Dreams

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.

Dreams - Family - International travel - Music - Scrabble

11,000 miles — will it be worth it?

February 10, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a lesson with Strong After Shave Guy, the 17-year-old who literally ten minutes ago told me he’d decided to become a policeman. To be accepted into the Romanian police, you have to pass tests in English, Romanian and history. It’s quite refreshing to have someone who doesn’t want to become a YouTuber or an influencer or to work in IT. (I’d have made an absolutely terrible policeman.)

This morning I spoke to Mum and Dad. My brother, my sister-in-law and my niece all came down with a severe and acute tummy bug which put them in hospital for a short time. Happily they’re fine now, but my brother – who hardly ever used to get ill – has had every bug imaginable since he became a father. Mum and Dad now seem pretty keen to come to Europe, probably in mid-May. That’s a 180-degree turn from just two weeks ago. I’m still planning on flying to New Zealand in early August, but when I mentioned my plan to them this morning, Mum showed (for the second time) ambivalence at best. I know Dad would very much like me to come over, but I really do think that (in the best case!) Mum wouldn’t care either way. I can’t help but be upset by this, because I certainly would like to see Mum out there. Tomorrow Mum’s got golf, so tonight I’m going to call Dad – making sure it’s late enough that she’ll have gone – and lay it on the line. Would she prefer it if I don’t come? Because if so, it’s a heck of a long way.

On Saturday I had dinner with Mark at the Drunken Rat in Piața Unirii. The atmosphere and staff were very pleasant, reminding me of those bars in Lyon a quarter of a century ago. I had some dish involving chicken and rice and, as usual in Romania, nowhere near enough “stuff” to mop it all up with. Before our meal we went to a nearby bar and each had a Guinness. This was Mark’s idea. There aren’t many places in Timișoara where you can find Guinness; I hadn’t had it for ten years at least. Sadly I won’t be seeing Mark much longer. His wife has got herself a deputy head position in a private school in Preston (northern England), so they’ll be out of here in June. I expect I’ll make a trip to Preston, a place I know very little about with the exception of its football team, at some point when I go back to the UK.

My latest go-to song is Duran Duran’s The Chauffeur which came out in 1982. Duran Duran are a real mixed bag for me – some of their stuff, even their biggest hits, does very little for me, but others (like The Chauffeur) hit just the right spot. Yesterday, when I met up with Dorothy in Scârț, I heard a song I’d never heard before – Catch the Rainbow by a British band called, well, Rainbow. This song came out in 1975.

As for dreams, in a recent memorable one – in fact the only recent dream I remember – I was on a bus in Alabama (why there I have no idea) and everyone was singing. Not Sweet Home Alabama; I don’t know what it was.

Scrabble. When I met Dorothy yesterday we played a game in Romanian. It was a bit of a struggle, though I won 302-227. Similar to the other time we played, I got several of the high-point tiles, though this time my letters just didn’t mesh that well. Once again Dorothy got both blanks, but she burnt them cheaply. And guess what? I finished in the promotion spots in the online league, at my fifth attempt. I came fourth with a record of ten wins and four losses; the top five get promoted. This was highly unlikely at one point; my record was sitting at 4-4 and in the next game to finish I was way behind at a very advanced stage. In that game I was fortunate to draw into a bingo that gave me a seven-point win. I then won all my remaining games. Even with all those wins, without that earlier come-from-behind win I’d have only finished sixth. This will mean I’ll get another crack at that elite British player – who took the top spot and beat me handily – when it starts up again on Thursday. Being in the division above will turn up the pressure just a notch. I’m fully prepared to be immediately relegated.

