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Out of the dimness (and into the light?) as we enter winter time

October 29, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s the last day before the clocks go back, and the last vestiges of not-winter.

I played singles tennis tonight with the “good” Florin. After this morning’s rain the court was slippery – dangerously so – and I didn’t enjoy it one bit. The wet patches made it worse than if it was fully wet. I started out at the greasier end. Florin made a fair few unforced errors and I led for large parts of the set, but we landed in a tie-break which I lost 7-3. When that was over I told Florin what I thought – that playing singles on a slippery court and risking a broken ankle is bloody stupid – but he didn’t seem bothered. After the changeover (we only switch sides after each set) I moved to the less horrible end, but still slid in the tramlines and almost fell twice. I won the second set 6-2 and led 2-1 in the third when our time ran out, but amazingly Florin moved around the court at the (to me) lethal end as if nothing was amiss, at one stage even retrieving a deep lob. I was handicapped down there. I asked him how he managed it (was it the shoes?), and he said the secret was being brought up in north-eastern Romania, close to the border with Ukraine. Harsh winters back then, so he soon learnt how to move in the snow and ice. I can see that two years ago I had the same problem.

I’ve been reading Wild Wales, George Borrow’s account of his trek on foot through Wales in the middle of the 19th century. Back then, Wales really was wild and outsiders rarely ventured there. Unusually, Borrow could speak Welsh at a decent level. He liked to show off his intellect (this grates after a while) in his conversations with the locals he met along the way, which were surely embellished. My grandmother had a cottage in mid-Wales which we often stayed in when I was a kid, and necessitated a long car journey which I’ve talked about previously on this blog. In my teens I viewed that part of the country as dull and grey and remote, but really it was beautiful. I haven’t been there since 2001, and I’d like to go back.

I’ve picked up a few words of Welsh while reading Borrow’s book. My grandmother’s cottage was in the small town of Rhayader, a semi-Anglicised version of rhaiadr, meaning waterfall, though in fact there hasn’t been a waterfall there for centuries. The word for “not” or “without” is dim, which has a certain logic to it. People in Borrow’s book are always saying “Dim Saesneg”, meaning “no English (language)”, the word Saesneg literally meaning Saxon. For a while I was dim dŵr poeth (without hot water) and dim arian (without money – arian is literally silver) from Barclays, but those dim days are hopefully over now. Last week I called the complaints team to accept the £200 compensation they offered me, derisory though it was. Getting it all over with has a value.

Dad’s sister has bounced back better than he or anyone else (including her) imagined. He’s been seeing her almost every day. Her children, realising she’ll hang on a while longer, have stopped bothering to see her. Of course, her prognosis is still poor. Tomorrow is her 76th birthday and I will make the effort to give her a call, difficult though that will be.

Yesterday Dad caught up with his friends (and mine too – they visited me in Romania six years ago). The couple are in their mid-70s, similar to my parents, and although he was at death’s door in early 2022 before staging a recovery, they’ve managed to cut out most of the stress from their lives while still travelling and pursuing interests. I wish my parents could do likewise.

The Rugby World Cup final is about to get under way between the All Blacks and South Africa, the historical heavyweights of the competition with three wins apiece. (Two wins for Australia and one for England, so the Southern Hemisphere is going to make it 90% whatever happens tonight.) I vividly remember the 1995 final between the two nations – one of the most famous rugby matches ever because of what the occasion meant. There have been some good matches in the knockout stages but I haven’t watched any of them. My mind has been elsewhere. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the Irish fans’ use of the immensely powerful Cranberries song Zombie as an unofficial anthem. Not long till kick-off, and I guess I might actually watch it.

Books - Family - Music - New Zealand - Photos

Off to the Coast

August 28, 2023 by 0 Comments

The builders and electricians are hard at work. They’re listening to a classic hits station, and I’ve just been reminded that there’s nothing like a Crown – for picking it up and putting it down. As I write this, they’re playing Blind Melon’s No Rain. Mum and Dad’s plan is to head to the West Coast tomorrow. They’ve had the map out so they can decide on what route Mum wants to take. I’ll just go with whatever. (Next year Mum and Dad plan to visit Romania. We’ll probably go on some kind of road trip. Just imagine if I arranged the whole thing, with accommodation for four or five nights, without asking Mum if she’d like to do this or if that would be too far.)

