Writing a book

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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.

Language teaching - Politics - Writing a book

Democratic drama begins in 53 hours

July 3, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Democracy in Britain can be dramatic, high-octane stuff. I recently watched a clip of the results from Sunderland in the 2016 Brexit referendum. This was only the second local authority to declare; Leave got 82,000 votes against just 52,000 for Remain. The woman who announced the results – to wild cheers – was sitting on market-shattering, tectonic-plate-shifting dynamite. In the general election of 1997, Michael Portillo, a high-profile Tory thought to be a potential leader, lost his seat to a Labour guy named Twigg that no-one had heard of. The declaration came after three in the morning. The announcer (a man that time) stumbled over Portillo’s middle name Xavier, coming out with the four-syllable ex-ay-vi-er. His shock loss became a symbol of the Tories’ crushing defeat, and people still call it the “Portillo moment” now. Credit to him though for slipping away in a dignified manner; afterwards he made some very good documentary series on railway journeys.

We could get this level of drama on Thursday. Let’s hope there are a whole raft of Portillo moments. The Conservatives bear little resemblance to the party I remember when John Major was prime minister. (He was our local MP.) They’re not interested in conserving a damn thing and have made people’s lives measurably worse in their 14 years in power. A dream result, though unlikely, would be the Tories’ relegation to third place behind the Liberal Democrats. My prediction is for the Tories to do catastrophically badly, but not (unfortunately) the extinction-level stuff seen in some of the polls. Unusually many seats are too close to call this time around; Reform have risen and there has been a notable decline in the overall vote share of the two big parties, so just 30% will sometimes be enough to snag a seat. I’d love to see some momentum build for electoral reform – the current system is unfair and isn’t fit for purpose. The exit poll is always a huge moment on election night; it comes at 10pm, or midnight my time, and in recent elections has been deadly accurate.

The big question is what will happen after the election. Look at the surge of the far right in France (their final round is this weekend). Look at America where the most likely outcome this November could have frightening repercussions. I expect Labour and Keir Starmer to be miles better than the Tories and their numerous leaders of late, but they’re being far too timid in their plans. (Yeah I know, they’re way ahead in the polls so want to play it safe.)

This afternoon I had a quick demo session with the lady this firm have given me. I’d completely forgotten that I was being observed in incognito mode by a woman from the firm itself. That was a good thing – I’d have been panicking like mad otherwise. We’ll have our first real session tomorrow evening.

Dad has sent me some more illustrations to go in the book. He’s less busy with painting these days, so he has more time than usual. The illustrations are mostly great, but I need scanned (not photographed) versions.

Edit: The Netherlands have just opened the scoring in the 20th minute of their Euro 2024 match with Romania. (I first wrote that Belgium had scored. I’m not following it all that closely.)
Update: Romania were basically thrashed in the end, 3-0.

Music - Other sports - Tennis - Travel: Romania - Writing a book

Three and easy

June 19, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s getting hot and uncomfortable and soporific; we’re forecast to reach the mid-30s on each of the next four days.

Yesterday Romania’s match against neighbours Ukraine kicked off at four, just as my lesson did with the twins in their dark ground-floor flat near Piața Verde, one of the city’s many markets. We agreed to do English stuff with the game on mute in the background. We were discussing building materials when Nicolae Stanciu’s 29th-minute screamer went in. Romania scored twice more in double-quick time after the break. They were seriously impressive, surpassing all expectations. Most of the fans in Munich were decked out in the yellow of Romania. The match was still going on as I went past the bar at the market; old men sat there agog, probably reliving the golden age of Gheorghe Hagi. When I got home I met a young chap on the stairs. “Did you see the match? Trei-zero!” That was the final score. With 16 of the 24 teams qualifying for the next round (I’m not a fan of this format), Romania are already in prime position to do so. Then it’s a straight knockout and who knows.

I played tennis with Florin again on Saturday. I was up 7-6 (7-4), 4-0 when we finished. Once again I escaped after a frustratingly high unforced-error rate in the first set. In the middle of the set I felt I couldn’t execute anything.

Dad is knocking out some pictures to go in one of the potential books. (Doesn’t that sound weird?) Sometimes I have to nudge him in a different direction when, despite the artwork, it doesn’t quite get the language point across. One difficulty is getting the pictures to me without a loss of quality. So far he’s been sending me photos, but the lighting creates a grey background, sometimes verging on brown, that infiltrates the main colour of the picture too. I’m hoping he can scan them.

