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Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Politics

A day in monotone

October 17, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.

Family - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Music

Home sweet home

October 10, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.

Driving - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Music

A hot mess

August 20, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.

Life :) - Music - Other sports - Tennis - Travel: Romania

Dunken disorderly

June 26, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.


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

Three and easy

June 19, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books - Life :) - Music - Writing a book

Getting into print (but counting no chickens)

June 3, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family - Films - Music - Politics - Writing a book

Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength

May 31, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports

Trying not to sweat the small stuff

April 30, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m struggling a bit. Not at the level of last January or February, but struggling nonetheless. So many small things that add up to a big mess, with no resilience and nobody to share the load with. For instance, I made an online order and got a message to say it would be delivered today, but because I knew I’d be out for lessons I called their number and asked them to deliver it tomorrow instead. But now I’ve just had an email saying (in Romanian) “Great! Your package has been delivered! Mission completed! Give us a review.” So now what, apart from maybe zero stars? Perhaps I’ll still get it tomorrow (the last day before a public holiday) but who knows? Last night at eleven my doorbell rang. It was Domnul Pascu, the man of nearly 80 who lives directly below me. Water was leaking from my bathroom, through his ceiling, and in danger of electrocuting him. A plumber is coming tomorrow morning.

As I cycled to my maths lesson with Matei today I realised I hadn’t yet washed my car. There are car washes all over the city in beyond; they make me think of Sheryl Crow’s mid-nineties song about Santa Monica Boulevard and Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy and a giant car wash where people scrub the best they can in skirts and suits during their lunch breaks. On this sunny afternoon I had five spare minutes so I dropped into Car Wash Point, one of many car washes on the same stroad, just to see how these things work. There was a wash bit and a hoover bit and a blacken-your-tyres bit. There seemed to be a central machine where you obtain and then charge a card which you insert at the various stations. Just the wash bit had six buttons: pre-wash (what does that involve, I wonder?), normal wash, extra foam, wax, something else, and STOP. I wish I could wash the damn thing myself like I used to, back when life was simpler.

Matei has his first of two IGCSE maths papers this Thursday; the second paper (which accounts for 130 of the 200 marks) is next Wednesday. He’s fine with anything that involves a tried and trusted method, but his problem solving (a hard skill to teach) isn’t quite there. I felt powerless today as the sands of our two-hour lesson ran out. We’ll have two more lessons between his two papers. The I of IGCSE stands for International, and interestingly there are three versions of each paper; you get a different one depending on your time zone, so those in later zones can’t gain knowledge of the exam a few hours beforehand.

Yesterday I visited Lugoj, a large town 70 km from here. The river Timiș, and small island between two branches of it, makes for a picturesque setting. In the island there was, as always, an abandoned swimming pool. I could make a niche YouTube channel in which I travel around Romania showing nothing but abandoned swimming pools. The temperature was in the high 20s, hotter than forecast. Had it been 1984 I would have had a dip in that pool. My car heated up spectacularly and I was glad to get home. I should mention that I recently got my old winter tyres replaced with all-season ones. The old ones were nine years old and cracked, and only good for the gunoi (rubbish) according to the mechanic.

Yesterday morning I had my first chat for ages with my cousin in Wellington. Though I spoke to her after her cancer diagnosis and operation, I hadn’t seen her like this with her drooped jaw. Her bilabial plosives – Bs and Ps – became Vs and Fs respectively. As expected, there was no mention of her health. She doesn’t even broach the subject with her three younger sisters. I wasn’t sure how much she really wanted the chat, and we were done in twenty minutes. It was good to see her youngest boy who wants to be a policeman. Then I had a long chat with her husband who was far more, well, chatty than her. We talked about his business plans (the bottom has dropped out of the manuka honey market, he said) and driving in Romania.

On Saturday I watched the relegation battle between Huddersfield and Birmingham. Not a whole ton of quality, but Blues took the lead on the stroke of half-time through Koji Miyoshi. I don’t know what the Huddersfield team talk was during the break, but it worked. They equalised immediately and for a few minutes were rampant. Blues weathered the storm though, and the game rather petered out. One apiece. The draw sent Huddersfield down, while Blues themselves are in the mire. Realistically they now must beat Norwich in the last game of a zany season, and hope that either Plymouth fail to win, or one of Sheffield Wednesday and Blackburn actually lose. There’s all kinds of football vocab now that didn’t exist when I followed the sport more closely. In the nineties, wild goal celebrations in the crowd with arms and legs flailing weren’t known as limbs, and teams with nothing to play for weren’t on the beach. I saw that UB40’s Food for Thought (heck of a song, with the saxophone) is now a Birmingham City anthem of sorts. The song is supposedly about the genocide in Cambodia. In a similar vein, the Cranberries’ brilliant Zombie, which references IRA violence in Northern Ireland, was a favourite of Irish supporters during the last rugby World Cup.

When the football was on, I had one eye on the snooker. The corner pockets are noticeably tighter than last year, and century breaks have been at a premium. I particularly enjoyed the match between Jak Jones and Si Jiahui, which the Welshman won 13-9. Every other frame went down to the wire. In a week’s time both the football and the snooker will be over, and I won’t mind that one bit.

