Coronavirus

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Travel: Romania

The do and now for some time under canvas

July 30, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a chat with Elena, the lady who lives above me and who almost missed her flight two weeks ago. She safely made it to Toronto but managed to pick up Covid – there’s a lot of it about right now – though she’s now made a full recovery.

Four lessons today including a couple of real tooth-pullers. The one with the near-eight-year-old boy was especially dentisty. Not his fault at all – he’s a really nice boy – but when I give online lessons to kids that young, it’s like having both hands tied behind my back. I asked him if he was bored. A little bit. He was being impressively polite for his age. He counted down the minutes remaining one at a time. I told him that constantly looking at the clock won’t make it go any faster.

On Saturday we had Dorothy’s do in Buzad. I drove there with Dorothy. There were maybe 12 to 15 people. Luckily it wasn’t too hot and there was plenty of shade. The weather could hardly have been better. The barbecue and all the other foody bits were great, including a crumble that Dorothy herself had made. I put together a meatless quiche on request – I was surprised to receive a request of meatless anything. This is Romania. There was a good variety of folk, including the large Australian lady (who ended up in Romania for some churchy reason) and her two children. She was good to talk to – we had a fair bit in common culturally, I suppose. Some of the chat did get contentious. At one stage I asked why two of them insisted on peppering their sentences with English words; they said they didn’t know. Ah, but I know. You’re doing it to show off your sophistication, aren’t you? One lady whose native language is German managed to offend somebody by calling Romanian a “poor” language (in a purely linguistic sense). Luckily there wasn’t too much politics. I suggested that Trump now had a 60-70% chance of winning the November election, while one of the sophisticated guys thought it was just over 50%, but in reality there wasn’t much between our assessments. (I put Trump’s chances a little higher because of the inbuilt structural advantages the system affords him.)

My main complaint was that the “do” went on a bit long. Not that it finished too late, but that it started too early. Finally I could go home, with Dorothy and two other women including the very overweight Bobbie. This lady couldn’t be far off sixty but has never married or had children. For some reason she wanted to stay in Buzad as long as possible rather than go home. I found her pleasant enough, though rather odd, and her “chat” with me strayed into some pretty negative territory when you consider we’d never met. On the journey back – it was dusk at this point – she wanted me to stop so she could take photos of churches that in some cases didn’t even exist. (I’ll admit that the Orthodox church in Remetea Mică with the red roof was quite striking.)

So tomorrow I’m off to Maramureș. My first time camping by myself. I’ve had a practice with the tent which packs away unintuitively to say the least. I plan to stay three nights at a campsite near Bârsana which has a famous monastery. It looks pretty remote there; I hope I don’t get attacked by a bear. Then I’ve booked two nights at a guest house in Turda, near the salt mine which people have said is a must-see. Tomorrow’s journey should take 6½ hours, though I expect it to take longer because I’ll need a break. I hope to set off at around 8:30.

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The stress of it all

December 17, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents Skyped me this morning from the hotspot in Hampden. It was blowing a gale there; a purple and white flap-in-the-wind “Takeaways” sign was about to be unmoored until a member of staff came out to save it. Mum looked pissed off and washed out, and still far from fully recovered. Dad, who didn’t get Covid as badly as Mum, wore a more stoic expression. The line was much better than it normally is from there, and we spoke for 18 minutes. (Skype keeps a record.) On a call of that length there would normally be at least something to interrupt Mum’s gloom – a moment of levity – but this time there wasn’t the faintest ghost of a smile. I hate seeing them under so much stress, especially when so much of it (OK, maybe not the Covid bit) was avoidable. On the plus side they were away from home, that godforsaken place where building work is taking place at a glacial pace and right now they can’t even have a shower. They’d arrived in Moeraki a short time before, and I hope they spend a good few days down there. It would be great if they didn’t have to go back.

Dad and I talked about British Christmas. I’m so glad I decided not to make a trip to the UK for the festive season. For travelling and just being in the UK, it’s the most horrible time of the year, as Andy Williams might have sung 60 Christmases ago. If I had the prospect of a 6am flight and a bus trip from Luton and charades with my brother’s in-laws, my stomach would be churning right about now.

