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Cat - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Taxing times

July 18, 2025 by 0 Comments

Kitty keeps changing her happy place. Right now she has two. One is my bed. The other is the well of the printer that I got fixed recently. Yes, it’s got a Kitty-sized pit. This weekend I’ll take her for a test drive – an hour in a box to see how she copes. My guess is not very well, but you never know.

It’s hosing it down right now. Much rather that than 35-plus. So I’ll be probably driving to my upcoming lesson. It’s nice to have that option I suppose, although I did manage perfectly well for over seven years without it. This morning I had a two-hour lesson with the girl who once wrote that she was bored. Two hours. An aeon. I resorted to giving her a 100-question test that took up most of the session. She got 77%, a commendable effort considering she was visibly tired by the end of it. (I rarely give tests, but when I do, they’re nearly always harder than what the kids get at school. Often these kids are used to perfect or near-perfect scores, so I can have a job convincing them that they haven’t failed calamitously.)

On Monday I had my weekly Romanian lesson. I’m not sure how much it’s really helping. My Romanian has stalled, at best. This time I asked the teacher about a sign I’d seen at a market stall: Avem mațe. Hmm, mațe means intestines, doesn’t it? The sort you make sausage skins out of. We have intestines. Nice. I guessed that because the stall sells mainly booze and tobacco, it must mean something else. Cigarette papers or something. But no, my teacher assured me that it really does mean intestines for making sausage skins, and those visiting would know the stallholder personally. Stuff like this, or the clatter of the backgammon pieces if I visit the market on a Saturday, makes me feel more alive.

It’s hard to see, but Avem mațe is in the red circle. Avem tutun means “We have tobacco”. I wonder where the name Bampoa comes from.

It’s melon time. Marius Oltean, the melon man from Dăbuleni, even has a TikTok account.

My brother and I have been in contact with our aunt. Partly we’ve talked about her and our uncle’s recent house move, but the hot topic has been our parents. That’s great because we all agree on our parents’ urgent need to downsize and simplify the heck out of their lives. It’s also great because Mum respects our aunt a lot. I’ve been telling our aunt to badger Mum about the seeing the doctor when my parents get back ten days from now. There’s also the matter of Mum’s cataracts when she’ll need to get removed. Right now she’s as blind as a bat. You can point out a bird on a branch a few feet away and she won’t see it. Though both our parents are remarkably fit physically for their age still, a lot of things have come to a head quite suddenly, and my brother and I will have get far more involved.

Mum said something recently which made it clear that our attitudes to money are poles apart. She was talking about the verges – berms, as Kiwis might call them – in and around St Ives which the council had left unmown. Example 574 of how Britain has gone to the dogs. Fine. But then she specified. It was the verges beside the most expensive houses that bothered her. Their owners pay massive rates (or council tax) bills, she said, so they should be the ones that the council prioritises. The verges near the cheaper houses can basically go hang. Her idea might be a really common one for all I know, but it’s not one that’s ever crossed my mind. Owners pay rates based on the value of their property, then all that money gets pooled together and spent on libraries and playgrounds and rubbish collection and mowing (or not mowing) verges. Across the board throughout the area in which the council operates, irrespective of the proximity of a particular service to high-value properties. Isn’t that how it works, or am I being hopelessly naive? I wonder if Mum thinks that access to treatment for, I dunno, stage 3 cancer, should be based on one’s earnings to that point.

