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Avoiding arguments

February 22, 2026 by 0 Comments

On Wednesday I asked the doctor about my back. As I suspected, it was just a contusion – nothing was broken. He gave me two packets of pills and some cream. That all seems to be working, so that’s nice. Early in the week (Tuesday?) I had a pretty terrible morning with sinus pain. Even after I recovered, it put me on a go-slow for the rest of the week.

Mum and Dad seem good at the moment, although I can never be 100% sure. I expect they’ll make it to Romania in early June, before it gets too hot. I have no idea what we might do when they get here, but any big cross-country trips – to the Delta, say – might not be a clever idea. Avoiding stress (and falling out with Mum in particular) is a top priority. I’m happy to say that I’ve made a decent start to 2026 as far as Mum is concerned. Even though I felt a bit upset at Mum’s attitude to my potential trip to New Zealand (which basically knocked it on the head), I haven’t had any arguments with her and I really want to keep it that way. Last week she emailed me a picture of a car (a Range Rover, I think) parked in Geraldine whose number plate included the POM combination, with a Union Jack added for good measure. That would have cost several hundred dollars, unlike the POM I ended up with. I was just happy that she sent me a rare email. (Part of the problem is that she has several email addresses. Anything I send her is liable to go to her junk or vanish into the ether entirely, so I don’t email her, and as a result she doesn’t normally email me either. When I see her in June I hope I can sort all this out for her.)

Dorothy has gone to England for a week. She’s spending time with her late husband’s family, many of whom don’t get on with each other. I didn’t mention that last weekend Dorothy and I saw a film at Cinema Victoria. We saw a French film (subtitled in Romanian) called La Réparation. Its Romanian title is Ultima Rețetă (The Last Recipe). It’s all about a famous Michelin-starred restaurant in France, though the second half of the film is mostly set in Taiwan. The plot was more complex than I expected something like that to be, and whoever produced the film showed some in-depth knowledge of haute cuisine.

The latest round of the Scrabble league is over. I finished with eight wins and six losses, surpassing my expectations, and will stay in the same division when it restarts on Thursday. There was some unpleasantness in the group chat last week which was a shame, though I think things are resolved now. This weekend a tournament in Cluj is taking place; that’s the one I was invited to. I couldn’t realistically go; I’d have needed to go up there on Friday, taking both Friday and Saturday off work. That would have been too much. I’m targeting a tournament in Iași in early August, when I’ll have a much lighter workload. Iași, which I visited in 2021, is a long way from here, but I’m planning a trip to the Republic of Moldova – over the border – and maybe I could stop in Iași on the way back. By that point I’ll have hopefully improved a bit and will have had the chance to practise tile tracking.

Early in the week a song came on the radio that I hadn’t heard in a while – Sowing the Seeds of Love by Tears for Fears, which came out in 1989. I hadn’t appreciated its complexity; it feels like four or five songs in one.

Having obtained a distinction in his master’s degree, my brother is proudly brandishing his qualifications in his email signature. I’m very proud of you, but when you display all those letters after your name so overtly, I only see four letters: dee eye cee kay.

Some good news: my bike is back in business and the repair cost less than expected – 268 lei (around £45 or just over NZ$100).

I’m meeting Mark in town for lunch in an hour or so.

Family - Films - Photos - Romania - Scrabble

A profound sadness and some pictures of Lipova

January 27, 2026 by 0 Comments

So yesterday I spoke to my brother – only for five minutes, because he had to put his daughter to bed. Before that he gave his son a mug of something greenish-yellow to drink; my nephew asked if it was wee-wee. My brother had been talking to Dad: a rare conversation with only Dad – a rare encounter with the truth, in other words. “It’s depressing over there, isn’t it?” my brother said. Dad is worried about the sale of the flat. Worried about Mum’s health. Worried that his later years have been irreparably wrecked. My brother and I both expressed quite a profound sadness at it all. In the next week or two I’ll hopefully book some flights to New Zealand. It’s highly unlikely that Mum and Dad will make it to Europe in 2026 – perhaps they never will – and I know Dad would like to see me over there, even if Mum is probably indifferent to the idea. At least I can make the trip. For my brother it’s much harder. And he’s going through a tough time himself because my sister-in-law is struggling to cope with the kids and may (reading between the lines) be suffering from depression.

