Family

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

An agonising day

November 30, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’d just about got over my latest kidney stone business when Sunday happened. I woke up at about 5:30 with sinus pain, the sort that eats into the quality of my life without completely wrecking it. I got up just before eight. The pain in my left sinuses was still there, and getting more intense. By nine it had become unbearable. Sheer agony. I didn’t go to bed, because pacing up and down helps relieve the pain at least somewhat. Normally the excruciating pain lasts two hours, but what if it doesn’t this time? What if the torture lasts hours or days on end, what then? It did start to subside at eleven, and I went to bed until half-two. I couldn’t eat anything – it wouldn’t have stayed down. The rest of the day I was on a go-slow, and even two days later I feel devoid of energy. Yesterday I felt a strange calmness come over me, as if nothing in the outside world really mattered. No TV please, and no internet if I can help it. Do my lessons and don’t do much else.

Yesterday I had an early-morning lesson, then went to the doctor’s surgery for blood and urine tests. When I got back I made myself a late breakfast (because I had to fast before the tests), and in the middle of eating it, the phone rang. You haven’t paid. The lady used the posh Romanian word for paid, achitat, instead of the common word, plătit. You’re right. How embarrassing. In the afternoon I had the face-to-face lesson with the single pair of twins, and I passed by the doctor’s on the way. All the tests came to 356 lei (£63; NZ$120), so it wasn’t especially cheap. I’ll post my results next time. I seriously need to consider surgery on my sinuses. My normal doctor, who is generally very good, prescribes me pills or sprays that are of very little benefit. As Mum said, spray and walk away.

I’ve been quickly getting through (and thoroughly enjoying) The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel. It’s the second book of hers I’ve read, the first being Station Eleven which is all about a fictional pandemic and its aftermath (I reread bits of it at the start of the Covid outbreak).

Mum and Dad are now on their way from Singapore to Christchurch. They Skyped me from the airport this lunchtime (my time). All around I could see Airportland. Flashing (and surprisingly fast) buggies, travelators that seemed to stretch miles, and a sign saying Changi Terminal One. Changi consists of four vast terminals. They were too tired to enjoy their stay in Singapore much this time, although they’d had a very good beef dish from a street market, or bar, the night before. On the London-to-Singapore leg, they had to contend with a screaming baby for the entire 13½ hours. When I spoke to them today, they dearly wanted to get home.

Two new students tomorrow – a twelve-year-old boy and his mother, separately. Tomorrow will be St Andrew’s Day, the first of two public holidays. Thursday (1st December) is Romania’s national day. Many Romanians have decided to take Friday off as well, giving them a five-day weekend.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music

Feeling cabbagey

November 25, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

The walls of my Ceaușescu-era apartment are thick, solid concrete, so sound from other flats rarely travels into mine. Smells often do, however, and there’s a distinct meaty cabbagey whiff right now. Romanian cuisine is often meaty and cabbagey, especially at this time of year.

To get to the nitty-gritty, it’s been a pretty shitty week. I had stomach pain on Monday night, just after I wrote my blog post, and I hardly slept at all. It’s my kidney stones again, isn’t it? Luckily Tuesday is when my usual after-hours doctor is on duty, so I saw him after muddling through four lessons. It was hosing it down and I was sapped of energy but I had to make the trip. I was like a drowned rat when I got there. After waiting for a whole family to be seen to, he did all the usual checks like blood pressure, then I lay down on the table for an abdominal ultrasound. He checked my organs in turn – at one point he examined my liver for Covid-related damage of which there was none – finishing with my kidneys. I now just have one stone – not three like in February – which is in my right kidney. It’s 5 mm wide which is only borderline passable. I also had some tiny stony stuff in my left kidney, which he called “sand”. He seemed surprisingly unfazed by all this, and gave me some pills to relieve the pain caused by the build-up of gas. The pain was nowhere near as severe and persistent as nine months ago, coinciding with the start of the war in Ukraine, and it’s basically gone away now, but I feel whacked. Yesterday I even managed to fall off my bike on the way home from a lesson. I was in a rush, it was wet, my handlebar grip flew off, and I ended up with just a grazed knee and hand. It could have been something far messier. I’m now going to get the cheapest hairspray I can find, which hopefully will glue the grip to the handlebar.

