Family

Family - Life :) - Music - Politics - Scrabble

A happy tradition in a scary world

March 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s the last day of February and the last day of winter, and we’ve had beautiful sunshine all day. I’ve just been up to see Elena (the lady who lives above me) and give her a mărțișor, which is a kind of small good-luck charm on a șnur – a red-and-white string. Romanians traditionally give mărțișoare to women to mark the beginning of spring. It’s one of my favourite traditional Romanian traditions, mainly because it costs very little: you can buy these trinkets – some of which are handmade – for just a few lei apiece. The one I gave to Elena was in the form of a black cat.

Unusually for a Saturday, I only had one lesson today, first thing this morning. After my lesson on food with Noah in Dumbrăvița, I decided to drive to Jimbolia. On the way there I listened to Bogdan Puriș’s music programme. He played songs by Bruce Hornsby, including the new Indigo Park as well as The Way It Is which, according to Puriș, came out in 1986. That date checks out because when I was a kid the BBC used the song as background music when they showed the football tables on a Saturday. Then my phone made that six-beep alert when something seismic has just happened and when I got to Jimbolia I found out that Trump and Israel had just bombed Iran. I’m as far from an expert on Middle East geopolitics as you can get, but to me this is absolutely terrifying. And for the love of God, Britain must not get involved in it. I didn’t do a lot in Jimbolia. I was just trying to take advantage of the warmer, brighter weather. I wandered around for a bit and then sat near the railway station and read a couple of stories from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I suggested to Elena that we go out for a drive sometime.

I spoke to Mum last night; she’d just had the operation done on her second eye. It seems to have gone well, though we don’t really know yet. Before that I spoke to Dad. We discussed his own mother’s unsteadiness in later years, such as in 2000 when they were living in Cairns and she and I came to visit, and suddenly she couldn’t go up and down escalators. Heck, Mum is only a year and a bit younger than she was. When put in those terms, Mum is doing very well. Dad too. (His own father died at almost exactly the age Dad is now, after a decade of living with Alzheimer’s.)

On Thursday night there was a UK by-election – in a part of Manchester – which the Greens won surprisingly comfortably. Reform came second while Labour, who had won the seat by a huge margin in 2024, were consigned to third place. The woman who won the seat for the Greens is – well, was – a plumber. Her victory speech, while strangely lacking in actual green stuff, was mighty impressive. “If you work hard, you deserve a nice life. And if you aren’t able to work, you still deserve a nice life.” Uncomplicated but effective. This result, plus everything else, might force the very disappointing Keir Starmer out of his position as prime minister.

Scrabble. Two wins and two losses so far from my completed league games. This time around there will be 13 games in total instead of the usual 14. A few days ago on ISC (the other site I play on), I was unfortunate enough to concede a 185-point triple-triple (SHERWANI, a word I didn’t know), and despite playing three bingos I lost 527-460. My opponent also found three bingos. That’s the highest total score in any game I’ve played.

Tomorrow I’m playing squash with Mark.

Family - Films - Life :) - Music - Scrabble

Avoiding arguments

February 22, 2026 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cat - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Scrabble

Loss of a family friend

February 18, 2026 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother last night. He told me the sad news that an old family friend had died. She was born and bred in Ireland and was the mother of two boys who were friends of my brother’s and mine. Growing up, we saw a lot of her. She had a number of health complications in later life (and earlier – she had a heart valve operation, similar to what my father had, at a pretty young age). She was a little older than our mother – we reckon she must have been 80, give or take a year.

I’ve had some problems with my bike. When I took it into the shop, they told me they had no choice but to fit a whole new front gear system and pedals. That’ll set me back 350 lei (£60 or NZ$135). So that means I’ve done more walking than usual. The benefits of that are that I see more. Even practical things at times, like a handy appliance repair shop which I didn’t know existed, and the fact that I can my pay local rates bill across the road.

