New Zealand

Life :) - New Zealand

Getting plumbed in

July 14, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve got the plumber here for the third day running. He’s a really nice guy, and he’s doing a good job as far as I can tell. But with the exception of my students who are confined to one room, I’m used to having this place to myself. He has to constantly flit between all the rooms to replace the old heaters, and I can’t relax. Not his fault, obviously. Nor was it his fault that he locked me in on Wednesday night. When he left I was giving an online lesson. He locked the front door behind him with the spare key I’d given him, turning the key twice. When I tried to leave at 9pm, I couldn’t. I found out that if you turn the key twice, whoever is inside can’t open the door. Before Wednesday I had no idea about that. (I live by myself. There isn’t normally a ‘someone else’ to lock the door behind them.) Thankfully there was no fire that night – my only option would have been to jump – and when he came back the next morning I was a free man again. This place is now a complete pigsty, and of course there’s the noise too. I’m grateful for the thunderstorm we had in the middle of last night; it has (temporarily) taken the edge off the temperature, so I could comfortably escape for a bit earlier today. I think (hope!) he won’t come back again tomorrow, and will start getting everything piped up on the 24th when he comes back from his break. Wednesday was an expensive day – I forked out 11,645 lei (£2000, or NZ$4100) on all the materials. I’ll give the plumber 2000 lei today, and the remainder (a little over 2000 lei, I think) when he finishes the job.

This morning I spoke to my parents from the café next to the market. It was 10:15 and I was the only person not drinking beer or whisky. Their builders had had the day off; it was the newfangled Matariki public holiday. (I always get that word muddled with tamariki, which means ‘children’ in Maori.) Matariki doesn’t shine very brightly in their part of the country, though I’m sure people don’t mind the extra day off in the middle of winter.

I read a couple of articles this morning on the local news website. The first was about a musical instrument called a duduk which will be accompanying an organ at an upcoming festival. My first thought was, ah, it’s Indonesian or Malay. I thought that because on all those Garuda and Malaysia Airlines flights I took many years ago, I saw the native word duduk – which meant ‘seat’ or ‘sit’ – all the time. It’s a distinctive word. Your life vest is under your duduk. Please fasten your duduk belt. Maybe the duduk is similar to an organ, and has that name because you have to sit down to play it. But no, it’s actually an Armenian woodwind instrument.

The second article was about the International Maths Olympiad which had just taken place in Japan. Romania finished an impressive fourth of the 112 countries who took part, behind (in order) China, the US, and South Korea. (New Zealand came 64th.) Maths olympiads are a really big deal in Romania – they’re treated a bit like American spelling bees – and some teenagers spend many hours priming themselves for them. (The test/exam takes 4½ hours, by the way. Are you allowed to pop out for a pee?) So I’m not surprised that Romania did so well. Each national team consisted of six students, and (this is the bit that blew me away) 59 of the 60 participants from the top ten countries were male. You expect a skew towards boys – they have a thing for largely pointless competitiveness – but that stat is just nuts. An important takeaway is that just because Romania did well in this olympiad thingy, Romanians aren’t necessarily good at maths as a whole. It was nice when Andy Murray won his three grand slams, but it didn’t make Britain any better at tennis.

Life :) - Maths teaching - Music - New Zealand - Photos

More sad news, and some happier traditions

June 18, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a marathon – 81-minute – Skype call with my parents.

We spent the first part of our call discussing the latest shocking news, that my Wellington-based cousin has cancer in her jaw. My parents had noticed something was up when they met her at their tragically young relative’s funeral in late April, but never imagined it was cancer. Googling “jaw cancer” makes for sobering reading. Jaw cancer is rare and doesn’t exist per se; it nearly always starts somewhere else in the mouth and spreads to the jaw, meaning it’s usually in an advanced stage. The prognosis can’t be good. On Wednesday she’ll have an operation to remove flesh from her jaw and replace it, probably from her arm. I must send my cousin a message, but what do you say?

