Family

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.

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.