Music

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.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - Tennis

Panic, picking peaches and plums, and plexing your googol

March 26, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It was playing tennis on a balmy early Saturday evening when I had another panic attack. Despite making far more unforced errors than normal I led Florin 5-3. In the next game I was about to serve, down 0-30, when it hit me again. It felt as though my lower body might give way. I soldiered on through that game in which I even had a set point, then to some relief I broke him to love in the following game for the set. Relief because that meant we could change ends. We restarted almost immediately and I staggered on through three games with great difficulty, feeling the need to support myself with the back fence after every point. Look, I’m really not feeling great, I admitted. “Are you dizzy?” Well that’s one way of putting it. He was sympathetic and with ten minutes of our session left we called it a day. I wonder what has brought this on all of a sudden. I can’t be the fear of getting behind the wheel; my first episode was before I bought the car. I’m glad to be going away for a few days – my trip might act as some kind of reset button.

This evening I had my 285th session with Alin and my last for a while. He told me he had to leave his job for personal reasons and would need to give up our twice-weekly meetings until he gets himself sorted. Normally when people say that I don’t expect to see them again, but we’ve built up quite a rapport in that time – a long journey through phrasal verbs, native-speaker podcasts, and a great deal of humour – so I’d put my chances at about even. Tonight we talked about cars and little else; he told me about his five-minute driving test in the mid-nineties. Yesterday I sent the mother of one of my students a message to say I could fit her son in before I go away. She replied to say that he’s too busy and by the way I’ve just cut my finger while slicing a carrot, with an accompanying picture of her bandaged digit. She’s into star signs and stuff so I then suggested that the full moon was responsible for her bad luck.

On Saturday morning before my long day of lessons (they continued after my truncated tennis session) I had a great chat with Mum, the best I can remember for a while. She had been picking Black Boy peaches from trees (pomi) outside the nearby preschool, wondering how all that ripe fruit was still there. I always wonder the same thing when I fill a whole rucksack with plums from the Mehala area of Timișoara. She gave me some tips on preserving fruit – I’ve been hanging on to my jars. Then we talked about our trip to the West Coast and the incredible weather we had, then the possibility of my coming back to New Zealand. My parents are putting me under no immediate pressure, and that’s just as well because while in theory NZ would be great, in practice I dunno man. For one, could I even afford it, and secondly I feel so alive in this place. Then Dad came on the line and we discussed cars. A recurring theme right now.

In my maths lesson with Matei we strayed (partly) off topic as we discussed the googol and its big daddy the googolplex. A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros, right, and a googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeros. It took him a while, then bam!, mind blown. You can’t write it out because there aren’t enough atoms in the universe. Um, sorry what? That’s one thing I love about teaching maths. English is very cool, but you never quite achieve the bam! effect.

I loved this morning’s Romanian lesson. Most of it was spent discussing our teacher’s day-to-day experiences of living under communism. She told us about the summer of ’89, the Ceaușescus’ last summer. She was at university, sharing a tenth-floor room with three other girls. It was inhumanly hot and air conditioning was an unthinkable luxury back then. During an important exam period the only way she could sleep was by soaking bedsheets in water. There was a lift which sometimes left the girls stranded between floors. Escaping involved opening the door by disengaging a small wheel and then climbing up or down, at not inconsiderable risk, to the next floor. Occasionally the water supply would cease and they’d be forced to get water from a well (as I do now with my drinking water) and carry it in glass bottles (no plastic bottles back then) up those ten floors. Now she lives in a ground-floor flat. After those experiences I’d want to be close to the ground too. At the end of a lesson we played Taboo where I had to describe a word to Dorothy (or vice versa) while avoiding five forbidden words. On one occasion I had to guess “panic”. I play Taboo with my students; I created over 500 cards of my own, with just three banned words for each.

When I discussed my favourite vinyl albums of those I own (so far), I neglected to mention Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside. A masterpiece, and how she made it as a teenager I’ll never know.

Driving - Music - Photos

A quick trip

March 21, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Earlier starts are good for me. This morning I had a one-hour lesson from eight, then cycled to the local produce market where I bought a sack of potatoes, cheese (cow’s this time), some spinach and some spring onions. I heard a stallholder say “crumpir”, a regional word for “potato”: it comes from the Serbian “krompir”. As usual at this time of year there were bags of stinging nettles for sale; I should probably try cooking with them at some stage.

