Family

Family - Life :) - Other sports

Dreary and weary

April 19, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I watched my brother’s graduation ceremony this lunchtime – they had a live stream from Lincoln Cathedral, an incredible setting for it. After they got through many dozens of postgraduates who almost all originated in Africa, finally it was his turn. A huge achievement, and not something I could have done. I mean, business management, c’mon. I would have lasted ten minutes on that course. Where his motivation came from is beyond me.

My brother is now staying in St Ives and he asked me what I did with the parking permit. Sorry, what? The parking permit I gave to you and asked to leave in the flat after picking you up from Luton. I had zero recollection of that until he mentioned it, and even then my memory of it was pretty vague. I’m talking a level of memory loss I often had at work. I really should have made a note; without notes my life would be an unholy mess of forgettory. Sure enough I’ve found the permit, right here in my flat in Timișoara. So I guess that means he can’t park there legally and I’m in the shit. Looking back, that trip was a real struggle for me. It was too short and I had nowhere near enough time to myself.

It hasn’t been a great few days because I also managed to drop my phone while on my bike and crack the glass. I often wondered how people ended up with spider-web-looking cracked screens, and now I know. I went into the shop to ask if they could swap out the glass without an expensive replacement of the whole display – it’s still fully functional – but I got a pretty firm “no can do”.

A combination of all this and the weather – now dull and dismal, or mohorât as they say here – means I now feel a million miles from where I did four weeks ago when I drove to Recaș on that beautiful day and just sat in the park.

Last year I watched the final qualifiers of the world snooker, and all the drama that involved, but this year my work schedule has made that impossible and I’m not sure I’d have bothered anyway. I hope I can watch some of the real tournament because it’s a nice relaxing thing to do. There’s also the football. Can Blues stay up? They have three games left. First up is a trip to Rotherham, the worst team in the division by some distance, on Saturday. A win would be massive, but it’s far from guaranteed – Blues’ away record is atrocious.

I feel tired. I can’t wait for the Orthodox Easter weekend, now two weeks away, and a general lack of having to see or communicate with people. The curse of instant messaging means those blissful spells are fewer and farther between.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Other sports - Tennis

Lucky to have him

April 14, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve now heard that my aunt won’t be having a proper funeral service. Instead they’ll have an informal celebration at her house in Earith in the coming weeks before the place is sold. Her ashes will be scattered in the river in Wales, where my uncle’s also were after he died in 2002.

With family members popping off around him, Dad feels like the last man standing. After what he’s been through health-wise, we’re lucky to have him. We nearly lost him in 2005 – he was only 55 – when his heart valve operation in the UK went awry. Then five years ago he got bowel cancer. He’s just had a check-up on his heart – he was supposed to have them annually but because his operation took place in the UK he slipped through the NZ net. A sleeve was placed over his aortic valve to stop it expanding, but a section was left sleeveless (why?) and that’s a potential problem. He said it’ll be OK for now but he’ll get it looked at every year until he’s 85 (they stop caring at that point) and maybe at some stage he’ll need an operation.

When I spoke to my parents yesterday they’d just been to Ashburton. They dropped in on Mum’s mother’s cousin (aged 106) in the home. Imagine that, three whole decades on top of what my aunt managed. Amazingly, she isn’t even the oldest resident of Ashburton. Her childhood friend, three months older, is also still alive. The two of them, still kicking around today, at odds of zillions to one. Mum had been to a performance of The Vicar of Dibley in Geraldine, which just happens to be the vicar’s name. Very well received, even if Alice was too fat. I suggested that Father Ted, which is bloody hilarious, would also go down well there.

Two big stories came out of America last week. One, the total solar eclipse. A student of mine mentioned the 2000 eclipse which was visible all over Europe and at its most extreme (perigee? apogee?) in Romania. I said that in fact it was in 1999, then he “corrected” me by saying that it must have been 2000 because they came out with a commemorative 2000-lei note. I then pointed out that not even crazy Romanians would have produced a 1999-lei note. The most striking aspect of that eclipse, which took place in August, was the plummeting temperature. The other headline was that OJ Simpson died. Like my aunt, he was 76 (trombones). His car chase in 1994 was one of the most-watched events in American TV history, then for the next year he was never out of the news until he was finally acquitted of double murder. I remember the school cricket team instituted an “OJ award” for getting away with murder.

