Environment

Environment - Politics

Time to wake up

November 11, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum shares a birthday with Donald Trump. Dad shares a birthday with Elon Musk. I share a birthday with Adolf Hitler. When it was over without yet being officially over over, we three sharers of villainous birthdays chatted for a good half-hour about what how we got here, how we’ve been asleep at the wheel for so long, and what further horrors are around the corner.

Unlike 2020 when the map of voting shifts was a mishmash of red and blue arrows and was described as a Jackson Pollock painting, this time it was one-way traffic. Only two states out of fifty didn’t move in Trump’s direction. Trump gained among men and women, irrespective of age or race. In other words, Kamala Harris (who ran a good campaign, I thought) faced an impossible task. Biden should have got out much earlier. In fact he should have been a one-term president from the start and the Democrats could have picked Harris or whoever else through a proper primary process. I can’t see the Dems nominating another woman in a hurry. Two of the last three elections they’ve failed to elect one to the White House, and in between they nominated an old white guy. Who won.

I listened to one commentator who complained of a “failure of imagination” as to how bad things could get under Trump and his minions. Best case scenario is their egos and lack of organisation keep the level of damage to a minimum. This is hard to imagine, now that the traditional Republicans have left the scene. It’s full-on MAGA now. Worst case is the US ends up like Hungary, or even Russia. For us in Europe, you can forget about the best case. Ukraine is fucked. There will be some “solution” whereby the Donbas is ceded to Russia, and then what? And forget anything to help the environment. “Drill, baby, drill”, which sounds like something out of Don’t Look Up, will be the mantra for the foreseeable future. They’re likely to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. A third of the area of Romania, this refuge is home to polar bears and other large mammals. It has already seen its ice melt, making sea levels rise, causing more ice to melt due to the albedo effect and so on, so this will be one catastrophe piled on another.

I spoke to my cousin earlier today on Skype. He lives just out of Albany, New York. Good luck for the next four years, I said. Two, he shot back. The midterms. But how can you be so sure the Democrats will gain, even if Trump wrecks everything? Then he talked about good old checks and balances and all the guardrails holding firm. Which they do, until they don’t. I asked him eight years ago if he was going to stay up and watch the election coverage. No, there’s no way that idiot will win. But he did. You wouldn’t think a rapist, a felon and the instigator of a deadly insurrection could run for the presidency a second time, let alone get over 50% of the vote, because that’s obviously fucking ridiculous. But he has. My cousin has a PhD and is very switched on, but I came away from our chat thinking, I dunno man, you might be asleep at the wheel here too. His wife later came on the line. It was great to chat to her. She said she cried when the election results came through.

Yesterday I had maths with Matei. We discussed the election. He talked about all the TikTok memes, making fun of Harris’s laugh and her “working-class family”. And her lies. She’s such a liar, isn’t she? Heaven help us all. Trump lies practically every time he opens his mouth. And are you aware that he tried to violently overturn the 2020 election? He wasn’t. He was twelve at the time, so I suppose I’ll let him off, but it’s interesting that there was no TikTok about that. As I’ve said many times on here, social media is destroying us. Then we moved on to talking about bridges and cathedrals and maths.

Environment - Photos - Politics - Writing a book

Book plans and planning for the worst

November 3, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

A fairly productive Saturday. An online session (I hesitate to call it a lesson) with the priest, then two maths lessons in Dumbrăvița. After doing quadratic equations with Matei, we discussed the US election for the last 10 or 15 minutes. (It would have been helpful to have devoted the whole two hours to the election. So much maths there. The Electoral College, gerrymandering, and all the rest of it.) Matei brought up the site 270towin.com where you can plug in your own predictions.

After my lessons I met Dorothy to discuss the smaller of the books I (and Dad) have been working on. We wanted to meet at Scârț but it was closed for renovation. What kind of renovation, we wondered. Its messiness is kind of the whole point. I hope it’s for something structural rather than any kind of tarting up. The area surrounding Scârț, which has a park, cobbled streets, and architecture from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, might be my favourite part of the city. We ended up having our tea and coffee a place called Viniloteca (as in vinyl records), which I’d previously misread as Vinoteca (as in wine). It was great, with all its proper music. I felt a certain pang when Tonight by David Bowie and Tina Turner came on. I’ll have to go there with Mark sometime. I didn’t buy any of the records or T-shirts on sale, but that wasn’t my focus. Dorothy and I looked at Dad’s 25 pictures, each one demonstrating a common error that Romanians make when they communicate in English. Seeing a whole body of Dad’s work really shows you what an extraordinary talent he has. (I know I’m biased.) On Monday I’ll try and arrange a meeting with the publishers to see what (if anything) will be the next step in getting the book into print. Will it cost me money? I say “if anything” because this is Romania, where nothing is guaranteed.

