Scrabble

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Scrabble

Bingo!

October 20, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve had a cold for the last few days, and though I’m still struggling, I made it to the swimming pool this morning.

Yesterday I called Mum and Dad from Buziaș, among the rich autumn colours. So they’re coming to the UK in 2027. They’ve already booked their tickets. They’ll be staying for absolutely ages, from sometime in May until mid-August. That’s even longer than this year, which they said was too long. Maybe they feel it’ll be their last trip over. I’d planned to go to New Zealand in August, to get out of the heat for one thing, but I can nix that idea now, unless I go in late August and into September (after school starts, which will mean missing out on work). It would have been cool if they (or Mum, let’s be honest) had run it past me first before committing, but hey, Mum would have booked the cheapest option regardless of how it affected anyone else. They’re flying direct to the UK – a silly idea – although at least they’re having a stopover on the way back. Whatever happens, there’s no way I’ll be staying in Timișoara all of next summer. The heat just messes me up too much.

Update: As I write this, two cars have collided in the car park.

There’s no further news about the sale of Mum and Dad’s flat in St Ives. There are still legal hurdles to be overcome that I don’t understand. My brother told them that he doesn’t want to hear about the flat anymore. They “drone on about it for half an hour”, as he put it. As I don’t have kids, I suppose I have more “bandwidth” for this stuff than he does, and more sympathy. Nobody should be dealing with this in their late 70s. It keeps them up at night.

I’ve had a bit more success with the nine-year-old girl from Thailand. It’s no wonder she’s struggling. She’s had no continuity whatsoever. She moved to India at age five, then to Romania at eight. Though her spoken English is good, her go-to language is Thai. Then at school her classmates will mostly be speaking Romanian. When I saw her on Friday she cut up rough as soon as I arrived. But then she calmed down and she did far better than I expected when it came to adding numbers. As for English, her teacher seems to have figured out that comprehension exercises are beyond her. Her latest worksheet just tested sh- and ch- words. One of the words was ship. I asked her what it meant, just to be sure. Something you find on a farm. I see. I’ve got another session with her later today. She’ll be the last of three young girls, one after the other.

Good luck with number 3

On the way to Buziaș yesterday I stopped briefly at the village of Chevereșu Mare. There was a woolly ram, stock-still, next to someone’s fence whose colour it matched perfectly. This thing wasn’t moving and I seriously thought for a minute that it was a new sculpture. Then it budged.

At the weekend I watched a rather depressing, but very well made, 2009 documentary from Canada about serious bingo players. I wonder how it was recommended to me. Years ago I made a variety of bingo games which I still play with my students to improve their vocabulary (they have pictures rather than numbers), and “bingo” is a term in Scrabble for when you use all seven tiles in one turn, so maybe the algorithm picked up somehow that the word “bingo” features quite prominently in my life. I didn’t even know serious bingo was a thing, but it absolutely is. I was shocked by how joyless the experience was for these people. For a start it’s different from British-style bingo that you might get at slightly seedy seaside resorts where the numbers go from 1 to 90, many of which have special “calls” like “two fat ladies” for 88 or “unlucky for some” for 13. In this version the numbers only went up to 75 and any vestige of comedy was gone. There was so much denial, as expected, from these gamblers about how much they were losing. Saddest of all was the lady of about 90 who won $700 one time, and happily proclaimed that she’d spend it on bingo.

I finished the Scrabble league with seven wins and seven losses. That surpassed my expectations; I didn’t draw fantastically and I faced some strong opponents. I’ve signed up for the next round, where I’ll be in the same division.

Autism - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Scrabble

Nine going on five, and autism, the latest culture war

October 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

Earlier today I had a proper headache. It wasn’t as bad as the ones I had in the spring, but it slowed me down nonetheless. While I was in pain, I was also yawning. Luckily it only lasted three hours or so.

I’ve just finished a lesson with a nine-year-old girl. A waste of time, basically, but her mother insists. She didn’t want to be there, and that’s hardly her fault. On Saturday I had my third lesson with the other nine-year-old girl, the one who speaks good English but is only semi-literate. I talked to Mum about her yesterday. She gave me some advice: to focus on three-letter CVC words, then move on to consonant blends. It can be handy having an ex-primary school teacher as a parent, and she’s absolutely right. The problem is that she gets homework designed for age nine, not five, and her parents expect me to help her with that, which actively gets in the way of her learning. Then there’s maths. She’s years behind there too. In the recent test in which she literally got no marks at all, her teacher wrote nothing on the paper except a scrawled “0/15”. When I asked her if I could take a picture, she agreed.