After I got back from the market I took my car for a spin because I was free of lessons until 2:30. What’s great about Timișoara (among many other things) is that when you’re out of the city, you’re properly out of it, so I drove to Recaș, 25 minutes down the road. Famous for its winery, it’s easy to get to from my side of the city. When I arrived at eleven, I found a town brimming with life and bathed in sunshine. It was lovely just to sit for a few minutes on a bench in the small central park where the trees were in pink blossom and the birds were chirruping away. There was a small indoor market and a popular outdoor stall selling mici and chips. Most of the folk were older; a fair few of them were gypsies. I’d only been to Recaș once before, back in 2017, to pick up wine with one of my students. After a quick look round the place I went to the winery outlet (in a more modern building now) and got five litres of medium dry white wine from the tap for NZ$18 or just under £9, then came home. On the way back I saw a Wizz Air plane come in to land – probably the one I’ll be coming in on two weeks tomorrow. Though it was a chilly start to the day and the temperature barely made it into the teens, there’s hardly been a cloud in the sky.

In recent weeks I’ve felt a lot of anxiety. I’m not sure why. It’s probably a combination of pessimism about the modern world as a whole (I keep wanting to escape it by putting on 50-year-old records) and recognising that I’m getting older and need to change aspects of my life but don’t know what or how. It’s also the being on my own thing. It’s been so long that I hardly remember anything else, but it’s not supposed to be like this, is it? You’re supposed to have a rock, a safety net, someone to share your experiences and problems and foreign-language life admin with. Without that, life can get precarious, overwhelming, and expensive. (Single people are screwed over financially all round. Politically, we are second-class citizens, not in the same league as hard-working families that David Cameron and his ilk liked to woo.) During my chat with Dad, he wondered how on earth he would manage his banking should anything happen to Mum. He doesn’t even have an operational cell phone.

My records. I’ve now got 18 albums. What are my favourites so far? My top three would probably be Leonard Cohen’s 1975 greatest hits album (one of the first batch of records I bought), Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram, and Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn. All brilliant. Ram showcases Paul in his raw state, shortly after the Beatles broke up and before he got all sugary. Some honourable mentions too, such as ELO’s double album Out of the Blue, and Paul Simon’s Graceland which doesn’t really count because I’d played it hundreds of times on CD so its brilliance wasn’t exactly a shock. I mean, the first track Boy in the Bubble, good God. And if you’re talking individual tracks, Ramble Tamble – track one of Cosmo’s Factory by CCR – that’s mindblowingly cool.

I’ll be off to the UK next Thursday, coming back the following Thursday. After staying in St Ives, my brother will kindly pick me up from the airport and take me to Poole; I’ll probably stay there until Easter Sunday. Then I plan to get the bus to Cambridge and stay in St Ives. On the Monday I’ll try and see my aunt in the home – that will likely involve a long bike ride, then the next day I might see my friend in Birmingham. On Wednesday I’ll have to make my way to Luton and stay there overnight. I think I’ll just stay the night in the airport, as tiring as that might be.

I was apprehensive about getting a car but after today’s excursion I’m glad I’ve done it. It will open up all kinds of possibilities to see this beautiful country. And rather than being a cause of stress, it might have the opposite effect on me – outside the city, at least – just like it did in New Zealand.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Music - Other sports - Tennis

Panic stations

March 12, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I didn’t sleep well last night and got up at 7:30, half an hour after I meant to. After breakfast I reviewed some Romanian words – there’s a few I can never bloody remember – before our lesson that started at nine. It was an enjoyable lesson – probably the highlight of the day. Then I called Mum and Dad. During the pandemic (it’s now four years since everything went mad) we became closer, but now our lives and experiences have drifted apart again. I have to feign interest in their building project, while the novelty of their son teaching English in Romania has long since worn off. During our chat, they said they might come to Europe in 2025. Might. Jeez.