I had a quick chat with Mum and Dad yesterday. They were in the library next to a shelf with Andy McNab books, and had to keep the volume down. They’re always worried about me, what with me being stuck here on my own. Their train from Poole to Cambridge on Monday was at a standstill for two hours, meaning they hit Cambridge in rush hour and a relatively simple journey turned into a stressful messful ordeal. Nothing has been simple about their trip. They fly back home tomorrow night and frankly they can’t wait.

I’ve had a good amount of work this week, though less than it feels like I’ve had. The lesson with the four twins went decently – I now have a handle on the girls’ unusual names; I’m no longer drowning in a sea of A’s and E’s and I’s. One incredible thing keeps happening with teenagers (though sometimes younger children too) and old rock bands. On Monday the single twins both wrote a paragraph about their favourite band: Metallica. Their favourite song, they said, was Nothing Else Matters. It is an amazing song, and according to Wikipedia it was released on my 12th birthday, which is bloody ages ago now. On Tuesday my 16-year-old female student came in a Guns ‘n’ Roses top with pictures of magazine cuttings dated 1988. On Wednesday I had an online lesson (finishing at 10:15 pm – ugh) with a 15-year-old boy who popped up on my screen in an AC/DC T-shirt. The eight-year-old girl in Germany – I’ll see her online later today – said her favourite band was Depeche Mode. It keeps coming. Admittedly I’m dealing with a tiny sample size here, but if it’s even partly replicated elsewhere, it’s nothing short of a phenomenon. And why? I asked Guns ‘n’ Roses Girl why, because I was so intrigued by that point. Modern music is really bad, she said. If she means mainstream modern music, I agree 100%.

Another interesting lesson was with a 32-year-old bloke who likes his football and parties. He’s close to an absolute beginner. We did some food vocab, and I asked him to pick out the foods in the pictures that he’d eaten in the past week. Chicken, burgers, pizza, chips, cakes, and hardly a fruit or vegetable to be seen. Good god man, you’re a human dustbin. I sometimes have a go at Mum on this blog, and immediately feel terrible about it, but she made sure us two boys got a proper healthy diet, which we’ve largely maintained in adulthood. Lack of McDonald’s and the like in our home town (there’s one now) certainly helped.

Family - The UK - Writing a book

The book, and a lack of pommy pride

November 19, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I made some progress today. First, I got my passport notarised and sent of a load of bumph to Barclays which might mean I can get my money back. Second, the chance that the plumber comes over to look at my bathroom went up. Third, I had a video call with my friend from Birmingham. At the end of a long chat, I mentioned my book idea and my need of a English–Romanian translator. His girlfriend works as a translator, and although she certainly can’t translate anything into or out of Romanian, she might know someone who can, so I’m going to have a video call with her on Sunday morning.

Yesterday I spoke to Dad who for various reasons was on his own at my brother’s place. “It’s bloody cold,” he said. Meaning inside. My brother and sister-in-law are very sparing with the heating because it’s got so expensive. Two people with decent incomes. And a baby. Crazy shit. My parents had gone down on the train. Return tickets were over £100 each. What are you even paying for? Dad used the word “grim”, just like Mum had done, to describe the current state of the UK. He said that if I were to leave Romania, moving back to New Zealand (rather than the UK) would be a no-brainer. I look back to my early days of working in NZ, around 2004-2006. I’d get all the jokes about “you poms”, but I could tell there was really a grudging respect for Brits and all our rich history and culture and music and comedy and pragmatism. I was proud to be a pom. But not now. It’s going to take a long time to turn the oil tanker around. Turfing out the current lot at the next election would be a good start.

