Scrabble

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

August 31, 2026

by plutoman 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 plutoman 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 plutoman 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

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 plutoman 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 plutoman 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 plutoman 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.

Books - Family - Life :) - Music - Scrabble

The big slowdown (so I don’t drown)

July 28, 2026

by plutoman 0 Comments

Dad called me this morning as I was sitting in the café by the market and the river. I’d finished my coffee (which now costs 8.50 lei; I remember when it was 3.50), so I wandered over to the river away from the TV noise. One of Whitney Houston’s music videos – I Wanna Dance With Somebody – had been playing. She was not much older than me and my brother when she died.

It’s my brother’s 45th birthday today. Dad handed his device to my brother so I could wish him a happy birthday and have a chat, but he was too preoccupied with the kids to manage more than 30 seconds. I did see both the kids, which was rather nice. My nephew knew how old his father was. I think the six of them will take the train to Swanage as they did last June (on Dad’s birthday) when I was over. That was a lovely day. I wonder if they’ll have cream teas this time.

I’m a bit better today, certainly. I still had that business when I woke up in the morning where my body felt leaden and it was an effort to extract myself from bed, but I could walk to the market at close to my normal speed, which I haven’t been able to do for some days. Apart from Dorothy’s thing on Saturday I’ve tried to do very little. After a slow start I’ve made some headway with Cloud Atlas which seems to be nine books in one.

I’ve also been trying to learn Scrabble words. The four-letter words will require a monumental effort for me to master. There are 5662 of them, many of which are highly obscure. Knowing the words isn’t enough; I have to ensure I’m not confusing them with non-words. (Some people find this easy. I have no idea how.) My memory isn’t very good so I try to recognise patterns. MANG, MENG, MING, MONG and MUNG are all valid. As are SNAB, SNEB, SNIB, SNOB and SNUB. KOR is a valid three-letter word, and you can plop any of the five vowels on the end to make a valid four (including KORU, the Maori design). The four valid anagrams of AIKM all have A as the second letter. But that only gets me so far, especially when I’ve been battling brain fog. I got relegated last time (four wins, ten losses) and nearly didn’t sign up for the next round because I didn’t think I could manage it, but I’ve now decided I will.

Oh yes, Dorothy’s birthday do in Buzad. That was tough. I made an apricot tart the night before, despite feeling very tired. The drive used to take an hour but because of the road works both at my end and on the way there, you can add an extra 15 minutes. At least they weren’t actually working on Saturday, or else who knows how long it might have taken. Although I felt like crap, the drive there was pleasurable in a way because there was no-one to bother me. On the radio they talked about an international maths competition (these are a big deal over here) in which several Romanians had done well, but nobody could now compete with AI. Erasure came on with Love to Hate You, reminding me of my bus trips to and from high school. They mentioned a large asteroid that they thought may actually be heading our way in 2029 but will in fact just miss us. What a shame, I thought. There was an old song about kids spending their summer holidays with their grandparents – common in Romania, and used to be even more common.

I got to her place at just after 1pm and I knew it would be hard. I was in no fit state to chat to people. And there were a lot of people. Apart from Dorothy, the first person I met was a young African woman called Queen. She was very nice. There were people I’d met before but whose names I couldn’t remember. Slightly awkwardly, our Romanian teacher was there. We’ve taken a break from lessons. I found I could hardly cobble together a semi-coherent sentence in Romanian. I’d have struggled enough in English. The food, part European, part African, part Asian, was amazing. The location too – it’s a beautiful spot. But I couldn’t appreciate any of it. At least people gobbled down the apricot tart, once they’d figured out the apricot halves weren’t actually egg yolks. (One lady had made an apple pie that looked rather like a large Yorkshire pudding or maybe a Lancashire hotpot.)

I left at 3:30. That was all I could handle. I drove back feeling quite sad, wondering what I might do with my life if I won’t have any energy or anyone to help me. I felt very alone. Lost in France by the recently departed Bonnie Tyler came on the radio. She recorded it before her voice changed. The host commented that being lost in France wouldn’t be a great idea right now with all the fires. My parents called me the next morning. I was in the park nearby. We hadn’t spoken for four days which by recent standards is a lot. I can’t have looked or sounded that great.