Yesterday I took the car to Lipova which is about 70 minutes away. I hadn’t had a decent drive for a while, but the snow and ice had pretty much melted, and even though it was an overcast day I thought, why not? It’s a pleasant, typical provincial Romanian town that sits on the substantial River Mureș. Not a lot was going on there on a Sunday morning. The architecture was nice, even if (as it so often the case) it was in need of some TLC. Because it’s provincial and time moves more slowly there, a lot of the eighties signage has still survived. I think you can eat there quite cheaply.

Today I achieved something quite remarkable: I managed to track down some NBT (normal bloody tea). Earl Grey in fact. Lidl only had three boxes of the stuff and I bought them all. Sixty tea bags, or a fortnight’s worth. A couple of weeks ago I saw Profi had just one box of NBT left. I didn’t buy it – it didn’t seem right to take the last box. A few days later that same box was still there – I could tell it was the same box because it had a dent in it – and I bought it. Early last week, with my supplies running low, I went back there to find an “out of stock” sign. On Friday I ran out completely. I even tried in Lipova, but no luck. I had the same problem when I arrived in Romania – after a month I finally found a packet of NBT which had a picture of Big Ben on the front.

I finished watching The Queen’s Gambit. The ending was a bit predictable, and in the end I found Beth Harmon a little hard to root for, but the series as a whole was a good watch all the same. I noticed that Harmon’s name appeared as XAPMOH in Cyrillic during her Moscow tournament. Hmm, that looks familiar. Oh yes, it’s an anagram of that Poxham name I came up with in my dream.

Talking of anagramming, yesterday I got accused of cheating in a game on the old site. Really that amounted to abuse; I may give up playing on there entirely and play exclusively on Woogles, the new site where the leagues are.

The Mureș at Lipova, with a handsome building looking out onto it

Surviving eighties signage

Umbrellas like in Timișoara, only they don’t take them down in winter, and patriotic park benches

Orthodox Church on the left (service in full swing), Catholic on the right, and an ex-market in the middle

I liked the hand-painted road signs. I remember when New Zealand used to have them.

This banister was amazing

The church at Zăbrani on the way back. Surprisingly, the clock was working.


Cat - Family - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Scrabble

The attraction of a cat

January 19, 2026 by 0 Comments

In family news, today is my niece’s first birthday. It’s also the eve of Mum’s cataract operation on her first eye. She’ll get the other one done next month. I think the bill for both eyes is around NZ$10,000, a staggering amount. In Romania it would cost a fifth of that. Mum is pretty dire need of this surgery (which only takes ten minutes per eye, though there’s considerable faff when you get to the clinic). Her eyesight was pretty terrible when I saw her last May and June, and has deteriorated further since then.

Yesterday was a reasonably busy day for a Sunday. The twins, whom I normally see at their place on Wednesdays, came to my place yesterday morning instead. They seemed to enjoy the lesson because they got to see (and play with) the cat. Kitty has been a boon to my face-to-face lessons at home. Later I met Mark for lunch at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. He tried a few words of Romanian with the waitress but she didn’t understand him. You can see why I hardly bother. It can be like that sometimes. It’s rare for a non-native to speak Romanian, so Romanians aren’t “tuned in” to imperfect, non-native versions of their language. That’s in sharp contrast to us native English speakers who hear imperfect second-language English all the time to the point where we don’t think anything of it, and it creates a barrier for anyone trying to learn Romanian. You have to reach a certain level before you can even cross the start line. The barrier has even been raised somewhat in my time here; Timișoara is fairly cosmopolitan by Romanian standards and as a result more and more people are gaining a command of English, so if you’re not careful you can find yourself dealing almost exclusively in English even after living here for years. That’s especially true of someone like Mark who works at a British school and lives a far more “expat” lifestyle than me. Our lunch was done and dusted in a very swift 50 minutes; quite often it’ll take you that long just to get served.

In the evening I went to Dorothy’s for our monthly English Conversation Club meeting. She managed to start it up again in November. There were ten of us, of whom eight were women. (Language learning – and teaching – can skew pretty heavily in that direction.) I had to cycle home, and by that stage the temperature had plummeted to −6. First thing this morning we were at −10.