This June-like weather – high 20s most days, 31 forecast tomorrow – will soon end. It’s been a heck of a run. Romanians are used to weather being predictable, and if it’s out of kilter with the time of year – even if that means bluer skies and beautiful sunshine – they don’t like it. As for me, I was brought up in the UK and spent 5½ years in Wellington, so I take what I can get. Yesterday I had only five hours of lessons, all in Dumbrăvița. First up was maths. Circle theorems – not my favourite topic. I learn them, then forget them. And I’m supposed to teach them. If I have time tomorrow I’ll spend an hour on them before I see Matei again in the evening. After that I saw Octavian’s sister who is coming on in leaps and bounds, then Octavian himself. My lessons with him always frustrate me; he’s doing an IGCSE which forces him to study literary devices, when improving his pronunciation and intonation (still nowhere near good enough) would be far more useful.

After teaching I played tennis with Florin. Whether it was a panic attack or a kind of derealisation I wasn’t too sure, but I felt shaky out there in our 90-minute session. In the first set I led 4-1, but felt unsteady in the next game in which I opened with a double fault and dropped my serve to love. Leading 5-3 on his serve, I had two set points at 15-40, then another two, but couldn’t break him down. He was zoned in. After a torturous rally in which I finished second best, I let out an Andy Murray-like screech, to my slight embarrassment. In the following game I was lucky; he had a point for 5-5 and I clipped the tape to keep myself in the game, then closed out the set on my sixth opportunity. I got that same wobbly sensation in the second set, especially on serve, but I won it 6-3. The whole time I was battling the heat and my inadequate-sized water bottle. Florin hardly broke sweat. In a little while I’m meeting him and some of his friends down by the river.

Football. I watched Blues’ home game with Cardiff on Wednesday night. They weren’t terrible but they were uninspiring and lacked creativity. When Cardiff scored midway through the second half, I was done watching it. There were no further goals, and Blues were plunged deeper into the mire. On to yesterday’s game at home to Coventry, a local rival still fighting for promotion and with an FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United in the pipeline. To everyone’s surprise a hungry Blues gobbled up Coventry 3-0 in front of 27,000 fans – a huge result as they try to dodge the drop in one of the weirdest seasons ever. There were fireworks before the game – what relegation battle? If they do stay up, the future is very bright for the club; the new owners have near boundless ambition.

Driving - Family - Travel: Romania

Sad news about my aunt

April 11, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

My aunt passed away on Monday at the age of 76, just a week after I’d visited her in the home. My brother had brought his son along only a few days before that. We had no inkling that we would lose her so soon. Her oxygen levels were very low, as a result of her cancer, and she couldn’t be kept alive. That’s probably why I had such a job waking her when I saw her.

It is some consolation that my brother and I saw her, and had good conversations with her, during her final days. The other consolation is that she was very well looked after and she didn’t really suffer. Considering she was bedbound and spent her days staring at the ceiling, she was strangely at peace; perhaps that was the morphine. Since I heard the news I’ve been thinking of all the happy memories I have of her: the times when she made me smile and laugh. She had quite a knack for that. One time that springs to mind was when I joined her and my grandmother in southern Spain in January 2000. She had an interesting way, shall I say, of transporting her mother in a wheelchair. At a restaurant that served breadsticks, she started shoving them up her ears and nose and other orifices besides.

I don’t know yet when or where the funeral will be, or whether I’ll go over for it. (British funerals are sometimes weeks after a person’s death.) Dad won’t be travelling from New Zealand; he did his bit in the autumn when he visited her almost daily for a month.

Understandably, Dad’s mood has been low. He’s been struck by the realisation that, on his side of the family, it’s only him left of his generation. His cousins have gone too.

I went back to Recaș today with the plan to get a barbecue lunch which they serve there on Wednesdays. I called my parents from there. I thought that the blue sky in the background might lift Dad’s mood – we’ve had glorious whether here since, and even before, I got back. I showed Mum my car – she didn’t believe that my bright blue Peugeot had POM on its number plate. I didn’t have lunch there after all because I got a splitting sinus headache and just wanted to get home and take some Advil and have a banana sandwich which was all I could manage. On the way back I turned onto the motorway by mistake, so I got a surprise first taste of Romanian motorway driving. The road was mostly empty; the speed limit here is 130 km/h, more than I’m used to. Thankfully the Advil did the trick.

On Sunday I went on a much longer trip, first to Lipova by the Mureș River, then east, then south, then west, then north and finally back home. Over 300 km in all. I went on all manner of back roads, passing through villages with roads flanked by donkeys, goats, and old ladies whose reaction made me think that a real person passing through in a real car was quite an event.

