Family

Family - Films - The UK

One of each

September 8, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ll be getting a niece to go with my nephew. When my brother told me, I was over the moon. I don’t really know why. I might just be that so much of the toxic crap we face these days is generated by men. The due date is 22nd January. Hey, isn’t that around the date of the presidential inauguration? How about a little Kamala, then, if she wins? Goes pretty well with our surname. Of course they wouldn’t dream of calling her anything like that, but it’s fun to think of slightly out-there names.

Last night I had my longest phone chat ever with my brother. He’s not one for talking on the phone, or even WhatsApp video (as it was), but we managed a whopping 50 minutes. There was a lot to get through. The baby gender reveal (should be “sex reveal”, really), the New Zealand trip, the flight back in which my nephew screamed and bawled for hours, and my parents’ house. He was horrified by how impractical it was. How did our eminently sensible Mum and Dad descend into such madness? Then when I told him how much the renovation cost (he didn’t know), his jaw dropped.

This summer is the first time I’ve ever been seriously mentally affected by weather. The floods in St Ives, the humidity of Auckland, the howling wind and horizontal rain of Wellington, my pretty brutal first winter in Timișoara, even some heat waves I’ve experienced here, none of it comes close to the summer of 2024. It’s been unremitting. I’ve almost put housework on hold, because after 15 minutes I’m dripping with sweat and need a cold shower. With the air con, the living room stays nice and cool, but that’s meant I’ve been confined to just this one room. The good news is that seasons don’t change gradually here; you shift abruptly – bam! – from one to the next. The forecast tells me that we’ll get the bam next week, and it can’t come soon enough. One ray of light has been my sinuses. At just about the moment I got back from NZ a year ago tomorrow, they stopped running. I’d had a constant stream for a year and a half, mostly from my left nostril. Then like magic, it stopped. How I have no idea. I still get pain sometimes, and end up taking paracetamol or occasionally something stronger, but the stream drying up has made a huge difference.

Yesterday I saw One Life at Cinema Timiș with Dorothy. Starring Anthony Hopkins, it told the story of Nicky Wilton who helped hundreds of mostly Jewish children escape from Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia on trains to Britain, just before the start of WW2. The last train, with 250 children on board, never made it – it was aborted, tragically, when Germany invaded Poland. The film flitted back and forth between 1939 and the autumn of 1987, when Winton was an old man. (Winton died in 2015 at the extraordinary age of 106.) I clearly remember the autumn of ’87 when so much bad stuff happened. Mum’s mother was over from NZ at the time. She got bronchitis when she was with us, during which time world stock markets plunged, our garden was waist-deep in water (there are photos of my brother and I canoeing in the garden), an unforecast hurricane ripped through southern Britain giving us a day off school, and (the day before my grandma left the UK) a fire at King’s Cross underground station killed 31 people.

The inquiry into the Grenfell fire, which killed 72, came out last week. Damning stuff. So many players, all cutting corners, ignoring dire warnings about the cladding, putting their own profits above human lives, blaming each other. A good number of them need to be banged up. Owners of flats in the UK (600,000 people) are having to pay to have the cladding replaced. A lot of them simply can’t afford to. This is all a lot like the earthquake-prone building business in NZ which I was caught up in, only at least it’s getting some proper coverage.

Three new students, all women, at the end of last week. I really seemed to click with the last one; that’s always nice.

Family - Photos - Travel: Europe

Photos from Vienna

September 6, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tomorrow we’ll know whether my nephew will get a little brother or sister to terrorise. Mum and Dad are still recovering from their extended family time. I’m sure all five of them would have had a better time if my sister-in-law had stayed at home.

Now for some pictures from my Vienna trip.

The view from our apartment. Red squirrels abounded.

Above: Pictures from Schönbrunn Palace. The bottom photo is from the Gloriette.

The Gloriette: a display of strength and power

The next day: Walking to the Albertina, and below: some paintings I particularly liked.