On Saturday I had my first lesson with a seven-year-old boy called Noah. I don’t really like teaching kids that young, but he was very nice and our session went well. Unusually, he was happy to see me. (Most small children have a look of either puzzlement or fear on their face the first time I see them.) The name Noah is very un-Romanian; the Biblical Noah is called Noe in Romanian, while a final h is pronounced here with a guttural sound like the ch inloch.

In a recent conversation with Dad, he mentioned his decision in the late seventies to quit his job as an illustrator for the Ministry of Defence and go his own way as a painter. It takes a lot of courage to step away. As you also did, he said. It would have been so easy to have stayed where I was, he then said, rather than take that leap. Ah, I said, this is where we differ. The idea that insurance was any sort of comfort zone for me is laughable. I simply couldn’t have stayed there; it would have been dangerous to have done so. Staying there might literally have killed me; I had to leave. Moving to the water company was a useful stopgap – it got me away from a lot of that corporate toxicity – before I decided what I really wanted to do. (I was also several years older than Dad was when he made the move.) Talking of the corporate world, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comics, died of cancer last week. Those comics were extremely popular and funny; they did a great job of satirising office life and the practices that came to the fore in the nineties. Sadly in later life he became a Trump-supporting attention-seeking twat. (It’s quite possible he was always a twat, but only with the advent of social media did he gain an avenue for his twattishness.)

Scrabble. I’ve had three wins and five losses so far in my latest round of league matches, but my six outstanding games aren’t looking too bad. I’ve also got a decent tie-breaker this time if I happen to finish on the same number of wins as another player. There has been some controversy this time around as one player in our division has been kicked out, presumably for cheating. Before his expulsion he managed to beat me. Six of his matches were still outstanding, so I’m guessing his opponents in those games will be given walkover wins, but I don’t know if his earlier victims (including me) will be compensated in any way. Last week I had a crazy game on ISC, the other site. I put down a bingo only for my opponent to respond with the huge 158-point triple-triple TIDYTIpS, a word I didn’t know. (It’s a very pretty yellow flower found in America.) But a couple of turns later I put down BURTHEN (an old form of burden that I’d seen in books) for 97. A very close finish ensued, and eventually I won by a single point, 428-427.

I’ve just got one episode of The Queen’s Gambit still to watch. It’s been great so far. Obsession with something like chess can certainly drive one to madness. In addition to the story I’ve been enjoying the sixties music as well as the cars and decor of that time.

Dreams - Family - Films - Music - Photos - Scrabble

Deep freeze

January 11, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s been bitterly cold. On Friday morning it was minus 16 degrees. As I write this at 9:30 on Sunday morning, it’s −9; the top temperature today is forecast to be −5. Yesterday, when we soared to the dizzy heights of zero, I had to drive to my two maths lessons in Dumbrăvița. The main roads had been ploughed of snow, so they weren’t too bad, but the side roads bordered on treacherous. It was also foggy on my journey out there. (I got all-weather tyres put on my car. A lot of people make a twice-yearly switch between summer and winter tyres, but it’s a real palaver that can take up an entire weekend.) I was very glad to get home. It’s all very reminiscent of my first winter here, nine years ago, when the river froze and there were icicles hanging from the building I’d just moved into. Kids under about 13 have no recollection of a proper winter, but winters like this – and even more extreme – used to be an annual occurrence here. The snow has got the young ones all excited, and we’ve got more coming in the next few days. Apart from driving which required serious concentration yesterday, I have no problem coping with these rather nippy conditions. There’s always something you can do to keep warm. Summer is a totally different ball game though.

On my trip to Dumbrăvița yesterday they played Crowded House’s Weather With You on the radio. A nice touch, assuming it was deliberate. The song immediately before that was Der Kommissar by Falco, which came out at the end of 1981. I still remember when their bigger hit Rock Me Amadeus came out in ’85. The night before I had a dream where I was hiking somewhere in Romania and met a younger British woman. For some reason she showed me an ID photo with her face on it. Her surname was Smith. She then told me she’d changed her surname to Poxam. I attempted to spell it, putting an h after the x, but she said it was H-less. Then she asked me if I’d like to come and see her in the UK, at which point I woke up. I wonder where I got that name from. Poxham is a plausible name for a British village. There is a Poxham out there, and in fact it’s a picturesque hamlet in Austria. The closest name I’ve ever had anything to do with is Moxham Avenue, the main street in the Wellington suburb of Hataitai. I once put in an offer on a flat in a Disney-style block there, but it wasn’t accepted.

