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A brutal morning

March 3, 2026 by 0 Comments

This morning was just horrendous for me. I had what I used to think of as a “sinus headache” but I’m pretty sure was actually a migraine. I don’t get these too often, and the severe pain normally subsides within two hours when I do. But this morning I suffered at least four hours of excruciating pain. Light and sound became unbearable – I blocked them out as best I could, and had no choice but to shut Kitty away in the living room. For some time I writhed around on my bed, then decided I was better off pacing around and bumping into the door jambs while trying to let as little light into my eyes as possible. I was fortunate not to have any lessons until later in the day. Otherwise I don’t know how I would have coped. I had a simple late lunch of banana sandwiches and yoghurt (rich food would have made me sick), then managed to walk to the supermarket. Even though the pain had eased and survived my lessons, I was (and still am) on a major go-slow. This episode reminded me of my father; when I was a boy, he got migraines of terrifying intensity, duration and frequency. One work day in five was pretty much wrecked by them. Like I do now, he had no boss, so he could get by. (In his twenties, before I was born, he did have a boss. I’m sure his migraines were very bad then too. Heaven knows how he managed.) Though he still gets headaches, they aren’t anything like as severe as they used to be.

When I spoke to Dad yesterday, he wondered why Trump has been able to make a mockery of America’s famous “checks and balances”. It must just be his popularity, Dad said. Well no, Trump isn’t that popular. He never has been. He’s got an extremely vociferous base, that’s certainly true, but that’s not the same thing as popularity. For each of his fans, there’s more than one person who hates his guts. Really Trump’s success in breaking those norms is down to him wanting to be a dictator and having zero respect for the job of president. None of his predecessors – not even George W. Bush who was hopeless – were anything like that. And then there’s social media. I can’t imagine a Trump presidency would have been vaguely possible without it.

I didn’t play squash with Mark yesterday after all. He messaged me first thing to tell me he’d had too much Guinness the night before, so I had to call up the sports centre and cancel. There’s something typically British about getting rip-roaring drunk in your mid-fifties. (Personally I think any Guinness is too much Guinness.) Though I have a beer fairly often, it’s usually just the one, and three would be my absolute limit. The hangover isn’t worth it, and any social event that involves a lot of drinking isn’t one I’m likely to enjoy anyway.

After getting through Walter Mitty I’ve started a new book: The Colony by Annika Norlin, published last year. It’s based in Sweden and translated from Swedish into English. The author is a pop star (I didn’t know that when I bought the book) and to my surprise she was born in 1977; I guessed she was several years younger. I’m thoroughly enjoying it so far. Anything that involves chucking iPhones into lakes gets my vote.

Scrabble. In the latest round of the league I’ve had seven wins and four losses, with two games still outstanding and in the balance. If I win both of those, I’ll very likely get promoted. Even one win could be enough depending on other results. Being in this position is a surprise; two days ago my sights were set on avoiding relegation, but then an opponent missed an out play, enabling me to win by twelve, when I’d given that game up for dead.

I start at 9:30 tomorrow morning. I’m pleased it’s not too early. I need some sleep.

Books - Cat - Family - Language learning - Other sports - Politics

The too-hard basket

July 20, 2025 by 0 Comments

I just took Kitty out for a drive. She spent one hour in a large cardboard box, 70 by 50 by 30 cm, with holes cut out of it (obviously) and an absorbent blanket at the bottom. (Lately I’ve put her food in the box to get her used to it.) She clearly didn’t love the experience, but she wasn’t traumatised by it either, so I’ll try it again in a few days. When I was little, our cat would be let loose in the Allegro or the Mazda on our five-hour-plus trips to and from Wales. With Kitty, that would be beyond dangerous.