Christian Rohlfs

Albin Egger-Lienz

Oskar Kokoschka

Rudolf Wacker. This might have been my favourite of all. Dorothy and I spent considerable time perusing it.

Franz Sedlacek. At first glance you think they’re birds.

Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, painter and scupltor

Marc Chagall. I could have stared at this one for hours.

There was a whole room of Picassos that I didn’t take photos of, then we saw the extensive collection of American photographer Gregory Crewdson which was well worth it. Each photograph included a frozen figure; the small-town America setting only increased the creep factor.

This little girl was transfixed by the violinist

These newsstands add colour to a city, but they’re thin on the ground these days

St Stephen’s Cathedral

The Belvedere

Cities need more buildings like these. The height and general appearance make you feel good.
Family - Travel: Europe

Vienna trip report (and some family stuff)

September 5, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

So last Thursday I drove to Vienna with Dorothy (70), Sanda (54), and Sanda’s uncle Valeriu (about to turn 80 and who had never been out of Romania before). Another long drive for me. After some stops along the way and a very slow run into Vienna, we finally made it to the Park & Ride. Sanda, who speaks excellent German, was able to ask someone how that whole system worked. Then we took the underground to our apartment which was in an old building similar in style to the ones in Timișoara. (Timișoara was part of the same empire then, after all.) I shared a room with Valeriu. My mother’s father was 77 when he first left New Zealand. Valeriu had him beat, and at times he was like a fish out of water. He relied heavily on his niece. (Valeriu lost his wife last year after a long illness. They never had children.)

The apartment had cooking facilities and we used them three nights out of four. The next day I was completely shattered. A combination of the long drive, broken sleep, and the sheer heat meant I couldn’t stop yawning the whole day. A shame, because we visited the beautiful Schönbrunn Palace, the residence of the Habsburgs until their monarchy ended in 1918. Valeriu was very keen to see everything there was to see about Empress Elisabeth, otherwise known as Sisi, who Romanians have great affinity with. She was stabbed to death in 1898. We did an audio tour of the palace – I had no hope of keeping up with the Ferninands and Josephs – then climbed up to the top of the Gloriette which sits at an elevated position at the end of Schönbrunn’s garden. I tried to decipher the inscription on the Gloriette with the help of Dorothy who once taught Latin and Greek. The way I was feeling, my favourite part of the day was in the morning when I had a very good coffee with Dorothy at an underground station while Sanda helped Valeriu buy an “Austria” baseball cap.

Day two was much better. Sanda and Valeriu went to a technological museum, while Dorothy and I visited the Albertina, a quite wonderful art gallery near the centre. The previous time I properly went to an art gallery was in 2006 when I visited the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. This was at least as good. The Monet to Picasso collection could hold you transfixed for hours. Zoom in, zoom out. What is this supposed to be? What was he thinking? What further wonders would he have produced if he hadn’t been killed in the war? How shocking was this at the time? Look how incredible those hands are. We must have spent four hours there. The thermostat was turned right down – it was pretty parky in there – but much better that than sweating and yawning and rapidly losing interest. The night before I’d found an out-of-the-way restaurant with local cuisine; the four of us met up there at 6:30. (I relied mostly on an old map. Outside the apartment, my phone was a brick with a camera.) We took one look at the prices and went next door instead. Sausages, goulash, beer. Perfectly good, only I could have eaten twice as much.

Our last full day involved us all meeting up with two of Sanda’s friends at a café slap-bang in the middle of the city, in the shadow of St Stephen’s Cathedral. Again we split up – Valeriu stayed with Sanda and her friends, while Dorothy and I wended our way through the Mozart zone to the Belvedere Gardens. We didn’t go to the museum; we just walked through the gardens which were free to enter. On the way back we had tea and an apple strudel in a café, then met the other two in the city centre once more. By this stage, Sanda had tummy troubles and Valeriu was understandably tired. I wonder what he made of the whole experience. He certainly travelled light; he came with one small holdall and no shorts or other summer clothes. He predates even the baby boomer generation and grew up in the sticks not too far from where I went in late June, and having never been abroad before, the idea of changing his wardrobe from the tried and true was alien to him.