This was the first question on the test:


Unlike most of the other questions where she at least wrote (or drew!) something, she made no attempt at this one. And I’m not surprised. There are three tasks you have to fulfil here. First, read and understand the question. I doubt she could have done that. Second, realise that you need to put the 1 first, then the 3, and so on, to make the smallest possible five-digit number that uses all the digits. Third, you have to put that number in words. That means knowing how we express that kind of number as well as being able to write thirteen and hundred and thousand and stuff like that. Two of those three tasks aren’t even maths, they’re English! She would have had no hope. Then you add in the fact that she doesn’t like maths and (so far) lacks the maturity to understand that you sometimes have to do things you don’t like, and the overall picture isn’t pretty.

After Saturday’s lessons I picked up Dorothy and we drove to Buzad which is just over an hour away, so she could bring a load of apples and pears back to Timișoara. When she asked me (in a message) if I could do this, I cursed. After my lessons I just wanted to get home and not have to see anyone. But actually it was nice chatting in the car – the time went by quickly – and the palette of autumn colours (and some trees hadn’t turned yet) was beautiful. Plus it was good to go back to the village. I hadn’t enjoyed the previous two times – once it was far too hot, while the other time I felt like crap. When we were back in Timișoara we got pizzas from the place next door. They had Italian music playing and even – slightly weirdly – told us in Italian how much we needed to pay. Ottanta.

This morning I read something about overdiagnosis of autism and ADHD. There was a lot to unpack. I totally agree that children are being overmedicated for these conditions to a dangerous level, especially in the US. I also agree that if one in five kids (or whatever the latest figure is) in the UK now has an official diagnosis of autism, ADHD or some other learning or behavioural difficulty that entitles them to a learning assistant at school and/or some form of disability benefit, that’s financially unsustainable. Parents are increasingly keen for their children to get a diagnosis just so they can receive these benefits. But on the flip side (and I can only really talk about autism here – I certainly don’t have ADHD), being even mildly autistic makes so many aspects of life so much harder that having some form of support is pretty damn useful. Labels are largely unnecessary, and there don’t need to be cash handouts except in severe cases, but a support group or someone to bounce ideas off is extremely valuable. Apart from a little bit in Auckland and Wellington when I was already 30-plus, I missed out on all of that – I’ve never had a diagnosis – so I’ve had to navigate life on my own. Very much on my own. My coping mechanism has so often been to retreat from people, to avoid embarrassment or exhaustion, and I’ve failed to form relationships as a result. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have had someone to help me find an alternative? In the face of overdiagnosis and overmedication, a new culture war has emerged. In the eyes of many, if you’re autistic, deal with it. No excuses. Can’t manage job interviews. Tough. That’s your own fault. Let’s all go back to 1976. Or better, 1876. The Victorians had it right. One thing that really hasn’t helped is the removal of Asperger’s as a condition when the fifth edition of the DSM – an American publication – came out in 2013. The distinction between autistic people who can’t feed or clothe themselves (unlike me) and those who struggle with open-plan offices (like me) was very helpful. What I don’t understand is why the rest of the Western world had to follow what the Americans did. As is the case so often, fuck ’em. Seriously.

In other news, the sale of my parents’ flat in St Ives still hasn’t gone through. There’s some hold-up involving the buyers’ solicitors. Dad said in an email that he still fears the nightmare scenario of the sale falling through entirely, almost a year after their tenants said they wanted to buy.

Scrabble. I rejoined the league last Thursday. They put me in the sixth division out of 14. According to the analysis I’ve been playing well. Whether that will be good enough to save me from relegation remains to be seen.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Scrabble

The three Rs

October 5, 2026 by 0 Comments

Pretty light on the news front. Yesterday I had four lessons, all in Dumbrăvița. Since then I’ve been thinking what the heck I should do with that nine-year-old girl from Thailand. Her Thai mum met a German guy in … I can’t remember where, and a year ago they moved to Romania for his work. He must earn pretty well because she goes to the super-expensive British school. They’re away from the sprawling estate of Dumbrăvița and they have a good section, with apple and plum trees and three chickens. They used to have a rooster too, but they got rid of it after the neighbours complained at the noise. Anyway, this girl. She speaks perfectly decent English, but she’s only semi-literate at best. And semi-numerate too. She got zero out of 15 in a recent maths test and didn’t even understand that she’d got zero. I think her parents would like me to attack her maths too. She clearly getting very little help from her teacher despite the vast expense.

