Music

Family - Life :) - Music - Politics - Scrabble

A happy tradition in a scary world

March 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s the last day of February and the last day of winter, and we’ve had beautiful sunshine all day. I’ve just been up to see Elena (the lady who lives above me) and give her a mărțișor, which is a kind of small good-luck charm on a șnur – a red-and-white string. Romanians traditionally give mărțișoare to women to mark the beginning of spring. It’s one of my favourite traditional Romanian traditions, mainly because it costs very little: you can buy these trinkets – some of which are handmade – for just a few lei apiece. The one I gave to Elena was in the form of a black cat.

Unusually for a Saturday, I only had one lesson today, first thing this morning. After my lesson on food with Noah in Dumbrăvița, I decided to drive to Jimbolia. On the way there I listened to Bogdan Puriș’s music programme. He played songs by Bruce Hornsby, including the new Indigo Park as well as The Way It Is which, according to Puriș, came out in 1986. That date checks out because when I was a kid the BBC used the song as background music when they showed the football tables on a Saturday. Then my phone made that six-beep alert when something seismic has just happened and when I got to Jimbolia I found out that Trump and Israel had just bombed Iran. I’m as far from an expert on Middle East geopolitics as you can get, but to me this is absolutely terrifying. And for the love of God, Britain must not get involved in it. I didn’t do a lot in Jimbolia. I was just trying to take advantage of the warmer, brighter weather. I wandered around for a bit and then sat near the railway station and read a couple of stories from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I suggested to Elena that we go out for a drive sometime.

I spoke to Mum last night; she’d just had the operation done on her second eye. It seems to have gone well, though we don’t really know yet. Before that I spoke to Dad. We discussed his own mother’s unsteadiness in later years, such as in 2000 when they were living in Cairns and she and I came to visit, and suddenly she couldn’t go up and down escalators. Heck, Mum is only a year and a bit younger than she was. When put in those terms, Mum is doing very well. Dad too. (His own father died at almost exactly the age Dad is now, after a decade of living with Alzheimer’s.)

On Thursday night there was a UK by-election – in a part of Manchester – which the Greens won surprisingly comfortably. Reform came second while Labour, who had won the seat by a huge margin in 2024, were consigned to third place. The woman who won the seat for the Greens is – well, was – a plumber. Her victory speech, while strangely lacking in actual green stuff, was mighty impressive. “If you work hard, you deserve a nice life. And if you aren’t able to work, you still deserve a nice life.” Uncomplicated but effective. This result, plus everything else, might force the very disappointing Keir Starmer out of his position as prime minister.

Scrabble. Two wins and two losses so far from my completed league games. This time around there will be 13 games in total instead of the usual 14. A few days ago on ISC (the other site I play on), I was unfortunate enough to concede a 185-point triple-triple (SHERWANI, a word I didn’t know), and despite playing three bingos I lost 527-460. My opponent also found three bingos. That’s the highest total score in any game I’ve played.

Tomorrow I’m playing squash with Mark.

Family - Films - Life :) - Music - Scrabble

Avoiding arguments

February 22, 2026 by 0 Comments

On Wednesday I asked the doctor about my back. As I suspected, it was just a contusion – nothing was broken. He gave me two packets of pills and some cream. That all seems to be working, so that’s nice. Early in the week (Tuesday?) I had a pretty terrible morning with sinus pain. Even after I recovered, it put me on a go-slow for the rest of the week.

Mum and Dad seem good at the moment, although I can never be 100% sure. I expect they’ll make it to Romania in early June, before it gets too hot. I have no idea what we might do when they get here, but any big cross-country trips – to the Delta, say – might not be a clever idea. Avoiding stress (and falling out with Mum in particular) is a top priority. I’m happy to say that I’ve made a decent start to 2026 as far as Mum is concerned. Even though I felt a bit upset at Mum’s attitude to my potential trip to New Zealand (which basically knocked it on the head), I haven’t had any arguments with her and I really want to keep it that way. Last week she emailed me a picture of a car (a Range Rover, I think) parked in Geraldine whose number plate included the POM combination, with a Union Jack added for good measure. That would have cost several hundred dollars, unlike the POM I ended up with. I was just happy that she sent me a rare email. (Part of the problem is that she has several email addresses. Anything I send her is liable to go to her junk or vanish into the ether entirely, so I don’t email her, and as a result she doesn’t normally email me either. When I see her in June I hope I can sort all this out for her.)

