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What the hell is it this time?

May 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today started off with a Romanian lesson. I made my fair share of mistakes, and only got into the swing of things when (alas) the 90 minutes were almost up. If I somehow had whole days of making conversation in nothing but Romanian – something approaching proper immersion – I could make great strides, but in the absence of that I keep hitting an unbreakable ceiling.

After Romanian it was back to English, with four lessons. My 16-year-old student is going to Bucharest tomorrow – a 12-hour journey – to get her hair dyed. As you do. The single pair of twins who live in the dark apartment near Piața Verde wanted to know about Mrs and Miss and Ms. This topic comes up surprisingly often. They were in fits of hysterics every time I said Ms, so of course I kept saying it, and in an increasingly exaggerated way. “So it was really as a result of discrimination that Mmmzzzzzz came about.” The girl said that Ms might even be her new favourite English word, supplanting her previous favourite, queue. One of my adult students says that her favourite English word is the rather banal although, because it sounds so delightfully English. An ex-student of mine, a man of about fifty, said his favourite was foreshadow. When I got home I had two online lessons, one with a man a little older than me and another with Octavian, the teenager who started at British School two months ago and says his classmates are hopelessly spoilt.

I spoke to my parents three times last week. Mum seems tired so often these days, as if she’s collapsing under the weight of life admin. I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish they could simplify everything, financially extricate themselves from the UK forever, and enjoy their remaining years. Their capacity to enjoy anything is hugely reduced by all this crap. I sympathise with them because it’s happening to me too. (I mean, international travel just to sort out a problem with my bank – and there’s no guarantee even of that – is crazy.) We’re all being bombarded by crap from all angles. I don’t do social media, I’m not in any active WhatsApp groups, and even I just want to punch a permanent mute button. I get yet another anxiety-provoking instant message and I’m thinking, what the hell is it this time?

Of course there’s always new tech that forces you to act in a way you’d prefer not to. On Friday, when picking up some overpriced ink cartridges, I was faced with the latest trick – a jumbled-up PIN keypad. Yeesh. For the previous ten years I’d been typing in my PIN instinctively as a series of finger movements without ever thinking what the numbers actually were. But this time the digits were arranged 562 904 317 8 or whatever. What actually is my PIN? I was relieved to get it on my second go.

We’ve had atrocious weather – bad enough to hit the orange alert level and make my phone emit ear-splitting noises. Tennis was a washout on both days at the weekend. This evening I was seriously worried about being struck by lightning on my bike. And there’s no respite in sight.

I’ve been reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. For some reason the previous owner of this flat had left a copy of the novel, printed in 1981, several years before she was born. (She left many other books behind and even – weirdly – a load of old photos of her as a child.) Not my thing really, but I’ve been enjoying (in a way) the depiction of Oxford University with all its obscure terminology that, as far as I know, still persists. The vernacular is similar at Eton and some other prestigious public schools. Given that so many senior British politicians took the Eton-and-Oxford route (or something close to it), it’s no wonder the political class over there is so hopelessly out of touch.

At the weekend I read an article about Nick Drake, a folk singer-songwriter who was underappreciated in his lifetime but has found considerable posthumous fame. He suffered badly from depression, and I sometimes listened to him (perhaps unwisely) during my own depressive spells before coming to Romania. He studied at Cambridge. I read an extraordinary letter that his (obviously highly educated and intelligent) father wrote, imploring him not to drop out of university. Nick Drake died of an overdose at the age of just 26.

I said I’d give up looking at cars until I got back from New Zealand, but tomorrow morning I’m going to have a look at a black 1.6-litre Dacia Logan. After that I’ve got my appointment with the neurologist. I wonder if anything will come of that.