A song I’ve heard a lot over the last two months is Too Sweet by Hozier. It’s a rare modern mainstream hit that I actually like. I plan to use it for one of my fill-in-the-gaps-in-the-lyrics exercises. I usually resort to older songs for these, so it’s nice to have something contemporary for a change. A far less mainstream song that came on the radio yesterday was Lume, Lume by Vunk, one of my favourite Romanian bands. I was its 2014th Shazammer. I should also mention that today is Paul McCartney’s 82nd birthday.

Next Thursday I’m off to Prigor in Țara Almăjului, where I’ll spend three nights. The whole area is in an isolated valley of the River Nera; from the photos it looks beautiful. I’m looking forward to getting away. My shortish break will serve as a bit of a dry run for something more ambitious later.

Books - Life :) - Music - Writing a book

Getting into print (but counting no chickens)

June 3, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

An interesting day yesterday. At 12:30 I turned up at Porto Arte for lunch to celebrate Florin’s wife’s birthday. There weren’t many of us there – that was fine by me. I had a traditional Romanian lunch: pork, sausages, a fried egg and some vegetables. We sat outside where the music wasn’t bad. Dragostea din Tei by O-Zone came on; this was a massive hit throughout Europe in 2004, but by that point I’d moved to New Zealand so it passed me by. (The tei referenced in the song is that lime tree which provides an olfactory backdrop to this time of year.) Later Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown played. Lightfoot died last year aged 84. His haunting Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald often came on when I listened to the Sound in Wellington. I said I’d have to leave at two to attend a meeting about the book, and that provoked some interest. When 2pm rolled around I got out some cash to pay, but Florin told me it was an invitation and that I should put my money away. If only it ended there. But once again he gave me a lecture on how we do things in Romania and you need to learn. All unnecessary. What was I supposed to do? Just assume I didn’t have to pay? Seriously man, piss off.

So on to the book meeting. Dorothy came too. We stood outside the offices of Editura de Vest where there were aging signs that were partly in Serbian, and tried to read the Cyrillic. Then the lady in her sixties showed up and opened the door. It was a large old building which I’d been in several times before – it used to house a branch of Banca Transilvania before that closed around the start of the pandemic. She spent half an hour (!) showing us around the offices of the publishing house – high-ceilinged caverns (the ceilings leaked in a storm) piled high with musty books. The outfit was founded in 1972 and showed little sign of change since then. I was getting pretty antsy. Are we going to move on the actual book here or what?

Mercifully she switched on a PC with a large screen – the only piece of tech I could see – and brought up the eighth and final part of my book. Yes, we can publish this. Really? Sure, 500-odd pages in B5 format, no problem. (B5 is around ten inches by seven, I found out.) I didn’t expect that at all. I explained that it wasn’t quite finalised and no, there are no page numbers because what I have in my document won’t match up with what appears on paper. I still need to include a pronunciation key and a “legend” describing all the symbols I’ve used. She gave me free rein over what fonts to use. (Romanians just love Arial and Times New Roman. I really can’t abide Arial, and though I don’t mind Times in itself, to me it smacks of “boring” and “you haven’t thought about this”. I plan to use a mixture of Cambria and Franklin Demi.)

Next I showed her a picture Dad had done, illustrating perfectly the difference between “exercise” and “practice”. I suggested a second, smaller book in a landscape format with 30 or so of Dad’s illustrations. Sounds good. She then said that they have a link with the Minister of Culture and there will be some event next May, so main book would need to go to press before then. As for the illustrated one, that could be published sooner. Gosh. Dorothy often chipped in; in fact she spoke at least as much as I did. At 4:15 the lady’s daughter arrived. Unlike her mother, she could speak English, but we continued in Romanian. Dorothy had to leave at that point. It’s all extremely positive and it would be incredible if the book(s) made their way into print, but I’m not counting any chickens. Far from it. I think back to the time in 2016 when a language school offered me a job, then later un-offered it. This is Romania; take nothing for granted.

I went for another drive on Saturday, skirting the border with Serbia. I got stopped by the border police. It’s kind of weird living close to land borders. The two policemen took down my details and I was free to go.

