I’m off to Poland just 36 hours from now. I’m spending five nights in Bydgoszcz (say “bid”, then “gosh”, then add a “ch” at the end, and you’ll get pretty close to pronouncing this intimidating name). Because it’s close to 1300 km which is much too far to go in a single drive, I’m breaking up the journey by spending two nights in the Czech city of Olomouc (say “o-lo-moats” in three syllables). Bydgoszcz, which is in the northern half of Poland, has great architecture and isn’t touristy at all from what I can gather. Avoiding expensive touristy cities (theme parks, if you like) is an absolute must for me. Because I’ll have four full days in Bydgoszcz, I’ll have plenty of time to look around and maybe even make a day trip to Gdańsk on the coast, which does get a bit of tourism. I should accomplish two main goals: one, simply to get away (and visit two new countries which is a bonus), and two, to escape the heat. On the way back I’ll have a one-night stop – probably in Olomouc again.
Kitty has added an extra wrinkle to planning this sort of trip. What do I do with her? As an experiment, I dropped her off at Dorothy’s on Tuesday morning, just for the day. Dorothy got a kitten in June. Maybe the two felines would get on fine, even though mine was twice the size of hers, in which case a longer stay could work. No such luck. Her kitten was scared of Kitty (don’t blame her) to the point where she hid for four hours. Dorothy couldn’t find her. They had to be separated, and even that didn’t entirely work because their scents lingered… So I’ve booked Kitty in for nine nights at a so-called pet hotel in Timișoara, at a cost of 540 lei (£90 or NZ$210). In the longer term I’ll have to think about what to do. Kitty’s lovely and everything, but if I want to be spending a month in New Zealand and stuff, I’m sad to say she might not be worth the hassle and expense.
I got a surprise letter in the post from the Romanian equivalent of the IRD, saying that I hadn’t declared my foreign income for 2019. What the hell? That’s six years ago. Did you mean my NZ rental income (which I’d already paid tax on) or what? I went to the office yesterday but the queue was a mile long. This morning I got there much earlier and they told me it was to do with the £51 of interest I’d apparently received on my Barclays account that year. When I get back from Poland I’ll have to make another trip there – it sounds like I’ll have to do something on a self-service kiosk. Some of the stuff you get in Romania is laughable.
On Monday morning after my Romanian lesson I got a call from Mum and Dad. Sunday was a stinker (we topped out at 38) and it didn’t drop below 22 that night, so I slept terribly. Talking to them was a struggle. I can’t wait to escape that.
On Saturday I made another trip to Jimbolia. My parents called me while I was there. I tried to give them a video tour of the town but they were struggling to stay awake. Jet lag has hit them both hard this time around, though I think they’re just about over it now. After Mum’s ongoing irregularity, she’s all of a sudden very regular indeed. A more pressing problem for her is her eyesight. Dad says it’s got worse since I saw her in the UK, which must mean she’s practically as blind as a bat now. And she’s still driving a car. Yeesh. It doesn’t bear thinking about. As for me, it’s taken me a heck of a long time to get over the bug I probably picked up from my nephew. My doctor gave me some soluble pills last week and they seem to have worked.
On Saturday night I went to a free concert in Parcul Civic. I say free, but there were ample opportunities to buy overpriced food and drink if you wanted. I only turned up for the end of the concert to see Mika, the British–Lebanese artist who had a biggish hit with Grace Kelly in 2007. He’s had a couple of other hits since then that I didn’t even realise were him. I really enjoyed his versatility, his enthusiasm, his humour. He’s a bit mad, which helped. He could even speak a few words of Romanian. I was impressed. I mean, întoarceți-vă (turn around) isn’t the easiest phrase to articulate. He lived part of his childhood in Paris, so he probably grew up bilingual (at least), which would make learning other languages easier. I came away thinking, he’s a good guy, isn’t he. The world needs more Mikas.
