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Books - Family - Life :)

The christening

July 17, 2023 by 0 Comments

Earlier today I saw my nephew’s christening. My brother had set up a Skype link to the church; our parents also hooked up to it (eventually – Mum had got the time wrong). It wasn’t a traditional christening – Dad called it a Butlin’s service. Apparently I was the godfather. (I didn’t even know you could be a remote godfather.) There was some weird “action song” which started off like a haka. The flamboyant vicar said “This is like a hooker, isn’t it?” before my brother corrected him. The vicar checked in regularly to see if the connections to New Zealand and Romania were still live. A baby, but not my nephew, cried almost incessantly. After the anointment (if that’s the right word), they sang the five verses of Lord of the Dance, which reminded me of school assemblies but in a good way, then after an hour it was all over.

It’s hot. It’s currently 35, and tomorrow we’re forecast to hit 39. I struggled at tennis last night and don’t expect to do any better tonight. New Zealand can’t come quick enough. Southern and eastern Europe is smothered in infernal heat, and parts of south-western US are dangerously hot. Many thousands will die as a result.

The men’s Wimbledon final between Djokovic and Alcaraz is about to get under way. This year’s event has almost passed me by. I saw that Barclays are sponsoring Wimbledon. Bleugh. Clothing and other official merch are selling like never before this year. It’s almost like the cost-of-living crisis only affects certain classes of people, or something. (To be fair, a ground pass costs £27, which is very good value. When I went to the Australian Open in 2008 I bought a ground pass for the first four days, and that was excellent value. Ditto the US Open – first two days – in 2015. It’s all that non-tennis stuff, which I avoided, where they get you.)

I’ve watched a few more YouTube videos about the Titan sub, and it now appears the occupants were – agonisingly – fully aware of what was about to happen. Since the disaster, the focus has understandably been on the egomaniac CEO Stockton Rush, but 77-year-old PH Nargeolet also played a major part. A veteran of 37 dives to the Titanic, the company used him to legitimise the whole operation. One of the videos drew parallels with the 1996 Everest disaster in which esteemed New Zealand climber Rob Hall and seven others died. I recently watched an incredible presentation (it’s incomplete, unfortunately) on that disaster, which climber and writer Jon Krakauer gave the following year. I also watched a Netflix documentary on the 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanches that occurred during climbing season. The most moving part of that for me was the Buddhist ceremony that took place the night before the earthquake in the village of Tanglang. The whole village came together for that. Within hours, the earthquake would strike, causing a landslide that would wipe out the entire village and everyone in it.

The plumber came back yesterday for a fourth day. That means he’ll have less to do when I see him again a week tomorrow. I’ll sort out the mess on Tuesday. Tomorrow I’ll be too busy with lessons and today I feel utterly lethargic.

Yesterday I had my second two-hour lesson with the young guy. He wants to learn to do different accents; that’s a new one on me. After that I finished Day of the Triffids. An enjoyable and thought-provoking book, and an ending I didn’t expect. Well worth the read.

Update: I survived tonight’s tennis in the heat; I coped a bit better than yesterday as the sun went behind a cloud, even though the ambient temperature was a notch higher. But there was other tennis going on at the same time, and what a match I missed. Alcaraz, just wow. Getting the better of the master, somehow, after dropping the first five games. I’ll have to catch up on that ludicrous game in the third set which went 13 deuces – 32 points – tying the marathon that Graf and Sanchez-Vicario produced in the latter stages of their 1995 final. Alcaraz turned 20 in May and he already looks the complete deal. He’s scarily good. And now he’s won the biggest prize of them all.