The route I took on Sunday

A stork’s nest – a common sight – in Mașloc

Not much risk of flooding in the Mureș at Lipova with the weather we’re having

Today I took delivery of a 2009-edition road atlas of Romania. The scale is 1:300,000 or nearly five miles to an inch. It didn’t realise it would be such a vast tome; it also contains smaller-scale maps of the rest of Europe. I’ll buy a GPS gizmo too, though a physical map allows me to plan better and is just a nice object to have.

Family - The UK

Easter trip report — Part 2 of 3

April 7, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It isn’t that far from Poole to St Ives – in the bottom half of the UK, nothing is that far – but I had to change coaches twice, at Victoria Station and Stansted, so the whole thing took an age. It was a typically British grey day; not a bad day for such a journey. The trip had its moments, such as at the beginning when a mother and daughter, who were both mad in a good way, were making their way to London to see a show. The daughter lived in Aberdeen, while her mum was a serious jam maker. She marketed her produce as the pleasingly alliterative Jurassic Jam after the Jurassic Coast on which she lives. She talked about the logo, which obviously involved a dinosaur, and the cloth top on the jars which was designed for maximum tweeness. Victoria Station looked very tired; the loos had a level of cleanliness I’m more accustomed to in Romania. We went past the great sights: the Albert Hall, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben and the Tower of London. Luckily we arrived in Cambridge five minutes early, so I could jump straight on the bus to St Ives. After getting into the flat at close to 6pm, I grabbed a takeaway lamb satay and didn’t do much in the evening.

I’d earmarked Easter Monday for seeing my aunt in her home in Cottenham. In the past, there was a bumper market on these bank holidays, but we now live in the age of Ali Express and Temu – or at least some of us do – so now we just get the normal Monday market. I took Dad’s old bike and cycled along by the busway. That seemed the easiest way. It was a ten-mile ride each way; I turned left at a village called Westwick which I hadn’t even heard of, and it was another 2½ miles from there. At the home I was shown to my aunt’s room; she was in a deep sleep and she only stirred when I prodded her. She rarely gets out of bed. I gave her some Easter chocolates and we had a good chat – better than when everything was soaked in alcohol and she didn’t talk to you but through you. I stayed for 50 minutes and then went back the same way to St Ives where I bought some focaccia bread from the market.

Passing Fen Drayton Lakes as I cycled down the busway

This busway graffiti – on a commuter route – says “Work, eat, sleep, repeat”. I prefer the one that says “Gary Numan’s Busway Army”.

Later in the afternoon I met some family friends – the ones who came to Romania in 2017. I always enjoy spending time at their place with their vegetable garden and assorted knick-knacks and rather groovy wall patterns. They were overrun with forget-me-nots which they put outside the front gate for sale. After a chat, we went to Wetherspoons for dinner. Wetherspoons gets a bad rap, partly because of their chairman Tim Martin who’s a raving Brexit supporter, but if like me you just want to be fed and watered – cheaply if possible – you can’t go wrong there. They also tend to set themselves up in architecturally nice buildings. I had a steak and kidney pie, and tried to convince them to come back to Romania now that I have a car. Covid and his severe illness, which he has bounced back from remarkably well, have made that sort of travel harder, psychologically as much as anything. Blues won 1-0 at home to Preston that day – it was a lucky goal – and though that win (their first in ages) is huge, they’re far from safe. That game didn’t feature a single corner; that’s an exceedingly rare event. They held a UB40 concert after the game.

My friends’ bathroom at quarter to thirteen on Bendsday

On Tuesday I had another early start. My bus into Cambridge left at half-six; my train to Birmingham left at eight. I’d bought what they call a split ticket and imagined I’d have to change at Melton Mowbray but no, I could stay on the same train. (I had visions of buying a pork pie there; Melton Mowbray is where they originate.) I met my friend at New Street and we wandered along the canal, stopping for a coffee in the quite extensive Jewellery Quarter. Along the way there was a park where you could play table tennis for free, so we rallied for a few minutes. We walked through the lovely St Paul’s Square where my friend introduced me to a birdsong app – basically it’s Shazam for birds. We then meandered through the Gun Quarter and stopped in a pub where we met his girlfriend. She is still recovering from cancer which she got at only 33. She was in good spirits; her life is gradually getting back to normal after being extremely compromised. I had bangers and mash – when in Rome – and we mostly just chatted before going to their flat in the centre of town which they had recently renovated. Visitors gradually dribbled in; they were playing a Lord of the Rings board game that evening. I left just before the game got under way. I stepped out into the rain, looked around the centre for a bit, then boarded my train. I got back to the St Ives flat at 11:20.

This small place near Ely, with a railway station, is pronounced MAY-nee. I went there once when I was eleven. In Romanian it’s a type of music that people love to hate.

