Still no baby news. I wonder who will be the US president when she’s born. I heard that Trump’s inauguration (ugh) will take place inside because it will – quite aptly – be bitterly cold on Monday. Heck, it’s been eight years since his first one and everything now feels eight times worse.
Elena, my neighbour who lives above me, got back yesterday. I’ve just been up to see her. She seems in remarkably fine fettle after such a trip. Her journey hasn’t affected her ability to talk, that’s for sure.
Mum and Dad have been down in Moeraki since Tuesday. They’re able to call me from there now by tapping into a neighbour’s wi-fi. Before they’d have to use some hotspot thingy outside the fish and chip shop in Hampden, and normally the line was terrible. So far they’ve had a disappointing summer, weather-wise. When we spoke it was unseasonably cold and windy there, despite the blue sky.
I slept better the last two nights. Last weekend and early this week were a total mess. Kitty’s constant darting around was doing my head in too. Seriously Kitty, you can stop this shit now. She’s calmed down a bit since. One of her favourite haunts is the top of the old cupboard in the “balcony” bit of my living room. Another of her favourites is my desk, because of all the pens and other stationery for her to play with. She’s very curious.
Since my self-imposed YouTube ban I’ve been using Spotify a lot more for music. There are two songs I’ve been playing over and over lately. One is Sad White Reggae by British band Placebo. Heaven knows why the song is called that. He talks about being on a train to Scotland (I think I just really like trains) and about every river flowing “back to Dundee”. The song is about loss. And insomnia. It just all seems to fit. The second song is Crowded House’s Four Seasons In One Day. Such a Kiwi expression. The weather could be pretty damn changeable in England too. But in Timișoara we don’t exactly get nor’westers springing up out of nowhere, or cold southerlies, or the river suddenly half-way up people’s gardens. We’re nine hours’ drive from the sea after all. Anyway, the best line of this Crowded House song for me is “Up the creek and through the mill” which is where a lot of us feel we’ve been dragged, a lot of the time. I should also mention the line “The sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the domain”. I bet a lot of people were confused by that one.
After visiting Kaufland (one of the big supermarkets) today, I decided to look around rather than head straight home. Here are a few of the pictures I took:
One of Timișoara’s other train stationsBega-Pam: off to the left is the bread factory. I don’t know if it still operates.A brace of bums. I don’t know how they managed to get BUM on both their cars.The old water towerPopa is the surname and perhaps Romania’s most common.But how do they know?
It was like a war zone here either side of midnight on New Year’s Eve as people let off bangers all around me. And now we’re in the second half of the twenties. The world took a leap backwards in the first half, and I can’t see where even a baby step forwards is coming from. Why I think we’re screwed is pretty simple. We absolutely aren’t going to innovate our way, or “tech” our way, out of this hole. (Tech is a lot of the problem.) Our only way out is to accept being poorer in the short term, maybe even the medium term, to benefit society and the environment in the long term. (The long-term economy would benefit too.) But most people won’t give an inch. Just look at Covid. It’s my right to travel abroad every summer, come hell or high water. I deserve it. No you bloody well don’t.
Yesterday I had my first lesson of 2025, a two-hour session with an English teacher in her late forties. I got her to do the same exercises I’d given a 15-year-old boy. Despite being a teacher, she was nowhere near as good as him. Then I saw Mark in town. We wandered around the Christmas market which is still running for another few days. I noticed stalls were selling things like “Dubai cakes” and “Dubai chocolate”. People here are so obsessed with the otherworldly glitz and opulence of Dubai that the word has taken on a meaning of fancy. Wouldn’t Dubai chocolate melt, though, given that the place is practically an oven? Mark then asked me if I wanted a cat to look after. In theory it would lovely to have the company of a cat, but it’s extra work, and what if I go away? That’s the real killer. Who would I have to look after him or her? I think it’s a her.
Later I spoke to Dad. He talked a lot about the appallingly cruel US healthcare system, having watched a YouTube video starring Michael Moore. He sent me the video with a note: “This will make you angry.” I suppose I’ll force myself to watch it tomorrow, when my self-ban of YouTube is lifted.