Dreams - Family - Films - Music - Photos - Scrabble

Deep freeze

January 11, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s been bitterly cold. On Friday morning it was minus 16 degrees. As I write this at 9:30 on Sunday morning, it’s −9; the top temperature today is forecast to be −5. Yesterday, when we soared to the dizzy heights of zero, I had to drive to my two maths lessons in Dumbrăvița. The main roads had been ploughed of snow, so they weren’t too bad, but the side roads bordered on treacherous. It was also foggy on my journey out there. (I got all-weather tyres put on my car. A lot of people make a twice-yearly switch between summer and winter tyres, but it’s a real palaver that can take up an entire weekend.) I was very glad to get home. It’s all very reminiscent of my first winter here, nine years ago, when the river froze and there were icicles hanging from the building I’d just moved into. Kids under about 13 have no recollection of a proper winter, but winters like this – and even more extreme – used to be an annual occurrence here. The snow has got the young ones all excited, and we’ve got more coming in the next few days. Apart from driving which required serious concentration yesterday, I have no problem coping with these rather nippy conditions. There’s always something you can do to keep warm. Summer is a totally different ball game though.

On my trip to Dumbrăvița yesterday they played Crowded House’s Weather With You on the radio. A nice touch, assuming it was deliberate. The song immediately before that was Der Kommissar by Falco, which came out at the end of 1981. I still remember when their bigger hit Rock Me Amadeus came out in ’85. The night before I had a dream where I was hiking somewhere in Romania and met a younger British woman. For some reason she showed me an ID photo with her face on it. Her surname was Smith. She then told me she’d changed her surname to Poxam. I attempted to spell it, putting an h after the x, but she said it was H-less. Then she asked me if I’d like to come and see her in the UK, at which point I woke up. I wonder where I got that name from. Poxham is a plausible name for a British village. There is a Poxham out there, and in fact it’s a picturesque hamlet in Austria. The closest name I’ve ever had anything to do with is Moxham Avenue, the main street in the Wellington suburb of Hataitai. I once put in an offer on a flat in a Disney-style block there, but it wasn’t accepted.

Lately I’ve been tuning out of politics and international news. That’s just as well; what’s coming out of America would drive me to insanity if I paid close attention to it. However, the shooting – cold-blooded murder – by an ICE officer of an innocent mother driving her car in Minneapolis was too awful to ignore. America right now seems a lost cause. I sometimes laugh when I hear people intellectualising the president, using adjectives like transactional, when really it’s far, far simpler. He’s a piece of shit who cares for nothing but his own power and ego and has no respect for human life. He enjoys hurting other people. Most of the people around him are pieces of shit too. And 77 million people voted for that, with their eyes wide open. None of what is happening is a surprise.

Scrabble. The latest round of league matches is over, and just like last time I won eight and lost six. That vastly surpassed my early expectations – I had a pretty rough start. So that should mean I’ll stay in the same division for the fourth round in succession. Yesterday I played six games on ISC. I lost the first of them, then won four straight before being hammered 508-306 in my last game. In that game I drew terribly to the point where it was probably unwinnable no matter what I did, but I was still disappointed with my decision making. More generally, my word knowledge keeps letting me down. I’m still totally ignorant of a lot of very useful fours and fives, and even if I do know them, I’m likely to miss them because I haven’t played enough for my brain to properly “zone in”. Missing – or simply not knowing – these words has all kinds of knock-on effects. It makes it harder to sort out a bad rack, leading to lower scores (and fewer bingos) down the line. The tournament in Cluj is six weeks away, on 21st and 22nd February. I don’t know if I could realistically make that. It’s a four-hour drive so I’d have to go up the day before and miss some work. I was hoping there would be a sleeper train but there doesn’t seem to be. So far I’ve watched the first three episodes of The Queen’s Gambit which Mark recommended to me. I didn’t like the ending of the third episode – Beth’s stepmother really needed to tell Beth to “pull her head in” – but hey. So far it’s clear that however scary a Scrabble tournament would be, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as chess.

The last time I spoke to my brother, things weren’t easy for him. He said he’d like to take the kids camping at some point, but there’s no way his wife would ever go. She prefers cruises or Center Parcs (the name makes me shudder), neither of which are my brother’s cup of tea, and they wouldn’t be mine either. We had great camping trips as kids, and I’m sure my nephew would love camping. With my brother’s line of work, it would be right up his street too. And what’s more, they live in a great part of the country for it. Practically right on the coast, with the New Forest on their doorstep, and a quick hop over to France if they ever felt like camping over there. I hope my sister-in-law can be convinced.

Dreams - Language teaching - Music - Politics

14/10/15

October 14, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s ten years since I started this blog. If I hadn’t decided to radically change my life at that point, I might not even have made it this far.

