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The queue of despair

May 26, 2023 by 0 Comments

It hasn’t been the best of weeks so far; at times it’s been utterly dismal.

After Sunday’s debacle, I looked at another Dacia the following day. Although I’d spoken to the vendor half an hour earlier, when I got there he told me he’d already sold the car but would give it to me instead if I paid extra. Bullshit. The people I have to deal with here, jeez. It would have been a bit of fun to bomb around Romania for a bit before my trip to New Zealand, and on Sunday my chance of doing that was in excess of 90%, but with all the other crap I’m dealing with I’ve decided to delay my pursuit of four wheels until September.

On Tuesday morning I was free of lessons, so I got up bright and early to visit the immigration hellhole, attempting to get the address on my residence permit updated so that Barclays could have proof of where I live. I set my alarm for 4:40, had breakfast, and was there at 5:30. By “there” I mean outside the office (if you can call it that) which opens at 8:30. They’d drawn up an informal numbered list of people in order of their arrival; I was ninth. One man was incensed because apparently there had been another list which someone had ripped off during the night. I chatted to a young Serbian man who was studying at the university. He was a linguist. His English and Romanian were both impeccable. Eventually staff arrived and the doors opened. EU citizens, of which I’m no longer one of course, had priority. They only have one person processing everybody, so the queue moved at a snail’s pace. Then disaster struck. A group of eleven Vietnamese workers arrived, and because their boss was Romanian they could jump the queue. During my fifth hour in that inhuman cesspit where everything is yellow and brown and falling apart, it dawned on me that maybe I’d never reach the front at all before the office closed at 12:30. And that’s exactly what happened. What a waste of seven hours. There was anger, not least on my part, but the real shocker was the older Romanian couple in front of me in positions seven and eight on the list. Forty years ago they would have routinely queued for several hours just to get bread. Why they were in the office I didn’t know, but I went up to them and said, “You do realise that the office closes soon and we’ll have got out of bed at a ridiculous hour for absolutely nothing?!” They didn’t care. If it closes, it closes. Wake up, you fucking loons, I wanted to say. Perhaps I did say it, I can’t remember now. I bet you don’t vote in elections either. A country of incredible beauty, but one in which its bureaucratic systems and processes demonstrably fail to function. (The immigration office did function, up to a point, during Covid when virtually no workers were entering the country. Now they are arriving daily from India and Pakistan, and obviously Vietnam too.) That evening I saw the after-hours doctor and I came back via the office. It was 10pm, and people were already queuing outside for the following morning, all relying on a lack of Vietnamese or Pakistani shelf-stackers.

So, Barclays. I called them later on Tuesday. I was told that yes, if I visit a branch in the UK then I can get my ID documents certified and hopefully my money back. So, having exhausted all options that don’t involve actually being in the UK (I’m not going back to that office again until my residence permit expires in 2026; heaven help me at that point), I bit the bullet and booked a trip over there. I’m leaving on 9th June, two weeks today, and will come back on the 13th. I hope to meet my university friend there. Before I booked my flights I asked him which of my two options (the 9th and the 23rd) would suit him better, and he said clearly the 9th. Then he told me why. His girlfriend, in only her early thirties, has been diagnosed with breast cancer and will be starting a course of chemo later in the month. He said it’s been caught early and the prognosis is very good, but yeesh. What a shock. A lovely person too. Hearing that put my wasted hours in a queue into some sort of perspective.

Tina Turner has died. An extraordinary talent, a million miles from a modern diva, and in the eighties a superstar. And all after a tough upbringing and an abusive relationship. Yesterday morning Tonight, featuring Tina Turner and David Bowie, came on the radio. A beautiful song. And now they’re both gone.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Other sports - Writing a book

The boon of the book (so far)

January 8, 2023 by 0 Comments

The book based on my time with the guy in Auckland has been uppermost in my mind this week. Many hours spent on it. For my mental health it’s been a real boon. Let’s hope I can keep the momentum going.

