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The latest scare

August 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad fly back to New Zealand later today. It’s a 9pm flight, so they won’t have to rush. On Thursday I got a scary series of messages from Dad to say that he still felt terrible, the day after coming back from my brother’s place, and may not be able to take the flight. This was while I was teaching. When I got home I spoke to him. By this stage he was feeling a bit better. He’d managed to see the doctor who gave him the green light to make the long trip back. (The 14-hour leg from Dubai to Sydney would be an ordeal for anybody.) The doctor saw that his heartbeat was irregular – he knew that of course – but the warfarin, which he’s been taking since 2005, should keep it sufficiently in check. Mum and Dad will be glad to get home.

It’s so hot again now. You only have to look at the news for five minutes to see that Europe is burning. We could easily hit 40 by the middle of next week, and at night-time it remains in the 20s, meaning I sleep even less well than I do normally. Though I’m better than I was, I never feel fully rested and ready to tackle, well, anything of real significance. (As I write this, Kitty is zooming around like a mad thing. She makes me feel old.) At least I rarely have to go out for lessons at the moment. If I do, it’s best to go by bike, as long as I don’t have to stop.

I’ve been thinking of getting away for a few days, probably to the mountains, to escape the heat. But that takes a certain amount of planning – what do I do with Kitty? – so my best bet might be to hunker down (or bunker down) here. I’m still toying with the idea of going to Moldova (the country – Moldova is also a region of Romania) towards the end of August.

The Scrabble league is in full swing again. I started my games pretty well but yesterday I ran into some heavy weather and, despite my best efforts and learning a bunch of four-letter words, a second straight relegation my be on the cards (or the tiles, to be more accurate). I have to keep reminding myself that the standard of opposition has improved considerably since the early days of the league (last winter). These people literally jet around the world to play Scrabble. It’s mental, really.

Family - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

Dad’s tumultuous journey

July 30, 2026 by 0 Comments

Dad called me last night but I had an online lesson so I couldn’t answer. I called Mum this morning on the off-chance she’d answer – I expected them to be on the train, making an early start, so I was alarmed to see her still in my brother’s living room. Our train is at 10:45. Damn. That means they’ll be travelling in the heat of the day and it’s forecast to break 30. Getting through the underground in London will be a nightmare. If there’s a delay they may even hit rush-hour traffic in Cambridge. “You’re going to have a shitty trip back,” I said to Mum. She didn’t seem to like that. I don’t think it’s because I’d used the S-word and my nephew might have heard; she just wanted to pretend (to nobody in particular) that it would be fine. She was still at my brother’s place, so her image was of prime importance. I can’t be seen to have problems. Then Dad came on the line and said he’d been up all night worrying about the trip. (They got a later train because it was much cheaper.)

Then a couple of hours ago I got a Teams call from Dad. He was shirtless. They’d just got back to the St Ives flat. Dad said he felt “very strange” during the underground bit and thought he might not make it. (I’ve just got an email from him saying that he was “very scared” and “I felt it would take very little for me to collapse on the floor and become a hospital case.”) The trains themselves were air-conditioned and not a problem, but it’s all a huge worry. And I’m not sure Mum cares all that much. For instance, when I told her about my tiredness and lack of energy, she may as well have had “NOT MY PROBLEM” spelt out in dazzling neon above her head. (A few days later, when she could see on the video calls that I wasn’t right, she was more sympathetic. Dad may well have said something in the meantime too.) Mum and Dad have two full days before they fly back to New Zealand. Mum is stressed because someone will be staying in the flat, maybe for months, soon after they leave.

As for me, there’s been an uptick in my energy levels. I’m no longer huffing and puffing just walking up (or even down) the stairs. That’s excellent news – I didn’t know when (or if) I’d ever come right. I just hope I don’t get messed up again by the searing heat we’ll face in the coming days. Today it reached “only” 33: the last day before the inferno.

Andy Burnham. He’s acting fast. As he must do. Labour have a majority of 160-plus and even the back-up of the Lib Dems (with over 70 seats) if absolutely necessary. In other words, Burnham’s got all the ammo he needs to effect real change. But under three years to do it. His big thing today was reform of the elderly care sector which is iniquitous as it currently stands. You go into a care home for any length of time and you’re bled dry of all your savings. (My grandmother was “lucky” that she didn’t last long there. Her intestinal problem came back and that was that.)

The next round of the Scrabble league starts tomorrow morning. I’ll be in division four. As ever, I’ll have my work cut out. The word KAT is valid. You can put an I either before or after KAT to make a valid four-letter word. TAKI and TIKA are the other two anagrams of that set. LIPA (as in the singer Dua Lipa) is valid. Its four anagrams all begin with P: PALI, PILA, PAIL, PIAL. B is the only letter you can put in front of LET to make a valid four. And so it goes on.

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The big slowdown (so I don’t drown)

July 28, 2026 by 0 Comments

Dad called me this morning as I was sitting in the café by the market and the river. I’d finished my coffee (which now costs 8.50 lei; I remember when it was 3.50), so I wandered over to the river away from the TV noise. One of Whitney Houston’s music videos – I Wanna Dance With Somebody – had been playing. She was not much older than me and my brother when she died.

