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Cat - Family - Hiking - Scrabble - Travel: Romania

Kitty concerns and trip pics

August 17, 2026 by 0 Comments

I took Kitty in to the see the vet on Friday. It was a regular check, but she’d noticeably lost weight. When I put her on their scales, she was down 150 grams, which doesn’t sound like much but is actually 5% of her weight. I’d love to lose 5% of my weight. I mentioned that she had less energy than before. The vet also remarked that her coat wasn’t as shiny as it could be. She gave me some vitamin “paste” to mix in with Kitty’s wet food, and recommended that I give her some better dry food rather than the supermarket own-brand stuff I’ve been buying until now. When I went to bed last night I let her roam around my flat, which I don’t normally do at night, and she was back to being pretty damn active. A good sign. I’ll have to watch things though. It might be the case that she was discombobulated somehow by the pet hotel. I’m thinking of going away again for a few days, in which case I don’t know what I’ll do with her. I don’t feel I can ask Elena (the lady who lives above me) again.

As for me, I’ve made something of a recovery from being in a crippling energy desert. I didn’t know when (or if) I’d bounce back. This is a huge relief, for now at least.

On Wednesday night I had a very brief chat with my brother who was in the garden watching the solar eclipse. His son demanded his attention almost immediately. Chat over. We didn’t get much eclipse here in Romania, by the way. That’s in contrast to the August 1999 eclipse, which Romania witnessed better than anywhere else. It wasn’t far off totality in Cambridgeshire in ’99; it was a pretty big deal at the time. It was the uni summer holidays so I was staying with my parents. My uncle and his girlfriend (who later became his third wife) had come from New Zealand to stay with us, but at the time of the eclipse they were doing a tour of Ireland. They’d forgotten all about the event and couldn’t understand why it had suddenly become so cold and dark on a summer’s day.

I had a proper chat with my brother last night, after the kids had gone to bed. He’s been in his new job (which has something to do with submarines) for two weeks and it’s going well. His colleagues are great, he said. That’s half the battle. You can ask them anything and they’ll help you. If only I could have had colleagues like that when I started in life insurance. He’s working almost exclusively from home. They’ve armed him with a fancy laptop and three screens. He’s put the third one in the attic, he said. I asked semi-seriously if I could have it. Unlike me, my brother is a heavy user of AI and text-to-speech.

Jason Arday ended his life on Friday. What a tragedy this has been, on so many levels. And it would have all been so different if it wasn’t for people on social media, let’s be honest, enjoying Arday’s downfall.

Scrabble. I got a reprieve from relegation after the last round. I finished with five wins, one more than I expected, and I survived because one or two people pulled out. My immediate reaction though was, wouldn’t I rather be relegated? The current round, in the same fourth division, has been a horror show. A steady stream of dross from the virtual bag. Please make it stop! I may end up with just a solitary win, albeit one by 200-odd points. The encouraging thing is that they keep a tally of mistakes each player makes (presumably AI is involved in this somehow), and mine has never been this low. I’ve played enough online poker to know not to be too results-oriented. Sometimes it just won’t happen for you no matter what. I still might want to take a break after this round because – like the poker was – it’s a bit time-consuming.

Visiting the waterfall on the first full day of my trip

Down into the cave on day two

With a storm brewing, I popped into this quite remarkable late-18th-century church on the way back from the cave

Visiting another waterfall on day three following two storms

Up to the Rusty Pit on the afternoon of day three
Cat - Family - Scrabble - Travel: Romania

Scary times in Geraldine and a trip to the mountains

August 5, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad are back home. They arrived early yesterday morning, my time. Their journey was about as good as you can expect when you’re not far off 80, you start at one of the hellishly busy London airports – Stansted in their case, and just part of your trip involves being squashed into a tube for 14 hours straight. My aunt and uncle picked them up in Christchurch and dropped them off at home in Geraldine, and that’s when things got really scary. My uncle (who turns 85 next month if I’m not mistaken) tried to lift one of their suitcases and he collapsed on the ground. There wasn’t much sign of life. Mum gave a few chest compressions and he sputtered back into life. I’m impressed that Mum had the presence of mind to do that. So many people would panic there, especially if they’re dog tired having flown halfway around the world. Mum has always been pretty good in that kind of emergency. My aunt called 111 immediately, the ambulance came, and he was rushed off to hospital. He’s now at home after spending just one night there. The words “heart attack” were never uttered; he has something called stenosis, which means narrowing of the arteries. (Useful in Scrabble, should I ever get three S’s and a bunch of other common letters. The plural stenoses is also valid.)