My lessons got cancelled this morning. Annoying for a bunch of reasons including lack of a bike ride, so I went for a walk. This place is big enough that I can still ramble down random streets and see things I haven’t clapped my eyes on before, such as this rustic-looking restaurant:

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Saying no

December 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I went over pronouns and possessive adjectives with my extroverted beginner student this evening (see below). When I asked him what should replace the question marks, he said “shim”, which I thought was funny because (a) it has a certain logic to it, and (b) who knows, maybe “shim” is actually a pronoun now. Edit: “shim” is already a word: it’s a thin sliver of material (wood, usually) that you wedge into a gap to ensure a nice tight fit.

In my previous session with him we talked about his extroversion. He has to be around people all the time, and the more the merrier. At 33 he’s never spent a whole day alone; the very idea filled him with dread. We’re at opposites ends of the spectrum, I said, and be thankful you’re at your end – life will treat you better.

I called up my tennis friend yesterday and told him that no, I wouldn’t be going to the New Year’s do because I had “other plans”. I said I felt bad for not going (which was true – they’re all lovely people) and I’d like to meet up for a drink at the usual place by the river (also true) in the near future. Saying no was really hard, but after doing it I realised it was still eight times easier than going to the bloody party would have been.

Next week things will start to wind down a bit. I’m going over to Dorothy’s for Christmas; there should be four of us there. Other than that, I’m looking forward to the time to myself – reading, watching the darts (I know), and working on the book I started a year ago but soon put to one side. I’ve got to finish it.

Last night I watched a film called The Whale, which Dad had recommended to me. The title is a reference to the main character, a morbidly obese online university professor, as well as to the novel Moby-Dick. I found the story gripping, even if it was harrowing a lot of the time. I certainly recommend it.

I’m about to call my parents. Last time we spoke, there was a chink of light at the end of the Covid tunnel, so let’s hope it wasn’t a false dawn. If I really wanted to wind Dad up, I could ask him what “shim” means.
Update: I gave them a call. They’re on the mend, but it’s been a really rough time for them. With all their ridiculous building work which will continue into the new year, their living quarters would be dangerously impractical even if they were in rude health.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching

Looking positive in Geraldine

December 12, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Now Dad’s got Covid too. He didn’t look too clever when I spoke to him this morning (my time). Mum had already gone to bed by then. He told me that Mum had forced herself to do painting and other ridiculous DIY that day, despite being sick as a dog herself, and had been angry with Dad for not doing the same. It beats me how Dad has lived with Mum for half a century without ever (as far as I know) telling her to eff off.

Last week I got an email from one of the other ex-owners in our Wellington apartment block. Ex. Thank our lucky stars that we’re ex. Still being embroiled in that misery (which about 650 owners in Wellington are) hardly bears thinking about. The email contained the words disproportionate, unfair and inequitable, which the whole situation absolutely is. (I spelt that out to letters I sent to Grant Robertson, my local MP, but they got passed on to the housing minister who was bloody hopeless.) The ball is starting to roll now, but up a depressingly steep hill.

Last week it was Boris Johnson’s turn in the hot seat at the Covid inquiry. He had aged, and at times he looked quite ill. The interesting bit came right at the beginning as some protesters were asked to leave during Johnson’s initial apology, and then Hugo Keith (the KC) pointed out that the UK had the second-worst mortality rate in Western Europe, behind Italy who were extraordinarily unlucky in the early stages and have a very high elderly population. “Look at the table!” the ex-PM protested. “Why are you excluding countries like Bulgaria [top of the European Covid death league overall] or Romania [fourth, I think]? When you include these vastly poorer countries full of anti-vax nutters, we’re slap-bang in the middle!” What a joke. After he’d got that apology out of the way, he spent two days justifying and normalising everything, including missing those five emergency Cobra meetings prior to mid-March. No, the toxicity in government at the time was not normal nor in any way desirable, and I seriously doubt it would have been like that had Theresa May or Gordon Brown or any of a number of former prime ministers had been in charge. This week the current PM Rishi Sunak, of Eat Out to Help Out fame, is stepping up to the plate.