Family - Life :)

A Dacia deal

May 20, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It looks like I might have bought a car. I met the owner in a McDonald’s car park earlier this evening. He intimdiated the hell out of me, after seeming quite personable on the phone. This red 2006 Dacia Logan looked in good nick, but what do I know, really? I offered him €2000, which was my absolute limit, and he accepted. It isn’t finalised yet – we’re going to meet in Iulius Mall to hopefully go through the process on Sunday. I expect to be intimidated again. The car has air con – an absolute must here – and interestingly it runs on both LPG and petrol. It starts on petrol and then uses LPG as long as it still has some in the tank. I expected the LPG tank to take up half the boot, but that wasn’t the case. I hope that the LPG will provide a fuel saving for me. Frustratingly I wasn’t able to test-drive the car properly. I drove it in the car park – literally two or three turns of the wheel – and that told me nothing apart from that car parks at one of the busiest times of the the week are horrible places to be when you’re out of driving practice.

This was the third Dacia I looked at this week. On Tuesday I took the bus into the depths of Calea Șagului to look at another red one. After hanging around an industrial park and eventually finding a coffee machine, I met the owner and gave the car a proper test-drive. I liked what I saw and felt. The major sticking point was the price. He wanted more than it was advertised at. Are you trying it on just because I’m foreign? Whatever the reason, bugger you. Then on Wednesday I looked at a navy blue Dacia in the south of the city, but discounted it immediately because it didn’t have air con.

Timișoara gets pretty congested at times, so I’m hardly salivating at the prospect of driving in town. Outside the city, though – well, that’s the whole point.

When I got home from viewing the car, I watched the first episode of Wild Carpathia on YouTube. Not quite as enjoyable as Flavours of Romania (you can find that on Netflix) but still well worth watching, especially for the bit at the end with the future king.

Mum and Dad were in a dull mood when I spoke to them this morning. All the banking stuff was getting them down, especially Mum. She looked shattered.

A busy Saturday in store tomorrow, with four lessons.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - The UK

One man’s obsession, and travel hassle

May 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

After I heard what had happened to my friend in Auckland, I wanted to find out more. He was bipolar and had a horrific time with that before I met him, though he seemed to have it under control. Sometimes during our Skype chats he’d come out with “I don’t know if I can be bothered with life”, but in a surprisingly upbeat way; I didn’t for one minute think he’d actually do it. I emailed the author of that blog, and he quickly got back to me. This guy mentioned my friend’s obsession with the two Malaysian incidents, and his delusions about the book he was writing on the subject. This book, jam-packed with conspiracy theories, was going to be a bombshell to rock the world of civil aviation. He said he had video conferences around the world and around the clock with the real movers and shakers. The reality was that only a handful of other conspiracists might have wanted anything to do with his book which he’d spent years on, and maybe the realisation of that sent him over the edge.

Without a doubt, my friend had a high IQ. He was eloquent, both in speech and in writing. He was also generous, often offering to pick me up or drop me off somewhere or other in his latest big swanky car. (His expensive cars riled the facilitator of the men’s mental health group. No job. Disability benefit. You’re gaming the system, mate.) The no-job thing was a biggie, as it is so often. Even a crappy job forces you to interact with people, it keeps you grounded, it keeps you in touch with the real world to some extent. I suggested that given his interest in aviation he should look for a job at the airport, but he never did. My aunt – Dad’s sister – married young and could afford not to have a real job, so she’s never had one. In fact she often childishly mocked people who had real jobs – “he does data, how boooring” – much to my annoyance. I’m sure her joblessness has come at a huge cost to her wellbeing. Anyway, I sometimes visited his house in a modern estate on the North Shore – not somewhere I’d like to live. His place was well looked after, but he’d put up weird signage everywhere, and he had about eight landline phones. In later years he bought a scooter, and I found a 2017 article about him patrolling the streets on his new vehicle. He was a nosy bugger, that’s for sure. He would come along to the mental health group tuned to police radio.

The author of that blog is a full-time conspiracist too – his posts are chock-full of anti-vax diatribes and lies about the 2020 US election being stolen – so I’ll give his little slice of the web a pass. Still, I appreciated him getting back to me so quickly.