Books - Environment - Family - Language teaching

The details matter

July 9, 2023 by 0 Comments

On Wednesday I got a phone call from what seemed to be a teenage girl wanting lessons. A few minutes later (this person had spoken very good English in this time) I asked for a name. David. He pronounced it in the English way (the Romanian way is dah-vid). This morning 17-year-old David arrived for a two-hour lesson. He’s been homeschooled since the beginning of Covid; I hadn’t met anybody who was homeschooled before and didn’t even know if it was legal in Romania. He was quite remarkable: his attention to detail – different accents, glottal stops, phrasal verbs, weak forms, the IPA phonemic chart, you name it – was something I hadn’t seen previously. Some of my students show quite poor attention to detail, and that makes them rather difficult to teach. At times I’m forced to say, “Hey, this thing I’m telling you actually matters and you need to pay attention.” Others are much better, they ask questions, they make notes, and they’re always much easier to teach. (I’ve noticed that people who make notes almost always learn faster than those who don’t. Whether that’s the notes themselves, or just that people who make notes tend to be more focused, I don’t know.) Anyway, this David was extremely easy to teach. My whiteboard kept filling up and the two hours went by in no time. We can only have three more sessions before I go away, and he isn’t interested in online learning. I don’t blame him. Perhaps the best thing to come out of the pandemic is the acceptance of working from home. Millions of people are now missing out on unnecessary soul-crushing commutes that add 25% to their working day, and that’s fantastic. But teaching does work better face-to-face: books and all kinds of tactile games and exercises become available, and you dodge all the annoying tech issues. “I can hear you but I can’t see you.” “Sorry, you’re breaking up a bit.” And so on.

Of course there are environmental benefits to working from home too, although the reduction in carbon emissions on the roads must be offset by extra electricity use at home, and I have no idea how those numbers stack up. We definitely need some major shifts in human behaviour after a week in which we broke the all-time record for the world’s hottest day, two days in a row. (I lie. It wasn’t/isn’t an all-time record, just the record since the Eemian which I hadn’t heard of before and ended only 115,000 years ago.)

My sinus problem isn’t getting any better. Well, in one way it is, because (touch wood) I haven’t had an excruciating headache for months now. But it affects me every day. The pressure builds up and builds up until phew, I’m able to blow out a jet of slime, and the process repeats. Nights are often terrible because the process doesn’t magically stop when I’m asleep. This means my sleep is interrupted, and when I wake up for the final time in the morning I often feel shattered. My energy is depleted; everything feels heavy. I have an appointment with a specialist in Timișoara on 20th September, shortly after I arrive back in the country, and if nothing comes of that, my next step might be a trip to Bucharest and possibly surgery.

The last time I spoke to Dad, he mentioned Alzheimer’s. (By Dad’s age, his own father was in the advanced stages of it.) Dad had read that the onset of the disease is usually marked by a combination of “brain fog” and anxiety. He said that he had none of the brain fog (beyond the usual!) but loads of anxiety, beyond anything he’d experienced before, seemingly brought on by all the life admin and tech stuff. It’s sad that he’s been so affected by that. In the last week, there have been positive signs though. The building work is in full swing and they’re cracking on at a good pace. The sooner that’s done, the better.

It’s been a terrible 2023 for tennis. Rain meant that both of last weekend’s sessions got cancelled. No sign of rain this weekend though, so we should get two sessions in. On Monday I’ve got a jam-packed day of lessons planned – I’m grateful for that because it should be good for my mood, even if it’ll be tiring. I doubt I’ll have any more days like that until I go away.

I finished Digital Minimalism and have started John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.

Books - Life :) - Music

When being bored was OK

July 4, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday morning I got a message from Dorothy to say that she’d left her suitcase on a National Express coach after flying from Timișoara to Luton for a funeral. The case contained her laptop and medication. What a nightmare. I’m always paranoid that I’ll do something like that. She was still able to attend our online Romanian lesson, and seemed remarkably calm under the circumstances. The lesson was on the relative benefits of living in the city and the country. We spent half the session studying the famous 1981 song Vara la Țară (“Summer in the Country”) by the folk rock group Pasărea Colibri; the song is really a piss-take of unsophisticated country living, and was adapted from a late-19th-century novel of the same name which had a far more positive take on rural life.