Dorothy has gone to England for a week. She’s spending time with her late husband’s family, many of whom don’t get on with each other. I didn’t mention that last weekend Dorothy and I saw a film at Cinema Victoria. We saw a French film (subtitled in Romanian) called La Réparation. Its Romanian title is Ultima Rețetă (The Last Recipe). It’s all about a famous Michelin-starred restaurant in France, though the second half of the film is mostly set in Taiwan. The plot was more complex than I expected something like that to be, and whoever produced the film showed some in-depth knowledge of haute cuisine.

The latest round of the Scrabble league is over. I finished with eight wins and six losses, surpassing my expectations, and will stay in the same division when it restarts on Thursday. There was some unpleasantness in the group chat last week which was a shame, though I think things are resolved now. This weekend a tournament in Cluj is taking place; that’s the one I was invited to. I couldn’t realistically go; I’d have needed to go up there on Friday, taking both Friday and Saturday off work. That would have been too much. I’m targeting a tournament in Iași in early August, when I’ll have a much lighter workload. Iași, which I visited in 2021, is a long way from here, but I’m planning a trip to the Republic of Moldova – over the border – and maybe I could stop in Iași on the way back. By that point I’ll have hopefully improved a bit and will have had the chance to practise tile tracking.

Early in the week a song came on the radio that I hadn’t heard in a while – Sowing the Seeds of Love by Tears for Fears, which came out in 1989. I hadn’t appreciated its complexity; it feels like four or five songs in one.

Having obtained a distinction in his master’s degree, my brother is proudly brandishing his qualifications in his email signature. I’m very proud of you, but when you display all those letters after your name so overtly, I only see four letters: dee eye cee kay.

Some good news: my bike is back in business and the repair cost less than expected – 268 lei (around £45 or just over NZ$100).

I’m meeting Mark in town for lunch in an hour or so.

Dreams - Family - International travel - Music - Scrabble

11,000 miles — will it be worth it?

February 10, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a lesson with Strong After Shave Guy, the 17-year-old who literally ten minutes ago told me he’d decided to become a policeman. To be accepted into the Romanian police, you have to pass tests in English, Romanian and history. It’s quite refreshing to have someone who doesn’t want to become a YouTuber or an influencer or to work in IT. (I’d have made an absolutely terrible policeman.)

This morning I spoke to Mum and Dad. My brother, my sister-in-law and my niece all came down with a severe and acute tummy bug which put them in hospital for a short time. Happily they’re fine now, but my brother – who hardly ever used to get ill – has had every bug imaginable since he became a father. Mum and Dad now seem pretty keen to come to Europe, probably in mid-May. That’s a 180-degree turn from just two weeks ago. I’m still planning on flying to New Zealand in early August, but when I mentioned my plan to them this morning, Mum showed (for the second time) ambivalence at best. I know Dad would very much like me to come over, but I really do think that (in the best case!) Mum wouldn’t care either way. I can’t help but be upset by this, because I certainly would like to see Mum out there. Tomorrow Mum’s got golf, so tonight I’m going to call Dad – making sure it’s late enough that she’ll have gone – and lay it on the line. Would she prefer it if I don’t come? Because if so, it’s a heck of a long way.

On Saturday I had dinner with Mark at the Drunken Rat in Piața Unirii. The atmosphere and staff were very pleasant, reminding me of those bars in Lyon a quarter of a century ago. I had some dish involving chicken and rice and, as usual in Romania, nowhere near enough “stuff” to mop it all up with. Before our meal we went to a nearby bar and each had a Guinness. This was Mark’s idea. There aren’t many places in Timișoara where you can find Guinness; I hadn’t had it for ten years at least. Sadly I won’t be seeing Mark much longer. His wife has got herself a deputy head position in a private school in Preston (northern England), so they’ll be out of here in June. I expect I’ll make a trip to Preston, a place I know very little about with the exception of its football team, at some point when I go back to the UK.

My latest go-to song is Duran Duran’s The Chauffeur which came out in 1982. Duran Duran are a real mixed bag for me – some of their stuff, even their biggest hits, does very little for me, but others (like The Chauffeur) hit just the right spot. Yesterday, when I met up with Dorothy in Scârț, I heard a song I’d never heard before – Catch the Rainbow by a British band called, well, Rainbow. This song came out in 1975.

