Music

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Nagging doubts as Mum and Dad are about to arrive

June 6, 2026 by 0 Comments

Not long until Mum and Dad get here. Assuming they get here. There are nagging doubts over whether their check-in (which they can’t do until Sunday evening, 24 hours before their flight) will work. I spoke to them this morning. They were just about to have breakfast before checking out of their Paddington hotel. They managed to see two shows: Moulin Rouge, which they both thoroughly enjoyed, and Beetlejuice, which they didn’t. (Mum said it was “yuck”.) I saw the Moulin Rouge film at the cinema with my grandmother. It didn’t do a lot for me then (I was 21), but it sounds like I’d now enjoy a theatre performance of it.

On Tuesday they said on the radio that there were only nine days until the football World Cup. So there are now only six. And this time, just like last time, I really couldn’t give a damn. Even though New Zealand are in it. With 48 teams, it’s such a bloated competition. It’ll take 72 games just to eliminate a third of the teams. Seriously, sod that. Plus it’s in America and all that has come to mean, and matches will be taking place at all hours of the night for me.

On the radio – probably the same day that they talked about the World Cup – they played Videli noci (“I’ve seen the night”) by Moldovan band Zdob și Zdub, a song I hadn’t heard before. It was in Russian and I couldn’t make out any words except “tram” and “taxi”. I really liked it, and assumed it was a new song of theirs, but in fact it came out in 2001. Recently I played one of Paul Simon’s albums on my record player. (I’ve got a few of them.) One of the songs was My Little Town. Ugh, I don’t like this song, I thought as I was listening to it. I mean, it’s a very good song (it’s Paul Simon after all), but the lyrics – “Nothing but the dead and the dying in my little town” – are upsetting. Right at the other end of the spectrum from very good songs, Life by Des’Ree came on the radio when I was in the car. I’m afraid of a ghost, let’s have a piece of toast, doo-doo-da-doo, or however it goes. It was a pretty big hit when it came out in 1998, so who am I to judge?

I saw on the BBC this week that in 2024 only 9% of transactions in the UK were cash. That figure would be much higher in Romania, but it’s gradually coming down here too. I was wondering what kids do with money in a cashless world. How does pocket money work exactly? I was also thinking about display technology. When I was growing up, different types of information were displayed in their own distinct ways. Newsstands with handwritten headlines. The newspapers themselves. Thermometers. Billboards. Road signs with their extremely clear font. (In New Zealand the smaller road signs were often hand-painted, which I thought was cool.) Petrol prices. Departure boards at railway stations and airports. Clocks, in many different forms. The scoreboards at Wimbledon (dot-matrix on the two biggest courts, manually operated on all the others). And so on. And now practically everything is, rather depressingly, just a video screen. I thought about this as I was driving along and there were video billboards everywhere with the exception of one which had those mechanical triangular prism-shaped slats and showed three different adverts in a cycle.

Scrabble. It isn’t getting any easier in the latest round of the league and I’ll do well to survive. I did however make BACTERIUM in one game, putting down my seven letters on the front of UM which was already on the board. It’s pretty rare that I ever make a nine-letter word.

It’s proper summer here now: the smell of the lime trees, the first mosquito in my bedroom, and birds (jackdaws I think) waking me in the morning with their strangled-cat sound.

Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports - Scrabble

The big cancel

April 28, 2026 by 0 Comments

Right now I’m shot to shit, mentally and physically. Life has slowed to a crawl. I have just about all the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome or ME. Or long Covid, for that matter, not that I’ve ever knowingly had even short Covid. Terrible sleep, energy levels through the floor, and feeling generally discombobulated (great word) when faced with, well, just about anything. I have found pages online linking migraine attacks and chronic fatigue, but you’ll find pages linking anything to anything if you look hard enough. My hope is that given time I’ll get back to normal, as I did for ten days or so in the early part of this month.

So I’ve been cancelling lessons left, right and centre. I stumbled through my two-hour maths lesson this morning, then had a Zoom call with my uni friend (my brain fog meant that even arranging that meeting felt like a big deal). And that was it for the day. I’d let the three Ms (Matei, Mihaela and Martin) know that I wouldn’t be seeing them. Tomorrow I’m cancelling three sessions out of five. Even doing that is hard, because I can’t immediately think of their names to cancel them, and I feel embarrassed doing it. Paying bills online and shit – jeez. It’s all a massive effort, which is exactly why I’m cancelling all lessons beyond the few I need to give me some human contact and a sense of purpose. I’ve been thinking of those films where someone (usually on their own, but with a cat) ends up living in squalor with piles of unopened red bills and how easy it would be to get like that.

So I watched the snooker this afternoon. John Higgins beat Ronnie O’Sullivan 13-12. A fantastic match and all so improbable: Ronnie made all the early running and led 9-4 and had chances in subsequent frames. At the same time Wu Yize (who was my pick for the tournament before it started) edged past Mark Selby 13-11. My man Mark Williams bowed out. He lost 13-9 to Barry Hawkins. A shame, but Barry is a thoroughly likeable chap, just like most Barrys I’ve met. And gosh, there were some crazy frames in that match, like the one where they spent 15 minutes on just the green, then Williams fluked the pink to win it. They’re just about to start the last session of the second round. Tomorrow the quarter-finals (played over just two days) begin.

