Family

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Scrabble

Catching up

September 25, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’m struggling a bit this morning with a cold. It’s possible I even have Covid. (Remember that?) There’s a lot of it flying around.

I’m in the middle of a catching-up-with-people period. On Sunday I had a Teams call with my cousin in New York state. His wife briefly came on the line too. We talked about our parents. His father (whose 84th birthday it is tomorrow) recently lost his driver’s licence after badly flunking a memory test. I’ll have a chat with him and my aunt tomorrow. On Sunday I plan to catch up with my Wellington-based cousin who seems to have recovered from her jaw cancer. I was very pessimistic about that, but I was just speculating; she didn’t tell anybody, not even her immediate family, what was happening, so I feared the worst. Last night I spoke to the lady who lives above me (she’s in Canada and will be until January) on WhatsApp. Then yesterday morning I got a very quick call from my parents who are in Moeraki. They said they’d been sleeping a lot, which is fantastic. Something about that place allows them to relax.

And that’s not all. Yesterday I went to the local produce market (which runs twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays) and bumped into Domnul Sfâra who I used to play tennis with. He’s now 90; he told me about all his birthday celebrations with friends. Though frail and diminutive, he’s still as sharp as a tack. I mentioned that I passed the halfway point to his impressive milestone earlier in the year.

I’ve had some interesting lessons this week. On Monday I had my fourth lesson with a 16-year-old boy. What different worlds we inhabit. The idea of visiting a local produce market wouldn’t even cross his mind. In fact I showed him some pictures of people eating in different places (this was part of a Cambridge speaking test) and he said he’d never had a picnic in his life and never intends to do so, opting for restaurants instead. I figured he’d been to more restaurants than I have, despite me being nearly three times older. (At that age even the word restaurant sounded so damn fancy to me.) We then talked about social media. I think he was surprised when I said that social media (an indispensible part of life for him – no, let’s rephrase that, it is his life) was the worst invention in the last 80 years. Or maybe he just thought, here we go, another old man yelling at clouds. He was also amused when I said I manage to avoid it pretty much entirely and have never even been on Instagram. But I’m utterly convinced of its toxicity. I’d love to nuke it out of existence. He said that any news he gets (which isn’t much) is via social media. How do you know it’s true? I just assume it is true, and even if it isn’t, I don’t care. And besides, what goes on in the world doesn’t affect me and I’m too young to vote anyway. That’s why you’re too young to vote. There’s been a push in some countries to lower the voting age to 16. (In Austria, for example, it is now 16.) Sometimes I think it should go up rather than down. Maybe it should work like driver’s licences and you get tested at both ends of the age range.

Kitty is now asleep on the sofa, on top of an open file which I’ll have to pick up before my next lesson starts. I often get envious of her life’s simplicity. She’s become a real positive in my life – a calming influence – as well as just part of the furniture. She’s a boon to my face-to-face lessons at home with kids; the majority of them like her being around. It’s all a contrast to the early days of Kitty when she was fearful of me, prone to biting at any moment, hyperactive, and a general pain in the arse.

Scrabble. I played two games last night. In the first I began with a blank but complete junk alongside it. I exchanged all but the blank and drew six vowels, giving me no sensible options other than to exchange again. Meanwhile my opponent hit bingos on his opening two turns, putting me 158-0 down. In the end I was able to score well, losing a high-scoring battle 505-441. Despite the loss I was happy with how I played. Then came the second game which was ridiculous. I obliterated my personal best score with a 650-253 win, slapping down five bingos. My play certainly wasn’t perfect in that game – at my level of experience, it’s never going to be – but hitting a mammoth total like that was encouraging all the same, even if it was the definition of a massive outlier.

Update: I’ve just taken a test for Covid and the flu. I’m negative for both. I still haven’t knowingly had Covid. Summer is properly over now; a run of unseasonably high temperatures (30 or above) came to a welcome end today.

Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Weddings: pressing all the wrong buttons

September 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. No real news there. A vicious storm had been forecast for their local area, but it didn’t fully bare its teeth. On Friday I spoke to my brother who was nonplussed after Mum and Dad failed to make a call or send a message for their grandson’s birthday. (He turned three last Monday.) And it’s not like they forgot; Mum, who has a good memory for such things, chucked some birthday money in his direction, but they consciously decided not to make contact. What gives, my brother wondered. They spent all that time with their grandchildren over the summer but now they simply don’t care? He speculated that maybe both Mum and Dad had been hardened at a young age by attending boarding school. Just throw money at him, that’ll do.