Today I drove to Buziaș. It’s nice and relaxing there. It might have been better if I’d gone in a couple of weeks – the leaves will be falling off the trees then – though I could always go back. My brother called me while I was there. I turned the camera around and showed him the fountain and bandstand and covered walkway, but he seemed unimpressed. He wanted to know where the people were. I said that it was Sunday morning and a lot of them would have been at church, but really it would have been quiet no matter the time of day or week. A few people walking their dogs and the occasional squirrel. That’s why if I left Romania I’d have a hard time going back to England. It’s so hard to escape people there. My brother showed me both the kids. My niece is changing rapidly. My brother tested his son’s maths. What’s two plus two? Four, he proudly said. I then asked my nephew what four plus four was. He didn’t know, but he did know five plus five. He’s getting pretty good with his science now, my brother said.

I played four games of Scrabble today. I won the first three, extending my winning streak to six, thanks to some really lucky draws. But in the last game things just didn’t happen for me. I can have no complaints. I might rejoin the league again this week after a six-week absence.

Back to the swimming pool tomorrow.

Family - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Scrabble - Tennis

Statins

September 27, 2026 by 0 Comments

So I saw my doctor on Tuesday. He went through my blood test results. Everything was fine until he came to the dreaded cholesterol. “This isn’t your fault,” he said to me, in English, as if he really wanted to get the point across. It’s simple genetics, he said. He told me to eat less dairy (I do eat too much of the stuff, I know), no more than three eggs a week (I’ve been averaging close to one a day), and pork no more than once a week. But at the end of the day, he said, I could eat a perfect diet and my cholesterol would still be too high. So as I rather suspected, there was only one thing for it. Statins. These can have knock-on effects on your liver function, so I’ve also started taking something for my liver too. That’s likely to be my future: taking some drug, then another drug to counteract the effect of that drug, and so on, to the point where I’ll no longer know what’s what. I’ll get my cholesterol tested again in six months’ time, to see if the statins are doing what they should.

I’ve just been catching up with the family. I had a good chat with my cousin in Wellington – we hadn’t been in touch for a while – then called Mum and Dad. They had Mum’s younger brother (who lives in Palmerston North) staying. He was down for my older uncle’s 85th birthday party. It was the first proper family get-together for several years. Everyone seemed to have a really nice time. They’ve had an unusually late dumping of snow there; the skiers will be making the most of it.

I had another new student (or pupil I suppose) yesterday, a nine-year-old girl who goes to the British school. She was born in Thailand. Though she speaks good English, she’s two or three years behind with her reading and writing. She also finds it hard to follow instructions. She does know the alphabet which is a help, but on the evidence of yesterday I’ll have my work cut out.

I’ve watched two more old Wimbledon matches, both involving Pete Sampras. And both involving Pete Sampras losing, which he did very little of at Wimbledon. I was never a fan of his. He was extraordinarily effective, to the point of monotony. In fact, some of the big matches involving Sampras bordered on sleep-inducing, especially if his opponent was another big server like Goran Ivanisevic. Their final in 1994 was almost unwatchable. Sampras’s match with Federer in 2001 though was an absolute classic grass-court battle that was in the balance right until the end. It wasn’t a massive shock that Federer won – by this stage everyone knew that he was the real deal. It brought back happy memories for me, because Mum and I went to see the men’s semi-finals a few days later. The other match was from the following year: Sampras’s five-set loss to George Bastl, whom nobody had heard of. This was a shock. It was played on the old Court Two, which was traditionally a graveyard of the top seeds. Sampras sat in his chair for several minutes afterwards, perhaps realising that he’d never play at Wimbledon again. And he didn’t. But wouldn’t you know it, a couple of months later he went and won the US Open, beating Andre Agassi in the final. I think that was his last competitive match.

These days, the top end of English football is disgusting and I can’t bring myself to follow it. But Man City. Damn. Throw the book at them. No pointless fine (well, you can do that too if you want), but relegate the bastards several divisions and take their trophies off them. Harsh on their fans from decades back, when they were a real club rather than the fake Abu Dhabi-owned pile of plastic they’ve become, but that’s life.