Before my maths lesson yesterday, I met up with Mark at the beer factory. I had a pasta dish while he had a very Romanian combination: a slab of pork, some sausages, some mici, and mămăligă. I’ll go for that next time. Just one beer each; I’d soon be explaining algebraic fractions. We discussed various ongoings in his job which are making the experience rather less fun, and the possibility of my one day getting Romanian citizenship. Becoming actually Romanian and having triple nationality would be totally mad, wouldn’t it?

Talking of mad, someone else to put in the mad-but-good category is Luke Thompson, an English teacher based in Paris who has a long-running YouTube channel with over 850 episodes. I use his channel as a teaching tool for my more advanced students.

Five English lessons for me today after my initial Romanian one. Plenty of work, and with a welcome drop in my life admin, I’m not complaining.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Photos

Mum’s Covid and a spot of music

December 10, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Almost four years after everything went nuts, Mum’s got Covid. She’s been ill for five days – fever, sore throat, aching joints, the works, and different to anything she’s had before – but she only tested positive this morning. A bright second line in under a minute, she said. I’m glad it’s Covid – she looked wiped out when saw her on Friday on our Skype call, but now the mystery (as it was then) has been solved. Let’s hope she’s back to normal ASAP and Dad doesn’t now come down with something five times worse.

“Shine your light,” big bright yellow posters proclaimed at the beginning of the year, as Timișoara became European capital of culture. The slogan alluded to Timișoara being the first city in mainland Europe to get electric street lights, back in 1884. Since then we’ve mostly been kept in the dark. The whos and whats and whens and wheres of the events have been badly publicised, and visitor numbers have been well down on expectations. It’s done about as well as the Festival of Brexit. This weekend has been something of an exception though, with a well-signposted (by Romanian standards) closing ceremony in town. On Friday night I was lucky to finish lessons at 6:30, and I managed to drag Dorothy along to the free concert in Piața Unirii. I’m very glad I did. It kicked off at eight with Delia, a celebrity in Romania and an exponent of bubblegum pop. It was visually impressive – dry ice and streamers and fireworks – but the music did nothing for me and even less for Dorothy. Fifteen-odd songs that blurred into one another. We didn’t have much of a vantage point; the square was rammed with young people who then filed away the moment Delia’s hour-long set ended, allowing us to get much closer to the stage. On came Katie Melua who is very, very good. British but born in Georgia (the country, not the American state) she hit the scene in oh-five with Nine Million Bicycles, the inspiration for which was a guided tour of Beijing. Because why not? Her other main successes were The Closest Thing to Crazy, which is partly in 7/4 time, and The Flood, a track with regular changes of tempo and a total shift half-way through. She treated us to all three of these and several other songs – all dripping with emotion and creativity – that I hadn’t heard before. I felt so lucky to see her in Timișoara, at a cost of zero lei. Dorothy seemed to like her too. When she’d done her bit, I was keen to get home – my hands and feet were like ice, and I had an early start in the morning.

During Delia’s set

Katie Melua during The Flood and I Cried For You

I’ve had a busy week of teaching. I was supposed to have a two-hour maths lesson at nine this morning (Sunday – not my preferred day), taking me to 33 hours, but my student messaged me 35 minutes before we were due to start. Any chance we can move it? Hmm. Where I come from, you’re committed at that point. At the very least, the word sorry needs to appear somewhere in your message. But this is Romania. She’ll now be coming at 4pm instead. Yesterday I had my first online lesson with a guy in Bucharest whose wife I used to teach, then it was off to Dumbrăvița to see the kids. The heating in Octavian’s place is always jacked up to something crazy and I’m unable to stifle my yawns.