Three weeks since I left my brother’s place, I’ve still got the cold I picked up from (probably) my nephew. He picks up a bug from nursery, infects his mum and dad and anyone else he comes into contact within, then three days later he’s as happy as Larry while everyone else is suffering for weeks. Mum and Dad have still got it too. Mum didn’t look great at all when I saw her on WhatsApp yesterday. They leave in only five days. I hope their trip back goes smoothly, or as smoothly as something like that ever can. At least this time they’ll break up their journey with a stopover in Singapore. I never want them to go direct again. Despite none of us being 100%, we had a really nice chat which made me feel good. Mum had been to meet up a few of the teachers from her school in St Ives, for the first time in about a decade. She was struck by how hard they had found the Covid period. We were pretty lucky in NZ, weren’t we? No Matt Hancock, who really should be behind bars. I was lucky too. Romania was at times riddled with virus, but my personal circumstances allowed me to dodge the worst of it.

The night before last I slept terribly. Yesterday I just had one lesson – maths in Dumbrăvița in the morning – and when I came back I lay on the sofa, washed out, where I finished Ella Minnow Pea (a fun read) and watched round three of the Open golf. My yearly golf watching. I like the Open visually: the dunes, the crags, the ever-changing skies, the squalls that come out of nowhere. I enjoy seeing top golfers battle near-horizontal rain and brutal rough. I particularly enjoy it when there’s a packed leaderboard on the final day and half a dozen potential winners as they turn for home, and a previously unheralded player keeps it together through all the mayhem to win – to make history – with a score of maybe three under par. This year’s tournament is taking place at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. Barring the heavy shower I saw on day two which added to the drama, the conditions have mostly been benign. Scottie Scheffler – number one in the world and a brilliant player – has taken a four-shot lead going into the last round, which might be a procession. A shame if so. World number ones haven’t won many Opens in recent times. Tiger Woods was the last to do it, I think. Rory McIlroy is six shots off the lead. He’s from Northern Ireland and a huge star in the game, so it’s no surprise that the crowd went nuts throughout his round of 66 yesterday.

Since the bit I wrote last time about council tax, I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to get these kinds of things right. Coming up with a fair and workable system is oh so complicated. Countries like New Zealand benefit here from being small, with relatively few working parts. What you don’t do though is hold your hands up and say it’s too hard. That’s exactly what the UK government is doing. We know this is unfair and absurd, but we’ll keep it the same (which in reality means making it worse: it will only become more unfair and absurd over time) because it’s too politically hard to change anything. And that’s just one aspect of tax policy. It’s the same thing with immigration, healthcare, housing, energy, infrastructure, the lot. Education isn’t too bad in the UK and they’ve made some progress on the environment. But everything else is going backwards because of a lack of political will to do anything. It’s the same all over the western world. The only people who do have the balls to change anything are those who aren’t interested in a fairer world and just want to make their mark. So they make things more shit. As I keep saying, how did we get here? When I was over in the UK recently, I watched an episode of Newsnight. They had ex-policitians (with opposing views) on the programme to discuss Labour’s climbdown on benefits. Adults, talking about a serious topic in a civil manner. This would no longer happen in America, I kept thinking. For the UK at least, there is still hope.

Next week’s challenge: for seven days, everything I read or listen to must be in Romanian where at all possible. I will also write something in Romanian every day. My Romanian has stalled and I can’t not do anything about it because it’s too hard.

Books - Family - Life :) - Tennis

Windfall and new (and old) balls

July 15, 2025 by 0 Comments

Recently Dad found out that his mother had an account in a bank (or was it a building society?) that no longer exists. So he could reclaim the money, which might have been a fiver for all he knew, I ordered my grandmother’s death certificate online, then Dad got photocopies and other bits and pieces. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a few hundred. Even a thousand. Late last week he got a cheque in the mail (cheque – it’s still 1995 in the UK apparently) for about £11,500. A pleasant surprise. Dad will give my two UK-based cousins, now orphans after their mother died last year, a quarter each. My brother wanted Dad to keep the whole thing secret and not give his cousins a penny. He’s not a fan of his cousins – “they’re not nice people and they’ve had enough handouts already” was how he put it – but Dad couldn’t do that.