This morning I saw I’d missed a message about a lesson. I was still able to go to it in Mehala. It was tipping it down so I drove. On the radio I heard a new song by the Romanian band Vunk, as well as Dust in the Wind by Kansas. A beautiful song.
The darts. The final between Luke Littler and Michael van Gerwen (MVG) is an hour away. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay awake for all of it; I have lessons in the morning. Littler, still not 18, is a phenomenal talent who has hit international headlines. He must go into the final as a warm favourite. On New Year’s Day there were two fantastic quarter-finals back-to-back. First was Chris Dobey against Gerwyn Price. When I got back from seeing Dorothy, Dobey was two sets down, but he worked his way into a 4-2 lead in a race to five. He then missed five darts for the match before finally, mercifully, getting over the line in a 5-3 win, hitting two double 19s to seal the victory. Then came MVG against Callan Rydz. Super high quality throughout, and honestly Rydz was marginally the better player, but MVG’s timing and the vagaries of darts’ scoring allowed the Dutchman to run out a 5-3 winner.
One of the matches I watched thanks to a stream I picked up from New Zealand. It was weird seeing all the ads featuring rugby and barbecues and Wattyl paints. I see they’re still doing the thing with jillions of overpriced shades of paint that nobody needs or, let’s be honest, even wants. Ask a four-year-old boy what colour he’d like his bedroom wall to be and he might say blue. What shade of blue, Tommy? Horizon blue? (Just looking on the Wattyl website now.) Londonderry blue? (Makes me think of the IRA.) Hamilton blue? (The blue of the future.) Out of the blue? (Now that’s a good name.) Whaaat? Noooo!Blue blue! Thomas the Tank Engine blue! We’ve even got the same name! I’m convinced that adults’ colour preferences are really just the same as kids’ ones. When was the last time you heard anyone of any age say their favourite colour was sodding magnolia? But millions of people paint their walls various hues of beige or taupe because they’ve convinced themselves that they like them. It’s what they should like and should have. And of course a real colour might make the value of their house go down. It always comes down to that, at the end of the day. If I was in charge of this stuff in NZ, I’d enact a law that only permitted ten shades of paint. That’s your lot. If you want some pastelly crap, mix white with one of the other permitted colours. That’s what a pastel shade is anyway. There’d be border police and special dogs trained to sniff out contraband paint. Beige beagles. You’d still face a $400 fine for a rogue apple left in your bag, but a $4000 fine for a pot of beige. It would be fantastic.
On Monday I found out that Petrică, one of the guys I used to play tennis with, had died at the age of just 57. He died a month ago of a heart attack. When I first played with him he leapt around the court. I remember partnering him in a set of doubles which we lost 6-1. If you’d just let me take my shot occasionally, maybe we wouldn’t have got thrashed. The next thing I knew, he’d developed kidney problems and was on dialysis. He still played tennis, but was limited to half an hour at a time. I’ve been in touch with a female friend of his; she said she’s in no mood for anything Christmassy. Petrică is the second of the tennis group to pass away: Domnul Ionescu, who was 70 or so, died of cancer at the beginning of 2022.
In other sad news, yesterday I had a lesson with my London-based student. I asked him if he had any news. Looks like I’m getting a divorce. He’s 35, with two boys aged five and two. I get the impression they got married nine years ago (in Romania, before moving to the UK) because it was just what you did, and now they’re facing a divorce which is just about always stressful and traumatic. With divorce rates hovering close to 50%, I often wonder whether getting married is ever really worth it. I mean, getting married is pretty damn stressful in itself, not to mention expensive.
This morning I opened a letter from my family friend in St Ives whom I spent considerable time with in August when I visited. Getting a letter these days is really quite something.
