Family

Family - New Zealand - Other sports - Politics - Travel: New Zealand

Escaping the danger zone

August 12, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a frosty Saturday morning and I’m listening to Kim Hill’s programme on the radio. She’s interviewing an expert in levitated dipole reactors. She’s always struck me as someone with an arty bent, but she’s spent the entire (long) interview asking intelligent and insightful questions, as if she actually knows what she’s talking about. She’s a clever bugger, basically.

It’s nice to get out – away from Mum and Dad’s place which, while their extension work is in progress, is an accident waiting to happen. We’re falling over each other to grab knives or plates or tins of tomatoes. They have about a fifth of the plug points they need. The kettle? The toaster? Dad’s iPad? Choose one. Cooking here is one level above camping. Washing clothes is impossible. The builders are here every weekday, and they seem great (as they should be, given the vast sums involved). Mum and Dad tell me what will be where when the work is all done – the sliding doors will be here, the pantry here, the island here (did we always have islands?) and it will look great when it’s finished I’m sure, but the place will still be impractical, and increasingly so as my parents age. In two or three years they’ll probably move again.

We went into Timaru yesterday. We parked down on the bay, as we used to all those years ago, although then it was always summer; it was lovely to see the snowy mountains over Caroline Bay on a chilly but sunny day. I went to ASB to find my KiwiSaver balance and dealt with a helpful young woman who spoke the same language as me and wasn’t overwhelmed with other (angry) customers. We had a chat and she showed dollar projections on her screen for the various funds. I asked how those estimates were arrived at. Mean? Median? Half the time above, half below? She couldn’t answer that. I moved my money into the second most aggressive fund, with the intention of dialling it down a notch in a few years’ time, and hoped for the best. I was very happy that my parents popped into House of Travel – they’re serious about a trip to Europe next year. We visited my aunt – Mum’s older sister, who lost her husband in 2021 – and that was great. I’ve always got on well with her. She’s aged and the outer edges of her memory are becoming slightly fuzzy. She talked about her daughter in Wellington who is battling jaw cancer; reading between the lines, things don’t look good there. It was what she didn’t say. On the way back I was pleased to see that some unspectacular old cars, like the odd Ford Laser from the eighties, were still kicking around.

We did some shopping at Pak ‘n’ Save, or at least Mum did. She commented on the ballooning prices, but I was surprised how cheap things were. Most items were only a little more expensive than in Romania, but average earnings must be close to triple what people live on over there. Food products are massively more affordable here. (Housing is another matter.) We came back via Temuka, to visit the laundromat. A load took about half an hour to wash and cost $4.50. There was an enormous plume of choking black smoke from around the saleyards opposite. Entering both Timaru and Temuka, I noticed a weird trend for translating placenames from what I thought were Maori anyway into real Maori. Te Tihi-o-Maru. Te Umu Kaha.

Last night we watched the women’s World Cup quarter-final between Sweden and Japan. A very good game, which the much more physically imposing Sweden dominated for the most part but ended with the Swedes hanging on for dear life – during lashings of injury time – for a 2-1 win. Mum slept through most of it. There were ex-players in the studio; one of them was unable to answer a question without saying “absolutely”.

It’s election season again, which in New Zealand means you get all those crazy opinion poll figures with spurious decimal places: 37.8 to 32.1. I’d forgotten about those. C’mon, when your data is subject to so much sampling variation, you gotta ditch those decimals; 38 to 32 is the only way to handle it. You don’t get decimal degrees in weather forecasts, and including them in polls is worse than that would be.

A brand-new vape shop in Temuka with bollards to prevent ram raids. Crazy, really.

This flatiron-shaped building on the corner of the Loop Road housed Mascot Finance until it went under in (I think) 2009

The old backpackers’ lodge

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music

What was the secret?