I was on the phone to my parents for an hour today. Most of that was taken up with money stuff. Not just that surprise windfall, but preparing to sell their third and fourth properties and seeing lawyers and accountants. From my vantage point, it’s all so bizarre. As I’ve said before on this blog, it’s like watching the All Blacks play Romania, 75-0 up in the last minute, desperate for one last push over the line before the final hooter. (OK, it’s more like 75-7 now. They switched off momentarily at the back when they bought the mad house.)

I’m still trying to lose weight. Since I started my effort, I’ve dropped three kilos, which isn’t nothing, but I’ve still got a paunch I’d like to get rid of and a couple of pairs of jeans I’d like to get into. Losing weight isn’t easy. Although I try not to write too much about it here, I still go days or weeks on end of struggling to enjoy a whole lot. Except food. When I’m in one of those spells, resisting the temptation to totally pig out on some big cheesy sausagey pasta-y thing takes some doing.

Yesterday I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român for the exercise. I was just finishing a coffee there when my brother rang. I moved out of the bar, in which some old geezers were playing a particularly loud game of cards, and sat in a gazebo, out of the sun. We discussed the windfall – those bloody cousins – and our parents’ need to offload those properties toot-sweet.

Wimbledon. It’s over for another year. The men’s final was a damn good match, with Sinner the winner and I suppose the grinner. He was the better man on the day. Still, it could have got hairy for him when he faced 15-40 on his serve at 4-2 in the fourth set, especially after what he endured at Roland Garros last month. His serve was brilliant throughout. Alcaraz and Sinner keep producing great matches and right now they’re a league apart from the rest. (I should mention that Sinner got away with one against Grigov Dimitrov in the fourth round. Dimitrov of Bulgaria was two sets up when he was forced to retire with a crippling injury to his right pec.) As for the women, I said last time that Amanda Anisimova’s winning shot in her semi-final – against the world number one – was “sublime”. Well, it went from the sublime to the ridiculous in double-quick time on Saturday. Iga Świątek whitewashed her. It was just the second 6-0 6-0 Wimbledon final; the only other was in 1911. (There was one rather more recent whitewash in a grand slam final, when Steffi Graf beat Natasha Zvereva in the 1988 French Open. Steffi was untouchable that year – she won the calendar slam and Olympic gold.) You had to feel for Anisimova. She had 40-15 in an early service game, I think four chances to win it, then it all just unravelled against an opponent who wouldn’t let up for a second. Please, just win one game…

Mum watched a lot more Wimbledon than me. That’s great. It’s helped to relax her. It’s also given us something nice to talk about. Mum and I often used to watch matches together. (We played a lot together, too.) Steffi and Novotna in ’93. Steffi and Hingis in ’99 at the French Open. I’ve thought today about that first time we were lucky enough to go to Wimbledon, for the first time, in ’98. We were members of a small tennis club that was allocated ten pairs of tickets. We went into a draw and our names came out of the hat. (Because the club was so small, our odds were decent.) Our tickets were for No. 1 court on the first Saturday. We took the train there. Before taking our seats, we watched a pair of clay-courters thrash it out on an outside court. It was jaw-dropping stuff. TV gives you no real appreciation for how hard those guys are larruping the ball. The only match we saw in its entirety on No. 1 court was Petr Korda – champion at Melbourne earlier that year – against Jérôme Golmard of France. Korda won in four close sets. (Golmard, I just found out, died of motor neuron disease at only 43.) Midway through the next match the rain came, as it so often does. There were conga lines and people in ponchos, but that was that. No roof back then. That No. 1 court had only just been built and the atmosphere in the stadium was surprisingly sleepy. Mum actually did fall asleep in the fourth set of the men’s match. I also remember smoke drifting across the court from a fire in a nearby apartment.