I’d planned to visit the UK in July for my nephew’s christening, but the trip is becoming less doable by the day. I can’t find a flight back to Timișoara for much under £200. Before then I’ll have to get down south, somehow, probably taking a ludicrously expensive train. I’ll have to stay at least one night near the airport in Luton because the plane gets in so late. Then I wanted to get across to Birmingham and back to St Ives … it’s all just too bloody hard. I feel bad because I’d basically promised my sister-in-law that I’d be there, but what can I do? My best bet now is to stay two or three nights in Budapest when I come back from New Zealand in September, then go to the UK for my nephew’s first birthday.

On Wednesday I had my medical check-up for my driving licence. This included standing on one leg with my eyes closed and repeating whispered Romanian numbers with my hand over one ear. In all I had to visit six specialists in clinics on two floors. The whole process took 90 minutes including a fair bit of hanging around in a waiting room. I got the green light, so my next step is to go to Iulius Mall for the conversion. When I eventually get my hands on a Romanian licence I’ll buy a car, and that won’t be an easy task either. Registering a car is such a bureaucratic process, even for Romanians, that there are middlemen all over the city who you pay to do it for you.

The coronation is tomorrow. I’m not a monarchist, I’m not a republican, I have no strong feelings on the matter. For me, the royal family have always just been there. Still, I’m a little disappointed that I have to work and won’t be able to watch all the proceedings. From a pure visual perspective, it would have been great. I’d have enjoyed the talk of ampullas and sceptres and cherubs and tritons. Oh well. I’ll watch the highlights, or just wait until the next one.

The snooker. Yippee, it’s over! That was my first thought; it was enthralling, but such a time sink for me. What a final, though. Luca Brecel thoroughly deserved his victory, which almost nobody was expecting. Before arriving at the Crucible this year, he’d never won a single match in five attempts. Then he cleared up. A crucial moment of the final came in the last frame of Monday afternoon’s session. With the balls in extremely awkward spots, Brecel compiled one of the best breaks I’ve ever seen, and that put him 15-10 up going into the evening session. At that score, an awful lot needed to go right for Mark Selby and it nearly did. He won a tense scrappy frame to close to 16-12, then when he cracked open the reds in the following frame it was clear he meant business. Brecel hardly had a look in until the 32nd frame when Selby missed a black and then a brown, but finally the Belgian player was able to close out the match. I hope his win will help grow the game in continental Europe.

Letters of the alphabet sometimes rise to prominence in my lessons, Sesame Street style. Yesterday was brought to me by F and W. I’d like to do a series of posts on the alphabet because, unlike most normal people for which it’s incidental, letters and words have always been very meaningful to me.

Yesterday the mother of one of my students gave me ten eggs from the countryside, including a duck egg. In return I gave her two slices of pizza that I’d made. When I make pizza I follow Mum’s recipe – she’s always had a knack for making very tasty pizzas. I make the dough rather than buying the base – there’s something therapeutic about kneading it.

After two overcast days, it’s a beautiful day today.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

And now he’s gone

May 1, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

What a sad start to the day. This morning I thought, what ever happened to the guy in Auckland? We first met in 2009 at one of the mental health groups, and we kept in touch from time to time after I moved away. I last saw him in 2016, just before I left New Zealand. We had a longish Skype chat on 30th August last year, then I tried contacting him again and never got a reply. This happens to me quite often, so I didn’t think much of it. Then this morning I googled his name and found out he had died within ten days of our chat. The information I found was scant, and came from a single page discussing the two Malaysia Airlines crashes; he’d been trying to publish a book on the subject. He almost certainly committed suicide. It was hard to find information because he had changed his name twice, I didn’t know any of his other contacts, and I’m not on Facebook. I don’t know his exact age but he must have been in his late fifties, perhaps even sixty. For a time he presented a radio show in Auckland. We had all these weird Skype calls which were mostly monologues – I rarely got a word in – but at least we were in touch. And now he’s gone. I feel bad that I didn’t look him up much earlier than this.

Just before my Romanian lesson I saw an email from Dad. He and Mum had just got back from Christchurch where they attended the funeral of the 25-year-old teacher – Mum’s cousin’s son – who drowned in Wellington Harbour the week before last. As Dad said, what on earth do you say to his parents who are now living in a personal hell? There’s nothing you can say after a tragedy like this.

