Family

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

What do you say?

September 1, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning one of my students called me to say he won’t be coming to our lesson tomorrow because his 64-year-old father had died of a heart attack. His parents live in the country and his father was out doing heavy physical work in the blazing sun. Yeesh. What do you say when somebody’s father dies so suddenly at a too-young age? He says he’ll be back to see me on 22nd September, but seriously, just when you’re up to it again.

Just last night I happened to be reading about Romania’s low life expectancy relative to other EU countries, especially among men, and especially in the countryside where people are poorer and have less access to healthcare. For a man born in 1956 in rural Romania, 64 is probably about average. Heart disease is the number one killer.

I had a good lesson this morning. My student couldn’t get the sound on Zoom to work, so we made do with WhatsApp. She got the present simple. To be in all its forms, and the positive forms of all other verbs. She’s got that first brick in the often-flimsy verb wall in place. After that we played Taboo and she added half a dozen words to her vocabulary. I happily extended the lesson to make up for all the faff at the start. Our next session will be on Wednesday. (I’m grateful for the 7:30 starts which are forcing me to get up earlier and helping me structure my day.)

My parents keep me updated on the Kiwi coronavirus situation, and I keep telling them that Romania is getting about as many cases daily as New Zealand has had in total. Tomorrow Romanian restaurants and cafés are opening up again inside. You can count me out, thank you very much.

In the last six months, coronavirus has shone a 500-megawatt spotlight on Western society in 2020, and not in a good way. The misinformation, the politicisation, the tribalism, the selfishness, the entitlement, the steaming pile of shit that is social media – it’s hard not to feel extremely pessimistic. I was just reading an article about Marseille’s anti-mask, anti-science, anti-Paris warrior – he’s all over social media, potentially killing the city’s residents with his advice, but they don’t care because he’s on their team. No country is immune from this nihilism, not even New Zealand who are perhaps the nearest thing to it.

In New Zealand, they seem to have good scientists who people (by and large) respect. One of these is Siouxsie Wiles, infectious disease expert. Judging by her long curly pink hair, she’s probably ever so slightly mad, but she’s done no end of good during the pandemic. As I said about Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in another post, mad does not have to be evil; most of the time mad is good.

Yesterday, as I heard the strains of Por Una Cabeza and Vara la Țară from the buskers on a scorching late-summer day, I thought of how much time I’d spent alone this summer, even more than usual. The odd face-to-face lesson, the occasional drink with Bogdan, a few games of tennis, and that’s been just about it.

Last week I spoke to my brother – it was great to see him in such an upbeat mood. The UK Covid situation seemed to have dragged him down, even if he was managing fine from a practical perspective – but being back at work has given him a much-needed boost.

A pigeon has just laid an egg in a ledge outside my laundry.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Writing a book

Steady progress with the book

August 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my aunt this morning. We both had an almost total lack of news. It was hot in Earith where she lives, just like here, so at least this time she couldn’t contradict me on the weather front.

My work volumes are relatively low so I’ve been working on the book. I’m now up to letter I of the dictionary part. My Romanian teacher is now tackling the first (most important) part which contains all the big-ticket items, in other words the mistakes that even good speakers make over and over. She’s made a good start at correcting my Romanian, which as I’ve said before, isn’t up to this kind of task.

I only had one lesson today, with the eleven-year-old boy who lives with his grandmother. I beat him in the Formula One game for the fourth time running. He’s a mild-mannered kid but I think he was ever so slightly pissed off today. In the first couple of games he didn’t exactly apply optimal strategy, but now it’s pretty much dumb luck. Today he drew a card that sent him into the pit stop on the last lap, and I was able to overtake him.

Last week we had that awful explosion in Beirut. At first I thought it was a terrorist attack, but it was a terrible accident. The warehouse was on the waterfront, right next to a grain silo, so the blast took out much of the city’s food supply. As well as the hundreds who have died, about 300,000 people have been displaced. Lebanon was in a deep enough crisis already, exacerbated by Covid-19, so this is an utter tragedy. It was impressive to see Emmanuel Macron make a hasty visit to Beirut, appearing in a packed crowd and risking getting Covid-19; I could hardly imagine Boris Johnson doing something similar. I’ve just read that the Lebanese government have quit.

Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump shows signs of narrowing. His average lead looks to be seven points, or perhaps half a point more. There are under three months to go, and early voting starts soon in some states. I see this election as a giant IQ test, but even if the country passes it (i.e. significantly more people vote for Biden than for Trump), will their sham of an electoral system hold up enough to be rid of the bastard?

