Maths teaching

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Scrabble

Bingo!

October 20, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve had a cold for the last few days, and though I’m still struggling, I made it to the swimming pool this morning.

Yesterday I called Mum and Dad from Buziaș, among the rich autumn colours. So they’re coming to the UK in 2027. They’ve already booked their tickets. They’ll be staying for absolutely ages, from sometime in May until mid-August. That’s even longer than this year, which they said was too long. Maybe they feel it’ll be their last trip over. I’d planned to go to New Zealand in August, to get out of the heat for one thing, but I can nix that idea now, unless I go in late August and into September (after school starts, which will mean missing out on work). It would have been cool if they (or Mum, let’s be honest) had run it past me first before committing, but hey, Mum would have booked the cheapest option regardless of how it affected anyone else. They’re flying direct to the UK – a silly idea – although at least they’re having a stopover on the way back. Whatever happens, there’s no way I’ll be staying in Timișoara all of next summer. The heat just messes me up too much.

Update: As I write this, two cars have collided in the car park.

There’s no further news about the sale of Mum and Dad’s flat in St Ives. There are still legal hurdles to be overcome that I don’t understand. My brother told them that he doesn’t want to hear about the flat anymore. They “drone on about it for half an hour”, as he put it. As I don’t have kids, I suppose I have more “bandwidth” for this stuff than he does, and more sympathy. Nobody should be dealing with this in their late 70s. It keeps them up at night.

I’ve had a bit more success with the nine-year-old girl from Thailand. It’s no wonder she’s struggling. She’s had no continuity whatsoever. She moved to India at age five, then to Romania at eight. Though her spoken English is good, her go-to language is Thai. Then at school her classmates will mostly be speaking Romanian. When I saw her on Friday she cut up rough as soon as I arrived. But then she calmed down and she did far better than I expected when it came to adding numbers. As for English, her teacher seems to have figured out that comprehension exercises are beyond her. Her latest worksheet just tested sh- and ch- words. One of the words was ship. I asked her what it meant, just to be sure. Something you find on a farm. I see. I’ve got another session with her later today. She’ll be the last of three young girls, one after the other.

Good luck with number 3

On the way to Buziaș yesterday I stopped briefly at the village of Chevereșu Mare. There was a woolly ram, stock-still, next to someone’s fence whose colour it matched perfectly. This thing wasn’t moving and I seriously thought for a minute that it was a new sculpture. Then it budged.

At the weekend I watched a rather depressing, but very well made, 2009 documentary from Canada about serious bingo players. I wonder how it was recommended to me. Years ago I made a variety of bingo games which I still play with my students to improve their vocabulary (they have pictures rather than numbers), and “bingo” is a term in Scrabble for when you use all seven tiles in one turn, so maybe the algorithm picked up somehow that the word “bingo” features quite prominently in my life. I didn’t even know serious bingo was a thing, but it absolutely is. I was shocked by how joyless the experience was for these people. For a start it’s different from British-style bingo that you might get at slightly seedy seaside resorts where the numbers go from 1 to 90, many of which have special “calls” like “two fat ladies” for 88 or “unlucky for some” for 13. In this version the numbers only went up to 75 and any vestige of comedy was gone. There was so much denial, as expected, from these gamblers about how much they were losing. Saddest of all was the lady of about 90 who won $700 one time, and happily proclaimed that she’d spend it on bingo.

I finished the Scrabble league with seven wins and seven losses. That surpassed my expectations; I didn’t draw fantastically and I faced some strong opponents. I’ve signed up for the next round, where I’ll be in the same division.

Autism - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Scrabble

Nine going on five, and autism, the latest culture war

October 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

Earlier today I had a proper headache. It wasn’t as bad as the ones I had in the spring, but it slowed me down nonetheless. While I was in pain, I was also yawning. Luckily it only lasted three hours or so.