Last night I had another strange dream. Mum had to see a lawyer – a rich and powerful woman – in connection with one of the flats in St Ives. The only snag: this lawyer didn’t speak a word of English, only Irish. Her son Sam did the job of interpreting. After the meeting Mum described the lawyer as “the most horrible woman I’ve ever met”.

Dreams are so often a summary of the previous day. I’d had a late online session with a new guy who knew very little English so the whole lesson was conducted in Romanian. In an earlier session we discussed phrasal verbs and I gave an example of someone collecting their son from school. Sam was his name, of course. I explained that you can pick Sam up or you can pick up Sam, but when you use a pronoun instead of the name, things change. You can pick him up but you can’t pick up him.

I’m slowly getting over this cold, but I’m still low on energy. Outside my lessons but inside my life, not a lot is happening. I meant to say that the Moldovan parliamentary elections took place at the end of September. Maia Sandu’s pro-EU party won handily. That was a relief. In other news, Jane Goodall, the eminent primatologist and a thoroughly good person, died two weeks ago at the age of 91. Her love for primates was sparked a young age when she was given a stuffed toy chimpanzee.

Dad recently sent me this video of a Tiny Desk concert featuring the band Big Thief. It dates back to the early days of this blog, when Obama was still president. It’s excellent. My favourite Big Thief song (that I’ve heard so far) is Double Infinity, although Grandmother gives it a good run for its money.

Cat - Dreams - Family - Scrabble

What dreams are made of

October 6, 2025 by 0 Comments

Last night I woke up three or four times during the night. Each time I went back to sleep, I resumed a weird and unpleasant dream. This dream started off with me running late for a meeting – I first had to walk to collect my bike – and then when I got there I found it wasn’t a meeting but a game in which everyone was in teams except me who was on my own. The game consisted of a number of physical puzzles to solve. While the others were busily solving these puzzles in their teams, I was getting absolutely nowhere and wanted to escape. The game morphed into some kind of meal. I was on my own again at a table which I knocked over. I then lost my bike. My mother appeared out of the blue, then disappeared. The meal turned into a party in what seemed like student accommodation. Plenty of food was involved. I enjoyed the food but otherwise hated the experience. A power cut allowed me to escape the packed room with food in my pockets. I found an empty room and ate alone until the others located me, to my embarrassment.

There has been a huge shift in the weather in the space of a few days. It’s like September and October have been ripped from the calendar and we’ve lurched from August straight to November. At the weekend Dorothy went to Păltiniș, a mountain resort not too far from Sibiu. She sent me pictures of the (rare) early October snow. In Timișoara we had major downpours last Friday and Saturday. The sun has hardly shown itself.

Last week was an exhausting one. My 31 hours of teaching were nothing too unusual, but the scheduling became a real pain with messages batting backwards and forwards constantly (I felt my batteries being further depleted with each one) and one 17-year-old girl in particular being annoyed that I couldn’t see her at a time that perfectly suited her. Saturday started off in inauspicious fashion when Matei’s father invited me to “take off my clothes”. Matei’s dad doesn’t lack confidence when it comes to speaking English, even if he makes plenty of errors. (The cause of that rather amusing error is that the singular Romanian noun haină means a coat, while the plural haine means clothing in general.)

I worry enormously about my parents. So often they look drained when I talk to them. Dad hasn’t slept. Mum has the weight of the world on her shoulders. On Tuesday they both looked so bad that I guessed something really terrible must have happened to them or to a friend or family member. But no, it was the usual stuff – the tangled web of tech problems and their flats in St Ives. Dad mentioned that the property manager for one of their places had just changed, leading to no end of issues. He later emailed me to apologise for mentioning that. God no, Dad, there’s no need to apologise – your problems are my (and my brother’s) problems too – but I’m much more concerned about the effects they’re having on you and Mum than on the problems themselves.