Because the weather looked dicey yesterday morning, Dad didn’t attempt to fly his plane. With the flying a no-go and Mum at church, Dad and I went for a walk at the wonderfully named Pekapeka Gully. I drove an electric car for the first time – I was behind the wheel for all of three minutes. On Saturday Mum saw the Barbie movie at Geraldine Cinema with some friends from church or golf or both. Dad and I nearly went too, but we stayed at home and watched Dune, a film based on Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel. I think Mum had recorded it. We expected it to be a modern version, but it was from 1984 and it showed. A youngish Sting was among the cast. It was hard to make head or tail of, and Dad said it bore little resemblance to the book. Unlike me, he’d actually read it. Just before Mum got back from Barbie, my brother rang, and we saw the little one who is already not so little. My brother asked when my parents would be coming to the UK, and he asked again when Mum called him back after she returned from the cinema.

Dad had been trying to find his record collection. He said it was buried somewhere in the spare room, beneath cushions and boxes of mason jars and, well, paintings. When my parents were out I rooted around in there and found it. He doesn’t have a big collection – perhaps two dozen records in a single box. I was surprised he had so much classical music. He told me he had Paul McCartney’s Ram but he must have misremembered. He had Wings’ greatest hits plus the Beatles’ Please Please Me and Abbey Road. He put on Abbey Road but his record player needs fixing – it only has one working speaker.

I finally finished my book yesterday – Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. It was one of the books the previous owner of my flat had left behind. (I doubt I’d have chosen something with Love in the title otherwise.) Some books are so absorbing that you can glide from one page to the next, even if there’s background noise like the TV or building work. This one is firmly in the other category. Extremely well written, but so much complexity of plot (often fantastical) and language. It was translated from Spanish, after all. As soon as you see the past perfect (and there was a lot of past perfect in this book), you know the going will be tough.

On Sunday mornings Radio NZ has a segment named Calling Home, where a New Zealander who has moved overseas calls in to the programme. Calls home. Recently somebody called in from Uganda. Mum suggested that I write in, but I’m not a born and bred Kiwi, and New Zealand isn’t quite home. Nowhere is, really – Timișoara is the closest thing I have. In the film Miracle Club, Daniel, the boy who didn’t speak, finally said one word – home – when he returned from Lourdes. It’s one of the most powerful words in the English language. The sound of it – the long O, a diphthong, before the satisfying ‘m’ sound – makes it especially evocative. To lack a home, a base, a rock, certainly can’t help one’s mental health.

The Skip-Bo scores are now 4-2-2.

Milford Lagoon on Saturday

Three kererū, or native New Zealand wood pigeons, in my parents’ plum tree yesterday
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New Zealand is off the map here

August 5, 2023 by 0 Comments

My parents are staying in Moeraki. This morning (my time) they called me from the hotspot in Hampden to wish me a good trip. The signal was dodgy as ever. They’ll be picking me up in Christchurch on Monday afternoon.

It’s my last full day before I jet off. I’ve made these sorts of trips before without batting an eyelid, but this time it all feels like a bigger deal. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, maybe it’s because I haven’t done anything like this for seven years and the world isn’t the same place now, or maybe it’s the reactions I get from other people. New Zealand is unimaginably far off most Romanians’ mental maps. Few of them could locate the country on a real map of the world, even one that actually shows New Zealand. When it’s stinking hot (like it is right now) and I open up a weather app that says it’s currently one degree in Geraldine, it doesn’t compute. How can it be both winter and night-time? The US and Canada certainly do feature, however, and this morning I dropped in on my neighbour above me, who told me she (or some member of her family) had just booked a flight to Canada for next Friday, and she’ll be gone for five months.