I’ve just finished a lesson with a nine-year-old girl. A waste of time, basically, but her mother insists. She didn’t want to be there, and that’s hardly her fault. On Saturday I had my third lesson with the other nine-year-old girl, the one who speaks good English but is only semi-literate. I talked to Mum about her yesterday. She gave me some advice: to focus on three-letter CVC words, then move on to consonant blends. It can be handy having an ex-primary school teacher as a parent, and she’s absolutely right. The problem is that she gets homework designed for age nine, not five, and her parents expect me to help her with that, which actively gets in the way of her learning. Then there’s maths. She’s years behind there too. In the recent test in which she literally got no marks at all, her teacher wrote nothing on the paper except a scrawled “0/15”. When I asked her if I could take a picture, she agreed.

This was the first question on the test:


Unlike most of the other questions where she at least wrote (or drew!) something, she made no attempt at this one. And I’m not surprised. There are three tasks you have to fulfil here. First, read and understand the question. I doubt she could have done that. Second, realise that you need to put the 1 first, then the 3, and so on, to make the smallest possible five-digit number that uses all the digits. Third, you have to put that number in words. That means knowing how we express that kind of number as well as being able to write thirteen and hundred and thousand and stuff like that. Two of those three tasks aren’t even maths, they’re English! She would have had no hope. Then you add in the fact that she doesn’t like maths and (so far) lacks the maturity to understand that you sometimes have to do things you don’t like, and the overall picture isn’t pretty.

After Saturday’s lessons I picked up Dorothy and we drove to Buzad which is just over an hour away, so she could bring a load of apples and pears back to Timișoara. When she asked me (in a message) if I could do this, I cursed. After my lessons I just wanted to get home and not have to see anyone. But actually it was nice chatting in the car – the time went by quickly – and the palette of autumn colours (and some trees hadn’t turned yet) was beautiful. Plus it was good to go back to the village. I hadn’t enjoyed the previous two times – once it was far too hot, while the other time I felt like crap. When we were back in Timișoara we got pizzas from the place next door. They had Italian music playing and even – slightly weirdly – told us in Italian how much we needed to pay. Ottanta.

This morning I read something about overdiagnosis of autism and ADHD. There was a lot to unpack. I totally agree that children are being overmedicated for these conditions to a dangerous level, especially in the US. I also agree that if one in five kids (or whatever the latest figure is) in the UK now has an official diagnosis of autism, ADHD or some other learning or behavioural difficulty that entitles them to a learning assistant at school and/or some form of disability benefit, that’s financially unsustainable. Parents are increasingly keen for their children to get a diagnosis just so they can receive these benefits. But on the flip side (and I can only really talk about autism here – I certainly don’t have ADHD), being even mildly autistic makes so many aspects of life so much harder that having some form of support is pretty damn useful. Labels are largely unnecessary, and there don’t need to be cash handouts except in severe cases, but a support group or someone to bounce ideas off is extremely valuable. Apart from a little bit in Auckland and Wellington when I was already 30-plus, I missed out on all of that – I’ve never had a diagnosis – so I’ve had to navigate life on my own. Very much on my own. My coping mechanism has so often been to retreat from people, to avoid embarrassment or exhaustion, and I’ve failed to form relationships as a result. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have had someone to help me find an alternative? In the face of overdiagnosis and overmedication, a new culture war has emerged. In the eyes of many, if you’re autistic, deal with it. No excuses. Can’t manage job interviews. Tough. That’s your own fault. Let’s all go back to 1976. Or better, 1876. The Victorians had it right. One thing that really hasn’t helped is the removal of Asperger’s as a condition when the fifth edition of the DSM – an American publication – came out in 2013. The distinction between autistic people who can’t feed or clothe themselves (unlike me) and those who struggle with open-plan offices (like me) was very helpful. What I don’t understand is why the rest of the Western world had to follow what the Americans did. As is the case so often, fuck ’em. Seriously.

In other news, the sale of my parents’ flat in St Ives still hasn’t gone through. There’s some hold-up involving the buyers’ solicitors. Dad said in an email that he still fears the nightmare scenario of the sale falling through entirely, almost a year after their tenants said they wanted to buy.

