Dreams

Dreams - Life :) - Photos - Politics

Make politics boring again (and some photos)

June 11, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Life is really just a case of lurching from one mini problem to another, hoping all the while to dodge the big ones. The plumber fixed the leaking pipe in the bathroom but now it reeks of sewage in there, just like in the guest houses I stayed at when I arrived in Romania. And now my bank app has stopped working so there are bills I physically can’t pay. (I booked some accommodation for a couple of weeks’ time but had to cancel the booking because I couldn’t make the payment.) I made two trips to the bank yesterday but they couldn’t sort it out. I’ll go back there later today. All stupidly time-consuming.
Update: On my third visit to the bank, a younger cashier got involved and it looks like it’s now working. However I’ve just had a no-show from one of my younger students. She only has lessons with me at all because her mother has the money to pay for them; she really couldn’t give a damn. One of my goals for the coming months (before the schools go back in September) is to get rid of all these time-wasters.

I’ve mentioned dreams before on here. Last night I had a dream in which I was hopelessly physically weak. Then a week or two ago I got the results of some general knowledge test that had vital implications – exactly what I don’t know. I went with some friends to receive the news. While they mostly got scores well into the 30s (the max was unclear), I got 25 which was bang on the pass mark. I was relieved but embarrassed and tried to hide my score from my friends. Yep, I passed, no worries. My paper was returned to me covered in red ink. I was branded as “incurious” and in one instance a “dumbass”, then at the end the examiner scrawled “I can’t prove it, but you know and I know that you cheated.” Do other people have to endure dreams like this? Inadequacy and embarrassment are running themes. Is my self-esteem that bad? The only positive from this dream was that I seemed to have a few friends.

Tests, exams, education. On Thursday my student in Slobozia – an English teacher – was rather upset with me when I criticised the Romanian education system and its knock-on effects. I explained that I certainly wasn’t critical of her. (Why a teacher should be so keen to defend the system is beyond me.) I felt bad, but right on cue the next day a viral video emerged from Ineu, a town around two hours’ drive to the north of me. A girl by the name of Iulia who had just finished her final year with the best grades in her school (in New Zealand she’d be the dux) gave a damning acceptance speech. The system has stripped me of my personality and taught me how to lie. It has taught me how to be a shallow hypocrite rather than to develop ethically and morally. Ouch!

Last week Nigel Farage entered the fray in the UK election campaign. He talks some sense on immigration but I wish he would stop there. When he criticised Rishi Sunak’s D-day desertion, he said “he doesn’t care about our culture,” implying that Sunak (who is of Indian descent) is from a different culture. Something other. In fact Sunak, who was born in Southampton, is about as British as they come. Then there’s Farage overt support for Donald Trump. His Reform party may well pick up 15% or so, though under the ridiculous first-past-the-post system they may only get one or two seats. The party I’m most impressed with right now are the Liberal Democrats. Their leader Ed Davey doesn’t take himself too seriously (so far in the campaign he’s been falling off paddleboards) and he has a compelling life story that shows him to be greatly empathetic. Yesterday they talked about pumping money into the care sector, and so far they’re the only party who are even daring to mention Brexit – the elephant in the room.

When I spoke to my brother he said he wished to go back to politics being boring again. Apart from maybe in the days just before or after an election, the subject never came up around the kitchen table when we were growing up. He mentioned the Monica Lewinsky scandal and what a big deal that was at the time. Now something twice as big happens every week it seems. Back to boring would be nice. After what happened in the European elections at the weekend, we might be waiting a while. Here in Timișoara the current mayor Dominic Fritz has been re-elected – he beat Nicolae Robu who was mayor from 2012 to 2020.

On Sunday I met Dorothy at Scârț, the place where they have the theatre and the museum of communism. I ordered a lemonade in Romanian, then the young lady asked me if I was from Birmingham or somewhere in that area. Well, I studied there, I said. Nobody had ever “accused” me of having a Brummie accent before, and as far as I’m aware I definitely don’t have one. (I think I have a hard-to-pin-down standard British accent that has been “contaminated” a little by all that time in New Zealand.) When you move around as I’ve done, bits and pieces are bound to rub off on you, so who knows?