I managed to keep today free of lessons. My last lesson before I go – my 614th of the year – was an online session last night with a woman who broke her ankle two weeks ago playing tennis. The one before that was with a woman I started with way back in 2017. Since then our lessons have been off and on, and two years ago she gave birth to a girl. Last night’s meeting with her was on Skype; she was at her parents’ place in a small town. It was a traditional house that her grandparents had built – the family house, to be passed down through generations, is a feature of Romanian life – and it seemed to be overrun by animals of all sorts. My student is lovely, and easy to build a rapport with, but she lacks the attention to detail required to really improve. She’s been at about the same level for years. For example, the word “freight” came up on numerous occasions last night because she works in logistics. The first time, she pronounced it like “fright”. It could logically be pronounced that way, if you consider height, but it isn’t, so I corrected her, emphasising that “fright” is a different word. But despite my best efforts she kept on pronouncing it “fright” regardless, and I gave up. I expect that if I’m still teaching her in 2029, I’ll still get messages from her saying “I will late 2 minutes”.

Yesterday was Ziua Timișoarei, the 104th anniversary of when Banat – the region where I live – officially became part of Romania. In the gap between my two pairs of lessons I met Dorothy and we chatted for an hour in one of the cafés in Piața Victoriei – inside, to get out of the heat.

My bags are now packed. I’ve used up half my 30 kg allowance and I’m wondering what the hell I’ve missed.

Update: In tonight’s Muzicorama, the big highlight for me was Paul Young.

The Rose Garden this morning

A volleyball court, where the European youth finals were played, outside the Opera House
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music

What was the secret?

August 1, 2023 by 0 Comments

I had two lessons this morning. First I had an hour with the young woman who looks like a similar-aged Martina Hingis when she ties her hair back. Her English isn’t bad, but – as is often the case with the young ones – her vocabulary is a couple of thousand words shy of where it needs to be, and I don’t think she’s all that interested in expanding it. Then I had Alexandru, the twelve-year-old football fanatic who lives in Spain. I asked him whether he goes by Alexandru or Alejandro or just Alex, and to my surprise he said Alek, with a k, a letter that doesn’t exist natively in either Romanian or Spanish – he clearly just wants to be a bit fancy. I’ve got three more lessons planned for later today, and with a bit of luck they’ll actually happen.

On Sunday I had a longish chat to Mum and Dad. How did you get into this mess with the plumber? Well, it’s not that much mess, but the how is because I’m in Romania. The Wild West (or East). You literally just pay for the building or plumbing work, in cash of course, and if there’s collateral damage (that could in some cases be lethal), that’s your lookout. I spoke to my upstairs neighbour who has family in Canada and she said how “civilised” it all seemed over there. I then met Mark for lunch. He also has a Canada connection – his daughter lives in Vancouver – and he and his girlfriend had just got back from there. Later I played tennis, with thousands of squawking crows flying overhead and somebody in a nearby church banging on a toacă. When I got home I called my brother who has his knee op tomorrow. His mood was about what you’d expect from someone about to be put of commission for a while. We didn’t talk for long.

My parents said that they’re unlikely to see their grandson in New Zealand anytime soon because the cost would be beyond my brother’s means. Well then, Mum, how did you afford to fly your two boys – both under two years old – to New Zealand in 1982? My brother is ten years older than you were. They have two incomes, not the one-and-a-tiny-bit you had. Just how? Oh yes, your double-digit (ha!) monthly mortgage which you were able to achieve by, let me see what the trick was, let me think for a sec, hmm, oh yes that’s it, being born at the right time. To be fair, my parents were pretty frugal too, but society somehow allowed them to be.

Muzicorama last night. Big birthdays were the theme. Lobo (born 31/7/43) was first up with Me and You and a Dog Named Boo (1971) – the wonders of a simple life on the road. Most of the rest of the programme was devoted to Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim (born 31/7/63), with those massive hits in 1998-99 that remind me so much of my first year of university. Some I liked, some I didn’t, and that’s OK.

Though it’s now August, we still have long evenings, mostly as a result of our geographical position and time zone. I should make the most of my final four of them. (Sunset tonight is 9:11.)