In a recent lesson I asked a very capable 14-year-old boy to write a short essay responding to this statement: Some people think women should be allowed to join the army, the navy and the air force just like men. Do you agree? His well-articulated response was a resounding no. His first sentence was: No, I don’t agree, because women have to take care of children, not take men’s occupations and manners. They shouldn’t steal men’s jobs, in other words. His mother, for what it’s worth, is vehemently anti-vax (though he himself was very careful during the pandemic, especially around masks). I asked him what he thought about women’s sport. Tennis and badminton were fine, but football?! God no. He’s a big football fan. Nobody actually watches women’s football, do they? Um, I hate to break it to you, but there was a World Cup recently and, yeah. His views are far from universal here – a 12-year-old boy I teach knows many of England’s top female players by name – but it’s interesting that they’re still so easy to come by in 2023. The pair of “position vacant” ads below are on the window of a popular second-hand clothes shop near me. I often cycle past it on a Saturday morning just before it opens at 9:30, and it’s heaving outside. Both the ads specify a woman (implicitly through feminine forms in the first ad, and explicitly in the second).

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The good, the bad and the mad

December 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

So I watched the interview about Covid vaccines (an hour and a quarter long) that Dad sent me. It’s on John Campbell’s YouTube channel. Angus Dalgleish, the professor of oncology whom Campbell interviewed, started off by raising what sounded like some good points about T-cell activation and boosters, but then he said this: “Covid only killed old people who would have died three months later anyway.” Ye gods. He’s one of those people. Lockdowns were “lunacy”. Anthony Fauci was “not very bright”; Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance were “idiotic”. And so it went on. Supremely confident in his own views (never a “maybe” or an “I think”), but quick to criticise everyone else. I knew people like that back in my office days, and they were invariably nasty pieces of work whom I tried to have as little to do with as possible. I note that Dalgleish is an ardent Brexiter who stood as a UKIP candidate in the 2015 election. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it’s interesting how often anti-vax overlaps with that political outlook. Dalgleish did talk some sense about vitamin D at the end of the interview, even if he quoted an implausible statistic. Vitamin D is well known to boost your immunity against a lot more than just Covid, so in winter when we get little sun I take a tablet (2000 international units) every morning.

In the early days of the pandemic, when we were fumbling around in the dark, I watched Campbell’s channel religiously. While we were running around like headless chickens, his daily reports were a beacon of sanity. They were all the better for their lack of slickness. Then around the end of 2021 when the Covid situation had markedly improved, I stopped tuning in. Since then, his viewership has only grown, and his channel has become a haven for anti-vaxers judging by the comments. Campbell is doing rather nicely from his channel, and though he seems to be a principled man, he’s incentivised to feed his viewers red meat every other day rather than accurate information. On the BBC’s More or Less – a radio programme about statistics – they debunked a dangerously (and laughably) wrong statistic that Campbell gave about excess deaths caused by vaccines. Campbell took the video down, but the damage had been done by then. I often wish we could nuke YouTube and social media out of existence.

I’ve written before about people being criticised for being “mad” (Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, for example) when it’s not the madness that’s the problem. That’s always annoyed me; some of the most creative and most interesting people are a little bit mad, and it’s entirely possible to be mad without being a dangerous arsehole. Tom Crawford, the exceptional Oxford and Cambridge mathematician whose tattoos grow near-exponentially, is clearly a bit mad, but he’s a good guy with it. The world needs more people like him. Siouxsie Wiles, the UK-born, New Zealand-based microbiologist who was instrumental in handling the Covid pandemic, is another one. We need more people like her. Norvin Richards, the professor in the MIT linguistics lectures I watched, comes into that category too. You could even include Charlie Ottley, the guy who does the brilliant Flavours of Romania series on Netflix. Good mad people abound.