I’ve just started reading a book called Ella Minnow Pea. If that sounds like the middle of the alphabet, it is. It’s about a fictitious world in which letters of the alphabet are progressively outlawed. It reminds me that I need to write my series of posts about the alphabet that I’ve had planned for ages.

Still no news from the publisher about the fate of my book(s).

Books - Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis

Perfect storm

July 12, 2025 by 0 Comments

We had severe storms here on both Monday and Tuesday. The alert system worked a treat, unlike eight years ago when nobody saw those 15 minutes of mayhem coming, and people lost their lives. I watched the roof opposite like a hawk – it was still gleaming having been replaced just last month – and the tiles held. Further east the storm was much more devastating – buildings and cars were destroyed and people were badly injured. I was grateful for the much cooler weather that the turmoil brought. The few days I’ve been able to sleep, to actually live. Isn’t that great? (OK, I’m suffering a bit from a cold, coughing up thick gunk.)

My brother called me yesterday while I was half-watching the semi-final between Alcaraz and Fritz. (Alcaraz won in four sets following a dramatic tie-break. He’ll play Sinner in the final, a repeat of that match at the French Open last month.) We’d spoken a couple of days before. Oh god, what’s happened? It was to do with our parents’ UK properties which they plan – desperately need, in fact – to offload. Because they don’t live in the UK, solicitors won’t touch them with a barge pole. Increased risk of fraud, apparently. I’m sure they can find someone who’ll deal with their situation, at the right price. It’s hardly rare, after all. My god, my parents’ lives have got pretty damn complicated all of a sudden, haven’t they? This property crap is going to dominate their lives for god knows how long and, as my brother said, it’ll take over a fair chunk of our lives too. They should also get rid of their mad house in Geraldine sooner rather than later. Mum seems hell-bent on selling the Moeraki place even though it’s the only place they have that isn’t either shit or causing shit. And Mum still isn’t well – she goes to the loo every fifth day or something – and is determined not to see the doctor. All their problems are surmountable if they could just be businesslike about things, but Mum stopped being businesslike about anything ages ago. It makes me question the purpose of accumulating all this vast wealth (by my standards, it’s certainly vast) if all it does is cause constant stress in your old age. When I last spoke to Dad, he said he’d lost sleep because of it, and that was before the latest business with the solicitors.

In other news, my London-based student of seven years told me his divorce that was on, then was off, is now back on. He was amazingly matter-of-fact about the whole thing. How will your boys cope? They just will. He said it’s a shame I guess after being married for six years. Six years? I said. But you started having lessons with me seven years ago and weren’t you married then? Hmm, let me see, oh yes, it’s nine years. Time flies I suppose. My wife has a good job, he said, so she’ll be fine. What does she do exactly? I asked. Don’t really know, he said.

I finished The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde’s only novel) earlier this week. I kept flitting between liking it a lot and barely tolerating it, getting it and not getting it. The chapter with all the gemstones and spices slowed me down, as it was meant to, even though I enjoyed all the vivid vocabulary – words like bezoar. Then I rattled through the next few chapters. A wild ride. It must have been highly controversial in its day.

I felt pretty down after saying goodbye to Mum and Dad. Especially Mum. On Friday night I hardly slept. I’ve also had a cold. On the other hand I’ve had a good week of lessons considering it’s summer – I’m just about to have one on square roots. Work is always a pretty useful antidote.

The women’s Wimbledon final between Świątek and Anisimova takes place this evening. There was a great finish to Anisimova’s win over Sabalenka in the semi. That winner to end it, when it could easily have slipped from her grasp if she hadn’t nailed it, was sublime.