Life :) - Music

Health stuff and a few tunes

July 22, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve had an inch-wide ball-like lump on my back for the last few weeks. On Tuesday I was seeing the doctor anyway, so I showed it to him. He said categorically that it was a benign cyst. I hope he’s right. I’ll try and have it removed when I get back to Romania in September. He also wrote me two prescriptions for my antidepressants so I can stock up for my trip. Then I’ve got my incessant sinus problem to contend with. I was always a one-pillow person. Lately I’ve been using two. Last night I added a third, so I could really prop myself up. Two other rules: drink camomile (should I include an h?) tea before bed, ensuring I inhale plenty of steam both from the kettle and the mug, and no screens after 10pm. The heat hasn’t helped. Last night was just a couple of degrees cooler and got by without the fan; I had my first proper night’s sleep for ages. But I didn’t feel fully refreshed, even after that. I’ve been fumbling in a fog of near-permanent fatigue for weeks on end.

This morning I had a two-hour session with David (one of two Davids I now teach) who had his 16th birthday when he was in Tunisia with his family. He didn’t think much of the place; he showed me a beach strewn with camel shit. (Here’s David Bowie talking about camel shit in a song from Scary Monsters.) We played the skyscraper board game I came up with last summer; he suggested a rule change which I was a big fan of.

I recently listened to Too Many Friends by British band Placebo. It opens with an impressive “My computer thinks I’m gay” and then goes on to say “This is my last communiqué down the superhighway.” It’s about social media, and it’s no coincidence that it came out in 2013 when social media stopped being an ignorable sideshow and noticeably – depressingly – took over from everything else. Superhighway appearing in the lyrics is interesting. In 1995 the internet was this newfangled thing often termed (in the UK at least) “the information superhighway”. Placebo have been around for ages; they were already in business by ’95.

I heard a couple of other interesting songs last night on Muzicorama. One was the satirical Short People (1977) by Randy Newman. The other was the brilliant Fire Lake (1980) by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band.

Fifteen days to go.

Life :) - Music - Tennis

New Zealand: where to go

July 10, 2023 by 0 Comments

My brother called me last night. As usual, he had a beer bottle in his hand. He said that his knee operation, scheduled for this coming Thursday, had been put back to 2nd August.

This morning I took the bike to Sânmihaiu Român in a repeat of last Sunday. Once again I grabbed a coffee from the bar, then sat on a bench and read, before moving to the gazebo when the hot sun drifted onto me. Next week will be properly hot; the dog days are now upon us.

With just 27 days until I get on the plane, I’m thinking of where I might go when I’m in New Zealand. Much will depend on my parents. They’ll want some respite from the building work in Geraldine, so I’m sure we’ll spend some time in Moeraki. I have a friend in nearby Naseby whom I obviously haven’t seen since I left NZ seven years ago, and I’ll certainly want to catch up with her. Central Otago as a whole is quite magical. I spent a few days with my parents there in the blistering dry heat of December 2014 – we camped at Omarama, where they have the gliders, and then at Omakau. I remember Ranfurly and Wedderburn and lovely Ophir. Maybe one day I’ll do the bike Rail Trail where you can ride from Hyde to Clyde and much more beside. The West Coast could be an option – I don’t think any of us have been there since 2009 – or how about the Catlins in the south? I’ve never been down there. A top priority would have been Wellington, but now that my cousin has cancer I might end up giving the North Island a miss completely.

I went to the very popular Festivalul Inimilor on Friday night – another open-air spectacle of traditional music from Romania and beyond. It was in Parcul Rozelor, next to where we play tennis. There were huge groups from Turkey and Serbia as well as my local Banat region. There was a sombre mood when the local group came on, because the man who founded it back in the sixties had passed away. The festival is free to attend, although there are a lot of food and drink stalls and even some selling traditional costumes. It was on again last night, and provided a noisy backdrop to our game of tennis. In the first set, I played with a woman slightly older than me named Gabriela against two men including 88-year-old Domnul Sfâra. It’s surprisingly hard to play against him, because you have no choice but to go easy on him. After winning a long opening game on my serve, we duly lost 6-1 without ever getting to deuce again. Then Domnul Sfâra exited stage left, and Gabriela and I found ourselves up against two guys both called Florin. We beat them 6-1 6-4 6-1.
Update: I also played this evening, again with musical accompaniment as Festivalul Inimilor entered its final night. This time I played five (extremely one-sided) sets. First I played with Domnul Sfâra, and we won 6-1 after losing a close first game – a repeat of last night. Then I played with one of the Florins against Gabriela and the other Florin, and from our perspective it finished a bizarre 6-0 1-6. Then I teamed up with Gabriela against both Florins, and we won 6-1 6-0.

