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Coronavirus - Family - Films - Life :) - New Zealand

Nearly half a lifetime ago…

September 12, 2021 by 0 Comments

Twenty years ago today I was recovering from a nosedive brought on by recurrent panic attacks. In late June I was basically fine, but by mid-July I was plummeting at a thousand feet per second. But by now the drugs had started kicking in, and in an attempt to clamber out of the pit I’d fallen into, I was working nights at a sorting office. Dad picked me up every morning at four; I’m eternally grateful for what he did. In a few weeks I’d be starting my final year of university. (It looked for a while that I’d have to delay it. I just couldn’t function.) We couldn’t get Kylie’s latest hit out of our heads. So at half-two on a Tuesday afternoon I was at home with Dad, who was working in the studio. Then the phone rang. I picked it up. It was my grandmother, telling me to switch on the TV. I did, and told Dad he needed to watch it. For a few minutes we thought it might have been an accident. And then we saw the second plane hit. It seems that almost every American old enough to remember can remember where they were.

Staggering but true: neither of the two women’s US Open finalists was even born when 9/11 happened. They’ve both come utterly out of nowhere, in particular 150th-ranked Emma Răducanu who qualified and has therefore won nine straight matches to reach the final, without dropping a set. Răducanu (born 13/11/02) has a Chinese mother and a Romanian father (hence her name), was born in Canada but moved to London when she was two, and now plays for Britain. And there I was thinking I was a mongrel. Her opponent Leylah Fernandez (born 6/9/02), part-Ecuadorian, part-Filipino, and playing for Canada (!), is ranked only 73rd in the world and has gone to three sets in each of her last four matches. Far fewer surprises among the men, where Novak Djoković is one win, 18 mere games, from walk-on-water status. Nobody has won the calendar grand slam since 1969 because it’s damn near impossible to do. For one, Djoković had to overcome the undisputed King of Clay in Paris. Now he’s on the verge of being the undisputed King of Tennis.

Mum and Dad have been busy moving, shifting, lifting. They’re almost there, ready to move into their new house, which is actually reasonably old by NZ standards. If it was up to Dad they wouldn’t be moving at all, but I’m with Mum on this. Their current place seems unmanageably big, with a two-acre garden. If it isn’t too much yet, it soon will be, and right now they still have plenty of emotional energy (how?) for the move and everything that will come after.

If I’m really lucky I might one day see my parents in their new abode. They’ve managed to contain the latest outbreak in NZ, for now at least, and the South Island has remained Covid-free. No such luck in Romania, where they’ve practically given up. Cases are doubling every seven to ten days, and everyone’s going about their normal business in the NZ equivalent of level one-and-a-bit. The NZ opening-up plan is to vet travellers to the country based on rates of disease and vaccination in their home country and any other territories they’ve visited in the previous fortnight. Romania will surely be blacklisted. My idea, assuming the UK is on the green list by then, is to fly to the UK for two weeks before then flying to New Zealand. I’ll need an internet connection in the UK though. It’s hard not to feel some anger at Romanians. A warm, friendly, welcoming bunch of people, but somehow they’re willing to fuck up people’s health and their economy and their kids’ education and the country’s reputation and everything and everybody just because of their flat-earth beliefs.

On Thursday I called my aunt. I was shocked to get through; she hardly ever picks up the phone these days. I was almost as shocked that we had a normal conversation. She mentioned getting an MRI scan for her painful back, and the extreme difficulty of getting medical attention at all in the UK. The collateral non-Covid-related damage caused by the disease is immense.

Last Saturday I went to the film festival in the Summer Garden just across the road. I saw Nowhere Special, a drama based in Belfast and partly produced in Romania, and I didn’t have to pay a penny (or, as they say here, a ban). I won’t give any spoilers here, but it gets a big thumbs up from me. The Belfast accent isn’t the easiest to get right but James Norton certainly pulled it off.

It’s another glorious day here. I’ll be playing tennis a bit later.

Films - Language teaching - Life :)

Freak-outs

September 29, 2019 by 0 Comments

My work volume has dropped off a little in the last week or two, so I’ve started advertising again. I put up an online ad, mostly in Romanian but with the last line in English: “I look forward to teaching you English.” Someone replied to my ad, questioning my command of my mother tongue. He didn’t think the -ing on the end of “teaching” should have been there. I swiftly corrected him; he was making a very common mistake.