Dad also mentioned that they met my cousin – the one whom I spoke to three weeks ago – and one side of her face had dropped. She’d either had a stroke or was suffering from Bell’s palsy. She’s 53. There had been no mention of that from her mother – Mum’s elder sister – but then she never mentions anything.

I watched the snooker last night, but not the last three frames because I couldn’t stay up that late. When I hit the hay, Luca Brecel was playing great attacking snooker and had built a 9-5 lead. I missed a lot: Selby hit back to make it 9-8, and in the process compiled a maximum break, the first ever in a World Championship final. I don’t regret having an earlier night because I absolutely needed it. They play the two remaining sessions later today.

Next time I might write about my Romanian lessons.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

A desire to get moving

May 1, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning I called my parents from the Mehala car market. I recently looked at the many hundreds of photos from my trip around Romania in 2016. Isn’t this country beautiful? So far I’ve only been able to scratch the surface of it, so wouldn’t it be great to have my own set of wheels? I’m apprehensive about the whole thing though; buying and owning a car in Romania seems bureaucratically onerous and could add further layers of life admin that send my whole wobbly edifice crashing to the ground. And I really don’t want to spend much. Plus, if you write a blog you can find out the exact date that you last did something. I last drove a car on 1/10/17, which is bloody ages ago. On Wednesday I’ve got my medical tests – all six of them! – which I need for a Romanian licence, then I’ve made an appointment for 15th May to actually get my licence converted over. Probably something or other won’t be in order and I’ll have to come back weeks later. I know the drill by now.

It’s the last day of April, when Timișoara is guaranteed to be beautiful. Cycling through tree-lined Mehala on a quiet Sunday is quite lovely. Not all of it was quiet this morning, though. At the huge Orthodox church there was the usual hubbub of people coming and going, and there were queues of people filling up big bottles from the well. According to the official list, there are 92 wells dotted around the city, but the one outside Mehala Church has the best water, or so they say. I tried to encourage Mum and Dad to come to Romania next spring. They must be thoroughly sick of my brother and I banging that drum, though I hope they’re happy that their kids want to see more of them.

The snooker. Yikes. Two gripping semi-finals and a very late night for me. In the first match, Luca Brecel (who had pulled off an extraordinary win over O’Sullivan) trailed Si Jiahui 14-5 with 17 being the target. In other words, Si was playing out of his skin and Brecel was gone. Until he wasn’t. Brecel went for broke, and got lucky when Si missed a green in the last frame of Friday’s brilliant session. Everything the Belgian player touched turned to gold, and he continued in the same vein when they returned yesterday. I didn’t see the end of the match because I was playing tennis, but he won eleven straight frames and ran out a 17-15 winner. Nobody had previously won a match at the Crucible from nine frames behind. I just hope the loss – on his debut – doesn’t permanently scar the Chinese player. If that match was free-flowing, the other semi between the two Marks – Selby and Allen – was the polar opposite; it was chess with balls. Selby’s shtick is to grind his opponent into the dust with tactical play. Allen just happens to be rather good at that type of snooker too, and the two of them tore hunks out of each other in a match spanning 13½ hours. The balls ran awkwardly and sizeable breaks were rare. Even the aging Scottish referee seemed to put on extra years during the match. Last night it seemed Mark Selby had finally worn his opponent down as he led 16-10, needing just one for victory. Great, some sleep! But Selby kept missing chances to win. Each frame was a drawn-out battle. Allen squeaked out five of them to close to within one, then at last Selby got in around the black and sealed the deal. Even then, he had a black barely wriggle into the corner pocket. I’m two hours ahead of the UK, and the match finished at ten to three my time. There’s now the small matter of the final between Brecel and Selby, where the winner is the first to 18. The conventional wisdom is that Selby will win, perhaps easily, but I’m not so sure. For one thing, you’d expect Selby to be shattered after his efforts.

Family - Language learning - Life :) - Other sports

Losing my aspiration

April 27, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a sunny morning as I write this. That helps enormously. In the old place, my mood wasn’t so weather-dependent. On Monday I had my usual lesson with the single set of twins in their ground-floor flat. No light ever penetrates the place. That would drive me to despair.