In a recent English lesson, an eleven-year-old boy showed me his maths homework. “I don’t like maths,” he said. I asked if I could take a picture of his homework, which you can see below. It’s a bit grainy, but you get the idea. I’m not surprised you don’t like maths. Who in their right mind would set something so boring and intimidating? So much is wrong there, I don’t know where to start. There are far too many questions, there’s far too little variety in them, the font size is way too small, the font itself – Times New Roman – is hopelessly unfriendly for kids, it’s not even typeset properly (it uses the letter x for times and a hyphen for minus), there are triple brackets (why inflict that on them?!), there’s nowhere near enough white space, and so on. I’d never dream of producing something like that. (Yes, fonts matter. The two I avoid at all costs are Times New Roman and the ubiquitous Arial.)

What happened to questions 31 to 42?

Crappy assessments aren’t limited to Romania, sadly. On Friday I had a lesson with a 17-year-old girl who will take the C1 Cambridge exam in about three months. I really can’t stand the reading part of the test, and neither can she. The first part of the reading we did was a text about the UK shipping forecast which I actually wrote about on this blog in 2022. A slightly bizarre topic for a young person with no connection to the UK, and although it would have been interesting for me in theory, the text was made to be utterly tedious; virtually nobody would want to read something so vapid. If you knew nothing about the topic before reading the next, you’d still know next to nothing afterwards. After that, we did another text – I can’t remember what that was about, though my student said it was even less inspiring than the one about the shipping forecast. The grammar part of the text isn’t quite as bad, but at times it spectacularly fails to test 21st-century (or even late 20th-century) English. In one question, it expected my student to come up with “Despite my not having spoken to him.” Practically nobody talks or writes like that anymore.

I was pissed off with Mum last week, but I’m over that now. As my brother said last night, you never quite know what she’s thinking. He also told me to save my money rather than make a costly trip to New Zealand this year. I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ll do. A bit sad in some ways, especially because Dad would clearly like to see me and even sent me some fares from Flight Centre (a NZ travel agent), mostly with China Airlines who are in fact Taiwanese.

I’ve had some more weird dreams. Two in the same night, in fact. In one of them I was working in some office job and went to the wrong floor and had to move a chair whose owner I didn’t know. When I asked who the owner was, I got a patronising reply. “Who do you think that chair belongs to?” Then in an even worse dream, I was transported back half a lifetime to my early twenties and another job which had some sort of initiation camp involving thousands of employees in a field. Everyone had special clothes delivered (By courier? Post? This wasn’t clear), but Mum and Dad came to deliver mine in person. I said to them, “I can’t do this,” to which Dad replied, “I know you can’t” and then I woke up. So often, the theme of these dreams is embarrassment.

A new café has opened up in the middle of town. I saw it on one of my walking trips last week. Whoever the clientèle is for this place, I’m very much outside it.

In Romania, avoiding places with bullshit English text is good policy. It’ll save you money for a start.

Scrabble. Last night I was able to see (on YouTube) the tail end of a fairly major tournament based in Canada. With seconds left on both players’ clocks, world champion Adam Logan was barely able to hold off Josh Castellano in the deciding seventh game of the final. He won that last game by twelve points. After the game, rather than just congratulating and commiserating, these elite players discussed potential moves in great depth, as if winning and losing were secondary to solving a fiendish puzzle. Adam is one of the best mathematicians alive, while Josh has a top job at Google. As for my progress, I started the latest round of the league with a good number of wins, but it’s an uphill struggle in the latter stages and I may have a fight on my hands to avoid relegation. We’ll see.

It’s five weeks since I fell over on the ice, and my back still hasn’t fully recovered. The pain (which luckily isn’t too bad) comes and goes. I’ll mention it to my after-hours doctor when I see him tomorrow to get my monthly supply of pills.

Kitty has been exceptionally friendly this week. Long may it continue.