Last night I bumped into Bogdan, the guy in his early forties who lives on the second floor of my block, in apartment 10. (I live at number 13, on the third of eight floors.) For months and months I saw him hanging around outside the apartment building, and until I got talking to him I never imagined he actually lived there. We decided to go for a beer in the square, just opposite our block, and he seemed reasonably switched on. He even knew a reasonable amount of English; he said he’d done eight years of it at school. He doesn’t work, and doesn’t currently have a functioning cell phone.

Among all the big news stories that flashed by in the first half of last week, I completely neglected to mention Thomas Cook, a big travel company that went to the wall. The number of people stranded overseas was in six figures. The modern company didn’t bear much resemblance to the outfit whose memorable slogan I remember as a kid: “Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it.” However, it was still headquartered in Peterborough and it will be a huge blow to the city.

When I spoke to my dad yesterday, he reminded me of the time (or one of the times) I completely freaked out when I was small. I would have been three or four, and we’d gone to the airport to pick up my grandmother who had flown all the way from New Zealand. I guess this must have been Terminal 3 of Heathrow. Even in the eighties it was vast and chaotic, and none of that helped, but I think it was the loudspeaker announcements that did it for me. I screamed and bawled, and broke out in a hot sweat. Dad said he wasn’t angry with me, but instead he felt powerless and sad. Another episode came in a shop called Habitat in the newly-opened Grafton Centre in Cambridge. On this occasion it was the thick ceiling pipes that I couldn’t handle. They totally spooked me. There were all manner of shops I just wouldn’t go into back then. Shops with freezers were a particular problem. I really didn’t like freezers. Except the dozens that must have been in John’s Freezer Centre in Godmanchester, where I often went with Mum; somehow those ones were OK. Tesco’s in Bar Hill was never an easy one for me. It was huge for a start, there were frequent tannoy announcements, and of course lots and lots of freezers. I was about seven when I got over all of this.

Dad and I also talked about the political situation in the UK, following the incendiary session in the Commons on Wednesday. We agreed that the risks associated with Brexit have now become secondary to the risks that Britain’s democracy will be irreparably damaged. Dad said that he voted to leave in 2016 because he wanted to “shake the tree” a bit. We had a good laugh at that. He now says he’d vote to remain in a future referendum.

I recently watched the five-part Chernobyl series. Very good. Chilling, but brilliant. I imagine the cover-ups and chicanery were even worse than depicted on screen. I certainly won’t be watching the Russian-made version.

Family - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

9/3/99

March 10, 2019 by 0 Comments

Last week was an exhausting one. I’m not sure why – my 30 hours of lessons were pretty standard – but after yesterday’s final lesson I didn’t feel like doing a whole lot. It might have been the late finishes (on five consecutive days) and all the extra to-ing and fro-ing that happens when I teach kids. With the exception of one boy, a 14-year-old, all my lessons with kids involve a trip.

When I turned up nine days ago for my lesson with seven-year-old Albert (I’d seen a Victoria earlier in the day), my heart sank. He stood almost pinned to the back of the sofa, cowering, wondering why this strange man had entered his lair. I felt sorry for him. Look, I said, it’ll be fine, knowing of course that I had an hour and a half with him, and it was likely to be anything but fine. But to my surprise, I was able to put him at ease. Being able to communicate with him in Romanian was a huge help. Unlike some kids who expect me to be fluent in their mother tongue, Albert seemed quite impressed with my Romanian skills. He had a pretty good knowledge of the basics: numbers, colours, animals, simple food items. We played a simple board game I’d created involving frogs, and before I knew it our time was up. On Friday I had my second lesson with him, and he ran up to me when I arrived. It was quite incredible to see that. He spent half the lesson wanting to run: he was a bundle of boundless energy. Simon says for god’s sake stop running! It truth it’s much easier to teach someone like him than a kid who looks perpetually bored and whose favourite words are “no” and “I don’t know”.

Yesterday I had a pair of new students – an ambitious 20-year-old couple – who want to do the Cambridge exam and perhaps move to the UK. They were both at a good level, around a 7½ on my 0-to-10 scale. They specifically mentioned Birmingham as a city they’d like to live in. The bloke marvelled at what I see as my extremely standard British accent. I get that from time to time from people who have been brought up on a diet of American movies and games. With this couple, I’ve now had 76 students (but no trombones) since I started back in November 2016.