A video popped up on Youtube last week which is an absolute must-watch for anyone with a friend or family member on the autistic spectrum. It’s about how weddings are sheer hell on about a dozen levels if you’re autistic. (Honestly, they often aren’t much fun even if you’re not because of the eye-watering cost. And these modern “destination weddings” are the epitome of wastage and selfishness. I’m worth you all spending thousands each to fly to my wedding in sodding Tahiti. Sorry, you’re not. You’re really really not. And because you’re so selfish, it’s fifty-fifty that it’ll be all over within five years.) The guy who made this video (and is married!) has a great sense of humour, as you can see at the beginning when he struggles even to utter the word “wedding”. And oh god, the expectation to dance. Someone asked me once to name my three greatest fears and I said dancing, weddings, and dancing at weddings. He did make one big omission, however, and that’s just how triggering weddings are. All the time you’re thinking, this is something normal people do but I’ll never do – certainly not like this, anyway – because I’m not normal. I should mention here that my brother’s one on the army base in Plymouth was fine, but that’s because it was my actual brother and I was very happy for him. Even then, I wasn’t too disappointed to get back to the hotel room at around midnight.

After my lessons yesterday I played six games of Scrabble – three wins, three losses. I’m finding 50-point bonuses at a decent clip but am hampered by my lack of knowledge of shorter words.

Today I’ll take the bike to Padurea Verde (the Green Forest) where I haven’t been for ages. We’re getting incredibly warm weather still – we’re forecast to hit 31 this afternoon. When I get back I’ve got a video call lined up with my cousin in America.

Family - Life :) - Travel: the US

My US trip a decade ago and news from an ex-student

August 31, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s ten years since I took the train from Boston to Albany, New York to meet my cousin and his Italian wife to be. I spent two nights with them. We chatted over dinner and the Sam Adams beer that I’d brought with me from Boston, then they showed me around the local area. Best of all, we went for a hike in the Adirondacks, where the views were breathtaking, and visited Lake Placid. Then we made a trip to Flushing Meadow to see the opening day of the US Open. It was the first time they’d been to a grand slam, but for me it completed my set of four. I had a lovely time with them. I spent four weeks in the US in all, and when I got back I felt great. That trip – my first overseas trip for five years – gave me the impetus to do what I’ve done since. There’s a big world out there! Options. Ways to escape the cycle of hopelessness that had felt interminable. That was before the US went totally crazy. Even during Trump’s first term, it seemed his bark was worse than his bite. I felt some affinity with the US, having been there not long before. I followed baseball. I read Fivethirtyeight, my favourite website at the time. (It no longer exists.) Now I don’t follow US-based news because it’s just too appalling.

Yesterday I was in contact with the lady whom I gave nearly 200 lessons before and during Covid, until I said we couldn’t carry on. She was downright weird. And obsessive. And bored. Since then she’s become a hairdresser – having an actual job has helped her no end. Last year her son, whom I also used to teach – he got very good at English – was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Heartbreaking, really. He was a very smart cookie who wanted to be a pilot. We spent large chunks of lessons discussing passenger planes and routes, and often watched videos on the subject. He seemed to have all the right attributes for captaining a triple seven, including his excellent English. Then disaster struck. Dream over. His mother said he’s handled the last year remarkably well with all his treatments and analyses and tests. He’s just got his driving licence – his parents have bought him a Mercedes, as you do when your kid is 18, though I think in this case it’s a form of recognition for the very shitty time he’s had. They’re in the final stages of getting a house built in Mehala, one of my favourite parts of Timișoara, and should move in before Christmas.

I had another video call with my parents yesterday. Mum looked a lot better – on Wednesday she looked like death warmed up. So that was a relief, but sadly it’s just a matter of time until the next episode.

Cat - Family - Travel: Europe

Czech and Poland trip — Part 2 of 3

August 28, 2025 by 0 Comments

I got back on Sunday evening. The next morning I picked Kitty up from the pet hotel after one of the workers had introduced me to a monstrous moggy weighing eight kilos. Kitty didn’t especially want to leave, but as I write this she looks pretty comfortable in her favourite spot atop the tall cupboard in the living room.