Earlier on Monday I had my Romanian lesson with Dorothy, the English lady, and Coco, our teacher. Coco has a good command of English but we all spoke Romanian throughout. She told me I needed to watch my pronunciation of the Romanian t. In English it’s aspirated – put your hand over your mouth as you say an English t, and you’ll feel a breath of air, but in Romanian it isn’t. To Romanian ears, an aspirated t can come across almost as a ch sound. There was so much else to unpack, such as when to use articulated nouns and when not to. Romanians have great trouble with this dilemma in English, and I still have fun and games with this in Romanian too. For instance, I started the previous sentence with Romanians, but in Romanian that would be Românii, which is the equivalent of the Romanians. Another quirk here is that nationalities and names of languages aren’t capitalised in romanian – I prefer that to what we do in english – but obviously Românii needs a capital R in my example because it’s the first word of the sentence. Coco is hot on all this stuff – she doesn’t gloss over it as some (often bad) teachers do – and she recognises that both Dorothy and I actually care.

Mum and Dad desperately need to simplify their financial lives. They recently committed to a three-year rental contract on one of their flats in St Ives, and they’ve had to open a new account with a different British bank so they can receive rent payments because their other account is about to be closed. All of this means being on hold at 11pm and pressing one and pressing two and getting nowhere. It’s all getting both of them down mentally, and in Mum’s case it’s affecting her physically too. I was happy yesterday when Mum said she’d been gardening, which is something she enjoys.

Snooker. Other than Luca Brecel’s 13-11 win over Mark Williams, the lack of close matches made the second round something of a disappointment, but the quarter-finals – four super-high-stakes matches played over just two days – definitely made up for that. Last night I had to pull the plug as Si Jiahui made it 11-11 against Anthony McGill. Ronnie O’Sullivan’s earlier exit ramped up the pressure in that final session to a near-unbearable level. Si won in the end, 13-12, to make the semis. What a tournament he’s had on his debut, having also come through three qualifying matches. McGill, who also had to qualify and had been playing so well, will be licking his wounds for sure. The real shock though was Ronnie. He’d built up a 10-6 lead against Brecel despite being nowhere near his best, and then from the snippets I saw of yesterday’s session he didn’t even want to be there. Brecel went for everything, got just about the lot, and rattled off seven straight frames in no time. The semis are Brecel against Si, and Mark Allen against Mark Selby. To my mind, Selby is the clear favourite because he’s so difficult to break down and he thrives in long matches. The semis, which start later today, are a marathon over the best of 33 frames.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The new religion

April 9, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Where I come from it’s Easter, but in Romania, where the Orthodox church dominates, we have to wait a week.

My teaching volumes were down last week, mainly because of the girl who has gone to Dubai and the 20-year-old guy who told me he “couldn’t see me again”, quite possibly because I argued with him about his favourite topic – cryptocurrencies. (A misnomer if ever there was one. They aren’t currencies at all.) Crypto is nothing short of a religion in Romania, but if you don’t have a willy, or if you do have one but it’s over 35 years old, you’re highly unlikely to be an adherent.

This morning I had a 7:45 start for my online lesson with the woman who lives near Bucharest, then it was off to Dumbrăvița for maths with Matei. My route goes past one of Timișoara’s many second-hand clothes shops – there are always hordes of people outside waiting for it to open at 9:30 – then I pass the tram cemetery full of rusty Ceaușescu-era hulks, then I go over the railway line. The crossing is at the 571-kilometre post but I don’t know what it’s 571 kilometres to. Bucharest, which would make sense, is less; Constanța, by the Black Sea, is certainly more. The crossing is dangerous because often the lights flash and the barriers go down but no train appears for several minutes; drivers often give up and turn back, while bikers and pedestrians go round the barrier. Then of course eventually the train does come. There are flowers outside the crossing.