Last month O’Sullivan made a 153 break – the highest ever. Bigger than the “maximum” 147. A super-max. Of course it would be him to do it. It takes some very unlikely circumstances to make such a feat even possible. You need a free ball before any reds have been potted – that means being snookered on all 15 reds after your opponent has committed a foul themselves, which is pretty damn rare.

Talking of records, someone – in fact two people – did a sub-two-hour marathon in London yesterday. That milestone was always the big one to go. And now it’s gone.

Scrabble. This time around the league has been a pain in the arse. I feel like I can’t be bothered with it, like everything else. Saying that, I managed to post a 606-295 win in a game just finished, going out with my fifth bingo. It’s only the second time I’ve scored 600 or more. The problem is I’m losing the close games. One of them was against a very experienced Aussie lady who beat me in a high-scoring encounter, 472-454. I haven’t studied any words for a while now, but I will need to get back to that if I have any intention of playing real-life games.

The maths girl came in Louis Vuitton shoes this morning. Yikes. Maybe they’re fake; I wouldn’t be able to tell. Last week it was Hermès, which I said was pronounced air-mess but is actually air-mez. Those ès-ending French words and names are unpredictable in how (or if) the final s is pronounced. Many have a silent s, like après and succès, but others have the s pronounced as either s or z.

Edit: The evening session at the snooker is about to start. You get some crappy walk-on music sometimes, but some great stuff too like the Automatic’s Monster which Chris Wakelin just came on to. In gaps between frames on Romanian TV there’s an ad for Magnum ice cream which (surprisingly) uses Courtney Barnett’s Pedestrian at Best. I’ve always liked her; she’s a unique artist. Some other interesting songs I’ve heard lately are Pic Pic by Romanian band Voltaj and REM’s Supernatural Superserious.

Update: Getting out of bed has become like inching into cold sea water. Once out of bed this morning, I watched bits of the news and struggled to take it in. I didn’t quite get why there was such shock that the shooting suspect at the Trump event was a mechanical engineer with a master’s degree. An intelligent guy would want to do that?

Oh, and the other Trump lost to Iran last night. Hossein Vafaei beat Judd Trump in a deciding 25th frame. I had to switch it off at 11-all. That was a bit of a shock.

Language teaching - Music - Photos - Politics

Don’t need to cook much this Easter

April 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

It hasn’t been a bad Orthodox Easter weekend. The best part has been only one lesson over the four days. That was with Matei yesterday, on his 18th birthday. I’ve now been teaching him for over half his life, though those days will soon be over – his maths exam is just a few weeks away, and then he’ll almost certainly be off to Germany for uni. I thought about how well adjusted he is at that age compared to how I was.

This morning I went to the park near the cathedral with all the tulips to read my book. I got there on the dot of ten – the cathedral bells were going full-bore – and the place was practically deserted. People would have been up all night for the Easter vigil. I brought a flask of coffee. I hadn’t read for weeks and it was nice to get back into the swing of it.

Piața Operei this morning

Last night Elena (the lady who lives above me) gave me a huge platter of sarmale, drob (very similar to haggis), and various cakes and biscuits. It was like hitting the culinary jackpot. “It’s a pleasure,” she said. Then, in seriousness, “Don’t throw it away”. Why on earth did she think I might throw all that food away? Sanda (someone I met a few years ago but is usually out of the city) has invited me over to her place tomorrow, so I may take some of that food.

Drob

Last week I had two sessions with the 25-year-old woman who has just started a new job. I was lucky to have two evening slots for her. Her job involves hot-desking – having to book a desk via an app every workday – which for me would be the seventh circle of hell. Not that I’d get to work in a place like that at my stage of the game; she said there’s nobody over 35 there. When you get to 35 you age out of those kinds of jobs, and then what? In one of our sessions we discussed AI. I said that for people of her generation, the first thing they do when they have a question is ask AI. She said, no, for me that’s the second thing I do. The first is to ask TikTok. I bet TikTok is largely AI-based anyway. I keep my lessons entirely AI-free to the best of my knowledge. I’m proud of that fact that my teaching materials are produced manually and guess what, I actually enjoy that side of it.

Polls have just closed in Hungary where maybe, just maybe, Viktor Orbán will be ousted after 16 years. The opinion polls point that way, but in a country where the media is basically state-controlled and the elections may not exactly be free and fair, we really have no idea until actual results start coming in.

Some music. Our Mutual Friend by the Divine Comedy. It came out in 2004. What a powerful song. The band’s name comes from Dante’s poem (which is all about circles of hell as I mentioned two paragraphs ago).

Update: With 85% of the votes counted, it’s all over for Orbán. Hooray! He conceded impressively early in the night. Crucially, Péter Magyar’s party will win at least two-thirds of the seats, meaning they will be able to reverse Orbán’s constitutional changes. Magyar’s party has similar policies to Orbán, but he ran on an anti-corruption and pro-EU platform. This is great news for Europe. The fact that JD Vance was trying to get Orbán re-elected shows you that that’s really good news.

I’ve just been reading about Hungary’s joke political party, called the Two-Tailed Dog Party.

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.