I’ve now read the bit about “solitude deprivation” in Digital Minimalism. As the author says, as recently as the nineties you often had no choice but to be alone in your thoughts, but first the iPod – just after the millennium – allowed us to be surrounded by constant noise, and then the smartphone gave us constant visual as well as auditory stimulation, often with the added pressure to respond to it. Those born after 1995 – the “real millennials” I mentioned in another post – won’t even know what it’s like to be properly alone. This near-constant smartphone use seems to be responsible for young people’s mental health falling off a cliff.

A massive change I’ve seen is people’s attitudes to boredom. Being bored used to be OK. Expected, even. When I was a kid, we stayed at my grandmother’s cottage in mid-Wales once or twice a year. The 190-mile drive from Cambridgeshire was doable in four-and-a-bit hours if you went the quickest route that skirted around Birmingham. Dad, being a painter and all that, always took the scenic route; the drive through Warwickshire and Worcestershire was really quite lovely. Being a painter, he also liked to make regular stops to take photos of views that would make nice paintings. Once I timed our journey back from Wales at one minute under seven hours, including a stop at a service station. Yes, it was boring, especially from the bit where we entered Northamptonshire, although we probably had fish and chips that time in the picturesque Warwickshire town of Southam. Occasionally I might have had a book or a hand-held LCD game, but most of the time I just sat in the back of the car. Would that even be acceptable today?

Yesterday I dropped in on Elena because I had to sign something central-heating-related and give it to her. She said she walked 18,000 steps earlier that day. (She has an actual pedometer to work that out, rather than a smartphone.)

Today is the fourth of July. Here is Simon and Garfunkel’s wonderful America, from a time when boredom was definitely still OK.

Books - Family - Life :) - Music

We’re asocial creatures sometimes, too

July 3, 2023 by 0 Comments

The time until I go away has now dipped under the length of time I’ll be away; I generally get excited about a big trip when I hit that milestone.

Yesterday I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român where I called my parents, had a basic lunch, and finished Three Men in a Boat. Dad marvelled at my ability to make video calls to New Zealand while out and about in Romania. If they tried to do the reverse, their data would be chewed up in no time. We agreed that this is an island of great benefit in a sea of toxic tech. I’d only just finished saying how wonderful my internet is in Romania when a message flashed up to say that my phone was getting too hot and the app would need to close (before, presumably, it caught fire). Before that, I told them that they really do need to book some flights to Europe, even if they’re ten months away. Just think how happy my brother will be if he knows they’re coming over.

Last night I spoke to my brother – he’d just got back from his cruise with his wife, the in-laws and the little one. They’d been to Spain and Portugal, not Somalia. My brother had a better time than he was expecting. They’re already planning Christmas. Would you like to come over? I’d love to spend time with my brother, sister-in-law and nephew, but jeez, British Christmas is so depressing. Getting to my brother’s place will be arduous and expensive. I don’t know whether I can face it. I did toy with the idea of flying to England from Budapest for my nephew’s first birthday after I come back from New Zealand, but when I land in Budapest all I’ll want to do is bloody well get home. Going over there and having to talk with family when I’m absolutely knackered would wreck me. I told Mum this, and she recalled the time in 1994 when she and my brother flew into Auckland from London and immediately attended a funeral. She had to make sandwiches and cups of tea and chat with third cousins twice removed, all while badly jet-lagged; it was nightmarish. I asked my brother if we could all meet up in St Ives sometime in October. It’ll be a push with the extra little person, but we should manage it.

The big thing I have to contend with right now is getting central heating installed. Last winter – albeit a mild one – the city heating system was more than adequate. Unfortunately the cost of that is going through the roof, and everyone in this block now has no sensible choice but to install their individual central heating if they haven’t already done so. It’s a major expense (NZ$6000, or £3000) and hassle I could do without. One little benefit, however, is that I’ve got to know Elena, the old lady (she turns 80 later this year) who lives directly above me. Her children emigrated to Canada some time ago and have grown-up children of their own. She said that all her friends in Timișoara have passed away. She seems a lovely lady and we’ve had some good conversations.