On Sunday I met both Mark and Dorothy in town, one after another with a longish break in between. I met them both at Berăria 700 which has reasonably priced food and drinks. Mark is almost ten years older than me, and I like to ask him about his memories of the seventies, growing up as he did in Tamworth, which isn’t far from Birmingham. This time he talked about people driving bubble cars. Being born right at the start of the Thatcher–Reagan era and growing up in Cambridgeshire rather than say the north of England, I sadly have no memories of a time before money was everything, except perhaps when I was really little and rampant capitalism hadn’t fully kicked in. I’m thinking of the funny little shops that still existed in St Ives back then, or the local auction in which Dad would scout around for antique furniture. (There’s still an auction in St Ives now, but the bottom has really dropped out of the antique market in the last 40 years.) Being born in 1980 means I can remember nothing that came before, but everything that came after.
I could really see the stark difference between the beginning and the end of the eighties when I read two of Garrison Keillor’s books, one published in 1981, the other in 1988. In the space of a few years, money had morphed from being a tool for buying useful goods and services and providing security, to being a thing in itself that fairly ordinary people wanted to acquire. Share prices were suddenly read out on radio bulletins as if they were things that mums and dads ought to know about, rather than being hidden away in tiny font in some obscure section of the paper.
Music. Lately I’ve been listening to Joan Armatrading. She was born in St Kitts and Nevis, as it is now called, but moved to Birmingham at a young age. She came out with a number of hits in the seventies and eighties. Love and Affection (1976) is wonderful; Drop the Pilot (1983) isn’t bad either.
Here are some pictures of town on Sunday evening:
Then and now. We might be going back to “then”.The third old-style cinema to have opened in the city
A storm ripped through last night at 3am; for an hour and a half I couldn’t sleep. It’s still blowing a gale (or something at around a force 6 or 7 at least) now. And it’s raining hard. Either before or after the storm – I can’t remember – I had my first dream to feature Donald Trump. I was in a small town or village on a sunny day, having been on one of my excursions in the car, when he appeared. There was no rally or anything; he was just there, surrounded by a handful of people. It was all very civilised. He seemed to be at least six foot six. My instinct was to get away from him for fear of being shot. In the same dream, or perhaps the next one, my laptop caught fire.
Here’s a map of the weather warnings that were put out yesterday. The combination of high winds and (in higher terrain) blizzards has made for quite a complex picture. I’m in the orange zone:
Last night I had a chat with Mum. What’s happened to your tooth? A crown had fallen out. She’d already been to the new gleaming-white state-of-the-art dental practice in Geraldine; in ten days she’ll get a replacement crown at a cost of $1800. Dad then came on the line to say he’d just sold a painting for the same amount (I don’t know if that was net or gross). It took me three days to do that! As if three days was a long time. I immediately thought, just imagine being able to make $600 a day doing what I’m doing. I told Mum that if she could hang on for six months (!), she could get it done in Romania for a fraction of the cost. Coincidentally I’d just been reading David Walliams’ Demon Dentist with a very bright girl of almost eleven before this talk of dentistry with my parents. After the dental talk, conversation turned to the various haka and hikoi that have been going on lately in New Zealand.
In a lesson on Tuesday my student went through a long article about career choices. The author of the article likened career decisions to an octopus where each tentacle needs to be fed and accommodated. Tending to your “practical” tentacle too much can mean you neglect your “social” tentacle, and so on. It mentioned that as your salary increases, your expectations increase likewise. You’ll never be properly satisfied. Reading this sort of thing emphasises how atypical my own experiences have been. In January 2008 I went to Melbourne for eight days to attend the Australian Open. And to see Melbourne, which I liked a lot. Then when I got back to work everything got pretty crap pretty quickly. I’d muddled along for a few years as one of the young guys, but all of a sudden a bunch of actual young guys and girls joined the department and I was 28, supposedly a level above. The others at my level were suddenly doing life stuff like buying houses, getting married, having kids, and spending proper money on cars. They were progressing. It became obvious, within the space of a few weeks, that it wasn’t going to work for me. So I actually cut down on my spending, squirrelling away $500 a week for the rest of ’08 and the whole of ’09, until the end finally came in December. When I was in New Zealand last year, I stumbled upon some old payslips from 2007. Oh really, that much? That was the last year, in fact the only year, that I was at least somewhat into my corporate job. I was part of a team of just five. That all felt an awfully long time ago.