As for dreams, in a recent memorable one – in fact the only recent dream I remember – I was on a bus in Alabama (why there I have no idea) and everyone was singing. Not Sweet Home Alabama; I don’t know what it was.

Scrabble. When I met Dorothy yesterday we played a game in Romanian. It was a bit of a struggle, though I won 302-227. Similar to the other time we played, I got several of the high-point tiles, though this time my letters just didn’t mesh that well. Once again Dorothy got both blanks, but she burnt them cheaply. And guess what? I finished in the promotion spots in the online league, at my fifth attempt. I came fourth with a record of ten wins and four losses; the top five get promoted. This was highly unlikely at one point; my record was sitting at 4-4 and in the next game to finish I was way behind at a very advanced stage. In that game I was fortunate to draw into a bingo that gave me a seven-point win. I then won all my remaining games. Even with all those wins, without that earlier come-from-behind win I’d have only finished sixth. This will mean I’ll get another crack at that elite British player – who took the top spot and beat me handily – when it starts up again on Thursday. Being in the division above will turn up the pressure just a notch. I’m fully prepared to be immediately relegated.

Family - Music

Priority C

January 28, 2026 by 0 Comments

Dad got a message back from the agents yesterday. The current tenants are still keen to buy. That’s a huge relief. Mum and Dad were down in the dumps, to put it mildly, after they hadn’t heard back.

With everything going on with my parents, and also my brother bringing up a family, anything I do here now feels of tertiary importance.

Just now I’ve been looking at flights from Budapest to Christchurch and back. It looks likely I’ll be going in the first half of August and coming back in the first half of September, but I haven’t booked anything yet.

While I was coming back from Lipova on Sunday, they had local (Banat) music programme on the radio. They played a doină, a traditional wistful song that at the time (as I was passing traditional villages) I felt was so beautiful that I pulled off the road to Shazam it. It’s called Omu-n Lume-și Știe Neamu by Traian Jurchela. It’s still very good now, but not quite what it was when I was bowling along and hearing it for the first time.

Dreams - Family - Films - Music - Photos - Scrabble

Deep freeze

January 11, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s been bitterly cold. On Friday morning it was minus 16 degrees. As I write this at 9:30 on Sunday morning, it’s −9; the top temperature today is forecast to be −5. Yesterday, when we soared to the dizzy heights of zero, I had to drive to my two maths lessons in Dumbrăvița. The main roads had been ploughed of snow, so they weren’t too bad, but the side roads bordered on treacherous. It was also foggy on my journey out there. (I got all-weather tyres put on my car. A lot of people make a twice-yearly switch between summer and winter tyres, but it’s a real palaver that can take up an entire weekend.) I was very glad to get home. It’s all very reminiscent of my first winter here, nine years ago, when the river froze and there were icicles hanging from the building I’d just moved into. Kids under about 13 have no recollection of a proper winter, but winters like this – and even more extreme – used to be an annual occurrence here. The snow has got the young ones all excited, and we’ve got more coming in the next few days. Apart from driving which required serious concentration yesterday, I have no problem coping with these rather nippy conditions. There’s always something you can do to keep warm. Summer is a totally different ball game though.

On my trip to Dumbrăvița yesterday they played Crowded House’s Weather With You on the radio. A nice touch, assuming it was deliberate. The song immediately before that was Der Kommissar by Falco, which came out at the end of 1981. I still remember when their bigger hit Rock Me Amadeus came out in ’85. The night before I had a dream where I was hiking somewhere in Romania and met a younger British woman. For some reason she showed me an ID photo with her face on it. Her surname was Smith. She then told me she’d changed her surname to Poxam. I attempted to spell it, putting an h after the x, but she said it was H-less. Then she asked me if I’d like to come and see her in the UK, at which point I woke up. I wonder where I got that name from. Poxham is a plausible name for a British village. There is a Poxham out there, and in fact it’s a picturesque hamlet in Austria. The closest name I’ve ever had anything to do with is Moxham Avenue, the main street in the Wellington suburb of Hataitai. I once put in an offer on a flat in a Disney-style block there, but it wasn’t accepted.

