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Family - Life :) - Maths teaching

Well that’s a relief…

November 20, 2025 by 0 Comments

I had a good night’s sleep last night. I had an easier than average work day yesterday. And I still feel absolutely shattered.

Last night I met up with Mark at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. We both had spätzle which Mark had had before but was totally new to me. Spätzle are a kind of German egg noodles; mine were topped with minced beef in tomato sauce, so the dish was very much like bog-standard spaghetti bolognese. Very good though. We both drove there so neither of us could drink anything. Hopefully next time we go there, if there is a next time, we’ll be on our bikes. I say if there is a next time because Mark won’t be in Romania much longer. He and his wife are heading back to the UK. They may stick it out until the summer, but his wife has just applied for a deputy head position at a school in Cardiff; she’d start in three months’ time. Saying goodbye to Mark isn’t going to be much fun.

When I got back from Dumbrăvița I called my parents. Good news. Dad just happened to be closest to the phone when it rang, and he unilaterally accepted the offer of £245,000. A straight accept, no halfway house or anything. I don’t blame him. The risk of having the sale fall through is simply too great. Lately Mum has been attending an exercise class on Thursdays. This meant Mum had to leave in the middle of our chat, so I got the chance to talk to Dad alone. He said that for the past two days he’d had to deal with a permanently angry Mum. Angry with him, mostly. During these spells, which are all too frequent, Mum becomes practically impossible to live with. As I’ve said to Dad before, 80% of blokes wouldn’t put up with it as he does.

Braytim, that slightly weird name for a suburb of Timișoara that I was keen to avoid that I mentioned in my last post, is in fact the name of the Romanian–French construction company that built the development in the nineties. So it isn’t quite as new as I thought. The Bray part of the name comes from Saint-Jean-de-Braye, which is a place in France, while tim obviously comes from Timișoara. There are names ending in (or beginning with) tim everywhere here. I once thought about setting up a teaching company called Verbatim.

I had an interesting maths lesson yesterday with a 12-year-old girl. For a while we went off-topic. At one point I mentioned car loans, saying that they’re generally a terrible idea. She wondered why. They give you ages to pay it off, right? If you take out a car loan for €10,000, I said, how much would you have to pay back? Well, €10,000, of course. No, it might be more like €15,000. Whatever the figure, it’s a lot more than the original price. This is the sort of thing they should be teaching you in maths classes at school. Well of course they’re not going to teach us that! That’s life stuff, and you don’t get taught life stuff at school. Gosh, sadly you’re absolutely positively right on that point, aren’t you?

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Scrabble

Sometimes your principles need to go out the window

November 19, 2025 by 0 Comments

At 8:30 this morning I met Dorothy at the immigration office. She’d being trying to renew her residence permit, just like I did back in April, but struggling with the online process that (like me) she found impenetrable. This time, to her great relief, the man at the desk allowed her to bypass the inscrutable portal and get her permit processed manually. They probably took pity on her because of her age. (I was lucky that the place was pretty much deserted when I went.) She was there for ages behind a sort of curtain. I couldn’t figure out what was taking so long. The problem was in fact her fingerprints. After many decades of gardening, they had worn flat. Whatever she did, they couldn’t get a reading. Finally they let her through regardless. Afterwards we wandered around trying to find somewhere nearby to have a coffee. My cappuccino was, as always, nowhere near warm enough, but we had a very good chat.

While I was out, Dad had tried to call me on Teams. I didn’t hear a thing; it just flashed up with a message. By the time I got back it was a bit too late, and honestly I was afraid of how the conversation might unfold. Yesterday our aunt emailed my brother and I to inform us that Mum and Dad’s prospective buyers – their current tenants – who had already agreed to buy the place for £250,000, had lowered their offer by £5,000. The English “system” is crazy. You sign, you agree, that’s final, if you then back out you lose your 10% deposit. That’s what sensible countries do. It’s even what Scotland does, as far as I know. But not England. The tenants mentioned something about wear and tear and renovation costs. My aunt said our parents should meet the tenants halfway and come down to £247,500. I entirely agreed with her – that’s exactly what I would do in their shoes. My brother though said that the tenants are in a weak position, the talk of renovation costs is ridiculous, and our parents should stick to their guns on principle. As I see it, Mum and Dad have basically just won Lotto here and to risk losing the sale for the sake of 2% or even 1% of the asking price would be terrible. Any future sale, if there is one, would likely have horrendous chains attached (that could break at any moment) and could involve untold time and stress. I’m meeting Mark for dinner tonight – I have an extremely rare early finish of 7pm – and maybe I’ll call Mum and Dad when I get back and find out what they’ve decided to do.