After the chat with my parents I felt on edge. Can I face another online lesson with that damn woman? Following a surprisingly normal chat, she read screeds of corporate shite from Harvard Business Review. Doubling down on robust penetration capability to achieve superior resilience in a crowded landscape. The more I stare at that sentence the more lewd it gets. She read at 100 miles an hour – her typical Romanian monotone (and the subject matter) made it seem even faster. Slow the eff down. Please. Then it was the 17-year-old girl. We talked about music festivals. I’ve never been to one; she’s already been to three. Have I missed out? Yes, she said. I’m not convinced.

Then it was off to the twins. A quick turnaround. They wanted to talk about their diarrhoea travel experiences and Adolf Hitler. Then a third of the way through our 90-minute session it happened. A panic attack, just like I had regularly in 2001. Or at least that’s what I think it was. A sudden jolt, my heart seemingly skipping a beat, and I felt as if my lower body was giving way from under me. The twins wondered what was happening. Shaken, I recovered and made it through to the end, then did some breathing exercises on my bike trip back. My final lesson of the day was with the extremely pleasant guy in his late forties. He read from Michelle Obama’s autobiography – a fascinating window into her early life, with no end of words and expressions to challenge even an accomplished English speaker such as my student. At one point she mentioned the Muppets. I asked him if they got the Muppets here in Romania. Yes, he said, but only right here because being close to the border meant they could access Serbian TV. He was lucky to live in Muppetland, he said.

Last week I felt terribly demotivated. Heck, I’ve got to do something. Two things. Sort out a car for myself and write that damn book. I had 32 hours of lessons despite a number of cancellations. I doubt I’ll ever get the money from Marco, the bugger. Two and a half hours, then I don’t hear from him. The smoking in bed and his unwavering religious devotion rang alarm bells, though this is Romania, a country of many false alarms. On Saturday I had the most incredible lesson with the girl who has just turned seven. Two hours. How will I cope? Or more to the point, how will she cope? She managed phenomenally well. Several worksheets and colouring exercises on clothes, then a bingo game (she knows her numbers up to 60 upside down and backwards), then I read her a few tactile books before we played a 20-minute game of Kiwi-style Last Card which incredibly we didn’t even finish. She sat there the whole time in rapt attention.

Yesterday I met Mark at Scârț, the place where they have the museum of communism. It was packed there because there was a vinyl sale that I wasn’t even aware of. Then I found both Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Cosmo’s Factory and David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, both of which I’d been looking at online just an hour earlier. At 220 lei between them, they weren’t cheap, but I snapped them up. As Mark said, you’ve got to have a hobby. I’ve now got 18 records, most of them older than me. The texture of the sleeves, the artwork, the smells, it’s all pure happiness and that’s before I even start playing them. Mark and I had a good chat as always, though 14 lei for a lukewarm coffee was a rip-off. I love that area of town so I then hung around in the park on Romulus and Remus Streets with all the blossom out and hardly anyone else around. My next trick was carrying the records home on my bike (I was unprepared, obviously) without falling off it again. Then in the evening I met Dorothy in Piața Unirii. She’d just got back from a trip to the UK where she slept in six different beds and then got bumped off her flight home but got put up in Luton and received $400 in compensation.

Football. Following any kind of sport can be a heck of a time sink. After work on Saturday I watched Birmingham’s game at Millwall, direct rivals in the battle to avoid relegation. It wasn’t easy on the eye. Blues were shocking in the first half but improved somewhat in the second. The game was petering out to a goalless draw, but then Millwall scored from a corner in the 90th minute – a real sucker punch – and that was that. With ten games to go Blues are teetering, there’s no doubt about it. Since their manager was forced to take a back seat, they’ve taken just one point in four games and sit a single point above the drop zone. The good news is that five of Blues’ next seven matches are at home, including tomorrow night’s catch-up game with Middlesbrough. Straight after that run, they travel to Rotherham who were long ago cut adrift at the bottom of the table. If they can garner four wins in those eight matches, they’ll very likely stay up. Even three with the odd draw would give them a good chance. Less than that though and they’re in deep doo-doo.

Dorothy and I even talked briefly about football last night. Mostly we discussed the evocative names of the clubs. Um, OK, not Birmingham City, but rather those named after a girl or a weekday or the Far East or three successive letters of the alphabet. We didn’t talk about the names of the grounds, but those can be quite lovely too. I used to love Burnden Park and Upton Park and Roker Park and the Baseball Ground, none of which exist today. I remember a game from the 1995-96 season in which West Bromwich Albion drew 4-4 with Watford having been way out in front. West Brom’s ground was, and still is, called the Hawthorns. As Watford equalised, a reporter said “it’s four-four at the Hawthorns!” and I remember thinking how poetic that sounded.