Yesterday I called Mum and Dad from my car. I was in the village of Bucovăț, which is only a short drive from Timișoara. I’d parked next to a farmhouse which had a large gaggle of geese – dozens of them – outside. I got out of the car to show my parents the geese when a burly bloke asked me what the heck I was doing. Six dogs soon appeared. I told Dad that I was getting flashbacks to New Zealand when I was a kid. Dad was taking pictures of a farmhouse at Hanging Rock when suddenly the farmer levelled his gun at us all. At some point in our conversation, Dad said “shuffling tiles like in Scrabble” and I mentioned that I’d played two games the night before. I also said that I learnt that “hikoi” was a valid word. This was a bad idea: they both said that the inclusion of Maori words is ridiculous. I then countered that it isn’t so simple. “Kiwi” is obviously fine, so where do you draw the line? What about weta? Or weka? By the way, hikoi also functions as a verb, so the rather strange-looking hikoied and hikoiing are also valid Scrabble words.

I played seven games in all over the weekend, winning six. As is often the case, it was my loss that taught me the most. My opponent, who had a higher rating than me, simply knew more words. His (or her) opening play of ZAFTIG scored over 50 and though I competed well, I fell to a 474-423 loss. My losing score was in fact more than I managed in five of my six wins. In the last week I’ve been concentrating on committing the three-letter words to memory.

When I talked to Mum and Dad on Tuesday, I said half-seriously that they should get a cat. Though she was hard work at the start, having Kitty has helped calm me down.

Dreams - Photos - Travel: Europe

Czech and Poland trip — Part 3 of 3 (photos, and is it really worth it anymore?)

September 3, 2025 by 0 Comments

The night before last I had a weird dream in which I was forced to leave Timișoara and move to Cluj. I don’t know why the prospect was so frightening given some of the other moves I’ve made in my life. Cluj is a fine city; maybe I’ll go there with Mum and Dad if they come this way again.

It’s officially the end of summer. I don’t mind that one bit. (It got to 33 today all the same; I had to have a cold shower in the middle of the day after a bike ride.) This summer wasn’t in the same league as the infernal three months we had last year that just about did for me. A combination of the heat and the news made me feel that we were heading for hell in a handcart. A year later I’ve just about checked out of the news entirely; it’s got too much for me.

Moving to New Zealand in 2003 meant I missed out on a lot of potential travel opportunities in Europe. Now, with ever more globalisation and saminess and theme-park-isation, I wonder if it’s even worth it. It’s the differences that make travel interesting. Why not just look at the pictures while staying here? Here is more interesting to me than many popular destinations anyway, with all the funny little shops and bars and cafés. I’m reminded of an episode of Miranda where everyone thinks she’s gone on some exotic trip when in fact she’s booked into the motel down the road to avoid all the hassle. Then there’s the expense. On Sunday I played squash with Mark in Dumbrăvița, then we had pizza and beer at a place around the corner. He’d just got back from a seven-week trip (with his wife and their two dogs) around western Europe, all at unavoidably high cost.

I forgot to mention that I got a speeding ticket coming back from Slovakia. I was still in Slovakia when I was pulled over for doing 132 km/h when the limit was 110. (This was in the middle a short section when the limit dropped from 130. For the police it was like shooting fish in a barrel.) I expected the worst. When I got a fine of only €20, which I paid in cash on the spot, I was immensely relieved. I also think I might have got flashed by a camera in the Czech Republic at the start of my trip.

Here’s a selection of the pictures I took on my trip:

Firstly, Olomouc (which was lovely really) in the Czech Republic:

Kroměříž, not that far from Olomouc:

Příbor, still in the Czech Republic, birthplace of Sigmund Freud:

Bydgoszcz, Poland, where I spent most of my time:

The beautiful port city of Gdańsk in northern Poland:

Cat - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

A little rascal

June 7, 2025 by 0 Comments

Today I had a free morning, giving me the chance to cycle to Sânmihaiu Român before it got too hot. But really it was already too hot. I was sweating like a pig and jumped into a cold shower when I got back. The sweet smell of tei – or lime – has now taken hold. Not helping matters was another bout of sinus pain – though not as bad as the one before, it sapped me of energy as always.