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When being bored was OK

July 4, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday morning I got a message from Dorothy to say that she’d left her suitcase on a National Express coach after flying from Timișoara to Luton for a funeral. The case contained her laptop and medication. What a nightmare. I’m always paranoid that I’ll do something like that. She was still able to attend our online Romanian lesson, and seemed remarkably calm under the circumstances. The lesson was on the relative benefits of living in the city and the country. We spent half the session studying the famous 1981 song Vara la Țară (“Summer in the Country”) by the folk rock group Pasărea Colibri; the song is really a piss-take of unsophisticated country living, and was adapted from a late-19th-century novel of the same name which had a far more positive take on rural life.

I’ve now read the bit about “solitude deprivation” in Digital Minimalism. As the author says, as recently as the nineties you often had no choice but to be alone in your thoughts, but first the iPod – just after the millennium – allowed us to be surrounded by constant noise, and then the smartphone gave us constant visual as well as auditory stimulation, often with the added pressure to respond to it. Those born after 1995 – the “real millennials” I mentioned in another post – won’t even know what it’s like to be properly alone. This near-constant smartphone use seems to be responsible for young people’s mental health falling off a cliff.

A massive change I’ve seen is people’s attitudes to boredom. Being bored used to be OK. Expected, even. When I was a kid, we stayed at my grandmother’s cottage in mid-Wales once or twice a year. The 190-mile drive from Cambridgeshire was doable in four-and-a-bit hours if you went the quickest route that skirted around Birmingham. Dad, being a painter and all that, always took the scenic route; the drive through Warwickshire and Worcestershire was really quite lovely. Being a painter, he also liked to make regular stops to take photos of views that would make nice paintings. Once I timed our journey back from Wales at one minute under seven hours, including a stop at a service station. Yes, it was boring, especially from the bit where we entered Northamptonshire, although we probably had fish and chips that time in the picturesque Warwickshire town of Southam. Occasionally I might have had a book or a hand-held LCD game, but most of the time I just sat in the back of the car. Would that even be acceptable today?

Yesterday I dropped in on Elena because I had to sign something central-heating-related and give it to her. She said she walked 18,000 steps earlier that day. (She has an actual pedometer to work that out, rather than a smartphone.)

Today is the fourth of July. Here is Simon and Garfunkel’s wonderful America, from a time when boredom was definitely still OK.

Books - Family - Life :) - Music

We’re asocial creatures sometimes, too

July 3, 2023 by 0 Comments

The time until I go away has now dipped under the length of time I’ll be away; I generally get excited about a big trip when I hit that milestone.

Yesterday I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român where I called my parents, had a basic lunch, and finished Three Men in a Boat. Dad marvelled at my ability to make video calls to New Zealand while out and about in Romania. If they tried to do the reverse, their data would be chewed up in no time. We agreed that this is an island of great benefit in a sea of toxic tech. I’d only just finished saying how wonderful my internet is in Romania when a message flashed up to say that my phone was getting too hot and the app would need to close (before, presumably, it caught fire). Before that, I told them that they really do need to book some flights to Europe, even if they’re ten months away. Just think how happy my brother will be if he knows they’re coming over.