Not much other news. The ex-owner of this place left behind an expensive-looking speaker system (and much more: a Gucci watch, a load of books including Grey’s Anatomy and a bunch of novels I’ve since read, and family photos). I’ve only just got round to getting the speakers working. I’m now able to play music through them from my laptop. I’m impressed with the sound quality. (Right now I’m playing Kiwi band The Phoenix Foundation.)
Later today a plumber should be coming over to look at the pong in the bathroom. It’s been a problem since I got the bath leak fixed last year. Dad, who’s more clued up on these matters than me (who isn’t?), couldn’t tell where the stench was coming from any more than I could. I really hope the plumber (not the same one as last year, obviously) won’t have to dismantle the tiles around the bath (again) to get at it.
I’ll try and persuade Dorothy (who now has a kitten) to have Kitty for a trial 24-hour period. If it works, great. I should be good to go to Poland or wherever for a few days and I can offer to take her cat in exchange. If not, well at least I tried.
Only two lessons today. With a bit more free time, I’m getting back to the book about my tennis partner. I had to reread the first five chapters – I couldn’t even remember what I’d written, it’s been so long.
It’s a busyish day for the time of year: three lessons down, two to go. At the start of the first lesson, Kitty was energised by the intercom bell as usual. My student’s father came up to my door, apologising for being late. Could I extend the lesson beyond our scheduled time? Doorstep chats don’t work very well with an energised Kitty, and sure enough she ran out the door and up the stairs. No harm done – I picked her up easily – but it was a dramatic start to my work day all the same.
Mum and Dad arrived in Christchurch on Tuesday morning, their time, having been away for the best part of three months. They said their flight from Singapore was the worst they’d ever experienced in terms of turbulence. These storms have been occurring at higher altitudes for some reason and planes are unable to fly above them. The day they left Singapore, they had an 11am checkout from their hotel. They both slept in until then, which was only 4am in the UK, entirely by accident. It didn’t seem to be a problem, and they could even use the hotel pool until they were ready to leave for their early-evening flight. My parents are fans of the city state. It’s clean – the draconian litter laws help there – and, for them, predictable: they’ve stayed there several times before. I’m on the fence about the place; criticism of the governing party (which has been in power for just about ever) doesn’t go down too well. I’ve been there twice: once when I was nearly seven (the colossal plazas and space-age-seeming tech were fascinating for a small boy) and again in 2008.
Temperatures in Timișoara approached 40 towards the end of the last week. Pure hell, in other words. My sleep was broken at best. Doing anything became a real challenge. Then on Saturday night a storm ripped through. The temperature nosedived by 15 degrees in a couple of hours. A number of concertgoers were injured in the storm and ended up in hospital. Since then, our highs have remained in the mid-20s and there’s often been a nice breeze. What a welcome change. It’s helped me think more clearly and get some odd (but important) life admin jobs done.
Last weekend, when I was still reeling from the hot weather, I attempted to solve some sample problems from linguistics olympiads. Yes, the linguistics olympiad is a real thing in which high school students compete both individually and in teams. (I like that they do both.) This year’s edition has just taken place in Taiwan, while next year’s will be in Romania. There were 15 or so problems, ranging from very doable to (for me) impossible. They’re really just logic puzzles. If word A in some obscure language means X in English, and word B means Y, what does word C have to mean? No prior knowledge of the language is required, which is why they choose obscure languages (so speakers of that language don’t gain an unfair advantage), but knowledge of how languages work in general, and the features they can have, is a must. There was one problem involving seven fishermen each describing their catch in the language of their remote island, with accompanying pictures (out of order) of what each man had caught. You had to match them, with the added wrinkle that one of the men was lying. I was all at sea (!) there. The language clearly had features that I’d never seen before, and I couldn’t make head nor tail of it in terms of how the size and number of fish were expressed.
I hope people didn’t go down to Caroline Bay to see the tsunami generated by the earthquake off Kamchatka (which I only know from the game Risk). In 1960, tens of thousands did just that following the massive Chile earthquake. The tsunami, which they called a tidal wave back then, never came.