Council tax (i.e. rates) in the UK is weird. And unfair. Even though I’ve never owned a UK property, I know about council tax in some detail because my student, that one who’s getting a divorce, tried to get his bill lowered. It went to court, he didn’t win, and it set him back £10,000 in court costs. Not great for their marriage, I imagine. The weirdness and unfairness are twofold. One, the big one, is that council tax in England is based on the value of your property in 1991. Unless some government decides to change the law, that 1991 date is set in stone. In perpetuity. For anything built after that date, they estimate what it hypothetically would have been worth then. As for extensions and so on, don’t ask. Of course prices haven’t gone up uniformly throughout the country since ’91. They’ve skyrocketed in London and the south-east but have risen more slowly in the north. So if you’ve got a house worth £700k in some fashionable suburb in London, you’ll be paying a lot less tax than someone with a £700k house in a less swanky part of Yorkshire, because of its much lower ’91 value. Absurd, isn’t it? The second problem is that council tax has eight bands, A to H, with A being the lowest. Once you’re in H, you can’t go any higher, so someone owning a house worth many millions in London doesn’t pay any more than that owner in Yorkshire. (Some very expensive houses aren’t even in H anyway.) There really should be bands stretching into the middle of the alphabet at the very least. Oh, and for rental properties, it’s the tenants that have to pay council tax, not the landlords. The whole system needs a huge overhaul. Maybe it shouldn’t even be based on property value at all. They should probably hammer AirBnBs and second properties left vacant. Someone far cleverer than me could dream up a fair and workable system. What they have now clearly isn’t it. (New Zealand’s, with its rateable values updated every three years, is certainly better.) By the way, this all came about after the ill-conceived poll tax (a uniform tax per adult, brought in at the end of Thatcher’s time) which resulted in riots. Anything is better than that, which I could tell was appalling even though I was ten years old.

I hadn’t meant to write so much about bloody council tax! Mum and Dad often talk about the UK going to the dogs. Dad is worse than Mum in that regard. It’s not great, but I wouldn’t say it’s quite as bad as they make out. (Dad would feel better about his homeland if he stopped reading the Daily Mail.) Part of it is just a general negativity about the present. We’re all guilty of that, especially as we get older. I know I am. This week I saw a news presenter (a bit older than me) interviewing an aviation expert about last month’s Air India crash. He said, it seems there are more crashes now than there were in the past. I was practically shouting at the screen, even before the expert replied. Flying is far safer now than say 40 years ago.

Cat - Life :)

Trip report to come…

July 5, 2025 by 0 Comments

I got back last night at 2am, very tired and with a chesty cough that I’ve probably picked up from Mum. Luckily that’s all I’ve picked up from her. (She isn’t great at the moment.) The temperatures today have been horrendous – we hit 39 this afternoon. I don’t have the energy for much, though I will venture outside now that a breeze has sprung up. Lots to write about, but I can’t face doing that now. Dad thought I might come home to find a skeleton on the mat, but no, Kitty had been well looked after. She seemed to miss me, judging by all the meowing. I gave Elena two boxes of biscuits. Next Thursday I’ll take her to the airport for her very early flight.

Books - Cat - Family - Life :) - Music

Rubbing along and a simpler UK plan

June 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow is the longest day. Then it’s all downhill from there. Right now it’s a beautiful evening – I’ve just been down to the river. Only three full days till I go away. I’ve chosen a good time for it: a pair of ghastly 37s have popped up on the long-range forecast.

I’m grateful to Elena, the lady above me, for agreeing to feed Kitty. For a while I was cursing my lack of friends. After nearly six months, Kitty has become part of the scenery. Our start was somewhat rocky. She’d bite or scratch me, or cower in the naughty corner. She just wasn’t comfortable here. Combine that unease with her pent-up energy and she’d drive me to despair. Now she’ll sit beside me or on my lap, sometimes nuzzling up to me. She sleeps a lot more now than in the early days. As my grandmother would have said, we rub along pretty well together. I just wish she had a proper name. For some reason the Genevieve film came into my head this week – wouldn’t that be a nice name? – but she got saddled with Kitty, a non-name really, and that was that.

My UK itinerary has changed once again. My brother thought that going to London wouldn’t give us enough time to properly see him – he’s probably right there – so Mum (who is masterminding this) has deleted London from the schedule. Thinking about it, I’m glad. Meeting up in London but getting lost, phones not working, staying in shitty accommodation (they might not even have had fucking slippers), going to a show that may or may not have been any good, it was all a recipe for stress and falling out. Not worth it. It now looks like I’ll spend two nights in St Ives, then we’ll go down to Poole next Thursday. We’ll spend four nights there before returning to St Ives. A week on Tuesday I’ll catch an early train from Cambridge to Birmingham and spend the day there, which should be fun.

What other news? Well, the roof on the block opposite me has been replaced, and now looks pretty smart. We might get ours done too if all the owners can agree. The Praid salt mine, similar to the one I went to in Turda last summer, flooded last month, with disastrous effects both economically and ecologically. When I met Dorothy last Monday, I saw she had five copies of The Picture of Dorian Gray on her bookshelf. She happily lent me one to read while I’m away. (I’ve almost finished Wessex Tales.) And my colour printer is back in working order.