Scrabble. I rejoined the league last Thursday. They put me in the sixth division out of 14. According to the analysis I’ve been playing well. Whether that will be good enough to save me from relegation remains to be seen.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Scrabble

The three Rs

October 5, 2026 by 0 Comments

Pretty light on the news front. Yesterday I had four lessons, all in Dumbrăvița. Since then I’ve been thinking what the heck I should do with that nine-year-old girl from Thailand. Her Thai mum met a German guy in … I can’t remember where, and a year ago they moved to Romania for his work. He must earn pretty well because she goes to the super-expensive British school. They’re away from the sprawling estate of Dumbrăvița and they have a good section, with apple and plum trees and three chickens. They used to have a rooster too, but they got rid of it after the neighbours complained at the noise. Anyway, this girl. She speaks perfectly decent English, but she’s only semi-literate at best. And semi-numerate too. She got zero out of 15 in a recent maths test and didn’t even understand that she’d got zero. I think her parents would like me to attack her maths too. She clearly getting very little help from her teacher despite the vast expense.

Today I drove to Buziaș. It’s nice and relaxing there. It might have been better if I’d gone in a couple of weeks – the leaves will be falling off the trees then – though I could always go back. My brother called me while I was there. I turned the camera around and showed him the fountain and bandstand and covered walkway, but he seemed unimpressed. He wanted to know where the people were. I said that it was Sunday morning and a lot of them would have been at church, but really it would have been quiet no matter the time of day or week. A few people walking their dogs and the occasional squirrel. That’s why if I left Romania I’d have a hard time going back to England. It’s so hard to escape people there. My brother showed me both the kids. My niece is changing rapidly. My brother tested his son’s maths. What’s two plus two? Four, he proudly said. I then asked my nephew what four plus four was. He didn’t know, but he did know five plus five. He’s getting pretty good with his science now, my brother said.

I played four games of Scrabble today. I won the first three, extending my winning streak to six, thanks to some really lucky draws. But in the last game things just didn’t happen for me. I can have no complaints. I might rejoin the league again this week after a six-week absence.

Back to the swimming pool tomorrow.

Life :) - Maths teaching

The end of everything

August 24, 2026 by 0 Comments

I felt much better after going away, but this last week I’ve taken a giant leap backwards, to the point where today it’s felt like the end of everything. On Tuesday (or Wednesday, I can’t remember) I ate something that disagreed with me, then Thursday and Friday were so hot that I felt imprisoned in this damn room. I’ve been sleeping terribly. I’ve also had terrible dandruff. It’s been itching like mad. I suffer from seborrheic dermatitis which means it’s not just my scalp that gets it. This weekend I’ve had almost no energy and today I’ve wanted it all just to be over. I have however booked three nights (Tuesday to Friday) in Lupeni, in the Jiu Valley, to the south-east of here. It’s supposedly three-and-a-bit hours but I bet it’ll be more. One thing’s for sure, it’ll be cooler there. My neighbour Elena says she’ll check in on Kitty twice a day while I’m away. I didn’t feel I could leave Kitty at the pet hotel again.

So it’s all an enormous struggle. It’s been a hopelessly unproductive week. The most productive thing was probably on Friday when I got a new mufă for my phone. It cost me a fair bit: 265 lei or around NZ$100. A mufă is what I think we call a charging port in English.

I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. After we talked about the All Blacks’ big win in Johannesburg (which was nice), we discussed my future in Romania. It does feel that I’m far closer to the end of my time here than the beginning. When I picked up some figs and other fruit from the market today I did think, I might not be doing this for much longer. A lot of it is the damn heat. Summers are a right mess for me. I’m seriously considering going back to New Zealand, but I’ll see how the next few months play out.

Dorothy said she’d like to meet up tomorrow but with three lessons and going away the next day and the time taken for me to do anything quadrupled when I’m like this, I don’t know if I can. There have been protests in town against the removal of Dominic Fritz as mayor. I went along on Wednesday – it does seem he’s been treated shockingly – but there wasn’t a huge crowd and you couldn’t hardly hear what the bloke with the megaphone was saying. A far cry from the demonstrations of ten winters ago.