Yes, the election. I read an article that described it as bearing down on us all. “Bear down on” – an ominous three-word phrasal verb if ever there was one. Mum, Dad and I doomed for half an hour on Skype last night. What a Trump win would mean for Ukraine and the security of Europe as a whole. What it would mean for democracy. What it would mean for the environment which is deteriorating before our eyes. How the fuck the future of so much of Europe depends on a few thousand ill-informed voters in Cumberland County in Pennsylvania who don’t even care about foreign policy. (I know nothing about Cumberland County. It was a name I picked at random from the list of counties. I’m sure the people who live there are lovely. But that’s kind of the point.) The main thrust of our conversation was: how did we get here? When my parents were my age and I was a teenager, this sort of talk would have been unimaginable.

This was my guess on the 270towin website:

Of the seven swing states, I gave only Michigan to Harris. The most likely map is in fact all seven states falling to Trump. That’s because of how correlated the states are with each other. If there’s a polling error of a few points, it’ll likely be reflected across the board. In the last couple of days, things have looked marginally better for Harris, so I’m still hopeful. It’s certainly not a done deal, as Dad called it last night. But it’s best to mentally prepare for the worst, especially when there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Talking of the environment, more than 200 people have so far died in Biblical-level flooding in Valencia.

Crysanthemums at the market yesterday. It was 1st November, the Day of the Dead.

The two pictures above were taken today.

Environment - Films - Photos

Horror watch

October 15, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I saw Threads on Saturday night. The last 60% of the film, from the attack onwards, was extremely chilling. I nearly didn’t see it through to the end. It was broadcast on the BBC in September 1984, three weeks after I started school. There were reminders of my early childhood everywhere: football scores, typewriters, cars similar to what we had, and most poignantly an educational TV programme called Words and Pictures. Educational TV was a big thing in the UK in the eighties. Us tiny kids would file into the TV room, then the teacher would wheel out the great big telly on a trolley, just in time for the ten-minute programme to start. Sometimes this was Words and Pictures. Seeing a garbled post-nuclear version of this – which made reference to skeletons and skulls – was haunting. Threads, in its way, was brilliantly done. It was also informative. My only gripe was that those born after the attack spoke a greatly simplified pidgin English; this was unrealistic to me. Tragically, the girl who played Jane died in a car crash in 1990.

Last Wednesday night, just after I wrote my previous post, I found a live YouTube stream of Hurricane Milton. Or rather, it was a stream of the tornadoes that preceded Milton’s landfall in Florida. There was a host – a qualified meteorologist – transmitting a barrage of tornado warnings, accompanied by a younger meteorologist in another room and three storm chasers on the ground. There were brightly coloured maps showing the path of the tornadoes in precise detail. A locality that got disproportionate attention was the village of Yeehaw Junction (what a name) with a population of just over 200. I’ve become skeptical of some modern technology, but they were using fantastic, life-saving tech.

Yesterday I cycled to Utvin in the morning. The village is larger than I imagined, with around 3000 people. Then in the afternoon I went for a drive. I ended up in the north of Timiș, not far from where Dorothy has her place. At one point, two kestrels flew overhead. Another time six or seven piglets ran out alongside me. There’s something quite wonderful about just being in rural Romania. I was a little too early to fully catch the full array of autumn colours.

Just three weeks until the US election. I’ve got a horrible feeling about it.

Utvin. Can you spot the cat?