Dorothy and I got on well. We talked a lot about language. That subject came up a lot with Sanda too; she is practically fluent in four languages (Romanian, English, German and Italian) – that level of mastery isn’t that rare in Romania, but it continues to blow me away. I did get slightly annoyed by Sanda’s tendency to organise everyone, even though she meant well, and her penchant for selfies. Valeriu had clearly done a lot of driving back in the day; much of our conversation focused on that.

After breakfast the next morning, we were off back home. A short loo break 170-odd km down the road, then a similar distance to Kecskemét, a small city in the centre of Hungary, far from the tourist trail, where we stopped for lunch. (It was close to 3pm by then. I was ravenous.) Sorting out parking payment was hard work. None of us could read the Hungarian signs. Does that mean three wheels? But I’ve got four wheels. What the hell? Dorothy and Sanda exchanged forint notes for coins at a bank – this took ages and Dorothy thought it was jolly good fun – while Valeriu and I stood by the car. Eventually that was sorted. Now for some food. A bistro round the corner. Looks good. Then it came to ordering our meals. A major performance. We found one guy who spoke English but he didn’t work there. Sanda made cow noises and flappy bird gestures. Google Translate came out. I was rapidly losing the will to live. We got there in the end, and it took them less time to bring us our food than it took to order it. I had a substantial meal of pork escalopes and chips. Great. But then two massive plates of food materialised that we hadn’t ordered – a communciation breakdown despite everyone’s best efforts. By 7:45 I’d dropped the others off and I was home, but not before a tight squeeze in the car park behind my apartment block which nearly threw me after being on the road for so long.

Yesterday I spoke to Mum and Dad. A sigh of relief. Bar the first couple of days, it had been a really shitty time for them all. Dad still isn’t right. My sister-in-law didn’t want to come to NZ anyway, as far as I could see. She’d rather have used up her leave allocation elsewhere – probably something involving a cruise. Mum and Dad were pissed off that my brother did most of the work when it came to looking after my nephew. He was up early while she stayed in bed. And as for my nephew, he’s a very bright little boy, and physically strong with it. He hurt my parents on several occasions, and seemed to enjoy it. (Yikes.) He can already count to twelve. Count me out.

I can’t wait for the sub-30 temperatures that we’re forecast to get early next week. Right now it’s still far too hot. My university friend and his girlfriend are staying with me for two nights from the 21st. Not many people other than students get to see the inside of my flat, so that’ll be slightly nerve-wracking for me. I’m now off to Dedeman to get flat-related bits and pieces. When they’ve gone it’ll all be back to normal.

Like my recent drives across Hungary – four of them – this post has gone on far too long.

Family - Life :) - Romania - Tennis

On the right track (maybe)

August 28, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

A bit more positivity from New Zealand this morning. I got to see my nephew who is a very bright little boy indeed. He loves playing with toy cars, especially old British ones like Morgans, apparently. Then Dad said, “We’d better get onto booking our trip as soon as they’re gone,” meaning a trip to Europe. If they’re serious about ever seeing their younger son and grandson again, they don’t have a lot of choice. Dad’s been ill for too long for it to be a virus, so he’s been put on antibiotics. Mum, who I’m sure is greatly enjoying spending time with her grandson despite the stress, seemed to like my pictures of Slovenia.

After our Skype chat, and before my four lessons, I met Dorothy in town. We talked about how Romania is, slowly but surely, heading in the right direction. Every week I see a building being renovated or a bike rack conveniently added or an intersection modified to make it that little bit safer. Romania’s economy has grown substantially in the time I’ve been here. People are earning more in real terms. Unlike some of its neighbours, Romania has become considerably more stable. It’s still very imperfect – those imperfections really came to the fore during Covid – and I worry that Romania’s urge to modernise will compromise its natural and man-made beauty, but there are reasons to be optimistic.