I watched the Artemis I launch on Wednesday morning (weirdly, it took off in the middle of the night in Florida). The will-it-or-won’t-it-actually-go added to the drama. I missed out on the thrill of the space race that my parents lived through, so to see a new space age dawn in real time was an exciting moment. The first human moon landing since 1972 is planned for 2025.

Family - Life :)

Opt miliarde

November 16, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

That’s the current world population, more of less, written in Romanian. Pretty much the whole of continental Europe uses some version of “milliard” to mean what we (in the English-speaking world) call a billion, and honestly it makes more sense. A billion used to mean a million million, but then the Americans repurposed billion to mean a thousand million, because no-one would ever need to talk about a million million, and eventually Britain, Australia and New Zealand followed suit as they so often do. A million million (which, it turns out, we do need to talk about) is a trillion. This rescaling which means you get a new word every thousand (instead of every million) is kind of messy. A quintillion, for instance, isn’t the fifth power of a million, but it isn’t the fifth power of a thousand either. It’s the sixth power of a thousand, or 1 with 18 zeros after it, which under the old system would just be a trillion. By the way, in the “grains of rice on a chessboard” problem there are just over nine quintillion grains, under the rebased system, on the last square. And even further by the way, Indians don’t use millions and billions in their everyday lives at all as far as I know; they use the lakh (100,000) and crore (10 million), so they’d call the world population “800 crore”.

Whatever you call it, it’s too many bloody people. If you’re 48, the world’s population has doubled in your lifetime. If you’re 69 it has tripled. If you’re 95 it has quadrupled. Britain now has miserably many people; it’s an island coming apart at the seams. I spoke to Mum this morning – she Skyped me from the library so had to be quiet – and she called the UK grim. Dad said I have a better quality of life in Romania – a country doing its bit to combat the world population explosion – than I would in the UK and I agree. (They’re keen for me to go back to New Zealand at some point, though.)

I was already blogging when we hit seven billion. At six billion I was at university. I was seven when we crashed through the five billion barrier and a newborn boy was christened the five billionth baby. But, but, how do they know? What’s my number?

Family - Photos - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

A flappy board and some grounds for optimism

November 15, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Above is the popular split-flap departure board at Timișoara Airport (5/11/22) showing that my parents’ flight had landed. These clicky clacky things used to be ubiquitous, but they’re now few and far between. Even this bad boy won’t be long for this world, sadly.

I don’t often get emails from Mum, but she sent me a newsy one on Saturday, perhaps from the local library as they don’t have internet access in their flat in St Ives. Yesterday they were going to the Remembrance Day parade. As Mum pointed out, all those years ago when there was still a small band of First World War veterans (!) we all had to wrap up warm. Not so now. They’re going down to my brother’s place on Wednesday, for four days. They’re taking the train which will be expensive. She talked about New Zealand’s dramatic win over England in the women’s rugby World Cup final, and how some New Zealanders are finding the women’s game a better spectacle than the more stop-start men’s version. I’d like emails to and from Mum to become a more regular thing. (I then got a message from Dad saying he really wasn’t feeling well.)

Another Mum thing. When they were here I played tennis; when I got back I saw Mum was following the Paris Masters final between Djokovic and the Danish 19-year-old Holger Rune on her phone. Djokovic had won the first set but was losing in the second. I found a stream for her, and the three of us watched the remainder of the match. What a finish it was, as Rune staved off six break points in a marathon last game (18 minutes?) to pull off a logic-defying 3-6 6-3 7-5 win. Mum was disappointed but I was happy the plucky teenager got the win in the biggest moment of his short career to date.

The newly renovated buildings, including the Lloyd “Palace”, in Piața Victoriei this sunny afternoon

The US midterms. Two years ago the gradual drip-feed of results added to the drama. What’s happening in Washoe or Clark or Pima or Maricopa? When will we get the latest dump? All these obscure-sounding counties that are actually not that obscure because they’re heavily populated. It’s been much the same this time around. The phenomenon of Trump has focused more international eyes on the minutiae of American politics than ever before. And rightly so – it’s all very consequential. I always go back to the 2000 election and the Florida recounts. A little over two years later, my brother was in sodding Basra and we were scared shitless. What if Gore, who (don’t forget) won more votes than Bush overall, had become president instead? The 9/11 attacks may still have happened, but I imagine the world in general would have gone down a less destructive path. Now there’s a chink of light with the Democrats holding the Senate (it would be nice if they could gain a 51st seat in next month’s Georgia run-off) and the Republicans probably gaining just a bare majority in the House. With what happened in war-ravaged Kherson on Friday as well, there is something to be cheerful about at last.