My trip into the wilderness on Sunday: I was pleased to get a shot of the bounding deer

Lugoj last Thursday. An abandoned swimming pool and restaurant.

The cemetery at Toager near the Serbian border on Saturday 1st June

Dreams - Life :) - Tennis

Bull in a china shop, but am I coming out of it?

May 14, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Saturday evening I played tennis with Florin. The way I was feeling I didn’t expect to play well, but to my surprise I raced to 6-0, 4-0, with three break points in the following game. He was far from his best, but I had vast amounts of pent-up energy, and that meant I played more aggressively than usual. He improved while I hit the speed wobbles, especially on serve where I was creaking. There were worlds in which I might even have lost the second set, but I eked it out 6-3 and led 4-3 in the third when we finished.

Soon after writing my last post I met Mark by the river. He’s now a married man – again – after an eight-minute wedding in Scotland. You have to reside in England to marry there, but Scotland has so such rule, so they got married in Gretna which is just over the border. Nearby Gretna Green was where elopers from England would marry 200-odd years ago; back then if you were under 21 you couldn’t marry in England without permission from your parents, but that rule didn’t apply in Scotland. Timotion was in full swing in town – that’s basically like Round the Bays which I sometimes did in Auckland or Wellington, but without the bays; there was also a half-marathon option. I couldn’t think of anything worse than being among a crowd of people emblazoned with company logos.

After seeing Mark I got in the car and stopped in the village of Dragșina. I got out because I wanted to take a photo of a stork nesting atop a lamp-post to show somebody, but I couldn’t do that because my phone had died. Fuzzy coloured lines jumped about on the screen. I’d planned to go further but my dead phone stopped me in my tracks, so I then went home via one of the several Kauflands dotted around the city. I felt disoriented in that supermarket, which I’d never been to before. It was simply too big. Then I managed to tip the trolley over in the car park, which isn’t an easy thing to do, giving myself a great big bruise on my shin. I was like a bull in a china shop there, with no control whatsoever. Luckily I hadn’t bought eggs or anything else that might break. I drove home, relieved to make it back before doing serious damage to me or anyone else.

I had to buy a new phone, and quick. I mean, I hate phones, but they’re a necessity of modern life. In the evening I cycled to Altex in the north of the city (the shop is open until 9pm, even on a Sunday) where I got another Samsung. Whether that was wise I don’t know. It cost 825 lei (roughly NZ$300 or £140). Today I’ll get a screen protector and a better charger. I was constantly plugging and unplugging my old phone – that can’t have done it much good – and charging it at all became an increasing struggle. Dropping it didn’t help either, of course. I lost a load of recent WhatsApp messages, but nothing important, and luckily I’d only just transferred a batch of photos to my laptop.

I’ve had two recent chats with my brother. All is well there. My nephew is coming on in giant leaps now. We discussed the northern lights that had been visible down to unusually low latitudes, though neither of us actually saw them. We also talked about WhatsApp groups and how they’re sucking the life out of us all. He said most of the other students on his university course where part of groups but he steered clear, and probably benefited as a result. Yesterday I spoke to my parents who had just had the carpet fitted in their living room at a cost of $4000. Everything there has become mindblowingly expensive.

Yesterday I had my Romanian lesson. I felt frustrated that I’m not improving. If anything I might be regressing. Then I had four English lessons of varying meaningfulness. After all that I put on the lovely Ommadawn, Mike Oldfield’s album, and for the first time in a month I was able to just be, albeit for half an hour. I’m about to have another lesson, after which I’ll go into town and hopefully pay my rates – I never receive a bill for that, so I don’t know how much it will be, nor what would happen if I didn’t pay at all.

I had a strange dream last night where I was with Dad in a seedy theme park. The rides were age-restricted; I was only just inside the upper age limit. There was some sort of key that we needed to exit the park, but ours didn’t work. What do we do now? Then I woke up.