Cat - Family - New Zealand - Scrabble

Now it looks like I’m not

February 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum went back to the eye clinic in Timaru on Wednesday morning. The sight in her left eye hadn’t improved as much as she’d hoped following her cataract operation. It turns out that many of the central blood vessels in that eye have basically died; I think it’s a form of macular degeneration. This came as a bit of a shock. She’s been given some treatment to stop it from regressing further, but I don’t know if she’ll ever get her central vision back to anything like normal. She’s having the cataract operation in the other eye (which hopefully hasn’t suffered the same fate) in a couple of weeks. Before Mum had her eye looked at, my parents went to the travel agents to book their flights. They’re flying to the UK on 18th May and returning in the second half of July. They’re flying Singapore Airlines, as they usually do. I wonder, if they’d done the eye business and the flight booking business the other way round, maybe they wouldn’t have booked those flights at all. Anyway, it’s good (and somewhat surprising) that they’re making the trip.

After I talked about all of this with my parents yesterday, conversation turned to my trip to New Zealand later in the summer. I didn’t have to read too closely between the lines to figure that Mum would rather I didn’t bother. That’s despite anything Dad said to try to make me feel better. The expense, finding someone to look after Kitty, and the journey itself, it’s a lot when your mother can’t really be arsed whether she sees you (even if she only has one half-decent eye to see you with). It’s a shame because New Zealand is a beautiful country and I’d already psyched myself up to go there, but I think I’ll wait till next year when my parents may not come to Europe. (There is always the possibility that Mum and Dad end up cancelling their flights for whatever reason, like in 2019 and 2020 and nearly last year too, in which case I probably will make the trip, even if a later booking hits me in the back pocket.)

When I spoke to Dad on Monday, I said that Mum would score above average on an IQ test, the values that she lives by are admirable, she has a good sense of humour, and she’s always been extremely helpful on a practical level. But unfortunately her emotional intelligence is similar to Kitty’s. Dad didn’t disagree with me; in fact he just laughed. I also said that he should make more use of Mum’s good sense of humour to help defuse stressful situations. Since I said that, Kitty has been lovely; she’s shown more affection that I can remember. The only snag is that once she’s fed up with sitting on my lap and snuggling up to me, she then uses me as a launching pad. Her back legs are so strong that when she digs them into me to launch herself, it can hurt. That’s a small price to pay though.

The latest round of the Scrabble league started earlier today, with me now up a division. In one of the games, my opponent opened with ZED in the middle of the board. Any six-letter extension to the left (and there are lots of these when you consider all the -ized words) would hit the triple word square. A bit later, with the extension still unused and unblocked, I found CAPONIZED for 72. I think to caponize (or -ise) means to castrate maybe a goose or a turkey, but I’m not entirely sure. That game, along with all the others, is still ongoing.

Family - Language teaching

Looks like I’m making the trip

February 11, 2026 by 0 Comments

We’ve had a sudden drop in temperature today; it briefly snowed this morning.

So last night I called Dad. I waited till half-ten (my time) to make sure that, barring something unforeseen, Mum would be out. He brought up the subject of Mum without my prompting. At one point the electrician showed up at my parents’ place, so our call was interrupted and went even later than expected. So, does Mum want me to come or not? Yes, he assured me, she absolutely does. He said that he could certainly see where I was coming from though, and she was just in a funny mood the day before. I’ll take his word for it. He even said that she’d now be quite upset if I didn’t make it over. So I guess that’s settled. I can safely book the trip. I really do want to see both Mum and Dad over there, as well as extended family and friends. Plus it’s just a great country to spend a month in – that’s the plan. Mum and Dad have virtually decided to spend two months in Europe, arriving in the middle of May, so I’ll likely be spending more time with them than I imagined. That can surely only be a good thing. As for Mum’s golf, she’d only played five holes when one of her playing partners took ill, so they called it a day.

Some other family news: my brother got a distinction in his master’s degree. His academic exploits appear to be limitless. It’s all mighty impressive, firstly because he didn’t have an academic bone in his body as a kid, and secondly it’s in business management, something that would bore me to tears (and I assumed would bore him to tears too, but clearly not). Mum is keen to attend his graduation in July, just before they go back home.