Lately I’ve been tuning out of politics and international news. That’s just as well; what’s coming out of America would drive me to insanity if I paid close attention to it. However, the shooting – cold-blooded murder – by an ICE officer of an innocent mother driving her car in Minneapolis was too awful to ignore. America right now seems a lost cause. I sometimes laugh when I hear people intellectualising the president, using adjectives like transactional, when really it’s far, far simpler. He’s a piece of shit who cares for nothing but his own power and ego and has no respect for human life. He enjoys hurting other people. Most of the people around him are pieces of shit too. And 77 million people voted for that, with their eyes wide open. None of what is happening is a surprise.

Scrabble. The latest round of league matches is over, and just like last time I won eight and lost six. That vastly surpassed my early expectations – I had a pretty rough start. So that should mean I’ll stay in the same division for the fourth round in succession. Yesterday I played six games on ISC. I lost the first of them, then won four straight before being hammered 508-306 in my last game. In that game I drew terribly to the point where it was probably unwinnable no matter what I did, but I was still disappointed with my decision making. More generally, my word knowledge keeps letting me down. I’m still totally ignorant of a lot of very useful fours and fives, and even if I do know them, I’m likely to miss them because I haven’t played enough for my brain to properly “zone in”. Missing – or simply not knowing – these words has all kinds of knock-on effects. It makes it harder to sort out a bad rack, leading to lower scores (and fewer bingos) down the line. The tournament in Cluj is six weeks away, on 21st and 22nd February. I don’t know if I could realistically make that. It’s a four-hour drive so I’d have to go up the day before and miss some work. I was hoping there would be a sleeper train but there doesn’t seem to be. So far I’ve watched the first three episodes of The Queen’s Gambit which Mark recommended to me. I didn’t like the ending of the third episode – Beth’s stepmother really needed to tell Beth to “pull her head in” – but hey. So far it’s clear that however scary a Scrabble tournament would be, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as chess.

The last time I spoke to my brother, things weren’t easy for him. He said he’d like to take the kids camping at some point, but there’s no way his wife would ever go. She prefers cruises or Center Parcs (the name makes me shudder), neither of which are my brother’s cup of tea, and they wouldn’t be mine either. We had great camping trips as kids, and I’m sure my nephew would love camping. With my brother’s line of work, it would be right up his street too. And what’s more, they live in a great part of the country for it. Practically right on the coast, with the New Forest on their doorstep, and a quick hop over to France if they ever felt like camping over there. I hope my sister-in-law can be convinced.

Family - Life :) - Music

A quiet Christmas

December 26, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s been a very uneventful Christmas Day which I don’t mind at all. The living room looks halfway decent now so I attacked the bathroom. Then I made a salam de biscuiți – well two of them, actually – and a salată de boeuf to take to Dorothy’s tomorrow. I’ve had a lot of Merry Christmas messages with a couple of Marry Christmas ones thrown in. No Mary Christmas ones yet, but there’s still time. A bit earlier I had a chat with my neighbour Elena who is still in Canada bit will arrive back in Timișoara on 9th January.

I haven’t spoken to my brother today, though we had a chat last night. I imagine it’s pretty full-on for him, with his son now three and a quarter and amped all of a sudden by Christmas. Mum and Dad had a stress-free Christmas Day which I’m very happy about. They had dinner at Mum’s older sister’s place in Timaru; my cousin, her husband, daughter and son were also there. My cousin is simply a nice person with a great family, so that would have made everything way easier. My parents had been invited to go out somewhere on Christmas Eve, but Mum did something out-of-character (and utterly brilliant): she said no. She had stuff to do for the church and desserts to make for Christmas Day and all the rest of it, so hats off to her for uttering that very handy two-letter word.

Another of my twenty cousins, the one who lives in New York state, is over in New Zealand with his wife. Just before Christmas they went to Stewart Island with my cousin’s parents. My uncle is 84 and is suffering from memory loss, so I’m not sure what the trip would have been like. My cousin is a keen golfer and recently got a super-rare two on a par-five, known as an albatross. Holes-in-one are ten a penny when compared to an albatross. I’m impressed he was even able to drive the ball far enough to reach the green in two. Yes, I have exactly twenty cousins, just two of whom are on my father’s side.