Fifty years ago my mother was on the ship from New Zealand to England; it left port on 1st January 1973: a six-week voyage (probably not an inaccurate term) via the Panama Canal. She paid $666 for a return ticket – a fraction of the cost of an airfare back then. When the return leg didn’t happen, she was able to recover half of what she’d paid.

My bathroom is done, or just about. I just need to get the bath painted. The work and materials cost about 12,000 lei (a bit over £2000, or around NZ$4000). My parents said you can just about pay that for a set of taps in New Zealand. As for them, they’re about to get the builders in for an altogether more ambitious renovation. They’ll probably need to vacate their house for a period. They’d been stressed because of delays in getting the builders to come. Soon they’ll take delivery of a new electric car. I often wish Mum and Dad could be content with cooking, eating, watching the flowers grow, and playing euchre with their friends, like my mother’s own parents did.

On Thursday my brother had keyhole surgery to repair his knee ligament which had been shot to pieces from overuse in the army. He said he was under general anaesthetic for an hour, and described the experience as like something out of Red Dwarf – that hour was mysteriously deleted. He talked about the artificial intelligence revolution, embracing the concept much more than me. He said, “It’s all fast-evolving mathematics.” Fast-evolving mathematics, you say? (He got an F grade in his GCSE maths.) Are you just making shit up, I asked him. I said that fast-evolving mathematics has been responsible for a lot of misery, like the 2008 crash. To demonstrate I turned my camera around and scrawled a random formula on my whiteboard (making shit up), then added a fudge factor to it. He then said I looked like one of those Open University professors in the eighties, complete with beard. This was, I suppose, what you call banter.

This morning I gave my first maths lesson of 2023. Matei, who started at British School when it opened in 2019, said he now thinks in English, even when he’s alone in his thoughts. For me, a foreign language becoming dominant in my life like that is hard to imagine. He said he uses Romanian at home with his parents and his dog, but that’s about it. His Romanian lessons at school are relegated to minor importance. That verged on sad for me. On the way to our lesson I cycled on the cobblestones of Piața Traian, then had to negotiate a wobbly old yellow tricycle; the man sitting on it reminded me of Omar Sharif, though it must have been watching Doctor Zhivago recently that made me think that. That all lasted seconds and seemed perfectly normal, but before coming to Romania it would have been bizarre.

The darts. What a match the final was between the two Michaels, van Gerwen and Smith. In the second set, van Gerwen left 144 after six darts, but missed double 12 for a nine-darter. Nothing too crazy there, but Smith himself was on 141 after six darts and proceeded to check out on double 12 for a perfect leg. That had never happened before and the commentators couldn’t cope. Van Gerwen, the clear favourite, was just a notch below his best; Smith took advantage. I had a lesson in the morning and I couldn’t watch the end of it. When I went to bed, Smith was 5-3 up. Either there would be a big shock or a big comeback, and it was the former, Smith winning 7-4 after a tense finish.

Song of the last few days: Aimee Mann’s Save Me. It’s a masterpiece. It’s part of the soundtrack to Magnolia, a three-hour film that I saw once but can’t remember anything about except the boy who peed his pants on a quiz show.

The weather. It’s like April, with sunshine and temperatures rising into the teens. The mild conditions mean I can get to my lessons easily, but it does all feel weird. This time six years ago I was waking up to temperatures in the negative teens.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music

Feeling cabbagey

November 25, 2022 by 0 Comments

The walls of my Ceaușescu-era apartment are thick, solid concrete, so sound from other flats rarely travels into mine. Smells often do, however, and there’s a distinct meaty cabbagey whiff right now. Romanian cuisine is often meaty and cabbagey, especially at this time of year.