The impulsive and slightly repulsive Elon Musk recently bought Twitter for a barely imaginable sum of $44 billion, and it’s now it’s in some kind of malaise, freefall, meltdown, I don’t know what. A few years ago I joined Mastodon because I liked the name, but never really posted anything, so in the last few days I’ve been on there, trying to understand how it works, in the hope that I can find a social media platform that doesn’t totally creep me out.

My early new year’s resolution for 2023 is to get two books published. One on common mistakes that Romanians make in English (most of the donkey work for that is done) and another about a guy I used to play tennis with. How to make this all happen I’m as yet unsure about, but writing my resolution here won’t do the chances of it any harm.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Lack of problems can be a problem

November 14, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just got back from dinner in deepest darkest Dumbrăvița with Mark, the teacher at British School. It was the first time I’d met his girlfriend (or fiancée actually) since last Christmas. He’d made chicken curry and banana cake. All very nice. Then he showed me pictures of their various European travels.

Before that I played tennis. We played one set that needs a mention, or else I’ll forget about it. Playing with Adelin, the guy who could barely hold a racket a few weeks ago but has sporting talent in spades, we trailed 2-4 with my serve to come. I gave them a generous call on a wide ball after a long rally to give them 0-30, which then became 0-40, but we reeled off the next five points for the game. We led 5-4 and 6-5 but wound up in a tie-break in which we fell 6-2 down. Adelin hit a stone-dead net-cord to save set point number three, and we won both the next two points on my serve to bring up set point at 7-6. Alas, we lost the last three points, and that was finally that.

My new students. First, the twins. Two sets of them, aged seven and nearly nine. I got them to write some basic information about themselves. Name, age, favourite food, favourite colour, favourite school subject, and so on. Maybe not the best idea because the seven-year-olds struggled a bit to write even in their native language, although I obviously helped them as much as I could. How you’re supposed to deal with thirty of the little blighters who all want your attention at the same time I have no idea. Then it was “head, shoulders, knees and toes” and Simon Says. “Now sit down … but I didn’t say Simon Says!” Every time I do this I think it’s bloody hilarious that I worked in insurance in a previous life. Just how? Then, on the same day, I had my first session with Ana. Another Ana. This one in her mid-thirties. A total change of pace from the harum-scarum stuff with the four kids. We had a nice chat with some general grammar points thrown in. Tomorrow I’ve got my first lesson with a 16-year-old girl.

A word on my tricky lesson with Luca, aged ten, on Tuesday. He arrived in tears. He said he’d had a terrible day in which he’d been bullied for being short. I told him he really wasn’t that short, and that he’s a rather good English speaker for his age (true) who will end up with a better job, and will earn more money, than the idiots at his school. His tears dried up and we had a productive lesson, although I bet he was dreading the next day. (While I was writing that paragraph, someone messaged me to ask what “posh” meant. I said “upper-class or elevated”. I didn’t mention anything about the etymology.)

I don’t have central heating in this place and am relying on the city system to heat the radiators. So far it’s working. Last winter was a nightmare for those on the city system and I was worried my parents might freeze while they were here, even before we hit proper winter, but they were overly toasty if anything.

Mum. Perhaps her biggest problem is her lack of problems. Most of us have had to deal with a disability or some mental or physical health issue or a messy break-up or an addiction or a tragic loss or a financial setback, or most likely a concoction of some of the above. These traumas and negative experiences make one more introspective, to question oneself, to be more self-aware. It’s great, obviously, that Mum has dodged most of the bad stuff and is enjoying a prosperous and healthy retirement. But if she’d had a bit more crap to deal with, she might now have the self-awareness to view situations more objectively.