I’ve just started reading Franz Kafka’s The Trial. I had no idea it was the centenary of his death. Everything is Kafkaesque these days; it’s about time I saw what the fuss was about.

Last night we had a thunderstorm. We had a good downpour this morning too.

Family - Films - Music - Politics - Writing a book

Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength

May 31, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

My brother said that about fifteen people turned up for our aunt’s celebration on Tuesday. Apart from food and chat and sharing of photos, not a lot happened. He’d hoped someone might say a few words about her life, but that never happened.

It’s the last day of May and the sweet smell of tei – lime trees – is filling the air as it always does at this time of year. Before this morning’s lesson in the fifth-floor flat, my parents called me from Hampden. They were about to get fish and chips from the Tavern. They’ve had a relaxing time in Moeraki even if they’ve seen little of the late-autumn sun. We discussed Trump’s guilty verdict, announced hours earlier. Being a convicted criminal may improve his chances in November. Even being banged up – precisely what he deserves – wouldn’t bar him from becoming president. Because that’s the world we now live in, where black is white and war is peace. How did we end up here?

After my lesson I had some time to kill before getting my hair cut for the summer. I sat for a bit in the so-called Botanic Park, then cycled to my appointment in Dorothy’s neck of the woods. I happened to bump into her. She was incredulous that I was about to spend 50 lei. It actually set me back 65. The hairdresser – a woman of 40-odd – recognised me from last time. She did a good job, and I won’t need another chop for months, but I’ll go elsewhere next time because it’s got too pricey. It’s a pity the place opposite me closed down.

Last night I watched the first episode of Eric, a British series on Netflix starring Benedict Cumberbatch whom I hadn’t seen for years. I enjoyed it and plan to watch the remaining five episodes. It was set in gritty, grimy eighties New York, which I liked, and they used one of the late Sixto Rodriguez’s songs at the end of the episode. Talking of music, Dad sent me a clip of this song by British band alt-J. It’s called Deadcrush and is supposedly about crushes that the band members have on Elizabeth “Lee” Miller (an American photographer before and during World War Two) and Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII. The lyrics are mostly indecipherable, but the song (and video) is a fascinating piece of art nonetheless. I’d heard of alt-J but was unaware of this song (the song of theirs I know best talks about licking someone like the inside of a crisp packet); I wonder how Dad came across it.

I recently watched a video where Kwasi Kwarteng, who served as Chancellor under Liz Truss’s infamous lettuce leadership, gave a long interview. He went to Eton, just like David Cameron, George Osborne and the rest. He’s got a massive IQ but frankly so what. He and Truss crashed the economy and though he knew he messed up, didn’t show much contrition. It’s all a game to him. He’s a damn sight better than Truss herself though; she’s never shown an ounce of self-awareness at any point.

Latest news on the English book. We’ve now got a meeting at 2:30 on Sunday afternoon. I’ll prepare some bits and pieces and see what happens.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Writing a book

Wouldn’t it be nice

May 29, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today was my aunt’s celebration, the last ever get-together at her house which is already on the market for half a million quid. I haven’t heard from my brother yet to see how it went; I expect he’ll have been part of a small contingent. I’m just so glad I was fortunate enough to see her a week before she passed away. Today would have been my grandmother’s 102nd birthday. I wrote about her 88th birthday here: how time flies.

This afternoon I had a lesson with the boy who wants to be a farmer. So refreshing when so many of them want to be YouTubers. Last week I taught him some irregular plurals, so today I gave him a worksheet on them, complete with pictures. Easy peasy, he said. Seconds later he’d written mouses and foots and sheeps and childs. Tonight I gave my new maths student (a 15-year-old girl) what I called a quick quiz. Target time two minutes, three max. After about twelve minutes she was still slaving away, so I put her out of her misery. She’d forgotten just about everything I’d taught her about prime and square numbers. I wasn’t annoyed by this in any way; maths is just tough and weird for a lot of people.

Before all of that the plumber came and put in the new pipe. I had to go to Dedeman with him to pick up some blocks to which the tiles will be attached in front of the bath. I’m getting used to being actively involved, even though it’s bloody annoying when I have lessons.