To get to the nitty-gritty, it’s been a pretty shitty week. I had stomach pain on Monday night, just after I wrote my blog post, and I hardly slept at all. It’s my kidney stones again, isn’t it? Luckily Tuesday is when my usual after-hours doctor is on duty, so I saw him after muddling through four lessons. It was hosing it down and I was sapped of energy but I had to make the trip. I was like a drowned rat when I got there. After waiting for a whole family to be seen to, he did all the usual checks like blood pressure, then I lay down on the table for an abdominal ultrasound. He checked my organs in turn – at one point he examined my liver for Covid-related damage of which there was none – finishing with my kidneys. I now just have one stone – not three like in February – which is in my right kidney. It’s 5 mm wide which is only borderline passable. I also had some tiny stony stuff in my left kidney, which he called “sand”. He seemed surprisingly unfazed by all this, and gave me some pills to relieve the pain caused by the build-up of gas. The pain was nowhere near as severe and persistent as nine months ago, coinciding with the start of the war in Ukraine, and it’s basically gone away now, but I feel whacked. Yesterday I even managed to fall off my bike on the way home from a lesson. I was in a rush, it was wet, my handlebar grip flew off, and I ended up with just a grazed knee and hand. It could have been something far messier. I’m now going to get the cheapest hairspray I can find, which hopefully will glue the grip to the handlebar.

I had a quick chat with Mum and Dad yesterday. They were in the library next to a shelf with Andy McNab books, and had to keep the volume down. They’re always worried about me, what with me being stuck here on my own. Their train from Poole to Cambridge on Monday was at a standstill for two hours, meaning they hit Cambridge in rush hour and a relatively simple journey turned into a stressful messful ordeal. Nothing has been simple about their trip. They fly back home tomorrow night and frankly they can’t wait.

I’ve had a good amount of work this week, though less than it feels like I’ve had. The lesson with the four twins went decently – I now have a handle on the girls’ unusual names; I’m no longer drowning in a sea of A’s and E’s and I’s. One incredible thing keeps happening with teenagers (though sometimes younger children too) and old rock bands. On Monday the single twins both wrote a paragraph about their favourite band: Metallica. Their favourite song, they said, was Nothing Else Matters. It is an amazing song, and according to Wikipedia it was released on my 12th birthday, which is bloody ages ago now. On Tuesday my 16-year-old female student came in a Guns ‘n’ Roses top with pictures of magazine cuttings dated 1988. On Wednesday I had an online lesson (finishing at 10:15 pm – ugh) with a 15-year-old boy who popped up on my screen in an AC/DC T-shirt. The eight-year-old girl in Germany – I’ll see her online later today – said her favourite band was Depeche Mode. It keeps coming. Admittedly I’m dealing with a tiny sample size here, but if it’s even partly replicated elsewhere, it’s nothing short of a phenomenon. And why? I asked Guns ‘n’ Roses Girl why, because I was so intrigued by that point. Modern music is really bad, she said. If she means mainstream modern music, I agree 100%.

Another interesting lesson was with a 32-year-old bloke who likes his football and parties. He’s close to an absolute beginner. We did some food vocab, and I asked him to pick out the foods in the pictures that he’d eaten in the past week. Chicken, burgers, pizza, chips, cakes, and hardly a fruit or vegetable to be seen. Good god man, you’re a human dustbin. I sometimes have a go at Mum on this blog, and immediately feel terrible about it, but she made sure us two boys got a proper healthy diet, which we’ve largely maintained in adulthood. Lack of McDonald’s and the like in our home town (there’s one now) certainly helped.

Language learning - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - Tennis - The UK

What do you really do?

August 21, 2022 by 0 Comments

My 14-year-old student has just resumed maths lessons with me, and after this morning’s algebra session in Dumbrăvița I met my English friend for lunch at Casa Bunicii, a restaurant just down the road. He and his girlfriend had just got back from a six-week road trip around central and eastern Europe. A storm had been brewing for a while, and as I cycled back home I got soaked to the bone but happily avoided being struck by lightning. I’m glad that the temperature has dropped after another sweltering few days.