August 1, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had two lessons this morning. First I had an hour with the young woman who looks like a similar-aged Martina Hingis when she ties her hair back. Her English isn’t bad, but – as is often the case with the young ones – her vocabulary is a couple of thousand words shy of where it needs to be, and I don’t think she’s all that interested in expanding it. Then I had Alexandru, the twelve-year-old football fanatic who lives in Spain. I asked him whether he goes by Alexandru or Alejandro or just Alex, and to my surprise he said Alek, with a k, a letter that doesn’t exist natively in either Romanian or Spanish – he clearly just wants to be a bit fancy. I’ve got three more lessons planned for later today, and with a bit of luck they’ll actually happen.

On Sunday I had a longish chat to Mum and Dad. How did you get into this mess with the plumber? Well, it’s not that much mess, but the how is because I’m in Romania. The Wild West (or East). You literally just pay for the building or plumbing work, in cash of course, and if there’s collateral damage (that could in some cases be lethal), that’s your lookout. I spoke to my upstairs neighbour who has family in Canada and she said how “civilised” it all seemed over there. I then met Mark for lunch. He also has a Canada connection – his daughter lives in Vancouver – and he and his girlfriend had just got back from there. Later I played tennis, with thousands of squawking crows flying overhead and somebody in a nearby church banging on a toacă. When I got home I called my brother who has his knee op tomorrow. His mood was about what you’d expect from someone about to be put of commission for a while. We didn’t talk for long.

My parents said that they’re unlikely to see their grandson in New Zealand anytime soon because the cost would be beyond my brother’s means. Well then, Mum, how did you afford to fly your two boys – both under two years old – to New Zealand in 1982? My brother is ten years older than you were. They have two incomes, not the one-and-a-tiny-bit you had. Just how? Oh yes, your double-digit (ha!) monthly mortgage which you were able to achieve by, let me see what the trick was, let me think for a sec, hmm, oh yes that’s it, being born at the right time. To be fair, my parents were pretty frugal too, but society somehow allowed them to be.

Muzicorama last night. Big birthdays were the theme. Lobo (born 31/7/43) was first up with Me and You and a Dog Named Boo (1971) – the wonders of a simple life on the road. Most of the rest of the programme was devoted to Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim (born 31/7/63), with those massive hits in 1998-99 that remind me so much of my first year of university. Some I liked, some I didn’t, and that’s OK.

Though it’s now August, we still have long evenings, mostly as a result of our geographical position and time zone. I should make the most of my final four of them. (Sunset tonight is 9:11.)

Family - Other sports - Tennis

Her great nephew is, well, great

July 25, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Just twelve days to go now. The plumber is back, slaving away in the heat, after a week chilling (literally) in the mountains. Our minimum temperatures are causing as much havoc as our maximums. Tonight we’re forecast to bottom out at 23. Yuck.

My aunt called me, surprisingly, on Saturday afternoon. My brother had just been over to see her with his wife and son. It was the first time she’d seen my nephew, and was instantly besotted with him. He’s so handsome. She has four grandchildren of her own whom she doesn’t see from one year to the next; I found it quite touching that she felt such warmth towards my brother’s son. It helps that my brother and sister-in-law are a breath of fresh air compared to the animosity and high-maintenance crap that she gets from her own family. My aunt and I had a longer chat than usual. Last night I called my brother who was back on the south coast after a weekend in St Ives.

Yesterday wasn’t particularly enjoyable. The English Conversation Club met up at Porto Arte, which was (and still is) a lovely spot on the bank of the Bega. There was a bigger crowd than I expected and we spread out over two tables. I chose the wrong table. Two people had a long and heated debate, talking across me. One of them asked if he was speaking correct English and I had to admit that I hadn’t been listening. I’d drifted into my own world. The prices at Porto have ballooned since the pandemic, and that’s really taken the pleasure out of being there. When that was over, it was time for tennis. I played with one of the Florins, with Gabriela and the better Florin on the other side. Gabriela shouted “Yes!” every time my partner or I committed an unforced error. You don’t do that unless you’re ten years old or a complete arse, or both. If I did this in a singles match, I might expect my opponent to deck me. After 90 minutes of this (!), I eventually confronted her. “Cheering every time we miss isn’t OK at all. For God’s sake, stop it!” But her partner thought it was fine, and suddenly I was the problem. Perhaps it is fine in Romania. Buggered if I know. Not getting vaccinated was very fine here. Yesterday was a good example of why I like to avoid people.