Last night I watched an episode of Black Mirror entitled Demon 79. It was set in northern England in (as the title suggests) 1979. For the first half of the episode I thought, this is a bit silly but not quite bad enough to stop watching, especially as I got to listen to all that great music from ’79 and see all the old cars and so on. But then it really picked up and I couldn’t tell which way the ending would go. Well worth watching.

I realise I haven’t mentioned Scrabble for a while. I gave up the league play over a month ago. The league, and the damn chat that you couldn’t turn off, were dominated by strong regular tournament players. Even though I generally gave a good account of myself, there was little to encourage outsiders like me. I felt I didn’t belong. I might jump back in soon for one round and see how it goes. I’ve still been playing on ISC, the much older site. Last night I played six games, winning four. In one game I exchanged tiles on both my first two moves, and once again later in the game. Suffice to say I didn’t win that one. In my other loss, my final rack was RRAEIU plus a blank. There was an open L on the board. A bingo would have won me the game. Unusually for me, I had plenty of time on my clock. I was mostly looking at the -IER ending as that looked the most promising, but I just couldn’t see anything. It turned out I had five valid winning plays: RURALIsE, RURALIzE, RURALItE, REbURIAL and gLAURIER. So there was an -IER word after all, but I didn’t know it. I’m still battling with the short words. Learning the fours – there are 5662 of them – is a monumental task for me. I’m a lot better now than when I started my assault on the fours in early June, but despite my best efforts (I test myself every day) a lot of them are still a giant mush in my brain. The problem is that they are so similar to each other and also very similar to thousands of plausible non-words.

Books - Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Not much respite (and he doesn’t give a damn)

August 31, 2026 by 0 Comments

So I got a brief respite – a day and a bit – from this thing, then yesterday it came back with a vengeance. Everything was suddenly back to being a gigantic struggle. Talking to my brother didn’t help, even if I got to see his kids. (My niece is well out of the baby stage now.) His level of self-confidence grated on me. Plus he couldn’t have given a damn about anything I do here – the only thing he cared about were Russian drone incursions. Since I moved over her, he never has given a damn. If he had, he might have made the effort to see me in all this time. (Yes, there was Covid, but that still leaves eight years of never even entertaining the idea of coming over.) It would be nice if one time he could at least ask me something simple like how my cat is. I have huge admiration for my brother, but often wonder what the hell he thinks of me.

On Saturday, while I was beached on that island of normality, I went to Parcul Rozelor to see a production of the musical My Fair Lady. It was free. How all the cast and period costumes and everything were financed I don’t know. EU money? Dorothy came too – she had something else on but it got cancelled. The performance started at 8pm and went on (and on) until 11:30, with two intervals. It didn’t drag, in spite of the length. It was a tough one to carry off in Romanian, as so much depended on accent and pronunciation. There isn’t exactly a Romanian equivalent of Cockney. I thought they did a good job there, but what do I really know? I didn’t realise how many very well-known songs come from the musical. Dorothy saw the film version when it came out in 1964. I must have seen it on TV over Christmas when I was a kid; I’d like to see it again if I can find it.

Yesterday I gave up on reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, about 40% of the way through. Right now, something that complex and unrooted in reality is beyond me. It started off great, but soon I no longer knew who was who or what was what. I’ve started reading Flesh by the Hungarian author David Szalay instead. I haven’t had much luck with books lately. Dad gave me Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, saying it was brilliant. That novel is effectively six books sandwiched into one; they are very different from one another and (at best) loosely connected. You got the first halves of books 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in order, then all of book 6, then the second halves of 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. By the time you get near the finish, it ends up being a test of memory. When you have significant brain fog, that’s a problem. It was a very clever book and I got the impression that the author damn well knew it. I got through it, but I wasn’t exactly in the mood for clever. Then before that I read Patrick Hennessey’s army officer book – very readable but his writing style did my head in.

I was thinking more about my latest trip. You forget things. Like the funeral procession I met on the way – everyone dressed in black. Or how good the shower was, in a room where things were otherwise falling apart. Or what Elena said when I got back about her trips to Russia, buying and selling goods. I was even thinking about the fire salamander that I saw (and the Dutch couple identified) on my earlier trip.

On Saturday, before seeing the musical, they showed a live Scrabble game on YouTube between Mark Nyman and (if I’ve got his name right) David Shenkin. It was the first round of a major tournament in Derbyshire in England. I remembered Nyman because he was in Dictionary Corner on Countdown back in the day. A young man then, he had bags under his eyes 30 years later. (He’s about to turn 60.) His opponent, incredibly, was 91. Just as amazingly, after the game swung this way and that, it finished in a draw.