Last week I called up Elena, the lady who lives above me, on her 80th birthday. She’s still with her family in Canada – she’ll be back in mid-January. I can speak freely in Romanian with her; I wish I had more opportunities to do that. (Getting a car and visiting remote villages might help.) I’m still having Romanian lessons every Monday morning. In yesterday’s session we covered a ton of verbs, some of which are always used reflexively while others can be used either reflexively or non-reflexively with different meanings. The trick will be getting the chance to use them.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Romania

Accomplishments

December 3, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to all the family. First I Skyped Mum and Dad. Mum had that pissed-off look. I didn’t entirely blame her. While she’d been painting the ceiling, Dad had been watching YouTube videos about Covid vaccines. The vaccines were useless according to the latest video he’d watched. “He’s a very creditable, highly qualified scientist.” Sure, he’s got a list of qualifications as long as your arm, but that doesn’t mean what he’s saying is true. At all. In fact you see people weaponising their qualifications all the damn time. YouTube is great if you want to find good music. Likewise if you want to know how to make sarmale or put up bookshelves or even solve quadratic equations. For “information” about Covid vaccines and treatments though, you should probably give it a pass. There’s a lot of nuance about the Covid vaccines. Maybe they were pushed out too soon. Some vaccines were clearly better than others. (Um, the Chinese one, anybody?) Side effects were real, to the point that maybe for a fit young person it was just about worth chancing their arm on getting the virus, from an entirely selfish perspective. The efficacy of booster jabs – fourth, fifth and beyond – is debatable. But to say that the vaccines were a waste of time is quite clearly ridiculous, when all the data points to vaccination massively reducing mortality. The more shocking a YouTube video is, the more eyeballs it gets, and that’s pretty much the story. Dad wants me to watch this latest (long) video, and I suppose I’ll have to, just to humour him.

After Mum and Dad, I spoke to my brother. He, his wife, and his son have been under the weather lately. The little chappy has had a bout of scarlet fever, which sounds like something from the Middle Ages. They’re almost recovered now though. My brother is going to St Ives in the next few days. It seems Mum and Dad have now considered paying for them all to come out to New Zealand (maybe after a comment I made, who knows) – that would be fantastic if it happened.

Yesterday I had four lessons – three in Dumbrăvița, then an online session with the chap in London. My first session was maths with Matei. He’d been learning some basic stats and had no problems that I could see. At the end of the session, as I’ve done the last few weeks, I gave him a few short multiple-choice questions on a variety of topics, mainly to get his mathematical brain working. They’re designed to be answered in under a minute. One of them was this:

He stared at it for a good five minutes, maybe more. He eliminated A (“it can’t be smaller than 36”) and D (“too big”), but was unable to choose between B and C. The question clearly says (perhaps unfairly) that you can’t use a calculator, though I don’t think it would have helped him. If I was tackling this question, I’d immediately see that 75% is three-quarters. If 36 is three-quarters of our number, then 12 is a quarter, so I’d just add on 12 (the remaining quarter we need) to get the answer. It would take me ten seconds or so, without any recourse to algebra. Just for a laugh, I gave Mum that question on our Skype call this morning, without the four options. She got the answer impressively quickly, using the exact same method that I did. As soon as I read out the question, Dad blurted out, “is it a hundred?”. Ha! But how do I teach the method that Mum and I use? Between us we’ve been fiddling with numbers for over a century, and in that time we’ve developed all kinds of hard-to-teach tricks and time-savers that we use without even thinking about them.

After Matei I had English with Octavian. We looked at yet more poems by Ted Hughes, such as The Thought-Fox, a poem about writing a poem. By the time he does his IGCSE in the summer, he’ll be beyond sick of Ted Hughes’ poems. I wish I could focus on his pronunciation, which could be greatly improved, rather than poetry which while interesting is of far less long-term benefit. Then came his little sister – after last week’s horse-heavy session, this time I gave her loads of sheets with dinosaurs. Next time she wants stuff on Christmas. When I got home I had my online session – we went through two articles, one on AI, the other on consumerism.