My aunt, who is eight years younger than my uncle and the same age as Mum, has a lot on her plate. Her husband’s memory is fading fast and he’s got various other complications including this heart problem. She’s also trying to partially write her daughter – a complete arsehole who couldn’t give a toss about her parents – out of the will. Her daughter got wind of this and is trying to contest it, so my aunt is in the process of getting fully lawyered up. Sounds like fun.

So tomorrow morning I’m off to the mountains, mainly to get out of this oppressive heat. I’ll be staying four nights in a village (or maybe hamlet) called Izlaz, in the foothills of the Apuseni mountains. It’s about a 3½-hour drive from here. I have no idea what I’ll do there – there’s a cave I’ll probably visit and I’m sure I’ll go for walks – but that’s not really the point. I just wanted to go somewhere peaceful and most importantly about ten degrees cooler than here. It hasn’t been much fun of late. I’ve been going to bed around 11:30 – there’s no point in turning in any earlier because I know I won’t sleep. Then I watch the red digits on my clock cycle round from the late 23s to the zeros and then the ones, and maybe I’ll try reading or even testing myself on some Scrabble words. I get to sleep eventually, then wake up at least twice during the night. Then I’m shattered for most of the day. Today I got some energy back again, so that’s something.

I’ve just spoken to Elena, the lady who lives above me. Rather than try and impose Kitty on her again, I’m taking my furry friend to the pet hotel just like I did last summer when I went to Poland. That time Kitty didn’t want to come home afterwards.

Yeah, Scrabble. The latest round of games has been really tough, and when I’ve been feeling crappy I haven’t wanted to play at all. My opponents have been too strong and my draws far too weak to give me a chance. I’ll be relegated for the second time running, probably with a record of four wins and ten losses, just like last time.

Cat - Life :) - Other sports

Fantastic Mr Fox

July 20, 2026 by 0 Comments

I watched the final round of the Open golf today. And guess what, a Kiwi won it for the first time since 1963. Ryan Fox. He held his nerve when so many around him didn’t. In fact he played the final holes spectacularly well. He didn’t look a likely winner when his chip shot spun back to where it started, somewhere around the turn – I can’t remember which hole. But there he was, on the final green, standing over a twelve-footer or so. He probably won’t get this… but he bloody well did. Good on him. I called Mum as soon as the putt dropped, because I knew she’d be happy to hear the news. What’s more, Fox shot a record-equalling 62 in the third round. I had to feel a little sorry for Cam Young who hit a superb final-round 64 and spent hours on the driving range and practice green in anticipation of a play-off – he could quite possibly have even won outright – only to get pipped at the last by Fox. And yes, Mum was pretty happy. She said her brother in Palmerston North would have been up all night watching it. (Bob Charles was the winner in ’63. When I lived there he was on TV all the time, selling his Bob Charles deer velvet capsules. He’s still alive at the age of 90.)

It’s been a good day all round, because I feel I’ve made a significant recovery from the last seven days which have been pure garbage, such has been my lack of energy. It’s been absolutely horrible. Thursday was the crappiest day of them all, but every day has been a contender. What really gave me a boost today was catching up with Mark – for the second-to-last time before he says goodbye to Romania – at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. He and his wife had just got back from their epic African adventure where they scaled Kilimanjaro and then went on safari. It was great to hear about it all, after so much negativity coming from all directions. Scaling the mountain was predictably tough. Brutal was the word Mark used. The ascent itself wasn’t all that challenging, but the altitude – nearly 6000 metres – made things pretty damn messy. They didn’t skimp on having properly paid porters, who they tipped as well. It was all a very well-run operation. The pictures of the safari were good too. The highlights were a woman having a picnic oblivious that there was a huge elephant behind her, and a vast herd of wildebeest crossing a river.