Last night I spoke to my brother – he’d just got back from his cruise with his wife, the in-laws and the little one. They’d been to Spain and Portugal, not Somalia. My brother had a better time than he was expecting. They’re already planning Christmas. Would you like to come over? I’d love to spend time with my brother, sister-in-law and nephew, but jeez, British Christmas is so depressing. Getting to my brother’s place will be arduous and expensive. I don’t know whether I can face it. I did toy with the idea of flying to England from Budapest for my nephew’s first birthday after I come back from New Zealand, but when I land in Budapest all I’ll want to do is bloody well get home. Going over there and having to talk with family when I’m absolutely knackered would wreck me. I told Mum this, and she recalled the time in 1994 when she and my brother flew into Auckland from London and immediately attended a funeral. She had to make sandwiches and cups of tea and chat with third cousins twice removed, all while badly jet-lagged; it was nightmarish. I asked my brother if we could all meet up in St Ives sometime in October. It’ll be a push with the extra little person, but we should manage it.

The big thing I have to contend with right now is getting central heating installed. Last winter – albeit a mild one – the city heating system was more than adequate. Unfortunately the cost of that is going through the roof, and everyone in this block now has no sensible choice but to install their individual central heating if they haven’t already done so. It’s a major expense (NZ$6000, or £3000) and hassle I could do without. One little benefit, however, is that I’ve got to know Elena, the old lady (she turns 80 later this year) who lives directly above me. Her children emigrated to Canada some time ago and have grown-up children of their own. She said that all her friends in Timișoara have passed away. She seems a lovely lady and we’ve had some good conversations.

Three Men in a Boat is very cleverly written, and amusing all the way through. I was surprised by how little the author’s English of 1889 differs from that of today. He talks of dudes, which I didn’t think existed back then, least of all in Britain. On the other hand, he uses superlatives like pleasantest (which would be odd today) and peacefullest (even odder). He uses five-and-twenty and twenty-five interchangeably, indicating that the switch to the modern version was incomplete at that time. He also says four hours and a half; this is now incorrect and a bane of contemporary learners of English. His tales are peppered with constructions like despite his having seen me, which exists in some people’s modern English – my British friend Dorothy’s, for instance – but certainly not mine. (Dorothy’s English is interesting. She also says “One must do blah blah blah, mustn’t one?” and pronounces suit with the y sound of yes. This is not only a question of age – my parents don’t have these traits even though they’re a few years older than her – but one of education and class.)

I’ve started reading Digital Minimalism, a book all about pulling the plug on unnecessary and pernicious tech. I haven’t read the chapter on solitude yet, but I’m looking forward to it. Almost every day I hear “we’re social creatures!”, with the implication that we all need social interaction, online or offline, all the time. Piss off with that! All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, also need the absence of social interaction sometimes, and now many of us aren’t getting it.

Because my hours are down a bit (it’s summer), I now get the occasional chance to listen to Muzicorama on the radio. Last week they played some tracks from the wonderful War of the Worlds musical that came out in 1978, including the beautiful Forever Autumn.

Life :) - Music

Fade to grey

June 30, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I read an article by Adrian Chiles – I remember when he presented the business news on the BBC – about how everything is turning grey. “Why has the world been drained of colour?” he asks. The comments were almost unanimous in agreement with him. With the exception of undies and socks, I never buy actual new clothes from actual clothes shops, one because I want to save money, but two because I want to avoid all the drabness. And cars. When I looked at cars before giving up, I didn’t want a grey (or “silver”) one. It didn’t use to be like this. Go into the men’s section of H&M in 2003 and you’d find clothes with every combination of colours and patterns you could imagine. Go back another decade and mad dayglo ski jackets were all the rage among blokes whose idea of piste was something else. I really wanted one, but I was still a kid then – “you’re not having that” – and I ended up with something frustratingly tame, though probably still much brighter than what just-teenagers would wear today. One theory for the modern world being sapped of colour is all the in-your-face advertising and blinking screens we get at every turn; perhaps we all just want to dim the lights. Another theory, relating mostly to our homes, is that we’ve become so obsessed with viewing a home as an investment rather than a place to live that we don’t dare inject any colour it lest it affect its resale value.

Ten percent of fifty shades of grey – this afternoon

This morning I listened to the whole of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium double album. It took me back to early 2007 when I regularly put it on while studying for professional exams. (Music and study didn’t usually mix, but that was an exception for some reason.) I took those two exams – the latest in a long line – in April, then I fell out with my Japanese flatmate and I moved into a place by myself, and (with a couple of exceptions) I’ve lived alone ever since.