Before I went out yesterday, I saw that the Open golf championship was entering its final round. The diminutive and unheralded Brian Harman was leading by five, and the weather was terrible. When I was younger I often used to watch the Open on TV, and the yesterday’s conditions had all the makings of a dramatic finish in the wind and rain. I wish I could stay home and watch it. When I got home I was glad to find out that Harman had won by six shots and I hadn’t missed anything. I read a report that contrasted his serene passage to victory with Greg Norman’s collapse at the 1996 Masters and Jean van de Velde’s final-hole explosion at the Open in ’99. Heck, these happened last century and people haven’t even begun to forget. Collapses in golf are more brutal than in any other sport. They’re slow burners, where the heartbreak slowly unravels, and there’s no defence – if you lose a big lead in snooker, it could be down to your opponent’s brilliance as much as anything, but when in golf you shoot 78 or triple-bogey the last hole, that’s all on you. I found footage of van de Velde’s escapades on YouTube, with commentary by the late great Peter Alliss. The Frenchman up to his knees in mud at one point. Apart from some extraordinary bad luck, part of the problem was that both he and his caddy were so underprepared, as if they’d gone hiking the Himalayas in jandals. (Some Kiwis actually did this a few years ago.)

Dad sent me this video about Romania, which went out in 2001. Since then the cities have changed beyond belief, especially Cluj which was showcased in the video, while the countryside has remained much the same. Tourism hasn’t really materialised – yet.

Books - Family - Life :)

The christening

July 17, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Earlier today I saw my nephew’s christening. My brother had set up a Skype link to the church; our parents also hooked up to it (eventually – Mum had got the time wrong). It wasn’t a traditional christening – Dad called it a Butlin’s service. Apparently I was the godfather. (I didn’t even know you could be a remote godfather.) There was some weird “action song” which started off like a haka. The flamboyant vicar said “This is like a hooker, isn’t it?” before my brother corrected him. The vicar checked in regularly to see if the connections to New Zealand and Romania were still live. A baby, but not my nephew, cried almost incessantly. After the anointment (if that’s the right word), they sang the five verses of Lord of the Dance, which reminded me of school assemblies but in a good way, then after an hour it was all over.

It’s hot. It’s currently 35, and tomorrow we’re forecast to hit 39. I struggled at tennis last night and don’t expect to do any better tonight. New Zealand can’t come quick enough. Southern and eastern Europe is smothered in infernal heat, and parts of south-western US are dangerously hot. Many thousands will die as a result.

The men’s Wimbledon final between Djokovic and Alcaraz is about to get under way. This year’s event has almost passed me by. I saw that Barclays are sponsoring Wimbledon. Bleugh. Clothing and other official merch are selling like never before this year. It’s almost like the cost-of-living crisis only affects certain classes of people, or something. (To be fair, a ground pass costs £27, which is very good value. When I went to the Australian Open in 2008 I bought a ground pass for the first four days, and that was excellent value. Ditto the US Open – first two days – in 2015. It’s all that non-tennis stuff, which I avoided, where they get you.)

I’ve watched a few more YouTube videos about the Titan sub, and it now appears the occupants were – agonisingly – fully aware of what was about to happen. Since the disaster, the focus has understandably been on the egomaniac CEO Stockton Rush, but 77-year-old PH Nargeolet also played a major part. A veteran of 37 dives to the Titanic, the company used him to legitimise the whole operation. One of the videos drew parallels with the 1996 Everest disaster in which esteemed New Zealand climber Rob Hall and seven others died. I recently watched an incredible presentation (it’s incomplete, unfortunately) on that disaster, which climber and writer Jon Krakauer gave the following year. I also watched a Netflix documentary on the 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanches that occurred during climbing season. The most moving part of that for me was the Buddhist ceremony that took place the night before the earthquake in the village of Tanglang. The whole village came together for that. Within hours, the earthquake would strike, causing a landslide that would wipe out the entire village and everyone in it.