As planned I paid Gdańsk a visit last Thursday. I was only there for three hours. Everywhere I looked the architecture was stunning. The first building I clapped eyes on was the rather nice railway station, and things only improved from there. Gdańsk is pretty damn touristy, however, and that’s why I didn’t spend much time there and certainly didn’t book any accommodation there. I’ve developed an allergy to tourism-based theme parks. The river is spectacular and they make excellent use of it, unlike what you see – or don’t see – on Romania’s waterways. Pleasure boats are almost nonexistent here. After I sent Dad a bunch of photos of Gdańsk, he filled me in on its history. It was a shipbuilding city – Lech Wałęsa, Poland’s first president after communism, worked at the shipyard. I’ve been reading up on Wałęsa who is still alive today (he’ll be 82 next month). The changes he brought about sound overwhelmingly positive. (I was ten years old when he took over, so I wasn’t paying attention.) In Romania, many of those who gained power after 1989 were part of the old guard anyway, but in Poland there was more of a clean break. That’s probably why Poland made a swift recovery from communism while Romania’s has been much more gradual. Poland was one of the countries I thought of moving to, but a lower level of development is actually what drew me to Romania instead. It would make life that bit more interesting. For instance, yesterday I saw an old lady – probably a gypsy – sitting on a grassy area in the middle of a city centre car park, knitting. On Tuesday as I was walking home, I saw a family (again, probably gypsies) in some makeshift vehicle, dragging some sort of cargo behind them. Bits kept falling out and falling off. I’m guessing I wouldn’t see these things in a similar-sized Polish city.

Getting out of Gdańsk to go back to Bydgoszcz was a chore. My GPS sent me round in circles; it couldn’t handle the road works. I thought I might never properly escape the city. I became pretty damn au fait with the eighties hits radio station. Because I was stuck in traffic I could Shazam one of two of the Polish songs, such as this one by Urszula which came out in ’84. I even started to pick up the odd word of Polish, like czwartek, which means Thursday. I began to doubt it would still be czwartek when I got back. When I finally did so, I grabbed a spicy pork dish from across the road.

My last day in Bydgoszcz was a relaxing one. I wandered to the other side of the river where there was even more impressive architecture and a great park. For lunch tried a Polish speciality from a kiosk – a half-baguette (cut lengthways) with some mushroomy topping and ketchup. It had a tricky name that I can’t remember; to be honest it didn’t do much for me. When I got back to the apartment I read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and attempted to learn some Scrabble words.

On Saturday it was time to head back home. I’d managed to book into a place in Žilina in Slovakia by phone without any need for card. It was a 604 km trip to get there, taking me via a corner of the Czech Republic. There’s not much to say about Žilina, a large town whose centre is dominated by communist-era buildings. In town I had a tasty pizza with anchovies and a Czech beer called Bernard to go with it. My accommodation was fine. Breakfast was included, so the next morning I had bacon and eggs, though not as I know it. The strips of bacon were fried into the three eggs. Nothing wrong with that, just not what I’m used to. Then I was back on my way. A whopping 731 km to get home. The traffic was great; it only took me nine hours including various stops including one at Tesco (yes, Hungary has Tesco) just outside Kecskemét.

Mum and Dad have had all kinds of issues with their places in St Ives in the last few days, including a leak into the flat below theirs which seems to have nothing to do with them at all. They’ve been very stressed by all this. When I saw them yesterday, the atmosphere was beyond miserable. It’s horrible to see. Mum loses all sense of proportion when these things happen, which (because they’ve complicated their lives to this extent) they do with regularity. If I ever suggest that she takes a step back and sees that it really isn’t that bad, she’ll refuse to even talk to me. Bloody great, isn’t it?

I’ll put up the photos in my next post.

Family - Life :) - Music

Just before I go…

August 16, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’m just getting packed up for tomorrow, having finished my last lesson. It’s much easier when I’m not having to fly anywhere. I’m including a kettle; in Romania there’s no guarantee you’ll get one and I have a feeling Poland will be similar.