Yesterday I ended up watching a YouTube video about the 1996 Ethopian Airlines flight that was hijacked. Not long after the plane took off from Ethiopia, three men stormed the cockpit (as you could do in pre-9/11 days) and attacked the pilots with an axe and a fire extinguisher. They beat up the co-pilot, then ordered the pilot to fly to Australia, which was impossible – the plane didn’t have nearly enough fuel for that. Eventually the plane ran out of fuel and ditched off Comoros Islands, near a beach resort. The ditching was spectactularly caught on amateur video – whoever shot the video initially thought it was some kind of air show. Fifty of the 175 people on board survived, including both pilots. I had no recollection of this incident, even though I could remember two other crashes from the same year.

On Monday when I was at Mark’s, they had some music playing. I can’t remember who, but I commented that it sounded rather like Tracy Chapman. Mark’s wife then put on all of her first album, which I much appreciated. I never imagined she’d be a fan. Today I’ve been listening to a few Christmas songs including Chuck Berry’s Run Rudolph Run which I don’t remember hearing before.

I’m still a bit hazy about Dad’s health. Mum’s too, to be honest. Dad told me he was disoriented when he flew his model plane last Sunday. When the plane is flying away from you instead of towards you, left becomes right on the controls and vice-versa. He said he was momentarily confused with that, even though he’s been flying these planes since the late nineties. I can see worries about my parents’ health dominating large chunks of 2026.

Family - Life :) - Music - Scrabble

The game is rigged (and a health update)

December 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

Firstly, Dad sent me a video entitled How to Get Rich. It’s a must-watch. The game of accumulating wealth is increasingly rigged against young people (and even not-so-young people) unless they happen to have rich parents. And upsettingly (and “coincidentally”), people’s self-worth became synonymous with wealth in the eighties, just when the rigging clicked into overdrive. My solution to the rigged game was to walk off the pitch entirely, and I say that as as someone who does have well-off parents, if not exactly rich ones. Honestly I gave up chasing wealth in my late twenties, well before I even thought about living anywhere near Romania.

I spoke to Dad on Sunday night (Monday morning over there). Mum happened to be at the supermarket. Dad looked terrible. He felt dizzy and spoke of an attack of some sort, less than an hour before we spoke and just before Mum went out. His symptoms sounded akin to a mini stroke. While we were talking, Mum came home looking as happy as Larry. She asked me why I looked so worried. Dad later emailed me to say that he and Mum had managed to go for a walk, which was good to hear, and other than that he’d spent the rest of the day working on a painting in the studio. Mum, for her part, hasn’t been great either.

I’ve been on a go-slow today. I just felt so tired. Yesterday I only had a single two-hour lesson and then had a Christmas dinner of sorts in Dumbrăvița with Mark and his wife. Our last one – they’re moving back to the UK, probably in June. Mark, who (unlike his wife) enjoys cooking, made a risotto, while I brought over both my leftover cottage pie and a salată de boeuf I’d made earlier in the day. We had some interesting conversation, a lot of it (inevitably) about teaching because we all do so much of it. Mark’s wife at one point commented that eating out in Romania has got so much more expensive, saying she’d recently been out for sushi with one of the other teachers; it cost the equivalent of £80 each. What?! I said that I’d never spent eighty quid on a meal out in my life, which was certainly no lie. Unexpectedly, the three of us ended up playing Texas Hold ’em poker. Mark busted out early, then his wife won heads-up against me. Really I just wanted to get home by that point.

Scrabble. I’m back playing the Romanian guy again. He says he wants me to play real-life Scrabble. There’s a tournament in Cluj (which is where he lives) in February. Just weeks away. Playing serious Scrabble over the board would be a pretty nerve-wracking experience for me. Top players don’t just put down words, they also do admin stuff like tile-tracking so they can later figure out the endgame, which is something I’ve never done because when you play online that’s all done for you. Plus I might just be too busy for something like that. I’ll have to think about it. Overall I haven’t done badly in the league this time around. I had two surprise narrow victories (by ten and five points) which have certainly helped me.

I never mentioned the Bondi Beach shooting that happened last week, killing at least 15 people including a ten-year-old girl. I stayed at Bondi Beach in 2000, a few weeks before the Olympics, while my parents were living in Cairns. I think of Australia as being a safe haven of sorts, but it’s just as vulnerable to terror attacks as anywhere else; there have been a number in the last decade or so.