My grandfather (Dad’s dad) passed away twenty years ago yesterday. It was a Tuesday, I was in my first year of university, my brother was in his first year in Army uniform, and my parents had been in London to try and fix up a teaching exchange for Mum in New Zealand. As it happened, New Zealand was booked out, so my parents decided to spend 2000 in Cairns (Australia) instead. My grandfather, who had been a physically strong and debonair gentleman, with quite a sense of humour to boot, spent the last decade of his life in the ever-tightening grip of Alzheimer’s. It was all very sad, and extremely hard for my grandmother. His problems came to the fore when they visited New Zealand in the summer of 1989-90 (we were living there at the time). He, who had always been a lover of the outdoors, became dizzy and disoriented when exposed to the sun. From then on it was a downward spiral. My grandmother tried to keep things as normal as possible, even going on holiday in Barbados with him and my father as late as 1996, but it was very hard work. I remember the speech my dad gave at his funeral – a very good one, especially for someone who doesn’t normally speak in public.

Last weekend S and I watched an unusual film about Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president. It wasn’t an easy watch – it brought back some ugly memories of the early 2000s: that awful election, 9/11, and the Iraq War which Britain, and of course my brother, got dragged into. I learnt plenty about Dick Cheney and the machinations of American politics at that time, but it was hard not to watch it and feel angry. It was all just a bit too close to home. S disagreed with me, but it showed to me that elections can and do matter. Had Al Gore been the victor in 2000, which he perhaps would have been if the Florida recount hadn’t been stopped by the Supreme Court, the world would be a different place now. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people’s votes in elections matter, but that wasn’t my point.

Scrabble. Five games yesterday, and just one win, despite averaging 402. At the level I play, that kind of average is likely to give you four wins rather than four losses, but it wasn’t my lucky day. I lost one game by five points when my opponent played an out-bingo, and in another game I was a long way behind, but found a bingo and some other high-scoring plays, only to fall short by three points. Even in my final game I was made to sweat a bit when my opponent played a 97-point bingo to the triple, making several overlaps, but I managed to edge over the line. My rating has dipped into the low 1300s, which is probably an accurate reflection of where I am right now.

Films

Phew…

November 7, 2018 by 0 Comments

When I switched on Romanian TV this morning and saw that the Democrats had taken control of the House after all, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I was awake at 3am for some reason, and I had a look at Fivethirtyeight’s live blog. For the midterms, the site has been expressing probabilities using fractions rather than percentages, to stop people from freaking out over small changes of a percentage point or less. But on election night itself that didn’t work: the Democrats’ House probability plummeted from 11-in-12 to 2-in-5 in just 20 minutes. Full freak-out mode, in other words. Shit, Trump is going to carry on unchecked, and with the Republicans’ majority in the Senate boosted, they’ll probably get that health care bill through now, which will hurt and kill people. At that point, a tweet from Nate Silver was posted on the live blog, saying that the election night model was too sensative to early results, which were probably from rural areas that generally skew red. When I switched off my laptop I still feared the worst. In the end it isn’t the blue wave that some were predicting, and the American electoral system is so awful that all outcomes are somewhat depressing, but at least it’s a start. The most pleasing aspect was the turnout: the highest in the midterms for half a century, even if it’s still terrible by British or New Zealand (but not Romanian) standards.

Plenty of work again, in what it is yet another week of beautiful weather. Yesterday I had five lessons, including a slightly strange one last night: my student who is in his early forties and was born and bred in Timișoara said he hated the city. My views are quite the opposite. All the beautiful buildings, all the parks and green spaces, all the markets brimming with produce and life, all the trams clattering by. None of it is perfect, but I think I like that. Timișoara is a bit mad, a bit random, full of seams and fuzzy edges, at least once you get outside the god-awful central-Auckland-like angularity of Iulius Mall and its environs. And my job allows me to really be part of Timișoara. Right now I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else. (Of course if I’d been here all my life, I might feel different.)

Bohemian Rhapsody. Yes, the film was awesome. God, what an amazing band Queen were. Such talent across the board. What a fertile mind Freddie Mercury must have had. But after the film I couldn’t help but think how mainstream music has become such unbearably crap. It’s almost all meaningless pap. Last night I used Queen’s Bicycle Race in one of my lesson; he’s a keen biker and I’d spent a good deal of my day on a bike, so it seemed a good choice.

Books - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

Social life – what’s that?

November 5, 2018 by 0 Comments

After last week I was absolutely knackered. To be honest I still am. I had 30½ hours of lessons, which is a healthy rather than a ridiculous total, but it was my biggest week since April. With more work comes more exercise: the most convenient way for me to travel to my “off-premises” lessons is by bike.