I forgot to mention that I got stung by a bee at Șag on Sunday. It was my left middle finger. As a kid I got stung quite often on my foot. I was barefoot most of the time in summer – my Kiwi mum encouraged that – and the bees would be in the clover. That was back when the UK still had bees. When I was in the car I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if my parents were with me, but my blog posts for June 2017 have given me second thoughts. That got pretty fraught. If my family friends from St Ives came over, that would be quite wonderful. Even when I wander around my little patch of a warm evening I think it would be lovely if they were here, doing simple things like wandering from one funny little bar to another. It’s sad that I never get the chance to do that.

Yesterday I had a lesson where my student (a manager at a big bank) read an article about giving feedback to low-performing employees. I said that a lot of this poor performance comes from low engagement which shouldn’t be a surprise. She said that the objectives and deadlines are all there in black and white, so there’s no excuse. I replied that frankly who cares if xyz has to be done by 31st May if xyz seems pointless. How do you get motivated, when most of what you do all day is meaningless crap? The answer to that of course is that people are motivated by money and status and power, or simply job security when they have family members who depend on their income, but the “pointless shit” aspect (which is more salient than ever before) can’t help.

The book meeting, which I had to reschedule two lessons to accommodate, has been postponed again to who knows when.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Travel: Romania - Writing a book

Get rid of them please, and an important day beckons

May 28, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

First of all, Wednesday could be a very important day because I’ve got the meeting about the English book with the publishing house.

A follow-up on the UK election. My view of it lacks nuance I’m afraid. It’s simply get the buggers out by any legal means possible. If I lived in a swing seat, I’d vote for whichever party (probably the only party) able to beat the Tories. First-past-the-post makes tactical voting a must. If I lived in a safe seat where my vote didn’t matter, I’d probably vote Green. My ideal scenario would to the see Tories obliterated to the point where they aren’t even the official opposition anymore, because that’s what they deserve. They’ll mop up enough blue-rinse votes to make the final outcome far from that I’m sure. You can but dream. Dad said in an email that he still has misgivings about Labour because of the way they were controlled by the unions in the seventies, and even mentioned links to Russian spies. Wow. How much time needs to pass for you to finally let it go? And didn’t you actually vote Labour in ’97? I’m no great fan of the current Labour party – they should be far more ambitious – but anything has to be better than the current lot.

The Conservatives have announced plans for national service if re-elected. They’re trying anything now. As I read on a forum yesterday, “put down your books, pick up a gun, you’re gonna have a whole lot of fun”. Here’s Country Joe McDonald singing that Vietnam protest song at Woodstock.

Today I had the plumber back in. He removed the sink and smashed half the bricks and tiling to get at the bath, then found the pipe to the bath had a hole in it. A relief; I worried that the eighties cast-iron bath itself might be leaking. Tomorrow he’ll put the sink back in place and then I’ll need a plasterer to fix up the bricks and tiles. (I still have leftover tiles from the original work 18 months ago.)

This morning I had my weekly Romanian lesson. Lately Dorothy and I have compared notes. She has much greater fluency than me and better intonation. (She has been here longer and gets more opportunities to speak Romanian than I do, but she might just be better.) Even though my pronunciation of individual words is mostly fine, I rise and fall too much and overemphasise syllables. It’s hard to get out of the habit. I wrote on here 8½ years ago that Romanian, like French, is syllable-timed, while English is stress-timed. Romanianising my intonation is especially hard for me, I’ve realised, because I’m actually pretty expressive when I speak English. (When I accidentally recorded part of a video lesson, I couldn’t believe how much head-shifting and arm-waving was going on. Plus being a teacher incentivises me to be more animated and emphatic.)

Yesterday I went out in the car. I didn’t go very far; I stopped at Șag (pronounced “shag”) on the bank of the Timiș. It was a popular place for picnics and barbecues. My parents Skyped me when I was there. I spent the rest of the time either walking, eating lunch, picking mulberries, or listening to music on the radio. This great (if slightly depressing) song came on, telling me that death doesn’t have a phone number. It reminded me a bit of the French singer Renaud, and I imagined it was from the eighties, but then I heard “roaming” in the lyrics and found out it was from 2007.

Books - Life :) - Writing a book

Been here before, but what’s the way out this time?