Three Men in a Boat is very cleverly written, and amusing all the way through. I was surprised by how little the author’s English of 1889 differs from that of today. He talks of dudes, which I didn’t think existed back then, least of all in Britain. On the other hand, he uses superlatives like pleasantest (which would be odd today) and peacefullest (even odder). He uses five-and-twenty and twenty-five interchangeably, indicating that the switch to the modern version was incomplete at that time. He also says four hours and a half; this is now incorrect and a bane of contemporary learners of English. His tales are peppered with constructions like despite his having seen me, which exists in some people’s modern English – my British friend Dorothy’s, for instance – but certainly not mine. (Dorothy’s English is interesting. She also says “One must do blah blah blah, mustn’t one?” and pronounces suit with the y sound of yes. This is not only a question of age – my parents don’t have these traits even though they’re a few years older than her – but one of education and class.)

I’ve started reading Digital Minimalism, a book all about pulling the plug on unnecessary and pernicious tech. I haven’t read the chapter on solitude yet, but I’m looking forward to it. Almost every day I hear “we’re social creatures!”, with the implication that we all need social interaction, online or offline, all the time. Piss off with that! All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, also need the absence of social interaction sometimes, and now many of us aren’t getting it.

Because my hours are down a bit (it’s summer), I now get the occasional chance to listen to Muzicorama on the radio. Last week they played some tracks from the wonderful War of the Worlds musical that came out in 1978, including the beautiful Forever Autumn.

Books - Life :) - Photos

Human nature, and some pictures

June 25, 2023 by 0 Comments

I just put on Al-Jazeera to see what was going on with the rebellion in Russia, and didn’t imagine I’d see Tom McRae presenting. I remember him as the “Christchurch guy” on Paul Henry’s TV1 breakfast show in New Zealand; he later moved to TV3.

The Titanic sub which dominated the airwaves for a few days has given us another window on human nature. Hundreds die trying to reach Europe on boats, seemingly every week. Just ten days ago, as many as 500 perished on an overcrowded fishing boat as it sank while they tried to reach Italy from Libya. That tragedy did get international coverage, but not nearly as much as the Titan sub which had five people on board. The story of the submersible had everything to draw you in – the Titanic (it’s been the subject of some of my lessons, and who hasn’t seen the film?), rich businessmen (just like on the Titanic itself), and a race against time as their oxygen levels ran out, although as we know, that last factor was irrelevant. I was as guilty as anybody as I watched it all unfold. Then you had some people who thought, you had more money than sense, so it serves you right.

I’ve just started reading Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. It’s extremely funny; I’m amazed how well his humour of 134 years ago works today. On Thursday I finished The New Nomads by Felix Marquardt, a book I picked up at Luton on the way back. It’s an interesting book about the (mainly) positive sides of immigration. The two aspects I really like are that: (a) the author admits he used to be an arrogant dick and is now more humble – how many people actually do that? – and (b) he says that the ultra-connected jet-set elite who attend conferences in places like Davos do more harm than good. The only thing I didn’t like was that of all the great examples of immigrants who made positive differences to both their own lives and the countries they moved to, I don’t think one of them was over thirty.

Tennis got cancelled again today; it tipped it down late this afternoon. This evening the sun came out and I went for a walk by the lock. It was lovely down there. People were milling around in parks and in a bar that I didn’t even know existed. I see beauty – simple beauty, I suppose, everywhere in this place.

I’m feeling better now after the Barclays business. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to buy a car a few weeks ago; getting out on the open road and seeing more of this wonderful country would have been great.

Matei had gone to the loo when I took this picture this morning

The old tram on display in Piața Traian

If I remember rightly, these lilies were on Strada Garofiței, or Carnation Street

The sign means Bad dog, in the pre-1993 spelling, but which one?

The river by the lock this evening


Books - Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :)

What the hell is it this time?

May 30, 2023 by 0 Comments

Today started off with a Romanian lesson. I made my fair share of mistakes, and only got into the swing of things when (alas) the 90 minutes were almost up. If I somehow had whole days of making conversation in nothing but Romanian – something approaching proper immersion – I could make great strides, but in the absence of that I keep hitting an unbreakable ceiling.