During the week when it got very hot, I thought it would be nice to swim in a pool or a lake or something. Dotted along the Timiș there are things called beaches and I’ve always wondered exactly what they are. On Thursday I tried to go to one, about a half-hour drive from here. I found it despite the typically Romanian lack of signage, but the rusty gate was closed to vehicles. I parked near the gate and walked up to the entrance where there was a guy of my sort of age. He seemed nice, and told me to come back at the weekend. Which I did. Yesterday I tried again. The gate was open. I paid the bloke 15 lei. I wish I hadn’t bothered. You wouldn’t have dreamed of going in the river. Rat pee disease would have abounded, I’m sure. I lay on the grass under an umbrella-ish thing and read a chapter of my book. Or tried to. I couldn’t deal with the music. It was a killer. One dancified song morphed into the next. The rendition of Nik Kershaw’s The Riddle just about did for me. Every now and then it was interrupted to tell you, in English, that you were listening to Summer Vibes 2023. People kept arriving. None of them would have been born before the original version of The Riddle came out. One of the groups started a barbecue. The whole place was designed for younger people to be with other people. I stuck it out for an hour and a half, then gladly went home.

In some better news, my maths student – the one who came in Louis Vuitton and Hermès shoes – got an A-star in her IGCSE exam. I thought she’d either get an A or an A-star – it would be close – so that’s great. It massively helped that she could easily afford all those lessons with me, but she still worked extremely hard. I got a new English student last week. He’s 23 and what I’d call a high flyer.

This evening I made myself walk down to the Bega. It was a very pleasant temperature, but I felt absolutely awful.

Poor Smoc. It’s a rather well-produced poster, isn’t it? I suspect AI was involved. Motan is the Romanian word for a tom cat. Maybe in a few months there will be no more motan or mufă for me.

Family - Headaches - Life :) - Maths teaching - Politics - Scrabble

It’s ALL like freezing cold sea water

May 11, 2026 by 0 Comments

So last week I felt I was maybe coming back to life, then on Friday I came down with a cold – a horrible chesty one, coughing up gunge – and it was back to square one again. Right now I also have a headache, though certainly not one of those horrific migraines. Between Friday afternoon and Saturday afternoon I was supposed to have seven lessons, but two people cancelled, preventing me from disappearing down a pit that I may never have crawled out of. Recently I said that getting out of bed had become like inching into cold sea water. Now all of life has become like that. But worse, because at least the sea feels nice once you’re in. Nothing feels nice at the moment. Nice is history. I must say though that it did feel pretty good to get back home from Dumbrăvița just after three on Saturday afternoon, knowing that I wouldn’t have to see or talk to anybody for the rest of the weekend. I rarely used to take naps in the daytime but now I’m doing so out of necessity. On Thursday morning I had my Romanian lesson and then an English lesson with a new student – I met her at the conversation club – that finished at eleven. Then at 11:30 I could no longer stay awake. That’s pretty damn early to already be dead to the world, and that was even before I had the cold symptoms. I’m seeing the doctor on Wednesday.

I’ve been in touch with Mum and Dad. They leave New Zealand a week today. They plan to fly to Romania after giving themselves time to acclimatise in the UK. It’s likely they’ll fly to Cluj rather than Timișoara to avoid the horrors of flying from Luton and having to stay overnight there. (You can take a Ryanair flight from Stansted to Cluj at a sensible time of day.) I’ll make my way there – a four-hour drive – then pick them up at the airport and go to our accommodation, wherever that happens to be. I said I’d book it this time. Then we’ll spend maybe three days in Cluj before coming back to Timișoara. I don’t know how we’re all going to manage this. My parents will be 76 and 77 next month; I feel like I’m bloody 90. David Attenborough is 100 and I’m sure he’s managing better than I am. I spoke to my brother last night. Not for long – he was busy with the kids (I saw them both) and I didn’t exactly feel like much of a chat. He warned me about accommodation and Mum. You’ll need to tread carefully, he said. He’s right, which is why I decided I’d book it. Last time I let Mum book everything and it all got stressful. I’ll go for a proper hotel with a couple of extra stars this time. The hit to my back pocket (or someone’s back pocket – Mum will insist on reimbursing me) will be worth it. Then my flat has become hopelessly messy again and I’ll have to somehow sort that out in between the lessons and naps and feeling like crap.