I’ve got an online lesson very soon. I feel underprepared for it. Today, officially the last day of summer, we’re forecast to reach 36 degrees.

Update: My lesson was with a ten-year-old boy. He spent almost half the 90 minutes reading from one of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. I needed to follow his reading, so I found a PDF version online. However, he was reading from a bowdlerised version while the PDF was (I think) the original. It was funny to hear things like “a spanking” changed to “a good talking-to”.

Scrabble - Travel: Romania

My trip: a mixed bag

August 29, 2026 by 0 Comments

So I’m back. I got in this afternoon, just after four. My trip was a real mixed bag.

On Monday, the day before I left, I felt terrible and wished I hadn’t booked the damn thing. I made it to my lesson in Dumbrăvita, then met Dorothy for coffee at 11:30. We sat outside. Dorothy told me all about studying Latin and Greek at Cambridge in the seventies. It was the Greek that really grabbed her. I could have sat there all day, listening to her talk about ancient Greek (in ancient Greek would have been fine too) while watching the world go by. Alas I had to go home to pack – a process that felt like torture – and give a face-to-face lesson. My student, just like Dorothy had, told me I needed to see the doctor. I went to the after-hours place but my usual doctor wasn’t on shift and because I didn’t have an emergency (though it felt like one) it got too hard and I came home.

I tried to be off by 10:30 on Tuesday morning. I got away at 10:50 – not bad under the circumstances – and got my battery checked before heading properly on my way. I filled up with diesel – this cost 525 lei, only a little less than the 564 lei I paid for three nights’ accommodation. As I’ve mentioned before, fuel prices have been well and truly Hormuzed. I paid 10.14 lei per litre, equivalent to NZ$3.80. And this is after the recent tax break – when I went away earlier in the month I paid close to 11 lei.

It was just after I filled up that I felt thoroughly awful. Then Dad rang. Ugh. I can’t remember much about the drive apart from the two places I stopped in. I finally got to the guest house and parked around the back, near the pool. A swimming pool. Fantastic. Lugging my bags from the car to the building was a big effort. I felt so weak. My room was pretty cramped, with loose sockets and a loo seat that didn’t stay up and all that stuff I’ve come to expect from Romanian accommodation. It did the job I suppose. The great thing was the almost total lack of other guests. Oh, and the much cooler weather, which was practically the whole point of getting away.

That evening I was able to give an online lesson, thanks to that lack of other people. We read a BBC article about people who (annoyingly for everyone else) change their mannerisms and even their accents after coming back from an overseas holiday. In retrospect, this article was a notch or two above my student’s level. The article gave theories for the phenomenon, but I reckon it’s pretty simple. You’ve had a wonderful holiday where everything’s exciting and vibrant and different, then suddenly you’re back in your grotty fucking housing estate and your pointless fucking job and those parents’ fucking WhatsApp groups. Why wouldn’t you want to pretend you were still in Marrakesh or wherever? (I had something similar after visiting the US in 2015. For a few weeks afterwards I was tuning into Boston-based radio.)

I used the common room for another lesson on Wednesday morning. I felt really groggy – I needed a lie down after breakfast – but I got through it. It was just my second lesson with the 23-year-old guy who’s about to get married. He said they stand to make a 10,000-euro profit on their wedding. Er, what? Well, in Romania the guests all pay, and he reckons all the “donations” will greatly outweigh the cost. If you ask me I think it’s all a horrible practice that encourages people to vastly overspend on weddings: a lose-lose for everybody except singers, caterers, and people like that. At least they’ve stopped the practice of announcing, in turn, who gave how much. The Popescus gave 1000 lei but the Ionescus – shame on them – only gave 500.

After the lesson I looked around the town of Lupeni. An ex-mining town, it was pretty down-at-heel and there wasn’t much to see there. Besides, I had very little energy and, after visiting a fruit stall and a bakery, just sat in a park. I went back to the guest house and decided to make use of the pool. Lovely warm water. As I was lying on a sun lounger after my dip, four cars arrived, all with CT number plates. Constanța. They’d come a long way. Such a big party of people, nice people though they seemed, changed everything. It made me feel I shouldn’t have been there. Fortunately my lessons were done and dusted by then.