Yesterday I had a long Zoom chat with my cousin in Wellington. Her two eldest sons are at university. I saw the youngest one (going on 15) who plans to join the police. We talked about the fallout from the pandemic and I mentioned that I used to watch Dr John Campbell’s Youtube channel. In fact I watched it near-religiously in the early headless-chicken days; I found his videos informative, unbiased, and a voice of calm. Around Christmas 2021 I felt I’d gleaned all the information I needed from his channel, so I stopped tuning in. Since then, unbeknown to me, Campbell has gone off at a sinister tangent, peddling misinformation about vaccines and drugs like ivermectin, and falsely saying that Covid deaths have been inflated. What a shame.

The temperature plummeted in the early part of the week. On Tuesday we had unseasonal snow and howling winds. Out of my window I can see an aerial that wobbles if a bird lands on it; in the strong wind it was swaying madly and I wondered if it would come crashing down. I live in one of the blocks in the background of the photo below. The aerial is atop a corner shop (dairy in New Zealand); next to that is some cosmetic place and a popular bar (known as a birt here) where the locals sit outside. On the right is a street with two slightly different names.

Tomorrow I’m meeting up with Mark. Our plan is to play pool or snooker at a hall not too far from where I live. I haven’t done that for ages. I was always so hopeless, and although I liked snooker, I never enjoyed pool very much because it was always dominated by extroverts and drinking and flirting. Right now, the qualifiers for the World Championship are going on – a ten-day do-or-die marathon where players have to negotiate as many as four best-of-19-frame matches to book a place at the hallowed Crucible. I’ve been dipping into some of the commentary-free matches. Stephen Hendry fell at the first hurdle. He was barely a shadow of the young whippersnapper who utterly dominated the game back in the nineties.

The centre of town last Sunday
Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

A life of slime

April 2, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a wet, miserable day. After my first outing on the tennis court last Sunday, you could forget it today. It’s been a real mixed bag – only 3 degrees and sleet on Tuesday, but beautiful yesterday.

Life with my sinus problem ain’t a whole lot of fun. I haven’t had one of those excruciating headaches since December, but the low-to-medium-level pain (like I have right now) is unremitting. Blowing my nose eases the pain; often I only have to tap the right side of my nose and a jet of colourless slime shoots out of my left nostril at a rate of knots. Sometimes I don’t even know where the gunk has gone. Dad said it’s in Embarrassing Bodies territory – get on TV and maybe I could be sorted. Whenever I blow my nose during our Skype calls, Mum says, “I hope you don’t do that in your lessons.” I do try to tone it down, but what about me, Mum? She’s more bothered that I might briefly annoy my students than she is about my pain. I shouldn’t be surprised. Dad suffered from terrible migraines when I was growing up, and Mum’s sympathy cable was permanently unplugged. The only emotion she showed was anger. What will they think of me if we don’t show up to Jackie’s party? Or if I turn up alone? Thankfully Dad’s migraines are fewer and farther between these days.

On Monday I managed to catch my brother on WhatsApp when my nephew was up and about. It was great to see him grinning away on his playmat, but my brother and his wife are struggling with lack of sleep. My brother looked whacked. In the middle of my call, my sister-in-law’s parents showed up to provide some respite, but I could tell my brother would have preferred it if they’d stayed away. I don’t envy him one bit. Some time ago he said it’ll be a “one and done”, but we’ll see. This morning I read an article about only children. They’re selfish and spoilt according to the stereotype, but people with siblings can sure as hell be selfish and spoilt too.

Last night I had an interesting lesson with the Romanian guy who lives in London; he now has two sons. He’d just made a trip back to Romania, and said he felt a sense of greyness on his arrival back in the UK. I know exactly what he means because I’ve felt the same thing many times. That journey from the airport; the grey M25 and M11 with an equally grey sky overhead. He said that people in Romania were happier despite being poorer. That was something I noticed on only my second evening in Timișoara. It was a sunny Sunday October evening and I was walking along the road from the guest house to the university campus to grab some dinner. I passed a constellation of ugly communist-era blocks of flats which had a park outside, full of basic play equipment and half a dozen cheap-looking ping-pong tables. Kids were playing, people were walking their dogs, and all the ping-pong tables were being used. I was amazed how happy everybody seemed. I got the same feeling last night – another sunny evening – when I collected my 15 litres of water; not much money but a real sense of community. In contrast, when I have my lessons in well-to-do parts of town where Porsches abound, there’s no sense of community at all.