Books - Dreams - Family - Life :) - Other sports

It could have been curtains

February 20, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had an online lesson with a young woman in the final year of university. She’s also working part-time in IT as a tester. She shared her screen and described some bugs to me, saying that she’ll need to ask her colleagues before attempting to fix them. I asked her if her colleagues are approachable. Oh yes. I thought back to the early days of my insurance job in Auckland and how unapproachable they were. Day in day out, I felt unable to ask anybody and had no choice but to guess. For more than two years, until I got shunted off to a different department, I felt terminally stupid. My first real job, dealing with flood maps in Peterborough, wasn’t like that at all. People were happy to help, and guess what, I learnt stuff.

So I spoke to my parents after breathing that sigh of relief. Damn well tell us next time, I said. I was lucky enough to get five minutes of just Dad, as Mum dealt with a delivery man. Dad wasn’t too happy either. He said that Mum had had the lump for bloody ages before seeing a doctor, and if it had been melanoma she’d have been toast. Mum came back on the line to say she’d been back on the golf course, playing in some competition or other, going round in exactly 100. Nice to know she’s got her priorities straight.

On Sunday I had dinner with Mark at the Timișoreana beer factory which is a five-minute walk for me. We both had bulz bănățean – a substantial, very Romanian dish consisting of mămăligă (polenta) with cheese, a fried egg, sausages, mici, pork, gogonele (pickled green tomatoes) and pickled cucumbers. We had two beers apiece. It was busy there, though you’d never guess it from the outside, and as is typical for Romania it took us 40-odd minutes to get served. He told me about his girlfriend’s family, which made any issues I might have with my mother pale into insignificance. She grew up in a poor part of Yorkshire as the middle of three sisters; they suffered constant mental abuse at the hands of their father who committed suicide soon after they left home. Understandably this has left her badly scarred. (If you ask me though, she’s done remarkably well. She’s carved out a successful teaching career for herself.) Now 37, she is unable to have children; he said she will have IVF treatment. Next month (I think) they will get married in a registry office in Scotland. That’s because England requires you to be resident in the country to get married, but Scotland doesn’t.

I’ve almost finished reading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Dad gave me it – an 1896 edition – when I was over there six months ago. Defoe himself was only five when the bubonic plague struck London in 1665, so I wonder where all his facts and (extensive) figures came from. There are clear parallels with Covid, and the good and bad of humanity have changed remarkably little since that time. Just like with Covid, the plague’s long incubation period meant that people transmitted the disease asymptomatically, killing many others in the process. The lack of anything approaching modern medicine made the whole thing harrowing beyond belief. Doctors, such that they were, tried to break the swellings – or buboes – by burning them. Pure torture. In the autumn as the figures improved, people got blasé, thinking they were out of the woods. That brought about a second wave. Sounds familiar. The plague was followed by the Great Fire of London in the following year.

I watched Birmingham’s home game against Sunderland at the weekend. They came from a goal down at half-time to win 2-1 in front of a packed stadium. (The club had put on some kind of promotion.) Once young Jordan James bundled in the equaliser on the hour mark, the home side were galvanised and were clearly the better team. They were lucky though; Sunderland were really sluggish in defence in the second half. Now for the bad news. A serious medical issue has forced Tony Mowbray to step back from his managerial duties. Let’s hope he makes a full and speedy recovery, obviously. Mowbray strikes me as a thoroughly good bloke.

Finally, a totally mental dream I had last night. It took place at night in St Ives, the town where I grew up, except the streets were full of LED screens showing animated pictures of every colour imaginable. I met the young guy who ran the show, having learnt the trade from his father. He explained that the animation in St Ives was “three years out of date” compared to what other towns had. I said I preferred the older stuff. Then he invited me into the control room, where for some reason he was also broadcasting images to Mindanao in the Philippines. Where I got that from I have no idea. (This morning I found out that Mindanao is in fact an island, not a city.) I hope I have more dreams like that, not the ones where I trek around the city to do some life admin task, only find the place boarded up and overgrown by weeds.