The local election results in the UK were dire for Labour and fantastic for Reform and Nigel Farage who really could become prime minister in three years’ time. Under first-past-the-post, a majority is possible with only around 30% of the vote if the opposition is sufficiently fractured. That would surely be another big fat nail in the coffin. A Trump supporter and probably a fan of Putin too. He would have got the British forces properly involved in the Iran war. The Tories did badly too. They’ve tried to copy Reform in many ways, and why would you vote for a watered-down version when you can get the neat version?

I had my last-ever lesson with Matei on Saturday. (I saw him on Friday as well.) He has his two IB (International Baccalaureate) maths exams this week. His parents gave me a backpack as a present. All in all, I must have had about 300 sessions with him. Assuming he gets reasonable grades in his IB, he’ll be off to Bremen University in Germany in September. He’s signed up to do chemistry and biology but may switch to business studies instead.

On Wednesday I saw the girl whom I’d managed to traumatise with my “lightning quiz” the week before. This time she was OK. I think her mother might have drilled her times tables into her.

I haven’t mentioned Kitty for a while. She’s fine. As I write, she’s in her favourite spot atop the dresser at the end of the living room. I wish I had more energy to play and interact with her.

Scrabble. Once again I have a fight on my hands to stay in the division. In one game, which I may well need to win if I’m to survive, I have a small lead and it’s my turn. I’ve got the QU combination but no other vowels and I have no idea what to do.

Right now, life feels like one big relegation. I’m doing what I can to eat and sleep properly (I’ve put on weight) and get some exercise and sunshine. It’s about all I can do.

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

Just enough time to keep afloat

May 3, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve bounced back a little but the fatigue and brain fog is still a problem. Mum asked me what I’d done with all that “extra” time after cancelling those lessons, but that was the wrong question. I didn’t have extra time at all. I had just enough time to keep my head above water. And then I had two lessons last night and another three earlier today and I feel buggered again. This morning, before I set off for Dumbrăvița for my lessons that started at 8:30, I felt I was drowning. No, this isn’t all going to fit in that bag. Where’s my lunch? The felt-tip pens, have I got them? What about the sheet on integration? First thing this morning I played Crazy Rabbits (a board game I’d created ages ago) with the boy who’s about to turn seven. The farmer’s wife wants to make rabbit pie, go back to eight. We did Simon Says and Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes and talked about dinosaurs and planets. We both coloured in a dinosaur sheet. He decorated one dinosaur (a diplodocus?) in the colours of the Romanian flag.

Yesterday I had my last maths lesson with the 17-year-old girl. The Louis Vuitton girl. She’s got her second paper – the one that allows calculators – on Tuesday. In the middle of our session her calculator battery died so I bought her one for 2 lei from the kiosk near the tram stop, where they sell just about anything. After the lesson I turned on the snooker. Wu Yize, whose shotmaking the night before was extraordinary as he took a 6-2 lead against Mark Allen, had found it much more heavy going. Allen won five frames in a row, including a 145 break and a huge steal, to nudge into the lead. And then, that frame. People will remember it for decades. I didn’t catch the first 20 minutes or so, but what I saw was mad stuff. Eight reds surrounding the black over a corner pocket, Allen not wanting a re-rack because he had a lead, half an hour (or was it longer?) of back-and-forth in which nobody was close to sinking the black… Utter madness, all of it. The crowd played their part with slow handclaps and all the rest of it. Eventually (after far too long) the referee practically forced Allen to concede a foul by potting the black. Wu cleared enough balls to leave Allen needing two snookers but still it wasn’t over. Wu inexplicably knocked the black in and then Allen laid an incredible snooker that Wu somehow wriggled out of. After an hour and 40 minutes (a century of minutes!) Wu potted the pink and it was over, the longest frame ever at the Crucible. (I also saw the previous longest frame, 85 minutes, which took place four years ago.) Because it took so long and there was even another frame that took around an hour, that was it for the session, which concluded at 7-7. I missed their third session (damn – Wu amassed two 140-plus breaks), and they’re still tied up, now at 11-11. They play to a finish tonight. The first to 17 wins, so it could be a very late one. In the other semi it’s John Higgins leading Shaun Murphy 13-11 with their last session starting in 40 minutes or so.