The day I got back from my trip, I called Barclays because my bank card didn’t work in the UK. After an interminable wait, the call centre woman told me that my account had been closed because of Brexit. As a non-resident I can no longer have an account over there. “Are there any funds in your account?” Yes! I have, or had, five figures in there. She was looking at a blank screen. How can they do this? In 2022, in a supposedly civilised country, they can just disappear your account. (Bad grammar, I know.) I now have to go through a laborious process, lasting possibly three months, to hopefully get my money back.

I started with a new student on Tuesday. He wanted to start from scratch, in other words learn English in Romanian. Explaining English concepts in Romanian is no easy task for me. He seems to have a decent brain on him, and at least it was face-to-face and not online. He asked one question though that I get a lot. “What to you do for a job?” I do this. I teach English. “No, what to you really do, other than teach English?” People have a hard time believing that don’t also work for Bosch or something. A real job.

I’ve been trying to learn some Italian, in the hope that I’ll one day travel to a part of Italy where the locals are at the English level of my latest student. The good news is the internet is brimming with Italian resources, and I’ve even got a pretty handy grammar book. And it’s one notch down from Romanian in terms of complexity. The bad news is that it’s so easy to mix up Italian with Romanian, especially the simple stuff. Mai for instance means “never” in Italian, while in Romanian it means “more”. Many words end in i in both languages, but while in Italian the final i gets its full value, in Romanian it’s often a very short sound that can be close to inaudible. And so on.

Thinking about a hypothetical Birmingham-based heavy metal museum (I discussed this with my friend over there), in 2015 I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, one of many highlights of the city. At the Hall of Fame I clearly remember a woman in her twenties, who might have been autistic but it’s hard to tell, in her element and almost overcome by joy at being there. Seeing her living that dream gave me considerable pleasure.

No tennis today. The courts are waterlogged. I got two sessions in – both singles again – last weekend. After Saturday’s session I led 6-0, 2-2; the first set score flattered me as four of the games went to deuce. Sunday was a different story as I struggled to win the big points. I did hold on to win the first set 6-4, but then I fell 4-0 behind in the second. That’s a big hole to climb out of. I won the next two games, then the game after – which ended up being our last – was truly brutal. It must have gone eight deuces at least. It’s rare that I remember a specific shot in tennis – the game is nothing like golf in that respect – but as I held break point he came to the net and I put up a lob that landed in his backhand corner. Not only did my 60-year-old opponent retrieve it, which was impressive enough, but he hit a clean winner from it. It bounced so high that there simply wasn’t room between the baseline and the fence. I’ll remember that one for a while. On the last point, another break point, I lobbed him once again and he got that back too, but several shots later I was able to win the point. It’s a shame time ran out on us; 6-4, 3-4 is an interesting scenario to be in.

Family - Life :) - Music

They don’t know what day it is

December 21, 2021 by 0 Comments

Last night I met Mark (the teacher at British School) in the main square, where it was pretty busy. Unlike last year, the Christmas market is in full swing, although they’ve spread things out a bit more this time, presumably so that Covid spreads out a bit less. We met so that we could watch a colleague of his play a band that was appearing on stage. Eight o’clock came and went, but there was no sign of him or his band. At close to nine, I asked Mark if he’d got the right day, then he checked and saw that it had happened the night before. I’m pretty sure his Romanian colleague did indeed tell him “Sunday”, but Romanians confuse Saturday and Sunday all the time, while Tuesday and Thursday are one the same thing to them. We got some food from the market and then had a beer in a pub called Scotland Yard.