To give you some idea of how crazy simple things can be in Romania, I tried to get a copy of my front door key to give to Elena. Three useless keys and five trips to the key cutter later, plus waiting around for her to show up, I still haven’t got a spare key that works. Eventually she gave me my money back. (Luckily my front door has two locks, and I do have a spare key for the other lock which normally I don’t use.)

This week I took delivery of Tracy Chapman’s first (1988) album on vinyl. It’s one of my favourite albums, so that was cool.

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.

Cat - Family - Travel: Romania

Weary and washed out, but they made it

May 12, 2025 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad arrived on Tuesday afternoon, pretty damn tired, and also shocked that there were no passport checks at the airport. (Because Romania had recently joined Schengen and they’d flown from Munich, they could go straight through.) Their trip wasn’t bad as these things go, but when you’re 75 that kind of journey is an ordeal whichever way you slice and dice it, particularly that 13-hour leg from Singapore to Munich. They said that next time – if there’s a next time – they’ll stop off in Singapore on the way. (They will spend a couple of nights there on the way back.) Unsurprisingly they’ve been sleeping a fair bit during the day.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. While I was working in Dumbrăvița, Mum and Dad walked into town. They remarked on how much the city centre had smartened up since they were last here; there have been yet more building renovations. Today I took them to Buziaș which they found just as fascinating as I do. That park with the ornate walkway and the extremely tall trees but also the abandoned buildings and that somewhat dilapidated theme park restaurant with the soviet planes. In the park we saw a woodpecker – well, Dad was the one who spotted it; he has an eagle eye, honed from half a century of finding things to paint. On the way back we stopped at Decathlon (so I could get two new inner tubes for my bike – yesterday I got a flat tyre because the valve broke) and Dedeman (so Dad could get some DIY bits and pieces).

Tonight we ate at the beer factory that is so close to me that when anyone asks where in Timișoara I live, I say “near the beer factory”. Dad and I both had bulz which meant a heck of a good meal but an extraordinary amount of meat, while Mum had a pasta dish. For dessert we had papanași (which isn’t far off a rum baba) and a tiramisu between the three of us. I’d lost eight pounds since early March but I could almost feel that weight coming back on after such a rich meal.

After a full day of lessons for me tomorrow, we plan to travel to Brașov – a place none of us have been to yet – on Tuesday where we’ll spend two nights, then go somewhere else (Cluj? We haven’t decided yet) before coming back on Saturday or Sunday. No lessons for me while we’re away.

It’s been great having Mum and Dad here. Even more so because I’d almost given up hope of seeing them at one point. We’ve had a lot of good chat about Ernest Shackleton, the new pope, and Mum’s old colleague from her school in St Ives who died of mad cow disease. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well my parents have got on with Kitty. They’ve come at a good time in that regard. In the last few weeks she’s gone from being skittish at best and a pain in the arse at worse to a much more placid, friendly little thing. Tomorrow I’ll take Kitty to Dorothy’s – she kindly agreed to look after her while we went away.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Other sports

Permission to stay

April 28, 2025 by 0 Comments

Kitty showed some serious affection while writing this post. That was very nice, but it didn’t make the task any easier. She has been more affectionate of late; what a difference that makes.

Kitty on my bikes in front of Dad’s painting of Piața Traian in Timișoara

Some excitement now: the time until my parents get here is less than the time they’ll spend here. I spoke to them this morning; I asked about their travel plans in Romania – would they prefer a mountain trip or a valley trip or a city trip? – but we won’t make any decisions until they arrive eleven days from now. Who knows how they’ll feel after the flight.

I’ve made two bike trips to Sânmihaiu Român in the last week. This morning I grabbed a coffee there. People were already drinking beer; a raucous game of cruce (the popular card game with the Hungarian deck) was in progress in the corner. Frogs were chirruping away on the banks of the river, as they do at this time of year.