Friday was Romania’s national day, and a much warmer day than we’ve had of late. I met Dorothy in the centre of town – my old stomping ground – and we watched the parade of military and emergency vehicles. Unlike previous parades, this one was disappointingly short. When I sent my brother the pictures of the vast crowds, he likened it to Red Square victory parades. In truth there was little of that kind of vibe, but in Ceaușescu’s time they were just like what you saw in Moscow, or what you see now in North Korea. When the parade was over, I suggested to Dorothy that we walk through Central Park as I did countless times when I lived there. We walked by the busts of the great and the good of Timișoara – all men – and read some of the inscriptions. Some of them were ex-mayors. Many of them were writers. One was Béla Bartók, the famous Hungarian composer, who had links to Timișoara. When we reached Ioachim Miloia’s bust, I noted that he was my age now when he died. Look what he accomplished in that short time!

An art-history guru, a library founder, a writer on all matters related to local history, and painter who helped to restore numerous churches in Timișoara and its environs. And then look at me! Wouldn’t it be nice to say I’d accomplished something? Dorothy was taken aback by my comment, and I explained that I’d probably feel quite different if I had a family. My biggest accomplishment is, without a doubt, coming to Romania and making a life for myself here (and having a job where I help people, at least in a small way). In early 2015, a few months before I started this blog, I had the realisation that nothing would happen unless I did something drastic. Visiting the US that year – seeing the big wide world out there – gave me the impetus to actually do it.

Here are some pictures from the parade. The main square is being done up nicely.

Piața Unirii, 4:30 pm last Sunday
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A wintry blast

November 29, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

We had an early – and quite spectacular – flurry of snow on Thursday as I met Dorothy for coffee in Piața Unirii. Half an hour of dense, chunky, fluffy flakes. I can’t remember getting snow quite that early before. The Christmas market had just started – the Capital of Culture might have prompted an earlier start than usual. In my early days here, being among the aromas of mulled wine and chimney cakes and traditional meaty dishes was extremely satisfying. There was the parade for Romania’s national day on 1st December – almost upon us again – and all the lights and fireworks. It was all very new and exciting.

This morning I had an interesting first online lesson with a priest aged around sixty. He’s in the middle of a theological project, as far as I can tell, and wants to brush up on both his English and his Greek. He has a good command of Serbian and a smattering of Russian and French, having studied both those languages at school as was normal back then. It wasn’t an easy session because I had to speak Romanian most of the time (for some reason I struggled there), and we used Zoom which now has a 40-minute limit so we kept stopping and starting.

The evidence from the UK Covid inquiry just gets worse with every witness who speaks. Yesterday it was the turn of the metropolitan mayors. I didn’t realise that mask mandates came in so ridiculously late over there, months after they did in Romania. And finally, someone said it: you won’t magically save the economy by letting a deadly virus run riot. It isn’t a trade-off, for heaven’s sake. It’s amazing how much currency that bollocks had, and still has. It’s also become obvious how dangerously politicised the response to the pandemic was. Today Michael Gove, who was minister of education for four years, is giving evidence. Largely because of him I have to teach those bloody circle theorems that I struggle to remember myself.

I’ve almost given up on a Christmas UK trip. I could manage the seven-hour bus trips if I didn’t have to do the jolly Christmas crap too. One or the other, but not both.

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Bamboozled

November 25, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I got a phone call from Florin, the guy I play tennis with. They’re seeing in the new year at the same place as last year. They already need numbers. Do I want to come? Of course I don’t, but it’ll only be a few hours and won’t it be good to at least show my face? It couldn’t have been that bad last time, surely? Luckily I have this blog to remind me, and there it is, in black and white and orange. It really was that bad, and I even vowed not to put myself through that again. The difficulty is finding an excuse. A way out. There’s also the prospect of Christmas in the UK. A horrendous time of year to go there or be there. My brother doesn’t particularly enjoy Christmas with his wife’s family because they really go to town with party games and other activities he can’t stand, and I totally sympathise with him. I hope if I decide not to travel there for Christmas and instead go over at Easter, he won’t think I don’t care. Sometimes I really miss Covid.