I’m off to Vienna in under 36 hours. I’ll have three passengers, one of whom I’ve never met in my life. I have no idea how this will all pan out. I’ll reveal all in my next post.

Update: One thing that hasn’t noticeably improved since 2016 is Romania’s level of customer service. This morning I waited 45 minutes to withdraw some euros from my bank account. The woman at the desk (when I finally got there) must have had some pretty rigorous training. Never look at the customer or change your facial expression in any way. If the customer asks a question, remain silent. If he or she repeats the question, respond in an exasperated tone but whatever you do, never fully answer it. Consult your phone five times per minute and your smart watch ten times per minute.

The US Open is under way. I read that Birmingham-born Dan Evans came through the longest match in tournament history in the first round, beating 23rd-seeded Karen Khachanov in 5 hours and 35 minutes. Incredibly he was 4-0 down in the fifth set, but then won six games on the spin. He’s now a 34-year-old veteran; I saw him in Auckland when he was still a teenager. At only five foot nine, he’s struck me as a cross between Lleyton Hewitt and a typical British lad who never stops being a lad. A few years back he got a one-year ban for taking cocaine.

I’m now packing for Vienna.

Family - The UK - Travel: Europe

Tales from the Land of Nod

August 16, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

In a first for me, I managed to fall asleep in a lesson yesterday. It wasn’t face-to-face – I’m not that hopeless – but an online session with an eleven-year-old boy. I got him to do a written exercise in the present continuous, then a couple of minutes later I heard my name. Repeatedly. How embarrassing. We finished the lesson, then I had a session with his little brother. Please just let this be over. I then set an alarm on my laptop so I’d wake up in time for an online lesson in the evening, in case I fell asleep, which I did. The alarm made me jump out of my skin; I thought I was still in St Ives.

Getting back home was brutal. My bus arrived at Luton Airport at three minutes to midnight. I hardly slept a wink there. At 5:30 I blew £4.50 on an extra-strong coffee, then I had to think about my flight which was due to leave at 8:05. At gate 21 there was a picture of Timișoara taken right where I used to live, along with an up-to-the-minute weather report for the destination. I could see the temperature climbing into the 30s. We were stuck on the ground and took off from runway 07 an hour late, meaning it would be even hotter when we arrived. I had a window seat on the very back row. I got a great view of Lake Balaton which is the largest lake in Central Europe and marginally larger than Lake Geneva. There’s something amazing about seeing a major geographical feature like that in its entirety. I was one of the first off the plane; as I stepped onto the tarmac it was like walking into an oven. I got the bus to Badea Cârțan and from there I walked home in the heat. That and the lack of sleep just buggered me. Next time I might try the Ryanair flight from Stansted to Budapest followed by the train; I won’t put myself through that again.

It was a pretty good trip in all. I saw a lot of my family friends. Plenty of walks and meals – either homemade ones, or pub ones that didn’t come with enough chips. On Sunday, after my trip to Cambridge, we had a three-course meal which involved vegetables from their garden and seemed to take for ever. Conversation sometimes strayed into politics, which is never a good idea. When I suggested that young people have it harder than the older generation, I got the usual spiel about 15% mortgage interest rates in the 1970s and 80s. At least I was spared any mention of the threat of nuclear war, which is the other one that usually comes up. On Monday we walked to Houghton where we met one of Dad’s old friends. He lives with his wife in a beautiful old house; he had a selection of anti-woke posters in the windows including “I (heart) JK Rowling” and “Keep men out of women’s sports”. They’ve both had varying health complications. On Tuesday we went to Wetherspoons for their happy hour which runs from two till five. I had fish, nowhere near enough chips, and mushy peas. Then I tidied up the flat (someone is staying there on Friday) and took the guided bus to Cambridge where I got some provisions for my trip home. I got two Scotch eggs; I was years since I’d last had one.

What did I think of Britain this time? (It always changes.) Maybe I’m biased because that’s where I come from, but the people all seemed great. Calm, considerate, happy to help. Everyone doing their best. The problems are systemic; people’s lives are dominated by unavoidable systems and processes that are failing to function. To that point, the bank I photographed in my previous post is closing down in January and St Ives, a town of 17,000 people, will soon be bankless.