Yesterday I didn’t start till ten – unusually – but it was a busy day. It started with a two-hour lesson with a lady in her late forties in which I partly took on the role of a shrink, then I had four more one-hour sessions with kids aged 10 to 13. One of them meant trekking across the city on my bike. In between I took Kitty to the vet to get her latest jab, then got my car back after getting the air con fixed. They put freon in it and also replace a switch that had been playing up. That was an absolute necessity and it only set me back 700 lei (£120 or NZ$260). I’ve also had the battery replaced on my laptop. It’s been a good week for that kind of thing. I’m still waiting for someone to pick up my colour printer which has packed in well within its guarantee. With only a black-and-white printer, my options with kids are limited.

It was interesting talking to Mum and Dad after their trip down to Poole. They really took to their granddaughter. Their grandson on the other hand is proving to be a real live wire. Super intelligent (my brother wonders how he could possibly be so good with numbers and the alphabet) but pretty conniving with it. My brother could be a pain in the neck at that age – I can remember – but there was never any malice in him. So watch this space, I suppose. My brother has been extremely good with his son when a lot of fathers would lose their rag. They were relieved to get back to St Ives and not have to do very much for really the first time since they left New Zealand. (I’d wanted their time in Romania to be a relaxing one, but it didn’t quite pan out that way.)

When my parents were with me, Dad sometimes said “I don’t know how you do it” in relation to my work. He thought it was surprising that I have a job that has a large social element when socialising has never been easy for me. To be honest, the sheer amount of talking I have to do can be exhausting. Sometimes I’m not even talking in my own language. But the social aspect isn’t too bad – it’s hardly going to some packed trendy bar where socialising is the primary goal, I rarely have to interact with more than one or two people at a time (I’ve always been terrible in large groups), and I’m safe in the knowledge that after 60 or 90 or 120 minutes it’ll be all over. And I’m actually helping someone in the process, which is something most humans derive satisfaction from. The social side of an open-plan office is far, far harder for me, even if it involves less actual talking. So much fakeness and playing the game. And don’t get me started on Christmas parties.

It looks like Elena, the lady who lives above me, will feed Kitty during my nine-day stay in the UK. Dorothy just happens to be acquiring a kitten in the next week or two, so that wasn’t an option. I was worried that I’d be forced to find a shelter for her. As for my planned road trip to Poland, I may well end up taking Kitty with me. That thought made me think of the song Me and You and a Dog Named Boo by Lobo. It was a number-one hit in New Zealand in 1971 and they’d sometimes play it on classic hits stations. It makes life in those days seem pretty simple.

Off-the-pitch football news. Birmingham City’s already ambitious plans are going gangbusters now. They plan to build a 62,000-seater stadium in the middle of a sports quarter with transport links to the city. Potentially this could be huge. Blues are already a big club in terms of support – it’s a big city after all – but on the pitch they’ve been very much in the shadow of Aston Villa. This massive investment could turn the tables. They’ve got one trump card up their sleeves that Villa lack – having Birmingham in their name. A successful Blues team could really put the city on the map, giving it a real shot in the arm, as well as revitalising a pretty impoverished part of it. I just they hope they don’t totally down the Manchester City route; I stumbled upon one of their home matches on TV recently and I switch it off – I couldn’t handle the sheer scale of all the advertising.

Continuing the football theme, I had a dream on Tuesday night about a Championship (second-tier) club that lacked decent support or even a decent song. As a joke a supporter composed a song: “Keep the cat flying along” (whatever the hell that was supposed to mean; I think it was a mishmash of other football songs) that ended up becoming not only the club song but a major hit.

I’m currently watching the Roland-Garros semi-final between Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic, though it’s uncomfortably hot in the kitchen where the TV is. Sinner took the first set 6-4 and Djokovic leads 3-2 (on serve) in the second. There was an extraordinary point early in the second set in which both players scrambled to reach near-impossible balls. The winner will play Carlos Alcaraz in the final.

On Sunday I’m playing squash with Mark, and maybe his wife too.

Books - Cat - Dreams - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

We’re in Deep S***

January 31, 2025 by 0 Comments

Kitty. Yeah, she’s pretty good. Especially when she’s asleep, which isn’t very often. The last few days she’s shown plenty of affection, so I think she’s getting used to me. Tomorrow I’m taking her to the vet to her screened, or whatever they do, in preparation for next week when hopefully she’ll have her bits removed. I feel slightly sad about that. I mean, how much does the process hurt?