A Banksy in Birmingham. It would have passed me by if my friend hadn’t pointed it out.

In Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter


Family - The UK

Easter trip report — Part 1 of 3

April 6, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m back. Long story short, it was great to see my brother and his family, but next time I’ll want another couple of days.

On Thursday the 28th I got up at stupid o’clock – this became a recurring theme – and got a taxi to the airport. The flight to Luton was fine. It got in just after 7am; my brother picked me up at 8:30 or so – he’d driven all the way from St Ives. After last October’s fire in the multi-storey car park which damaged 1500-odd cars, the pick-up and drop-off bit is now acres of tarmac a half-mile or more from the terminal. My nephew was very active in the back of the car; St Ives had sent his sleep patterns way out of whack. The trip down to Poole didn’t take long despite the a woefully wet and windy weather. In the afternoon the four of us went to Wetherspoons in Wimborne. (The Ws kept coming.) They put me up in a room that looked out over the river and a wooded area, with the twittering of birds a pleasant feature. I just wished it wasn’t so bloody freezing (and I’m someone who likes to be a degree or two cooler than the national average).

At around 3:30 that night, my nephew woke up and bawled his eyes out. I was instructed to leave him alone, despite my urge to do something. On the morning of Good Friday the four of us went to Pamphill where they have a popular farmhouse and dairy shop. They hoped the little chappy would wear himself out. We grabbed some coffee and scones, and I think my brother also had an ice cream on a cool March day; eating out for families of young children is now expected, which it certainly wasn’t four decades ago. I think the expected level of consumption (among other factors) would make it very hard for me to bring up a family in 2024. So much of it is a massive WTF to me. Right, so how many bottles of liquid do we need for the bathroom? Shampoo, shower gel (they’re the same thing anyway), deodorant, after shave, and you might like some perfume and some moisturiser. Maybe some mouthwash and some hair stuff, and that should do it. So how many bottles is that? Eight? Ten? Judging by the average modern bathroom, they need at least sixty. My sister-in-law told me the crippling cost of their son’s nursery before moving him into a cheaper one a couple of months ago. It was roughly double what I spend on everything. Just mind-blowing.

A grey old day at Pamphill Dairy

Later on Friday, my brother and I went to the nearby pub where we both had cider. Meanwhile, the nearby river had burst its banks and was rising at a near-visible pace, much faster than the Ouse at St Ives did (or does). I saw that Blues lost 2-1 at QPR despite taking the lead in the second half. The decisive goal was another last-minute sucker punch, leaving them deep in the relegation mire. That evening we had curry and I figured I could somehow control their digital radio from my phone. It was called “kitchen control” or something of that sort. At this point I’m no longer a participant in modern tech, or indeed modern life; I’m just a bystander. By this stage my nephew was getting his sleep patterns back on track. He’s a lovely boy (definitely not a baby but a boy) and he makes very little trouble for anyone, beyond the usual peeing and pooing and not sleeping. He’s constantly curious and is expanding his horizons (and his vocabulary) every day. When I was there, he picked up the word “bottle”. He’s lucky to have such good parents who devote a lot of time to him. This was helped somewhat by my brother’s knee operation last year which prevented him from going very far. (He still isn’t 100% recovered, even now.) The knee business didn’t do his degree prospects any harm, either.

Every Saturday… but not this one

It’s running fast

We’d planned to go to the car boot sale on Saturday, but the flood put paid to that, so we had coffee in Wimborne instead. It turned into a sunny day, and in the afternoon we met a friend of my brother’s in a pub and had three pints apiece in the beer garden; I can’t remember when I last drank that much. We didn’t realise that the Boat Race, which Cambridge won, was happening at that time. When we got back we saw the final of Gladiators. The original programme in the nineties was Mum’s favourite; exhausted from a week of teaching, she’d blob out on the sofa for two hours and watch Gladiators followed by Blind Date. That night my brother showed me his ultra-precision short-wave military radio. A piece of kit dating from the eighties, it boasts an eight-foot antenna. We played around with it, picking up distant stations including a rather creepy Russian one which was sending out coded signals.

The clocks went forward on Saturday night, and on Easter Sunday morning it was time to say goodbye as I had a long old bus (or, as they say, coach) journey in store.

Driving - Family - Music - Photos

About to shoot off, but I think I’ll be here a while

March 28, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s my last day before my Easter break – one of the windiest days I can remember in Romania – and it’s going by in slow motion. I say Easter break, but in fact it’s the first of two Easters I’ll celebrate this year. Due to the vagaries of moon phases and an obsolete calendar, the gap between this year’s “normal” Easter and Orthodox Easter is five weeks – usually it’s just one week, and sometimes they even fall on the same day. My second Easter, when I won’t have to see anybody or do a whole lot, will feel like more of a break than the first.