I’ve spoken to all my immediate family today. My brother said he had a go at Mum for still driving even though her eyesight is equivalent to downing five pints. Don’t blame him – it’s inexcusable – but I’ve decided not to go there with Mum. He also mentioned his frustration with Mum and Dad’s negativity whenever he speaks to them. I feel the same as him. As an example, I got the Maori stuff again recently. Even though I broadly agree with them, I don’t want to hear it for the 85th time. If it was impinging on their quality of life to even a remote extent, I’d be a bit more receptive. Maybe negativity is something that comes with old age.

When I saw Dorothy on Tuesday, she had the order of service for the funeral of Samantha, a medical student from India whom I met twice last year at Dorothy’s church. I didn’t know she’d died in May at just 27. Around Christmas she contracted a rare disease – some kind of inflammation of the brain, Dorothy said – and was put in an induced coma. Even though I didn’t know her well at all, she seemed a very nice young woman; to have two-thirds of her expected life taken from her is very sad. Dorothy said she’d gone to a better place and so on, but that isn’t at all what I believe.

Today is Sfânta Maria, or St Mary’s Day. If you’re one of the millions of Romanian women called Maria or men called Marian or Marius, or numerous other variations, you get to celebrate your name day today. It’s one of the two biggest name days on the calendar, the other being St John (Ion, Ioan, Ionuț, Ioana, …) which is in January.

I don’t think I mentioned that the plumber had been. He created a U-bend under the sink, and after fiddling around with the shower for a while, seems to have got rid of the stench. Which is great.

At the market this morning I went past the stall where the guy often pumps out Depeche Mode on his speakers. Today he was playing something Depeche Mode-esque that I liked but hadn’t heard before. I Shazammed it; I was only the 183rd person to do so, it said. It was a British band called the Recreations with a song called Neoprene which came out in 2016.

It’s 36 degrees right now. Yeah, bugger this.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Music - Writing a book

We need more Mikas

August 6, 2025 by 0 Comments

On Saturday I made another trip to Jimbolia. My parents called me while I was there. I tried to give them a video tour of the town but they were struggling to stay awake. Jet lag has hit them both hard this time around, though I think they’re just about over it now. After Mum’s ongoing irregularity, she’s all of a sudden very regular indeed. A more pressing problem for her is her eyesight. Dad says it’s got worse since I saw her in the UK, which must mean she’s practically as blind as a bat now. And she’s still driving a car. Yeesh. It doesn’t bear thinking about. As for me, it’s taken me a heck of a long time to get over the bug I probably picked up from my nephew. My doctor gave me some soluble pills last week and they seem to have worked.

On Saturday night I went to a free concert in Parcul Civic. I say free, but there were ample opportunities to buy overpriced food and drink if you wanted. I only turned up for the end of the concert to see Mika, the British–Lebanese artist who had a biggish hit with Grace Kelly in 2007. He’s had a couple of other hits since then that I didn’t even realise were him. I really enjoyed his versatility, his enthusiasm, his humour. He’s a bit mad, which helped. He could even speak a few words of Romanian. I was impressed. I mean, întoarceți-vă (turn around) isn’t the easiest phrase to articulate. He lived part of his childhood in Paris, so he probably grew up bilingual (at least), which would make learning other languages easier. I came away thinking, he’s a good guy, isn’t he. The world needs more Mikas.

Not much other news. The ex-owner of this place left behind an expensive-looking speaker system (and much more: a Gucci watch, a load of books including Grey’s Anatomy and a bunch of novels I’ve since read, and family photos). I’ve only just got round to getting the speakers working. I’m now able to play music through them from my laptop. I’m impressed with the sound quality. (Right now I’m playing Kiwi band The Phoenix Foundation.)

Later today a plumber should be coming over to look at the pong in the bathroom. It’s been a problem since I got the bath leak fixed last year. Dad, who’s more clued up on these matters than me (who isn’t?), couldn’t tell where the stench was coming from any more than I could. I really hope the plumber (not the same one as last year, obviously) won’t have to dismantle the tiles around the bath (again) to get at it.

I’ll try and persuade Dorothy (who now has a kitten) to have Kitty for a trial 24-hour period. If it works, great. I should be good to go to Poland or wherever for a few days and I can offer to take her cat in exchange. If not, well at least I tried.

Only two lessons today. With a bit more free time, I’m getting back to the book about my tennis partner. I had to reread the first five chapters – I couldn’t even remember what I’d written, it’s been so long.