I still need to decide if I’m going anywhere and what to do with Kitty if I am.
I just took Kitty out for a drive. She spent one hour in a large cardboard box, 70 by 50 by 30 cm, with holes cut out of it (obviously) and an absorbent blanket at the bottom. (Lately I’ve put her food in the box to get her used to it.) She clearly didn’t love the experience, but she wasn’t traumatised by it either, so I’ll try it again in a few days. When I was little, our cat would be let loose in the Allegro or the Mazda on our five-hour-plus trips to and from Wales. With Kitty, that would be beyond dangerous.
Three weeks since I left my brother’s place, I’ve still got the cold I picked up from (probably) my nephew. He picks up a bug from nursery, infects his mum and dad and anyone else he comes into contact within, then three days later he’s as happy as Larry while everyone else is suffering for weeks. Mum and Dad have still got it too. Mum didn’t look great at all when I saw her on WhatsApp yesterday. They leave in only five days. I hope their trip back goes smoothly, or as smoothly as something like that ever can. At least this time they’ll break up their journey with a stopover in Singapore. I never want them to go direct again. Despite none of us being 100%, we had a really nice chat which made me feel good. Mum had been to meet up a few of the teachers from her school in St Ives, for the first time in about a decade. She was struck by how hard they had found the Covid period. We were pretty lucky in NZ, weren’t we? No Matt Hancock, who really should be behind bars. I was lucky too. Romania was at times riddled with virus, but my personal circumstances allowed me to dodge the worst of it.
The night before last I slept terribly. Yesterday I just had one lesson – maths in Dumbrăvița in the morning – and when I came back I lay on the sofa, washed out, where I finished Ella Minnow Pea (a fun read) and watched round three of the Open golf. My yearly golf watching. I like the Open visually: the dunes, the crags, the ever-changing skies, the squalls that come out of nowhere. I enjoy seeing top golfers battle near-horizontal rain and brutal rough. I particularly enjoy it when there’s a packed leaderboard on the final day and half a dozen potential winners as they turn for home, and a previously unheralded player keeps it together through all the mayhem to win – to make history – with a score of maybe three under par. This year’s tournament is taking place at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. Barring the heavy shower I saw on day two which added to the drama, the conditions have mostly been benign. Scottie Scheffler – number one in the world and a brilliant player – has taken a four-shot lead going into the last round, which might be a procession. A shame if so. World number ones haven’t won many Opens in recent times. Tiger Woods was the last to do it, I think. Rory McIlroy is six shots off the lead. He’s from Northern Ireland and a huge star in the game, so it’s no surprise that the crowd went nuts throughout his round of 66 yesterday.
Since the bit I wrote last time about council tax, I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to get these kinds of things right. Coming up with a fair and workable system is oh so complicated. Countries like New Zealand benefit here from being small, with relatively few working parts. What you don’t do though is hold your hands up and say it’s too hard. That’s exactly what the UK government is doing. We know this is unfair and absurd, but we’ll keep it the same (which in reality means making it worse: it will only become more unfair and absurd over time) because it’s too politically hard to change anything. And that’s just one aspect of tax policy. It’s the same thing with immigration, healthcare, housing, energy, infrastructure, the lot. Education isn’t too bad in the UK and they’ve made some progress on the environment. But everything else is going backwards because of a lack of political will to do anything. It’s the same all over the western world. The only people who do have the balls to change anything are those who aren’t interested in a fairer world and just want to make their mark. So they make things more shit. As I keep saying, how did we get here? When I was over in the UK recently, I watched an episode of Newsnight. They had ex-policitians (with opposing views) on the programme to discuss Labour’s climbdown on benefits. Adults, talking about a serious topic in a civil manner. This would no longer happen in America, I kept thinking. For the UK at least, there is still hope.
Next week’s challenge: for seven days, everything I read or listen to must be in Romanian where at all possible. I will also write something in Romanian every day. My Romanian has stalled and I can’t not do anything about it because it’s too hard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 nightThe 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.
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