Sleep that night was difficult. There was a pool table in the common room close to my room which had an unshuttable door, and a family (including a boy of eleven or so) thought it would be a great idea to play pool at 11:30 at night. Jeez. The next day I was looking forward to getting back home. I drove down the road a bit and stopped at Uricani, a nicer town than Lupeni. The scenery was great but I was in no mood to appreciate it. I sought out some waterfalls further down the 66A road but a very nice man told me there was no water. Back to the guest house and the pool.

I was glad to leave this morning and let the big group get on with their big meaty breakfasts and dinners without me impeding their progress. On the way back I stopped at a place called Pui (which means Chicken) next to a river called Bărbat (which means Man). From there I called New Zealand. I told my parents that a lady over there had two large melons (she did, in her hands) and that the stonemason across the road provided its services dead cheap. I had lunch at Hațeg, just down the road from there. After that I only made brief stops to get fruit and syrup to give Elena who had been looking after Kitty. I could feel the temperature rising the closer I got to home. Then I was home. Kitty was happy to see me. She’d been well looked after. I dropped in on Elena almost immediately and we had a very nice chat, mostly about her travel experiences in the mid-eighties, when Romania was still under communism. She visited Russia then, both by plane and by train.

There was a lot of news while I was away. Dolly Parton, one of those increasingly rare people liked by almost everybody. An extremely sharp American cookie who did so much good in the world. (I was proud to get the Dolly Parton, aka Moderna, vaccine for Covid.) Then there was the glacial collapse in Nepal and Tibet which reminded me of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Thousands, many of them tourists, must have died. Yesterday Ratko Mladić died in prison. He masterminded the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims in 1995. His name means “young warrior” or something to that effect. Good riddance. And all the while there was the business with Mark Carney (a contender for leader of the free world right now) and Trump (leader of the utterly fucked-up world).

I’ve pulled out of this round of the Scrabble league, by the way. That’s not because of my shocker in the last round (two wins, twelve losses, despite playing decently according to the stats) but because of my general brain fog. It had all become a chore.

After seeing Elena and writing this, I’m starting to feel ever so slightly better. I’ve got two lessons tomorrow morning.

Cat - Family - Hiking - Scrabble - Travel: Romania

Kitty concerns and trip pics

August 17, 2026 by 0 Comments

I took Kitty in to the see the vet on Friday. It was a regular check, but she’d noticeably lost weight. When I put her on their scales, she was down 150 grams, which doesn’t sound like much but is actually 5% of her weight. I’d love to lose 5% of my weight. I mentioned that she had less energy than before. The vet also remarked that her coat wasn’t as shiny as it could be. She gave me some vitamin “paste” to mix in with Kitty’s wet food, and recommended that I give her some better dry food rather than the supermarket own-brand stuff I’ve been buying until now. When I went to bed last night I let her roam around my flat, which I don’t normally do at night, and she was back to being pretty damn active. A good sign. I’ll have to watch things though. It might be the case that she was discombobulated somehow by the pet hotel. I’m thinking of going away again for a few days, in which case I don’t know what I’ll do with her. I don’t feel I can ask Elena (the lady who lives above me) again.

As for me, I’ve made something of a recovery from being in a crippling energy desert. I didn’t know when (or if) I’d bounce back. This is a huge relief, for now at least.

On Wednesday night I had a very brief chat with my brother who was in the garden watching the solar eclipse. His son demanded his attention almost immediately. Chat over. We didn’t get much eclipse here in Romania, by the way. That’s in contrast to the August 1999 eclipse, which Romania witnessed better than anywhere else. It wasn’t far off totality in Cambridgeshire in ’99; it was a pretty big deal at the time. It was the uni summer holidays so I was staying with my parents. My uncle and his girlfriend (who later became his third wife) had come from New Zealand to stay with us, but at the time of the eclipse they were doing a tour of Ireland. They’d forgotten all about the event and couldn’t understand why it had suddenly become so cold and dark on a summer’s day.

I had a proper chat with my brother last night, after the kids had gone to bed. He’s been in his new job (which has something to do with submarines) for two weeks and it’s going well. His colleagues are great, he said. That’s half the battle. You can ask them anything and they’ll help you. If only I could have had colleagues like that when I started in life insurance. He’s working almost exclusively from home. They’ve armed him with a fancy laptop and three screens. He’s put the third one in the attic, he said. I asked semi-seriously if I could have it. Unlike me, my brother is a heavy user of AI and text-to-speech.