A good half-hour of our chat was spent discussing life admin. It’s making my parents’ lives a misery. They must get rid of both their flats in the UK. They must move to somewhere far simpler as soon as the building work on their current place is finished. They must do things that are financially sub-optimal, just to simplify their lives. Seeing them buckle under the weight of all this crap is upsetting for me, especially at a time when I’ve been overwhelmed by it all myself.

Yesterday I had my pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița. When I turned up for the maths lesson, Matei’s father told me that the British school is hiring a maths teacher. I very much doubt I’d get the job anyway because I have no experience of teaching in a school, but if I did I’d have to Get Involved and coach football and heaven knows what else, and um, yeah, I’d have nice long holidays but no thanks.

After my lessons we were supposed to have the latest edition of the English Conversation Club, this time at my place, but just about everybody was away. Sanda, who ran the club in its previous incarnation, showed up at five. We chatted about wedding traditions and the word “venue”, and I gave her a Kiwi vocab matching game which she was somehow fascinated by. Then at 6:20 another woman, Ramona, turned up. She had lived some time in the US, and spoke English pretty well. At one point we discussed silent-b words: “subtle”, “debt”, “doubt”, and words ending in -mb such as “bomb” and “lamb”. Ramona told me, and I get this a lot, that “You don’t pronounce the b in doubt because you’re British. Sorry, but I learned American English and in America they pronounce it.” No, no, no, no, no. I may be British, but I’m also a teacher and I’ve taken the time to learn about pronunciation in different English-speaking countries, I also watch American films occasionally, and believe me, they don’t.

At seven, Sanda said she was going to the open-air museum to see Festivalul Etniilor, where performers based in the Banat region, but with different ethnicities, sang and played and danced. After tennis was cancelled because of the waterlogged courts, I decided to join her. There were Germans (Swabians or șvabi), Ukrainians, Serbians, Aromanians and Gypsies (Roma). It was a riot of colour as all the performers were dressed in their traditional costumes. The event was free and completely non-commercialised, unlike the much more publicised Flight Festival also taking place this weekend. The star of the show, Damian Drăghici with his group Damian & Friends, came on later. In the past he’s been a supporting act for the likes of Joe Cocker and James Brown. Towards the end he played the nai (a traditional panflute); the last song of the evening was Ciocârlia (the Lark), a very traditional Romanian tune – I much preferred last night’s version to the one in the link. I really enjoyed the evening; well, at least I did after the start – I was starving but grabbed a large langoș from a kiosk quite a way from the stage.

The Gypsies

The blind pianist

The flower stalls at the market, still open at 10:30 last night

I made a summer pudding for yesterday’s club which barely happened, and still have most of it. (We also discussed the word “pudding”. When I was growing up, we never used “dessert”. “Pudding”, or simply “pud”, covered anything that you ate after your main meal. For me, “pudding” sounds about nine times tastier than “dessert”.) The main benefit of yesterday’s “event” was that I made me tidy up the kitchen, living room, and main bathroom.

I promise I’ll talk about my trip next time.

Life :) - New Zealand

… or no deal

May 21, 2023 by 0 Comments

So I met the guy in the McDonald’s car park again and went with him to the mall. He was more friendly this time. When we got to the mall though and it became apparent that I didn’t actually have the equivalent of 2000 euros – almost 10,000 lei – in cold hard cash, his mood quickly turned sour. He accepted a bank transfer, but wanted it done there and then, and the sum was above the limit set by the banking app. My bank even has a branch at the mall that’s open on Sundays, but they wouldn’t allow me to withdraw that amount at the desk. The guy then got angry with me for not sorting all of this out beforehand, and at that point I decided to walk away. He asked me for 100 lei for wasting his time, so I gave him 50 and was relieved to get out of there relatively unscathed. Like so many Romanian men, he resorted to sheer aggression to get what he wanted. One of the guys from tennis recently lamented the “softness” of young people who live in cities. “They’re so much more aggressive in the country.” Aggression is seen as a positive attribute here. Well, this guy’s aggression cost him a sale. There’s one more car I’m interested in, and if nothing comes of that I might wait until I get back from New Zealand.