The plumber came back yesterday for a fourth day. That means he’ll have less to do when I see him again a week tomorrow. I’ll sort out the mess on Tuesday. Tomorrow I’ll be too busy with lessons and today I feel utterly lethargic.

Yesterday I had my second two-hour lesson with the young guy. He wants to learn to do different accents; that’s a new one on me. After that I finished Day of the Triffids. An enjoyable and thought-provoking book, and an ending I didn’t expect. Well worth the read.

Update: I survived tonight’s tennis in the heat; I coped a bit better than yesterday as the sun went behind a cloud, even though the ambient temperature was a notch higher. But there was other tennis going on at the same time, and what a match I missed. Alcaraz, just wow. Getting the better of the master, somehow, after dropping the first five games. I’ll have to catch up on that ludicrous game in the third set which went 13 deuces – 32 points – tying the marathon that Graf and Sanchez-Vicario produced in the latter stages of their 1995 final. Alcaraz turned 20 in May and he already looks the complete deal. He’s scarily good. And now he’s won the biggest prize of them all.

Books - Environment - Family - Language teaching

The details matter

July 9, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Wednesday I got a phone call from what seemed to be a teenage girl wanting lessons. A few minutes later (this person had spoken very good English in this time) I asked for a name. David. He pronounced it in the English way (the Romanian way is dah-vid). This morning 17-year-old David arrived for a two-hour lesson. He’s been homeschooled since the beginning of Covid; I hadn’t met anybody who was homeschooled before and didn’t even know if it was legal in Romania. He was quite remarkable: his attention to detail – different accents, glottal stops, phrasal verbs, weak forms, the IPA phonemic chart, you name it – was something I hadn’t seen previously. Some of my students show quite poor attention to detail, and that makes them rather difficult to teach. At times I’m forced to say, “Hey, this thing I’m telling you actually matters and you need to pay attention.” Others are much better, they ask questions, they make notes, and they’re always much easier to teach. (I’ve noticed that people who make notes almost always learn faster than those who don’t. Whether that’s the notes themselves, or just that people who make notes tend to be more focused, I don’t know.) Anyway, this David was extremely easy to teach. My whiteboard kept filling up and the two hours went by in no time. We can only have three more sessions before I go away, and he isn’t interested in online learning. I don’t blame him. Perhaps the best thing to come out of the pandemic is the acceptance of working from home. Millions of people are now missing out on unnecessary soul-crushing commutes that add 25% to their working day, and that’s fantastic. But teaching does work better face-to-face: books and all kinds of tactile games and exercises become available, and you dodge all the annoying tech issues. “I can hear you but I can’t see you.” “Sorry, you’re breaking up a bit.” And so on.

Of course there are environmental benefits to working from home too, although the reduction in carbon emissions on the roads must be offset by extra electricity use at home, and I have no idea how those numbers stack up. We definitely need some major shifts in human behaviour after a week in which we broke the all-time record for the world’s hottest day, two days in a row. (I lie. It wasn’t/isn’t an all-time record, just the record since the Eemian which I hadn’t heard of before and ended only 115,000 years ago.)

My sinus problem isn’t getting any better. Well, in one way it is, because (touch wood) I haven’t had an excruciating headache for months now. But it affects me every day. The pressure builds up and builds up until phew, I’m able to blow out a jet of slime, and the process repeats. Nights are often terrible because the process doesn’t magically stop when I’m asleep. This means my sleep is interrupted, and when I wake up for the final time in the morning I often feel shattered. My energy is depleted; everything feels heavy. I have an appointment with a specialist in Timișoara on 20th September, shortly after I arrive back in the country, and if nothing comes of that, my next step might be a trip to Bucharest and possibly surgery.

The last time I spoke to Dad, he mentioned Alzheimer’s. (By Dad’s age, his own father was in the advanced stages of it.) Dad had read that the onset of the disease is usually marked by a combination of “brain fog” and anxiety. He said that he had none of the brain fog (beyond the usual!) but loads of anxiety, beyond anything he’d experienced before, seemingly brought on by all the life admin and tech stuff. It’s sad that he’s been so affected by that. In the last week, there have been positive signs though. The building work is in full swing and they’re cracking on at a good pace. The sooner that’s done, the better.