The church at Remetea Mică
Environment - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Time to stop the willy waving

July 18, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I read this morning that the Australian state of Victoria has pulled out of hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games. My reaction to that was Good. How sensible. The earlier cost estimate of Au$2.6 billion – already ridiculous – had blown out to $7 billion. Sanity has prevailed for once. If memory serves – it might not – the 1990 Auckland games came in at NZ$14 million (under budget and ahead of schedule). That’s $30m in today’s dollars using CPI inflation. That might not be the best measure when considering the cost of building materials, so let’s call it $50m. So why on earth are these events now costing billions? Is it all just ego? A dick-waving competition? Last year’s Birmingham games, which I attended and thoroughly enjoyed, cost about £780m, or Au$1.5 billion. I suggest they save some cash by going back to Birmingham in 2026. (Some view the Commonwealth Games, and the commonwealth itself, as an anachronism. It’s possible that last year’s games were the last.)

Yesterday was a steamy, smelly day. My main objective was getting out of the heat and not losing my mind. That’s hard to do when you have lessons in other parts of the city and you haven’t slept well. I probably had my last lesson with the single pair of twins until the autumn. It was productive: two vocubulary exercises, then some exercises where they had to match phrasal verbs (written on cards) with their definitions, then a “correct or incorrect” sentences game, then (because it was our last activity for a while) the Formula 1 racing car game.

There are now endless apps and sites for exploring the weather in great detail. As the climate has got increasingly crazy – Sardinia and Sicily are heading for the mid-40s today – the demand for this information has also shot up. A good site I found is ventusky.com. It has historical, zoomable weather maps going back to 1979. Mum often talked about 1st October 1985. (We had the paddling pool out! In October!) Here’s the section of the map for our neck of the woods on that day. You can see the wind coming from the Mediterranean:

Back then, we normally topped out at that kind of temperature in summer. TV weather maps showed temperatures in orange (instead of the usual yellow) at 25 and above. Orange, at any time of year, was rare.

When I was discusing “intrusive r” with my young student on Saturday, I gave the same example I always do: Pamela Anderson, because it’s slightly amusing. (Non-rhotic speakers – people who don’t normally produce an audible r in words like hair – often introduce a rogue r sound between Pamela and Anderson. That’s an intrusive r.) Of course because he was so young he didn’t have the foggiest idea who Pamela Anderson was, so my example didn’t exactly pack the punch it does with older folk. I then gave him law and order (“Laura Norder”) instead.

One of the great things about this blog is that it stops me from forgetting things. I’d totally forgotten the unhappy feeling of cabin fever I had in June 2021, before I made the trip to Iași and into the mountains the following month.

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.

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

Earthquake weather

February 14, 2023 plutomanby 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
Environment - Politics - The UK - Travel: Europe

The records keep tumbling

July 21, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

First, my brother got Covid last week. When I spoke to him on Saturday he was still getting a faint second line on his test, and his wife – seven months pregnant – was giving him a wide berth. He’s since had the all clear.

So the records – which in the UK go back a really long time – tumbled yesterday. An infernal 40 degrees, with firefighters in London dealing with their busiest day since the word firefighter came into existence. I still use fireman with my students, because I’m not woke enough. (The real reason is that it’s easier for them.) Then today I heard one of the stallholders talk about our upcoming heatwave. “Forty-three on Saturday,” she kept repeating in disbelief, “and you can add two more on to that. Vai de capul nostru.” That last phrase is almost untranslatable: it means something like “have mercy on us”, or perhaps in this case “holy shit”. Presumably she’ll have to work in those temperatures, which presumably will be a new record. We already broke the June record last month. Obligatory Google screenshot:

New Zealand is currently facing one deluge of rain after another, as Australia did recently. This climate change lark is so much fun, isn’t it?

Last night I made my monthly trip to see the after-hours doctor. I mentioned my ongoing runny nose (left nostril only) and sinus pain, and he gave me a spray that will last a month. It should help (I’ve used it before), and when I get back from my trip I’ll look for a more permanent solution. The worst part of it all is fatigue; I’m always tired to some degree. He also told me that I need to wear a mask when I travel, so I’ve just ordered a set of proper FFP2 masks rather than those crappy cloth ones. Last night was a warm one, and at 10:45 there were still people milling around Piața Traian where the ramshackle non-stop shop was doing good business. When I got home I had a fly in my bedroom and the smell of fly spray reminded me happily of summer 2020 when my old place was host to flies and various other insects. I was more relaxed then, despite the more pressing threat of Covid and everything that might have meant.

Only six days till I go away. I’ve been organising my trip, trying to get all my ducks in a row. (Do people still say that?) A few years ago Mum gave me a blue folder full of plastic wallets, where I can put every piece of paper in the order that I’ll need them. It’s extremely handy. When I get to St Ives, I hope to see my friends who came to Romania in 2017. They’ve both been quite ill lately.