My street on Wednesday night

The new patriotic bridge at Sânmihaiu Român

Probably the biggest thing for me in the last week has been renewing my residence permit. I went to the office on Wednesday – remarkably there was no queue – and was told to apply on their website. Their site, or portal, was hard to make head or tail of. I didn’t know which of the many application options to choose, and when I did select one, it told me I had to upload seven separate documents, some of which were unknown to me. To top it all off, the first available appointment was on 4th September, which would get more delayed as I got my documents together. On Friday I went back to the office. A short queue this time. When I reached the front, the young bloke (he had just one stripe on his shoulders; I’ve seen up to five, and some even have stars) told me it should be fairly easy because I’m in a special “Brexit” category. He went away for some time, then came back with a list of documents I needed. Best of all, I can make my application at the desk rather than the inscrutable mess of online. And it shouldn’t take until the autumn. (Ideally, I wanted to get my updated permit, which runs out next April and currently has the wrong address, before the upcoming election. I was worried that I might not even get it at all before my current one runs out, and I’d be unable to get back into Romania if I left.) The immigration office now has two people on the desks rather than just one, making it a lot less awful.

Last Friday I sent off the introduction for the book that may or may not ever get published. I really don’t like having to write about myself. (Yeah, I do it here all the time, but it’s not at all the same thing.)

Snooker. They’re now approaching the end of the second-round matches, which are all first to 13 frames. Last night’s action was some of the best I’ve seen. They had the first session of Luca Brecel (winner in 2023) and Ding Junhui (a former finalist and the first of the Chinese players to really hit the scene). Ding rattled in a 141 break in the first frame. What a start. But then Brecel won the next seven frames in electrifying fashion. He went for and got everything – doubles, plants, you name it – and Ding hardly even had a shot. He even knocked in a three-ball plant that moved so many reds I couldn’t figure out what had just happened. It was like, I don’t give a shit, I’m going for this, and it was mesmerising. He was spot-on positionally, too. He did the same thing to Ronnie O’Sullivan the year he won it. Seven frames, just like last night, against the best player ever. What’s even more remarkable is that the intervening two years he’s done nothing of note on the snooker table. He has a private jet, which is interesting (it’s not like he’s got mega-rich from the game). He jet-setted off from Sheffield to sunny Portugal in between his first two matches. He’s a highly unconventional character, that’s for sure. Brecel and Ding are about to get under way again.

After that lightning session, on came John Higgins and Xiao Guodong to finish their match in an unscheduled fourth session. Higgins was on the verge of winning 13-10 within the scheduled three sessions, but he missed a simple (for him) red and Xiao cleared up to make it 12-11 and they had to come back. The 24th frame was lengthy and tense. This time Higgins missed match ball. Xiao cleared again; 12-12. Finally in the decider Higgins got over the line at 12:30 am my time, but not before suffering an awful kick. Great value for money for those who were there. The match as whole took over ten hours; there was a 63-minute frame amongst them. Higgins now plays Mark Williams who had a marathon of his own against Hossein Vafaei of Iran, winning 13-10.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Other sports

God it can be hard sometimes

April 19, 2025 by 0 Comments

My brother and I got an email from our aunt to say that Mum is indeed better. She also said that their deadline sale didn’t go as hoped – they got only one offer which much less than what she wanted. She’s in a tricky spot – they could really do with moving before my uncle goes downhill much further.

I’d hoped that Mum could have got the flight from Timișoara to Luton booked today, but it got complicated with all the baggage allowances and so forth, so I may end up booking it myself. I spoke to my brother last night; we talked about how technologically unsavvy both our parents are. (I’m not even that great myself, but I can at least do the basics.)

I had a surprise Good Friday lesson this morning. That one with the twins went well, but I had some tricky ones earlier in the week. Easter can make discussion awkward because of the religious aspect. People can’t talk about their Easter meal or egg painting or trips to see their family without also bringing religion into it. I often get asked whether I’m Catholic or Orthodox, as if only those two options exist. I sometimes say I’m a Catholic to make my life easier. (I did go to a Catholic church until I was 15 or so.) One boy mentioned the word atheist this week (or rather the Romanian equivalent ateu), practically shuddering with disgust as he said it. The more I think about it, the more I like Mum’s attitude to church – she keeps up the family tradition by going through the motions of attending the weekly service, then chats to her friends over coffee afterwards. I don’t think she really believes. Church certainly doesn’t get in the way of any other aspect of her life – whether to take a vaccine, for instance. Right on cue, Dorothy has just messaged me, inviting me to the Easter service at her church on Sunday.