I heard that Chris Rea has died. He’s most famous for Driving Home for Christmas which is an excellent Christmas song, though I really like his Road to Hell and especially Auberge.

We’re losing pop and rock stars at a rate of knots now. It’s hard to believe that nearly ten years have passed since David Bowie died. Lately my go-to song has been his Sound and Vision.

Tomorrow will be my cleaning-up day.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Music - Photos - Scrabble

Loads of lessons — time for a break

December 15, 2025 by 0 Comments

I took Kitty to the vet on Friday for her latest round of flea treatments and a general warrant of fitness. As I suspected after changing her food, she’d put on a smidgen of weight: according to their scales (which have 50-gram precision) she was exactly three kilos. She’ll always be a little kitty.

Last week was a very busy one with 35 hours of lessons. That’s a lot of contact time. A lot of talking. When you add in all the preparation, it was a pretty draining week. I’m now staring at my diary for tomorrow; after my early-morning lesson with the Romanian teacher I’ve got six sessions, finishing at 9:30 pm. I’m seriously looking forward to the Christmas break, in particular the days between Christmas and New Year when not a lot happens. This morning I bought an artificial Christmas tree from the supermarket. In some ways I’d have preferred a real one – I like their smell – but I had a look at them at the market and decided they weren’t really cost-effective for a single person. I’m glad I got to the mall this morning at nine, before it became impossibly busy for me. (Only the supermarket is open at that time; the other shops don’t open till ten.) I wondered what the heck was going on with the decorations you could buy in beige and other pastel shades. “Billy, I’ll put the oatmeal candy cane on this side just above the pale lilac Santa hat, and you can put the taupe reindeer over there. There’s a good boy.” Is it because it looks better on Instagram?

Mum and Dad went to Moeraki last week. They called me from outside the fish and chip shop in Hampden, which is the only place they can get a signal. They enjoyed themselves down there, as they usually do. Mum slept a lot. They plan to spend a few days there straight after Christmas.

My first round of the Scrabble league finished last Tuesday. To my surprise, I narrowly avoided relegation with a record of six wins and eight losses. That might not sound great, but I was delighted with the result. It all came down to my final game – with four of the five relegation spots already taken, it was a straight shoot-out, with the winner avoiding the drop. The correspondence format, where you often have to wait hours between moves, made for some nerve-wracking moments. I’d built up a handy lead in that last game but, partly thanks to my total lack of experience in these sorts of situations, did my best to blow it. My last two tiles were Q and J, and I could only play one of them. I decided to play the Q, but that allowed my opponent to play MEOW which a J play would have blocked. (I really should have seen that word.) He then played one tile at a time to maximise his score while I was stuck with the J. I just had enough of a buffer though, and I won in the end by 19. It’s possible they’ll rejig the divisions and I’ll be relegated anyway, and if that happens I’ll be pretty peeved – eking out those six wins took a real effort. The next round starts this Thursday.

On Friday I met up with Dorothy and another friend in town for coffee. And three-way Romanian Scrabble. The café has an upstairs bit, so we took the Scrabble up there. Our friend hadn’t played before, so despite playing in her native language, she wasn’t tuned into triple word scores and the like. In the end I won, finishing just seven points ahead of Dorothy. At one point I had a bunch of vowels and I queried whether AIOLI was valid in Romanian. Our friend asked the waitress about the validity of AIOLI. Unsurprisingly, this was met by a Huh?

A song I’ve been playing a lot in the last few days is John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels, one of his last songs before he was murdered.

It really does feel like time for a break.

Family - Language teaching - Music - Photos - Romania - Scrabble

December in Timișoara and being out of my league

December 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

A lot of stuff happens in Romania in December. The first of the month is the national day with all the parades of military and emergency vehicles. I wasn’t able to see the parade this time, but in the early evening I saw the bit where they march through the city carrying torches and stop every few minutes to sing the national anthem. A few days later there’s St Nicholas’ Day where all the kids get goody bags which always include a stick. Then on the 16th and for a few days afterwards there are commemorations of those who died in the 1989 revolution – that gets particular attention in Timișoara because it all kicked off here. Not long after that it’s Christmas, which is huge, though thankfully still not quite at the level of the UK. After a few blissful days it’s New Year’s Eve which is massive. As the clock ticks towards midnight, it’s practically impossible to move in town for people, as I found out nine years ago. (That was only my second night in my old flat.) Through it all and into January there’s the Christmas market which was very exciting to be among that first time with all the lights and smells. Though it seems far less exciting now – it all just feels normal – it’s actually got bigger.