I’ve got an easier day today and boy do I need it. My recent schedule has been exhausting. On top of the teaching there are lesson plans and debriefs so I don’t simply forget what I’ve done. The scheduling itself is a headache as it’s a struggle to fit everyone in. Online lessons can be particularly tiring because of all that screen time. The biggest problem is not having two free days at the weekend (or even free evenings) to recharge my batteries. I’m not complaining – after nine years this is still the best thing ever – but at times in the last two weeks I’ve felt absolutely shattered.

Yesterday I had my second lesson with the Dubai woman. The latest Dubai woman, I should say – there are so many. She lives in Braytim, a new development in the south of Timișoara. I don’t know where the “Bray” part of the name comes from. Y isn’t even part of the Romanian alphabet. I had a look at a couple of flats in that area and was put off immediately because it all seemed so soulless. I’d have gone stir-crazy there with all the unremitting newness. Plus the flats were all in that open-space format which is hopeless for teaching. I also wouldn’t have Kitty if I lived in a place like that. She’s lovely, but she’s so active that I do need to restrict her access at night. Last Friday I had a two-hour lesson at home with two boys who were blown away by Kitty’s agility.

On Monday my 37-year-old student in Slatina said something I found extremely sad. We were discussing photos. Do you take many photos? Are there lots of photos of you? She said, “I hate people taking photos of me because I’m ugly.” That’s very sad, I said. “It’s not sad, it’s just the truth.” Yikes. I almost cried.

Last week the world Scrabble championship took place in Ghana. It only happens every two years. Over 120 players each played 32 games; the top two then met in a best-of-seven final on Sunday. I caught snippets of it at best until the final games on Saturday and then the final itself. Adam Logan of Canada had already clinched a place in the final with games to spare, while New Zealand’s Nigel Richards, the undisputed best player of all time, won his last three games to sneak into second place and make the final. The final was streamed on YouTube. In a game largely dominated by nerdy young men, it was good to these two old geezers in the final. Every game was drama-packed, not least game four in which Nigel incredibly misplaced two tiles, forgoing 100-odd points, but won the game anyway. Top mathematician Adam took the lead, Nigel came back, but Adam – who completed a stunning fightback in the third game and had slightly better luck, particularly in game six – toughed out a 4-2 win. You could see at the end what it meant. I was fascinated by the fact that neither player had a phone. Scores are normally submitted via phones, but when perhaps the only two phoneless players met in the final, this obviously wasn’t an option. Both players are reclusive, as far as I can make out, and they hardly said a word throughout their battle. The sad thing for me is that Richards – clearly the best player ever in a very popular board game – gets virtually zero recognition in his native country. Maybe if he had to unscramble tiles with his head up other blokes’ arses as in a rugby scrum, he’d get more attention. (That’s unfair I know. NZ has moved on a lot from the rugby-racing-and-beer days. Also, Nigel moved to Malaysia in 2000.) During the stream they put up a poll. If you’re watching this, how old are you? Under 20, 20–29, 30–39, 40 or over. What an ageist poll! I’m firmly in the geriatric category here. But then, look who made the final two.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - The UK

Relieving my parents’ burden, I hope

November 14, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ll start with some very good news. The people currently renting one of Mum and Dad’s St Ives flats want to buy it. In fact my parents have already accepted their offer. A flat £250,000. Outright, so none of those god-awful chains you get over there that break at a moment’s notice and send you back to square one. I wonder how the renters are suddenly in a position to buy. There’s still legal stuff to get done, and it looks like they’ll get a bill for a couple of thousand to fix the roof, but wow, if this goes through it would be huge. I’m very happy Mum and Dad immediately accepted rather than hanging out for an extra five or ten grand or whatever. This all kicked off when they got a call on their home phone at three in the morning from their property manager. Shit, what’s this? Oh really?