In the last few days I’ve watched some videos about ME. My best friend had it when he was twelve or so. I also had a female colleague in Auckland who was ambitious and played rugby. Her father had been the New Zealand snooker champion; that seemed to impress me more than her. Anyway, by 2009 she was taking regular time off for ME or, as they (unfortunately) called it at the time, chronic fatigue syndrome. I think she left the company about the same time as me. I wonder what she’s doing now. From the (mostly UK-based) videos I watched, it was apparent that many patients have been treated absolutely scandalously, and that what I’ve been experiencing could be many times worse.

It’s been much cooler of late – that was a real saving grace on Dorothy’s birthday – but I’m now nervously eyeing the forecast for later this week. We’re predicted to reach at least the mid-30s.

I’ve got a lesson coming up, my first in a few days. There seems to be a cat in heat in the car park.

Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Scrabble

Vital vitamins

July 21, 2026

by plutoman 0 Comments

I thought I was coming right, but today I’ve been dragging myself through life once again. This morning I walked to the market – with all the road works it’s like a maze – and a young woman powered past me on foot. Normally I’m a fairly fast walker, but today I was at a crawl. I barely outpaced an old lady with one of those Zimmer-trolley things. When that was done I walked to the well to fetch 20 litres of water. A bit later I sorted out my bike. This all felt like a huge physical effort.

Last Thursday was the most ridiculous day of all. The woman in Italy cancelled her online lesson because her laptop wasn’t working. I didn’t mind that because I felt terrible and I still had to plan the rest of the day’s lessons. Then Dad called me, as he has done a lot while he’s been in the UK. Maybe he’s just bored. At lunchtime I went to a restaurant just off Piața Unirii to meet Dorothy and the other woman who did the Vienna trip two years ago. I had no idea what this place would be like, but it was actually rather nice. It was all you could eat for 40 lei, something I’d never experienced before in Romania. (They had signs telling you not to take food you wouldn’t eat.) Under normal circumstances I’d have enjoyed it, but even though the food was great I wasn’t in the mood when I was feeling like crap and on such a hot day. This other lady is fairly in-your-face and I couldn’t cope with that at all. At one point she called someone who wanted English lessons for her daughter and then handed the phone to me. Oh jeez, not now, please. I was relieved to hear that any lessons wouldn’t be starting until September.

Dorothy and the other woman went off to Piața 700 while I decided I’d prefer a break before my lessons with the brother and sister in Mehala. Just as I got to that part of town, I got a puncture in my back tyre. Damn. I lay in the long grass under the plum trees for half an hour, then chained my unusable bike to a lamp-post near where I had my lessons. The kids’ mother greeted me. Where’s your bike? Don’t ask, I said. I did the lessons – a struggle – then their mother insisted that their boy fix my puncture. He’s really into bikes now. I know – we did half a session on bikes recently. My plan was simply to leave the bike there to be picked up the next morning in the car, and to walk the 5 km home. Even with my low energy and the heat I’d just have time to do that before my next lesson. The boy though insisted he would repair my puncture. The time it took me to persuade him not to bother in the searing heat meant I had even less time to walk home. I had to jog in places. I got home just in time, absolutely dripping in sweat. The bell went as I was in the middle of having a pee, as it so often does.

After the lesson I saw the after-hours doctor. I was in and out quickly. I asked him if I needed blood tests but he just wrote me a prescription for Astenor “energy and tonic”, vials of liquid that contain a bunch of stuff: arginine (a semi-essential amino acid), vitamin B6 (which helps with the immune system), biotin (which helps maintain normal hair skin), and magnesium (which has had a lot of attention recently: it helps with your bones and teeth but is also said to be beneficial to your sleep and general mood). He also put me on a double dose of vitamin D as well as vitamin K. Whether all of this will make any difference I have no idea, but I doubt it will do me any harm.