Family - Life :)

A lovely time with my parents, but…

November 12, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

A beautiful November day here. Not a cloud in the sky, and way warmer than it should be at this time of year. Weather-wise we’re now all far removed from “should be”, of course.

Mum and Dad left yesterday evening. They got a taxi in the middle of my online lesson, so it was a very quick and rather sad goodbye. It was a lovely moment to meet them at the airport on Saturday and to sit in the sun and wait for the bus to come. When they got to my place they quickly went to work on my main bedroom wardrobe whose doors weren’t shutting properly. They (and I) spent the best part of an hour opening and shutting doors and yanking them into or out of position. Then Dad and I went to the shop downstairs and quickly found ourselves grappling with unpredictable sliding cabinet doors. We found this very funny. “It’s like Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em,” Dad said. Dad liked that little shop, which sells (among other things) small bottles of gin, vodka, and other strong liquor. For dinner that evening we had sarmale and salată de boeuf that I’d made earlier, followed by some grapefruit-flavoured gin that they’d picked up at the duty-free shop.

On Sunday we walked down the river and into town. Dad took numerous photos of the marvellous architecture. My parents remarked on all the renovation that had been carried out in the previous 4½ years, especially in the central squares. In the afternoon I played tennis. A new guy, Sebi, was there. He’s more of a footballer than a tennis player, although he can certainly hold a racket. I played against him (in doubles) the whole time, and from my perspective we finished up 6-4, 6-2, 6-6, following a high prevalence of deuce games. We didn’t have time for a tie-break at the end. On Monday my lessons didn’t start until the afternoon, so we took a long tram trip across the city from east to west, to arrive at Dedeman, one of the big hardware stores. My parents were impressed by the variety of products available. Better than Mitre 10, they said. We looked at everything bathroom-related. Mum was also taken aback by the size of Timișoara. You get to see quite a cross-section of the city on the number 2 tram, rather like line 2 on the Paris Métro. That evening we went out for a takeaway pizza.

On Tuesday we went to the other of Timișoara’s two Dedeman stores, this time on foot. Mum often commented on the state of Timișoara relative to Geraldine. The rubbish strewn everywhere, the uneven surfaces, the lack of pavements. One time we disposed of bagfuls of rubbish, only to find it had been well and truly rifled through an hour later. I had an argument with Mum in Dedeman – luckily for me it blew over – as she insisted I ask a staff member about something even though I knew they would direct me to the front desk. Mum made a tasty meal with bacon and various vegetables from my fridge.

Wednesday was a big work day for me, and Mum spent most of the day tidying up and putting item X into cupboard Y so I won’t find it until year Z. There’s almost too much storage space here. Nice problem to have, I suppose, but in the old place I could always find things because there was literally only one option. After my lessons we went to the restaurant next to the beer factory just around the corner from here. It was hidden away (there’s something typically Romanian about that) and I had to ask a security guard where the entrance was. When we finally got inside, we found ourselves in a spectacular and cavernous room. We ordered beer, I had a substantial salad, and my parents both had cheesy pasta dishes which were much bigger than first appeared. After that we all had different desserts – papanași, cremeș and tiramisu – which we shared. Yum yum. The whole lot came to 206 lei (£37 or NZ$72) including a tip. That seemed a lot to me, but it would be cheap as chips in either the UK or NZ, not that chips are cheap anymore there either.

Yesterday I moved my afternoon lesson online so that they could get a taxi from my place at a non-ridiculously-early time. They had done a lot for me in their few days here. Mum is, and always has been, enormously helpful from a practical standpoint. Even if at times I wish she’d get her grubby mitts off whatever she happens to be intervening with, I can certainly cope with her involvement. And then it was time to say goodbye. I had a very quick Skype call from Mum at Timișoara airport, then this morning they called me again from their hotel room in Luton.