Lately I’ve been tuning out of politics and international news. That’s just as well; what’s coming out of America would drive me to insanity if I paid close attention to it. However, the shooting – cold-blooded murder – by an ICE officer of an innocent mother driving her car in Minneapolis was too awful to ignore. America right now seems a lost cause. I sometimes laugh when I hear people intellectualising the president, using adjectives like transactional, when really it’s far, far simpler. He’s a piece of shit who cares for nothing but his own power and ego and has no respect for human life. He enjoys hurting other people. Most of the people around him are pieces of shit too. And 77 million people voted for that, with their eyes wide open. None of what is happening is a surprise.

Scrabble. The latest round of league matches is over, and just like last time I won eight and lost six. That vastly surpassed my early expectations – I had a pretty rough start. So that should mean I’ll stay in the same division for the fourth round in succession. Yesterday I played six games on ISC. I lost the first of them, then won four straight before being hammered 508-306 in my last game. In that game I drew terribly to the point where it was probably unwinnable no matter what I did, but I was still disappointed with my decision making. More generally, my word knowledge keeps letting me down. I’m still totally ignorant of a lot of very useful fours and fives, and even if I do know them, I’m likely to miss them because I haven’t played enough for my brain to properly “zone in”. Missing – or simply not knowing – these words has all kinds of knock-on effects. It makes it harder to sort out a bad rack, leading to lower scores (and fewer bingos) down the line. The tournament in Cluj is six weeks away, on 21st and 22nd February. I don’t know if I could realistically make that. It’s a four-hour drive so I’d have to go up the day before and miss some work. I was hoping there would be a sleeper train but there doesn’t seem to be. So far I’ve watched the first three episodes of The Queen’s Gambit which Mark recommended to me. I didn’t like the ending of the third episode – Beth’s stepmother really needed to tell Beth to “pull her head in” – but hey. So far it’s clear that however scary a Scrabble tournament would be, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as chess.

The last time I spoke to my brother, things weren’t easy for him. He said he’d like to take the kids camping at some point, but there’s no way his wife would ever go. She prefers cruises or Center Parcs (the name makes me shudder), neither of which are my brother’s cup of tea, and they wouldn’t be mine either. We had great camping trips as kids, and I’m sure my nephew would love camping. With my brother’s line of work, it would be right up his street too. And what’s more, they live in a great part of the country for it. Practically right on the coast, with the New Forest on their doorstep, and a quick hop over to France if they ever felt like camping over there. I hope my sister-in-law can be convinced.

Films - Other sports - Photos

The year has started all white

January 5, 2026 by 0 Comments

I had a tough start to the day with some pretty bad sinus pain. I’m fine now, but on the odd occasions when I get that (thankfully less often than I used to), I’m tired for many hours after the pain has subsided.

We’ve got proper winter here now. It’s snowed all day, pretty much, and all around is blanketed in white. Great for the kids who have bemoaned the lack of snow in recent years. The temperatures are forecast to plummet into the double-figure negatives late in the coming week.

Yesterday I called Mum and Dad, but I got a lot more than just them. My aunt and uncle (the ones who live close to my parents) were there, and so was my Wellington-based cousin – who has come through a gruelling two years of treatment for cancer in her jaw – and her mother. It was good to catch up with them all. Apart from lack of snow, their weather hasn’t been much better than mine. I did mention that I hope to get over to see them in August.

I watched the darts final last light. Luke Littler, still a teenager but the undisputed king of darts, basically thrashed Gian van Veen, the rather more cerebral Dutchman who at 23 is still very young. The match started out with great excitement. There were big out shots from both players at the beginning, then a tense and nervy deciding leg of the first set which van Veen won. Then Dutchman then went 2-0 up in the second set. Game on, as they say. But from there it was one-way traffic. Van Veen averaged 100, which is pretty damn impressive, but Littler averaged a whopping 106 and was always a step or two ahead. The highlight for me was probably the appearance of a wasp (not for the first time) that took some of the sting out of Littler just momentarily. The end came quickly, before I’d even finished grinding all the coffee beans; Littler’s 147 finish was the final flourish in a 7-1 win. By the way, the G in Gian van Veen’s first name is that guttural sound similar to a Spanish J. I knew a Gerrit and a Margriet – Dutch students from my time in France – and their Gs were pronounced the same.