Getting a view of Mika through the foliage

A couple of Kitty pics

Family - Language learning - Maths teaching

Daily dose of maths

August 2, 2025 by 0 Comments

This week I’ve had five 90-minute maths lessons with a girl who is 16 coming 17. I taught her the basics of trig, which she took to like a duck to water. It’s always good on the (relatively rare) occasions that they just get something. In today’s session, after we’d been through some constructions with a compass and straightedge, we did part of a past paper. The question she struggled most with was what I considered one of the easiest. Sophie uses two-thirds of a litre of milk per day. A bottle of milk contains 2 litres. Show that she’ll need to buy 3 bottles to last her 7 days. Soon there was an opaque soup of fractions and common denominators and who knows what else on her page.

That’s a lot of time spent with one person in a week. Her parents clearly have no problem affording that many lessons, and it may well be more of the same next week. She turns up in a car that cost more than mine did, wearing clothes that cost more than mine, with a phone that cost much more than mine, and so on. I think she’ll do fine in her IGCSE next year. And in life. She’s fine, but she’s just the sort of person who becomes the kind of manager that I’d prefer not to have. I mentioned her car – well, in Romania you’re allowed to drive an underpowered “toy” car at 16, which is what she has. Only at 18 can you drive a standard car.

I’ve done a bit better with my Romanian of late. The odd extra YouTube video or phone call or chat at the market. Visiting the market in the evening, when it’s quieter, is better for that. Some of the stallholders are intrigued. I mean, us non-native speakers of Romanian are thin on the ground, so they want to know the story. The nice ones do, anyway. One or two take my imperfect Romanian as an affront to their ears.

Mum and Dad are suffering a bit from jet lag. More than they did when they arrived in Romania, and that’s despite them breaking up the journey. At least Dad had decent compression stockings this time, so his feet didn’t swell up alarmingly. He’d just been to see the doctor who complimented him on keeping his warfarin levels well within the safe range. If only Mum could see the doctor too. When I asked her about her regularity, she succinctly said, “my irregularity, you mean”.

I recently unearthed this blog post from February 2021 in which I said I was “all for” my parents’ move. Yikes. I really had no idea, did I? I seriously thought they’d be simplifying their lives by moving into somewhere smaller. I trusted them fully – they knew about houses and stuff, I didn’t. And I didn’t quite appreciate how good their old place was. And was it really 4½ years ago?

Some problems from the linguistics competition:

This was a fun one. I managed to nut it out without too many problems.

This family-based one was a bit trickier, but I got there in the end.

As for this one with the fish, not a chance!

Cat - Family - Language teaching

Mum and Dad back in NZ, plus the benefits of benign weather

July 30, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s a busyish day for the time of year: three lessons down, two to go. At the start of the first lesson, Kitty was energised by the intercom bell as usual. My student’s father came up to my door, apologising for being late. Could I extend the lesson beyond our scheduled time? Doorstep chats don’t work very well with an energised Kitty, and sure enough she ran out the door and up the stairs. No harm done – I picked her up easily – but it was a dramatic start to my work day all the same.

Mum and Dad arrived in Christchurch on Tuesday morning, their time, having been away for the best part of three months. They said their flight from Singapore was the worst they’d ever experienced in terms of turbulence. These storms have been occurring at higher altitudes for some reason and planes are unable to fly above them. The day they left Singapore, they had an 11am checkout from their hotel. They both slept in until then, which was only 4am in the UK, entirely by accident. It didn’t seem to be a problem, and they could even use the hotel pool until they were ready to leave for their early-evening flight. My parents are fans of the city state. It’s clean – the draconian litter laws help there – and, for them, predictable: they’ve stayed there several times before. I’m on the fence about the place; criticism of the governing party (which has been in power for just about ever) doesn’t go down too well. I’ve been there twice: once when I was nearly seven (the colossal plazas and space-age-seeming tech were fascinating for a small boy) and again in 2008.

Temperatures in Timișoara approached 40 towards the end of the last week. Pure hell, in other words. My sleep was broken at best. Doing anything became a real challenge. Then on Saturday night a storm ripped through. The temperature nosedived by 15 degrees in a couple of hours. A number of concertgoers were injured in the storm and ended up in hospital. Since then, our highs have remained in the mid-20s and there’s often been a nice breeze. What a welcome change. It’s helped me think more clearly and get some odd (but important) life admin jobs done.