In tennis news, Simona Halep’s doping ban has been greatly reduced and she’ll be back on the court later this month. Great news. It’ll be interesting to see how well she does after such a long time away. And this morning on TV they showed the most extraordinary rally between 37-year-old Gaël Monfils and eighth-ranked Hubert Hurkacz. Monfils won the point, and eventually the match. As for my tennis, our season is about to resume but the cost has risen from 40 lei an hour to 70 – why such a huge increase I don’t know – so my court time is bound to come down. That’s a real shame.

Tomorrow morning I’ll have a look at a blue Peugeot 307. I’ve got to get this sorted, as scary as driving again might be.

That was a very long one, I’m sorry.

Family - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports - Romania

Family contact

February 12, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Good news – my brother and his family are going to New Zealand in August for three-and-a-bit weeks. They’ll come back just before my nephew turns two and the fare whops up. I spoke to my sister-in-law about it on Friday, just after they’d booked the trip. (She’d had to get the green light from her boss.) She was apprehensive about flying so far with her son, a placid little chappy though he is. Will the trauma of it all mess him up? I was roughly the same age as him when Mum took me – and my tiny brother – to New Zealand in 1982. The mind boggles. My parents are paying for the trip (“well I hope so,” my brother said, “because we can’t afford it”). That’s what living in the UK in 2024 with a sodding great mortgage does to you. Mum made the trip in ’82 (a similar cost in real terms) without batting a financial eyelid. They were living – pretty much – on just the unpredictable income of my father. Crazy, isn’t it?

They should have a nice time. The house will – I hope! – be finished, so Mum won’t be worn out and highly strung and miserable (let’s be honest) like she was when I was there. At any rate, even if she was under stress, she’d take great pains not to show it, unlike with me. I get the real deal. They’ll see a lot of Mum and Dad – if my parents had come to the UK, that might not have been the case – and there will be happy times as the little one is passed around various aunts and uncles.

A fairly standard week of lessons for me. On Saturday I had eight hours, including four of maths. With both my maths students it was the same story. Determine what the problem is and how to solve it, then do your calculations, not the other way round! There needs to be a maths equivalent of “aviate, navigate, communicate”. And jeez, when you’re 15 years old, dividing 35 by 7 doesn’t require a calculator. I wish someone would invent the shockulator, a calculator that administers electric shocks that increase in voltage the easier it gets to do the problem in your head.

On Wednesday I saw the ENT specialist again. We did the whole thing in Romanian this time. He put that probe up my nostrils. Stop flinching! Stop tensing up! Well I’m trying, but it bloody hurts! After then sucking the wax out from my ears (plenty of it), he gave me a prescription for some nasal spray that will last me two months, if that. I’ll probably wait until the long hot summer when I’ll need it the most.

Yesterday I went a different way on my bike. The wind made it slow going. I rode past the factories, some still in operation, others not, to Moșnița Nouă. When I went there six years ago for a lesson it was a village. Not any more. I wouldn’t want to live there.

Muzicorama – the nightly music programme on local radio – sadly finished last September, not that I got many chances to listen to it. The host, Bogdan Puriș, still does his show on a Sunday morning, and yesterday there was certainly an eclectic line-up. Four consecutive songs (saved on my Shazam) were Hey Matthew by Karel Fialka (1987), Bats by the Scary Bitches (2009) (because the lyrics mention Transylvania?), Come Down Jesus by José Feliciano (1971), and This Wheel’s On Fire by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity (1968).

Lately I’ve been listening – a lot – to David Bowie’s 2002 album Heathen.

I’ve just read that Kelvin Kiptum, marathon world record holder (2:00:35) died in a car crash yesterday. The Kenyan was only 24. At such a young age for a marathon runner, he would have had many chances to go under two hours. Tragic news.

Spumotim, which I think is still up and running. They make polyurethane foam products. (Spumă is Romanian for foam.)