Books - Films - Politics - Travel: Europe

As I go away, Mad Max is upon us

June 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ll be off very early in the morning – I’ll call a taxi to the airport at four. From Luton I’ll take a coach to Cambridge, then a local bus to St Ives which will only cost £2. I should get to Mum and Dad’s flat around midday. As well as St Ives, I’ve got my brother and his family to look forward down in Poole, then a day trip to Birmingham. After the debacle of last August, I decided I couldn’t face another night at Luton airport, so I’m flying from Stansted to Budapest instead. My long-distance bus to Timișoara is due to get in at 1:30 in the morning. Not ideal, but anything beats a sleepless night at Luton.

I’d hoped to avoid family discussion of politics because it’s always so negative. (I yearn for the days when politics just “did its thing” in the background and we didn’t have the toxicity of social media.) But after the Iran strikes, it’ll be hard to dodge entirely. Dad and I had discussed the prospect just hours before it happened. No, Trump wouldn’t do that. He’s too cowardly and joining a war is altogether too much like hard work for him. But then he damn well did it, using bombs called MOP which could hardly sound more innocuous. His motivation is pretty thin and probably doesn’t run much deeper than, no-one’s given me a goddamn Nobel peace prize yet so fuck it, I’m gonna bomb the shit out of Iran. He just craves the attention, the fame, never being out of the news for one moment. The actual threat posed by Iran (or lack of one – who really knows) doesn’t come into it. I’d be shocked if any good comes out of this. What I do know is that international law is basically dead, the UN might as well be dead, American law is meaningless for someone like Trump, and democracy is teetering on the edge everywhere. I recently watched the 1979 Aussie cult film Mad Max for the first time to see what all the fuss was about; we really are rapidly descending into a Mad Max world. It’s all so scary. I just dearly hope that at least the UK and Keir Starmer stay well out of the war in the Middle East. Memories of the Iraq war are still fresh, even after 22 years.

Last night I saw a film with Dorothy at Studio cinema, one of the old theatres that has recently been reopened. We saw Kontinental ’25, a Romanian film set in Cluj very recently as the title suggests. The smart city, the city of the future, the city with a certain animosity between Romanians and Hungarians, they couldn’t have chosen a better place in the country for this sort of film. It was a damn good film, hilarious in parts, dark in others, and very thought-provoking. Unusually, the camera would often focus on somewhere in the city, perhaps an apartment block, for ten seconds or more. This was quite striking. Afterwards we went to Berăria 700 where we both had bulz. They’ve now opened three of Timișoara’s old cinemas, with two more on the way. One of those two is Dacia – see below for what it looked like last Friday.

I finished Wessex Tales on Saturday. It’s all set close to where my brother lives. The biggest town, Casterbridge, is in fact Dorchester where my niece was born. The name Dorchester sounds quite posh, doesn’t it? (My nephew was born in Poole.) I used to think Wessex itself was a made-up name. Come to think of it, I thought the name Transylvania was made up, too. Many people think Timbuktu and Kalamazoo are invented, but they’re real as well. (Timbuktu is in Mali; Kalamazoo is in Michigan.)

I’ve shown Elena what to do with Kitty. My biggest concern is remembering not to enter auto-pilot and lock my front door at the bottom. Locking it at the bottom would lead to an enormous mess that doesn’t bear thinking about.

This week, 15-year-old Romanians have their evaluare națională, a pair of pressure-packed exams (in Romanian and maths) that will determine where they spend their final years of school.

I hadn’t been to the communist-block-heavy Dacia area for ages. Shots like this featured heavily in that film last night. There are three “jocuri de noroc” (basically pokie machine) places in this picture.

China shop. Maybe you’ll find a bull in there.

Dacia market

Lugoj yesterday. The guy on the left was the steadier player and I imagine he won in the end.

A popular spot for swimming

Books - Cat - Family - Life :) - Music

Rubbing along and a simpler UK plan

June 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow is the longest day. Then it’s all downhill from there. Right now it’s a beautiful evening – I’ve just been down to the river. Only three full days till I go away. I’ve chosen a good time for it: a pair of ghastly 37s have popped up on the long-range forecast.