Since my last post, Kitty has been great. She’s calmly sat on my lap without wanting to wriggle away at any opportunity. Let’s hope she carries on like this.

I can’t even begin to know what to think of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and capture of Maduro. It’s all beyond me.

My break from all those students is coming to an end. I’ll have lessons in dribs and drabs for the next two or three days, then bam!, it’ll be back to normal again.

Update: I’ve just spoken to my brother. It’s hard work looking after the kids. My niece has had a virus; my nephew is full-on whenever he’s not asleep. I think Christmas was probably tough for my brother – he spent a week with the in-laws, whom he gets on well with, but it’s just hard not being in your own home and having to look after the kids. Talking to him puts any issues I have with Kitty into perspective.

Cat - Films - Life :)

The absence of people

December 22, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’m absolutely desperate right now to not see anybody. Gagging for the total absence of people, and as such, to recharge my batteries. From the 27th to the 31st I might have one or two online lessons, but apart from that I will not see anyone over that period.

I get about 95% of my recommended daily human contact from work alone. I hardly need anything else. Dorothy invited me to church today. Not just the service, but also lunch afterwards. That meant I had to make something. There would be people of all nationalities, so people had to bring something from their home country. I made something British – a cottage pie. As I was making it last night, I felt exhausted. Making sure I have all the ingredients, buying those few ingredients I didn’t have, then making the pie which nobody was going to bloody eat (let’s face it), then going to the service and the lunch and getting there and back – all in all it was nearly six hours. Six hours that I’ll never get back. During the service itself, I felt pretty out of place. And very tired. I ended up next to a large man who told me his first two names were Cristian and Emanuel. Very Christmassy, I said. “If there’s anything in Romanian you don’t understand, let me know.” “I’m sure I’ll manage.” Eventually we came to the sermon which of course was in Romanian. (At 80-something minutes, the service was shorter than I expected.) The moment the sermon ended, Cristian Emanuel asked me in English, “So what were the three truths?” Oh god, you’re literally testing me?! Don’t you realise that I’m simply going through the motions here? The food bit wasn’t so bad, but I was still dying to get away. The Australian woman was there. She’s virtually my age and incredibly now has a three-month-old son. We talked about Antipodean expressions. She brought a pavlova which was very good. It reminded me of all my Kiwi Christmases. (Well, Mum made a lot of pavlovas even when we were still all in the UK.) A young woman from Ethiopia showed me how to type in Amharic on her phone. They have an alphabet (or really a syllabary) that works rather like Japanese hiragana but with far more symbols (over 200), presumably because the language has a larger inventory of sounds than Japanese.

I got away. Earlier this evening there was the English conversation club which meant yet more talking. Yesterday the 17-year-old girl wanted her third maths lesson of the week with me. I was seeing Matei at ten, then I had lunch with the tennis people at one, so I agreed to meet her at four. I got back home with a few minutes to spare and the bell went immediately while I was having a pee. Oh jeez, give time to have a pee will you, and preferably make a cup of tea and feed Kitty too.

Water, a two-year-old cat and a laptop really don’t mix, as I found out on Friday morning, ten minutes before I was due to start a lesson. Kitty jumped up and knocked a glass of water, mostly over me and the sofa, but a small amount went over the laptop keyboard. I wiped the keyboard – surely it’ll be fine – and quickly got changed, then bugger. This keyboard really isn’t working. For a while the digits were stuck, then M gave me H and G gave me V and the space bar wasn’t working properly. It still isn’t quite right now. The forward and down arrows aren’t working, and neither are some of the keys on the numerical keypad, but at least all the normal keys (if you like) are fine. Maybe those other keys will come right after I next shut down. I have no idea how any of the circuitry, or what have you, works. What a pain though, and for a while on Friday I was worried I’d have a keyboard that was completely out of action – a huge problem when my work relies so heavily on it.