I’ve been pretty busy of late with lessons. I’m having a tough time fitting them all in, to be honest, and it’s been tiring. The biggest problem is that my “client base” has become increasingly kid-heavy, and most of them are only available between 3pm and 7pm or thereabouts. On Wednesday I had a lesson with the 15-year-old twins, boy and girl, who live in a ground-floor flat whose lack of daylight would mess me up entirely. They’d just had an English test. The girl (who now has a very good command of English) got the maximum grade of 10 while the boy got a 7, which is still certainly a pass. They both talked at length of their stress of homework and tests and exams, and that’s even though they’re in the ninth class which is supposed to be less stressful than the one they completed last June. (At the end of eighth class, they have two high-stakes exams in Romanian and maths. The scores they receive in those exams determine what school they go to for the final four years. The scores are decimal numbers out of ten like 7.8 or 8.3; the best schools require averages well into the nines.)

It was clear the boy was disappointed with his English grade, and sure enough the next morning I got a message from his mum. Quoting verbatim: “Please be more demanding with [boy’s name]. I’m disappointed in him. He doesn’t study, otherwise I don’t understand how, after so many years of English, he gets a 7 on the test. Please give him homework. He only learns when you do it with him. And I want him to be able to get his Cambridge. Thank you very much!!” His mum wrote this in English. In the past she’d make lots of mistakes in English, but this was perfect, so quite possibly she used AI. I wanted to write back: Leave the poor chap alone! He’s got so many other subjects; just give him a break. He also happens to be on one of the country’s best robotics teams. I did reply, saying that in future I’ll let the girl get on with her work, mostly from a textbook, while being a lot more hands-on with the boy. The fact that they’re at quite different levels does create a problem in our lessons; she’s liable to blurt out an answer before he’s even had time to understand the question. By the way, “get his Cambridge” refers to a Cambridge English test, which you can take at various levels. It doesn’t mean getting into Cambridge University, though his mum probably has that in mind too.

On Tuesday I had a new student, a woman in her mid-thirties who works as an ear-nose-and-throat specialist. I’ve seen a few of them over the years. We met online; she was smoking a cigarette as we started the session. She had plenty of make-up and jewellery and what I’m sure was a fake tan. At one point I asked her if she’d travelled much. Oh yes. Where have you been? Given what she looked like and the fact that she must be on good money, I knew what was coming. Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Dubai. Of course Dubai. She’s at a beginner level so the lessons won’t be easy at all, but I’m sure I’ll manage.

I saw a video pop up on my YouTube entitled “Why you shouldn’t trust confident people”. I don’t. People who appear very confident and don’t ever say maybe and use very few filler words have always set off alarm bells in me. I was thinking about this when I saw Michael Gove interviewed recently. He was minister of education in the UK from 2010 to 2015 and is partly responsible for the maths GCSE over there being a lot harder now than it was 30 years ago when I did it. When I heard him speak I thought, gosh, you’re using all these big words and speaking oh so authoritatively, but I don’t really think you have a clue. And as a result, you’re dangerous.

When I spoke to Mum recently, she interrupted our conversation twice to visit the loo. She’s still not right down there, is she?

Family - Language teaching - Music - Politics

Taking pride

November 6, 2025 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother last night, just after I’d had a session with a 35-year-old guy who had never heard of Nelson Mandela. This happens quite often in lessons: a huge cultural figure or event that I assumed was universally known (such as 9/11) doesn’t figure at all in my student’s consciousness. Sometimes the reverse happens, too. My brother didn’t say a lot. It sounded like it was just the usual tiring business of looking after two small children. When I mentioned a potential Danube Delta trip with Mum and Dad next spring, he gave me a stark warning: Don’t do it. You’ll almost certainly fall out with Mum on a trip like that. Ugh, he’s probably right, but I’d like to give my parents the chance to see more of the world. And I’d quite like to visit the delta too. He even joked that the damage from the fall-out could be irreparable to the point where she writes me out of the will. (I haven’t watched Joanna Lumley’s Danube series yet, but it’s had some negative reviews, largely because huge swathes of territory – including Serbia – were inexplicably left out.)

Then this morning, after going to the local produce market, I spoke to Mum and Dad. It seems my brother had left quite a bit out when I spoke to him. My sister-in-law isn’t coping that well with the two kids. She relies quite heavily on her own parents, who often visit. She might well be suffering from depression. If so, at least she goes back to work soon. That so often helps.