The World Cup final is about to start. Dad hasn’t stopped moaning about England’s loss to Argentina in the semi-final. They should have done this or that. Dad knows bugger all about football and never follows it at any other time. And he was still going on about it after England had won an utterly batshit mad ten-goal thriller against France. Yes it was a shame that England lost, but the sky hasn’t fallen in. It would be nice now though if Spain could thrash Argentina.

I’ll write more about my crappy week, and the supplements my doctor has given me, in my next post. As I write this, or try to, I’m being mauled by Kitty in one of her displays of affection. Like me, she’s been avoiding the heat in the last few days. We’ve been up into the mid-30s again.

Cat - Music - Photos - Scrabble - Tennis

Left to my own devices

July 11, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’m now writing this on the new laptop. I still need to install a bunch of stuff and there are endless settings that I need to monkey around with to stop it from driving me mad, but I get the feeling it’ll be decent. Unlike my phone. It’ll now only charge at a snail’s pace and I can no longer transfer photos or videos from it to my laptop – the hole which the charger goes into seems to be buggered, even though it looks fine.

Yesterday I went to Sânmihaiu Român, my first long bike trip for ages. When I was there I got a coffee and called Mum and Dad who had been watching a lot of Wimbledon. They’ve been telling me about thrilling matches and deciding tie-breaks, but it’s passed me by. I also started The Cloud Atlas, a rather complex-looking novel that Dad gave me while he was here. I did actually watch bits of the men’s semi-finals after I got back. Even though Djokovic was well beaten by Jannik Sinner, it is pretty remarkable how he is still able to compete at such a high level at 39. The first match saw Alexander Zverev beat Arthur Fery, the Franco-British wildcard, also in straight sets. Fery collects £900,000 for getting so far.

In the last few days I’ve been listening to Shakespears Sister, a British duo who were pretty big in the early nineties. I remember our English teacher despairing at the spelling of the name – no apostrophe or final e – though Shakespeare himself was very inconsistent in how he spelt his name. Spelling wasn’t standardised back then. Stay was their biggest hit – it was number one in the charts for ages – and I also liked Hello (Turn Your Radio On), a song that mentions the pound “looking weak”. That was a hot topic back in the day.

Bonnie Tyler has passed away at the age of 75. Her rasping voice was instantly recognisable. Plus, she was Welsh. I used to think of her It’s a Heartache whenever I boiled an egg for too long.

I finished third in the end in the Scrabble league. A young woman by the name of Elise who travels around North America and the world to play Scrabble pipped me for second. We both got promoted.

Georgia at the Festivalul Inimilor

Kitty yesterday

At 10pm, during the heat wave

Cat - Life :) - Photos - Politics - Scrabble

Entering the world of the possible again

March 25, 2026 by 0 Comments

Today I’ve got a bit more energy. I’m even responding to messages. (I’d just about gone incommunicado for a while.) The trick is to get up at my normal time, even if I don’t have lessons. The lessons themselves, assuming I don’t have a splitting headache, are to my benefit too. I got 18 litres of water from the well today; that certainly felt a lot easier than the last time I did it.

Late last month I tried to pay my rates bill at the post office – you can do that there – but they had the wrong address for me. I was sent to the city hall. There I had to fill in various forms and make a small payment, then I needed to wait days or weeks for an email confirmation. That email came two weeks ago. Yesterday morning I went back to the post office. I was feeling like crap and couldn’t handle the length of the queue so I gave up. In the afternoon I returned – almost no queue – and they still had the wrong address. You’ll need to go back to the city hall.

This morning I did just that. When I got to the end of the short take-a-number queue, the lady told me I needed to visit the Direcția Fiscală which, according to a poster she pointed out to me, moved to Iulius Town in early 2023. Oh god, you’re telling me I have to go back there?! Iulius Town is the same dystopia I found myself in last week. Elevated fakeness, surrounded by soulless tower blocks, none of which existed when I moved to this city. Though it is no more than a few years old, I feel I’m in eighties Bedford or Milton Keynes. On one side you look down on abandoned factories and silos that really are from the eighties. So it was back on my bike to Iulius Town. I had no trouble locating the Direcția Fiscală where people were queuing out the door. There was somebody all securitied up who kept whizzing by on a kind of Segway, as well a policeman controlling the entrance and smoking, just like half the people in the queue. It took me a while to get inside, then it was take-a-number time again. I was 18th in line. The woman told me to make a written declaration (Can you do this in Romanian?), then commentated on my surname which was the same as someone famous-ish 35 years ago. Only I was born with it, he wasn’t quite. She said my address would be updated within 45 days. That means that when I come to pay my rates I’ll face a (very small) fine or interest payment.