Dorothy invited me to a barbecue yesterday at her church, which they organised to help new immigrants get to know each other. A very good thing to put on, but there’s no way I could have gone. It’s mass participation, it would have gone on for hours (longer than the snooker) on a day in which I also had lessons, and it had nothing to do with me. Going to something like that would have messed me up. I will however go to her place tomorrow night for the English conversation club. Tomorrow morning I’m playing squash with Mark. It’ll be a physical test for me. I hope I won’t stay up too late to watch the snooker.

Update: Shaun Murphy (champion 21 years ago) finished with a four-frame flourish to beat John Higgins 17-15 and make the final. The better man won for sure. Whether I can stay awake for the other match I have no idea.

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

The big cancel

April 28, 2026 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a drag

April 24, 2026 by 0 Comments

Since Saturday I’ve been dragging myself out of bed, or around the supermarket, or off to lessons. It’s all felt like a huge effort. Just like in March, even fairly light physical activity has made me deeply exhale, as if I’m letting off steam. Monday was horrifically bad. Because it was my birthday, more people than usual wanted to communicate with me. I’m not talking a whole lot here, because I just don’t have that many contacts, but it was still far more than I could handle. I was not in a good place mentally that day, or the day after when all the new road works in two different parts of the city totally threw me. I don’t feel I should be driving at all right now. This feels dangerous. And the lessons of course. I’ve kept up a full week of teaching, including maths every day with the girl who has her IGCSE exams next week and the week after. I’m confident that she’ll get at least an A. Maybe even an A-star. She’s bright enough, and her determination is admirable, but it shows you what money can do. On Monday she brought me a box of biscuits for my birthday which was nice. That day, or was it the day after, she was wearing a pair of trainers. Normally she takes off her shoes when she comes in but this time she didn’t. I caught the brand: Hermès. Just imagine. I had half a mind to ask her if she knew how to pronounce it. It’s air-mess, by the way.

Seeing Mark for lunch on Wednesday gave me a slight boost, but it’s still a big struggle. I’m constantly fatigued. To make matters worse, I’ve just about lost my voice. Next week I’m going to cancel a bunch of lessons because that’s the only way I feel I can recover. I’ve never done that before, and when you work for yourself you feel a certain pressure to work whenever you can, but the way I am at the moment that’s a false economy.

Snooker. The second-round matches started yesterday and go through to Monday. The first round was slightly disappointing, though it had its moments. It looked for a while that the second round might be utterly (and depressingly) devoid of qualifiers, but Hossein Vafaei of Iran dismantled Si Jiahui 10-3 in the penultimate first-round match to finish. Just as he did in his last qualifying match, he won the last nine frames. So Iran versus Trump is still on. Vafaei is a colourful character and it certainly makes things more interesting that he’s still there in a sea of British and Chinese players. The most dramatic match I saw was Stan Moody against 2024 champion Kyren Wilson. Moody (born 14/9/06) was playing brilliantly and stood on the verge of an 8-3 lead, but lost seven straight frames, some of them in highly improbable fashion. Mark Williams (born 21/3/75) got through his first match comfortably, 10-4, and his next match starts 90 minutes from now. He plays Barry Hawkins (23/4/79) over the best of 25 frames – three sessions. That’s what’s so great about the snooker. These long, engrossing matches practically warp time and allow you to forget about everything else.

Scrabble. I did avoid relegation, just barely, in the last round. The latest suite of games started yesterday. There are so many Aussies in my division this time. In fact all the divisions have their fair share – I had no idea competitive Scrabble was so big there.

Update: My brother, having been offered that job, has since had to go through various security clearances. The process has been pretty onerous. Mum has even been involved because she has various info relating to his New Zealand citizenship. When I last spoke to Mum, she was really worried. What if the job falls through for him now? Mum looked like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, her already small frame all shrunken up. It would have been really upsetting for us all if he’d missed out after all of this. But I’ve just spoken to her again and it seems everything will be fine.