I had five lessons today instead of my usual seven on a Thursday. My mother-and-son combo got shunted forward a day. When I saw Filip in Mehala, I got the usual. His mum gave me a pair of size-seven slippers to put on as well as a perfectly good cup of coffee. Then I went up to his room where his thermostat was jacked up to 28 degrees. Even when the conditions for teaching aren’t ideal, I remind myself. Life insurance? Open-plan hell? This is orders of magnitude better than that.

DeepSeek. The new Chinese AI app. Even the name scares the crap out of me – X-ray eyes, watching your every move. It managed to knock a trillion dollars off the Nasdaq in a single day. A trillion dollars! I can’t make sense of 2025 at all. $600 billion of that was a single company called Nvidia who apparently make chips. So they must be in the fast-food trade or else they’re some casino outfit. Nvidia joins a long list of bland made-up modern company or product names containing a V and ending in A. Off the top of my head there’s Aviva, Arriva, Aveda, Veolia and, um, Viagra. Nvidia goes one step further though in breaking the rules of English phonotactics – it starts with N followed by another consonant – for increased fakeness.

Maybe that’s why so many people have tattoos now. In a world of artificiality, at least they’re real. You can see them, touch them, and for a time, feel them. (I imagine you can smell them for a time too.) I’m not tempted, because there’s nothing I identify with strongly enough to get it permanently stamped on me. And frankly, being a native English speaker in Timișoara, teaching English and maths, with a beard and a fair old mop of hair, is plenty. Getting inked would be overkill. But the real thing is something that is very important to me. My job feels very real. So does this city, even if certain parts (like bloody Dumbrăvița) are so depressingly fake as to be unlivable for me.

I read something yesterday about how unhappy Generation Z are in the UK. They defined Gen Z as (currently) between 13 and 27. There were comments that said “I remember 1977 and the Sex Pistols. Nothing new here.” Even though I wasn’t born in ’77 I’ve read plenty about that time, and I disagree. Back then, at least young people were united through music, how they dressed, and even their football teams. (Though it could be unpleasant and even dangerous to see live football then, at least it was affordable.) Now society is too fractured for that sort of unity to be possible. Blame smartphones and social media.

Lately I’ve been reading a post-apocalyptic sci-fi book called A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was written in the 1950s by Walter M. Miller Jr and has strong religious themes. I’m two-thirds of the way through it. Having got this far I’ll stick with it, but in my fairly simple brain I’m filing it under the “too clever for me” category. Some of the themes resonate today, in particular the anti-intellectualism, called the Simplification in the novel. (Right on cue, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved their “Doomsday Clock” forward to just 89 seconds to midnight.)

I had a strange dream last night which involved a game of cricket in a park in Timișoara. Several games, in fact, and I had great difficulty walking through the park without being hit by a ball. (Nobody plays cricket in Romania, as far as I’m aware.) Games come up a lot in my dreams. A few nights ago I had a dream involving my aunt (the one who passed away last April) and the card game bridge. I know next to nothing about bridge. I only know that it’s a trick-taking game that involves bidding, compass points and 13-card hands. This dream probably came about from something my aunt once said about endless parties and games of bridge in the RAF officers’ mess. She tried to make it sound glamorous, but I thought it sounded awful.

Earlier this week I wrote my first proper letter since 2009. When my friend from St Ives surprised and delighted me by sending me one, I decided to reply in kind. It would be wonderful if she and her husband could make a trip to Romania (they came in 2017), but they’ve got so much stuff going on and he narrowly escaped death in 2022. I don’t know how feasible it would be.

A football score from the Cypriot league that caught my eye earlier this month:

“Have you heard about Jim?” What’s happened? “He’s only just got over his omonia, and now he’s come down with a terrible case of anorthosis.” Poor Jim. I hope he pulls through.

I’m pretty sure the name Anorthosis has the same ortho- root as in orthopedic, orthography and orthogonal: it means straight ahead or correct. But at first glance it looks like something I’d want to steer clear of.