Last week there was a fire in a hostel in Wellington, just a stone’s throw from where I used to live. It was almost certainly arson, and at least five people were killed. The building had no sprinklers – amazingly, given how stringent New Zealand’s safety regulations tend to be across the board, it was exempt from them. Very sad and a total failure on a number of levels, but to put it into perspective, fatal fires are probably a weekly occurrence in Romania.

I’m just about to meet Mark in town. Apparently there’s a “festival” of overpriced “street food” going on. It’s such a nice day; it’s bound to be heaving there.

Life :) - New Zealand

Off the map

May 15, 2023 by 0 Comments

Today has been a catch-up day after a tiring week. Yesterday I had a pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița followed by a 90-minute one at home, then I went to the second meeting of the English Conversation Club to give a presentation on New Zealand. I’d had to prepare the talk and also give a translation into Romanian because one of the women in the audience (of four!), whom I’ve started teaching, knows very little English at this point. I went on for 20-odd minutes and could have gone longer. I also prepared a Kiwi vocab list – chocka, crook, dairy, Eftpos, feijoa, heaps, jandals, munted, OE, pom, she’ll be right, stoked, tiki tour, togs, wops, and more. One of the women found this list fascinating, especially the bit about chips meaning both hot chips and cold chips. A young bloke knew about the All Blacks and the haka, but otherwise people knew very little. New Zealand is off the map to most Romanians. (It’s literally off the map to many people, it seems.) One woman was amazed to learn that there exists a side of the world with reversed seasons. Skiing in August? You having a laugh?

Plenty of work for the rest of the week too, and not nearly enough sleep. I felt pretty good though, for a number of reasons. We had good weather (that today has turned sour). My shipment of second-hand clothes arrived. I got my bike fixed (again, at a cost of nearly 300 lei, even more than I expected). I felt the eager anticipation of getting on the road and seeing more of this amazing country, the place I now call home. And the biggie – lately I’ve stopped feeling blasé about what I did by coming to Romania. It’s nothing to be blasé about, is it? Coming to a place where I don’t know a soul and can hardly communicate, to do a job I’ve barely dabbled in before and do it full-time. Utterly batshit mad, on the face of it. But I did it, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Before I came here, people were incredulous. Why Romania? Why not do what thousands of other native speakers do and teach in tried-and-trusted Japan? Or Korea? No no no. Precisely because of the thousands of other teachers. I’d have been part of a teaching farm. Competing against people better than me and feeling like a failure again. Sod that. Romania was blissfully off the map. After 6½ years it’s still just me doing this, in a city the size of Wellington. I’ve got this whole wonderful place to myself, which is utterly batshit mad. Should I put my prices way up? I do think about it. On Thursday one of my students – a teacher – was about to go to Greece for a teaching conference. She showed me the programme, chock-full of life-sucking buzzwords and acronyms. Look what I’ve escaped, I thought.

Tomorrow I’ve got my appointment to get my British driving licence converted to a Romanian one. If everything is deemed to be in order, they should give me a temporary licence to tide me over until I get the proper one in the post, and I’ll look at buying one of those Dacias.

Family - Life :) - New Zealand

Our perilous existence

March 2, 2023 by 0 Comments

My parents are staying in Moeraki for four days. Just up the coast is Hampden, the village with a great fish and chip shop and a wi-fi hotspot which they called me from last night, luckily after I’d finished work. The morning sky was a brilliant blue, as was their shiny, shapely new electric vehicle. Seeing that sky made me really look forward to getting over there. Five months away. Earlier Dad almost got wiped out in a Pak ‘n’ Save car park. He was pushing a trolley when an old lady went full throttle in reverse, ripping the trolley out of Dad’s hand, and slammed into two cars on the edge of the car park. Dad’s hand was hurt in the process, but a few inches or a split second this way or that and he’d have ended up under the car. Such is our perilous existence. The driver was unscathed (thankfully she was going backwards); it sounds like she wrote off three cars, but it could easily have been catastrophic. The incident was caught on camera; it took 30 seconds for staff to appear on the scene.