I had another argument with Mum on the phone this morning. While Dad wasn’t in the room, she said that Dad hadn’t been able to cope with the stress of travelling, while she’d been in control the whole time. You know you’re talking bollocks, don’t you? Or do you really, seriously think that’s true? Do you really lack self-awareness to that extent? I didn’t exactly say that, but I made it clear that I wouldn’t stand for her total disregard for the truth. She comes out with this steaming bullshit, which normally involves insulting Dad behind his back, so often. “He’s like a child.” Umm, hello! Anyone there? It’s tough for me because she’s so helpful and generous and loving to me, and she’s my mum, but I can’t help being appalled by this.

My brother, who is unaware that my parents have had a stressful trip, really wants them to make another journey down south before they fly back to NZ in a fortnight. If they don’t hire a car, it’s six hours each way on the bus. Dad’s had a cold for the last few days, and would prefer not to go, especially when they have a two-month-old baby. Mum probably has the beginnings of a cold too, but she feels obliged to make the trip. Ugh.

This morning I called the plumber that one of my students recommended to me; he should come early next week to look at the main bathroom. Then I got through to Barclays – amazingly they put me in the priority queue and I soon spoke to a real person based in Manchester with the accent to boot. He told me what I need to do to (hopefully) get my money back on my closed account.

A long one today. I’ve had (and will have) some new students, whom I’ll probably write about tomorrow.

Family - Poker - Politics - The UK

Four years and a magical piece of life — Part 2

October 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Liz Truss had resigned from her disastrous seven-week stint as leader on the day I arrived in the UK, and the latest (abbreviated) race, which Boris Johnson mercifully pulled out of, dominated the news. Rishi took over from Lizzie, and suddenly everything was going to be fine and dandy once more. Yeah, right.

I gave a lesson on my last morning in that country I called home half a lifetime ago, then we looked at some old slides of my brother and I when we were little, and even before then when Mum and Dad had barely met. The ones from our early childhood were incredible to look back on; I think we’d forgotten how primitive things were back then in our largely run-down house before it all got done up, or perhaps we were just too young to remember. Then it was time to go. Mum and Dad took me to the coach station in Poole. On the way, we got a call from my brother to say that I’d left half my laptop charger there. It was too late to turn back. Bugger. That put a dark cloud over the next 24 hours for me. The station wasn’t in an obvious place either, but a helpful lady directed me to it – down the underpass and past all the local buses – and I was on my way.

I had to take two buses to get to the airport, first from Poole to Victoria Coach Station in London, and then to Luton. Almost six hours including the short gap in between. I searched for laptop cables using the National Express wi-fi, and considered ordering one to arrive in the following day or two, but figured with a bit of luck I might somehow get by until my parents come to Timișoara on 5th November. Fortunately my first bus arrived at Victoria Station on time. A youngish woman who had one arm was in the Luton queue (gate 10); she was concerned that her return destination was blank on her ticket, and she really needed to get the bus to Luton to avoid missing her flight, but I couldn’t help her. She asked a woman in uniform who has no help whatsoever. Finally a much more useful uniformed man told her she had to go all the way down to the desk at gate 0 to get a new ticket printed. (British bus and train authorities love the number zero for some reason.) She had to jump the queue there to get back before the bus left. On the bus I had a good chat with her. It turned out she was a Paralympic triathlete who had been in the UK in a vain search for an obscure medicine. She competed for Hungary in last years Paralympics in Tokyo, and was flying back to Budapest. She started off as a swimmer, and attempted to qualify for Athens as a teenager, before finally making it in her thirties. When we get to Luton I’ll only have an hour so I’ll have to run. You should be good at that, I said. I got her name out of her, but no phone number, and that was that.

I touched down in Timișoara just before two in the morning, as scheduled. Unlike at Luton, my mini suitcase appeared on the carousel almost immediately, and a taxi soon whisked me off back home. Like everything else in Romania, the cost of taxis has shot up. It felt good to be back, though the laptop business was eating away at me. I tried charging it via USB-C, but no luck. After almost giving up (will one of my students have a charger that works?), I saw my old HP charger out of the corner of my eye. It was so old it still had a New Zealand plug on the end of it. But I have adapters for those, and it worked. I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. I can hardly function without my laptop.