Some pictures from Sunday:

I had a bit of time on Monday before my lesson. I hadn’t noticed this chimney before:

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

Dodging a bullet and getting up my nose

December 15, 2024 by 0 Comments

Last night I had two strange dreams. In the first, I was piloting a small plane and was in trouble (though I was surprisingly calm) until my brother got me out of it. I communicated with him via text or something. Soon after I had another near accident, which made me nervous about flying in small planes again. (In that dream, flying in small planes was a normal part of everyday life.) In the second dream I was in trouble at work for playing some kind of ball game (that I’d invented) during office hours. My boss seemed to quite like the game though, and thought I should market it. In fact he talked enthusiastically about a business opportunity. I was embarrassed about the whole thing and began to skulk around the office.

The “invented game” dream might have come from the board game I played with some of my students last week. This is the one Dad came up with back in 1993 or ’94 – racing cars around a three-lane track, where the fast lane gets you round faster, obviously, but requires more fuel. I refined his idea and a quarter of a century later started using it in my lessons. My 13-year-old student wanted a copy of the game that he could print out and play at home, so I sent him soft copies of the game board, the dashboards (showing fuel and completed laps), and the cards that you have to draw if you land on certain spaces.

On Monday night I started getting pain in my sinuses that continued through Tuesday and Wednesday. I also seemed to pick up a bug of sorts. I was devoid of energy for two days. On Thursday I was back to some sort of normal which was just as well – I had seven lessons that day. The pain hasn’t entirely gone away and I’ve had no choice but to take painkillers. Fatigue has been a major issue for a while; it isn’t helped by my waking up multiple times virtually every night.

On Monday morning I had my weekly Romanian lesson. Inevitably we talked about the election, or un-election. I suggested that Georgescu was similar to Viktor Orbán. Oh no, my teacher replied. Far worse. Cancelling the election so close to the final round was very clumsy and looks antidemocratic on the face of it. Oh shit, it looks like we might elect an anti-establishment figure that we don’t like, let’s cancel the election. But the truth is the election had been manipulated in a big way on social media. Georgescu’s assertion that he spent “zero lei” on his campaign was quite clearly a lie. And his credentials that I mentioned before – that’s he’s a scientist with a PhD – are probably made up too. Invalidating the election may have been cack-handed, but in the short term at least, Romania has dodged a major bullet here. Since I arrived here, the country has been moving, albeit slowly and unevenly, in the right direction. It is less poor than it was eight years ago. It came very close to throwing that progress away. By the way, Romania and Bulgaria have now been fully admitted to the Schengen area. That will mean that I won’t have to queue at the border to get into Hungary, whether in a car or on a bus or train, and more importantly, trucks won’t be held up for hours. There might still be checks until June; I saw contradictory information on that.

I had six maths lessons last week. In one of them I estimated pi using a round bowl, a tape measure and a piece of string. I got a value of 3.129, which was a lot closer than I expected.

The darts World Championship starts in London tonight. There’s a lot to like about the format, the colourful characters, and the fact that it takes place over the festive season. Last year I got fairly into it. This year I expect I’ll watch rather less: I really have to get the picture book finalised.

Books - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - New Zealand - Politics - Romania

Pulling teeth

November 22, 2024 by 0 Comments

A storm ripped through last night at 3am; for an hour and a half I couldn’t sleep. It’s still blowing a gale (or something at around a force 6 or 7 at least) now. And it’s raining hard. Either before or after the storm – I can’t remember – I had my first dream to feature Donald Trump. I was in a small town or village on a sunny day, having been on one of my excursions in the car, when he appeared. There was no rally or anything; he was just there, surrounded by a handful of people. It was all very civilised. He seemed to be at least six foot six. My instinct was to get away from him for fear of being shot. In the same dream, or perhaps the next one, my laptop caught fire.

Here’s a map of the weather warnings that were put out yesterday. The combination of high winds and (in higher terrain) blizzards has made for quite a complex picture. I’m in the orange zone:

Last night I had a chat with Mum. What’s happened to your tooth? A crown had fallen out. She’d already been to the new gleaming-white state-of-the-art dental practice in Geraldine; in ten days she’ll get a replacement crown at a cost of $1800. Dad then came on the line to say he’d just sold a painting for the same amount (I don’t know if that was net or gross). It took me three days to do that! As if three days was a long time. I immediately thought, just imagine being able to make $600 a day doing what I’m doing. I told Mum that if she could hang on for six months (!), she could get it done in Romania for a fraction of the cost. Coincidentally I’d just been reading David Walliams’ Demon Dentist with a very bright girl of almost eleven before this talk of dentistry with my parents. After the dental talk, conversation turned to the various haka and hikoi that have been going on lately in New Zealand.