I only watched snippets of the World Cup final. There was something dystopian about what I saw. Donald Trump up there in his ivory tower, the word FIFA spelled out every five seconds, music blaring. I didn’t see the Super Bowl-style half-time show which had a load of famous people and the Muppets. The Muppets are too good for something like that. Half-time went on nearly twice as long as it normally does, which is really crappy for the players (as well as breaching the rules of the game). This tournament also had hydration breaks – fine if they’re actually about hydration, but of course they were all about advertising. Then you had the Argentinians – nasty shits who constantly disrupted the game. Incredibly, they didn’t even have a shot on goal until well into extra time. It was after midnight when I decided I couldn’t take any more and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep though. Hmmm, it must be over now. I wonder who won? I was very glad to wake up to find that Spain had beaten the bastards, and better still without needing penalties. I also missed those Argentine fists fly after the match. Any Americans tuning into that game to watch football for the first time will be sticking to baseball and basketball in future, thank you very much.

As for Ryan Fox, winner of the Open in spectacular fashion, I had no idea he was the son of Grant Fox, one of the greatest All Blacks of all time. Fox is a fairly common surname, after all. I think Grant Fox’s father may have played cricket for New Zealand too. Talk about sport being in the blood. One thing I neglected to mention last time was that I watched commentary of the golf in French. Canadian French, to be exact. Listening to the commentary and picking up on the differences in vowel quality and vocabulary between Québecois and French French was as fascinating as any of the actual golf.

Scrabble. I’m almost certainly getting relegated this time around. I’ve played decently enough but my opponents are just too strong and I haven’t drawn all that well. My most enjoyable game was with an American guy named Ben who regularly plays big tournaments, with some success. He’s also a moderator on the site and a really nice guy. He wound up beating me by just eleven points in a high-scoring game. In another game I played this guy who constantly talks trash in the chat, to the point where I blocked him. He seems a total arse, just like the sort of boy I’d have avoided at school. Well I beat him at my third attempt. It looked like the game was up for me, but I found EBONICS which is a decidedly racist term (combining ebony and phonics) meaning how Black Americans speak. Last week I saw a YouTube video from someone preparing for the American national championships which are taking place right now. He still studies words using physical cards rather than apps. (Maybe he uses apps too; I couldn’t tell.) He showed a fat stack of cards, pointing to the number 512. No, that wasn’t the 512th card, but the 512th stack of cards. Wowee. He mentioned that he had high-functioning autism, which I suppose checks out. He said the best he could hope for in the tournament was a small prize in the hundreds which would be dwarfed by travel and accommodation costs for him and his husband.

Andy Burnham has taken over as British prime minister. I like the guy. He’s got the cards stacked against him in so many ways, with an unstable world and a rabid media, but let’s see what he can do.

My parents are going down to see my brother on Friday. Next Monday will be his 45th birthday. Then they fly back to New Zealand on 1st August.

Family - Other sports - Scrabble - Tennis

Loss of face

July 14, 2026

by plutoman 0 Comments

This morning I heard that brilliant New Zealand actor Sam Neill (of Jurassic Park fame, and much more) had died at 78. Those damn Aussies always liked to claim him. I read that his birth name was Nigel but at the age of twelve he started calling himself Sam. A smart move. Sam is a great name. Nigel Neill … isn’t.

Everyone is popping off at about the age of Mum and Dad. Just yesterday I said to Dad that I’m lucky to still have both parents. Not just alive, but in pretty good health. At my age, that must put me in the minority. Just anecdotally, I have a few students of a similar age to me and I think all of them only have one living parent. When I called Dad, Mum was at church. I wasn’t trying to avoid her or anything; I’d just forgotten that it was that time of day and week. That did give us an opportunity to talk about Mum, though. We said that so much of Mum’s stress comes down to loss of face, which a lot of the time isn’t real anyway. It would make sense for Mum and Dad to spend three days or so at my brother’s place (including his birthday on the 27th) just before they go back to NZ. Not much more than that; their previous stay was seriously unfun for both of them. Plus it might end up being far too hot again. But Mum is likely to insist they spend a whole week down there, for fear of upsetting my brother. It’s a similar story with their old friends and whoever else. She feels she has to do this and avoid talking about that so that this or that person won’t think X or Y or Z about her. I mentioned to Dad how refreshing it was to attend those autism groups back in the day, when all that crap went straight out the window. (It certainly flies out the window with Mum too when she isn’t with anyone except Dad or me. So it was a huge relief that my parents’ stay in Romania went as successfully as it did. Mum and I have been getting on well.)