Back in April I was extremely fortunate to find one of the immigration officers on a good day. This young official allowed me to bypass the inscrutable online system and get my ten-year residence permit processed manually. In May I had the new permit in my hands. Dorothy hasn’t been so lucky. She’s been forced to navigate the online process, which takes months and is truly awful. One problem is that her passport wasn’t stamped when she flew back from the UK in September. I might well end up taking her over the border into Serbia in the car, just so that she can have her passport stamped. It isn’t that far.

Last week during my chat with Dad when Mum had gone off to golf, I asked him what Mum really thought of me. She’s very proud of my brother, and why shouldn’t she be? I’m very proud of my brother. But what exactly does she think of me? No family, no big house, no illustrious career, no first-class degree. A cat and that’s about it. And that’s after all the promise I showed as a kid. Does she think I’m a failure? I was quite moved by what Dad then said, which is that Mum in fact thinks very highly of me and is extremely proud of how I took the bull by the horns and made a drastic – positive – change to my life. He said she often mentions me to her church friends in glowing terms. He said she’s very proud of both of us. That was lovely to hear.

Some excellent US election results overnight. Hopefully it’s the start of something. The soon-to-be New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s line was pretty effective: “So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up!”

Talking of elections, Dad mentioned that yesterday he wanted to use the loo in (I think) Mitre 10, when someone told him: “Don’t go in there. Someone’s just crapped in the sink.” Lovely. Guess what, I said, the bloke who crapped in the sink also gets to vote in elections.

After getting that gamelan LP, I’ve been thinking how great it would be to visit Indonesia again, if perhaps not Bali. I wonder if it would be possible on the way to or from New Zealand, assuming I make a trip out there next year.

Taylor Swift’s Fate of Ophelia came on the radio on Monday. I hadn’t heard it before. I’m very far from a Swiftie, but this was particularly good.

This was from yesterday’s final session. I didn’t even notice until this morning that he was somewhat confused as to the past tense of the verb to like. You can see the bottom half of Kitty here too:

Family - Life :) - Music - Romania - Scrabble - The UK

Delta plans?

November 3, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s 23 degrees right now: very warm for early November. I’ve just got back from Buziaș, one of my favourite towns in the vicinity. There were a lot of families milling around, taking advantage of the weather and crunchy golden-brown blanket of fallen leaves. With the ornate covered walkway too, it was quite a lovely setting. I realise I went there exactly 52 weeks ago, just before the US election, when there was still hope that it wouldn’t go, well, how I expected it to. Although Buziaș is great, the initial section of the road that takes you there – a deeply depressing stroad – is anything but.

Before Buziaș I spoke to my parents. Dad had crashed his plane that morning – it was a total write-off. On Wednesday night I managed to get Dad on his own as Mum had gone off on a golf trip. (During my summer, when their 9am is my midnight, that opportunity basically never arises.) First, it’s great that Mum is back playing golf again. Her stomach problems – which still aren’t resolved – had pretty much forced her to stay away from the course. During our long chat, Dad and I inevitably talked about Mum. I asked him for strategies to avoid falling out with her the next time I see her. It’s a real concern. One thing I thought of is humour. Mum has a pretty good sense of humour, and in the past when Dad (or I) has cracked a simple joke, that’s helped to take the sting out of things. Mum has fallen out (again) with her brother over Trump. My uncle is a fan of his. He has little to occupy himself and his unhealthy diet of sport and Fox News combats his boredom. I would have fallen out with him too.

Mum and Dad have finished watching Joanna Lumley’s Danube, a series on TV. They thoroughly enjoyed it, unsurprisingly because Joanna Lumley is great. I could have seen it here too on BBC, but I didn’t know about it; I’ll see if I can find it online. The last couple of episodes were in Romania; the Danube skirts around the country, then forms a delta – a veritable wonderland – before going out into the Black Sea. Having watched the series, my parents are keen to do a boat trip through the delta (if and) when they come here next year. That would be fantastic but would require considerable planning because it’s a long way from me and it’s vital that stress is kept to a minimum. I did a lesson on the delta some time ago.

Last weekend I met Dorothy at Scârț where they had a market of sorts. I picked up a record – produced in 1974 – full of Balinese gamelan music. The record was made in Italy, has a price in Deutsche marks on the front, and has ended up in Romania. It’s been around a bit, in other words. It’s great to listen to; it brings back memories of my childhood trips to Bali, especially the first trip. All the wonderful smells come flooding back too. Visiting in ’74 though, that would have really been something.