To get my driving confidence up, I need a window of a few hours so I can get the hell out of the city. A trip around the block won’t do it. This isn’t Geraldine; around the block involves the main road right outside my block of flats (turning left onto it is horrible, I’ve realised) with 18-wheelers bearing down on me. After this afternoon’s trip I got straight into the white wine I bought from Recaș last week. Getting out on the open road though is a whole heap of fun. At this point it seems my car is going to be pretty economical, as French cars often are. (Last night a student told me there’s a saying in Romania that you should avoid the letter F when it comes to cars. That means Ford, Fiat, or French.)

I met Dorothy in town yesterday. We talked about Timișoara and how it suits us both down to the ground. There’s so much to like here: the architecture, the parks, the river, the markets, the funny hole-in-the-wall shops, all the imperfections that make you feel more alive. Add in the welcoming people and the fact that it’s safer than almost any city in the UK. (If you don’t feel safe in a city, everything else falls away.) Plus all the signs being in an exotic language is massively cool. Having everything in my native English would now seem humdrum and tame. Returning to live in the country of my birth is a complete non-starter; New Zealand is an option but unless things ramp up horribly a few hundred miles east, I’ll be in Romania for a while yet.

Dad sent me a video of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, an extraordinary piece of music by The Band. I was more familiar with Joan Baez’s rendition of the song, but The Band’s original version is really quite something. In fact The Band have produced amazing stuff all round; I’ll probably end up adding one of their albums to my collection. Last night Dad told me about a programme he’d been listening to on the radio, all about accents, or more specifically what causes people to keep them or change them when they move. Mum certainly softened out the edges of her Kiwi accent when she moved to the UK; attracting the nickname Iggy based on how she pronounced “egg” might have given her the impetus to do that. Being a teacher must have been a driver too. (My brother’s name contains the same vowel as “egg”; Mum made a conscious effort to say it in the English way so it didn’t sound like a certain pulse that is sometimes preceded by “Mr.”)

I’ll be up at four tomorrow to get a taxi to the airport. Today my brother has taken the little one over to see his great-aunt in the home. My cousin was concerned that if he had a sniffle and his mum were to catch a cold, that would likely be the end of her. I’m planning to cycle over to her place on Monday.

Here are some snaps I took yesterday – a slice of Holland in the middle of Timișoara.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - Tennis

Panic, picking peaches and plums, and plexing your googol

March 26, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It was playing tennis on a balmy early Saturday evening when I had another panic attack. Despite making far more unforced errors than normal I led Florin 5-3. In the next game I was about to serve, down 0-30, when it hit me again. It felt as though my lower body might give way. I soldiered on through that game in which I even had a set point, then to some relief I broke him to love in the following game for the set. Relief because that meant we could change ends. We restarted almost immediately and I staggered on through three games with great difficulty, feeling the need to support myself with the back fence after every point. Look, I’m really not feeling great, I admitted. “Are you dizzy?” Well that’s one way of putting it. He was sympathetic and with ten minutes of our session left we called it a day. I wonder what has brought this on all of a sudden. I can’t be the fear of getting behind the wheel; my first episode was before I bought the car. I’m glad to be going away for a few days – my trip might act as some kind of reset button.

This evening I had my 285th session with Alin and my last for a while. He told me he had to leave his job for personal reasons and would need to give up our twice-weekly meetings until he gets himself sorted. Normally when people say that I don’t expect to see them again, but we’ve built up quite a rapport in that time – a long journey through phrasal verbs, native-speaker podcasts, and a great deal of humour – so I’d put my chances at about even. Tonight we talked about cars and little else; he told me about his five-minute driving test in the mid-nineties. Yesterday I sent the mother of one of my students a message to say I could fit her son in before I go away. She replied to say that he’s too busy and by the way I’ve just cut my finger while slicing a carrot, with an accompanying picture of her bandaged digit. She’s into star signs and stuff so I then suggested that the full moon was responsible for her bad luck.

On Saturday morning before my long day of lessons (they continued after my truncated tennis session) I had a great chat with Mum, the best I can remember for a while. She had been picking Black Boy peaches from trees (pomi) outside the nearby preschool, wondering how all that ripe fruit was still there. I always wonder the same thing when I fill a whole rucksack with plums from the Mehala area of Timișoara. She gave me some tips on preserving fruit – I’ve been hanging on to my jars. Then we talked about our trip to the West Coast and the incredible weather we had, then the possibility of my coming back to New Zealand. My parents are putting me under no immediate pressure, and that’s just as well because while in theory NZ would be great, in practice I dunno man. For one, could I even afford it, and secondly I feel so alive in this place. Then Dad came on the line and we discussed cars. A recurring theme right now.