On Saturday I met Mark in town, in the thick of Christmas market action. There were jazz Christmas songs booming from the stage. Things had all been rejigged to accommodate the extra stuff. We decided to get away from the chaos and go to Piața Unirii where the Museum of Banat was looking quite spectacular with all its Christmas lights. We tried a new restaurant. Predictably, it wasn’t worth it. It rarely is. One young waiter seemed to understand neither Romanian nor English. We sat there for over two hours and all I had was a burger and chips and two beers. Mark also had a dessert – some sort of pancake topped with a meringue which was supposedly some Banat speciality, though I’d never seen it before. I didn’t order a dessert and hoped Mark wouldn’t either because I knew it would mean sitting there for almost another hour.

I went to Ciacova yesterday – one of my favourite small towns around here – but the weather was pretty atrocious and I quickly came home. Other than that there’s not much news. Mum and Dad are currently in Moeraki. I’m glad about that because they manage to relax down there in a way they can’t at home.

Last week I had a session with a 25-year-old woman who said that making a lot of money is important to her. I told her that I gave up on that some time ago, and in fact I earned more at her age than I do now, 20 years later. She wants to move on from her job, not just in the pursuit of wealth but because she currently does shift work and the schedule is horrendous.

I had a difficult moment last week with a 17-year-old girl who in her last session with me made it clear that she didn’t believe in evolution. I find that hard, because to me evolution isn’t something you believe in any more than the result of two plus two is something you believe in. Anyway, on Wednesday night at close to eleven when I was halfway into bed, she sent me a message needing urgent help with an online test. At that time of night. Ugh. Reluctantly I agreed to help her. It was a 15-minute reading comprehension test that was part of the application process for an exchange programme in America. The problem is, her English level is well below what they require. She read the text and the possible answers to me but I struggled to understand what she was saying. If I’d had the text in front of me it would have been easy. In the end we ran out of time. I felt bad for her, but what could I do?

I recently joined an online Scrabble league. They split the participants up into eight divisions of 15 players each. I was put in the sixth division. It has a correspondence format in which you have to play the other 14 players in your division in 14 days. You get ten hours per move. Exceed that and you dip into a three-day time bank. If that runs out too, you lose the game. So there isn’t much time pressure. There is however significant pressure from my opponents who are mostly better than me, even in my lower division. You click on their profiles and they’ve played national and world championships, often with great success. So it’s a real uphill struggle for me. I’m currently on three wins and six losses, with five games still outstanding. Because this league is pretty new, they have an aggressive promotion and relegation system – five up, five down – so that people sort themselves quickly into the right divisions. It’s possible I can still sneak into tenth place and avoid the drop, but I may well end up being relegated. Though my play is sound strategically (I think), my word knowledge is my biggest handicap. As luck would have it, a Romanian player – one of the top-ranked English-language players in the country and a participant of two world championships – is in my division. We chatted in Romanian during our game. At one point he played cAEOmAS. Yes, using both blanks, as if he needed that advantage on top of all his others. I have no idea what that word means or how to pronounce it. I ended up getting stuck with the Q and he beat me by “just” 46. One of my other losses was by five points. My last play was MAN, and then my opponent went out with yet another word I didn’t know. I then remembered that NAM was also a word, and I could have played that instead. That would have given me four extra points, so fortunately it didn’t cost me the game.

On Saturday, the Beatles’ I’ll Follow the Sun came on the radio. Such a beautiful song, and all in a minute and 48 seconds. When I hear something like that (this song is from 1964), I always wonder how older people possibly manage in the modern world.

I’m trying to decide whether I can be bothered to get a Christmas tree. Here are some pictures of Timișoara in December:

The torch parade on 1st December

The Banat museum on Saturday night

Between the two market squares

Family - Music - Scrabble

Keeping the temperature down

December 1, 2025 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow it’ll officially be winter – my tenth in Romania. Winter has a nice cosy feel about it here, all the more so now that I have a cat. Yesterday it tipped it down all day – in my pre-car days I’d have got soaking wet getting to my lessons. We’ve had several days lately with highs of 3 or 4 degrees.