My university friend – it was his birthday yesterday – is currently in Morocco, joining his girlfriend’s parents there. It’s his first time out of Europe. His photos are brilliant. Lately I’ve complained of the saminess of modern travel; there’s nothing samey about those pictures, that’s for sure.

My microwave, which was in the flat when I moved in, had packed in (I’d got used to doing my porridge in the pan), so on Friday I got a new one from down the road. It seems wasteful, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t these things be repaired? These days it’s hardly worth the effort. I found one with two simple dials and nothing digital, which is what I wanted. In fact there were two like that; I got the larger, more powerful one because the price difference between the two was small. (It cost me 410 lei, or roughly £70 or NZ$160.) The woman at the checkout insisted that I purchase an extended warranty but I stubbornly refused. I know those things are a waste of money. When I got it home I opened the box, as you do, then removed the polystyrene packaging, as you do, then oh shit, the glass turntable which was hidden inside one of the chunks of polystyrene crashed to the floor into a thousand pieces. Kitty, you stay away. Fortunately the glass plate from the old microwave slotted in perfectly. (Good job I got the bigger one then.) I probably should have been more careful, but don’t they play-test these things? Loosely packing a glass plate inside polystyrene seems beyond nuts.

I played four games of Scrabble on Thursday night and another four yesterday. Both times I won two and lost two. Gamelan is valid, and a useful high-probability word. It’s good to know because it doesn’t follow the expected patterns of a word containing those letters. Naturally I’d want to put ng or age or man together when anagramming those seven letters, but gamelan doesn’t do anything like that.

In news very local to where I grew up, there was a stabbing last night on a train near Huntingdon station, a train I’ve been on dozens of times. Eleven people were injured, two of whom are currently in a life-threatening condition. Two men have now been arrested. It’s eerie to see the pictures of the familiar station with police cordons.

A busy day in store tomorrow. I’ve got the Romanian lesson starting at 8am, then a trip to the supermarket, then I’ll try and contact the woman with publishing contacts from years ago (no harm in trying), then I’ve got five English lessons finishing at 9:30.

Family - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Scrabble - Writing a book

AI: soon there’ll be nothing left

October 30, 2025 by 0 Comments

This will be a quick post. There just isn’t a lot of news. At this time of year, work tends to dominate. This morning I met up with Dorothy and another friend for coffee. Among other things we discussed the books. What happens how, if anything? Someone Dorothy knows said that AI might render books like mine obsolete. If that’s the case, maybe all books with an educational purpose are becoming obsolete. Or possibly even all books, full stop. And films and music and visual arts and the list goes on. Teachers too. Why am I even writing this now? It’s not like anyone ever read it even prior to ChatGPT. (Even before the AI boom, I endeavoured to make my teaching as manual as possible, with handwritten cards and pieces of paper glued together. People seem to like that. They appreciate the effort that goes into making it all. Obviously online sessions are a different story.)

Dad currently has an exhibition running in Geraldine. He sent me a wonderful photo of him and Mum in the gallery, with a number of his paintings in the background. Mum in particular looks great. I’ll have to print it out and put it in a frame along with the others in the living room. Last time I heard, nothing had sold. It’s partly sign of the times, and partly that the woman who runs the gallery has jacked up the prices to beyond what anyone apart from wealthy farmers can afford. And maybe that paintings are being made obsolete by AI.

Mum was telling me about the horrendous weather they’ve been having up and down the length of New Zealand. From what Mum said, the damage it’s done has been close to Jamaica levels. Here we’ve been doing much better; we sat outside for coffee this morning and were baked in sunshine. When I spoke to Mum this morning, she was about to watch New Zealand play Australia at netball.

I’m in a break between two maths lessons. The first was with that 17-year-old girl who has now got a pretty good handle on her maths. I fear though that in 10 or 15 years’ time she’ll be such an awful boss that many members of staff will quit as a result. That’s if jobs as we know them haven’t completely been replaced by AI by then.