I’ve lost a student. She questioned my lack of relevant credentials. So, would you seriously prefer a teacher with a TEFL qualification but without all the practical experience I have? Yes. OK then, I’m sure you can find someone who fits the bill pretty easily. That was my second and surely my last session with her. If it’s taken over nine years for someone to be bothered by my lack of a formal qualification, I’m glad I didn’t get one. (I did want to take a course in Wellington, but the sheer expense and the fact that I’d have needed to take time off work put it beyond my reach.) I had a funny lesson last night with a woman in her late thirties. I’ve got a new sink. I hope you like it, she said. Bathroom or kitchen sink? Chiuvetă. I said the Romanian word to confirm that I’d understood her. No no no, sink, like when you sink music. God! Oh, you mean a new song! Of course I do. You need to guess what I mean. No, sorry I don’t. Often you can make a mistake and still get the message across perfectly fine. But what you said was too far away for me to reasonably guess, and sounded like another word that was totally plausible.

In yesterday’s Romanian lesson, Dorothy talked about her time as a Latin teacher and her use of mnemonics. She mentioned this because some of the Romanian imperatives come straight from Latin and form a nice mnemonic in that language. I find mnemonics extremely handy. Most recently I’ve used them to learn Scrabble words. In that crucial game in the recent league I played DISPONE to give me a narrow win, a word which I’d learnt as ONSIDE plus a P. (SPINODE is a valid anagram.) Soon though I’ll have to shift away from these memory aids, otherwise there will be too many phrases to remember.

Dreams - Family - International travel - Music - Scrabble

11,000 miles — will it be worth it?

February 10, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a lesson with Strong After Shave Guy, the 17-year-old who literally ten minutes ago told me he’d decided to become a policeman. To be accepted into the Romanian police, you have to pass tests in English, Romanian and history. It’s quite refreshing to have someone who doesn’t want to become a YouTuber or an influencer or to work in IT. (I’d have made an absolutely terrible policeman.)

This morning I spoke to Mum and Dad. My brother, my sister-in-law and my niece all came down with a severe and acute tummy bug which put them in hospital for a short time. Happily they’re fine now, but my brother – who hardly ever used to get ill – has had every bug imaginable since he became a father. Mum and Dad now seem pretty keen to come to Europe, probably in mid-May. That’s a 180-degree turn from just two weeks ago. I’m still planning on flying to New Zealand in early August, but when I mentioned my plan to them this morning, Mum showed (for the second time) ambivalence at best. I know Dad would very much like me to come over, but I really do think that (in the best case!) Mum wouldn’t care either way. I can’t help but be upset by this, because I certainly would like to see Mum out there. Tomorrow Mum’s got golf, so tonight I’m going to call Dad – making sure it’s late enough that she’ll have gone – and lay it on the line. Would she prefer it if I don’t come? Because if so, it’s a heck of a long way.

On Saturday I had dinner with Mark at the Drunken Rat in Piața Unirii. The atmosphere and staff were very pleasant, reminding me of those bars in Lyon a quarter of a century ago. I had some dish involving chicken and rice and, as usual in Romania, nowhere near enough “stuff” to mop it all up with. Before our meal we went to a nearby bar and each had a Guinness. This was Mark’s idea. There aren’t many places in Timișoara where you can find Guinness; I hadn’t had it for ten years at least. Sadly I won’t be seeing Mark much longer. His wife has got herself a deputy head position in a private school in Preston (northern England), so they’ll be out of here in June. I expect I’ll make a trip to Preston, a place I know very little about with the exception of its football team, at some point when I go back to the UK.

My latest go-to song is Duran Duran’s The Chauffeur which came out in 1982. Duran Duran are a real mixed bag for me – some of their stuff, even their biggest hits, does very little for me, but others (like The Chauffeur) hit just the right spot. Yesterday, when I met up with Dorothy in Scârț, I heard a song I’d never heard before – Catch the Rainbow by a British band called, well, Rainbow. This song came out in 1975.