Yesterday I was exhausted. I had very little energy. I couldn’t even make myself watch all of the men’s Wimbledon final. The women’s final though unexpectedly burst into life when Linda Noskova led Karolina Muchova 6-2 5-2 and had five match points in the following three games. Games eight and nine of the second set were pure drama. The set slipped through Noskova’s fingers. How does she come back from this? But she did. Noskova served brilliantly on the big points early in the third set, and this time she didn’t relinquish her lead. I was pleased that Noskova, still early in her career, was able to win. A loss in those circumstances may have haunted her for years otherwise. (The butterfly effect was on full display in the women’s tournament. Noskova had been one point from exiting the tournament in the third round. Muchova also faced match point in her semi with Coco Gauff.) The final brought to mind the 2005 US Open semi-final between Kim Clijsters and Maria Sharapova. Clijsters had five match points in the second set, all in a single game, and ended up losing the set. But she won it in three and won her first grand slam two days later. That was an excellent tournament on both the men’s and women’s sides.

Dad asked me if I’d stayed up to watch England in the “soccer”, as he calls it. (The whole soccer-is-American, football-is-British thing is actually pretty new. It’s a bit like the notion that -ize is purely American. Pick up any UK-published book from the eighties or earlier and it’ll likely be full of -ize spellings. Even a lot of modern UK-English books are, especially those published by Oxford.) Anyway, I certainly didn’t stay up to watch it. Kick-off was midnight my time. England though are just two matches from winning the whole thing, so who knows? (I really am clueless about it this time. I haven’t watched a single ball be kicked. Or headed or shinned or anything else.)

I’ve got a couple more days before the Scrabble league starts up again. Learning the words continues to be a painstaking effort. I’ve made some recent progress with the fours, and tomorrow I’ll add a few more sevens and eights. A few people have now been expelled from the league for cheating, and someone wondered why anyone would bother to cheat. This isn’t poker; there’s no money at stake. Then somebody else said it’s all about ego. They’re probably right. As someone with very little ego, ego-based decisions – which can sink companies or even whole countries and more – often baffle me.

This evening a new student will be coming. I never know what I might get.

Cat - Music - Photos - Scrabble - Tennis

Left to my own devices

July 11, 2026

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’m now writing this on the new laptop. I still need to install a bunch of stuff and there are endless settings that I need to monkey around with to stop it from driving me mad, but I get the feeling it’ll be decent. Unlike my phone. It’ll now only charge at a snail’s pace and I can no longer transfer photos or videos from it to my laptop – the hole which the charger goes into seems to be buggered, even though it looks fine.

Yesterday I went to Sânmihaiu Român, my first long bike trip for ages. When I was there I got a coffee and called Mum and Dad who had been watching a lot of Wimbledon. They’ve been telling me about thrilling matches and deciding tie-breaks, but it’s passed me by. I also started The Cloud Atlas, a rather complex-looking novel that Dad gave me while he was here. I did actually watch bits of the men’s semi-finals after I got back. Even though Djokovic was well beaten by Jannik Sinner, it is pretty remarkable how he is still able to compete at such a high level at 39. The first match saw Alexander Zverev beat Arthur Fery, the Franco-British wildcard, also in straight sets. Fery collects £900,000 for getting so far.

In the last few days I’ve been listening to Shakespears Sister, a British duo who were pretty big in the early nineties. I remember our English teacher despairing at the spelling of the name – no apostrophe or final e – though Shakespeare himself was very inconsistent in how he spelt his name. Spelling wasn’t standardised back then. Stay was their biggest hit – it was number one in the charts for ages – and I also liked Hello (Turn Your Radio On), a song that mentions the pound “looking weak”. That was a hot topic back in the day.

Bonnie Tyler has passed away at the age of 75. Her rasping voice was instantly recognisable. Plus, she was Welsh. I used to think of her It’s a Heartache whenever I boiled an egg for too long.

I finished third in the end in the Scrabble league. A young woman by the name of Elise who travels around North America and the world to play Scrabble pipped me for second. We both got promoted.