Scrabble. The latest round of the league started on Thursday. It’s tough. My opponents are just too good. They’ve played proper tournaments – nationals and even world championships in some cases. The top divisions feature a world-class line-up. Last time I was fortunate to eke out enough games to escape the bottom five, but this time I don’t think I’ll be so lucky. As well as the Romanian again, there’s a New Zealander in my division this time – she’s from Palmerston North – as well as some Australians.

On Friday I went with Dorothy to Cinema Timiș to see The Yellow Tie, a film all about the Romanian conductor Silviu Celibidache. A brilliant film, and I realised how lucky we now are to have these proper cinemas in the city that don’t necessitate going to the mall. The acoustics were great, which for that sort of film you absolutely need. And at just 25 lei, it’s frankly a steal.

This flat is a complete mess. Christmas Eve will probably be my tidying-up day. I’ve got nothing planned for Christmas Day. On Boxing Day there’s something going on at Dorothy’s place. Then after that all I’ve got planned is a whole load of not seeing people.

Family - Films - Other sports - Scrabble

Is this really happening again?

November 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

I managed to completely fall out with Mum last night, for the dozenth time this year. It ended up with her shouting “YOU HATE ME! YOU HATE ME!” (it was definitely all-caps) and leaving me no choice but to end the call. Is this really happening again? After that I slept abysmally.

This all came about because Dad hasn’t been well. Last week he noticed his pulse was fast and irregular, and he’ll be seeing the doctor in the coming days. He told me this on Saturday night, just after I’d got back from the cinema. It was Sunday morning for them, so Mum was at church. Mum had told Dad not to tell me, but he told me anyway. This is obviously a big worry; quite possibly it’s come about from all the stress with the apartment sale in St Ives. I called Mum last night just before I went to bed. The first thing she said was, “Dad’s not well but don’t tell your brother.” I replied, “I will tell him. He needs to know. Why do you have to keep hiding these things?” She said he’s got a lot on his plate with the kids so it’s better he remains ignorant. And it all escalated from there. Mum isn’t exactly 100% herself. She’s practically blind right now, though she’s still driving, and on Saturday Dad told me her bowel issue is far from resolved; she sometimes has to change her clothes after what you might indelicately call a shart.

It’s impossible to disagree with Mum. You just can’t do so while maintaining a polite conversation. The moment you show any kind of dissent, a shouting match ensues. The only way to avoid this is to meekly agree. Mum knows best. And that’s exactly what Dad does. He agrees, just to make life easier in the short term, even if the agreement involves something like buying a house that he knows is unsuitable. In fact I can’t remember the last time I had an in-depth conversation with Mum about anything.

Probably Mum’s second-biggest driver of stress lately, just behind the apartment sale, has been the church roster. Seriously, the church roster. It consumes hours of her time. Days even. She says she has to put it into a PDF and it’s disappeared from the screen and so on and so forth and if I don’t get it out on time I’ll be shunned by all members of the congregation or something ridiculous. Maybe she even thinks she’ll be banished to the burning flames of hell. So last week she bought herself a new laptop, which at the moment she doesn’t know how to use, just to do the church roster. That’s a small clue as to Mum’s level of rationality.

I seriously have to think about what to do next year. I’d love to make a trip to New Zealand, but spending that length of time with Mum might be too risky. It nearly went horribly wrong last time around.

Yesterday was my niece’s christening. It was a double christening; my niece’s cousin (a six-month-old girl) was also baptised. Mum, Dad and I were able to hook up to the service on Teams. The minister who made it all happen was the same one who did my brother’s wedding and my nephew’s christening; he certainly has the capacity to entertain. My nephew spent practically the whole hour-plus event running.

The movie I saw was All the President’s Men, a 1976 film all about how the Watergate saga was covered by the Washington Post. It starred Robert Redford, who died recently, and Dustin Hoffman. I saw it with Dorothy at Cinema Timiș on a cold, wet Saturday evening. (Dorothy also saw it when it came out.) The star of the show was really Ben Bradlee, the newspaper’s chief editor. It made me realise that democracy, in the US and elsewhere, is indeed slowly dying. A modern Watergate would be met with a collective shrug. Of course Trump did instigate something worse than Watergate, and the only consequences for him have been to sue the BBC for a billion dollars.