Tuesday was when some of the more notable lessons happened. In the morning I asked a 28-year-old what he thought the worst (or most destructive) invention in modern human history was. He quickly shot back: social media. There are several other contenders: leaded petrol, cigarettes, landmines, nuclear weapons (though they may have prevented destruction), and plastic. But all of them were invented even before my parents were born, in some cases centuries before. If you’re talking about the worst invention in the last 75 years, social media must be it. It’s destroying the fabric of our society like nothing else, and it’s horrifying to watch this destruction unfold in real time. That evening I had a 90-minute session with a 23-year-old woman. Teaching women of that age is invariably hard, but this session was excruciating. I got one-word answers from her, if that. Look, this isn’t working. I’m saying five words for every one of yours. (I was being generous.) I was getting a real Demon Dentist feel about the whole thing; it was like pulling teeth.
It’s been a slightly frustrating week, with an above average number of cancellations. I’ve tried to make the most of the annoying downtime by making new games and exercises, for both English and maths. I made a set of cards with the numbers 1 to 100, to help with understanding factors, multiples, primes, and all the rest of it. I’d planned just to go up to 40, but then thought I may as well go the whole hog. I’m happy with the system I came up with. Black for odd, red for even (like the suits of a normal pack of cards), a purple border if the number is prime, squares in the corners to denote a square number, and a small triangle on the right if the number is triangular. It was important not to make it too busy. On the back of each card I wrote the prime factorisation and all the factors of the number.
I’ve been playing my Primitive Man LP by Icehouse (an Aussie band who were big in the early eighties) a lot lately. Icehouse came on Radio Hauraki a lot back in 2007, that one year when my job was meaningful. It was usually Great Southern Land, or sometimes Hey Little Girl. But there are other very good songs on that record too, like Goodnight Mr Matthews. A lot of the tracks remind me of Split Enz who were big at around the same time.
I gave up on Honey & Spice in the middle of the fifth chapter. Whoever the target market is for the novel, I’m as sure as hell not it.
It’s an important time for Romania right now. Citizens (i.e. not me) go to the polls three weekends running. This Sunday is the first round of the presidential election. The parliamentary elections follow on 1st December, which happens to be Romania’s national day, with the second round of the presidential election taking place on the 8th. The far-right anti-everything-except-Trump-and-Putin party will surely increase their vote share. If they gain power, Romania could go the same way as Hungary. Let’s hope not.
I’ve got an important meeting this evening regarding the book(s) I’ve been writing with the help of Dad. More about that next time; it’s been a long post.
It’s been a slow day today. In mid-morning I got an attack of sinus pain which I staved off with an Advil and several paracetamol. So I didn’t get the excruciating pain I suffer on rare occasions, but I became sensitive to light and sound, and energy drained from me. I lay on the sofa and dozed until 20 minutes before my first lesson (of four scheduled) started. This was an online session with an eight-year-old boy. He’s a nice boy. But because I was more sensitive to sounds than usual, the monotony of his reading voice got to me. What Does Jack Want To Do He Wants To Play With His Dog What Does Sam Like To Eat… All at one note – Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba – without any pauses between sentences, like a helium-fuelled robot. Native-speaker children are like this too when they learn to read, but Romanians take it to another level because their native language stays at a more constant pitch than English does.
Annoyingly I only got two of my four lessons. One of the two “real millennial” girls completely forgot, while the Bucharest-based guy in his forties cancelled with 50 minutes to go. (I told that young lady she’d need to pay me, then changed my mind because she’s still pretty new and it was her first “offence”.)
Tomorrow I’ve got seven sessions in my diary – that’s a lot – but the odds are against me actually having that many. One of them is with Alex, a boy of nearly 14. In a recent session he told me how his grandfather had just bought three of the latest Samsung phones (for himself, Alex’s mum and Alex) for €1100 apiece. (Well-off people talk in euros; poorer people talk in lei.) He wanted to know if it was true that black Air Forces had been banned in British schools. Black Air Forces? Are these shoes, or what? And how the hell would I bloody know?