It’s been a terrible 2023 for tennis. Rain meant that both of last weekend’s sessions got cancelled. No sign of rain this weekend though, so we should get two sessions in. On Monday I’ve got a jam-packed day of lessons planned – I’m grateful for that because it should be good for my mood, even if it’ll be tiring. I doubt I’ll have any more days like that until I go away.

I finished Digital Minimalism and have started John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.

Books - Family - Life :) - Music

We’re asocial creatures sometimes, too

July 3, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

The time until I go away has now dipped under the length of time I’ll be away; I generally get excited about a big trip when I hit that milestone.

Yesterday I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român where I called my parents, had a basic lunch, and finished Three Men in a Boat. Dad marvelled at my ability to make video calls to New Zealand while out and about in Romania. If they tried to do the reverse, their data would be chewed up in no time. We agreed that this is an island of great benefit in a sea of toxic tech. I’d only just finished saying how wonderful my internet is in Romania when a message flashed up to say that my phone was getting too hot and the app would need to close (before, presumably, it caught fire). Before that, I told them that they really do need to book some flights to Europe, even if they’re ten months away. Just think how happy my brother will be if he knows they’re coming over.

Last night I spoke to my brother – he’d just got back from his cruise with his wife, the in-laws and the little one. They’d been to Spain and Portugal, not Somalia. My brother had a better time than he was expecting. They’re already planning Christmas. Would you like to come over? I’d love to spend time with my brother, sister-in-law and nephew, but jeez, British Christmas is so depressing. Getting to my brother’s place will be arduous and expensive. I don’t know whether I can face it. I did toy with the idea of flying to England from Budapest for my nephew’s first birthday after I come back from New Zealand, but when I land in Budapest all I’ll want to do is bloody well get home. Going over there and having to talk with family when I’m absolutely knackered would wreck me. I told Mum this, and she recalled the time in 1994 when she and my brother flew into Auckland from London and immediately attended a funeral. She had to make sandwiches and cups of tea and chat with third cousins twice removed, all while badly jet-lagged; it was nightmarish. I asked my brother if we could all meet up in St Ives sometime in October. It’ll be a push with the extra little person, but we should manage it.

The big thing I have to contend with right now is getting central heating installed. Last winter – albeit a mild one – the city heating system was more than adequate. Unfortunately the cost of that is going through the roof, and everyone in this block now has no sensible choice but to install their individual central heating if they haven’t already done so. It’s a major expense (NZ$6000, or £3000) and hassle I could do without. One little benefit, however, is that I’ve got to know Elena, the old lady (she turns 80 later this year) who lives directly above me. Her children emigrated to Canada some time ago and have grown-up children of their own. She said that all her friends in Timișoara have passed away. She seems a lovely lady and we’ve had some good conversations.

Three Men in a Boat is very cleverly written, and amusing all the way through. I was surprised by how little the author’s English of 1889 differs from that of today. He talks of dudes, which I didn’t think existed back then, least of all in Britain. On the other hand, he uses superlatives like pleasantest (which would be odd today) and peacefullest (even odder). He uses five-and-twenty and twenty-five interchangeably, indicating that the switch to the modern version was incomplete at that time. He also says four hours and a half; this is now incorrect and a bane of contemporary learners of English. His tales are peppered with constructions like despite his having seen me, which exists in some people’s modern English – my British friend Dorothy’s, for instance – but certainly not mine. (Dorothy’s English is interesting. She also says “One must do blah blah blah, mustn’t one?” and pronounces suit with the y sound of yes. This is not only a question of age – my parents don’t have these traits even though they’re a few years older than her – but one of education and class.)

I’ve started reading Digital Minimalism, a book all about pulling the plug on unnecessary and pernicious tech. I haven’t read the chapter on solitude yet, but I’m looking forward to it. Almost every day I hear “we’re social creatures!”, with the implication that we all need social interaction, online or offline, all the time. Piss off with that! All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, also need the absence of social interaction sometimes, and now many of us aren’t getting it.