Dad has had several narrow escapes now. No such dramas here, though at times it feels like it. On Tuesday morning I went to the immigration office because my residence permit still shows my old address, and getting it updated (which I should have done months ago) might help me with my Barclays debacle. As soon as I got there, a middle-aged man said (in English), “Why are these places so fucking disgusting?” He was Mexican, and with his Romanian-born wife, whom he’d met in Germany, and their daughter. His wife and daughter were summoned to some office or other, and he and I had a chat. He wasn’t a fan of Romania at all. He compared the country to his native Mexico – a similar standard of living, he said, but services like immigration work much better over there. The immigration office is horrible, I agree, but I think I’d rather be living somewhere largely free of drug cartels in a city where I can walk around safely, day or night. Timișoara, touch wood, is a remarkably safe city. At one point, a border police van pulled up outside, and two Middle Eastern-looking handcuffed men got dragged in. The place was very busy, and after hanging around there for an hour, it was clear that I wouldn’t get anywhere. In the afternoon I tried again, and this time I met a Romanian guy of around sixty who told me to use the app instead of wasting hours in the office. He was extremely helpful (bizarrely, he actually seemed to enjoy this stuff) but when I got home and tried to use the app I had more questions than answers.

Yesterday morning I had a two-hour lesson scheduled for eight. I started with him last week, and I tried calling him the night before to confirm, but got no reply. (He’s twenty and a new student – exactly the sort of person liable to forget or just not be bothered.) If he didn’t come, I’d get the “opportunity” to go back to the immigration office. Should I go? Eight o’clock rolled around. He won’t turn up, will he? Then at 8:05 the intercom beep went off, to my relief. It was him. We had a productive session, I got paid, and the “opportunity” to deal with life admin was taken away from me. I wonder how I’d be managing right now if I still had the earthquake business in Wellington to contend with. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

I had three lessons this morning, and I still have three more this afternoon and evening. This is shaping up to be my busiest week for some time.

Environment - Life :) - New Zealand - Photos - Poker - Travel: Romania

Earthquake weather

February 14, 2023 by 0 Comments

At around 5pm yesterday, a 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck about 170 km east of here, at a depth of 15 km. I didn’t feel it, but many in Timișoara did, and I think the recent scenes from Turkey and Syria spooked some Romanians more than normal. Yes, earthquakes are common in Romania, mostly in Vrancea in the south-east. About 1600 people were killed in the 1977 Vrancea quake, which Ceaușescu took advantage of by clearing out swaths of Bucharest to build even more brutalist concrete blocks. There’s often talk of building codes and yellow stickers which is all hauntingly familiar to me.

It’s an absolute mess – once again – in New Zealand’s North Island. The floods caused by Cyclone Gabrielle have displaced thousands, destroyed homes, and cut off whole towns. I worked for a water consultancy company twenty years ago; we produced maps that were fascinating in their way, delineating the extend of flooding at various levels of likelihood: once every 5 years, then 10, 25, 50, 100 and 200. Then there was a “climate change” line that blew everything else out of the water, so to speak. A 1-in-200-year event would be more like a 1-in-2, if the doom scenario came to pass. It already has. I was pleased to see James Shaw, the minister for climate, give such an impassioned speech in parliament.