Last weekend, when I was still reeling from the hot weather, I attempted to solve some sample problems from linguistics olympiads. Yes, the linguistics olympiad is a real thing in which high school students compete both individually and in teams. (I like that they do both.) This year’s edition has just taken place in Taiwan, while next year’s will be in Romania. There were 15 or so problems, ranging from very doable to (for me) impossible. They’re really just logic puzzles. If word A in some obscure language means X in English, and word B means Y, what does word C have to mean? No prior knowledge of the language is required, which is why they choose obscure languages (so speakers of that language don’t gain an unfair advantage), but knowledge of how languages work in general, and the features they can have, is a must. There was one problem involving seven fishermen each describing their catch in the language of their remote island, with accompanying pictures (out of order) of what each man had caught. You had to match them, with the added wrinkle that one of the men was lying. I was all at sea (!) there. The language clearly had features that I’d never seen before, and I couldn’t make head nor tail of it in terms of how the size and number of fish were expressed.

I hope people didn’t go down to Caroline Bay to see the tsunami generated by the earthquake off Kamchatka (which I only know from the game Risk). In 1960, tens of thousands did just that following the massive Chile earthquake. The tsunami, which they called a tidal wave back then, never came.

I still need to decide if I’m going anywhere and what to do with Kitty if I am.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Romania

Roll on September

July 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

Last week I was having a discussion with the 11-year-old girl in Germany when she asked me what my favourite month was. When I said September, she thought I was crazy. End of holidays. Back to school. Homework. Tests. Getting up far too early. That’s what September means to her. But for me it means no more infernal heat for nine months. And yes, back to (hopefully) a full suite of lessons, without which life can feel purposeless.

Last summer messed me up mentally. The heat was relentless. So far (touch wood) this summer has been more manageable. Yes, we’ll be well into the 30s every day until Saturday, but then we’ll get a break. That’s just as well, because I’ve been feeling a bit down ever since my parents came over. Lots of talk about their properties and plans, lots too about my brother (his kids, his house, his career plans, his master’s degree), and then there’s me, stuck out here on my own, my life rather meaningless in comparison. Then there’s the sudden realisation that Mum and Dad are properly old and I’ll have to play a more active role in their lives. Having Kitty is certainly a positive amid all of this.

On Monday I saw a survey in which the majority of Romanians thought that Ceaușescu was a good president and would prefer to return to communism. Anybody under 40 has no memory of that time so wouldn’t know first-hand how awful things got, especially in the final years. He’s become something of a cult figure on social media. A cartoon character. I was shocked to see Ceaușescu fridge magnets for sale when I visited those monasteries four years ago. Older people fondly recall being young and pretty, with lives largely free of hard decisions. It’s still striking to see a poll like that though. People have frighteningly short memories. And we got pretty damn close to going back there in May’s presidential election.

Ozzy Osbourne has died at the age of 76. A legend. And like so many other icons of heavy metal, a Brummie. He held a farewell concert at Villa Park just two and a half weeks before his death. He had a horrific quad bike accident in 2003 that almost did for him. (Those things are bloody lethal. The following year I came off a quad bike on my cousin’s farm on the Coromandel. Not far from Thames. I got my leg trapped underneath it. I wasn’t hurt but it was certainly scary.)

Last week Felix Baumgartner died in a paragliding accident; he probably had a heart attack while he was still in the air. He’s the daredevil who jumped from the edge of space in 2012. I remember that well. There was Chuck Yeager with his “Attaboy” just before Baumgartner leapt into the void. Obama was about to be re-elected. We’d just had the London Olympics. The Queen’s diamond jubilee. Gangnam Style. I felt pretty crap about my own life, but at least the world still made some kind of sense. But within a year, social media had swallowed the lot and spat it out, and here we are. Because of his Romanian girlfriend, Baumgartner’s death has received a lot of attention where I am.

The golf. Scottie Scheffler, easily the best player right now, won the Open easily too. There was just the one slight bunker-based brain fart which resulted in a double bogey, but he soon put that behind him. But for that mishap, he didn’t have any single bogeys in the entire weekend. Best name of the tournament went to Chris Gotterup (‘e’s got ‘er up onto the green); he finished third. Runner-up was Harris English. I kept thinking his first name was Johnny. There were so many vying for second place that if it hadn’t been for Scheffler it would have been an absorbing afternoon and evening. Never mind.