There’s an eight-part Netflix series called Flavours of Romania, recorded in 2017, which does a brilliant job of showcasing the country. I’m so far half-way through. In each episode, British writer Charlie Ottley travels through a region of the country on his motorbike, bringing the beauty of Romania out in vivid technicolour, without glossing over its major problems. Episode four was on Moldova, and I just loved Catinca, the woman who made pastries and lived next door to Casa Popa, a museum in the village of Târpești. She’s one of those warm-hearted people you find all over the country, especially in rural areas. They keep their traditions alive. (Unfortunately, lately this has included a disdain for modern practices such as vaccination.)

About my brother’s lack of interest in my life in Romania, I think it’s the place more than the person. Romania does that to people. If I lived in Germany instead, he’d have a lot more to say I’m sure, and he’d have almost certainly visited me. I have a lot of admiration for my brother. He’s had a fulfilling career lasting almost a quarter-century, doing something out of my worst nightmares. He’s got a nice house, a lovely wife, a great bunch of friends, and he’s altogether a good bloke. I do wonder what he thinks of his big brother though, now that I’ve ended up here. (I think he’s genuinely happy that I’ve “found myself” here, even if perhaps he can’t understand why.)

The world darts championship is back on. I haven’t watched any of it. It must be a fantastic super-spreader event. Yesterday I read that Andy Fordham, one of the most recognisable figures in the game (he was over 30 stone at one stage, and drank unbelievable amounts), had died last summer at the age of 59.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Split Enz and Crowded House of late. The Finns have godlike status in New Zealand, and you can see why. Here’s Neil Finn’s extraordinary version of One Step Ahead, which he played in Auckland a few years ago.

Here are some of those cards I bought at the market yesterday, including a William Tell card:

Buying property - Language teaching - Music - Poker

We all need a lift

November 26, 2021 by 0 Comments

I had a new and interesting discussion topic in this morning’s lesson: golf. My student lived and worked in the UK and still does a lot of business with corporate Brits. Football is their biggest small-talk topic; golf is number two. It’s amazing quite how much jargon there is in the golf world, and how many normal everyday English words take on a different, specific meaning on the course: club, drive, rough, bunker, eagle, and so on. Oh, and bogey. The sport is almost non-existent in Romania, and his knowledge of the game was unsurprisingly similar. We happened to talk about this as Mum was coming to the end of a four-round golf marathon. I suspect she’ll tell me how it all finished up when we talk tomorrow.

I had a look at another flat on Monday. It was in the same block – the delightfully named U4 – as the two apartments I viewed last Friday, but you access it via a different entrance. Just like the place I owned in New Zealand, this flat is on two floors – but unlike the Wellington flat which took up the bottom two storeys, this place is on the fourth and fifth floors, and the lack of a lift is a deal-breaker for me. Not for me exactly – I’d manage – but when you’re trying to run a business, liftlessness is a serious minus. What a shame, because this spacious apartment otherwise had a lot to recommend it. There were balconies on both floors. Everything looked much sturdier than I’d seen in previous viewings. The build quality seemed to be there. I’ll have to keep looking.

Poker. Another tournament win yesterday, my third in eleven days. It’s been feast or famine this month, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Three wins and little else besides, and you’ll do much better than a string of 7ths and 11ths and 16ths, which is more the norm for me. This latest win came in no-limit single draw, and I was extremely lucky to reach the final table, let alone run out the winner. I played four tournaments in all yesterday, including an attempt at pot-limit five-card draw (high), which came to a screeching halt when I ran my pat queen-high straight into a pat threes full. I spent some time on Tuesday working out an equivalence between very strong hands in badugi, five-card draw and deuce-to-seven lowball; in big-bet draw games, it’s vital to know just how strong – probabilistically – your hand actually is. I made $62 overall yesterday; my bankroll is now up to $1194.

My favourite album right now is the one Romanian folk-rock band Celelalte Cuvinte (which means “the other words”) put out in 1987. Listen to it here.

Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Trying to keep up

November 15, 2021 by 0 Comments

I had seven lessons scheduled for Thursday. That would have been a record, but by the Romanian law of low averages it was pretty unlikely that they’d all actually happen. In the end, only four did. The guy who probably didn’t have Covid cancelled, then the new woman cancelled because she’d had a fight with her boyfriend, then I got a message from the twelve-year-old girl’s mum to say that she was ill. In the final case I had no complaints.

Saturday morning was cold, with thick fog. I went to the market in Mehala, which isn’t a million miles from that house I’d looked at the previous day, but didn’t buy anything. When I came back I had my lesson with the young couple, which went fine. I then watched an episode of Black Mirror. Hang the DJ, season four, episode four. I nearly didn’t watch it because I knew it was all about relationships, something I find ever so slightly triggering, but it was great episode and I’m glad I watched it.

After Black Mirror it was time for some poker. A fixed-limit badugi tournament with a $5.50 buy-in and 96 entries. I haven’t run well in that tournament in general, and on multiple occasions I had one foot out of the exit door. But I kept surviving, and when we got down to six players, all my Christmases came at once. I amassed a big stack which I never relinquished, and although we had a protracted short-handed battle, I was able to run out the winner for a profit of $90 in a little under four hours. What a surprise that was. It was my first win in 90 tournaments – that sounds bad, but in the intervening period I had four second places and two thirds. Yesterday, normal service resumed – three tournaments in which I got precisely nowhere. My bankroll is now $1096.

I’ve been listening to End of the Line by the Traveling Wilburys. (When I was younger, I imagined it was Wilberries, a kind of fruit. It’s only one letter away from those wimberries that I picked over the summer.) It’s a great song, and one that reminds me of the simple Twizel house we lived in on Princes Street in Temuka in the winter of ’89, before moving to a place on Richard Pearse Drive. We had no TV, and made do with the radio that was tuned to either 93 Gold or Radio Caroline. We always got the results from races eight, nine and ten. The scratchings and quinellas and trifectas. Racing seemed a big part of Kiwi life back then. I’m pretty sure one of the bedrooms had a waterbed, which were all the rage in the late eighties over there. There was always the pungent smell of chimney smoke, which we never had in the UK.

I played tennis again yesterday. Once again it was singles with the guy of nearly sixty who is like the Duracell bunny. How does he never get tired? I won the first two games, then he won the next three. I edged back in front, and on his serve at 4-5 down, he led 30-0 but I levelled the game at 30-all. The next point was an exhausting long rally, which I won to bring up set point, but I hit long on both the next two points and he dominated the rest of the set. I think that long point ultimately cost me. I was soon in a deep hole at 5-7, 1-4, having lost seven games out of eight. I was struggling physically while he was as fresh as a daisy. I also couldn’t win the important points. He had a killer shot to my backhand corner that I found hard to combat, and he saved plenty of game points with it. Despite the fatigue and sweat, I clung on, and reached 4-4. At 30-all in the next game, I had him pinned to both sidelines before eventually winning the point ten shots after I thought I’d won it. But he played the next three points as if nothing had happened, winning them all. Quite extraordinary. He led 30-0 in game ten to move within two points from victory, but I won the next four points to break him. At 5-5 I held serve from 15-40, but then he held to love to force a tie-break. I won the shoot-out 7-4 and we finished all square, but I was left wondering how somebody of that age could be so fit. I saw that sometimes with the trip leaders on the day tramps I did around Wellington. Is it all in the genes?

Here are some pictures of abandoned Timișoara. There are ex-swimming pools dotted around the city. If you look closely you can see the name of Morărit CILT, an old flour mill.

A sunny afternoon along by the Bega
Coronavirus - Language teaching - Music

Don’t freak out!

October 28, 2021 by 0 Comments

It’s a beautiful Thursday morning here. I’ve already had two lessons. The Rapid Bucharest football team bus has just pulled up outside the cathedral. They’re playing Poli Timișoara in a cup game this evening.