May 12, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Things have got pretty crappy, let’s be frank. It’s not like I haven’t been here before. I can’t enjoy things, can’t maintain interest in things, can’t take in new information, can’t concentrate, can’t prioritise (everything has become an obligation; a chore), my working memory is shot to shit, I’m clumsier, I’ve got 27 tabs open on my laptop, I can physically feel each instant message as if it’s a hammer blow to my brain (What the hell is it this time?) even though turning off sounds has helped, and so it goes on. What makes this particular episode worrying is that the reduction in meaningful lessons and increase in pointless ones means I don’t have my teaching to fall back on like I used to. The maths has been the only real plus (ha ha) of late.

The bath “fix” didn’t fix a damn thing – last night I had my first shower since the “repair” and there was soon a lake on the floor. He is going to have to smash the tiling and temporarily remove the basin after all. Apart from the cost, that means I’ll have to be here all the time, making it harder for me to visit the market or do any other life admin tasks that require going outside.

Some potential good news. (That depression survey question. Do you continue to feel down even when good things happen? Yes.) Dorothy has made contact with a Timișoara publisher, and there’s a chance that my English “tips, tricks and traps” dictionary (that could be a good name for it, come to think of it) could find its way into print. Dorothy and I might be meeting the publisher on Tuesday.

I’ve just bought some more ink cartridges (why are they so expensive?) and ordered five books in English: White Fang by Jack London (it is extremely popular in Romania under the title Colț Alb, so I thought my younger students would like to see the English version); Charlotte’s Web, another popular children’s book; and both Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne, together with Christopher Robin Milne’s autobiography. Those last ones are really for my benefit; I loved the Pooh books when I was a kid, as well as Milne’s poems, and I thought they might cheer me up. I doubt I’ll get the books for several weeks, though, and who knows what state I’ll be in by then.

As for my Vinted purchases, I’m pretty sure that one of the sellers scammed me. I buy a £30 item, the seller sees that I’m using a forwarder, he/she knows that I have to OK the item before I even see it, so they send me a £5 item and pocket the rest. Caveat emptor and all that. Getting anything delivered to Romania from outside its borders is fraught with difficulty and risk.

Soon I’m meeting Mark in town – I won’t drink anything – then I’ll go for a drive.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Writing a book

Putting a jetpack up my back-end

February 27, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

A miracle has just occurred. This site had locked me out of making new posts. A critical error has occurred. At work I remember getting both fatal and catastrophic errors. Though this sounded like a notch down from them, it didn’t exactly fill me with optimism. I had visions of being stuck on a help chatline for hours, not getting anywhere, and maybe being locked out for good. Then I read something about a Jetpack, whatever that is exactly. I hit the update button next to Jetpack on my back-end (this might sound like I have an inkling of what I’m doing; believe me, I don’t) and hey presto, it worked.

There’s very little to report since I last wrote. The greatest excitement came on Saturday when I fell off my bike. I’d just bought some speakers for my record player and tried to carry them on the handlebars. Bad idea. The rain didn’t help matters either. There was a fair bit of traffic on the road, so I was lucky to escape with only a few bruises.

This morning I had the Romanian lesson which cleared up one or two things. Most interestingly for me, our teacher said that -iă isn’t an allowable combination in Romanian, after I tried to create a word with that ending. It’s amazing what you miss. After that I had (just) three English lessons, the first of which was with an extremely shallow young woman of 17. We’re talking puddle-deep here. I still think she’s less superficial than the girl of the same age who started with me last autumn and – thank God – didn’t get back to me after visiting Bali over Christmas. It was a relief to get my session with the hyper-competitive mall rat over with, and see the twins before coming home for an online lesson with Alin who is currently reading Michelle Obama’s autobiography. The twins worked through a textbook before I played a game with them called Bedlam which I’d picked up from a car boot sale near my brother’s place. The name of the game tells you all you need to know.

Talking of my brother, his degree results are imminent. I don’t quite get how he’s completed a degree in a little over a year while also holding down a job (will the qualification carry the same weight as a standard three- or four-year degree?) but the way he’s applied himself is very impressive indeed. This is my brother, who could hardly have been less academic as a kid. He made a concerted effort not to learn anything. Lately he’s been going on about assignments and dissertations and bibliographies – is this him I’m talking to? I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets a first-class degree. I got an upper second, by the way, and was delighted with it. In my day, firsts were hard to come by, the preserve of the real high-flyer which I certainly wasn’t. I thought I was destined for a lower second, or 2:2, sometimes known as a Desmond (ha ha), but I was very focused towards the end of my final year and scraped into the level above by a couple of percentage points.