Getting that done (assuming it is actually “done”) was encouraging. A few days ago, or even yesterday, I couldn’t have handled it. Physically and (in recent days) mentally, this month has been a right mess. I haven’t had a bad headache since last Thursday. I hope that on Friday, as long as I stay largely headache-free, I’ll be able to tackle the cleaning. Last night I went back to the doctor’s surgery and got my blood pressure checked again. It had gone down: it was 140/80.

Earlier this morning I had a lesson with the English teacher in Slobozia. She told me the latest chapter in her life with her 15-year-old son, who has turned into a monster. “He bit me,” she said. Sorry, what, he isn’t a cat. Oh, beat. Romanians fail to make the distinction between those two vowel sounds, short and long. Live and leave, fill and feel, to say nothing of pairs that involve beach and sheet. “But in the past he has bitten me too.” I gave her a quick test at the start of the lesson. I showed her Trump’s latest all-caps social media post where he talks (lies, probably) about recent conversations with the Iranians. Can you spot the mistakes in lines one and nine? She could. I remember as a very little boy our teacher telling us the difference between the witch that flies on a broomstick and “which one”. The fact that he can’t spell basic words or use caps lock properly is the least of our worries, but once again, how did we get here? (That post on Truth Social, if that’s where it was, was likely just to manipulate the markets. Trump doesn’t understand a whole lot, but he does understand financial markets.) When I asked my student if she’d been following the war, she asked “What war?”

I read something funny at the weekend about “Strait-of-Hormuz guy”, the sort of guy you meet at the pub who, a month ago, wouldn’t have known how to spell or pronounce Hormuz or locate it on any map, but now knows its every nook and cranny and knows about all the ramifications of West Texas crude hitting one-fifty a barrel.

On BBC News yesterday I saw an ad for the Burj Azizi tower in Dubai, which when completed will be only a little shorter than the Burj Khalifa. Oh yes. The second-tallest building in the world. Can’t wait to visit once it’s topped out.

Yesterday I bumped into Lili (who lives on the first floor) as I was collecting a package from one of those Easybox things nearby. The package contained eye shades which I’d ordered online. Lili asked me if my nephew and niece will ever come to visit. I’m sure they’d like to play with your cat, she said.

I met Dorothy at Scârț on Sunday. We sat outside and played Scrabble in Romanian. I won 354-234 after putting down SCAPATE for 92 and DOBOS for 54. (Doboș is a very delicious cake that comes from Hungary but is also popular here, just over the border.) Mainly it was just nice to be outside.

Doboș

I took the picture above by the Bega yesterday. This is recent abandonment. When I arrived in Timișoara it was full of purple bikes which you could unhook (with a card and PIN code) and rehook at another station when you’d finished with them. Now it’s just for pigeons and their poo.

I managed to get Kitty mid-yawn this morning. I know how she feels.

It might not look like one, but this is certainly a restaurant. It has opened in Iulius Town. And they called it that?!

Update: This evening I had a lesson with a man in his mid-thirties and his 16-year-old niece. He’d had his teeth professionally whitened. “Bleach 4”, apparently. They were very white. And as for her, she wanted to know how to spell “which”.

Cat - Headaches - Life :) - Photos - Scrabble

What a performance this all is

March 22, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’m writing this after two full days without a headache to speak of. I’m still tired, but I slept well last night and got up this morning feeling something in the vague vicinity of normal. I had a long chat with Mum and Dad earlier, and last night I spoke to my brother on WhatsApp for the first time in a while. He commented that it seemed unusually dark where I was, and I told him that my headaches have made me want to cut the lights. I even have the contrast turned down on this laptop. Here I am in Romania, turning into a vampire. I’ve kept my phone on silent for several days too.

On Wednesday, when I wrote my last post on here, I had another splitting headache. The pain began to intensify at around 6pm while I was in the middle of a maths lesson in another part of the city. When I got home I had another maths lesson which I muddled through somehow. Luckily she only stayed for an hour; normally our lessons are an hour and a half, sometimes even two hours. Then the pain, like a screwdriver being rammed up my right nostril and into my eye, became unbearable. The only saving grace was that it was night-time, so relatively little light got in. The pain subsided just after eleven. I got to bed at 12:30.