Yesterday I got my hair cut. I went to a place at the other end of the (long) street where I lived for two months in a guest house. I was the only customer. The hairdresser was a lady of sixty or so. She went on about how bad things were in Romania compared to the “old days”, then she talked about all the people she knew who had become ill from the Covid vaccines. I asked her how she knew it was the vaccines. By this time she was in full flow, so much that she’d stopped actually cutting my hair. Mercifully she got off the subject and resumed my haircut.
Song of the week – Demons by the Welsh band Super Furry Animals. The song, which came out in 1997, makes an inauspicious start (I’d say), but then gets much better. The video is fantastic throughout. It features the Colombian capital Bogotá. It makes me really want to visit South America. Another Super Furry Animals song I like (in fact there are a few) is Y Gwyneb Iau, sung in Welsh.
Two posts ago I mentioned tetrahedral numbers. I neglected to mention that they came in handy for me in my online poker days. How many different seven badugis are there? That’ll be 20, the fourth tetrahedral number. What about eight badugis? That’s 35, the fifth tetrahedral number. And so on. If GG Poker ever get round to adding draw games and the like, I’ll probably give it a whirl, but otherwise I’m not going back there.
Kamala Harris is going on Fox News in a few hours. Great move, I reckon. More eyeballs on her, wherever they come from, are what she needs. And it makes her appear unfazed. It is risky of course, because she could completely bomb, but the upside outweighs the downside. No matter what, I still have a nasty feeling about 5th November.
I’ve just had a no-show from one of those real millennials I once talked about on here. One of the ones who’s been to Dubai. That’s after reminding her less than two hours before she started. Yes, she said. Or rather, da. Then nothing. When she messaged me last month to say she wanted to resume lessons with me, I let out a deep groan to myself. Uughhh. I thought I’d got rid of her.
Yesterday I caught up with my cousin on Zoom. The one who lives in Wellington and has had cancer. For all I know, she may still have cancer. In an hour she didn’t mention her health once. Her siblings and even her mother have virtually no idea what’s going on either. All very bizarre. There was still the visibly drooped jaw but her speech wasn’t affected. We discussed my parents’ house, both agreeing that it was madness, then we talked about working from home. On that matter we disagreed entirely. Her number one son has almost finished at Canterbury and is going to Sydney do a master’s in robotics. Number two boy has just started working for Wellington Free Ambulance. The little chap, now all of 16 (time whizzes by), looks set to join either the police or the military. I thought my cousin might push all her boys into academia, so I’m glad the younger two haven’t gone in that direction.
Yeah. Working from home. A bloody great invention if you ask me. Obviously some very important jobs can’t be done from home. Even mine doesn’t always work online. Getting an eight-year-old kid to sit still and look at me can be quite the battle. Teaching maths online is rather inconvenient. I can never seem to find the pi key. But yeesh, there are millions of people in white-collar jobs (both good and mind-numbingly crap) where face-to-face contact is a near-total irrelevance when it comes to actually doing the job. Sure, there’s the socialising if you’re into that, but even that can be unbearably fake. The modern office itself is unbearable to a lot of people. If I went back to a large open-plan office I’d last five minutes. Two minutes if hot desking was also involved. Just fuck no. And if you live in a dormitory town (what a horrible phrase) in the UK, you’re probably looking at two to three hours a day just getting from your soulless housing estate to some equally soulless business park and back. Who wouldn’t want rid of that and have the chance to exercise more (the amount of exercise the average Brit gets is shockingly low) and spend more time with their kids? (Yes, I know, there are plenty of TGIM fathers – thank God it’s Monday – who like all that commuting and office fakeness precisely so they can escape from their families.)
My cousin is 55 and owns a business. To put it mildly, she wasn’t a fan of working from home. She talked about fostering team environments which may have been a thing 30 years ago but isn’t really now. When I spoke to Dad, he expressed a dislike of the whole WFH concept which I found very weird coming from him, but then again he is 74 and you can’t cure 74. It’s great, he said, that civil servants in Wellington are finally going back to work. Back to work! This amused me greatly. If Dad’s definition of work involves travelling to an office, he has done zero hours of work in the last 45 years.