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos on cities (mostly American and Canadian ones) and public transport. One word that keeps coming up is stroad – a hybrid of a street, which has shops and bars and other stuff that people actually want to visit, and a road, whose purpose is to transport people from one place to another. A stroad tries to be a street and a road, and fails at both. Stroads, with their mega-center malls and drive-thru everything, are all over America and Canada. They’re depressing places if you’re in a car – you’re constantly stopping – and even more depressing if you’re not in a car. When I watched the videos I thought how I often found myself on one of sprawling Auckland’s soul-crushing stroads – Wairau Drive or whatever it was called. Wellington seemed almost free of them. Romania is pretty stroad-free I thought, until I suddenly realised something when I was cycling to my maths lesson on Saturday morning with the temperature hovering around minus 6. I cycled past Iulius Mall, which now has what the videos call a lifestyle centre (ugh), then went down the two-kilometre-long Calea Lipovei until I hit the roundabout at the edge of Dumbrăvița. Hey, now I’m on a stroad. There you’ll find a big supermarket that existed six years ago, and the Galaxy shopping centre that certainly didn’t. It’s already a big choke point, but now they’re also building a drive-thru McDonald’s. Just what we all need.

On Saturday I went back along the stroad again – all of it this time, because I was meeting the English guy Mark who lives at the end of the four-kilometre stroad and down a long, muddy, unpaved road where nothing is more than five years old. I think that would mess me up mentally. We, and the two dogs he and his girlfriend now have, went in his car to a village called Bogda, 45 minutes away. In the village was a camp that was used by schools and had clearly flourished in communist times, but was now abandoned like so much else around here. There was a good walkway and we trekked along and back with the dogs. It was a bit higher up and there was snow on the ground. I struggled with sinus pain, especially as we got back to the car, but subsided and when I got back home I felt much better after all that exercise. In fact I’m a bit better all round now.

I played poker yesterday for the first time in a while, and made $41 thanks to my first ever outright win in five-card draw. Here are some pictures.

The abandoned camp buildings and bandstand

This well is still functional

Some street art

The stroad
Life :) - New Zealand

New Zealand flights booked!

February 11, 2023 by 0 Comments

I found the early part of the week a struggle, but have bounced back since. I think the trick is recognising that life admin is a bit of a challenge for me, and if my less urgent tasks spill over into the following day or even week, that’s nothing to beat myself up over.

I’ve been trying to book flights to New Zealand today, all the time longing for the days (and places) of travel agents who could actually help you. I did visit two agents today, but the antipodes were alien to both them and whatever screens they were looking at. It wasn’t their fault, but their computers really did say no, at least for even a semi-reasonable price. I did eventually find a Turkish Airlines ticket online for just under £1400, but it wouldn’t let me book because it was over my online limit. I’ll try and get through to my New Zealand bank this evening and see if I can get that limit lifted.

Yesterday lunchtime I had pizza in the centre of town with the dictionary woman and another lady who speaks English at a high level and used to have lessons with me. That gave me a welcome, stress-free break in the middle of a busy day of lessons. They want to restart the English conversation club which was a success before it broke up ten years or so ago.

I’ve found two interesting YouTube channels of late. One is called CityNerd, and is all about urban planning and the depressing dominance of the car in North America. The other is called Lord Spoda, and features a guy who visits ghost towns – or close to it – far from any interstate. I enjoyed this video – if enjoy is exactly the word – of half a dozen once-thriving towns in Texas. Now it’s tumbleweed stuff. What names these places have. Motley County is delightful, as the narrator says. Paducah, named after the much larger place in Kentucky that I actually visited in 2015. Rhymes with Temuka. Quitaque, pronounced “kitty-kway”. Turkey. Yes, Turkey. And then there’s the pretty ghastly Floydada.

There have been hellish scenes in Turkey and Syria all week following Monday morning’s earthquake. Tens of thousands dead, and now great anger.

Update: I’ve just successfully booked my flights. I’m leaving Budapest on 5th August, arriving in Christchurch on 7th August and staying until 8th September. There are three stops, in Istanbul, Singapore and Melbourne, and there’s also the business of getting to Budapest. I didn’t expect to feel so excited at making an online booking, but I was practically jumping up and down for a couple of minutes after I got the confirmation.