The UK Covid inquiry resumed this week. Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Advisor, spoke unflatteringly of Boris Johnson. The former prime minister didn’t get the concept of exponential growth, or a heck of a lot else by the sound of things. In Vallance’s words, he was bamboozled. I liked Vallance’s comment about the heavy bias in government towards people with humanities backgrounds at the expense of science and maths. He said that it should be a 50-50 split, emphasising that a bias towards science and maths wouldn’t be a good thing either. Next week should be an absolute doozy – twat-in-chief Matt Hancock will be making an appearance, among others. The inquiry, or the bits I’ve seen so far, have thrown into sharp relief how dangerous the ministers and senior advisers were. The contrast between them and the general public, who were extremely compliant, could hardly be starker.

Maths last night. Plenty of bamboozlement there, as I started teaching my 15-year-old student the basics of probability. There are very few things in this world that I get, or that I’ve come somewhere close to mastering. Probability might just be one of them though, so you’d think I’d be on pretty firm ground. But there was one snag – this is Romania, and probability involves a whole ton of fractions. She really doesn’t get fractions, even at the most basic level. A half plus a quarter? Huh? I learnt about basic fractions when I was six or seven, before I ever touched decimals, but Romanians obviously didn’t, so when they join a British school where fractions abound in their maths classes they face an uphill battle. I’m in the middle of making a fractions worksheet (or workbook, as it might end up being). These things are all over the place online of course, but they’re (understandably) targeted at rather younger age groups.

Romania won their final qualifier against Switzerland 1-0 to finish their group in first place, with an impressive haul of 22 points from 10 games. It’ll be Romania’s first appearance in a major tournament since I arrived here. It was funny to watch the game against Israel on TV, where the local commentators didn’t even attempt to appear impartial.

A nippy start to the day as I had my lesson with the boy on the fifth floor. The lesson went well, though. Next week I’ll be starting lessons with her husband (a total beginner, she says, but I’m always skeptical about that).

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - The UK

Lock them up

November 3, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been following the UK Covid inquiry, and all I can say is lock the bastards up. The mishandling of the early stages of the pandemic went well beyond incompetence; these people were actively toxic. They were egomaniacs who behaved like playground bullies and were only in their positions because they supported Brexit. (The pandemic coming right after the brain drain of the December 2019 election was such unfortunate timing.) As senior civil servant Helen MacNamara (who wasn’t blameless herself) said in her hearing yesterday, there was an absence of humanity among the people in charge. For Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock, old people, poor people, and frankly all people who lacked their privileges, were expendable. Dominic Cummings, who gave his evidence on Tuesday, was just as bad. The insults that came from this special – unelected – advisor, mostly in WhatsApp messages, were shocking in their language. Making the right decisions didn’t matter to these c***s (as Mr Cummings would say); they only cared about whether the decisions made them look good. And what were they doing governing by WhatsApp anyway? They cost tens of thousands of lives. They should all go to prison for several years, and be banned from public office or indeed earning more than the national average income when they come out.

On Sunday I met Mark in town. We had lunch at Berăria 700, both opting for bulz – a bowl of cheese, bacon and mămăligă with an egg on top. Not the healthiest meal, but delicious. The funny bit was ordering the beer. Large or small? “Large, I suppose.” We thought that “large” meant a halbă which is just under a pint, but no, we got these great big steins that must have been a litre each. With the food and the sunny weather, getting through them wasn’t a problem. I showed him around the nearby market which for some reason he’d never been to before. He was amazed by the flowers, which are the most sense-engaging part of the whole thing. Just before we parted company, we discussed our good fortune at living in Timișoara – beautiful, lively, genuine, and (touch wood) safe. I played just one hour of tennis after that. Since then, the week has been a bit of a disappointment with so many cancellations caused by the Romanian equivalent of half-term, which only started to be a thing last year. All in all I can’t complain – I’m feeling much more relaxed than a couple of weeks ago. Last night I had a long chat with my friend in Birmingham, which was nice. Like Mum in Geraldine, he’s busy painting walls. I also spoke to Dad yesterday. Seeing his sister every day is leaving him exhausted. Britain is now being gripped by a storm. He’ll be flying back home in eleven days; he wishes it were sooner.