This afternoon, in one of those well-to-do areas, I managed to convince my 15-year-old student that a haggis was a hedgehoggish creature that inhabits the Scottish highlands. We read an article on Haggis scoticus from the Daily Record. Then I asked him to check the date on the article, which was 1st April 2021.

Last Sunday I had a wander through the woods with Mark and his two dogs. It was great to be out in nature and to hear the hammering of woodpeckers and humming of insects instead of the rumble of traffic. One thing I love about Timișoara is how easily you can escape from urban life.

The culmination of the snooker season is upon us once more. The sport is going through a rough patch with several Chinese players having recently being banned for match fixing. I also wonder where the fresh new faces will come from: it seems to be a middle-aged man’s sport. Is whiling away hours in a snooker hall, rather than on TikTok, even something a teenager would do these days? At the moment the Tour Championship, featuring the season’s top eight players, is in full swing, then later this month it’ll be the big one – the World Championship, the one event in the game that dwarfs all others.

I’m currently reading The Twisted Ones, which (unsurprisingly) is a horror novel. The author is Ursula Vernon, who wrote the book under the pen-name T. Kingfisher.

Family - Life :)

When brave-face mode is deactivated…

March 14, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I Skyped my parents on Sunday night. Mum looked horrendous. She had that stony-grey look on her face that she always has after an argument, probably because she’d just had an argument. But she was also clearly sleep-starved, and she was suffering from the neck pain that has been bugging her for months if not years. Only two people on the planet, Dad and me, ever see her like this. With everyone else, including my brother who’s like married and stuff, she snaps into brave-face mode. They recently got a letter from Barclays saying they’d be closing their account just like they did to mine, so that didn’t help her mood, but so much of this is caused by their house. Hassles and challenges and regrets that will only ever end if they sell the place, and then what? During most of the pandemic, when they still lived in the large but practical house that they built in 2004, things seemed to be on a nice even keel. And now this. It’s all so upsetting.

On Sunday morning I met Mark – the English guy – and we went down the bike track to La Livada, just past Sânmihaiu Român. We had a beer – at 11:30 – and a bite to eat. I had a goulash, which was tasty and had more of a kick than usual; I just wish it could have been bigger. The hot bread was the most wonderful bread I’d tasted in years and I’m not kidding. We talked about the varied challenges of teaching. At his private school, where the fees are an arm and a leg, a major problem is horribly spoilt kids. We saw a cyclist whizz by with a camera attached to his helmet; Mark called him a spaceman. Mark reckoned he saw a jackal, which looks like a cross between a wolf and a fox, when he was walking the dogs recently – this was funny because he used not to believe in the existence of jackals. (There is also a British military vehicle called a Jackal, which my brother knows perhaps too well.) We had a coffee at Porto Arte, the place I’ve been to a dozen times or more, then we parted ways. He and his girlfriend plan to leave Romania in June 2004.

Yesterday was quite productive, much more so that my culmea day of a week earlier. I turned up to the Direcția Fiscală, the place where you pay all your local bills and fines, only to find that it had moved to the mall. Ugh, not again. It must have only just moved because other people were doing the same as me. Someone piped up that if you’re just a person and not a company, you can go to any post office instead of the damn mall, so I went to the one round the corner. I wanted to know what was happening with my rates. Why hadn’t I received a bill? I was armed with a cash-stuffed envelope, because I never know if anyone will accept cards. The lady at the desk found me immediately on her system, and said I owed 227 lei. That’s about £40 or NZ$80. “Is that for the whole year?!” I asked in disbelief. Yes. Forty quid. I’d brought all the cash I had, which was at least ten times that. Part of living in Romania, as an outsider, is not knowing how many digits you’ll have to pay for something. Take train tickets. Opt lei, vă rog. Sorry, eight? Really? To get all the way from here to here on the map? Then the next day I’ll have some medical procedure which will be nouă sute și ceva – nine hundred and something – and my reaction is wha-wha-wha-fa-fa-fa.