After Romanian it was back to English, with four lessons. My 16-year-old student is going to Bucharest tomorrow – a 12-hour journey – to get her hair dyed. As you do. The single pair of twins who live in the dark apartment near Piața Verde wanted to know about Mrs and Miss and Ms. This topic comes up surprisingly often. They were in fits of hysterics every time I said Ms, so of course I kept saying it, and in an increasingly exaggerated way. “So it was really as a result of discrimination that Mmmzzzzzz came about.” The girl said that Ms might even be her new favourite English word, supplanting her previous favourite, queue. One of my adult students says that her favourite English word is the rather banal although, because it sounds so delightfully English. An ex-student of mine, a man of about fifty, said his favourite was foreshadow. When I got home I had two online lessons, one with a man a little older than me and another with Octavian, the teenager who started at British School two months ago and says his classmates are hopelessly spoilt.

I spoke to my parents three times last week. Mum seems tired so often these days, as if she’s collapsing under the weight of life admin. I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish they could simplify everything, financially extricate themselves from the UK forever, and enjoy their remaining years. Their capacity to enjoy anything is hugely reduced by all this crap. I sympathise with them because it’s happening to me too. (I mean, international travel just to sort out a problem with my bank – and there’s no guarantee even of that – is crazy.) We’re all being bombarded by crap from all angles. I don’t do social media, I’m not in any active WhatsApp groups, and even I just want to punch a permanent mute button. I get yet another anxiety-provoking instant message and I’m thinking, what the hell is it this time?

Of course there’s always new tech that forces you to act in a way you’d prefer not to. On Friday, when picking up some overpriced ink cartridges, I was faced with the latest trick – a jumbled-up PIN keypad. Yeesh. For the previous ten years I’d been typing in my PIN instinctively as a series of finger movements without ever thinking what the numbers actually were. But this time the digits were arranged 562 904 317 8 or whatever. What actually is my PIN? I was relieved to get it on my second go.

We’ve had atrocious weather – bad enough to hit the orange alert level and make my phone emit ear-splitting noises. Tennis was a washout on both days at the weekend. This evening I was seriously worried about being struck by lightning on my bike. And there’s no respite in sight.

I’ve been reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. For some reason the previous owner of this flat had left a copy of the novel, printed in 1981, several years before she was born. (She left many other books behind and even – weirdly – a load of old photos of her as a child.) Not my thing really, but I’ve been enjoying (in a way) the depiction of Oxford University with all its obscure terminology that, as far as I know, still persists. The vernacular is similar at Eton and some other prestigious public schools. Given that so many senior British politicians took the Eton-and-Oxford route (or something close to it), it’s no wonder the political class over there is so hopelessly out of touch.

At the weekend I read an article about Nick Drake, a folk singer-songwriter who was underappreciated in his lifetime but has found considerable posthumous fame. He suffered badly from depression, and I sometimes listened to him (perhaps unwisely) during my own depressive spells before coming to Romania. He studied at Cambridge. I read an extraordinary letter that his (obviously highly educated and intelligent) father wrote, imploring him not to drop out of university. Nick Drake died of an overdose at the age of just 26.

I said I’d give up looking at cars until I got back from New Zealand, but tomorrow morning I’m going to have a look at a black 1.6-litre Dacia Logan. After that I’ve got my appointment with the neurologist. I wonder if anything will come of that.

Books - Family - Headaches - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

A life of slime

April 2, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s been a wet, miserable day. After my first outing on the tennis court last Sunday, you could forget it today. It’s been a real mixed bag – only 3 degrees and sleet on Tuesday, but beautiful yesterday.