In New Zealand, my brother and his family are suffering with a bug they picked up on the plane. Even Mum has come down with it.

Lloyds Bank in Cambridge on Tuesday night

Sunset in Timișoara on 24th July
Family - Life :) - Politics

Time for one more

July 26, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

So on Tuesday my brother sent me my sister-in-law’s 12-week scan. You could make out its head (still an it at this stage, and thankfully not a them) but not a lot else. Everything is fine, apparently. I knew that she was pregnant with her second child several weeks ago. When my brother told me, I could think of was Oh no! The idea of bringing any humans kicking and screaming into the 2020s sounds terrifying, let alone two of them. And in the UK, bringing up a child properly is now horrendously expensive. I didn’t see it coming – my brother had made pretty clear noises about his son being a first and last, and my sister-in-law will be three months short of forty when the baby pops out in the winter. The biggest beneficiary of this extra human will be my nephew – I just look at all the kids I teach, and those who have a sibling are generally better adjusted than those who don’t. (Only children are very common in modern Romania.) I’m personally very glad that I have a brother. The first time around they wanted a surprise, but this time they want to know the sex of the baby – they’ll find that out when they get back from New Zealand in September.

Having children, or not, has been in the news of late. Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance, has said the US is run by “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable at their own lives”. He even brought Pete Buttigieg (who isn’t a “cat lady” as far as I’m aware) into the discussion. He said that people without children don’t have a direct stake in the future of the country. If you really believe that, JD, you’re a fucking idiot (as well as being an insulting prick, but we already knew that bit). In 2016, David Cameron quit immediately after the Brexit referendum. In short order the ensuing Conservative leadership contest had been narrowed down to just two: Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May. Leadsom said in a comment to a newspaper that she’d make the better prime minister because she had children and her rival didn’t. This stupid comment basically handed the job to Theresa May. Sadly in the US, that’s not how it works.

Family - Life :)

More about Mum, and a famous family

June 23, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

There was much more I could have said about Mum two posts ago, but at 1100-plus words, that “essay” was already getting up there. So I’ll add a couple more things right now.

First, obligations. Fulfilling obligations is very important to her and always has been. If she says she’ll be at x place at y time, she’ll damn well be there. Sometimes she’ll take this to extremes by turning non-obligations, where nobody is going to care if she turns up or not, into musts. When I was a kid this got particularly bad when Mum and Dad had signed up for some event or other, and then Dad got one of his crippling migraines as he so often did in the eighties and nineties. Mum would seethe and sigh and huff and puff. Why are you being so awkward? She treated him like a disobedient child. Not an ounce of sympathy. Watching from the sidelines, it was painful. Apart from that, which I find unforgivable, I see a strong sense of obligation as a good thing, and I like to think it has rubbed off on me. (I do fulfil the vast majority of my obligations, partly because I try not to have too many of them outside work. I know my limits.) Some of my students in Romania don’t have this sense, and I’ll admit that does frustrate me.

Second, church. Mum has attended the Catholic church since she was tiny. (I did too until I was 16 or so.) But really it comes into the category of obligations. She goes because she always has done. I’ve never seen her read the Bible or express any profound religious thoughts; I don’t even know if she believes. What church does do for Mum is promote a certain way of living. She looks after herself. She gets plenty of exercise, doesn’t gamble, doesn’t smoke, drinks very little (that’s just as well; two glasses of wine and she’s gone), and has an impressive level of self-control over her eating. Growing up I remember the big platefuls she’d dish out to the three men in the house, while she’d give herself half the amount. Church also gives her a social benefit; after the service she has coffee with other women who attend, which probably means a whole load of inane gossip.

I thought about the church thing because Dorothy has invited me to attend tomorrow, including the baptism afterwards. Under normal circumstances I’d have said no, but because I’m going through a lighter period of lessons I should be able to cope with this extra human contact. I just hope it doesn’t last too long.