In my maths lesson with Matei we strayed (partly) off topic as we discussed the googol and its big daddy the googolplex. A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros, right, and a googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeros. It took him a while, then bam!, mind blown. You can’t write it out because there aren’t enough atoms in the universe. Um, sorry what? That’s one thing I love about teaching maths. English is very cool, but you never quite achieve the bam! effect.

I loved this morning’s Romanian lesson. Most of it was spent discussing our teacher’s day-to-day experiences of living under communism. She told us about the summer of ’89, the Ceaușescus’ last summer. She was at university, sharing a tenth-floor room with three other girls. It was inhumanly hot and air conditioning was an unthinkable luxury back then. During an important exam period the only way she could sleep was by soaking bedsheets in water. There was a lift which sometimes left the girls stranded between floors. Escaping involved opening the door by disengaging a small wheel and then climbing up or down, at not inconsiderable risk, to the next floor. Occasionally the water supply would cease and they’d be forced to get water from a well (as I do now with my drinking water) and carry it in glass bottles (no plastic bottles back then) up those ten floors. Now she lives in a ground-floor flat. After those experiences I’d want to be close to the ground too. At the end of a lesson we played Taboo where I had to describe a word to Dorothy (or vice versa) while avoiding five forbidden words. On one occasion I had to guess “panic”. I play Taboo with my students; I created over 500 cards of my own, with just three banned words for each.

When I discussed my favourite vinyl albums of those I own (so far), I neglected to mention Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside. A masterpiece, and how she made it as a teenager I’ll never know.

Driving - Family

Blueberries and pomegranates

March 23, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

A miracle occurred about the time I got back from New Zealand. (Coincidence or not?) My left nostril had been running almost constantly for 18 months since about when the Ukraine war started, then magically it stopped. It still runs if I’m outside in cold weather or when I exercise, and I still take paracetamol most days for low-level pain, but otherwise it’s a spectacular improvement and one I didn’t expect.

Last weekend I emailed a friend from Wellington. He’s such a nice bloke, but I hadn’t heard from him since just after the 2020 US election, so I wrote only a couple of lines, not expecting a reply. But to my delight he got back to me. I hope we can keep in touch now.

On Wednesday my brother passed on a short video of his son. His mum was feeding him – Weetabix with blueberries – and he made a decent attempt at saying “blueberry”. He came out with something like “blubby”. I talked to my brother about this, saying that the repeated B is nice and baby-friendly. I also wondered what he’s doing getting blueberries in March, the spoilt little chap. We never got them in any month. My brother said that if it was up to him, his little boy wouldn’t be getting them either. Under six days till I see them all; I’m looking forward to that a lot.

Today I had to make two trips to the mall for all my car insurance and paperwork. And new number plates. I got to pick my three-letter combination from about two dozen options all around the middle of the P series. (I could have got pretty much any combo if I’d been willing to fork out for it.) When I saw POM among a load of all-consonant blends I went straight for it. It’s easy to remember and it’s hilarious honestly when I look back at all my Kiwi cousins and classmates in Temuka calling me a stinky pom or something even less flattering. By the time I started working over there, I felt quite proud of the term – Britain was cool back then. In fact I even mentioned it in a post in late 2022. In Romanian, a pom is a fruit tree. (Wouldn’t it be nice to have a garden with pomi one day?) A non-fruit-bearing tree is a copac, though sometimes I hear non-fruit trees being called pomi too; languages are complicated. By the way, that’s the closest I’ll ever get to having a vanity plate. They were popular and advertised all the damn time on the radio in New Zealand; they always seemed a great waste of money.

That was the fun bit. Letters and words always are to me. The rest of the process was just weird and confusing, like so much of Romanian bureaucracy. People (my students, mainly) told me to use one of the several brokers in the mall because doing it myself would be a massive struggle. The extra cost would be worth it. They were absolutely right; I’d have been stuffed on my own. This morning there were crowds of people carrying files full of paper. Two supermarket trolleys laden with old plates were wheeled into some kind of oblivion. There was a policewoman with five stripes on her epaulettes – how do you get that many? There were counters that the broker lady could go to but I couldn’t, and vice versa. They’re sending me an updated talon – a kind of log book – that you must have on you when you drive. But because changing my address at the immigration office has proven impossible, they’re sending it to my old address. I’ve asked my tennis partner (he still lives in the block) if he can somehow intercept my mail.