On Friday night I joined S for drinks to celebrate her recent purchase of an apartment. After my experience, why entering the property market should be a cause for celebrating is beyond me, but I got to meet some of her work colleagues and we ended up at the Bierhaus where we tried some locally-brewed craft beers. S invited me to play board games last night, but I had two more lessons yesterday morning and after that I felt extremely sluggish so I said no. Normally I might have agreed, but tonight I’ll be seeing the film about Bohemian Rhapsody (which has the makings of a treat) with S and some of her friends. Three social events in a single weekend are one too many for me. Whatever happens with S, it’s great to have a semblance of a social life in Timișoara at last. I’m planning on joining S on a trip to Sibiu, either for Romania’s centenary on 1st December, or the following weekend. Either way, we’ll be there for the amazing (from what I’ve heard) Christmas market.

Interesting moments keep cropping up at work. One of my female students is a 23-year-old in her final year of a medical degree. Sometimes I also see her younger sister, who speaks English at a very basic level, at the same time. One time, when both sisters were in attendance, I did a lesson on directions, because the topic seemed appropiate for both of them. At one point I talked about pubs. “Is there a good pub near here? How do you get to the nearest pub?” The older sister then said that she didn’t do pubs, and could we please make the destination a church instead? She’s a devout adherent of the Pentecostal church.

After yesterday’s lessons I read a few chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale (S had given me a copy) and played eleven games of Scrabble, winning nine. I am improving, without doubt. My last game had just a 12-minute clock but I coped with that without too many problems. My next step (and it’s a big one) is to learn the words. I need to have the threes down pat and get a handle on their front and back hooks. I got my fingers burnt in a recent game by not realising ADRY was a word (why would it be?), and voilà, my opponent was able to hook an A onto the front of DRY and make use of the triple word square in the endgame, leaving me a-high and a-dry. I lost that game by three points. I get down plenty of bingos, but the vast majority of those are words I know from everyday life, and at some point I’ll actually need to study them in a way that isn’t a chore, if such a method exists.

Yes, the Red Sox are so-called world champions for the fourth time this century. Great city, great fans, you can’t say they don’t deserve it. What an incredible season they had.

The midterm elections take place on Tuesday night, my time. The Trump factor has focused the world’s attention on them in a way I’ve never seen before. According to Fivethirtyeight, one of my favourite sites, the Democrats will take the House but the Republicans will keep the Senate, so long as there isn’t a systematic polling error in one direction, which you can hardly discount.

Sodding Halloween, which shouldn’t be within 5000 miles of Romania’s borders, is mercifully over. It’s 4th November and it’s T-shirt weather here.

Books - Films - Life :)

Dipping my toe in…

September 3, 2018 by 0 Comments

On Friday I joined Tinder. My Skype student has been telling me about the wonders of Tinder over the last six months – that’s how he met his wife – and finally, just before my weekly lesson with him, I signed up. So far I’ve only just dipped my toe in, and I’m guessing it’ll be a while before I dip anything else in. I uploaded a selfie of me standing outside the cathedral, but I still haven’t completed my blurb, which needs to be in Romanian of course. I haven’t yet figured out the mechanics of swiping right and “super likes”, and besides, it’s all just a bit scary. At least I wasn’t forced to sign up using Facebook. (Someone “hearted” me earlier today. What do I do now?)
I would like a partner, but I’m not desperate. Most of the time I’m absolutely fine being on my own.

A film festival has been taking place here over the last few days. Some of the films have been showing at the small amphitheatre just two minutes’ walk from here. On Friday night, soon after my Skype lesson, I saw Coborâm la Prima (which I’d translate as “We’re getting off at the next stop”). It seemed very Romanian, being set almost entirely in one carriage of a Bucharest metro train, on the day after the Colectiv night club disaster of 2015. The train got stuck and the occupants of the carriage got to know each other quite well. Some of them even used Tinder. Last night I expected to be seeing a film about the massacre in Norway, but there was a technical hitch and they showed Jeune Femme, a French film, instead. It was thoroughly enjoyable. Neither of those films cost me a penny.

Station Eleven was a brilliant read. My only issue was that the flu pandemic, that wiped out over 99% of the world population, spread at an unrealistic speed. If you die within two days of catching it, with almost no incubation period, how could that level of contagion occur? That’s a very minor complaint though. It was a beautifully written book, and I highly recommend it.

My Skype student also said I should join a dance class, but we all have lines we need to draw.