Football. Birmingham lost 3-1 at Ipswich. I’ve always liked Ipswich – they’re fairly local to where I grew up. They’ve got a good shot at automatic promotion now. As for Birmingham, that loss to a better side puts them back in the relegation picture again after other struggling teams surprisingly won. I also watched a few frames of snooker – it’s getting to that time of year again.

Tomorrow I’ll get back to the book once more. I really need to put a jetpack up my back-end as far as that is concerned.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Writing a book

Food for thought

January 24, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

So I’ve just had a long chat with Mum and Dad. It would now be a massive shock if they came to Europe in 2024. Their vanity project is more important than seeing their family; that much is clear. They even talked about what a hassle their late-2022 trip was because it was spring in New Zealand and, you know, plants grew while they were away. So inconsiderate of them. They did see their family in that time including their tiny grandson, but whatever. A minor detail. These conversations get progressively more bizarre. The bright spot is that my brother and his family are likely to make the trip to NZ in August or September; Mum said they’d help them out financially. Help. I’d say a fair level of help would be 100%.

I had a fascinating chat with my brother at the weekend. He was in St Ives, dodging the storms that are battering the country, and had just seen our aunt. He said that for the first time in his life he’d had a proper conversation with her. Her responses were dependent on what he had just said. She went cold turkey on booze and fags when she got to the home; half a lifetime of brain-addling drinking gone at a stroke. Her muscles have atrophied to the point where she doesn’t get out of bed, but he said she was strangely content.

I saw the doctor last night, as I do once a month, to stock up on pills. He told me that he’d divorced from his wife last summer; she’d been cheating on him for two years. They have a ten-year-old son. It’s still all extremely raw. Then he said that their surgery would be moving to one of those horrible new glass buildings next to the mall. Ugh. That will mean more of a trek, and having to enter a depressing building to get my antidepressants. Some people even work there. Just imagine. The building is called UBC 0. United Business Center zero. It’s number 0 presumably for the same reason that King’s Cross built a platform 0 in 2010, leaving me momentarily baffled when I needed to catch a train from there. I could transfer to another surgery but that would be a pain too.

Five lessons yesterday. At least three of them are making no discernible progress; that’s the harsh reality. One of them is a university student who seems quite content with not improving. Not much I can do about that. One is a kid who’s got way behind at school and doesn’t quite realise it. And one needs to up his level of focus in my lessons by at least 300% to have any hope. I need to change tack entirely with him.

My high school didn’t do much for me (I was glad to leave at 16) except in one important respect. In a country where school food had a terrible reputation, my place provided substantial, nutritious cooked meals every day. Then I’d have another cooked dinner when I got home. On a Friday I’d get fish twice. At that age, both my brother and I packed it away. We had a proper breakfast too – porridge and toast, usually; going without breakfast would have been unthinkable. Importantly, we practically never ate between meals, apart from pieces of fruit which were in plentiful supply. Mum was in control of 90% of this – no surprise there – and the values that she’d gained from growing up on a farm, thousands of acres and a couple of decades from any fast food outlets, helped us boys considerably. Yesterday I was talking to a kid who skips breakfast, practically inhales a rudimentary sandwich and a few wine gums at school, then finally has something meaningful – schnitzel or the like – when he comes home. The boy who is falling behind at school only has a single meal per day as far as I can tell. And it’s not like the parents of kids I see can’t afford it. So what’s going on? It’s probably a number of things. Blame modern society, blame TikTok, blame the messed-up Romanian education system that forces kids to spend hours cramming pointless facts about lakes in China in order to get the coveted 10 grade.

Writing the book. It’s hard. I finally planned out the chapters, 19 of them, something I should have done years ago. I’m still learning, right. It’s tough because you can spend hours plugging away, moving words and paragraphs around, and it just doesn’t work. I should think of it as the new online poker.

I’ve bought seven new records and will grab a few more. I’m getting them delivered to a single location in France to be forwarded on to me. Ups the cost slightly, but it’s worth it for the huge increase in convenience.