During a lesson on Tuesday afternoon I started to feel less than 100%. A stuffy nose, a few sniffles, fatigue. Normally I wouldn’t think anything of that – they’re typical symptoms of a cold – but when I’m living in a country where daily Covid death tolls are in the 500s, that’s panic-stations territory. As it happens, I was paying the doctor my monthly visit that evening, and naturally I asked him if I should be alarmed. He took my temperature and measured my oxygen saturation level, and said I was probably fine. I slept badly that night and had all sorts of weird dreams, and the morning after I felt (and looked) pretty groggy. I called my parents and asked them not to freak out. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Covid but I got a rapid test from the pharmacy anyway. It isn’t easy to do the test – how to I swab my tonsils without wanting to gag, or twizzle the swab around several times in my nostril without sneezing? As expected, the test (which has a high false-negative rate) was negative. Yesterday I improved throughout the day, and last night I slept well. Mum called me back last night, and was glad I looked better. South Islanders are understandably mad that two cases of the virus are now in Christchurch. Why there are no restrictions on flights between north and south beats me.

I’ve got a new student – a 21-year-old guy – and I had my first lesson with him this morning. Yesterday he introduced himself on the phone as Răzvan, but he popped up on Skype as the rather non-Romanian-sounding Memet. Today he told me he was a musician – a saxophone player in a travelling band – and he’s still enrolled in high school after having to repeat whole years, although he never actually attends any lessons. He said he wanted a change of lifestyle. A job? A career? A salary? Oh no, he said, my only boss is God. He didn’t seem particularly well educated (failing whole years isn’t a good sign); when I used the English word “precarious”, and then gave him the translation precar which isn’t an uncommon word in Romanian, he didn’t know what I meant. But he’s already paid me for today’s session and now plans to have two lessons a week, so he should be OK.

Last night my student gave me the happy news that she’d passed her driving test at her first attempt, having only started learning about three months ago. She told me she still feels uncomfortable driving at more than 40 km/h. Getting a licence at that stage of the game would have been unthinkable for me. It took me ages to get mine (at my third attempt, not counting the test that was postponed because of snow). British tests were bloody hard. Atypical of young men, I was low on confidence and unmotivated to get my licence until I really needed to. Running and insuring a car in the UK was ridiculously expensive, even back then. I then moved to New Zealand where I would have been utterly screwed if I’d been unable to drive.

In one of my weird dreams, a song started playing. Heck, what is that song? Ah yes, it’s one of those songs that I voted for to be the UK’s Eurovision entry, a very long time ago, by calling an 0898 number. It might have been ’93 or ’94. It’s amazing what your mind can dredge up in a dream. Yesterday I found it on YouTube – it’s Lover Come In, a beautiful non-Eurovision-y song written and performed by Brendan Faye, a Liverpool folk singer. It just missed out on being Britain’s 1991 entry (even earlier than I thought), coming second to some forgettable poppy crap that came in the middle of the pack on Eurovision night. Had Faye’s song been nominated, it could well have won the whole shebang, and I’d be hearing it now on Romanian radio 30 years later. (Eurovision is big here, for some reason.) I wonder what happened to him.

The MicroMillions series has started on Poker Stars. It’s a series of small buy-in tournaments with big fields in a wide variety of games. I plan to play two of these tournaments tonight.

Coronavirus - Family - Films - Music

The sights and sounds, soon to be silenced

September 20, 2021 by 0 Comments

The Covid Express freight train is careering towards us, and as such, this is probably the last normal weekend we’ll have here for a while. Buskers playing Por una cabeza. Weddings and baptisms on the steps of the cathedral. We might still get the buskers for a little while, but mass-participation events will soon be verboten, or as they say here, interzis. Last week the government agreed to mandate the Covid “green pass”, which you can get if you’ve been vaccinated, had a recent negative test, or recovered from the illness in the last six months. Supposedly you’ll need a green pass to enter a pub, but if and how the various birturi or cârciumi will enforce that I’ve no idea. On the local website, people were up in arms. It’s discriminatory. Yes you’re right, and that’s the whole point.

