Dreams

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

We’re in Deep S***

January 31, 2025 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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.

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.