The next morning I had a Romanian lesson at eight with Dorothy and our teacher, who didn’t show up. (I probably shouldn’t have shown up either. I was so tired.) I talked to Dorothy for over half an hour, then mooched around until my lessons started in the afternoon. Just three of them. Then it was Wizard of Oz time. Dorothy was back. In almost ten years in Timișoara, I’d never been inside the Opera House. What a beautiful building on the inside. I’d have preferred to have been on my own, perusing the interior, rather than being among a load of schoolkids and parents. I managed to get in without anything resembling a ticket. What other performances at the Opera House might I be able to gatecrash? As for the performance itself, I’d give it maybe two and a half stars. Dorothy herself was fine. The lion – a girl – didn’t look anything like a lion; this detracted from the experience somewhat. Neither was the scarecrow scarecrowy enough. The tin man, on the other hand, had made his costume himself and was very convincing. I had to keep reminding myself that, even though these teenagers go to a (really expensive) British school and have their lessons in English, they were still performing in a non-native language. Their command of spoken English varied wildly. Another thing – the set was far too sparse. Most of the time they cheated by projecting a backdrop onto the back wall. Seeing “TheatreBackdrop.com” in big letters in the corner of the wall didn’t do much for me. A lot of the time I wished I was watching the excellent original (colour!) Wizard of Oz movie from the 1930s – a superb film – instead. My general negativity probably came from another intense headache (but not as bad as the one the previous night) which started halfway through the play. I just wanted to get home.

On Friday morning my parents called me from Hampden. They’d just had fish and chips. As usual, the line was dodgy. When I got off the phone I felt beyond washed out. I felt gone. I knew at some point that day I’d have to force myself to do a big shop at the supermarket because I was starting to run out of things. When I finally made myself do, it, what an effort it was. Where did I put the trolley? It would need to be a big shop because who knew when I’d get to go back there. It reminded me of the shop I did at the start of Covid after coming back from an ill-advised trip to the mountains. Even the business of carrying it all in from the car wasn’t much fun. I only just had time to put it all away before my lesson started. My lessons have remained possible, but only because I’ve done so many of them by now and even if I mess up badly, it’s not like anyone can sack me.

I had four lessons yesterday, all in Dumbrăvița, from 8:30 till 4:30. Two English and two maths. Between my last two lessons I had a break which I spent in the park. That was nice and relaxing. Feeling I could really do with the exercise, I cycled rather than drove. Just like in March 2020, in those early days of Covid, we’ve had some beautiful spring weather.

When I spoke to my parents this morning, we (inevitably) discussed whether or not they’d be able to make it over in May. None of us has a clue. Donald Trump – what an irredeemable piece of shit – certainly doesn’t. His latest tweet (bleat? excrete?) followed the death of Robert Mueller who investigated Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” Now Mueller was a good man and a highly decorated war veteran. Where do you even start with this? It’s worth watching this too: the glee on Trump’s face when he announces that a congressman (a Republican congressman!) would be dead in three months following a terminal diagnosis.

Scrabble. It’s taken a back seat in my mind, even though I’m still studying words. In the latest round of the league I survived with a decent record of eight wins and six losses, despite my spread – points scored minus points conceded – being negative. (I lost one game by a whopping 300.) So, starting on Thursday, I’ll get another crack at division four. I think I’ll get to battle that Romanian player again.

The Opera House

I was surprised to see her using her bed

An extra digit: fancy diesel was well over 10 lei per litre yesterday; normal diesel was only just under.

Cat - Headaches - Life :) - Photos - Politics

Challenging times

March 16, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s been a pretty challenging two weeks now. We’ve had beautiful spring weather but the headaches haven’t stopped (sometimes the pain is on one side of my head, sometimes the other) and the perpetual fatigue has made me want to curl up into a ball. Just when I’m beginning to recover, or sometimes well before that, I’m crippled by another bad headache, so as well as having to deal with the pain I feel permanently exhausted. It’s like chronic fatigue syndrome or what they used to call ME. Maybe it’s what long Covid would feel like. Yesterday morning I managed to walk to Karlsruhe Park (named after one of the places that Timișoara is twinned with). When I got there it was already quarter to twelve. I read my book for a bit in the sunshine, then dawdled home via the supermarket. When I got to my shamefully untidy home I was exhausted. Kitty, who has been lovely of late, was all meeaa-eeeaa-yyeeeoww and in my face. Seriously, just piss off, would you? She then scratched me on my hand there was blood everywhere. Great.