Life with my sinus problem ain’t a whole lot of fun. I haven’t had one of those excruciating headaches since December, but the low-to-medium-level pain (like I have right now) is unremitting. Blowing my nose eases the pain; often I only have to tap the right side of my nose and a jet of colourless slime shoots out of my left nostril at a rate of knots. Sometimes I don’t even know where the gunk has gone. Dad said it’s in Embarrassing Bodies territory – get on TV and maybe I could be sorted. Whenever I blow my nose during our Skype calls, Mum says, “I hope you don’t do that in your lessons.” I do try to tone it down, but what about me, Mum? She’s more bothered that I might briefly annoy my students than she is about my pain. I shouldn’t be surprised. Dad suffered from terrible migraines when I was growing up, and Mum’s sympathy cable was permanently unplugged. The only emotion she showed was anger. What will they think of me if we don’t show up to Jackie’s party? Or if I turn up alone? Thankfully Dad’s migraines are fewer and farther between these days.

On Monday I managed to catch my brother on WhatsApp when my nephew was up and about. It was great to see him grinning away on his playmat, but my brother and his wife are struggling with lack of sleep. My brother looked whacked. In the middle of my call, my sister-in-law’s parents showed up to provide some respite, but I could tell my brother would have preferred it if they’d stayed away. I don’t envy him one bit. Some time ago he said it’ll be a “one and done”, but we’ll see. This morning I read an article about only children. They’re selfish and spoilt according to the stereotype, but people with siblings can sure as hell be selfish and spoilt too.

Last night I had an interesting lesson with the Romanian guy who lives in London; he now has two sons. He’d just made a trip back to Romania, and said he felt a sense of greyness on his arrival back in the UK. I know exactly what he means because I’ve felt the same thing many times. That journey from the airport; the grey M25 and M11 with an equally grey sky overhead. He said that people in Romania were happier despite being poorer. That was something I noticed on only my second evening in Timișoara. It was a sunny Sunday October evening and I was walking along the road from the guest house to the university campus to grab some dinner. I passed a constellation of ugly communist-era blocks of flats which had a park outside, full of basic play equipment and half a dozen cheap-looking ping-pong tables. Kids were playing, people were walking their dogs, and all the ping-pong tables were being used. I was amazed how happy everybody seemed. I got the same feeling last night – another sunny evening – when I collected my 15 litres of water; not much money but a real sense of community. In contrast, when I have my lessons in well-to-do parts of town where Porsches abound, there’s no sense of community at all.

This afternoon, in one of those well-to-do areas, I managed to convince my 15-year-old student that a haggis was a hedgehoggish creature that inhabits the Scottish highlands. We read an article on Haggis scoticus from the Daily Record. Then I asked him to check the date on the article, which was 1st April 2021.

Last Sunday I had a wander through the woods with Mark and his two dogs. It was great to be out in nature and to hear the hammering of woodpeckers and humming of insects instead of the rumble of traffic. One thing I love about Timișoara is how easily you can escape from urban life.

The culmination of the snooker season is upon us once more. The sport is going through a rough patch with several Chinese players having recently being banned for match fixing. I also wonder where the fresh new faces will come from: it seems to be a middle-aged man’s sport. Is whiling away hours in a snooker hall, rather than on TikTok, even something a teenager would do these days? At the moment the Tour Championship, featuring the season’s top eight players, is in full swing, then later this month it’ll be the big one – the World Championship, the one event in the game that dwarfs all others.

I’m currently reading The Twisted Ones, which (unsurprisingly) is a horror novel. The author is Ursula Vernon, who wrote the book under the pen-name T. Kingfisher.

Books - Life :) - Tennis

Ploughing through

January 29, 2023 by 0 Comments

At last we’re getting some real winter with some proper chunky flakes of snow.

I’ve had a busy week: 30-odd hours of lessons plus preparation time and ploughing through the city on my bike to see kids without getting my wheels stuck in the tram tracks, writing and editing more of my “tips and tricks” dictionary, and all the ongoing medical stuff. I saw the ENT specialist on Thursday; after seeing the results of my MRI scan, she thinks I might have a fistula up there. I’ve made an appointment with the neurologist for 20th February. In the meantime she’s given me half a shelf full of drugs: an antibiotic, a probiotic, a nasal spray (another one), two variations of a plant extract to deal with both acute and chronic sinusitis, and prednisone (a steroid) to take on days seven to ten. It isn’t easy to manage the whens and hows of taking this many medicines when “life admin” is already a struggle.