Because my hours are down a bit (it’s summer), I now get the occasional chance to listen to Muzicorama on the radio. Last week they played some tracks from the wonderful War of the Worlds musical that came out in 1978, including the beautiful Forever Autumn.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :)

You can’t win ’em all

June 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a longer walk than I planned this evening, making it to (and beyond) a cemetery I didn’t know existed. The cemetery is called Mătăsarilor; it’s on a street with the same name, which means “silk workers”. (There are a lot of streets in the city named after industries or workers, and there used to be even more before their names were changed to those of local figures.)

My hours are down as people start to go on holiday. I don’t mind that too much. I can work on the book I’ve neglected for months and brush up on my Romanian. Our last session on Tuesday was pretty good, although both Dorothy and I said that the game our teacher devised for us – guessing things you find in a city, based on clues – was a bit easy. The information about the imperfect tense was extremely useful though. Also on Tuesday, I had my first (and almost certainly last) lesson with a nine-year-old girl. Her elder brother has been coming since last autumn, but this week he was away on a camp, so his mother suggested his sister have a lesson with me instead. Fine. I chatted with the girl and tried to make her feel at ease, then gave her some sheets to colour in, as well as a few exercises where she had to count coloured stars and match farm animals. She smiled the whole time and did pretty well with all the exercises, so I thought the session had been a success. “Did you like it?” No. “You don’t want to come again, then?” No. “Was it boring?” Yes. But don’t worry, Mum does English with me sometimes too, and it’s boring with her as well. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

Dad turned 73 yesterday, and is now back to just one year behind Mum again – her birthday was two weeks earlier. I can’t get my head around them being that old. They certainly don’t seem it or feel it, even if all their stuff has been dragging them down in recent months. As I’ve said so many times on this blog, they’ve got to extricate themselves from their life admin mire, and that means selling their UK properties as a first step. At this point, who cares if it’s the “wrong time” to sell? If I’m still hearing about meter readings and property managers as they approach 80, my sympathy will start to wear thin. (Earlier this week they got an estimated monthly power bill of £3300 for one of their UK properties.)

Autism - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Real millennials

June 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a lesson with a 22-year-old university student who, when she ties her hair back, looks like Martina Hingis. She also has a part-time job in IT testing; she has ambitious plans for a career in that field. At the end of the session, she said she wanted to drop from two meetings a week with me to just one. I wonder how long before she plumps for zero. How ever hard I try, I find it hard to connect with her. I get a lot of people of around her age – the real millennials, those born around 2000 – and they’re the hardest to build a rapport with. Older adults are easier, as are kids, but with these real millennials we’re often transmitting on different wavebands. It doesn’t help that this particular student is very normal for someone of her age, and I’ve always found very normal people hard to relate to. (I’ve always thought that Normal People Scare Me, a 2006 documentary about autism, is one of the best titles of anything ever.)

My cousin had her eight-hour cancer removal operation on Wednesday. Apart from the extraordinary length of the procedure, I haven’t had any news about how it went.

Tomorrow my brother, his wife and their son are going on a one-week cruise. When I spoke to him on Tuesday he clearly didn’t want to go. (He wife wasn’t there.) When I asked him where he was going, he said he didn’t know. “How do you know it isn’t Somalia?” I asked. He had been to Somalia, or at least past it, on one of his army excursions or missions or whatever the right word is. I do know that at some point he’ll need to attend a black tie dinner. Not his thing at all, nor mine. His wife would dress the little one up in a black tie too, given the chance.

This week I’ve sent two letters to Barclays, first to the CEO, and then (changing the wording slightly) to their complaints team. Each letter ran to 2500 words, so it was a big effort. I’m glad to get that out of the way.