In a lesson on Tuesday my student went through a long article about career choices. The author of the article likened career decisions to an octopus where each tentacle needs to be fed and accommodated. Tending to your “practical” tentacle too much can mean you neglect your “social” tentacle, and so on. It mentioned that as your salary increases, your expectations increase likewise. You’ll never be properly satisfied. Reading this sort of thing emphasises how atypical my own experiences have been. In January 2008 I went to Melbourne for eight days to attend the Australian Open. And to see Melbourne, which I liked a lot. Then when I got back to work everything got pretty crap pretty quickly. I’d muddled along for a few years as one of the young guys, but all of a sudden a bunch of actual young guys and girls joined the department and I was 28, supposedly a level above. The others at my level were suddenly doing life stuff like buying houses, getting married, having kids, and spending proper money on cars. They were progressing. It became obvious, within the space of a few weeks, that it wasn’t going to work for me. So I actually cut down on my spending, squirrelling away $500 a week for the rest of ’08 and the whole of ’09, until the end finally came in December. When I was in New Zealand last year, I stumbled upon some old payslips from 2007. Oh really, that much? That was the last year, in fact the only year, that I was at least somewhat into my corporate job. I was part of a team of just five. That all felt an awfully long time ago.

Tuesday was when some of the more notable lessons happened. In the morning I asked a 28-year-old what he thought the worst (or most destructive) invention in modern human history was. He quickly shot back: social media. There are several other contenders: leaded petrol, cigarettes, landmines, nuclear weapons (though they may have prevented destruction), and plastic. But all of them were invented even before my parents were born, in some cases centuries before. If you’re talking about the worst invention in the last 75 years, social media must be it. It’s destroying the fabric of our society like nothing else, and it’s horrifying to watch this destruction unfold in real time. That evening I had a 90-minute session with a 23-year-old woman. Teaching women of that age is invariably hard, but this session was excruciating. I got one-word answers from her, if that. Look, this isn’t working. I’m saying five words for every one of yours. (I was being generous.) I was getting a real Demon Dentist feel about the whole thing; it was like pulling teeth.

It’s been a slightly frustrating week, with an above average number of cancellations. I’ve tried to make the most of the annoying downtime by making new games and exercises, for both English and maths. I made a set of cards with the numbers 1 to 100, to help with understanding factors, multiples, primes, and all the rest of it. I’d planned just to go up to 40, but then thought I may as well go the whole hog. I’m happy with the system I came up with. Black for odd, red for even (like the suits of a normal pack of cards), a purple border if the number is prime, squares in the corners to denote a square number, and a small triangle on the right if the number is triangular. It was important not to make it too busy. On the back of each card I wrote the prime factorisation and all the factors of the number.

I’ve been playing my Primitive Man LP by Icehouse (an Aussie band who were big in the early eighties) a lot lately. Icehouse came on Radio Hauraki a lot back in 2007, that one year when my job was meaningful. It was usually Great Southern Land, or sometimes Hey Little Girl. But there are other very good songs on that record too, like Goodnight Mr Matthews. A lot of the tracks remind me of Split Enz who were big at around the same time.

I gave up on Honey & Spice in the middle of the fifth chapter. Whoever the target market is for the novel, I’m as sure as hell not it.

It’s an important time for Romania right now. Citizens (i.e. not me) go to the polls three weekends running. This Sunday is the first round of the presidential election. The parliamentary elections follow on 1st December, which happens to be Romania’s national day, with the second round of the presidential election taking place on the 8th. The far-right anti-everything-except-Trump-and-Putin party will surely increase their vote share. If they gain power, Romania could go the same way as Hungary. Let’s hope not.

I’ve got an important meeting this evening regarding the book(s) I’ve been writing with the help of Dad. More about that next time; it’s been a long post.