Jason Arday ended his life on Friday. What a tragedy this has been, on so many levels. And it would have all been so different if it wasn’t for people on social media, let’s be honest, enjoying Arday’s downfall.

Scrabble. I got a reprieve from relegation after the last round. I finished with five wins, one more than I expected, and I survived because one or two people pulled out. My immediate reaction though was, wouldn’t I rather be relegated? The current round, in the same fourth division, has been a horror show. A steady stream of dross from the virtual bag. Please make it stop! I may end up with just a solitary win, albeit one by 200-odd points. The encouraging thing is that they keep a tally of mistakes each player makes (presumably AI is involved in this somehow), and mine has never been this low. I’ve played enough online poker to know not to be too results-oriented. Sometimes it just won’t happen for you no matter what. I still might want to take a break after this round because – like the poker was – it’s a bit time-consuming.

Visiting the waterfall on the first full day of my trip

Down into the cave on day two

With a storm brewing, I popped into this quite remarkable late-18th-century church on the way back from the cave

Visiting another waterfall on day three following two storms

Up to the Rusty Pit on the afternoon of day three
Cat - Family - Scrabble - Travel: Romania

Scary times in Geraldine and a trip to the mountains

August 5, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad are back home. They arrived early yesterday morning, my time. Their journey was about as good as you can expect when you’re not far off 80, you start at one of the hellishly busy London airports – Stansted in their case, and just part of your trip involves being squashed into a tube for 14 hours straight. My aunt and uncle picked them up in Christchurch and dropped them off at home in Geraldine, and that’s when things got really scary. My uncle (who turns 85 next month if I’m not mistaken) tried to lift one of their suitcases and he collapsed on the ground. There wasn’t much sign of life. Mum gave a few chest compressions and he sputtered back into life. I’m impressed that Mum had the presence of mind to do that. So many people would panic there, especially if they’re dog tired having flown halfway around the world. Mum has always been pretty good in that kind of emergency. My aunt called 111 immediately, the ambulance came, and he was rushed off to hospital. He’s now at home after spending just one night there. The words “heart attack” were never uttered; he has something called stenosis, which means narrowing of the arteries. (Useful in Scrabble, should I ever get three S’s and a bunch of other common letters. The plural stenoses is also valid.)

My aunt, who is eight years younger than my uncle and the same age as Mum, has a lot on her plate. Her husband’s memory is fading fast and he’s got various other complications including this heart problem. She’s also trying to partially write her daughter – a complete arsehole who couldn’t give a toss about her parents – out of the will. Her daughter got wind of this and is trying to contest it, so my aunt is in the process of getting fully lawyered up. Sounds like fun.

So tomorrow morning I’m off to the mountains, mainly to get out of this oppressive heat. I’ll be staying four nights in a village (or maybe hamlet) called Izlaz, in the foothills of the Apuseni mountains. It’s about a 3½-hour drive from here. I have no idea what I’ll do there – there’s a cave I’ll probably visit and I’m sure I’ll go for walks – but that’s not really the point. I just wanted to go somewhere peaceful and most importantly about ten degrees cooler than here. It hasn’t been much fun of late. I’ve been going to bed around 11:30 – there’s no point in turning in any earlier because I know I won’t sleep. Then I watch the red digits on my clock cycle round from the late 23s to the zeros and then the ones, and maybe I’ll try reading or even testing myself on some Scrabble words. I get to sleep eventually, then wake up at least twice during the night. Then I’m shattered for most of the day. Today I got some energy back again, so that’s something.

I’ve just spoken to Elena, the lady who lives above me. Rather than try and impose Kitty on her again, I’m taking my furry friend to the pet hotel just like I did last summer when I went to Poland. That time Kitty didn’t want to come home afterwards.

Yeah, Scrabble. The latest round of games has been really tough, and when I’ve been feeling crappy I haven’t wanted to play at all. My opponents have been too strong and my draws far too weak to give me a chance. I’ll be relegated for the second time running, probably with a record of four wins and ten losses, just like last time.

Family - Life :) - Scrabble

The latest scare

August 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad fly back to New Zealand later today. It’s a 9pm flight, so they won’t have to rush. On Thursday I got a scary series of messages from Dad to say that he still felt terrible, the day after coming back from my brother’s place, and may not be able to take the flight. This was while I was teaching. When I got home I spoke to him. By this stage he was feeling a bit better. He’d managed to see the doctor who gave him the green light to make the long trip back. (The 14-hour leg from Dubai to Sydney would be an ordeal for anybody.) The doctor saw that his heartbeat was irregular – he knew that of course – but the warfarin, which he’s been taking since 2005, should keep it sufficiently in check. Mum and Dad will be glad to get home.