The Tories in the UK are about to get down to the final two. It has been a perversely fascinating contest. Much has been made of the diversity of candidates in terms of gender and race. The opposition should be glad that Kemi Badenoch has been eliminated. She clearly meant business, and unlike the three survivors in the race, would have been hard to attack. I dearly hope that whoever wins (maybe Rishi Sunak with his net worth of £750 million, but likely Liz Truss) gets booted out at the next election.

My new student is gradually improving. We’re currently having lessons every weekday. Recently he mentioned a possible reintroduction of Covid restrictions, using the word “mafia”. I nearly asked him which vaccine he got, but thought better of it. He then said that “nobody loves the current president”. That might not be far off the truth, and it’s no bad thing. When people love political leaders, that’s when things go horribly wrong.

Environment - Language learning - Life :)

Stay cool, everybody

July 18, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

When I had a short interview for my high school at age eleven, I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. A weatherman, I said. “You’re the first person to say that.” My grandmother worked in the Met Office for the RAF, and she told me about weather balloons and anemometers and such like. I always liked the weather maps and fronts and isobars that appeared on TV and in the newspapers. The BBC forecasts always highlighted freezing temperatures (zero or below) in blue, while 25 degrees or above was coloured orange. That was where hot started. Anything much above that – which was rare – and the whole country would descend into a collective madness of buckling train tracks and heatstroke. So here’s this week’s forecast for Cambridge, where I was born:

Cambridge actually holds the UK’s current record (39), set just three years ago.

Today and tomorrow, the southern part of the UK (i.e. where most of the people are) will get extreme, and in some cases lethal, temperatures. The UK is hopelessly unprepared for this. They’ve got politicians telling people to wear sun cream and enjoy the sunshine. Oh yes, what fun. Others are saying, “I survived 1976, so I’ll be fine.” Well, this will be a much sharper, more intense heat than the neverending summer of ’76 which my mother often talks about, and if you remember ’76 (as Damon Albarn does in this song), you’re no spring chicken. This hellish heat will become more and more commonplace in the UK. Of the five who remain in the race to be the next prime minister, only one of them gives half a shit about climate change and the environment, and he’ll probably be eliminated today.

I played tennis twice – singles with the older guy – at the weekend. Not so hot, in more ways than one. On Saturday I won the first set 6-2, but even at the end of that set I was starting to tire. I really had to dig deep to win the second 7-5. In the third I was 5-1 down, and struggling physically, when time ran out. A similar story last night when I won the opening set 6-3. Then Domnul Sfâra, aged 87, made a guest appearance. We hit with him for a while; I was mostly in awe of him being on the court at all. He shuffled off and left us to it. I won the second set 6-1, but then he attacked relentlessly in the third, which he won 6-3.

I’m trying to learn some Italian before I go away. I won’t have many opportunities to use it immediately, but I hope I can go back to Italy for a longer time next year.

Coronavirus - Environment - Life :) - Poker

Under the weather

July 2, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I picked up a cold at the beginning of the week, and that’s made things pretty shitty. This morning, after only sleeping a couple of hours (what a horrible night that was – it started with a big thunderstorm which set the tone) I’d lost my voice almost entirely. I had an online lesson at eight. I called my student, and planned to put on a video if she still wanted to have the lesson, but she was happy to call it off as soon as she heard me speak. So then the big question. It can’t be Covid, surely. I’m fully vaccinated, and there isn’t much virus swilling around at the moment. But then again. my symptoms aren’t far off what the Delta (Indian) variant gives you. I texted another of my students (who caught the virus last autumn) to ask her where she went for a test, and instead she came all the way over to my place and dropped off a self-testing kit. A Youtube video from the UK told me how to administer the test. Swab your tonsils four times on each side, then twizzle the swab around inside your nostril ten times. That was easier said that done – I wanted to sneeze at only the first twizzle. After the swabs, I was on tenterhooks for the next half-hour, to see if a second line showed up, next to the letter T. It didn’t; as expected I was negative. (Yes, I know these self tests are far from perfect, but I’ll trust it.)