Birmingham City’s new stadium was revealed last week after much anticipation. It’s going to have chimneys – twelve of them – and be visible for many miles. They plan to have it ready for the 2030-31 season. It’ll be part of a multi-billion-pound “sports quarter”. Something like this, if they have a top-class footballing side to go with it, really could revitalise a flagging city. Aston Villa have been easily the city’s best club over the years, and they have a fancy-sounding name. They don’t carry the name of the city though – the city of industry with all those chimneys – and that counts for something. Maybe Birmingham will be known as the Chimney Boys or something. (I’m not very good at this.)

The latest report from the UK Covid inquiry is out. Quoting verbatim, the chair of the inquiry said that while government was presented with unenviable choices under extreme pressure, “all four governments failed to appreciate the scale of the threat or the urgency of response it demanded in the early part of 2020.” Yes, absolutely. It was shockingly slow, and thousands died unnecessarily as a result. A common point of view is that it was going to be bad no matter what, and no government could have done anything about it. I disagree entirely with that.

I played six games of Scrabble yesterday, losing five. Not my best day, but I also drew poorly. That happens. Sharted is valid, and off the top of my head it has six anagrams: hardest, hardset, hatreds, threads, dearths and trashed.

A big week of lessons in store. I’ve got 36½ hours scheduled. They may not all happen – I usually get at least a couple of cancellations – but I don’t expect to have much free time.

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

Family - Films - Language teaching

Getting on and a great film

June 14, 2025 by 0 Comments

Today is Mum’s 76th birthday. I’ll be down at my brother’s place for Dad’s 75th in two weeks. (Yes, my brother has managed to get a week off work so I’ll see him and his family after all. That’s great news.) I still can’t get over my parents being this old. They’re in great physical health for their age. I mean, Dad almost died 20 years ago when his aortic valve replacement surgery got complicated, then in 2019 he had bowel cancer. Mum is in excellent health too, even with her digestive problem which needs to be looked at when she gets back to New Zealand. They’ve been walking up hillsides in Romania and going for bike rides in the area around St Ives. They just seem much younger. But then I hear Mum calling the computer you have on the end of your arm a “telephone” and Dad calling a conflict that ended 80 years ago “the last war” and yeah, they’re getting on a bit. It’s a crying shame they can’t just enjoy this period of their life, being better off than about 95% of couples of their age both financially and health-wise, but after Dad gave his “resignation” speech at the pub round the corner from me, it’s clear there’s little hope of that. This affects my parents a lot more than me, but since I’m literally the only person on the planet other than Dad who sees how bad Mum can get, I sort of have a special relationship with him.

I’ve been thinking of how to “play” the time I spend with my parents in the future. My UK trip coming up should be fine. We’ll be on somewhat neutral territory. I can let Mum make most of the decisions and when we’re on a bus or a train I can keep quiet, maybe with my nose in a book. Then when we’re down at my brother’s, Mum – fake Mum – will be fawning over her grandchildren and everything will be sweetness and light. Next year will be a challenge, though. I plan to make a trip to NZ. Part of the trick will be minimising the amount of time spent in their house, which is where most of the stress and life admin lies. I hope they let me borrow their (non-electric) car. Then they might come to Romania, in which case I’ll want to simplify everything. Mum and I get on fine when we’re on our video calls, but when we see each other there’s always the potential for things to get really shitty.

Conclave. I watched it this week over two nights. What a film. Brilliant acting throughout. Thought-provoking at about a dozen separate moments. I loved Cardinal Lawrence’s (Ralph Fiennes’) sermon. There is indeed far too much evidence-free certainty and too little doubt in our world. But then the ending. Controversial and a big negative for a lot of people. Dad saw the film on the plane coming over last month, then spoilt the ending for me, not realising I hadn’t seen it. No big deal really – it was thoroughly enjoyable all the same. Then, showing his age, Dad had forgotten that he’d spoilt the ending when I told him I’d seen it. The film got a massive boost from the real conclave that took place just a few months after it was released. Some cardinals even watched the film to glean some tips before attending the real thing.