It’s still pretty damn hot: we’ve had a high of 33 for the second day running.

Books - Films

Just a normal day

April 23, 2018 by 0 Comments

Friday was my 38th birthday, but in my head I’ve been 38 since the start of the year, maybe because it’s 2018, hence 20+18. That handy little rule will work, of course, until 2099. My “big” day was an entirely normal work day.

Last week was a busy one – as usual, I finished work every weekday (including my birthday) at 9:30 pm. One of the students I saw on Wednesday, and who started with me last June, texted me to say she’ll no longer be coming. She said it was for “personal reasons”, but I’m guessing it’s because I told her (finally) on Wednesday to stop interrupting me, even if she didn’t expressly say that was the reason. To be honest I’m fine with that.

I haven’t joined a tennis club yet (I’m still unsure of how to do so) and at the end of last week I sometimes stayed in bed beyond seven, but I didn’t do too badly with my goals. I’m certainly eating less.

After this morning’s lesson (with a guy who, as it happens, is one day younger than me) I had a Skype conversation with the bloke I carpooled with in Wellington. He seemed pretty good.

I’ve just finished Prisoners of Geography, a book about how geopolitics between nations is shaped and constrained by the geography of the countries involved. It’s not as dry as it sounds. I’m just about to see Red Sparrow at the cinema in Iulius Mall.

It’s warm for the time of year. Today it’s been 26 degrees and not a cloud in the sky.

Films - Language teaching - Life :)

New set of wheels (only two, so don’t get too excited)

March 26, 2018 by 0 Comments

Today I bought a second-hand mountain bike from Mehala, the market in the west of the city. It cost me 200 lei. The bike is made by Professional, a UK company. Its previous owner’s name, Allen (first name or surname, I can’t tell) is scrawled all over it, but you only notice that if you’re up close. I rode it home, so at least it works, but there are still bits and pieces I could do with getting. A good lock, for one. The best thing is that if the bike falls apart on me, 200 lei isn’t the end of the world.

Last week was a pretty good one. Articles on Stephen Hawking, games of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a piece on the oldest man ever to ride a rollercoaster, some construction-based vocabulary, my Space Race game, practice IELTS speaking tests, Simon Says, and Canadian driving theory test questions all made at least one appearance. The difference between last week and the sense of complete barrenness I use to feel every week, year in, year out, is almost indescribable. Of course I felt knackered by the end of it, as always. At one stage I had 15 lessons in just two and a half days, and I finished at 9:30pm every day from Monday to Friday.

Our clocks went forward last night. Yes, we’re now on summer time. After the unseasonably cold weather we’ve had over the last week to ten days, with snow blanketing the city, “summer time” sounds like a bad joke. The EU stipulates that all countries must change their clocks at the same time. In the UK, Ireland and Portugal, this means that 1am becomes 2am; for central Europe 2am becomes 3am; and for those of us out east, 3am becomes 4am. I happened to be awake for the switchover, and I lay in bed wondering just what the cathedral clock would do. Would it strike three or four? Surprisingly it did both, and even more weirdly it did the four first, then the three. I looked at the clock which clearly said 4:00, so who knows what those bells were playing at.

The change of clock did bring with it a change of weather and a palpable change of mood in the city today. Hopefully winter is finally over. Unfortunately, unlike last year, it looks like being a bad year for fruit.

Last night I watched Metrobranding, an interesting documentary on Romania’s manufacturing industry. Factories that employed thousands in Communist times have since mostly fallen into disuse. The documentary was in five parts, covering sewing machines, bicycles, tennis shoes, mattresses and light bulbs.

 

Films - Language teaching - Life :)

First man on the moon

October 15, 2017 by 0 Comments

I’ve had a big week: 23 hours of teaching over six days. When I came to Romania I thought I might not manage 23 hours in total. There’s a fair bit of preparation time too of course, so I’m working close to a full week now. The competition, or total lack of it, is helping me greatly. In a city the size of Wellington with thousands of people wanting to improve their English for thousands of reasons, I seem to be the only native speaker giving private lessons. I feel like a pioneer. The first man on the moon. Or Pluto. And that’s a pretty exciting feeling. At the beginning I struggled to build momentum and would lose students as fast as I’d gain them, but in the last few weeks I seem to have passed a tipping point: people are starting to like what I do and are recommending me to friends. In the new year I’ll probably increase my prices for new students, but I won’t want to overdo that and price myself out of the non-manicured-lawns market.