How I picked up a cold I don’t know. The air con? I’ve hardly seen a soul. Mercifully the temperature has dropped off today, following the thunderstorm that lasted more than two hours last night. We’re now sitting at 29. There are second-round matches going on at Wimbledon, and I’ve got the TV on with the sound down in the background, but I can’t get into it, or anything else.

The searing heat (up to 48 degrees) and humidity in Canada have made for distressing reading. This planet is becoming less survivable by the year. All because, as far as I can tell, people want more shiny shit.

Yesterday I snapped a streak of 14 cashless tournaments by finishing second in a pot-limit badugi. This one player had been hounding me all morning in all three of the tourneys I played, and it was almost inevitable that he was the one to beat me when we got heads-up. I was very lucky to make it that far, but at one stage I was a significant favourite to run out the winner. My bankroll is $730.

Environment - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

It’s 2020 but not everybody can see clearly

January 2, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents called me to say they’d spent the first day of the twenties shrouded in smoke from Australia, with only outlines of the mountains visible on a sunny day. Geraldine is just over 2000 km, or 1300 miles, from the West Island. That’s a long way. By comparison, from here to London is 1050 miles. The fires have long since reached apocalyptic levels. Six million hectares of land have been burnt since the start of the season – an area a quarter of the size of Romania. Hundreds of millions of animals have succumbed, either directly or indirectly. People are fleeing to beaches to escape the flames. Life is happening under a permanent solar eclipse, and it’s happening all over the country, not just in a localised area. Their prime minister has his head either up his arse or in the sand. There’s no rain in sight. This is going to get worse before it gets better.

Last night I ate dinner at my normal time and then took the bus to Matei’s place. When I got there at around nine I was greeted with mountains of food that I hadn’t expected at all. At around eleven, people filed out into the garden where they’d lit a fire. Midnight came around quite quickly. As the clock ticked around to the new year, they had Abba’s Happy New Year playing, and that was a good choice: “It’s the end of a decade / In another ten years’ time / Who can say what we’ll find / What lies waiting down the line / In the end of eighty-nine”. Quite prophetic really; the western world changed beyond belief in the eighties. There’s even a line in there about every neighbour being a friend, but we went backwards on that score. By 12:30 I’d had enough, but I couldn’t get away from all the meat and rum and whisky and having to talk and listen. Where do you all get your stamina from? We then had our second short-lived power cut of the night. They’d also had a water outage earlier in the day – they said it gave them flashbacks to the Ceaușescu era. I hoped the power would stay off, but no such luck. One-thirty. They were still going. Eating, drinking, making jokes. Am I really that weird? At this point I’d have much rather been at home than there – It wasn’t remotely close – but I couldn’t easily escape. At around two I finally got away. I mentioned something about taxis, and Matei’s mother called me an Uber. I’d got through the whole of the 2010s without ever Ubering (or Airbnb-ing for that matter), but two hours into the new decade I found myself in the back of an Uber car. When I arrived, I opened my wallet to pay the driver, but apparently Matei’s mum had already paid via her app. As I said, I’d never taken an Uber before. Next time I’ll know. How Uber works, and how Romanian New Year’s Eve parties work, so I can pace myself better. I don’t want to miss out on these experiences. I just want to manage them, and who knows, maybe one day even enjoy them.

We’re at last back in a decade that actually has a name. The twenties. I wonder what, if anything, will be the decade’s defining features. Will there be twenties music and twenties hairstyles and twenties parties? I guess not. Society is so much more divided now. In the UK for instance, comedy, music, TV (four channels!) and culture in general used to unite everybody, even people who didn’t like it. Now the UK, perhaps since it hosted the Olympics in 2012, seems to be culturally dead. Brexit hasn’t helped.

How do we say years in English? This subject comes up a lot in lessons. Until now I’ve told my students that years in English split into four groups. (1) You say years before 2000 as two pairs of digits, so 1994 is nineteen ninety-four; (2) From 2000 to 2009, you say the year like a normal number: 2004 is two thousand and four; (3) From 2010 to 2019, you have a choice: 2014 can either be two thousand and fourteen or twenty fourteen; (4) From 2020, everybody will revert to the pre-2000 system, so 2024 will be twenty twenty-four. I think that’s accurate. But in the future there’s a chance that the system will retrospectively change itself. A kid born today might be so used to hearing things like “twenty twenty-eight” and “twenty thirty-two” and he’ll say 2009 as twenty oh nine or even twenty zero nine.