The Australian Open has almost passed me by this year. I saw that big-hitting Sabalenka won the women’s title this morning, and Djokovic will probably win the men’s tomorrow. Andy Murray came through two gladiatorial matches in the first week, one of which lasted 5¾ hours. But I haven’t watched a single ball being hit. I’ve had neither the time nor the interest.

The ex-owner of this flat left a load of books behind (and that’s not all – more about that some other time). One of them was The Girl on the Train, which I got through pretty quickly. A real page-turner, but at the end I wondered what I’d just read. All three of the female characters were incredibly shallow, with such normal problems, that I found it hard to care what happened to them. The men were no better, except the ginger-haired bloke whom Rachel met on the train, or was it near the train, but he only made a cameo appearance. When I read the first few pages, the book was full of potential: a slightly mad woman gawking at people’s gardens twice a day from the window of her train and making up lives for those who reside there, and wondering what her fellow passengers must have thought of her. Then it veered uninterestingly (for me) off the rails.

I might have had my last session with the tearful boy. If that’s the case I won’t be disappointed.

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

Winter is upon us once more

December 2, 2022 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

An agonising day

November 30, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’d just about got over my latest kidney stone business when Sunday happened. I woke up at about 5:30 with sinus pain, the sort that eats into the quality of my life without completely wrecking it. I got up just before eight. The pain in my left sinuses was still there, and getting more intense. By nine it had become unbearable. Sheer agony. I didn’t go to bed, because pacing up and down helps relieve the pain at least somewhat. Normally the excruciating pain lasts two hours, but what if it doesn’t this time? What if the torture lasts hours or days on end, what then? It did start to subside at eleven, and I went to bed until half-two. I couldn’t eat anything – it wouldn’t have stayed down. The rest of the day I was on a go-slow, and even two days later I feel devoid of energy. Yesterday I felt a strange calmness come over me, as if nothing in the outside world really mattered. No TV please, and no internet if I can help it. Do my lessons and don’t do much else.

Yesterday I had an early-morning lesson, then went to the doctor’s surgery for blood and urine tests. When I got back I made myself a late breakfast (because I had to fast before the tests), and in the middle of eating it, the phone rang. You haven’t paid. The lady used the posh Romanian word for paid, achitat, instead of the common word, plătit. You’re right. How embarrassing. In the afternoon I had the face-to-face lesson with the single pair of twins, and I passed by the doctor’s on the way. All the tests came to 356 lei (£63; NZ$120), so it wasn’t especially cheap. I’ll post my results next time. I seriously need to consider surgery on my sinuses. My normal doctor, who is generally very good, prescribes me pills or sprays that are of very little benefit. As Mum said, spray and walk away.

I’ve been quickly getting through (and thoroughly enjoying) The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel. It’s the second book of hers I’ve read, the first being Station Eleven which is all about a fictional pandemic and its aftermath (I reread bits of it at the start of the Covid outbreak).

Mum and Dad are now on their way from Singapore to Christchurch. They Skyped me from the airport this lunchtime (my time). All around I could see Airportland. Flashing (and surprisingly fast) buggies, travelators that seemed to stretch miles, and a sign saying Changi Terminal One. Changi consists of four vast terminals. They were too tired to enjoy their stay in Singapore much this time, although they’d had a very good beef dish from a street market, or bar, the night before. On the London-to-Singapore leg, they had to contend with a screaming baby for the entire 13½ hours. When I spoke to them today, they dearly wanted to get home.

Two new students tomorrow – a twelve-year-old boy and his mother, separately. Tomorrow will be St Andrew’s Day, the first of two public holidays. Thursday (1st December) is Romania’s national day. Many Romanians have decided to take Friday off as well, giving them a five-day weekend.