I’m now worried I might have picked up a cold from the girl who has come here for two-hour maths lessons two nights running and will be back for round three tomorrow.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Music - Other sports - Tennis

Panic stations

March 12, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I didn’t sleep well last night and got up at 7:30, half an hour after I meant to. After breakfast I reviewed some Romanian words – there’s a few I can never bloody remember – before our lesson that started at nine. It was an enjoyable lesson – probably the highlight of the day. Then I called Mum and Dad. During the pandemic (it’s now four years since everything went mad) we became closer, but now our lives and experiences have drifted apart again. I have to feign interest in their building project, while the novelty of their son teaching English in Romania has long since worn off. During our chat, they said they might come to Europe in 2025. Might. Jeez.

After the chat with my parents I felt on edge. Can I face another online lesson with that damn woman? Following a surprisingly normal chat, she read screeds of corporate shite from Harvard Business Review. Doubling down on robust penetration capability to achieve superior resilience in a crowded landscape. The more I stare at that sentence the more lewd it gets. She read at 100 miles an hour – her typical Romanian monotone (and the subject matter) made it seem even faster. Slow the eff down. Please. Then it was the 17-year-old girl. We talked about music festivals. I’ve never been to one; she’s already been to three. Have I missed out? Yes, she said. I’m not convinced.

Then it was off to the twins. A quick turnaround. They wanted to talk about their diarrhoea travel experiences and Adolf Hitler. Then a third of the way through our 90-minute session it happened. A panic attack, just like I had regularly in 2001. Or at least that’s what I think it was. A sudden jolt, my heart seemingly skipping a beat, and I felt as if my lower body was giving way from under me. The twins wondered what was happening. Shaken, I recovered and made it through to the end, then did some breathing exercises on my bike trip back. My final lesson of the day was with the extremely pleasant guy in his late forties. He read from Michelle Obama’s autobiography – a fascinating window into her early life, with no end of words and expressions to challenge even an accomplished English speaker such as my student. At one point she mentioned the Muppets. I asked him if they got the Muppets here in Romania. Yes, he said, but only right here because being close to the border meant they could access Serbian TV. He was lucky to live in Muppetland, he said.

Last week I felt terribly demotivated. Heck, I’ve got to do something. Two things. Sort out a car for myself and write that damn book. I had 32 hours of lessons despite a number of cancellations. I doubt I’ll ever get the money from Marco, the bugger. Two and a half hours, then I don’t hear from him. The smoking in bed and his unwavering religious devotion rang alarm bells, though this is Romania, a country of many false alarms. On Saturday I had the most incredible lesson with the girl who has just turned seven. Two hours. How will I cope? Or more to the point, how will she cope? She managed phenomenally well. Several worksheets and colouring exercises on clothes, then a bingo game (she knows her numbers up to 60 upside down and backwards), then I read her a few tactile books before we played a 20-minute game of Kiwi-style Last Card which incredibly we didn’t even finish. She sat there the whole time in rapt attention.

Yesterday I met Mark at Scârț, the place where they have the museum of communism. It was packed there because there was a vinyl sale that I wasn’t even aware of. Then I found both Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Cosmo’s Factory and David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, both of which I’d been looking at online just an hour earlier. At 220 lei between them, they weren’t cheap, but I snapped them up. As Mark said, you’ve got to have a hobby. I’ve now got 18 records, most of them older than me. The texture of the sleeves, the artwork, the smells, it’s all pure happiness and that’s before I even start playing them. Mark and I had a good chat as always, though 14 lei for a lukewarm coffee was a rip-off. I love that area of town so I then hung around in the park on Romulus and Remus Streets with all the blossom out and hardly anyone else around. My next trick was carrying the records home on my bike (I was unprepared, obviously) without falling off it again. Then in the evening I met Dorothy in Piața Unirii. She’d just got back from a trip to the UK where she slept in six different beds and then got bumped off her flight home but got put up in Luton and received $400 in compensation.

Football. Following any kind of sport can be a heck of a time sink. After work on Saturday I watched Birmingham’s game at Millwall, direct rivals in the battle to avoid relegation. It wasn’t easy on the eye. Blues were shocking in the first half but improved somewhat in the second. The game was petering out to a goalless draw, but then Millwall scored from a corner in the 90th minute – a real sucker punch – and that was that. With ten games to go Blues are teetering, there’s no doubt about it. Since their manager was forced to take a back seat, they’ve taken just one point in four games and sit a single point above the drop zone. The good news is that five of Blues’ next seven matches are at home, including tomorrow night’s catch-up game with Middlesbrough. Straight after that run, they travel to Rotherham who were long ago cut adrift at the bottom of the table. If they can garner four wins in those eight matches, they’ll very likely stay up. Even three with the odd draw would give them a good chance. Less than that though and they’re in deep doo-doo.