I had an hour-long chat to Mum and Dad this morning. It was all very civil, as if last Sunday’s awful call with Mum had never happened. In the meantime a number of emails bounced around between Dad and me. He talked of Mum’s thin skin, among other things. He said that I can be quite strong in my opinions, particularly when Mum is involved. I don’t think of myself as being opinionated or combative, and I don’t like getting into arguments – if I did, I’d probably lose students quickly – but I appreciate that he said that. In future I will do my best not to react, and to count to ten, even if I think she’s said something totally out of line. (The exception is when she asks me to lie to my brother about her or Dad’s health. I draw the line there. But even then I’ll try to react as calmly as possible. Easier said than done.) That was our fifth verbal bust-up since my parents came here in May, which is far too many. Dad said that over the years he’s learnt not to raise the temperature, as he put it. I totally get that – so often with Mum it’s already baking before you start – but wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a deep, meaningful discussion where you agree and disagree like grown adults? That literally never happens.

Some very good news on the Mum front. She’s been to see the doctor. Properly. The doctor was amazed at Mum’s lack of medical records. They didn’t even know if she’d had children. She was practically a blank slate. On Wednesday she’ll get a full blood test done. This morning she showed me her new vitamin D tablets that she’ll only take once a month. I didn’t know that was possible, but each tablet is 25 times the strength of the ones I take daily. I think Dad’s latest episode was a warning shot across the bow for Mum. They’ve both reached a kind of breaking point. If the apartment sale goes through (and because it’s England, you can never be 100% sure), I really hope that will take the edge off things.

My work week was busy enough, but it wasn’t quite at the level I feared. There were a few cancellations including one really annoying last-minute one. Tomorrow is Romania’s national day – a public holiday – but I’ve got four English lessons anyway, plus the Romanian one.

In the summer I bought a Romanian Scrabble set, and after my lessons yesterday I finally managed to play a game with Dorothy. I won by quite a lot, 392-215, but that was mostly because I drew a lot of high-value tiles which enabled me to score well. I also think my recent games of English Scrabble helped me to see moves over the board. Dorothy got both blanks which are normally a big help, but they came out late and the board was pretty blocked by then. It’s quite a different game in Romanian. The letter values and distributions are different: B is worth five points, G six, C only one. K, Q, W and Y aren’t there at all. There’s no equivalent of a super-powerful S tile: most words can take either an A, E or I on the end, and in some cases all three. Before I even came to Romania, I tried making Romanian words using an English set, ignoring the points, but yesterday’s experience was very different to that. Perhaps the hardest thing was the colour scheme for the premium squares which really messed with my head.

I also managed ten games of Scrabble in English this weekend, winning seven. I’ve just joined a league with a correspondence format – you need to play 14 games simultaneously in 14 days, so you get plenty of freedom as to when you play. It’s split into divisions; the top divisions have some very strong players, so I expect (hope!) I’ll be put in the bottom division. The league starts this Thursday, I think.

Lately I’ve been playing the same song over and over. It’s called Marz, by John Grant. I really liked the ethereal nature of the song and was intrigued by the lyrics. It’s all about a sweet shop called Marz that the singer frequented as a kid, so it touches on childhood nostalgia and that sense of wonder that you have at a young age. Marz is a great name for a sweet shop. I mean, Mars itself is the name of one of the world’s most successful chocolate bars, but then if you really want to attract kids, stick a Z in there. Z means fun and excitement. K has the same effect. Skool looks a lot more kool than school.

The Hong Kong apartment block fire has been all over the news in the last few days. It’s like seven Grenfells in one, with deaths in the hundreds. Utterly horrific. I was shocked to see bamboo scaffolding still being used. I’ve just had a look at other terrible fires that linger in my memory, such as one in a Honduras prison in 2012 (361 deaths) and one in a Bangladesh clothing factory in the same year (117 deaths). The following year a staggering 1134 people died in Bangladesh when a building housing several clothing factories collapsed. I’ve tried to avoid “made in Bangladesh” ever since.

On Friday I had a chat with Elena, the lady who lives above me. Yesterday was her 82nd birthday. She’s still in Canada and will be back her on 10th January.