The most interesting lesson of last week was the Romanian one. Our teacher asked, Have you ever met a famous person? Like actually interacted with someone famous? I said no. I’ve seen plenty of famous people – members of the royal family, top tennis players, and so on, but I’ve never had a conversation with any of them. Dorothy said yes because she happens to be a member of the vast, and vastly successful, Freud family. Good grief. Sigmund Freud is her great-grandfather. Clement Freud (who had his fingers in numerous pies) and the artist Lucian Freud are both uncles of hers. The fashion designer Bella Freud is her cousin. I’d always wondered about Dorothy’s background because she has quite a clipped upper-class accent and uses elevated words and expressions that my parents wouldn’t use despite being a few years older. When she said that it was easy for her to get into Cambridge, that set off alarm bells. I wonder what her upbringing was like. She did say that she was happy to rid herself of the Freud name when she got married; I can imagine. In New Zealand I knew one of the daughters of Keith Holyoake, whom I think was the country’s longest-serving prime minister. She also felt burdened by the name.

This morning I drove to Mark’s place to pick up a tent. I’m thinking of going camping later this summer. The tent is a breeze to put up, but putting it away is another matter. I’m likely to have all kinds of fun and games there; I’ll have to practise before I use it for real. I met his wife who was in a moon boot; she managed to break her toe last week. She was complimentary of the level of care she’d received, saying it was much better and faster than it would have been in the UK. The NHS is a hot-button issue (as it should be) in the upcoming election.

Tennis coming up tonight. After that will be Romania’s next match at Euro 2024. They play Belgium. A draw should see them through to the next round with a game to spare.

As we pass the longest day, the temperature is forecast to drop tomorrow after four scorching days in a row. That should mean I’ll have a more comfortable time when I go away.

Family

Let’s talk about Mum

June 14, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is Mum’s 75th birthday. A genuine milestone. When I called her last night (it was already her birthday in New Zealand) she was unbothered by the whole thing. She’s had tummy troubles this week which haven’t put her in a celebratory mood.

Mum is five foot two and a half. Or at least she was; I’m sure the half has gone now. She grew up on a farm in South Canterbury with five brothers (three older, two younger) and an older sister. Growing up with all those boys might be why she punches above her weight. She went to teacher training college in Dunedin and began her teaching career at Portobello, just down the road. In 1972 she got engaged but that all fell through – I have no idea of the ins and outs of that; Mum never even mentioned it to me. She made the six-week boat trip to Southampton the following year and would spend the next three decades in the UK.

In those 30 years New Zealand never stopped being home; at no point did Britain hold an emotional attachment to her. I think in the early days she was at least content with being there. She and Dad lived on a street where many other residents were born outside the UK; it had a strong sense of community. Mum had hobbies and interests which she continued to pursue when I was little. She was a keen runner and spent a lot of time spinning and knitting. My brother’s and my health and education were always top priorities for her; she showed incredible perseverance when it came to teaching my brother to read. I always marvel at the energy she had. In 1981 they bought a derelict house that was frankly wrong when you have two tiny kids (when they moved in I was 18 months old and my brother just three months), then a couple of months later she flew to New Zealand with us two tots, leaving Dad to contend with the notably harsh British winter of 1981-82.

My memories of home as a little boy involve cement mixers and insulating foam and two builders named Jack and Jim. They extended the house and transformed it beyond recognition into an asset of great value. Mum had done supply teaching when we were small, but in 1988 she went full-time and that was the beginning of the end. Her interests dried up; I suppose she no longer had the time and energy for them. While she was excellent in the classroom and very conscientious outside it, from the early nineties teaching became a means to an end. Save up enough money to get me out of here. By about ’95 school had become a chore. Dad realised that Mum would be unhappy if she carried on living and teaching in the UK. In 2000 they had a dummy run when Mum did a teaching exchange in Cairns, then in 2003 they upped sticks permanently to New Zealand.