Dorothy and I even talked briefly about football last night. Mostly we discussed the evocative names of the clubs. Um, OK, not Birmingham City, but rather those named after a girl or a weekday or the Far East or three successive letters of the alphabet. We didn’t talk about the names of the grounds, but those can be quite lovely too. I used to love Burnden Park and Upton Park and Roker Park and the Baseball Ground, none of which exist today. I remember a game from the 1995-96 season in which West Bromwich Albion drew 4-4 with Watford having been way out in front. West Brom’s ground was, and still is, called the Hawthorns. As Watford equalised, a reporter said “it’s four-four at the Hawthorns!” and I remember thinking how poetic that sounded.

In tennis news, Simona Halep’s doping ban has been greatly reduced and she’ll be back on the court later this month. Great news. It’ll be interesting to see how well she does after such a long time away. And this morning on TV they showed the most extraordinary rally between 37-year-old Gaël Monfils and eighth-ranked Hubert Hurkacz. Monfils won the point, and eventually the match. As for my tennis, our season is about to resume but the cost has risen from 40 lei an hour to 70 – why such a huge increase I don’t know – so my court time is bound to come down. That’s a real shame.

Tomorrow morning I’ll have a look at a blue Peugeot 307. I’ve got to get this sorted, as scary as driving again might be.

That was a very long one, I’m sorry.

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

The warmest everything ever, everywhere

March 8, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

After a six-week winter we had the warmest February on record (warmest X on record is something we’ve been hearing a lot lately, right?), and now spring has well and truly sprung. Saying that, it’s tipped it down all day today.

A funny week of lessons, and it’s far from over. On Monday I had the 17-year-old mall rat again, though this time she seemed actually human. We had something approaching a chat, mostly about the Ukraine war. After two years, people here have become dangerously blasé about it all, but she was rightly concerned. One oddity was that she’d never heard of the September 11th attacks. I say oddity – for me it’s the where-were-you moment when the world changed at a stroke – but in Romania it had a much smaller impact on the collective psyche than in the English-speaking world or western Europe. And of course she wasn’t even born then. On the same day I had an online session with the senior manager (a 35-year-old woman) who lives somewhere near Bucharest. Saying these sessions are like talking to a brick wall would do a disservice to the responsiveness of masonry. Just an utter waste of time. The good news is that pointless work makes up just 20% of my hours; 15 years ago it was up near 90%.

A student from 18 months ago has also rejoined the fray. He goes by Italian-sounding name of Marco. I don’t know how you get that out of Dumitru, his real name. I’ve had three online “lessons” with him already this week. One of them he spent lying in bed; during another he smoked the whole time. (I recently had a guy vape during a face-to-face session at home; things suddenly got very strawberry-ish.) The sessions with Marco aren’t pointless exactly, but he’s on a different frequency to me somehow, and I struggle to pick up a signal.

It was 10pm when I finished with Marco on Tuesday. With no lessons the next morning, I put on the game between Hull and Birmingham. Hull, predictably, took the lead just after I tuned in – a goal that should have been disallowed for handball. Hull were dominant and it had all the makings of a stonking win for them, but Blues clung on and in the 82nd minute conjured up an equaliser as Lukas Jutkiewicz who had just come on as a substitute headed the ball home. A good point for Blues but they’re still very much in a relegation scrap. (Today I saw a simulation model that gave Blues a 15% chance of being relegated. Having seen a few of their performances, that feels low, even if they do still have a game in hand. They go to Millwall on Saturday, a huge game for them.) When the Blues game was over, I switched over to Ipswich – the Tractor Boys, as they’re affectionately known – at home to Bristol City. It was 2-2 with ten minutes left and the place was rocking. Ipswich were awarded a penalty, and a shocking kick was easily saved, but not to matter. They scored the winner a couple of minutes later, and it’s a wonder they didn’t add to their tally in stoppage time. That was fun to watch.

Not much other news. In my next post I’ll give a run-down of all the vinyl I bought recently. In the meantime, here’s a video from CityNerd on the world’s top ten music cities (by the metric he uses). Very interesting.

I’m extremely proud of my brother for getting his first-class degree. His graduation takes place on 18th April, a couple of weeks after I go to the UK. It’s a shame he won’t have family there for it. My graduation ceremony in 2002, which my parents and grandmother attended, was quite lovely really.