Coronavirus. Romania is in what looks like a plateau, but it has spread to just about all parts of the country. My panic level has dropped just a tad, but I don’t know how justified that is.

Mum and Dad got their birthday cards from me yesterday. Their birthdays were six and eight weeks ago.

Family - Language teaching

Awful old news

August 4, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had my weekly-ish chat to my aunt today. At the start, I mentioned the weather as a way of making small talk. When I told her it was hot here, she corrected me by saying that no, it wasn’t hot where she was, as if her weather was the correct weather, as if her poxy village was the only place on the planet that even had weather. But by now I’m used to her disregard for the world outside her ever-shrinking bubble. We then moved on to a fairly normal conversation, including the awful news of her and Dad’s cousin’s brain tumour.

Dad called me at ten to midnight on Saturday. Mum was at church, and Dad has never been that hot on numbers or times. I was in bed but not yet asleep. His previous day had been one to forget. He’d been struggling all day but he went to a theatre production in Geraldine with Mum and some others – it was one of those fake obligations that Mum imposes. He felt faint during the show and was in the middle of a row with no easy way out. He made it to the intermission, when he sensibly decided to leave. He’s had to change his blood pressure pills because the old ones had been phased out, and that has caused havoc. Then when he got home, he learnt that his cousin had been diagnosed with a (probably inoperable) brain tumour. That sounds impossibly awful.

His cousin is 69 and lives in mid-Wales. He’s been a successful potter. We used to see him once or twice a year when we made our trips over there. He must be at least six foot five, and he’s never exactly been fond of kids, so my brother and I found him intimidating as small children. A few years ago he split up with his wife (a lovely person, I’d always thought) and married a Korean woman about 30 years younger than him. The last time I saw him was at my uncle’s funeral in 2002. (On that occasion his daughter, who was grossly overweight, went straight through a wooden chair.)

Not much news other than that. I had my weekly masked lesson with the eleven-year-old boy today. Any time I try a new game, whether with a kid or an adult, I’m taking a bit of a gamble. Today I tried the rummy-style card game I made up with the pictures that begin with different letters of the alphabet, and it was a bit of a flop, unfortunately. That’s the way it goes, sometimes. After the session I felt sorry for his grandmother who told me she had “a thousand and one” health problems. The masks began to make even more sense.

Family - Life :)

Fighting the fatigue

July 26, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Suffering from fatigue again, though nothing like last weekend. Today I was able to have a decent walk and play tennis without too many problems. I wandered into Mehala this morning, where the plum trees were packed. I’m pretty sure I picked some from the same tree outside the house where the woman shouted at me two years ago. I was going to say that Mehala is my favourite part of Timișoara, but in truth I’ve got lots of favourites. It’s probably my favourite residential area, though.

On Thursday night I went to the doctor to pick up my month’s supply of pills. I continue to be impressed by the level of medical attention I get here. I told him about my fatigue, and he tested my oxygen saturation (good), blood pressure (fine) and breathing (no problems). My temperature had already been checked on the way in to the surgery, and that was fine too. I told him I didn’t have a cough or fever when I felt so tired. He concluded that it almost certainly wasn’t coronavirus (I was pretty sure of that anyway) and prescribed me some multivitamin pills, one a day for 15 days. They contain, iron, zinc, selenium, manganese, fluoride, copper, folic acid, and a whole host of other minerals and vitamins, including a small amount vitamin D, which I’m taking a much larger dose of in a separate tablet. They also contain ginseng, which seems to be quite popular here. These pills won’t do me any harm.

I haven’t heard any more from my brother about the house. It was obvious when I spoke to him that the enthusiasm for moving came from his wife far more than from him. My best guess is that she’d like to have a family – she can’t hang around – and their current place isn’t very kid-friendly.

Tomorrow I’ll have my sixth one-hour session this week with the guy in Austria. That’s given me an unexpected boost.

Family - Life :) - Politics

Unfathomable

July 2, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m having a better work week. Today I had four lessons – seven hours in total – and the boost that gives to my mental health makes everything else much more manageable, like, for instance, this flat going back on the market. I found out about that yesterday.

What an utterly mad first half of the year it has been. (My hair is now madder than ever, by the way.) I should be glued to Wimbledon right now, but a world in which people thwacked furry objects with bats, and other people queued to watch them do it, feels unfathomably far away. When will I next see any of my family?