In contrast to my private lessons which I enjoy immensely, my new job with the language school is, in some ways, a pain in the butt. The work itself is perfectly fine, but I miss out on other potential lessons due to the travel time, and all the admin that goes with it is a chore. (I mean, I don’t have a problem with admin. At times I even like admin. But only if it’s my own admin that uses my own systems. I really can’t be arsed with other people’s admin anymore.) On Tuesday only one person showed up to the lesson, and we got sidetracked trying to calculate just how many tonnes of lolly sticks are produced annually by the company. We arrived at a figure of 7500 tonnes. On Thursday two people turned up. The most difficult part of that lesson was reading from an on-screen PDF of which one page was printed upside down. I could have rotated the document but then all the other pages would have been upside down instead. I shouldn’t complain too much: the language school lessons are only 15% of my workload, and the rest of the time I’m free to do as I please.

There’s a cinema underneath my apartment block. I’ve wanted to go there since I moved in, but I’ve had nobody to go with. This weekend Timishort, a festival of short films, has been running, so yesterday I went there on my own. It cost me just 5 lei (a pound!) to see five 20-minute films. Incredible value. One of them was Eat Me, a thought-provoking Bulgarian-made musical about food. Where does it come from? What does it do to you? That would be my pick of the five, though I also liked The Committee, an amusing Scandinavian-made film about choosing a monument (or something) to replace the current stone at the Sweden–Norway–Finland tripoint. The cinema itself, which is only open four days a week, is a far cry from your modern multiplex. It reminds me a bit of the cinema in Geraldine. It has a single screen with a surprisingly large capacity. The seats are rather hard so some people brought cushions, and it got a bit chilly in there. Next time I’ll know.

We’ve had lovely weather of late; the autumn colours in Timișoara are really quite beautiful.

Books - Films - Romania - Travel: Romania

Baia Mare, here we come

August 12, 2017 by 0 Comments

Today Dad emailed me with a page outlining the potential horror show of complications that I could be faced with during and after sinus surgery, should I choose to have it some time in the autumn. Then, right on cue, I got an attack of severe pain lasting about an hour, this time in my right sinuses.

The ENT specialist told me that extreme weather doesn’t exactly help, and we’ve had a ton of that lately. Caniculă – extreme heat – has often been the first item on news bulletins. Tomorrow things will cool down significantly, and maybe Europe’s most energy-sapping and soporific heatwave since 2003 (which was my last European summer prior to this one) will be over.

Unsurprisingly, being holiday season, I’ll have slim pickings on the work front for the rest of the month. I’ve got a three-hour lesson pencilled in for tomorrow morning, then nothing else until Wednesday, so I’m taking the opportunity to go somewhere, just like my students. But where? Brașov seemed the obvious choice – everybody visits Brașov when they come to Romania, but I’ve lived here ten months (shit! have I really?) and still haven’t been there. Unfortunately, because it’s August, every man and his dog will be in Brașov, and by Romanian standards it’s an expensive city. So I’ve decided instead to head north to Baia Mare, a seven-hour train trip away. I’m due to get up there around 11pm tomorrow. I haven’t done much research on the place, but it’s in Maramureș, an extremely rugged and remote corner of Romania, jam-packed with tradition. On travelling through Maramureș, a 2013 article in the Telegraph says this: “This is not the place to hire a car or to drive your own car. Roads are notoriously dangerous, directions are difficult, and maps are few.” Well, I’ll just be visiting a city in my first taste of the region, but it should be interesting, and who knows who I might meet on the train.

After watching Nosedive, the opener to Series 3 of Black Mirror, in which everything you do and say is star-rated out of five, I dared to watch the next two episodes. Playtest wound up as a full-on horror movie which I thought was spoilt by the ending. Shut Up and Dance though, oh boy. I was hoping for something good to cling to, somewhere, anywhere, but by the end of it I felt my well had been sucked dry. The final twist was unexpected (to me; maybe I’m just bad at reading these things) and not in a good way. I did however sympathise enormously with the main protagonist, even after the shocking revelation at the end. At the start you see him working in a kitchen, and his experiences with his colleagues were similar to mine in real life when I washed dishes in a pub. Shut Up and Dance was very well done, but I’d strongly advise against watching it if you’re feeling emotionally fragile in any way, or if you have anything important to do immediately afterwards.

I’m currently reading The Elements of Eloquence. It’s about rhetoric. Figures of speech. Like parataxis. Which I’m using now. But not very well. I’m just about to find out what the hell epizeuxis is.