On Friday my parents left Poole and drove down to St Ives, only to break down at a service station on the M25. According to my brother they were already an hour late, at waiting for the AA to come and get them up and running again added another two hours. I’d dread to think what state Mum would have been in. On more than one occasion when Mum wasn’t around, Dad told me that Mum’s stress levels had been through the roof on their trip. The funny thing is that Mum keeps her real stressed-out self such a guarded secret that even my brother doesn’t know what she can be like. I wonder what version of her I’ll get when they come over next weekend. I’m guessing it won’t be the epitome of calm and cheerfulness – besotted by her grandson – that my brother and sister-in-law saw. We’ll see. As for me, I don’t know when I’ll next return to the UK. I’d love to play a part in the little one’s life, however fleeting.

The next few days will be taken up by lessons and getting ready for Mum and Dad. I might try and book a ticket for a play or a concert – I think they’d like that. This weekend I’ve given two lessons, played some reasonable tennis, and played five poker tournaments including a second place this morning.

Family - Life :) - The UK

Four years and a magical piece of life — Part 1

October 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

So I flew into Luton on Thursday night. No problems whatsoever with the flight, but I had to wait ages for my tiny suitcase to come off the carousel. (Unlike when I flew with Ryanair in July, I couldn’t just take it on the plane with me without paying extra extra on top of the extra I’d already paid to have the bag in the first place.) And there they were. Mum and Dad. After almost four years. A lovely moment. Then they told me about all the fun and games they’d had getting to and from their accommodation. Mum had been phoning and texting and emailing me to go to this place, no that place, no, stay where you are, not realising that in post-Brexit Britain my phone was only good for playing whatever the 2022 equivalent of Sudoku is. (I guess that would be Wordle, but as that requires the internet, it couldn’t even do that.) We stayed in a nice new eighth-floor apartment in a block called Calibra, after a Vauxhall car that came out when I was ten. (There is or was a Vauxhall plant nearby.) When I lived in New Zealand it always felt great to see my parents again after a period of a few months, so you can imagine how it felt after that long. Late that evening I ate a small pork pie; it had been years since my last one.

I slept well. Mum was keen to make an early start the next morning, but somebody had commandeered the only working lift. When we were finally ready to get away in the hire car (Dad was driving), we noticed something stuck to the windscreen. A parking ticket, with a time stamp of around half-six that morning. A hundred quid, reduced to sixty if you paid early enough. Public services, like for instance the NHS, are buckling under the weight of Brexit and Covid and too many bloody people in the damn country and not enough people running the country who actually care, but they make sure parking wardens are out in force early in the morning. Mum wasn’t a happy camper. They didn’t know not to park there, and it looks like they’ll get out of having to pay. It took at least four hours to reach my brother’s place near Poole. At one point there was torrential rain. The GPS directions were often unclear. For Dad it was hard work. We all agreed that we wouldn’t want to live in the UK again.

It was quite something for my parents to see their other son and daughter-in-law after all this time, and of course, their grandson. Six weeks old. It was hard to prise him away from Mum’s arms. She’s always been in her element with small children – it was her job for forty years after all – and she was in heaven with a child of her own flesh and blood. He got passed around to all of us, and I must say I enjoyed holding him too; it was a new experience for me. Most of the time he just slept, except of course when my brother and sister-in-law would have really liked him to be asleep. I think they will be very good parents to him.