I’m grateful to Elena, the lady above me, for agreeing to feed Kitty. For a while I was cursing my lack of friends. After nearly six months, Kitty has become part of the scenery. Our start was somewhat rocky. She’d bite or scratch me, or cower in the naughty corner. She just wasn’t comfortable here. Combine that unease with her pent-up energy and she’d drive me to despair. Now she’ll sit beside me or on my lap, sometimes nuzzling up to me. She sleeps a lot more now than in the early days. As my grandmother would have said, we rub along pretty well together. I just wish she had a proper name. For some reason the Genevieve film came into my head this week – wouldn’t that be a nice name? – but she got saddled with Kitty, a non-name really, and that was that.

My UK itinerary has changed once again. My brother thought that going to London wouldn’t give us enough time to properly see him – he’s probably right there – so Mum (who is masterminding this) has deleted London from the schedule. Thinking about it, I’m glad. Meeting up in London but getting lost, phones not working, staying in shitty accommodation (they might not even have had fucking slippers), going to a show that may or may not have been any good, it was all a recipe for stress and falling out. Not worth it. It now looks like I’ll spend two nights in St Ives, then we’ll go down to Poole next Thursday. We’ll spend four nights there before returning to St Ives. A week on Tuesday I’ll catch an early train from Cambridge to Birmingham and spend the day there, which should be fun.

What other news? Well, the roof on the block opposite me has been replaced, and now looks pretty smart. We might get ours done too if all the owners can agree. The Praid salt mine, similar to the one I went to in Turda last summer, flooded last month, with disastrous effects both economically and ecologically. When I met Dorothy last Monday, I saw she had five copies of The Picture of Dorian Gray on her bookshelf. She happily lent me one to read while I’m away. (I’ve almost finished Wessex Tales.) And my colour printer is back in working order.

To give you some idea of how crazy simple things can be in Romania, I tried to get a copy of my front door key to give to Elena. Three useless keys and five trips to the key cutter later, plus waiting around for her to show up, I still haven’t got a spare key that works. Eventually she gave me my money back. (Luckily my front door has two locks, and I do have a spare key for the other lock which normally I don’t use.)

This week I took delivery of Tracy Chapman’s first (1988) album on vinyl. It’s one of my favourite albums, so that was cool.

Books - Life :) - Photos - Travel: Romania

Jimbolia and how tech is wrecking us

June 17, 2025 by 0 Comments

This time next week I’ll be meeting Mum and Dad somewhere in London, hoping that my phone works over there. You can never be 100% sure. Blame Brexit for that.

My hours are now dropping like a stone. The end of the school year has that effect when kids make up a higher proportion of my students than ever before. As always, this time of year means more trips to the market. The strawberries will be done in a few days. Stone fruit is now in abundance. Before I go away I’ll buy a few kilos of sour cherries to preserve in jars for the winter. (In Romanian, sweet and sour cherries are completely different words: cireșe and vișine, respectively.) Yesterday I met up for lunch with Dorothy at one of those basic but good Romanian places in her neck of the woods. I had quite a substantial meal: bean soup with bread, chicken schnitzel, rice, and mashed potato mixed in with spinach. The temperature had climbed to 30 by then. As always, she was unfazed by the heat while I was constantly looking around for shade.

On Sunday I went to Jimbolia (a fun name to say), a town of 10,000 people which sits close to the Serbian border. It was a typically Romanian town, mostly unmodernised, its wide main street lined with trees painted (as always here) white on the bottom. They do that, as far as I know, to stop the trunks from absorbing too much heat when the temperature quickly rises in the spring. The main street ends in the railway station, a border crossing between the EU and the wild exterior. The station was practically deserted, but to my pleasant surprise there was a toilet inside. In Romania this is a big deal. Those in Loo Zealand don’t know how good they’ve got it. (That’s just reminded me that there was a Lew Zealand in the Muppets.) Mostly I sat in the shade and read Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories by Thomas Hardy that Dad gave me. It took me a while to “dial in” to the late-Victorian English and obsession with marriage, which was the norm back then. (In Romania, it’s still kind of the norm now. I’ve got used to brushing off the “Why aren’t you married?” question.) The tales take place in towns and villages near where my brother lives, though the names are changed in the book. I’d hoped the stories would be more focused on the places themselves, akin to Wild Wales, but they’ve been worth reading all the same.