Mum and Dad are off in just 48 hours. I still haven’t worked out where (or even if) I’m going between now and September.

Books - Cat - Family - Language learning - Other sports - Politics

The too-hard basket

July 20, 2025 by 0 Comments

I just took Kitty out for a drive. She spent one hour in a large cardboard box, 70 by 50 by 30 cm, with holes cut out of it (obviously) and an absorbent blanket at the bottom. (Lately I’ve put her food in the box to get her used to it.) She clearly didn’t love the experience, but she wasn’t traumatised by it either, so I’ll try it again in a few days. When I was little, our cat would be let loose in the Allegro or the Mazda on our five-hour-plus trips to and from Wales. With Kitty, that would be beyond dangerous.

Three weeks since I left my brother’s place, I’ve still got the cold I picked up from (probably) my nephew. He picks up a bug from nursery, infects his mum and dad and anyone else he comes into contact within, then three days later he’s as happy as Larry while everyone else is suffering for weeks. Mum and Dad have still got it too. Mum didn’t look great at all when I saw her on WhatsApp yesterday. They leave in only five days. I hope their trip back goes smoothly, or as smoothly as something like that ever can. At least this time they’ll break up their journey with a stopover in Singapore. I never want them to go direct again. Despite none of us being 100%, we had a really nice chat which made me feel good. Mum had been to meet up a few of the teachers from her school in St Ives, for the first time in about a decade. She was struck by how hard they had found the Covid period. We were pretty lucky in NZ, weren’t we? No Matt Hancock, who really should be behind bars. I was lucky too. Romania was at times riddled with virus, but my personal circumstances allowed me to dodge the worst of it.

The night before last I slept terribly. Yesterday I just had one lesson – maths in Dumbrăvița in the morning – and when I came back I lay on the sofa, washed out, where I finished Ella Minnow Pea (a fun read) and watched round three of the Open golf. My yearly golf watching. I like the Open visually: the dunes, the crags, the ever-changing skies, the squalls that come out of nowhere. I enjoy seeing top golfers battle near-horizontal rain and brutal rough. I particularly enjoy it when there’s a packed leaderboard on the final day and half a dozen potential winners as they turn for home, and a previously unheralded player keeps it together through all the mayhem to win – to make history – with a score of maybe three under par. This year’s tournament is taking place at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. Barring the heavy shower I saw on day two which added to the drama, the conditions have mostly been benign. Scottie Scheffler – number one in the world and a brilliant player – has taken a four-shot lead going into the last round, which might be a procession. A shame if so. World number ones haven’t won many Opens in recent times. Tiger Woods was the last to do it, I think. Rory McIlroy is six shots off the lead. He’s from Northern Ireland and a huge star in the game, so it’s no surprise that the crowd went nuts throughout his round of 66 yesterday.

Since the bit I wrote last time about council tax, I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to get these kinds of things right. Coming up with a fair and workable system is oh so complicated. Countries like New Zealand benefit here from being small, with relatively few working parts. What you don’t do though is hold your hands up and say it’s too hard. That’s exactly what the UK government is doing. We know this is unfair and absurd, but we’ll keep it the same (which in reality means making it worse: it will only become more unfair and absurd over time) because it’s too politically hard to change anything. And that’s just one aspect of tax policy. It’s the same thing with immigration, healthcare, housing, energy, infrastructure, the lot. Education isn’t too bad in the UK and they’ve made some progress on the environment. But everything else is going backwards because of a lack of political will to do anything. It’s the same all over the western world. The only people who do have the balls to change anything are those who aren’t interested in a fairer world and just want to make their mark. So they make things more shit. As I keep saying, how did we get here? When I was over in the UK recently, I watched an episode of Newsnight. They had ex-policitians (with opposing views) on the programme to discuss Labour’s climbdown on benefits. Adults, talking about a serious topic in a civil manner. This would no longer happen in America, I kept thinking. For the UK at least, there is still hope.

Next week’s challenge: for seven days, everything I read or listen to must be in Romanian where at all possible. I will also write something in Romanian every day. My Romanian has stalled and I can’t not do anything about it because it’s too hard.