Yesterday I watched Hated in the Nation, the last episode of season three of Black Mirror. Disturbing, as always, but very thought-provoking. What a monster we’ve created in social media. The writers managed to include the destruction of Britain’s natural environment, hence those creepy swarms of fake bees that reminded me of The Birds. The characters, especially the female Met police detectives, were spot on. Before Black Mirror I tried watching Atypical, a series about autism, but I gave up after a few minutes. Honestly I couldn’t stand it.

Music. I still often listen to Musicorama, the local radio programme, when I get the chance, making sure I Shazam any songs I like. Two recommendations: Heart of Fire by 22-year-old American blues rocker Ally Venable, and Bulunur Mu by Amsterdam-based Turkish folk rock band Altın Gün. Last weekend we had a parade of international musicians that then performed in the Rose Garden. They come every year – except last year, obviously – and they always add considerable colour and joy to the city centre.

Poker. Three tournaments today, including a second-place finish in the single draw which snapped a streak of ten tournaments without a cash. I almost totally missed out on bounties though, mainly because I made such a bad start. After that, my bankroll has ticked up to $946.

Mum and Dad are moving, definitively, a few hours from now. Some neighbours will help them move their bed and sofa, but so far they’ve done almost everything themselves. Tomorrow I’ll get to view at least one apartment, and that will feel like I’m making a start.

Family - Life :) - Music - Other sports - Poker

Need to escape this slump

June 26, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’ve been feeling down the last couple of days. No mental energy. No drive to do anything. The crazily hot weather hasn’t helped – I’ve been struggling to sleep. The reduction in my hours hasn’t been much fun either – work gives me energy to do other things as well as somebody to talk to. People have been going away, to Turkey, to Bulgaria, to attend weddings and baptisms and whatever else – events that didn’t happen in 2020. I could really do with getting away too, and will try to escape in the second half of July. My plan is to stay in Romania (it’s plenty big enough, especially if you travel by train) and visit the northern Moldova region, or Bucovina. I’m feeling cabin fever now.

My parents now have a buyer for their place in Geraldine. Dad is already talking about extending and renovating and gutting the new place. I wonder where the energy to even think about that kind of stuff comes from. They got six figures, only just missing out on a seventh (again, the mind boggles here), although it hasn’t yet gone unconditional. This is all excellent news obviously because their place had been on the market a while and they can now hopefully get on with the rest of their lives. This morning my student gave me two contacts in the real estate business; I’ll hit them up next week and hopefully get the ball rolling. I’m clueless there at the best of times, and now I’m adding a foreign language and totally alien systems and processes into the mix. I’m really fumbling in the dark.

New Zealand are inaugural World Test champions, when it looked for all the world that the English rain would have the final say. That’s a pretty big deal. Way bigger than, say, the America’s Cup. It’s NZ’s finest moment in the game, that’s for sure. They’re a brilliant team of cricketers and a great bunch of guys to boot. Good on ’em, that’s all I can say. World beaters at Covid, and now cricket. I wonder what’s next?

No Simona Halep at Wimbledon. That’s a shame.

Mum has just sent me an email with a picture of her plus three other women (combined age close to 300) holding aloft a big silver plate. It’s obviously a golf trophy of some sort. I’ll probably get all the details of that at the weekend.

Unusually, my weekend will be completely free of lessons. Tomorrow’s temperatures are forecast to be tolerable – a max of “only” 31 – so I’ll pop to the market and if I’m lucky I might find a second-hand bike.

My student told me all about the nai, or Romanian pan flute. A famous of exponent of this instrument is Gheorghe Zamfir; this is him playing Păstorul Singuratic, or The Lonely Shepherd. It’s quite lovely.

I’ve blanked my last nine poker tournaments; my bankroll has dipped to $718.