Music - Other sports - Travel: Romania

Back to Buzad

April 26, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

After last weekend I went back to Buzad today, this time with Dorothy to visit her place there. My driving issues were: (a) the ignition key not turning, sending me into a panic until waggling the steering wheel sorted it out; (b) getting lost in the maze of Dumbrăvița’s back streets; and (c) the one-way system near Dorothy’s flat in Timișoara. The rural part of the journey was much more relaxing, even accounting for the potholes that had been scraped out and not yet repaired, as well as the trucks transporting material from the quarry in Lipova.

Dorothy’s house in Buzad is bigger than I imagined, and sits on a biggish plot of land with dozens of fruit trees: apples, pears, quince, plums, peaches, and even a large fig tree whose fruit already look big and tasty. They got a treehouse built in their colossal walnut tree. She and her husband had plans to use the place for a kid’s summer camp, and did run one in 2019, but then Covid came along and her husband got cancer and died in 2021. At the end of my stay there, I picked some elderflower to make cordial from, as well as some fennel and the heavenly-smelling rosemary.

Music. Dad sent me a link to Fisherman’s Blues, a beautiful song – what a fiddle – from the Waterboys, a British folk band. It came out in 1988, three years after their bigger hit (but not in the same league for me) Whole of the Moon. Several weeks ago I bought David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane on vinyl. The first track is the theatrical-sounding Time, which is deep and weird and complex to the point that it should be more famous. Maybe the lyrics about recreational drugs and “wanking to the floor” cost it some airplay back in the day.

Football. Blues travel to Huddersfield on Saturday for their penultimate game of the season. Lose and they’re done for, or close to it. Avoid defeat and they’ve got a fighting chance of staying up. By my calculations, win both their last games (the final game is at home to Norwich) and they have a 99% chance of avoiding relegation. Win one and draw one and they’re at almost 80%. However, Blues’ away record is notably shite, so those stats (which rely on ifs) may be hopelessly irrelevant.

Snooker. So far the pattern has been: tune in at 9pm, watch one player look dominant and poised to win, hit the hay, then wake up the next morning only to find the other guy has somehow won. Earlier today I saw Rob Milkins, nicknamed the Milkman but whose walk-on song is I Am a Cider Drinker. There’s a lot to like about the snooker. For now that is, until it packs up and goes to Saudi Arabia, when that’ll be that. Yet another sport ruined.

Here are some photos from Buzad:

Driving - Family - Music - Photos

About to shoot off, but I think I’ll be here a while

March 28, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s my last day before my Easter break – one of the windiest days I can remember in Romania – and it’s going by in slow motion. I say Easter break, but in fact it’s the first of two Easters I’ll celebrate this year. Due to the vagaries of moon phases and an obsolete calendar, the gap between this year’s “normal” Easter and Orthodox Easter is five weeks – usually it’s just one week, and sometimes they even fall on the same day. My second Easter, when I won’t have to see anybody or do a whole lot, will feel like more of a break than the first.

To get my driving confidence up, I need a window of a few hours so I can get the hell out of the city. A trip around the block won’t do it. This isn’t Geraldine; around the block involves the main road right outside my block of flats (turning left onto it is horrible, I’ve realised) with 18-wheelers bearing down on me. After this afternoon’s trip I got straight into the white wine I bought from Recaș last week. Getting out on the open road though is a whole heap of fun. At this point it seems my car is going to be pretty economical, as French cars often are. (Last night a student told me there’s a saying in Romania that you should avoid the letter F when it comes to cars. That means Ford, Fiat, or French.)

I met Dorothy in town yesterday. We talked about Timișoara and how it suits us both down to the ground. There’s so much to like here: the architecture, the parks, the river, the markets, the funny hole-in-the-wall shops, all the imperfections that make you feel more alive. Add in the welcoming people and the fact that it’s safer than almost any city in the UK. (If you don’t feel safe in a city, everything else falls away.) Plus all the signs being in an exotic language is massively cool. Having everything in my native English would now seem humdrum and tame. Returning to live in the country of my birth is a complete non-starter; New Zealand is an option but unless things ramp up horribly a few hundred miles east, I’ll be in Romania for a while yet.

Dad sent me a video of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, an extraordinary piece of music by The Band. I was more familiar with Joan Baez’s rendition of the song, but The Band’s original version is really quite something. In fact The Band have produced amazing stuff all round; I’ll probably end up adding one of their albums to my collection. Last night Dad told me about a programme he’d been listening to on the radio, all about accents, or more specifically what causes people to keep them or change them when they move. Mum certainly softened out the edges of her Kiwi accent when she moved to the UK; attracting the nickname Iggy based on how she pronounced “egg” might have given her the impetus to do that. Being a teacher must have been a driver too. (My brother’s name contains the same vowel as “egg”; Mum made a conscious effort to say it in the English way so it didn’t sound like a certain pulse that is sometimes preceded by “Mr.”)

I’ll be up at four tomorrow to get a taxi to the airport. Today my brother has taken the little one over to see his great-aunt in the home. My cousin was concerned that if he had a sniffle and his mum were to catch a cold, that would likely be the end of her. I’m planning to cycle over to her place on Monday.

Here are some snaps I took yesterday – a slice of Holland in the middle of Timișoara.