didn’t actually make the ship sink faster.

The House. It feels worthy of a capital H now. On Wednesday I called Mum and Dad. After a few minutes with Mum, she went to an exercise class, so I got to talk to Dad alone, which meant a certain calmness and frankness. Their place is irretrievably bad, he said. “I’m embarrassed to have people round, especially if they ever saw our old place.” Yikes. He’s doing a whole load of DIY now, including doing up a big old shed, a process my brother called “polishing a turd”. Is all this work really worth it? Mum is in denial, he said. The only good news is that the house and renovation have set them back (so far!) around $900k, when I thought the figure was more like $1.1 million. It was confusing – there were so many quotes floating around before (and as) the work got started. Dad wants to be out of there in two years. Sounds like a good plan. They should be challenging their energies into finding a suitable next place, rather than, you know, polishing turds.

I’m reading a book that I picked up at Luton Airport in (I think) June 2023. It’s called Honey & Spice, by Bolu Babalola. I chose it mostly because of the enticing red-and-yellow cover and the author’s name. (The author is a woman.) The modern themes and language (words like mandem which looks kind of Portuguese to me; it’s actually multicultural London English or MLE) make me think I’m too old for this book. It’s like the opposite of a historical novel; I’m reading about a time after my own time. Wikipedia gives the author’s date of birth as 24/2/91, so yes, she’s quite a bit younger than me, but I would have guessed even younger. I’ve so far read just four chapters, and well chapter three was great, so even though the rest of it has left me cold I’ll persevere a little while longer.

Two months, give or take, until I have a niece. Apparently within two hours of my sister-in-law finding out she was having a girl, her mother had bought a whole load of new pink shit. Because that’s what we now do.