My lower workload will give me a chance to work on my other book, the one based on the bloke I played tennis with in Auckland. I hope to make some serious headway with that over the summer.

Last week I read this comment on AI:

AI is the latest con in a long line of charlatanism from the IT industry. Almost every promise made for how it would improve our lives has been a sham. The speed increase of communication has imposed insane pressures on people in the workplace. Social media has mentally damaged a whole generation. Society has become pornografied and every deranged whack job who previously would have had to stand shouting on a street corner has been given a seemingly respectable platform for their nonsensical hate filled tosh. No-one can read a map anymore – or spell – or write music – without pushing a button.

And now we have vast amounts of money being poured into a concept which is going to steal people’s jobs and just make us even more gullible and stupid. The worst part is being told that AI will solve climate change when in reality it is contributing massively to it! We don’t need a billion dollar computer to point out that we are consuming too much – we are just hoping that it will tell us how we can carry on doing it!

Think I’ll put my foot through the telly and go live up a mountain somewhere (if I can find one not swarming with bloody “influencers”).

I don’t think pornografied is really a word, but this commenter manages to be very funny and absolutely right (as I see it) at the same time. Social media has been profoundly damaging for people’s mental wellbeing. It has also catastrophically accelerated the hyperconsumption and each-man-for-himself “un-society” that started in about 1980. And as my student Matei (a big user of AI) said recently, we’ve now got AI on top of all of this, making us super dumb. (As for me, it’s instant messaging that’s the real killer. I turned off all alerts more than a year ago; it was the only way I could handle it. I couldn’t cope with being part of active WhatsApp groups.)

Here are some pictures of Jimbolia:

The railway station

I was met by goats outside the station

A compulsory charge of zero lei to use the loo doesn’t sound too bad. (It was once 2000 old lei.) But the loo had disappeared. Luckily there was one inside the station.

The main street, with the Catholic church on the left

The very centre. The statue on the left is of St Florian, who was venerated in Austro-Hungary, of which Jimbolia was a part at that time. (Jimbolia didn’t become Romanian until 1924.)

A monument marking 150 years since the 1848 revolution, also known as the Hungarian War of Independence, in which tens of thousands died. The plaque on the right uses the word “Pașoptiști”. That comes from the Romanian for forty-eight: patruzeci și opt, or patrușopt in quick speech. The suffix -ist (plural -iști) is used a lot in Romanian: IT workers are known as ITiști, for instance.

A WW2 memorial. The defaced plaque at the bottom is in German.

The Catholic church

Quite a handsome council building, I thought, even if it needs some TLC.

Books - Family - Life :) - Other sports - Politics

Halfway to ninety

April 20, 2025 by 0 Comments

Great news – Mum has booked their flight from Timișoara to Luton in the early hours of 22nd May. So it looks like they might actually come. The only negative is that Mum has broken a tooth. If she can’t get it repaired in Geraldine before they leave, I’ll book her in somewhere in Timișoara. There are loads of dentists here, and they’ll all be cheaper than in New Zealand.