Scrabble. I’m currently on a winning streak of ten games. I’m trying to keep abreast of the three-letter words while simultaneously learning sevens and eights as well as a few fives that contain high-value letters. Not an easy task for me.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Spelling it out

October 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s a dark, dank, windy Friday here. Tomorrow night the clocks will go back, meaning any final summery vestiges will be officially gone. I got up later than usual this morning; I woke up in the middle of the night and went into the living room where Kitty was being particularly affectionate. In fact, she’s chosen to clamber and walk over me, blocking the screen, as I attempt to write this. She’s purring loudly. This is all a far cry from when I first got her. Back then, she was unfriendly at best and positively evil at worst.

On Tuesday night I talked to my brother about his ambitious golden wedding plans for Mum and Dad, even including a blessing at the church. When I told him what I thought, he said I was being overly negative. “I’m not annoyed with you, but I just won’t talk about it anymore.” Actually, you are annoyed with me. I wouldn’t want to fall out with him over something like this. (Normally if he and our parents disagree on something, I end up siding with him, but not this time.) Thankfully we moved on from the subject and reminisced about our childhood Guy Fawkes nights. Yesterday I talked to Mum and Dad. It was pretty clear what they thought of the golden wedding business. Nice in theory, but wholly impractical. And I said to my brother, what even is negative about a simple meal with just the immediate family? Dad even said that after travelling halfway around the world, it would be another bloody thing that we could do without. That’s assuming they come at all.

Dad has been renewing his passport. He got an email back from the British authorities with a name change form attached. Huh? He’d misspelt his middle name on the application form. He’s also been trying to get a new gravestone made up for his mother’s grave in Wales. When the stonemason was about to get to work, Dad realised (or more likely Mum did) that he’d misspelt his mum’s name. He’s almost certainly dyslexic, though kids weren’t diagnosed back in his day. Thirty years later, my brother was diagnosed as having dyslexia, but wasn’t given much in the way of help. Yep, you’re dyslexic, now deal with it. Things have moved on since then.

Loosely on that theme, I had some annoying cancellations yesterday, though they allowed me to play Scrabble last night. It was a good session for me: five wins out of six. The first game was the tightest. I’d built up a healthy lead, but with the bag empty my opponent had great tiles including a blank. He (or she) would clearly find a bingo to end the game. I made a low-scoring play to offload as many of my tiles as possible – not a bad idea sometimes, but here there was higher-scoring play I should have made, even though it kept more tiles. It was easy to spot and I had plenty of time, so there were no mitigating factors. After my opponent went out with a 77-point bingo, I scraped home by five points. I noticed he could have scored 82 with a common word, leading to a draw, so I was lucky to still win after my blunder. In the second game I lurched from one crappy rack to the next and unsurprisingly lost, but then I won the next four games. One play of note from my side was the opening move of UMIAK. I’d learnt a few useful Q words including UMIAQ which is a boat used by Eskimos. It has an anagram of MAQUI which is a kind of shrub (with edible berries) found in Argentina and Chile. I was happy to remember that UMIAQ could also be (and is more commonly) spelt with a final K instead of the Q. (The dictionary tells me that there are seven valid spellings: OOMIAC, OOMIACK, OOMIAK, UMIAC, UMIACK, UMIAK and UMIAQ. How you’re ever supposed to remember this stuff, I have no idea.)

On Monday there was a huge outage that knocked out a whole load of Amazon services. Whenever I hear about such things, my initial thought is great. (I don’t use Amazon. Not intentionally, anyway.) I’d love to see the whole rotting tech edifice, dominated by five or six behemoths, come crashing down. The only sad thing about the episode, and it is a big one, is that it took out the payment system for Amazon staff at the same time.

It’s a light day today with just three lessons. Tomorrow I hope to catch up with Dorothy who has just got back from a trip to Greece, and also Mark. Maybe I’ll play squash with him on Sunday.

Family - Life :) - Photos

Golden no-go

October 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

At the weekend my brother messaged me about Mum and Dad’s upcoming golden wedding. It’s under six months away, on April 10th. He thought we should make a big thing of it in St Ives. But there are all kinds of reasons why that just ain’t gonna happen. For one, it’s unlikely they’ll be over in April. Heck, they might not be over at all. Then there just aren’t the people anymore. Most of the guests at Mum and Dad’s wedding are no longer even alive. It’s been half a century! There’s practically no family even. Simply put, it wouldn’t fly. Literally: Mum’s aging relatives in New Zealand are hardly going to make the trip for it. I think my brother still has fond memories of Mum’s parents’ golden wedding in 1989 when we just happened to be in New Zealand. And why not? It was quite the family occasion. All seven children and 18 grandchildren were present; there were uncles, aunts, cousins, you name it. Temuka was pretty much taken over by it. Stuff happened in the church, at St Joseph’s Hall, and best of all at the Tea Pot Inn (three words) where the fifty-odd (maybe more) of us had a celebratory meal.