New Zealand - Other sports - Writing a book

The magic of the Cup

January 30, 2023 by 0 Comments

Near-biblical rainfall, landslides, homes falling into the sea. That’s what Aucklanders have been dealing with in the last few days. Mum said last night that four months’ worth of rain fell in three hours in places. At least four people have died. I had the usual hell-in-a-handcart stuff from my parents, though I keep agreeing with them more and more; we’ve entered what I’ve already called on this blog a post-optimism world.

It’s weird how I sporadically get interested in various sports. Now it’s FA Cup football. I watched bits of Birmingham’s entertaining 2-2 draw at Blackburn on Saturday – Blues opened the scoring in just the third minute, were 2-1 down immediately after half-time, but 18-year-old Jordan James equalised in the 91st minute, just after he came on as a substitute. What a moment for him and for the supporters who are going through an ugly spell right now – they’re struggling in the league and everybody hates the current owners. The end of the match was marred by racial abuse towards Neil Etheridge, Blues’ Filipino goalkeeper. The replay is tomorrow night at St Andrew’s, Birmingham’s home ground which I visited a few times more than 20 years ago. Yesterday I dipped into Brighton’s 2-1 win over Liverpool, which featured a stunning late winner, then saw a marvellous match between Wrexham (currently outside the league) and Sheffield United (in the second tier), which finished 3-3. The Welsh club were recently taken over by a pair of Hollywood actors. Their kit sponsors are TikTok. I remember Wrexham’s run to the quarter-finals in 1996-97; back then they were sponsored by Wrexham Lager. Alcohol sponsorship has now been banned, so instead we’ve now got endless betting firms, big banks, and the likes of TikTok – collectively they’re doing at least as much harm as booze.

When I watched those games yesterday, my attention wasn’t squarely focused on them – I was working on my dictionary, adding entries and tweaking them here and there. It’s a big effort that I know might be for very little. I’ve had no choice but to my other book – the novel – on the back burner for now.

Language teaching - New Zealand - Other sports - Politics

Knowing when to go

January 19, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had another online lesson with that boy who cried. It was hard work – he rarely uttered anything apart from “yes”, “no”, and “I don’t know” – but at least he didn’t cry this time. Later I’ve got that maths lesson again. Yesterday I had a terrible session with the four twins. Having already exhausted all topics with them, I tried a printable domino-style words-and-pictures game that I found online – lots of painstaking printing and sticking – but the game descended into farce because there were too many cards and they were unable to read the words on them; none of them can read in English beyond words like “cat” and “dog”. The rest of the session turned into a load of nothing. It didn’t help that my mood was terrible and my enthusiasm at rock bottom.

Jacinda Ardern has resigned as prime minister of New Zealand. Good decision, I’d say. Most leaders are ego-driven, desperate to retain power at all costs, and they outstay their welcome by years. She dealt admirably with the horrors of the Christchurch mosque shooting, then the initial stages of the pandemic. Had National retained power in 2017, I imagine thousands more New Zealanders would have died of Covid “to keep the economy moving” or some such tripe, and the economy wouldn’t have moved any faster. Quite the opposite, in fact. Set against chaos of Trump and the like, her leadershup was a beacon of calm. Latterly, though, her star has fallen. The disappointment, as I see it, is that Labour won a majority in 2020 – almost unheard of in the MMP system – but have totally failed to use it. Housing is a zillion-dollar disaster. Mental health for many Kiwis continues to be a mess. (Mental health provision got noticeably worse in my time there; here was a chance to reverse that.) My parents are always telling me that local farmers can’t get workers from overseas to do the jobs that Kiwis won’t. I don’t know anything about this Luxon bloke who may well be prime minister by the end of this year, except that he’s probably less of an arse than Judith Collins.