It’s so hot again now. You only have to look at the news for five minutes to see that Europe is burning. We could easily hit 40 by the middle of next week, and at night-time it remains in the 20s, meaning I sleep even less well than I do normally. Though I’m better than I was, I never feel fully rested and ready to tackle, well, anything of real significance. (As I write this, Kitty is zooming around like a mad thing. She makes me feel old.) At least I rarely have to go out for lessons at the moment. If I do, it’s best to go by bike, as long as I don’t have to stop.

I’ve been thinking of getting away for a few days, probably to the mountains, to escape the heat. But that takes a certain amount of planning – what do I do with Kitty? – so my best bet might be to hunker down (or bunker down) here. I’m still toying with the idea of going to Moldova (the country – Moldova is also a region of Romania) towards the end of August.

The Scrabble league is in full swing again. I started my games pretty well but yesterday I ran into some heavy weather and, despite my best efforts and learning a bunch of four-letter words, a second straight relegation my be on the cards (or the tiles, to be more accurate). I have to keep reminding myself that the standard of opposition has improved considerably since the early days of the league (last winter). These people literally jet around the world to play Scrabble. It’s mental, really.

Family - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

Dad’s tumultuous journey

July 30, 2026 by 0 Comments

Dad called me last night but I had an online lesson so I couldn’t answer. I called Mum this morning on the off-chance she’d answer – I expected them to be on the train, making an early start, so I was alarmed to see her still in my brother’s living room. Our train is at 10:45. Damn. That means they’ll be travelling in the heat of the day and it’s forecast to break 30. Getting through the underground in London will be a nightmare. If there’s a delay they may even hit rush-hour traffic in Cambridge. “You’re going to have a shitty trip back,” I said to Mum. She didn’t seem to like that. I don’t think it’s because I’d used the S-word and my nephew might have heard; she just wanted to pretend (to nobody in particular) that it would be fine. She was still at my brother’s place, so her image was of prime importance. I can’t be seen to have problems. Then Dad came on the line and said he’d been up all night worrying about the trip. (They got a later train because it was much cheaper.)

Then a couple of hours ago I got a Teams call from Dad. He was shirtless. They’d just got back to the St Ives flat. Dad said he felt “very strange” during the underground bit and thought he might not make it. (I’ve just got an email from him saying that he was “very scared” and “I felt it would take very little for me to collapse on the floor and become a hospital case.”) The trains themselves were air-conditioned and not a problem, but it’s all a huge worry. And I’m not sure Mum cares all that much. For instance, when I told her about my tiredness and lack of energy, she may as well have had “NOT MY PROBLEM” spelt out in dazzling neon above her head. (A few days later, when she could see on the video calls that I wasn’t right, she was more sympathetic. Dad may well have said something in the meantime too.) Mum and Dad have two full days before they fly back to New Zealand. Mum is stressed because someone will be staying in the flat, maybe for months, soon after they leave.

As for me, there’s been an uptick in my energy levels. I’m no longer huffing and puffing just walking up (or even down) the stairs. That’s excellent news – I didn’t know when (or if) I’d ever come right. I just hope I don’t get messed up again by the searing heat we’ll face in the coming days. Today it reached “only” 33: the last day before the inferno.

Andy Burnham. He’s acting fast. As he must do. Labour have a majority of 160-plus and even the back-up of the Lib Dems (with over 70 seats) if absolutely necessary. In other words, Burnham’s got all the ammo he needs to effect real change. But under three years to do it. His big thing today was reform of the elderly care sector which is iniquitous as it currently stands. You go into a care home for any length of time and you’re bled dry of all your savings. (My grandmother was “lucky” that she didn’t last long there. Her intestinal problem came back and that was that.)

The next round of the Scrabble league starts tomorrow morning. I’ll be in division four. As ever, I’ll have my work cut out. The word KAT is valid. You can put an I either before or after KAT to make a valid four-letter word. TAKI and TIKA are the other two anagrams of that set. LIPA (as in the singer Dua Lipa) is valid. Its four anagrams all begin with P: PALI, PILA, PAIL, PIAL. B is the only letter you can put in front of LET to make a valid four. And so it goes on.