I need to stop watching YouTube. It isn’t helping. I saw a podcast at the weekend in which two youngish anti-Trump Americans mentioned Trump’s message to Keir Starmer. We don’t need your help because we’ve already won. One of the podcast hosts said, “If I’m Starmer, I’m like, fuck you man.” Too right. And then a few days later Trump sent a message urging several countries including the UK (and China!) to send warships to free up the Strait of Hormuz. Not enough has been made of Trump’s tweet (or whatever it was) saying that they might bomb an Iranian island again “just for fun”. Dear God.

When I last filled up with diesel, the price was somewhere in the upper sevens (lei per litre). At the weekend, diesel prices nudged over nine. Fancy high-octane diesel (if that’s a thing) has reached the mid-nines, so some of the stations are now getting pretty close to running out of digits.

Kitty during a lesson on 4th March

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.

Cat - Family - New Zealand - Scrabble

Now it looks like I’m not

February 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum went back to the eye clinic in Timaru on Wednesday morning. The sight in her left eye hadn’t improved as much as she’d hoped following her cataract operation. It turns out that many of the central blood vessels in that eye have basically died; I think it’s a form of macular degeneration. This came as a bit of a shock. She’s been given some treatment to stop it from regressing further, but I don’t know if she’ll ever get her central vision back to anything like normal. She’s having the cataract operation in the other eye (which hopefully hasn’t suffered the same fate) in a couple of weeks. Before Mum had her eye looked at, my parents went to the travel agents to book their flights. They’re flying to the UK on 18th May and returning in the second half of July. They’re flying Singapore Airlines, as they usually do. I wonder, if they’d done the eye business and the flight booking business the other way round, maybe they wouldn’t have booked those flights at all. Anyway, it’s good (and somewhat surprising) that they’re making the trip.

After I talked about all of this with my parents yesterday, conversation turned to my trip to New Zealand later in the summer. I didn’t have to read too closely between the lines to figure that Mum would rather I didn’t bother. That’s despite anything Dad said to try to make me feel better. The expense, finding someone to look after Kitty, and the journey itself, it’s a lot when your mother can’t really be arsed whether she sees you (even if she only has one half-decent eye to see you with). It’s a shame because New Zealand is a beautiful country and I’d already psyched myself up to go there, but I think I’ll wait till next year when my parents may not come to Europe. (There is always the possibility that Mum and Dad end up cancelling their flights for whatever reason, like in 2019 and 2020 and nearly last year too, in which case I probably will make the trip, even if a later booking hits me in the back pocket.)

When I spoke to Dad on Monday, I said that Mum would score above average on an IQ test, the values that she lives by are admirable, she has a good sense of humour, and she’s always been extremely helpful on a practical level. But unfortunately her emotional intelligence is similar to Kitty’s. Dad didn’t disagree with me; in fact he just laughed. I also said that he should make more use of Mum’s good sense of humour to help defuse stressful situations. Since I said that, Kitty has been lovely; she’s shown more affection that I can remember. The only snag is that once she’s fed up with sitting on my lap and snuggling up to me, she then uses me as a launching pad. Her back legs are so strong that when she digs them into me to launch herself, it can hurt. That’s a small price to pay though.

The latest round of the Scrabble league started earlier today, with me now up a division. In one of the games, my opponent opened with ZED in the middle of the board. Any six-letter extension to the left (and there are lots of these when you consider all the -ized words) would hit the triple word square. A bit later, with the extension still unused and unblocked, I found CAPONIZED for 72. I think to caponize (or -ise) means to castrate maybe a goose or a turkey, but I’m not entirely sure. That game, along with all the others, is still ongoing.