Easter in Romania is huge, so when your birthday coincides with it, it’s a bit like having your birthday on Christmas Day. I did my church bit this morning – hopefully for the last time until Christmas, even if a lot of the churchgoers seem really nice. I remembered the Easter etiquette this time – “Good morning” or even “Happy Easter” is what you don’t say on Easter Sunday, inside or outside church. You say “Hristos a înviat” (Christ has risen); the response to that is “Adevărat a înviat” (Indeed He has risen). The sermon was all about how you deal with death – pets or maybe grandparents dying when you are younger, and fear of death as you get older. A great subject on a birthday that makes me feel pretty old. But the priest told us that death isn’t the end of the story, as the resurrection proves, so there’s nothing to fear. That’s fantastic news, I must say. There were hymns, with the “lyrics” appearing on an overhead projector. I wish they could have chosen a font where the upper-case I was distinguishable from the lower-case l. They both exist on their own as pronouns in Romanian. No problem if you’re a Romanian who regularly goes to church, but I was left guessing. In the middle of the service, ten kids of various ages and levels of shyness each said an Easter-related line. After that, they were each given a Boomwhacker (I’ve just learnt the name) which is a coloured plastic tube that you literally whack against the floor. These tubes are tuned to different notes (they’re different lengths); if each kid whacks their tube at the right time, they can produce a passable melody which they sort of did.

There was some chat outside after the service. The large Australian lady, just a few months shy of 45, shocked me by saying she was pregnant. There was another lady, much much thinner and heavily pregnant, who clearly had problems. Dorothy told me that she was homeless and was having perhaps her fifth child, a daughter this time. Like the others, she won’t be able to keep her; she lacks the wherewithal to look after a child. All very sad. There was a boy of about eleven who spoke excellent English and talked (at serious length) about some game he’d been playing where, weirdly, he built transport links between East Anglian towns like Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds and Harwich.

Yesterday I went to Dorothy’s house in Buzad. It was a beautiful sunny day, just like today. It really is a lovely place she’s got there, though the garden (seven-eighths of an acre, full of trees) is a lot of work. Dorothy does plenty of planting and seeding and weeding herself, but employs various men too. We went for a walk around the village. Dorothy knew many of the villagers (being the only foreigner there, she’s semi-famous) and sometimes she’d stop for a chat. One of the women was extraordinarily chatty; she was with her husband who could hardly get a word in. Though the village is beautiful, I don’t think I could live there because I wouldn’t be able to hide. I then drove Dorothy back to her actual home in Timișoara. I drove 100 km there and back without any juddering at all. However, since that guy “diagnosed” all of my supposed issues and gave me that enormous quote, my brakes have been squeaky.

Robert F. Kennedy, the Secretary of Death (as I call him) has made some monumentally stupid comments about autism. He clearly knows nothing about it. “Perfectly normal” kids “regress into autism” at the age of two as a result of “environmental exposure” – it’s sickening stuff. He went on to say that autistic children will never go on a date, will never play baseball, will never pay taxes, and most baffling of all, will never write a poem. What. The. Fuck.

What a match yesterday on day one at the Crucible. I couldn’t stay awake for all of it. Kyren Wilson, last year’s champion, played Lei Peifan, one of the many Chinese. From Wilson’s point of view, the match oscillated from 0-2 to 6-2 (and almost 7-2) to 6-9, then to 9-9. The Chinese player then pulled off the upset in the deciding frame. Quite a surprise. Lei Peifan didn’t miss a thing in the first six frames of the evening session. I see another Chinese is already through and a third – the extremely gifted Zhao Xintong – is well on his way.

Football. On Good Friday, thinking Birmingham’s game with Crawley might be a non-event with so little at stake, I tuned into the Championship match between Norwich and Portsmouth instead. I’m glad I did – it was wonderfully chaotic from start to finish as Portsmouth (whose away form had been terrible) ran out 5-3 winners and have probably done just enough to avoid relegation. Portsmouth (the football club, the navy base, even the town) are known as Pompey. Nobody quite knows why. Fun nickname though.

On Friday I finally finished A Town Like Alice. Great story, brilliant writing, thoroughly enjoyable, even if Kitty mauled the cover of the book to pieces the second day after I got it.

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

Back on the (smaller) court

March 17, 2025 by 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 by 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.