Talking of unfathomable, what the heck is going on in the UK? How did we end up here? People throwing bottles and spreading Covid throughout Liverpool just because their team won the league. People shitting on beaches. People generally not giving a fuck. People handed a licence not to give a fuck because the people in power don’t either, beyond their own careers. A leader ripping whole hunks out of Trump’s book who is still remarkably popular (his fans include my own brother). I think how much better Britain would have handled the crisis back in 1995, when the country was led by John Major, who was very unpopular but objectively light years ahead of the charlatan currently in charge.

Last week I had something close to an argument with Mum. (That’s rare these days. Ever since my move to Romania, we’ve got on well.) She was blaming young people again. By young people, Mum means anybody under about 50. “They don’t have any money and for a lot of them it’s their own fault.” Um, OK. “They’ve got to have everything now.” Well yes, but whose fault actually is that? Are you really suggesting that they’re stupider than your generation? Seriously? Or maybe, just maybe, they’re essentially the same people, with at least 99.9% of the same DNA, but born into a very different world, with completely different decision paths available to them. Mum didn’t max out her credit card because there were no credit cards to max out. If Mum had been born in 1999 instead of 1949, I bet she’d be clambering over people to buy whatever the hell the latest number iPhone is. Honestly, this whole generation shaming, and it’s people of all generations who do it, is bloody ridiculous.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :)

Time marches on

June 29, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is Dad’s 70th birthday. He’s dodged at least two bullets to get there, and altogether he’s had a remarkable life. I know it’s simple maths, and I hit my own milestone a couple of months ago, but both my parents being in their seventies is hard to comprehend. I called him early this morning (my time), before my aunt and uncle and a couple of friends were due to arrive. Mum had the fancy glasses out because, well, they were having fancy champagne. My cousin from Wellington had bought a job lot of Moët, as she can happily afford to do, and given my parents a bottle.

After talking to Dad I had a moment’s panic. I went to the loo and what’s this? Streaks of red. Crikey. If I see the doctor, how will I even explain this? Mi-am dungi de sânge în… what word do I use? Caca? Pupu? Luckily it’s 2020 and we have Google, and the culprit seemed to be the several great hunks of watermelon I’d eaten in the previous 24 hours.

It’s been another hot day, but I’ll soon be wishing it was only 32 degrees. My student friend who lives in Austria (she had to quarantine for two weeks when she returned to Romania to visit) gave me a guided tour of central Timișoara today. In fact she had some friends visiting from Moldova, decided to show them around, and asked if I’d come along for the ride. It was great. I know the centre of Timișoara pretty well, but she had encyclopedic knowledge of the history behind the buildings, and pointed out details, some of which had escaped my attention in all this time. Best of all, the commentary was in Romanian. (Her friends’ Moldovan accent was very noticeable, but didn’t stop me from understanding them.)

Back to medical stuff, on my monthly visit to the doctor on Friday, he tested the oxygen saturation in my blood. The readout flickered between 96 and 97; that’s good news should I ever contract the virus.

Dad has just sent me another batch of photos, including me in my 1984 Nissan Bluebird. It’s amazing how tidy that car looked – it was already 20 years old. There are also some pictures of my great-aunt, who was a lovely person from what I’ve heard. I sat on her lap once as a baby; she died of cancer soon afterwards.

It doesn’t seem long ago that the official worldwide tally of coronavirus cases reached half a million. Today we reached half a million deaths and ten million cases. The real case numbers are, of course, far greater. (It is now spreading alarmingly in poor countries with limited health care. Will we reach ten million deaths?)

Tomorrow I might go back and look at those bikes.

Books - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching

Life probably WAS simpler then

June 25, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother on Tuesday night. He’d just been down to St Ives. He said they’d taken their inflatable motor boat for a trip down the Ouse from St Ives to Earith. Around Earith there’s a complex network of tributaries and drains – you’re on the edge of the Fens there. I remember all that from the flood mapping job I had before moving to New Zealand. Earith is where my aunt lives, and they wanted to drop in on her, but she told them to stay away. Among older people there’s still understandable fear. We talked about the photos that Dad had sent us. Was life really so much simpler back then, or did it just seem it because we were kids? We settled on the former.