Mum and Dad just gave me a surprise Skype call at 11pm their time. It was 3 degrees there and soon to go negative. (I’ve got that to look forward to.) The call was all about their banking and power bill craziness. Their building work is now in full swing – Dad showed me a photo of the impressive long arm of the cement mixer truck.

We’re half-way through 2023 – Timișoara’s reign of supposedly being the cultural capital of Europe.

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More sad news, and some happier traditions

June 18, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a marathon – 81-minute – Skype call with my parents.

We spent the first part of our call discussing the latest shocking news, that my Wellington-based cousin has cancer in her jaw. My parents had noticed something was up when they met her at their tragically young relative’s funeral in late April, but never imagined it was cancer. Googling “jaw cancer” makes for sobering reading. Jaw cancer is rare and doesn’t exist per se; it nearly always starts somewhere else in the mouth and spreads to the jaw, meaning it’s usually in an advanced stage. The prognosis can’t be good. On Wednesday she’ll have an operation to remove flesh from her jaw and replace it, probably from her arm. I must send my cousin a message, but what do you say?

A good half-hour of our chat was spent discussing life admin. It’s making my parents’ lives a misery. They must get rid of both their flats in the UK. They must move to somewhere far simpler as soon as the building work on their current place is finished. They must do things that are financially sub-optimal, just to simplify their lives. Seeing them buckle under the weight of all this crap is upsetting for me, especially at a time when I’ve been overwhelmed by it all myself.

Yesterday I had my pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița. When I turned up for the maths lesson, Matei’s father told me that the British school is hiring a maths teacher. I very much doubt I’d get the job anyway because I have no experience of teaching in a school, but if I did I’d have to Get Involved and coach football and heaven knows what else, and um, yeah, I’d have nice long holidays but no thanks.

After my lessons we were supposed to have the latest edition of the English Conversation Club, this time at my place, but just about everybody was away. Sanda, who ran the club in its previous incarnation, showed up at five. We chatted about wedding traditions and the word “venue”, and I gave her a Kiwi vocab matching game which she was somehow fascinated by. Then at 6:20 another woman, Ramona, turned up. She had lived some time in the US, and spoke English pretty well. At one point we discussed silent-b words: “subtle”, “debt”, “doubt”, and words ending in -mb such as “bomb” and “lamb”. Ramona told me, and I get this a lot, that “You don’t pronounce the b in doubt because you’re British. Sorry, but I learned American English and in America they pronounce it.” No, no, no, no, no. I may be British, but I’m also a teacher and I’ve taken the time to learn about pronunciation in different English-speaking countries, I also watch American films occasionally, and believe me, they don’t.

At seven, Sanda said she was going to the open-air museum to see Festivalul Etniilor, where performers based in the Banat region, but with different ethnicities, sang and played and danced. After tennis was cancelled because of the waterlogged courts, I decided to join her. There were Germans (Swabians or șvabi), Ukrainians, Serbians, Aromanians and Gypsies (Roma). It was a riot of colour as all the performers were dressed in their traditional costumes. The event was free and completely non-commercialised, unlike the much more publicised Flight Festival also taking place this weekend. The star of the show, Damian Drăghici with his group Damian & Friends, came on later. In the past he’s been a supporting act for the likes of Joe Cocker and James Brown. Towards the end he played the nai (a traditional panflute); the last song of the evening was Ciocârlia (the Lark), a very traditional Romanian tune – I much preferred last night’s version to the one in the link. I really enjoyed the evening; well, at least I did after the start – I was starving but grabbed a large langoș from a kiosk quite a way from the stage.

The Gypsies

The blind pianist

The flower stalls at the market, still open at 10:30 last night

I made a summer pudding for yesterday’s club which barely happened, and still have most of it. (We also discussed the word “pudding”. When I was growing up, we never used “dessert”. “Pudding”, or simply “pud”, covered anything that you ate after your main meal. For me, “pudding” sounds about nine times tastier than “dessert”.) The main benefit of yesterday’s “event” was that I made me tidy up the kitchen, living room, and main bathroom.

I promise I’ll talk about my trip next time.