I’ve just finished my lesson with the boy who wants to be a farmer. He’s been getting 3 out of 10 for English at school. I can see why. (Normally in Romania they give you 4 just for showing up.) His lack of knowledge and interest makes an online lesson with him like wading through treacle. Towards the end, he went to the loo. He was gone for something like eight minutes, coming back with only a couple of minutes left. He lives in a village with clearly a healthy bird population.

I had a funny experience yesterday. Near where I had my lesson in Dumbrăvița (two hours with an eight-year-old girl), I stopped off at a big supermarket for a pee. Getting back on my bike, I ripped the front of my shorts, almost from top to bottom. Great. I tried to tie a knot in them to make it look less bad, but no luck. When I saw the girl’s mum before the lesson, I had my bag strategically placed in front of me. I was sat down the whole time during the lesson and the girl didn’t say anything.

That printer repair was on the verge of taking over my life before the courier came to take it off my hands yesterday. It’s become maddeningly hard to talk a real person. Let’s hope it actually gets fixed.

Good weather right now, by which I mean not too hot. I’ll go to the local produce market now, then I’ll give Mum a birthday call.

Cat - Family - Films - Life :)

Tough to take

March 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

So when I spoke to Mum on Wednesday night I said that I’d fly over to New Zealand if they couldn’t make it over to Europe. She replied, “Are you sure? What about your work?” Well, you know, if I come it’ll be in the height of my summer when I’ll want to escape the heat and will have less work anyway. Plus I can still give online lessons if I want. It was only yesterday that it dawned on me. She couldn’t give a damn whether she sees me or not. Or my brother. Perhaps she’d even prefer not to see us. It took so long for me to figure it out because it didn’t seem possible. How can somebody not care about seeing her own children? Yesterday I sent her a message: “I really hope you can get your tummy troubles sorted and start making regular trips to the loo. Right now Kitty is sunning herself on the window ledge and she says she can’t wait to see you.” In her reply she just blanked the whole issue. As for Dad, he’s certainly better than Mum in this regard, but even he isn’t exactly champing at the bit to see his kids. Or grandchildren. This is tough to take. Last night I woke up at 2:18, checked in on Kitty, then spent the next three hours chewing all of this over in my head. I’m now putting the chances of Mum and Dad coming at 70% – down a bit, but still decent. But even if they come, it won’t be with any real enthusiasm.

On Wednesday morning I went to the bank to pay some money in. It’s a horrible branch, but it’s near the supermarket and I wouldn’t need to talk to anybody anyway. Just deposit the cash via the machine, then leave. The place stank and the machine’s screen seemed to be covered in a hazy brownish black muck. It was only when I tried to wipe it off that I realised the “muck” was on the inside. As usual, the machine rejected some of my notes and I had to repeat the process six or seven times. Finally I was done. Not the exact amount I’d planned to put in, but close enough. But then it swallowed my card. Um, did I just imagine that? I looked around just in case. No card. Jeez, what now? If you wanted to see anybody, there was a long queue. I spoke up. The machine has taken my card. The teller, a woman of 40-odd, told me to join the queue like everyone else. At this point I made a scene. This isn’t normal! Join the queue. The woman didn’t even look at me, or anybody else. I was braced for an hour in the queue followed by who knew what. A few minutes later I heard a young woman say, in English, “Is this your card?” The machine had spat my card out while she was using it. Amazing security they have there. I was relieved, but won’t dare visit that branch again for at least a year. Half an hour later, at the queue for the supermarket checkout, an older man was having difficulty with his Kaufland app. The cashier (a woman of 50 or so) really laid into him. You have to do this, then this, don’t you get it?! The man simply accepted this appalling treatment in a way I never would have. I love Romania, but the customer service here continues to be dire.

I’ve started watching a 2021 film called Nomadland. I’ve only seen the first 20 minutes, but I can tell it will be fascinating. It’s about Americans who have lost their jobs and survive by travelling around the country in RVs, getting odd jobs here and there. I was going to write more about America and its decline, but I don’t feel like writing much more today. I’ve teed up a video call with my cousin who lives in New York state.

My latest maths student is proving hard to teach. She can calculate, up to a point, but hasn’t yet learnt how to think. Teaching that isn’t an easy task at all.