I told my brother that I’d just had a lesson on verb tenses, and he said, with a tinge of pride, that he didn’t know what a verb was. He doesn’t need to know what a verb is. (I don’t think he’ll be learning Romanian or Serbian or any other foreign language any time soon.) And at least he knows there are things called verbs that he doesn’t know about – his work day is filled with tanks and other machinery that I don’t even know I don’t know about. But his remark showed how different the British and Romanian education systems are. The Romanian system has serious issues, but at least practically everyone leaves school knowing that you can’t make a sentence without a goddamn verb. (My students are often amazed when I tell them that I’ve had to teach English grammar myself, long after leaving school, by a mix of trial-and-error and studying foreign languages.)

I’ve just finished Border by Kapka Kassabova, a tale of life, death and travel in the harsh, wild border regions of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. Three languages, three alphabets, dozens of irregular verbs. So much upheaval, so much history that I couldn’t keep track of, and so much violence. The author was born in Bulgaria in 1974, and moved to New Zealand with her parents in around 1993 after the iron curtain fell. She got sick of all the rugby and beer and what she probably saw as a general shallowness, and ended up in Scotland. She’s extremely clever and at times used language that lay at the borders of my vocabulary. I liked that she explained the meaning of both people’s names and placenames; that added to the mystique.

In a lesson yesterday I translated the word “porch” as prispă, before adding “does anyone still use this word?”. My student told me that young people probably don’t even know the word: the typical Romanian image – quite lovely to me – of an old lady on her prispă is becoming history. People now use the more boring terasă – the same word that they use for outside areas of cafés and bars – instead. They then translate terasă as “terrace” in English, but that doesn’t feel right. After all that time in NZ, I would say “deck”. When I was growing up we used “patio”. There’s also “veranda(h)” and probably a bunch of others.

As I said last time, Biden is leading Trump by 9 or 10 points in the poll averages. (Update: And crucially, he has big leads in swing-state polls, too.) If the election was held now, he’d be an overwhelming favourite, but of course it isn’t. One way this could play out is a bit like last year’s women’s Wimbledon final. Simona built a lead, but surely Serena would come back. She’s Serena! But she never came back. She was sluggish, there was nothing there. Simona hardly put a foot wrong and it was all done and dusted in 56 minutes. This is a terrible analogy I know, but it’s one of many ways the campaign and election could go. Heaps of time for it to change, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it did, but right now Biden is up by about 25 points among women and least 35 among college-educated white women. That’s massive. But Trump can at least console himself that among white men who don’t know what a verb is, he has a commanding 70-point advantage.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :)

The calm before the next storm

June 20, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Bogdan, the guy on the second floor, just phoned me to ask if I wanted to join him at a bar on the riverbank. He said there was live music. I would have joined him but I have a Skype lesson soon. Hopefully we can meet tomorrow.

The coronavirus case numbers aren’t looking great in Romania – more than 300 new cases on each of the last three days – but people I talk to seem to be living in a parallel universe. “Social distancing is nonsense,” the father of one of my younger students told me yesterday. We still have very few cases here in Timiș, but the return of all those ambulance sirens I heard in April feels inevitable, sadly. But this time with the lid off.

My parents have a friend of sorts who has just flown from Christchurch to Arizona, where he grew up. Imagine voluntarily going to Arizona at the moment – they’ve got terrifying Covid numbers. What’s more, he’s over 70, he’s overweight and he’s got type II diabetes. His wife has stayed home; she might never see him again.

In my list of Timișoara smells in my last post, I didn’t mention mici. In the summer, the smell of those pieces of pork sizzling on a barbecue (grătar) permeates the city, and probably the whole of Romania. From time to time (not where I live, thankfully, but on other arterial roads in the city), you also get the dreadful pong of what will become mici. Pig crates. Even when they’ve rattled by and are well in the distance, the stench from the pigs, or rather their ordure, still lingers.

Family has seemed more important than ever, now that we can’t see each other, and Dad has been sending me family pictures from when I was a kid. My favourite so far is from the time we lived in Temuka in 1989-90 and Dad’s parents came out to see us. All four of my grandparents are in the picture, along with Mum, my brother, me and our cousin (she’s between me and my brother in age). My brother had Grandad’s hat on – he liked to wear it. Other highlights are my brother sitting on a tractor on my uncle’s farm on the West Coast, and one from even further back (December 1986) when we stopped off in New Caledonia on the way from the UK to New Zealand – my brother and I looked unbelievably tired.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

When will I see you again?