In the meantime Mum made what I regard as a weird decision about our education. Dad would have sent us both to the big secondary school in town, but Mum had other ideas. My brother ended up at a comprehensive church school in Cambridge (a pretty good school, truth be told) while she thought I could benefit from something more academic and competitive. At eleven I sat an extrance exam for a private school on the off-chance that I won a scholarship. Though I was accepted along with about a third of those who sat the exam, I didn’t win one of the handful of scholarships. I wasn’t too disappointed. Normal school for me. Then Mum decided that the expense – vast, it seemed to me – would be worth it. It wasn’t. I stuck it out for five years in a 400-year-old school that had classes on Saturday mornings in exchange for longer holidays. My brother often took the mick: “He goes to snob school.” Now I don’t feel I ever went to private school; it didn’t make much of an impact on me apart from to dent my confidence.

Dad hoped that emigrating to NZ might make Mum eternally happy. No stress, no hassle, no enemies. Though I’m sure she has been happier than if she’d in the UK, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. She has enemies at the golf club; she would have them if she beached on an uninhabited island. When I went out to NZ last year, Mum’s stress levels often shot off the scale. I’d hear that sigh and that was it. Category 4 hurricane. Batten down the hatches, you’re in for a rough ride. Apart from Dad (poor thing) and I, nobody ever gets caught up in the storm. My brother and sister-in-law certainly won’t when they go over in August.

Over time Mum and I have drifted apart in some ways. I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression since my early twenties, and Mum hasn’t known what (if anything) to do about that. She wanted her son to have a wife and kids and earn plenty of money and play rugby with his mates and for everything to be simple. Mental health was (and mostly still is) a foreign language to her. Eventually she acknowledged the existence of my problems, but her “solutions” for me were way off base. I took that job in Wellington largely because of her, and that damn near killed me. I was 31 by then, but she still didn’t “get” me. It took my move to Romania for the penny to drop.

Much of the “drift” has been a case of her inhabiting the world of money in a way that I just don’t. Not anymore, at least. If anything, her wealth has only helped to increase her stress levels. It has also made her more shallow – it saddens me that her success, as she sees it, is defined by her wealth (I was born at the right time; aren’t I clever?) rather than shaping thousands of children’s lives over 40 years. One time I stayed at my parents’ in 2015, I found her behaviour embarrassing.

When I spent time with Mum last year, I realised she’s a more complex (and knowledgeable) person than I gave her credit for. Her views on subjects aren’t as black and white as I thought. She’s happiest being outside in nature, many miles from her biggest financial asset. (Last year she particularly enjoyed visiting her old stomping grounds in Otago.) She’s genuinely happy for me despite my meagre earnings and lack of a family. Since I moved to Romania, we’ve got on pretty well most of the time. She’s always just wanted the best for me; she hasn’t always known what the best is, but I can hardly blame her for that.

Family - Films - Music - Politics - Writing a book

Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength

May 31, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

My brother said that about fifteen people turned up for our aunt’s celebration on Tuesday. Apart from food and chat and sharing of photos, not a lot happened. He’d hoped someone might say a few words about her life, but that never happened.

It’s the last day of May and the sweet smell of tei – lime trees – is filling the air as it always does at this time of year. Before this morning’s lesson in the fifth-floor flat, my parents called me from Hampden. They were about to get fish and chips from the Tavern. They’ve had a relaxing time in Moeraki even if they’ve seen little of the late-autumn sun. We discussed Trump’s guilty verdict, announced hours earlier. Being a convicted criminal may improve his chances in November. Even being banged up – precisely what he deserves – wouldn’t bar him from becoming president. Because that’s the world we now live in, where black is white and war is peace. How did we end up here?

After my lesson I had some time to kill before getting my hair cut for the summer. I sat for a bit in the so-called Botanic Park, then cycled to my appointment in Dorothy’s neck of the woods. I happened to bump into her. She was incredulous that I was about to spend 50 lei. It actually set me back 65. The hairdresser – a woman of 40-odd – recognised me from last time. She did a good job, and I won’t need another chop for months, but I’ll go elsewhere next time because it’s got too pricey. It’s a pity the place opposite me closed down.