On Tuesday night I watched a football match for the first time in ages. Birmingham City, a.k.a. Blues, a team I saw several times at university, were playing Forest Green Rovers away in the third round of the FA Cup. Forest Green are based in Nailsworth, a town of 5000-odd in the Cotswolds, and the smallest town in England ever to host a league football club. They’re owned by renewable-energy business moguls and everything at the club is fully vegan. During the game, flashing advertising hoardings counted up the number of plastic bottles thrown away, millisecond by millisecond, and other depressing environment-killing stats. Forest Green took the lead with a stunning goal in the eighth minute. Birmingham were terrible in the first half, though I liked their young player Hannibal, mostly because of his name. Their manager must have dished out a bollocking at half-time because they sprang into action and equalised just after the break. The big moment came at 1-1, when Blues’ keeper pulled off a scarcely believable double save. Though the atmosphere was mostly flat – the magic of the FA Cup is nothing like it once was – it was worth watching the game just for those ridiculous saves. Blues soon took the lead and saw out the remainder of the match. Forest Green were unfortunate not to at least force a replay; Birmingham now go to Blackburn in the next round.

Yesterday, before my bad session with the four kids, a fresh breeze blew, and as I was sitting at my desk hundreds of helicopter seeds hit my window before slowly twirling to the ground. At first I thought they were insects. This isn’t normal for mid-January, is it?

Life :) - New Zealand

Seismic times

March 1, 2022 by 0 Comments

On a snowy last day of February, I’m definitely feeling better. That might just be because the painkillers are kicking in, but I’ll take it. I’m taking a concoction of drugs right now. One of them comes in a partly pink box that looks like it should have a feminine hygiene product inside. Another has a name that sounds like somewhere Putin would like to invade, and consists of tiny amber-coloured pellets. But yes, I’m better. Last Monday, when the lesson with the twins rolled around, I was in pain and really didn’t want anything do with it. Today I managed to complete all my lessons at my desk instead of on the sofa. Tomorrow I’ll have my stomach ultrasound, which I bet won’t show anything.

The Ukraine war is mental, and unbelievably sad. Ukrainians are losing their lives all because of some twisted fucker whose delusions know no bounds. As my brother said, Putin has lost the plot. (He thinks one of his henchmen might take him out.) When I woke up on Thursday, it was like a magnitude-10 earthquake had jolted Europe. I googled Ivano-Frankivsk, a city 150 km from Romania’s border, whose airport had been bombed hours earlier. Google Street View showed a bustling city in summer, with shops and bars and a popular confectionery market.

The war is providing a grisly backdrop to everything. I’m grappling with all these Ukrainian names I’d never heard of before – all these harsh Vs and Ks. I’m not even quite sure how I should be pronouncing Kyiv, the Ukrainian (and therefore accurate) version of the city I’d always called Kiev (the Russian name). Yesterday morning there were at times both Ukrainian and Russian players at my online poker table. Last night Dad was complaining to me about the awful Australian-owned banks (and they really are profit-gouging bastards), and I jokingly suggested that the NZ goverment should kick them out of SWIFT, a system I’d only vaguely heard of a week ago.

Europe is increasingly uniting against evil. (I had serious doubts over this.) Germany finally got on board with sanctions over the weekend, and is now providing weapons to the Ukraine. I must say I liked seeing the rouble plummet to one cent against the US dollar this morning. Roll on half a cent. It’s bad that innocent Russians – many of whom already live in poverty – are going to be hit hard by this, but what’s the alternative?

I bought some shoes today, on the way to the supermarket. They’re leather, blue and brown – well mostly anyway – and made in Romania. A super-rare impulse purchase (and another sign I’m feeling better). They were 130 lei, or about NZ$45. A bargain.

I’m now seriously considering a trip to New Zealand in August. NZ is feeling the full force of Omicron right now, but with such high vaccination rates it should be much less painful than it was (and still is) here. Then normality, we all hope.