Here’s the British comedian Michael Spicer’s take on the WFH phenomenon. My favourite comment to the video is the one that mentions commercial real estate investors and surrounding businesses like coffee shops. Sorry, but $7 cups of coffee aren’t a good enough reason to bring people back.
A terrifying storm, which goes by the less-than-terrifying name of Milton, is making landfall in Florida. There are several tornadoes. Joe Biden has just called it the Storm of the Century. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Milton. The name makes me think of the character from the Office Space (ha!) documentary comedy film. Another Milton I’m aware of is the nephew of the mathematician who wanted a name for 1 followed by 100 zeros. Milton came up with googol. This was then extended to the googolplex, which is 1 followed by a googol zeros. The name “googol” was the inspiration for the name Google.
On the subject of maths, it’s taken me till October to realise that the year 2024 is a tetrahedral number. In 2016 we were living in a triangular year: if you have 2016 balls, you can arrange them into an equilateral triangle with 63 balls on each side. Well, tetrahedral numbers take this to another level. (Or several other levels, to be precise.) You can arrange 2024 balls into a tetrahedron (or triangular-based pyramid) in which each face is an equilateral triangle. Specifically, 2024 is the 22nd tetrahedral number; there are 22 balls on each edge. It’s equivalent to the sum of the first 22 triangular numbers. This means that tetrahedral numbers (or years) are even rarer than triangular ones. The previous one was 1771; the next one won’t be until 2300.
Earlier today my student read an article about Threads, a 1984 docu-drama about a nuclear apocalypse. Frightening as it must have been then, during the Cold War, I’d like to find and watch it now.
Music. A new favourite song of mine is called Help Me See the Trees by Particle Kid. The lead singer of the band is Willie Nelson’s son. Here’s the song being performed at the Tomboy Sessions in Santa Cruz, California. There’s loads of other good stuff – mostly country music – from the Tomboy Sessions.
It’s all got a bit crappy today. I got up at 6:30 after nowhere near enough sleep (three hours? four? That’s been pretty standard in this heat) and then started shouting and crashing into stuff. It was like 31/1/23 (that date is etched in my mind), but not quite as bad. It’s been coming. Although I’ve been to places and (sort of) done stuff lately, I’ve been going through the motions. Yet again. I’ve got a sodding master’s degree in going through the motions. No enjoyment, nothing means anything, everything feels like an obligation or even a chore, and the cherry on the top is a complete inability to relax.
Today I did actually get some stuff done. Three lessons, totalling 5½ hours, including maths with Matei in Dumbrăvița. Last week he got his IGCSE results; he got a B in maths and maybe I could have got him up to an A but it was a question of too much to do in too little time. It didn’t help that the buggers at his school didn’t let me see his mock paper in which he got a D – that would have been invaluable to me. (By the way, a B is the third-highest grade; the top grade is an A-star.) This afternoon I had two hours with a 13-year-old football-obsessed boy who lives in Spain but is in his native Romania for the summer. His English is good. In other words, he’s pretty much trilingual. We went through a English textbook of his with instructions in Spanish, most of which I could understand without too much difficulty.
Something else I got done today was get my car battery replaced. It was dead when I got back from the UK – the heat doesn’t help. There’s no such thing in Romania (as far as I know) as the AA which I was always a member of in New Zealand. Over there my battery would die, I’d call them up, and a man with a van would be round in minutes. Here it’s more complicated and that stressed me out no end. I’m supposed to be going to Slovenia on Thursday. A man did come over with some jump leads and I drove to another part of the city where I got a replacement. It was early afternoon – already crazily hot – and I felt shattered.
On Saturday they had a free concert in Parcul Civic. I wish I’d known that Zdob și Zdub were the opening act because I really like their music. I did get to see Passenger though. Or kind of. He was a speck in the distance. Passenger isn’t a band, he’s just one Englishman with a guitar. And a distinctive voice. He shot to fame in 2012 with his Let Her Go. You only miss the sun when it starts to snow. Or however it goes. He had three or four other songs on his album that I liked, but that one hit was the making of him. (He talked about what an extraordinary lucky break that was for someone who was a busker up until then.) He started his set by saying, “Is this a normal temperature for you? I’m from England where it never gets this fucking hot.” This was after 8pm and it was 35 at least. The crowd never properly got into his stuff. I don’t think he realised that only 5% of the crowd properly understood him and all his idioms. Even though I really like him, I just wanted to get home. I wasn’t in the mood for anything. Certainly not Rita Ora who came on after Passenger. She’s British too, but her stuff isn’t my thing at all.