The biggest news story of the week has probably been the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible near the wreck of the Titanic, killing its five occupants. They were all super-wealthy men, aged from 19 – tragically, a boy really – to 77. Because it operated in international waters, the Titan could bypass all safety regulations. (It was controlled using a modified game console.) If you ponied up US$250,000 and signed a long waiver that mentioned death three times on the first page, you were good to go. This incident reminds me of conversations we had when I worked in life insurance. As well as administrative cost savings for larger policies, people who insured themselves for larger sums were wealthier and, on average, in a better state of health. We priced our policies accordingly: $1 million of life insurance did not cost five times what $200,000 did. However, when you got to really large amounts – say, $10 million – you were into the realms of Learjets and adventure tourism. Also, rich people often get into that position by taking risks that pay off. They’re risk seekers by nature.

It’s hot. A top temperature of 35 is forecast for today. I went to the market before my lesson with the real millennial, and that will be my only venture outside.

Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

It’s snot much fun

June 6, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a whole heap more to say last time, but didn’t want to bombard my vast readership with too much in one go.

Last Tuesday I went back to the neurologist for another consultation. My left nostril is “always on” and causes me considerable discomfort. The pressure builds up and builds up – and so does the pain – until eventually I’m able to blow the thick clear, colourless gunk out. Sometimes it shoots out with such force that I don’t know where it’s gone. Occasionally I can’t blow it out, and then I’m in a whole world of hurt – the pain can then become excruciating. I normally wake up in the middle of the night and have to give my nose a good blow – I’ve yet to devise a way of doing this in my sleep. I told the neurologist all of this, and he said that unfortunately most of the ENT specialists in Timișoara are lacking. He gave me the number of one who might be reasonable, but said that ultimately I might need to see one in Bucharest, and that wouldn’t be cheap. He quoted something like £2000, which I’d happily pay to get rid of this once and for all.

On Thursday I decided to give up on online poker, having lost the desire to play. I played one final session, finishing with a fourth and a third in my last two tournaments, then cashed out. Annoyingly they creamed something like 10% off the top – it was never anything like that high when I lived in New Zealand – but the remainder (around £1100 or NZ£2200) will be useful. So will the extra time. I’ll have a bit more time over the summer to work on these books which I haven’t forgotten about.

This afternoon, to my great surprise, I got through to my aunt on the phone. She rarely picks it up. She sounded fine, but admitted that physically she was a mess. I plan to cycle over to her place on Saturday, just like I did last summer. When I told her about the Barclays business, she said I needed to make an appointment at the branch, so I did as she suggested. I’ll visit Barclays in Cambridge on Friday (the day I arrive), then I’ll still have an appointment up my sleeve on Monday if that doesn’t work out, although that will mean making a special trip to Cambridge. Tomorrow I’ll need to get my electricity bill translated, once again. The whole thing slipped into the realms of farce ages ago.

Teachers have been on strike for the last two weeks. They’ve chosen the end of the school year, when all the big exams are held, for maximum disruption. I sympathise with them; teachers’ salaries in Romania are derisory. But giving teachers more money will hardly begin to repair Romania’s creaking education system. This is the subject of a whole separate post. (I need to make a series of posts on how stuff works, or doesn’t, in Romania.)

I played a strange set of tennis last night. I partnered Ionuț, a man of around my age, against his daughter and Gabriela, a competitive woman also in her forties. So yes, it was boys against girls. The girls won the first eleven points; in the end we won the set 7-5 despite (if I calculated correctly) winning two fewer points than them overall.

Nearly 300 people died in a horrific train crash in India on Friday. To see the grieving families was extremely distressing. The Wikipedia page on Indian railway incidents shows a litany of disaster over decades, although (this awful incident notwithstanding) they have reduced in frequency.

I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. Workers in New Zealand had the day off for King’s birthday. Doesn’t that sound weird?