It’s a bright sunny day here. I’ve just been to get a new watch strap and a block of sheep’s cheese – even doing that is an effort. That stallholder near the dairy market was blasting out Depeche Mode as usual. And now I’m about to sit down and watch Mark Williams until my first lesson starts.

Family - Maths teaching - Politics - Scrabble

Chickening out but feeling better at last

April 9, 2026 by 0 Comments

Finally! After five weeks, I now feel close to normal. I’m no longer ravaged by headaches and mentally and physically exhausted. What a relief. But let’s see how long I stay like this.

Speaking of relief, I went to bed last night not knowing if World War Three might have broken out by the morning. Last night I wondered, are you able to wager on such an outcome? Sure enough, I found a site called simply ww3.bet that allows you to bet on whether or not WW3 will start by the end of April. The site looks legit, but there are a couple of practical problems with a bet like that. Last night the implied chances of armageddon were around one in six. Crazy, but hardly orders of magnitude from reality. This morning, following the ceasefire, they were one in twenty.

Trump’s TACO Tuesday makes it more likely that I’ll see Mum and Dad in the early summer. Had the US followed through on “wiping out a whole civilisation”, the Gulf states would have likely been obliterated too, and no commercial planes would have gone anywhere in the region for some time. I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. Dad thought that the alliance between Europe and the US was still worth holding onto, while Mum didn’t. I agreed with Mum. While the orange turd is in charge (and quite possibly for some years afterwards), America is enemy territory as far as I’m concerned. The other news I saw this morning (reinforcing my view) showed JD Vance just over the border from me in Hungary, cosying up to Viktor Orbán, trying to sway this weekend’s parliamentary election. Orbán is currently down in the polls. Whether that will translate to the election I have no idea, but let’s hope he gets a shellacking.

Mum and Dad will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary on Friday. A few months ago my brother suggested that we all meet up in the UK and have a big celebration there. When I told him that yeah, that’s a nice idea, but it just wouldn’t fly for several reasons (the biggest of which is that there just aren’t the people in the UK anymore to celebrate with), he thought I was being overly negative. Just this morning, Dad joked that they’ll struggle to handle the sheer number of people at their party. (They did think of taking the TranzAlpine train to the West Coast and back, but found it was ludicrously expensive.)

On Monday my brother called me. He was very upbeat about his new job, as well he might be. He said there were six positions available, and he probably just barely snagged the last of them. His very good degree gave him a shot. (His wife didn’t think the degree would be worth it. Hmmm.) He’ll be working for BAE, which I called “British Aerospace” in my last post. It hasn’t been called that since 2000, so that shows how out of touch I am. His job should pay well and provide excellent job security, which is a rare commodity these days. This is a real boom period for the defence industry. I’m really happy for him.

My bike is now fixed, for the moment at least. This afternoon I had a maths lesson in Aradului with an eleven-year-old girl. I’m facing the same battle with her as with almost all my maths students. I’m coming up against an education system that so emphasises methods and procedures – can you remember how to do this trick which will be almost useless in real life? – when their real problems are (1) an inability to do basic calculations quickly and accurately, and (2) a general inability to problem solve.

The next round of the Scrabble league starts tomorrow. The common word “coating” already has a valid anagram: “cotinga”, which is a bird found in Central and South America. Maybe “tacoing” will have made it in by the next update.

Cat - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Scrabble

Loss of a family friend

February 18, 2026 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother last night. He told me the sad news that an old family friend had died. She was born and bred in Ireland and was the mother of two boys who were friends of my brother’s and mine. Growing up, we saw a lot of her. She had a number of health complications in later life (and earlier – she had a heart valve operation, similar to what my father had, at a pretty young age). She was a little older than our mother – we reckon she must have been 80, give or take a year.