On Saturday I had my usual maths session with Matei. He told me he’d been offered a university place at Bremen in Germany, assuming he gets the grades. Exciting for him. When he’s flown the nest, his parents will move Bucharest where they lived until 2016 when they moved to Timișoara for work. So after nine years, it looks like my time with Matei (and his family) will be at an end.

My cousin took part in the “No Kings” anti-Trump protests in New York state over the weekend. He’s not massively politically motivated, but that shows you the critical mass that has (at last) built up.

On Friday there was a huge gas explosion in a Ceaușescu-era tower block near Bucharest that killed three people including a pregnant woman. The disaster has since dominated the news.

Yesterday I took the car to Lake Surduc, and hour and a bit from here. Hardly a soul was there. The weather was just about perfect and it the autumn colours made for some nice scenery. Unfortunately there’s no way of walking around the lake unless you’re prepared to trudge through forest, which I actually did with Mark (and his dog) 3½ years ago. The lake is pretty close to that beautiful spot where I stayed with my friends from St Ives even further back. I came back via the town of Făget.

Topolovățu Mare, on the way to the lake

Lake Surduc

Făget
Cat - Dreams - Family - Scrabble

What dreams are made of

October 6, 2025 by 0 Comments

Last night I woke up three or four times during the night. Each time I went back to sleep, I resumed a weird and unpleasant dream. This dream started off with me running late for a meeting – I first had to walk to collect my bike – and then when I got there I found it wasn’t a meeting but a game in which everyone was in teams except me who was on my own. The game consisted of a number of physical puzzles to solve. While the others were busily solving these puzzles in their teams, I was getting absolutely nowhere and wanted to escape. The game morphed into some kind of meal. I was on my own again at a table which I knocked over. I then lost my bike. My mother appeared out of the blue, then disappeared. The meal turned into a party in what seemed like student accommodation. Plenty of food was involved. I enjoyed the food but otherwise hated the experience. A power cut allowed me to escape the packed room with food in my pockets. I found an empty room and ate alone until the others located me, to my embarrassment.

There has been a huge shift in the weather in the space of a few days. It’s like September and October have been ripped from the calendar and we’ve lurched from August straight to November. At the weekend Dorothy went to Păltiniș, a mountain resort not too far from Sibiu. She sent me pictures of the (rare) early October snow. In Timișoara we had major downpours last Friday and Saturday. The sun has hardly shown itself.

Last week was an exhausting one. My 31 hours of teaching were nothing too unusual, but the scheduling became a real pain with messages batting backwards and forwards constantly (I felt my batteries being further depleted with each one) and one 17-year-old girl in particular being annoyed that I couldn’t see her at a time that perfectly suited her. Saturday started off in inauspicious fashion when Matei’s father invited me to “take off my clothes”. Matei’s dad doesn’t lack confidence when it comes to speaking English, even if he makes plenty of errors. (The cause of that rather amusing error is that the singular Romanian noun haină means a coat, while the plural haine means clothing in general.)

I worry enormously about my parents. So often they look drained when I talk to them. Dad hasn’t slept. Mum has the weight of the world on her shoulders. On Tuesday they both looked so bad that I guessed something really terrible must have happened to them or to a friend or family member. But no, it was the usual stuff – the tangled web of tech problems and their flats in St Ives. Dad mentioned that the property manager for one of their places had just changed, leading to no end of issues. He later emailed me to apologise for mentioning that. God no, Dad, there’s no need to apologise – your problems are my (and my brother’s) problems too – but I’m much more concerned about the effects they’re having on you and Mum than on the problems themselves.