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Romania - Tennis

Back to nature

June 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Lots of biking this weekend. This morning I met Mark at his place in Dumbrăvița and we cycled to the (relatively) nearby village of Covaci, then into the countryside, through fields of wheat and barley and rapeseed (though that had been harvested). As I realised we were at the highest point of a câmpie, a plain basically, I was reminded of Haddenham, a large village in Cambridgeshire and perhaps the highest point in that very flat county. (The Blossoms and Bygones open day held every May in Haddenham was really quite wonderful. The vintage cars, the traction engines, seeing horses being shod, trips on horse-drawn carts, going up the church tower and water tower, and best of all, cheap cakes and biscuits. This event seemed to run out of steam around the turn of the century, and Wikipedia tells me that it finished for good in 2013.) We saw two foxes and a hare (hares can run at around twice the speed us pathetic humans can) as well as several storks, and the puddles (of which there were many) were teeming with froglets. And, as always in Romania, so many insects. My old city bike, as opposed to Mark’s newish hybrid bike, coped OK with the narrow dirt tracks. Even on the paved roads there was gloriously little traffic; it was great to be away from the noise of people and their machines. We came back via another pleasant village named Cerneteaz (pronounced “chair-net-yazz“, or close to that; click for a late-eighties flashback) where we had a packed lunch. Traditional Romanian music was playing; we both agreed that we quite liked it.

Made from mud and glass bottles, it’s supposed to be like this

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei, who had just got a D grade in a test at school. That disappointing result was little to do with him and a lot to do with his teacher who hadn’t really done her job properly. Her explanations had clearly been superficial, so no wonder when she dumped a demanding test on her pupils, they were mostly at sea. Matei showed me the unprofessional-looking test which had been cobbled together from at least four different past papers. The worst part was the marking scheme. Not every mark on every past paper is worth the same. One two-hour paper might carry 100 marks; another two-hour paper which has just as much stuff in it might only have 60 marks. If you’re going to just smoosh different papers together, you have to adjust the marks up and down accordingly. You’d think a maths teacher might have figured that out. After seeing Matei I met Mark at a restaurant called Astur, just off the main street of Dumbrăvița. Unusually there was a large, nicely mown beer-garden-style outdoor area. I was hungry so I had a carbonara and a beer as we sat in the full glare of the sun. (The tops of my legs certainly caught it.) As we were about to leave, my brother surprisingly called me and showed me my nephew, now closing in on nine months old and a different person from the previous time I’d seen him. He’d just uttered his first word: cat. He and the cat are best mates; they spend many hours in close proximity. It was a bit awkward to talk, so I called my brother back in the evening after tennis.

Mark and I soon parted ways, and I cycled to Giarmata Vii to look at yet another Dacia, this time a bright blue one from 2005. It was going for 1500 euros. It had one or two small spots of rust, and only had two weeks left on its ITP (MOT in the UK, or WOF in New Zealand). The owner took me for a ride around the village, and it seemed fine. I don’t know what to do. On Tuesday I looked at another car that seemed fine on the surface, but I found out that it had been in a crash that damaged both the right doors and the pillar and cost a lot to repair. At this rate, buying a car is looking as hard as buying a flat was. (I still have awful flashbacks to that meeting in the lawyer’s office on 5/5/22. My stress levels were off the scale.)

On Friday night I had my lesson with the guy who lives in London. He’d recently been to Alton Towers. I went there twice, in 1999 and 2003. The more famous rides, such as Nemesis, and Oblivion which was brand new in ’99, are still running. He’d also been back to Romania with his family to attend a wedding. They stayed in a hotel which he’d booked on booking.com. The hotel was dire and he duly left a one-star review. The hotel owners then tracked him down, found where he works in the UK, and gave his company a one-star review. What bastards. After he read articles about Boris Johnson and Philip Schofield, he said he’d read The Noonday Demon, a 2001 book about depression that I’d been meaning to get hold of. He said his wife suffers from depression but is denial of it. We had a very interesting conversation about the subject, in particular the number of people who are affected indirectly.

Tennis. I played last night for the first time in two weeks. I played with the teenage girl; her father and 88-year-old Domnul Sfâra were on the other side. We won 6-1, 7-6 (7-5). The local tradition of swapping the side you receive from with your partner every second game is weird and against the rules of tennis, and gets very confusing during a tie-break. Our first set point at 6-3 in the tie-break was the most incredible rally I’ve been involved in for some time; the fact that a near-nonagenarian was also involved made in even more remarkable.

Only four full days until I go away.