I’ve had some problems with my bike. When I took it into the shop, they told me they had no choice but to fit a whole new front gear system and pedals. That’ll set me back 350 lei (£60 or NZ$135). So that means I’ve done more walking than usual. The benefits of that are that I see more. Even practical things at times, like a handy appliance repair shop which I didn’t know existed, and the fact that I can my pay local rates bill across the road.

In a recent English lesson, an eleven-year-old boy showed me his maths homework. “I don’t like maths,” he said. I asked if I could take a picture of his homework, which you can see below. It’s a bit grainy, but you get the idea. I’m not surprised you don’t like maths. Who in their right mind would set something so boring and intimidating? So much is wrong there, I don’t know where to start. There are far too many questions, there’s far too little variety in them, the font size is way too small, the font itself – Times New Roman – is hopelessly unfriendly for kids, it’s not even typeset properly (it uses the letter x for times and a hyphen for minus), there are triple brackets (why inflict that on them?!), there’s nowhere near enough white space, and so on. I’d never dream of producing something like that. (Yes, fonts matter. The two I avoid at all costs are Times New Roman and the ubiquitous Arial.)

What happened to questions 31 to 42?

Crappy assessments aren’t limited to Romania, sadly. On Friday I had a lesson with a 17-year-old girl who will take the C1 Cambridge exam in about three months. I really can’t stand the reading part of the test, and neither can she. The first part of the reading we did was a text about the UK shipping forecast which I actually wrote about on this blog in 2022. A slightly bizarre topic for a young person with no connection to the UK, and although it would have been interesting for me in theory, the text was made to be utterly tedious; virtually nobody would want to read something so vapid. If you knew nothing about the topic before reading the next, you’d still know next to nothing afterwards. After that, we did another text – I can’t remember what that was about, though my student said it was even less inspiring than the one about the shipping forecast. The grammar part of the text isn’t quite as bad, but at times it spectacularly fails to test 21st-century (or even late 20th-century) English. In one question, it expected my student to come up with “Despite my not having spoken to him.” Practically nobody talks or writes like that anymore.

I was pissed off with Mum last week, but I’m over that now. As my brother said last night, you never quite know what she’s thinking. He also told me to save my money rather than make a costly trip to New Zealand this year. I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ll do. A bit sad in some ways, especially because Dad would clearly like to see me and even sent me some fares from Flight Centre (a NZ travel agent), mostly with China Airlines who are in fact Taiwanese.

I’ve had some more weird dreams. Two in the same night, in fact. In one of them I was working in some office job and went to the wrong floor and had to move a chair whose owner I didn’t know. When I asked who the owner was, I got a patronising reply. “Who do you think that chair belongs to?” Then in an even worse dream, I was transported back half a lifetime to my early twenties and another job which had some sort of initiation camp involving thousands of employees in a field. Everyone had special clothes delivered (By courier? Post? This wasn’t clear), but Mum and Dad came to deliver mine in person. I said to them, “I can’t do this,” to which Dad replied, “I know you can’t” and then I woke up. So often, the theme of these dreams is embarrassment.

A new café has opened up in the middle of town. I saw it on one of my walking trips last week. Whoever the clientèle is for this place, I’m very much outside it.

In Romania, avoiding places with bullshit English text is good policy. It’ll save you money for a start.

Scrabble. Last night I was able to see (on YouTube) the tail end of a fairly major tournament based in Canada. With seconds left on both players’ clocks, world champion Adam Logan was barely able to hold off Josh Castellano in the deciding seventh game of the final. He won that last game by twelve points. After the game, rather than just congratulating and commiserating, these elite players discussed potential moves in great depth, as if winning and losing were secondary to solving a fiendish puzzle. Adam is one of the best mathematicians alive, while Josh has a top job at Google. As for my progress, I started the latest round of the league with a good number of wins, but it’s an uphill struggle in the latter stages and I may have a fight on my hands to avoid relegation. We’ll see.

It’s five weeks since I fell over on the ice, and my back still hasn’t fully recovered. The pain (which luckily isn’t too bad) comes and goes. I’ll mention it to my after-hours doctor when I see him tomorrow to get my monthly supply of pills.

Kitty has been exceptionally friendly this week. Long may it continue.