Yesterday I called Mum and Dad from my car. I was in the village of Bucovăț, which is only a short drive from Timișoara. I’d parked next to a farmhouse which had a large gaggle of geese – dozens of them – outside. I got out of the car to show my parents the geese when a burly bloke asked me what the heck I was doing. Six dogs soon appeared. I told Dad that I was getting flashbacks to New Zealand when I was a kid. Dad was taking pictures of a farmhouse at Hanging Rock when suddenly the farmer levelled his gun at us all. At some point in our conversation, Dad said “shuffling tiles like in Scrabble” and I mentioned that I’d played two games the night before. I also said that I learnt that “hikoi” was a valid word. This was a bad idea: they both said that the inclusion of Maori words is ridiculous. I then countered that it isn’t so simple. “Kiwi” is obviously fine, so where do you draw the line? What about weta? Or weka? By the way, hikoi also functions as a verb, so the rather strange-looking hikoied and hikoiing are also valid Scrabble words.

I played seven games in all over the weekend, winning six. As is often the case, it was my loss that taught me the most. My opponent, who had a higher rating than me, simply knew more words. His (or her) opening play of ZAFTIG scored over 50 and though I competed well, I fell to a 474-423 loss. My losing score was in fact more than I managed in five of my six wins. In the last week I’ve been concentrating on committing the three-letter words to memory.

When I talked to Mum and Dad on Tuesday, I said half-seriously that they should get a cat. Though she was hard work at the start, having Kitty has helped calm me down.

Family - Music - New Zealand

Some ups and downs from NZ

October 1, 2025 by 0 Comments

When I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning, they both looked dreadful. Stress (or more like dispair) was etched on their faces. I wondered what had happened. Just the usual stuff. A mixture of tech going wrong (and getting beyond them) and all the business with their flats in St Ives. The toll this is taking on them is very heavy and I wish it didn’t have to be that way.

I spoke to my cousin in Wellington on Sunday. You could see from her face that she’d had a tough time of it, though she never discussed her cancer treatment. Mostly we talked about cats (they adopted a cat for a time; it got stuck and they had to dismantle the kitchen to extricate it), then moved on to her three sons. The eldest (23) is now in Sydney doing a PhD. The youngest (17) plans to become a policeman. And what about the middle one, aged 20? He’d been suffering badly with mental health problems – my cousin said he was almost admitted last year, having dropped out of university after one term – but now works as a paramedic for Wellington Free Ambulance. The new job has helped him immensely, as you might expect – that sort of job is high up the satisfaction scale. When I later spoke to my parents, they told me that they’d seen a picture of him with long pink hair and (according to my cousin’s younger sister who lives just outside Timaru) he may even transition to a woman. Mum said his mother wouldn’t let him do that. Mum, hello, he’s 20.

After that I spoke to my aunt and uncle who moved into their new place in Geraldine a few months ago. (Well, I mostly just spoke to my aunt. My uncle, who used to let his opinions be known on all manner of subjects, doesn’t say much these days.) The move has been a resounding success, even if it’s been disorienting at times for my uncle. We talked at length about my parents’ property mess and how they might ever escape from it.

I’m very glad to have the saga of my flat in Wellington behind me, but I feel sorry for other owners who are still caught up in the ludicrous earthquake-prone nightmare. Finally though some common sense has seen the light of day, and thousands of buildings are being removed from the list. I suspect that my place would have still been in the firing line: it was on six floors and in a prominent location, close to the war memorial. What will happen to those who have already spent a fortune on strengthening I have no idea. I don’t suppose they’ll get any compensation.

Another major fire on the news this morning. A hotel near Ploiești, about 40 km from the capital, was completely gutted. Two young female Nepalese workers were killed. Just two weeks ago the hotel had been closed by authorities for not having adequate fire protection, but reviews have appeared on booking.com since then. The hotel, which was six years old but looked much older to me, didn’t comply with any building regulations.

A couple of songs. First, Jet Airliner by Steve Miller Band. Everything about it is great, including the intro. (They also produced a radio-friendly version with no intro and “funky shit” replaced with “funky kicks”. Yeah, you’ll want to stick to the original.) It’s worth watching the video too, for all the pictures of Boeing 707s. Watching it make me think how confusing the modern world must be for someone like my father who grew up at the dawn of the jet age. All these exciting possibilities stretched out before us, and somehow we’ve ended up with this. The other song came on my car radio on Sunday. It’s Stand By Me by Oasis. I was never a huge fan of Oasis, but this one which came out in ’97 is rather nice.