June 17, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a lesson with a guy who admitted that he was addicted to fishing, to the point where he regularly dreams about it. It sounded like quite a good addiction to have. This was our first lesson since early March, before the lockdown.

I had a long chat with my parents this morning. I won’t be seeing them for absolutely ages. Not until we get a vaccine, which is probably a year away. For me, this has been the saddest part. I don’t know when I’ll next see my brother in the UK either. At least this is 2020 and not 1990, when hour-long video calls to the other side of the world would have practically been science fiction. Mum was disappointed that two new Covid cases had been imported into New Zealand from the UK.

Romania has seen 250 more cases and 10 deaths in the last 24 hours. Still way too many. I don’t know where we might head from here. There’s a lot of good simple stuff here – for instance, whenever I buy anything from the pharmacy (wearing a mask, of course) they give me another mask – but just about everything has now reopened, including malls. I was supposed to have a face-to-face lesson with a boy yesterday, but his mum changed her mind and we ended up still doing it remotely. I mentioned to him that malls had just reopened, and he said he wouldn’t be going anywhere near one because it’s too dangerous. But the fact is that after three months of being stuck, people have had enough. We’re seeing this all over the world. I don’t even talk to my brother about the virus anymore.

It really smelt of June today, with the sweet aroma of lime trees just about permeating the whole city. There’s no doubt about it, Timișoara has smells. When I moved in to this flat, the waft from the patisseries really got me, although that disappeared over the lockdown. The markets can be quite pungent, especially at this time of year, although the cheese section pongs all year round. Then the river has its own distinctive smell too. And then there’s the pigeon poo. And crow poo. I still remember visiting the UK in April 2018 and how good it felt, on my arrival in the middle of the night, to smell Timișoara again.

In March I asked Mum what her secret was for making such good pizza, and she gave me her recipe. Things got ugly with the virus almost immediately, and baking products became hard to come by, especially yeast. But yesterday yeast was back on the shelves, and I’ve currently got a pizza in the oven. I’m sure it won’t be anything like as good as Mum’s.

We’re having a run of wet, stormy weather. Here are some pictures I took this afternoon:

A busker about to start up
The Opera House getting an extreme makeover
So many pigeons
Coronavirus - Family - Life :)

Should have stayed in Peterborough

June 15, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I gave up painstakingly updating my Covid graph on 21st May, but it hasn’t gone away. Far from it. Today we reported 320 new cases in Romania, the most on one day since 8th May, and 16 more deaths. Active cases are edging back up. In this corner of the country we’ve got near–New Zealand levels, but it’s spreading like wildfire in Bucharest, Suceava and Brașov, and will surely be back here with a vengeance.

Today is Mum’s birthday (and Steffi Graf’s and Donald Trump’s). When I called her, my aunt and uncle (who visited Timișoara two years ago) were over for dinner. It was great to see them on FaceTime. They were shocked to see I now have a ponytail. I’m shocked to have one too.

Yesterday I had a bad day with my sinuses, or migraine (whichever it was), so today it was nice to sit on the riverbank and read my book, and get all the wonderful strawberries and cherries and apricots and tomatoes from the market (while I still can, before the second wave hits).

On Friday I had my lesson with the guy who lives on the outskirts of London with his wife and son whose first birthday it was. They’re looking at buying a house; he said they’d been to see a ghastly place costing £500,000. He showed me an online property evaluator with an intriguing feature called a happiness rating. You tap in a postcode and this needle waggles into position, telling you how happy everyone in the area is. It’s based on crime, deprivation, health, levels of education, and so on. I asked him to tap in the postcode of the flat I rented in central Peterborough in 2003, and the needle hardly budged. So sad. But I was reasonably happy there. My job didn’t pay a lot but I had interesting flatmates, played tennis, went bowling, went to the pub, and ate out from time to time. I often saw my grandmother. I made two trips to France, including beautiful Montpellier. I only had a six-month work contract which they happily extended, and they would have given me a permanent role. But my boss said he was unconvinced that flood mapping and forecasting was the best career path for me, and when my parents decided to shift to NZ, I convinced myself that I’d be better off over there.

Anyway, we read an article containing the word cusp, and I explained that the word is sometimes used in relation to star signs (which some Romanians take as gospel). Like me, he is on the cusp: he was born on 21/9/89. He has a family, a career, pretty soon he’ll have a house, and he has almost an extra decade to play with compared to me. Maybe I should have stayed in Peterborough.