As much of this colossal abandoned factory as I could get in the camera lens
Family - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports

Not this year, maybe not ever

February 4, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Not a terrible week, if a fair few cancellations. Two or three times this week I’ve had to check myself. This will be nice for Mum and Dad when they come over. Ah. I’d been looking forward to it for months. But they won’t be coming this year, maybe not next year either, maybe not ever. I avoid the subject with them on the phone now. When we last spoke, they’d just been to Washdyke to do something housey. Mum talked about the importance of flow. Heck, they had all the flow in the world back at the other place.

Three sessions today, including a marathon 2½-hour maths lesson this afternoon. When I saw Matei this morning for our usual two-hour stint, his parents – they both have senior positions at a big supermarket chain – showed me photos of their recent team building. His father was up on the dance floor. An extrovert’s dream. When we were upstairs in his room, Matei – less extroverted than his father – said he dearly hoped he’d never have to do that. We spent most of the session on quadratic equations, which he can just about do in his sleep. He has an enormous world map on his wall. It’s fun to stare at. Spratly Islands popped out at me today. Sometimes I can even use it to explain concepts, like when we were doing bearings and I happened to have watched a video of a 1989 flight between the Brazilian cities of Marabá and Belém which went horribly wrong, partly because someone had keyed in the wrong bearing. On the way to Matei’s place I stopped at Kaufland to get a coffee from the machine. A homeless man who must have been there all night asked me for the time.

Yesterday I watched this YouTube video on Luton. Yikes, that hotel. A reminder that I’ll have to stay a night in Luton in two months’ time. The one positive from that video is the local football team: yes, Luton Town play in the Premier League. At a ground with entrances inside a row of Victorian terraced housing. Last season they went up through the play-offs in dramatic fashion. Their final against Coventry stood at 1-1 with moments left in extra time when they scored. Delirium. Only for the goal to be chalked off for handball following a video replay. Then they somehow kept their nerve to win on penalties. This afternoon Luton had a ridiculous 4-4 draw at Newcastle; they sit one point above the relegation zone.

On Tuesday I had my first haircut for ages. The place opposite me closed a few months back, and it’s now a trek to get it done. A middle-aged woman did it. I apologised for my dodgy Romanian. It doesn’t matter. I was hoping she might say it wasn’t actually that bad, but hey.

I’ve now ordered eleven records, the latest being Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue, and a few books. I’m getting them sent to a single location near Paris, and from there I’d get them delivered as a job lot rather than in dribs and drabs.

Tomorrow I’m going over to Mark’s place, and from there we’ll go to Buziaș, a town 30 km from here.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music

Stubborn refusal and songs about trains

January 26, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I felt sad after talking to my parents yesterday. Seeing them was something to look forward to. They can justify it all they like, but refusing to come after the dozens of times my brother must have asked them – I mean yeesh. We’re talking some serious stubbornness here. Steely determination. OK, they’ve got their self-inflicted house shite to deal with, but the trip would still be very doable. Hopefully my brother will make the journey in our late summer and the rellies (do people still say that in NZ?) will get to see and hold the little man.

This morning, after the lesson with the priest, I had back-to-back lessons with a woman in her late forties and her 13-year-old son who’s a piece of work. I feel sorry for her. Before that I watched a spot of Romanian breakfast TV and they talked about digitising the post office here. Not before time, because right now it’s a clunking wreck. But there are bound to be teething problems (to put it mildly) when the new system doesn’t function properly and the system grinds to an even screechier halt than it does at the moment. And in 2024, talk of computerised post office systems will frighten anyone with even half an eye on the UK: the post office scandal there, which took a four-part docu-drama for people to sit up and take notice, has been appalling. Here’s what an American who lives in the UK, and now has British citizenship, has to say on the matter.

Music. I’ve been listening to a lot of R.E.M. lately. Their song Driver 8, which I mentioned in a previous post, made me think of other great train-based songs. Here’s a few I can think of:
Marrakesh Express by Crosby, Stills & Nash
City of New Orleans by Arlo Guthrie (I’ve actually been on that train)
Downbound Train by Bruce Springsteen
Last Train to Clarksville by the Monkees (yeah I know)
5:15 The Angels Have Gone by David Bowie
Long Train Running by the Doobie Brothers
Midnight Special by Creedence Clearwater Revival
I thought Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show was about a train (it does say “southbound train” in the lyrics) but it turns out I was wrong.

And that’s my lot.