Watching the last two Crucible qualifiers on Wednesday bordered on being painful. Both of them reached a deciding 19th frame at the same time and were shown on a split screen. Both final frames were extremely cagey, such were the stakes. There were three re-racks between the two of them. Seeing Matthew Stevens miss out was a real shame – he reached the world final in 2000 (back in what I think of as my era) and again a few years later. Having built a good lead in the decider, he potted a superb red but then instead of playing safe and gaining a tactical upper hand, he went all-out for an overly ambitious black. He missed, and Wu Yize, one of ten Chinese to make the main tournament, took advantage. The other decider was between Matthew Selt (who has serious issues, it seems) and Jimmy Robertson, who was a perfectly nice bloke as far as I could see. Robertson, who had been way ahead at 8-3, had a difficult pink to make it through. It didn’t find the pocket, and Selt (bugger him) potted pink and black to qualify. The phalanx of Chinese qualifiers made the post-match interviews interesting. Some had a smattering of English, but others didn’t speak a word and needed an interpreter.

This morning I saw the result of last night’s Europa League second-leg match between Manchester United and Olympique Lyonnais. They’d drawn 2-2 in the first leg, so this was a straight decider. United went two up, but Lyon scored twice to force extra time and then led 4-2, only for United to score three in the final few minutes and run out winners in extraordinary fashion. I saw Lyon play a bunch of times when I lived there in 2000-01; they had an exciting team. (Tickets were way cheaper than in England.) That match last night sounds amazing, but what even are Manchester United or Olympique Lyonnais, really? Brands, badges, entities? Are they even the same things as they were, say, in 2000 or even further back? I’ve always struggled with that, and that’s why I like individual sports (as much as I even like sport at all, these days).

I bought that water pistol, from the toy shop down the road, straight after I wrote my previous post. It’s worked a treat, so far. Kitty has cottoned onto it very quickly. Already, just brandishing the thing does the trick. No squirting needed.

Cat - Other sports

Kitty: the first hundred days

April 16, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s actually a bit over 100 days. So has it been worth it? Kitty is a lovely little thing with a beautiful soft coat, and that’s probably what made me take her on in the first place. It’s fascinating just to watch her. Cats – especially young ones like her – are amazing animals. I often marvel at how well designed she is, with her speed, strength (those back legs!) and flexibility. As I lumber around my flat, I feel utterly pathetic in comparison. I’ve also become acutely aware of how few places on my body I’m capable of licking. (She can get to almost anywhere, and for the few places she can’t, she’ll just lick her paw, then wipe her wet paw on the desired area.)

So, Kitty is great to observe, but is there any benefit to actually having her? After all, there are cats all over the show in Timișoara. I could just watch them. That’s a tough question. She knows where to pee and poo, and she hasn’t wrecked my furniture as I’d feared, so really she hasn’t been a problem. The real disappointment is that she hasn’t become a friend. She loves to play, but not really when I’m involved. Expressions of affection – or even interest in me – are extremely rare. Some of that must be down to her start in life. The only time Kitty seems halfway friendly (and only sometimes, even then) is when she’s purring away in an inactive state. If I come into the living room at night, she’ll sometimes rub up against me. It’s lovely when she does that, but all too rare. At times I feel sorry for her as she looks longingly out the window. I bet she’d love to be on the other side. I’ve got used to the zooming which took me aback at first, but I really wish she wouldn’t jump on my desk so much. My desk is a place for work and concentration, not a place for Kitty to play. I often end up manhandling her off my desk, but she usually jumps back on anyway unless I lock her in the living room – I so sometimes resort to that. I’m going to invest in a water pistol.

In short, Kitty is fine and I don’t regret having her, but if someone (a student, say) told me they really wanted a cat and had some outdoor space at home, I’d probably palm her off onto that person.

Last night I watched the Champions League quarter-final second leg between Aston Villa and Paris St-Germain. I almost never watch football at that level, but by golly, what a match it was. So open and so fast. It was like a different sport from the other games I’ve seen lately at a lower level, or even the top-level games I’d watch back in the nineties. The sheer pace was dizzying. Villa, already 3-1 down from the away leg, conceded twice to go four goals behind on aggregate, and surely it was done. But they got one back before half-time and though they still had a mountain to climb, the game was so ridiculously open… They got two more early in the second half. Madness. Just wave upon wave of Villa attacks against perhaps the best club team in the world. And they still had ages to level things or even win it. Villa had some great chances, and some superb saves from PSG keeper Donnarumma basically made the difference in the end. I have no idea why they played only three minutes of added time. PSG had a player called Désiré Doué. What a name. Doué means gifted or talented in French. It was a night that will live long in the memory of Villa fans, including Prince William who was there (no idea why he supports Aston Villa – the name?) but it was nearly one of the all-time great comebacks in the sport.