After paying that shockingly small bill, I met the English lady who’s been helping me with the dictionary, then went to Piața Unirii to pick up my translated electricity bill, then had my ciorbă – a beef and bean soup – at the market, where I also bought a block of cheese. The cheese woman wanted to know where I was from – I could tell that “no, I actually live here” didn’t fully compute with her. When your rates bill is only forty quid, it starts to compute a bit more. I had four lessons including a fairly productive one with the single pair of twins, then I set about getting all my Barclays bits together. That meant a load of tedious scanning and PDFing, and after having to start all over when the page timed out – how aggravating – I managed to send them all the documents online. What will happen next is anyone’s guess.

I’m in a much better place than even three days ago, and let’s hope I can stay that way. To see Mum like that is a real worry though.

Family - Language teaching - Life :)

The freight train is coming

March 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a long chat with my brother last night. I’m thinking of seeing the three of them over Orthodox Easter weekend. If his grandparents aren’t able to see the little one, at least his uncle can. Mum and Dad have mentioned the cost of the flights as a reason for not coming over. They have loads of legitimate reasons which I entirely understand, but the cost ain’t one, I’m afraid. They’ve just spent almost ten times that amount – money they won’t get back – on an EV. Edit: They will of course save money on fuel, and isn’t there some kind of rebate? But it’s still a fast-depreciating asset.

My work week (28 sessions totalling “just” 32½ teaching hours – unusually many short sessions) is over. Last night I had a weird 90-minute session with the bloke who lives near the Dartford Tunnel in London. As usual he read an article out loud a paragraph at a time, but this time he used ChatGPT to translate the text into his native Romanian, bit by bit. He could hardly contain himself, such was the quality of the translation in his view. “Sounds like you don’t need me anymore, then,” I said. Supposedly it can even translate jokes, and he showed me a letter he’d written to a phone company that was ChatGPT-generated. Although it’s free and intriguing, I haven’t tried ChatGPT, mainly because it forces you to create an account. Why should I have to do that? I know, I know, I have accounts with everything else. Like, for instance, one of the clinics here in Timișoara. Call reception and there’s no receptionist on the other end, just a message telling you to create an account – the 47th goddamn thing in your life that needs a password. You have no choice in the matter. More alarmingly, this artificial so-called intelligence is ripping jobs away from us like a freight train – it’s already gathering serious momentum and will soon be unstoppable. As a private teacher I’m probably safe for the next 10 to 15 years, but all bets are off after that.

This morning I had a one-hour online lesson with a Bucharest-based woman, then I cycled to Dumbrăvița for a pair of two-hour lessons with teenage boys. From 10 till 12 I had maths with Matei. He informed me that the boy I’d be seeing after lunch had just joined him at British School, and in only one week had already become slightly unpopular. “The rich kid,” Matei said. His father owns a computer hardware company. After a packed lunch – a cheese and salami sandwich, a boiled egg and some fruit – I had my English lesson with the rich kid, who can at times be conceited but wasn’t today.

I’ve just been reading something about the demise of cursive writing. I found the whole thing a bit puzzling, because it suggested that there were only two types of handwriting – the flowery swashy style and letter-by-letter printing, when surely there’s a very practical in-between. When I was at school, the word “cursive” was never mentioned – we just called it “joined-up writing” – and a version of that is what I use to this day. Romanian kids, interestingly enough, still learn what I would call proper cursive. The Romanian cursive has some distinctive features like a curvy x, like the one I use when writing maths, but with an added crossbar.

Here are some recent samples of my handwriting from my whiteboard. It’s slightly less joined-up than normal, because I’m sacrificing some speed for an increase in legibility. Note that in the third sample, my student has written “where” and “were” in the bottom-right corner with w‘s that look like pairs of crossed v‘s; that’s typical of Romanians – their native language is w-less, so they don’t develop a quicker way of writing the letter.