As for dreams, in a recent memorable one – in fact the only recent dream I remember – I was on a bus in Alabama (why there I have no idea) and everyone was singing. Not Sweet Home Alabama; I don’t know what it was.

Scrabble. When I met Dorothy yesterday we played a game in Romanian. It was a bit of a struggle, though I won 302-227. Similar to the other time we played, I got several of the high-point tiles, though this time my letters just didn’t mesh that well. Once again Dorothy got both blanks, but she burnt them cheaply. And guess what? I finished in the promotion spots in the online league, at my fifth attempt. I came fourth with a record of ten wins and four losses; the top five get promoted. This was highly unlikely at one point; my record was sitting at 4-4 and in the next game to finish I was way behind at a very advanced stage. In that game I was fortunate to draw into a bingo that gave me a seven-point win. I then won all my remaining games. Even with all those wins, without that earlier come-from-behind win I’d have only finished sixth. This will mean I’ll get another crack at that elite British player – who took the top spot and beat me handily – when it starts up again on Thursday. Being in the division above will turn up the pressure just a notch. I’m fully prepared to be immediately relegated.

Family - Life :) - Scrabble - Tennis - Writing a book

I wish I could have known the story

February 3, 2026 by 0 Comments

Earlier today I went to the supermarket to get one or two bits and pieces. There was a very old lady, dressed in not much more than rags on a zero-degree day, and all of about four foot nine, looking at the sachets of hot paprika. “Not hot,” she said, “I want the not hot.” These sachets were on a special stand, away from the rest of the herbs and spices. I didn’t know where the mild paprika was, or even if they had any. There are supermarkets everywhere in Timișoara. That’s convenient, but it means that each of them has hardly any staff. I got frustrated. Can’t somebody help this woman? Eventually a young female member of staff located the lady’s non-spicy paprika. Then the old lady asked me where the small tins of tomato purée were. This time I could help her. Is there anything else I can help you with? She didn’t reply. I wanted to ask where she lived and whether she had children or grandchildren. There was a story there, spanning eight or nine decades.

Some good news – there has been a development with the books. The other lady (not Dorothy) with whom I went to Vienna in 2024 has put me in touch with a woman who runs a publishing house. She’s based some way south of here, close to the Danube. She seems to like both books, based on the samples I sent her. Today she asked me why the font size I used for the headings in the small book (the one that Dad illustrated) is so much larger than the body text. Well, it’s simply to make an impact, rather like a newspaper. After all, it’s not a textbook designed to be ploughed through from beginning to end. I’ll see what happens next, but the fact that she’s even asking about these sorts of details is encouraging.

More good news – my brother and I had practically given up on Mum and Dad coming over, but now they’re at least considering it. If they do make the trip, it won’t be for nearly as long as last time. A lot will depend on what happens with the flat in St Ives. Yesterday I had a chat with my brother. My nephew was running around constantly while my niece is very nearly walking. I don’t always get to see the kids, so that was great.

I watched the third and fourth sets of Carlos Alcaraz’s history-making win over Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open final. I missed the early stages when Djokovic apparently played lights-out tennis (at the age of almost 39!) and Alcaraz was in second gear. The age gap became pretty apparent as the match progressed, but even then Djokovic found a second wind of sorts in the fourth set and came close to sending the match to a decider. Djokovic also served pretty damn well. Amazingly that was the Serb’s first loss in a final at Melbourne – he’s won it ten times. But for Alcaraz, whose lack of weaknesses borders on terrifying, the sky’s the limit. That was his seventh major title and he’s now completed the career grand slam before his 23rd birthday. The match reminded me a bit of the 2005 US Open final, in which Agassi at 35 faced, and ultimately lost to, Federer who at the time was all-conquering. That was a great tournament. I was flatting then. We had no Sky TV so I just listened to it on the radio in between studying for my professional exams. The American commentator referred to the net as the twine, I seem to remember. Saturday’s women’s final wasn’t too shabby either, but with a busy work day I had no chance of seeing it.