Yesterday I met Mark at Berăria 700. I hadn’t seen him for ages. It was great to catch up and have a laugh. That didn’t stop me from feeling like utter crap a few hours later, though. I wish I knew the secret.
It would help if it would just cool down. Being outside in nature or even among the architecture we have here is hugely helpful if you’re prone to iffy mental health. But when the infernal heat imposes what might as well be a curfew on you…
I had a rather brief catch-up with New Zealand on Saturday. Dad had a sore throat and could hardly speak. Everyone else was suffering too. As for Mum, she didn’t have a cold (yet), but she was exhausted. I hope their fortunes improve.
My first lesson tomorrow is at 11am, so I’ll get on the bike beforehand. That’s if I get some sleep first.
On Sunday I went to Dorothy’s Baptist church to see, well, a baptism. Just like the other times I went there, I felt out of place. Before the service I stood in a queue for the loo, staring at a boiler which showed warning messages in 16 European languages, none of which was English. I thought how exotic the Polish word for “warning” – uwaga – looked compared to the others. I could be Swahili or something. I did manage to relieve myself and then it all started. Two Baptist churches combined for the two-hour service which took place outside. (It was a few degrees cooler than on previous days. I would have stayed at home otherwise.) In the middle of the service a four-month-old boy named Abel was “dedicated”. This involved words only – no water. Then at the end, after the long sermon, came the main event. A tall woman of twentyish in a white dress was about to be properly baptised. She stood in an inflatable swimming pool. This also had warning messages on it – “no diving” – in several languages. My favourite was the Dutch – niet dunken. The young woman gave a short speech standing in the pool, then got fully dunken. (I took three pictures at various stages of dunkenness, but won’t put them on here.) When that was over we had a kind of smorgasbord for lunch, including a quiche that I’d made the previous day. I got talking to a young chap who had recently arrived from Benin. He knew neither English nor Romanian, so we spoke in French. My French is very rusty and I’m liable to mix French words with Romanian ones. I was glad to get home after all of that – more than enough crowds for one day.
On Saturday I played tennis with Florin. It was pretty warm, even at 8pm. Because the grip on my usual racket was in such poor shape, I brought an older one. Leading 5-2 but with game point to Florin, I popped a string. This can happen on a racket that has been unused for a while. Luckily Florin had a spare – a Donnay that was made in Belgium in (he guessed) the late eighties. Romania would be playing Belgium shortly after we finished. I actually played better with his racket, and was up 6-3, 4-1 at the end.
I didn’t watch Romania’s 2-0 loss to Belgium. Tomorrow they play Slovakia in their final group game. A draw would guarantee both teams a place in the next round. The odds reflect this; you can only get 11/10 on a stalemate, where you normally see more than 2/1 on a draw between two evenly matched teams. If I had to pick a score, I’d go with 0-0.
At the weekend Touch of Grey by the Grateful Dead came on my car radio. I know shamefully little about the Grateful Dead, but I really like this song that was released in 1987, two decades after most of their stuff. I did the fill-in-the-gaps exercise with Hozier’s Too Sweet this morning; it went down well, I thought.
I’m now reading Christopher Robin Milne’s autobiography Enchanted Places. A fascinating read. I discussed it with my parents when I spoke to them yesterday. Mum started our chat by complaining about all the people who pronounce “route” as “rout”; that made me think she must be feeling OK.
On Thursday I’m going on my trip. I’m staying three nights in Prigor, close to the Nera River. There should be plenty to see there: a water mill, a monastery, multiple tracks for hiking and places in the river to swim afterwards. And not a lot of tourists. Sounds great.
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.
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.
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