Last night I watched the first episode of Eric, a British series on Netflix starring Benedict Cumberbatch whom I hadn’t seen for years. I enjoyed it and plan to watch the remaining five episodes. It was set in gritty, grimy eighties New York, which I liked, and they used one of the late Sixto Rodriguez’s songs at the end of the episode. Talking of music, Dad sent me a clip of this song by British band alt-J. It’s called Deadcrush and is supposedly about crushes that the band members have on Elizabeth “Lee” Miller (an American photographer before and during World War Two) and Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII. The lyrics are mostly indecipherable, but the song (and video) is a fascinating piece of art nonetheless. I’d heard of alt-J but was unaware of this song (the song of theirs I know best talks about licking someone like the inside of a crisp packet); I wonder how Dad came across it.

I recently watched a video where Kwasi Kwarteng, who served as Chancellor under Liz Truss’s infamous lettuce leadership, gave a long interview. He went to Eton, just like David Cameron, George Osborne and the rest. He’s got a massive IQ but frankly so what. He and Truss crashed the economy and though he knew he messed up, didn’t show much contrition. It’s all a game to him. He’s a damn sight better than Truss herself though; she’s never shown an ounce of self-awareness at any point.

Latest news on the English book. We’ve now got a meeting at 2:30 on Sunday afternoon. I’ll prepare some bits and pieces and see what happens.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Writing a book

Wouldn’t it be nice

May 29, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today was my aunt’s celebration, the last ever get-together at her house which is already on the market for half a million quid. I haven’t heard from my brother yet to see how it went; I expect he’ll have been part of a small contingent. I’m just so glad I was fortunate enough to see her a week before she passed away. Today would have been my grandmother’s 102nd birthday. I wrote about her 88th birthday here: how time flies.

This afternoon I had a lesson with the boy who wants to be a farmer. So refreshing when so many of them want to be YouTubers. Last week I taught him some irregular plurals, so today I gave him a worksheet on them, complete with pictures. Easy peasy, he said. Seconds later he’d written mouses and foots and sheeps and childs. Tonight I gave my new maths student (a 15-year-old girl) what I called a quick quiz. Target time two minutes, three max. After about twelve minutes she was still slaving away, so I put her out of her misery. She’d forgotten just about everything I’d taught her about prime and square numbers. I wasn’t annoyed by this in any way; maths is just tough and weird for a lot of people.

Before all of that the plumber came and put in the new pipe. I had to go to Dedeman with him to pick up some blocks to which the tiles will be attached in front of the bath. I’m getting used to being actively involved, even though it’s bloody annoying when I have lessons.

I forgot to mention that I got stung by a bee at Șag on Sunday. It was my left middle finger. As a kid I got stung quite often on my foot. I was barefoot most of the time in summer – my Kiwi mum encouraged that – and the bees would be in the clover. That was back when the UK still had bees. When I was in the car I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if my parents were with me, but my blog posts for June 2017 have given me second thoughts. That got pretty fraught. If my family friends from St Ives came over, that would be quite wonderful. Even when I wander around my little patch of a warm evening I think it would be lovely if they were here, doing simple things like wandering from one funny little bar to another. It’s sad that I never get the chance to do that.

Yesterday I had a lesson where my student (a manager at a big bank) read an article about giving feedback to low-performing employees. I said that a lot of this poor performance comes from low engagement which shouldn’t be a surprise. She said that the objectives and deadlines are all there in black and white, so there’s no excuse. I replied that frankly who cares if xyz has to be done by 31st May if xyz seems pointless. How do you get motivated, when most of what you do all day is meaningless crap? The answer to that of course is that people are motivated by money and status and power, or simply job security when they have family members who depend on their income, but the “pointless shit” aspect (which is more salient than ever before) can’t help.

The book meeting, which I had to reschedule two lessons to accommodate, has been postponed again to who knows when.