In the latest round of the Scrabble league I’ve so far won four and lost four; I’m up in five of the six remaining games, so you never know… They may tweak things a bit soon – when experts join the league, they enter in the bottom division, mostly thrashing the poor schmucks who aren’t at that level. That isn’t fun for anybody.

At the weekend I was reading an article about UK salaries and pension plans and the expense of living in London and I thought about how much I’ve checked out of what you might call normal life. The great thing about living Romania – well, one of them – is that being here makes checking out perfectly fine. If I went back to New Zealand I don’t think it would be anymore and I’d likely go back to thinking that something is drastically wrong with me.

Family - Music

Priority C

January 28, 2026 by 0 Comments

Dad got a message back from the agents yesterday. The current tenants are still keen to buy. That’s a huge relief. Mum and Dad were down in the dumps, to put it mildly, after they hadn’t heard back.

With everything going on with my parents, and also my brother bringing up a family, anything I do here now feels of tertiary importance.

Just now I’ve been looking at flights from Budapest to Christchurch and back. It looks likely I’ll be going in the first half of August and coming back in the first half of September, but I haven’t booked anything yet.

While I was coming back from Lipova on Sunday, they had local (Banat) music programme on the radio. They played a doină, a traditional wistful song that at the time (as I was passing traditional villages) I felt was so beautiful that I pulled off the road to Shazam it. It’s called Omu-n Lume-și Știe Neamu by Traian Jurchela. It’s still very good now, but not quite what it was when I was bowling along and hearing it for the first time.

Family - Films - Photos - Romania - Scrabble

A profound sadness and some pictures of Lipova

January 27, 2026 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surviving eighties signage

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

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

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

This banister was amazing

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


Family - New Zealand - Romania - Scrabble

It may all fall through

January 23, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. There’s now the very real possibility that the St Ives flat sale will fall through. The prospective buyers haven’t been answering their phone. The system in England (but not Scotland) allows a buyer to pull out of a purchase right up until the moment you have the keys in your hand, and it doesn’t cost them a penny. In 2026 that’s simply nuts. This has caused my parents months of stress already, and who knows how many more months (or years) they will face. If the sale doesn’t happen, they’ll probably rent it out again. I can see them being stuck with the place until they’re 85.

Mum got her eye done on Tuesday. It’s clearly made a big difference, but she might never have 100% sight in that eye. There’s a buy-one-get-one-free offer over there, but under that scheme she’d need to wait till May to have the second eye done. She’s decided (to my surprise) to pony up the extra $5000 and get the other eye done next month. That now means there’s some chance that they’ll make a trip to Europe in spring or summer. I’d put it at 30%. Whether they do or don’t, I’m going to book a trip to New Zealand during my long, oppressive summer. Hopefully I can find a less roundabout route this time.

They’re had terrible weather in NZ, especially up north. I’ve seen the pictures of a landslide above a campsite; two people were killed and several more are missing.

Much closer to (my current) home, a murder took place on Monday in the village of Cenei, right next door to Bobda which is where I went on New Year’s Eve. A 15-year-old boy was killed by two other teenagers who then buried him in a garden. He may have been stabbed to death; the details are still murky. This murder has come up a lot in my lessons this week; the locals are understandably shocked by it.

Scrabble. I finished my latest round of matches with eight wins and six losses, yet again. I’m assuming here that my opponent in my last game logs in sometime before tomorrow afternoon (when his time bank is due to run out) to finish me off. This player is an International Master. I’m far from au fait with these accolades, but that clearly means he’s played at a very high level for several years. I thought I would beat him actually, but his final rack was much more flexible than mine and he was able to set himself up to play a sneaky word that I didn’t even know. This should mean that I’ll play in the same (sixth) division for a fifth straight round.

There have been some developments with the book which I’ll talk about next time.