Cat - Family - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Scrabble

The attraction of a cat

January 19, 2026 by 0 Comments

In family news, today is my niece’s first birthday. It’s also the eve of Mum’s cataract operation on her first eye. She’ll get the other one done next month. I think the bill for both eyes is around NZ$10,000, a staggering amount. In Romania it would cost a fifth of that. Mum is pretty dire need of this surgery (which only takes ten minutes per eye, though there’s considerable faff when you get to the clinic). Her eyesight was pretty terrible when I saw her last May and June, and has deteriorated further since then.

Yesterday was a reasonably busy day for a Sunday. The twins, whom I normally see at their place on Wednesdays, came to my place yesterday morning instead. They seemed to enjoy the lesson because they got to see (and play with) the cat. Kitty has been a boon to my face-to-face lessons at home. Later I met Mark for lunch at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. He tried a few words of Romanian with the waitress but she didn’t understand him. You can see why I hardly bother. It can be like that sometimes. It’s rare for a non-native to speak Romanian, so Romanians aren’t “tuned in” to imperfect, non-native versions of their language. That’s in sharp contrast to us native English speakers who hear imperfect second-language English all the time to the point where we don’t think anything of it, and it creates a barrier for anyone trying to learn Romanian. You have to reach a certain level before you can even cross the start line. The barrier has even been raised somewhat in my time here; Timișoara is fairly cosmopolitan by Romanian standards and as a result more and more people are gaining a command of English, so if you’re not careful you can find yourself dealing almost exclusively in English even after living here for years. That’s especially true of someone like Mark who works at a British school and lives a far more “expat” lifestyle than me. Our lunch was done and dusted in a very swift 50 minutes; quite often it’ll take you that long just to get served.

In the evening I went to Dorothy’s for our monthly English Conversation Club meeting. She managed to start it up again in November. There were ten of us, of whom eight were women. (Language learning – and teaching – can skew pretty heavily in that direction.) I had to cycle home, and by that stage the temperature had plummeted to −6. First thing this morning we were at −10.

On Saturday I had my first lesson with a seven-year-old boy called Noah. I don’t really like teaching kids that young, but he was very nice and our session went well. Unusually, he was happy to see me. (Most small children have a look of either puzzlement or fear on their face the first time I see them.) The name Noah is very un-Romanian; the Biblical Noah is called Noe in Romanian, while a final h is pronounced here with a guttural sound like the ch inloch.

In a recent conversation with Dad, he mentioned his decision in the late seventies to quit his job as an illustrator for the Ministry of Defence and go his own way as a painter. It takes a lot of courage to step away. As you also did, he said. It would have been so easy to have stayed where I was, he then said, rather than take that leap. Ah, I said, this is where we differ. The idea that insurance was any sort of comfort zone for me is laughable. I simply couldn’t have stayed there; it would have been dangerous to have done so. Staying there might literally have killed me; I had to leave. Moving to the water company was a useful stopgap – it got me away from a lot of that corporate toxicity – before I decided what I really wanted to do. (I was also several years older than Dad was when he made the move.) Talking of the corporate world, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comics, died of cancer last week. Those comics were extremely popular and funny; they did a great job of satirising office life and the practices that came to the fore in the nineties. Sadly in later life he became a Trump-supporting attention-seeking twat. (It’s quite possible he was always a twat, but only with the advent of social media did he gain an avenue for his twattishness.)

Scrabble. I’ve had three wins and five losses so far in my latest round of league matches, but my six outstanding games aren’t looking too bad. I’ve also got a decent tie-breaker this time if I happen to finish on the same number of wins as another player. There has been some controversy this time around as one player in our division has been kicked out, presumably for cheating. Before his expulsion he managed to beat me. Six of his matches were still outstanding, so I’m guessing his opponents in those games will be given walkover wins, but I don’t know if his earlier victims (including me) will be compensated in any way. Last week I had a crazy game on ISC, the other site. I put down a bingo only for my opponent to respond with the huge 158-point triple-triple TIDYTIpS, a word I didn’t know. (It’s a very pretty yellow flower found in America.) But a couple of turns later I put down BURTHEN (an old form of burden that I’d seen in books) for 97. A very close finish ensued, and eventually I won by a single point, 428-427.

I’ve just got one episode of The Queen’s Gambit still to watch. It’s been great so far. Obsession with something like chess can certainly drive one to madness. In addition to the story I’ve been enjoying the sixties music as well as the cars and decor of that time.