I brought my laptop with me, and liked being able to hole myself up in the study and give online lessons. Outside my teaching, it was hard to do very much there. The TV or the radio was on most of the time, usually both, so even reading a book wasn’t that easy, not when it was in a foreign language. TV is, bizarrely to me, still of huge importance to British society. Game shows and cookery programmes and people actually caring who gets voted off. Bake Off. Strictly. Celebs I’ve never heard of doing shit I don’t care about. It seemed endless. We also got a fair dousing of good old British rain. On Saturday, when I was working, Dad and my brother went to a car boot sale and picked up a second-hand 1000-piece jigsaw of military planes in the sky, which we painstakingly tackled but got nowhere near finishing. We spent didn’t even know if the puzzle was complete. (A few years ago I started to liken my life to a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle with about 300 pieces missing. Forget even trying to make an approximation of what’s on the lid of the box. It’s time I made something else.) Twice we went to the upmarket nearby town of Wimborne. Mum bought me a checked fleecy jacket from a shop there, saying it was a Christmas present. It was reduced, but still well above my usual budget. The food was great, pretty much universally. One night we ordered curry. Another time we had Stilton sausages. Yummy. On my last night there, we had fish and chips. Apart from the food, one of the highlights was the beautiful autumn colours.

Family - International travel - Photos - Poker - Tennis

Countdown mode and memories of Singapore

October 17, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s only three days till I go away, so I’m on full don’t-forget mode now. I will forget something, though, I always do. I’ll be taking my laptop with me so I can give lessons when I’m away. Which lessons, I’m still not sure at this point, because Friday is normally a busy day for me but I don’t know what time my parents plan to get to my brother’s place on that day. Perhaps after this length of time I should prioritise family rather than work, I don’t know.

Last time I mentioned that my parents had spent two nights in Singapore on the way to the UK. In January 1987 we spent four nights there on the way back from our six-week stay in New Zealand. Back then I got very excited by anything big and futuristic and technological, so Singapore was fascinating to me. We stayed on the 20th floor of the 21-storey President Merlin hotel, Mum and my brother in room 2014, Dad and I in 2015. In the morning we would phone each other. There were malls everywhere, rising to six or seven storeys, full of shops selling gadgets that were unimaginable back home. Sports shops were everywhere, and we picked up my first proper tennis racket. I remember a cheap hand-held LCD racing car game where nobody could ever get more than 13 laps no matter how hard they tried. As for the food, my memories are hazy, but I clearly remember the time Mum ordered bee hoon for us all in a massive ground-floor food court, not having the foggiest clue what we’d be getting. It turned out to be some noodley dish which we all had great difficulty physically eating, and two Chinese girls had a good laugh at us from an upper-floor balcony. I remember Chinatown, where my parents bought various figurines that they probably still have today. It was a few days before Chinese New Year – the Year of the Rabbit was coming up, as it will be again in a few months – and there were parades with dragons. Most of all I remember the durians – large spiky smelly fruit. Like really ponging something nasty. On one day we took the boat over to Sentosa Island, but apart from the cable car I don’t remember that too well. All in all we had a great time because it was all so different from what we were used to. I visited Singapore once again in 2008 but it had changed. Obviously I was no longer a kid, so that sense of wonder had gone, but the malls seemed to have been taken over by designer clothes stores, the sort that you find at airports. Travel is going in that direction in general; with globalisation, places become more and more samey.

Chinatown, 2008 (including durians)

I played reasonably decent tennis at the weekend. The 18-year-old lad was there for both sessions, and he’s improving at a rate of knots. Mindblowingly fast. Two weeks ago he was playing cricket shots, had no backhand to speak of, and could barely get a serve into play. All very standard for someone who had hardly held a tennis racket before. Now he can reliably get his serve in, can rally from both wings, and is very tactically aware. All from just a few hours on the court. He’s clearly an all-round natural sportsman. To get to his level took me many many hours on my own, hitting against a wall, or rallying with my parents in the garden. Being anywhere near an actual tennis court would have been disastrous for me initially.

Poker. Another win on Saturday night, and this one (pot-limit badugi) kept me up until after two in the morning. I ran well and crucially collected bounties with regularity along the way. As we got short-handed I amassed a huge stack and was able to run over the table. Heads-up lasted two hands. My reward for winning and collecting so many bounties was a rare three-figure payout; I made $101 for my evening’s work – that was very nice indeed.