Writing a book

It’s Boxing Day here. The day after my un-Christmas and the 20th anniversary of the tsunami that killed nearly 230,000 people.

Last Thursday, the 19th, I had a video call with my friend who came to visit in September. He was about to travel to Normandy to spend Christmas with his girlfriend’s family. I told him that seeing him in Timișoara was a real highlight of my year, which was the truth. He surprised me slightly when he said that it was a major highlight for him too. I suppose I’m just not used to people saying that seeing me is a highlight.

On Sunday, straight after I wrote my last post, I went to Dorothy’s church. Unlike a lot of churches, this one seems harmless. The service lasted 1¾ hours and included a few carols, including one with a verse in French. I quite enjoyed the mini-detour into French. But gosh, that sermon. When will this thing ever end? He was tireless, not even taking a sip of water. Mercifully, at last he said (in Romanian), “As I come to the end…”. He spoke for 45 minutes. I was subjected to some pretty bad sermons as a kid – the priest mumbled so much that you couldn’t make out what he was saying – but at least none of them lasted 45 minutes. Afterwards there was food – good food and plenty of it – and chat, which I wasn’t really in the mood for, though I did talk for a while with the Aussie lady. Before I left, Dorothy gave me an old map of Timișoara, printed in 1983, as a sort of Christmas present. The cathedral, which was completed during the Second World War, was conspicuous in its absence. The government thought it could deny the existence of a major religious landmark by simply leaving it off maps. How bizarre.

The following day I had three lessons, all of them with boys, then later I had dinner with Mark and his wife in Dumbrăvița. It had started to rain just before I got on my bike, and I very nearly wimped out and took the car instead. I took my salată de boeuf and other bits and pieces. Whenever I go to their place at the far end of Dumbrăvița I think that I could not live there. No little bars, no market stalls, no ornate cast-iron doorways, in fact nothing at all more than a few years old. It would do my head in. When I got there, I was immediately greeted by the less placid of their two big dogs. (The one nice thing about where they live is the wood nearby, which is great for the dogs.) We sat down and shared a meal. Ambient music, the sort that I never choose to listen to in any circumstances, emanated from their smart TV. They were mostly very good songs, but annoyingly “ambientised”. We talked a lot about teaching, which makes sense – we all have that in common. We also talked about religion. It isn’t taught at all at their school, when really it should be. We all wondered how a very high IQ doesn’t stop a person having very staunch – and sometimes dangerous – religious beliefs. I only drank one glass of wine, because I knew I’d need to be alert the next day. After we ate, they taught me how to play the card game Shithead. I do remember playing it in France in 2000, but couldn’t remember a thing about it. Mark’s wife gave me a whole load of information without ever telling me that suits didn’t matter. Finally I twigged. So suits don’t matter?! That was the first thing you needed to say! I mastered the rules eventually, but as the game relies pretty heavily on short-term memory and mine is pretty bad, I can’t imagine I’d ever be any good at it. The rain had stopped by the time I left, though I still got pretty muddy. When I got home the darts was still on – this was the last session before Christmas, and the best of the tournament so far, but I couldn’t watch much of it because I needed to be up the next morning. I did however see Florian Hempel lose out in a close match; I’d really wanted him to get through.

The next day was Christmas Eve. A work day. Ten hours on the book, in five two-hour chunks. No interruptions. At one point my doorbell went. Almost certainly carol singers who had tailgated through the front entrance. I ignored it. This reminded me of when I studied for my final university exams. I spent the day writing explanations for the 25 pictures that Dad drew. Some were simple, others much more complicated. There’s probably still some tweaking to do, and then there’s the business of getting the layout right. Neither the pictures nor the explanations are a uniform size.

Christmas Day. I felt a cold coming on. In the morning I spoke to my brother who was up early sorting out his son and about to sort out the turkey too. Then I called Mum and Dad who were already done with Christmas dinner which they had at their place. Mum’s brother and sister-in-law had been, along with Mum’s niece with her (I think) third husband. We talked about a potential name for my little niece. My nephew has a five-letter, one-syllable first name, which follows all the rules of the English language, right down to a magic E to prevent it from being the plural of something sticky. My brother chose that, as far as I’m aware. But we have a feeling that my sister-in-law is less conservative than him (or me, for that matter) when it comes to names of humans, and it’s probably her turn this time. We’ll see what they come up with.

After the video calls, I read the whole of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach yesterday, with the exception of the first chunky chapter which I’d already read. Imagine if that could be a regular thing. No work, no having to see anybody or deal with any ghastly instant messages, just sitting down and reading almost a whole novel. On the Beach, written in 1957 and set in Melbourne following a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere, really was a compelling read. I read it with a map of eastern Australia open; at times he would refer to places as they were gradually “taken out” by radiation as it spread southward. I read the final chapter in bed, still not knowing what would happen. As always with an older book, there were a lot of interesting language aspects. One, he uses ‘ld as the contraction for would, instead of the now standard ‘d. Two, he uses directly as an adverb of time, to mean “as soon as”, as in “I went home directly I finished work”. That threw me the first time I saw it. Three, he calls a fridge a frig, which means something very different to me. Frig is also one of the two Romanian words for cold, the other being rece. I suppose fridges were still pretty new in 1957, and the spelling hadn’t been standardised. I’m glad we settled on fridge rather than frig. On the same theme, I remember when mike was used as the short form of microphone. Then mic took over, which is nowhere near as good in my book. Mic goes against English spelling rules, and the c ending makes the verb forms mic’d and mic’ing clumsy; miked and miking worked just perfectly. Imagine if we called a bike a bic. Ugh. Four, he uses the ligatures æ and œ in words like anæsthetic and manœuvre, which you rarely see these days. As for manoeuvre, that’s such a messy word. Yes I know it’s from French. The Americans spell it maneuver, which I prefer, but ideally I wish we’d all just go with manoover and have done with it. And five, he calls babies it. Yes, we still do that sometimes today, but not usually when we know the gender, which is the case when he says it.

Wow, this has been a long one. I went for a brisk walk this sunny morning after taking a Lemsip. Here are some pictures:

This bar was once open from 8am to 11pm, but has been closed a while. The patio area next door now looks to be a car wash. This is on Strada Mătăsarilor, or Silk Merchants Street. The Mătăsarilor cemetery is nearby.

I must have been past this large building several times without really noticing the designs on the top.