Snooker. Drama, as expected, in yesterday’s last-round qualifiers. The best match was between Zhao Xintong (a supreme talent; he’d just come back from a suspension for match-fixing – ugh) and Elliott Slessor who had the misfortune of having to play him. They both played at such a high level; Zhao won 10-8. There were also two 10-9 finishes. I felt sorry for Irishman Aaron Hill who had been well in front but was pipped by David Gilbert – he was just about in tears at the end. You could tell how much it meant. Eight more qualifiers today. The tournament proper starts on Saturday.

Can he keep the black out? This was a crazy tippy-tappy exchange. Wells (in the picture here) did eventually sink the black and Wilson won the frame, but Wells was the winner in a decider.

After watching both football and snooker, I’ve decided that snooker is more my thing. It has a nice mix of drama and relaxation.

We’ve got warm weather in store for the next little while.

Cat - Family - Other sports - Politics - Writing a book

Emotional distance

March 27, 2025 by 0 Comments

We’re having a warmish finale to March, but it’s grey and at times wet. Not a ray of sunshine to be seen, even in the long-range forecast. This could be England. (I much prefer this to the hellish temperatures we’re likely to get three months from now, though.)

Last night I had a chat with my brother. Inevitably, we talked about Mum and Dad. Especially Mum. My brother said she has an incredible knack for emotionally distancing herself from her family. We mentioned Dad’s mother who flew to New Zealand in 2005. She was 83 and largely immobile. She flew business class and needed a wheelchair to get to and from the gates. It wasn’t an easy trip, and it came at great expense – business class isn’t cheap and she wasn’t exactly wealthy – but she did it because she really wanted to see her son, even though she knew he’d be coming back to England in a couple of months for his heart valve surgery. That was the operation that nearly killed him and that Mum (emotional distance again) didn’t go over for. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a mum that really wanted to see us (and her two grandchildren)? One major difference between 20 years ago and now is the proliferation of ways to make video calls, but Skyping and Zooming are no real substitute, even if Mum thinks they are.

Mum hasn’t got any worse, so I’m bumping their chances of coming over back up to 80%. I’m concerned though that, apart from the scan, she’s done nothing to investigate a problem that started years ago. Taking a bunch of laxatives doesn’t get to the bottom (ha!) of the issue at all. As for Dad, he’s been in pain because he bit his cheek badly in the middle of the night. He has a habit of doing this – the insides of his cheeks are full of scars – but this episode was particularly bad.

Book news. Not great. Dorothy got in touch with the “publishers” yesterday. They’re now saying they’ll do 500 copies but the book would need to be accepted somehow by the Ministry of Culture and, if that happens, it’ll come at an unknown cost to me. I have no idea how their distribution works, if it works at all. There are a lot of ifs, suddenly. If it’s going to cost me more than a three-figure sum (in pounds), I’m out and I’ll try and find a publisher worthy of the name. They certainly exist in Romania, but the one I’ve been dealing with certainly isn’t it.

More chaos in the Trump “administration”. That leaked Signal group chat prior to the attack on Yemen. I mean, seriously, what a joke. And it obviously was a joke to them, with their use of emojis. This is what we’re dealing with here. A bunch of 12-year-olds. The idea that they’d even discuss something so serious and sensitive over some chat facility is ludicrous. And why did they need to bomb Yemen (and kill dozens of innocent civilians including children) anyway? It reminds me of the Tory ministers’ – and Dominic Cummings’ – WhatsApp messages during the early stages of the Covid pandemic. They didn’t have a clue, nor did they care. How have we sunk so low?

Last time I spoke to my parents, they had a game of cricket on TV in the background. New Zealand were playing, presumably in a Twenty20 match. Mum mentioned that NZ had already qualified for the football World Cup, long before it even happens. Well that’s nice, but that isn’t the achievement it used to be. The 2026 World Cup will feature 48 teams and 104 games. It’s too big. Everything has got too big. That’s half the reason we’re in this mess. What’s more, the group games – all 72 of them – will only serve to eliminate 16 of the teams. Most of the action will take place in the US; all the more reason to give it a miss. I watched NZ qualify for the 2010 tournament (32 teams) by beating Bahrain. That felt exciting and, well, meaningful, especially since NZ gave such a good account of themselves in the main competition. I wish I’d been around to see NZ qualify for the 1982 edition. It was a marathon campaign. The All Whites won in Australia to put them in the final round, then they eventually beat China in a do-or-die play-off. A country of three million beating one of close to a billion. Only 24 teams qualified then, so it was a huge achievement.

There has been a break in domestic football to accommodate international matches. This weekend the final run-in starts. There is talk of Birmingham breaking points records. Most teams in their division have eight or nine games left. Blues have eleven, including the EFL Trophy final. Their packed schedule might be their undoing; we’ll see.

Kitty injured her neck on Monday. I don’t know how she did it, only that it must have happened while I was out. There was a raw red patch. Later that day I saw blood on the windowsill in the little room next to my office. As I’d expect with Kitty, she was totally undeterred by this.

Cat - Family - Films - Life :)

Tough to take

March 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

So when I spoke to Mum on Wednesday night I said that I’d fly over to New Zealand if they couldn’t make it over to Europe. She replied, “Are you sure? What about your work?” Well, you know, if I come it’ll be in the height of my summer when I’ll want to escape the heat and will have less work anyway. Plus I can still give online lessons if I want. It was only yesterday that it dawned on me. She couldn’t give a damn whether she sees me or not. Or my brother. Perhaps she’d even prefer not to see us. It took so long for me to figure it out because it didn’t seem possible. How can somebody not care about seeing her own children? Yesterday I sent her a message: “I really hope you can get your tummy troubles sorted and start making regular trips to the loo. Right now Kitty is sunning herself on the window ledge and she says she can’t wait to see you.” In her reply she just blanked the whole issue. As for Dad, he’s certainly better than Mum in this regard, but even he isn’t exactly champing at the bit to see his kids. Or grandchildren. This is tough to take. Last night I woke up at 2:18, checked in on Kitty, then spent the next three hours chewing all of this over in my head. I’m now putting the chances of Mum and Dad coming at 70% – down a bit, but still decent. But even if they come, it won’t be with any real enthusiasm.

On Wednesday morning I went to the bank to pay some money in. It’s a horrible branch, but it’s near the supermarket and I wouldn’t need to talk to anybody anyway. Just deposit the cash via the machine, then leave. The place stank and the machine’s screen seemed to be covered in a hazy brownish black muck. It was only when I tried to wipe it off that I realised the “muck” was on the inside. As usual, the machine rejected some of my notes and I had to repeat the process six or seven times. Finally I was done. Not the exact amount I’d planned to put in, but close enough. But then it swallowed my card. Um, did I just imagine that? I looked around just in case. No card. Jeez, what now? If you wanted to see anybody, there was a long queue. I spoke up. The machine has taken my card. The teller, a woman of 40-odd, told me to join the queue like everyone else. At this point I made a scene. This isn’t normal! Join the queue. The woman didn’t even look at me, or anybody else. I was braced for an hour in the queue followed by who knew what. A few minutes later I heard a young woman say, in English, “Is this your card?” The machine had spat my card out while she was using it. Amazing security they have there. I was relieved, but won’t dare visit that branch again for at least a year. Half an hour later, at the queue for the supermarket checkout, an older man was having difficulty with his Kaufland app. The cashier (a woman of 50 or so) really laid into him. You have to do this, then this, don’t you get it?! The man simply accepted this appalling treatment in a way I never would have. I love Romania, but the customer service here continues to be dire.

I’ve started watching a 2021 film called Nomadland. I’ve only seen the first 20 minutes, but I can tell it will be fascinating. It’s about Americans who have lost their jobs and survive by travelling around the country in RVs, getting odd jobs here and there. I was going to write more about America and its decline, but I don’t feel like writing much more today. I’ve teed up a video call with my cousin who lives in New York state.

My latest maths student is proving hard to teach. She can calculate, up to a point, but hasn’t yet learnt how to think. Teaching that isn’t an easy task at all.