It’s my brother’s 45th birthday today. Dad handed his device to my brother so I could wish him a happy birthday and have a chat, but he was too preoccupied with the kids to manage more than 30 seconds. I did see both the kids, which was rather nice. My nephew knew how old his father was. I think the six of them will take the train to Swanage as they did last June (on Dad’s birthday) when I was over. That was a lovely day. I wonder if they’ll have cream teas this time.

I’m a bit better today, certainly. I still had that business when I woke up in the morning where my body felt leaden and it was an effort to extract myself from bed, but I could walk to the market at close to my normal speed, which I haven’t been able to do for some days. Apart from Dorothy’s thing on Saturday I’ve tried to do very little. After a slow start I’ve made some headway with Cloud Atlas which seems to be nine books in one.

I’ve also been trying to learn Scrabble words. The four-letter words will require a monumental effort for me to master. There are 5662 of them, many of which are highly obscure. Knowing the words isn’t enough; I have to ensure I’m not confusing them with non-words. (Some people find this easy. I have no idea how.) My memory isn’t very good so I try to recognise patterns. MANG, MENG, MING, MONG and MUNG are all valid. As are SNAB, SNEB, SNIB, SNOB and SNUB. KOR is a valid three-letter word, and you can plop any of the five vowels on the end to make a valid four (including KORU, the Maori design). The four valid anagrams of AIKM all have A as the second letter. But that only gets me so far, especially when I’ve been battling brain fog. I got relegated last time (four wins, ten losses) and nearly didn’t sign up for the next round because I didn’t think I could manage it, but I’ve now decided I will.

Oh yes, Dorothy’s birthday do in Buzad. That was tough. I made an apricot tart the night before, despite feeling very tired. The drive used to take an hour but because of the road works both at my end and on the way there, you can add an extra 15 minutes. At least they weren’t actually working on Saturday, or else who knows how long it might have taken. Although I felt like crap, the drive there was pleasurable in a way because there was no-one to bother me. On the radio they talked about an international maths competition (these are a big deal over here) in which several Romanians had done well, but nobody could now compete with AI. Erasure came on with Love to Hate You, reminding me of my bus trips to and from high school. They mentioned a large asteroid that they thought may actually be heading our way in 2029 but will in fact just miss us. What a shame, I thought. There was an old song about kids spending their summer holidays with their grandparents – common in Romania, and used to be even more common.

I got to her place at just after 1pm and I knew it would be hard. I was in no fit state to chat to people. And there were a lot of people. Apart from Dorothy, the first person I met was a young African woman called Queen. She was very nice. There were people I’d met before but whose names I couldn’t remember. Slightly awkwardly, our Romanian teacher was there. We’ve taken a break from lessons. I found I could hardly cobble together a semi-coherent sentence in Romanian. I’d have struggled enough in English. The food, part European, part African, part Asian, was amazing. The location too – it’s a beautiful spot. But I couldn’t appreciate any of it. At least people gobbled down the apricot tart, once they’d figured out the apricot halves weren’t actually egg yolks. (One lady had made an apple pie that looked rather like a large Yorkshire pudding or maybe a Lancashire hotpot.)

I left at 3:30. That was all I could handle. I drove back feeling quite sad, wondering what I might do with my life if I won’t have any energy or anyone to help me. I felt very alone. Lost in France by the recently departed Bonnie Tyler came on the radio. She recorded it before her voice changed. The host commented that being lost in France wouldn’t be a great idea right now with all the fires. My parents called me the next morning. I was in the park nearby. We hadn’t spoken for four days which by recent standards is a lot. I can’t have looked or sounded that great.

In the last few days I’ve watched some videos about ME. My best friend had it when he was twelve or so. I also had a female colleague in Auckland who was ambitious and played rugby. Her father had been the New Zealand snooker champion; that seemed to impress me more than her. Anyway, by 2009 she was taking regular time off for ME or, as they (unfortunately) called it at the time, chronic fatigue syndrome. I think she left the company about the same time as me. I wonder what she’s doing now. From the (mostly UK-based) videos I watched, it was apparent that many patients have been treated absolutely scandalously, and that what I’ve been experiencing could be many times worse.

It’s been much cooler of late – that was a real saving grace on Dorothy’s birthday – but I’m now nervously eyeing the forecast for later this week. We’re predicted to reach at least the mid-30s.

I’ve got a lesson coming up, my first in a few days. There seems to be a cat in heat in the car park.

Life :)

What it’s like right now

July 25, 2026 by 0 Comments

Life is exhausting. Mornings are damn near impossible and even though things improve during the day, I’m having to slow everything way down. Communication must be kept to a bare minimum – I find instant messaging a huge burden at the best of times. There’s certainly no point in trying to achieve anything, at least not anything that meets the 2020s definition of achieve. Today I spent most of the day in the park next to where I get the water once a week or so. It’s pleasant there. And quiet. And less crappy than sitting or lying on the sofa. I just wish there was a loo. Today’s weather was conducive to being outside. I’m thankful for the milder weather. The whole of yesterday morning was particularly terrible. I watched YouTube videos about climbing Everest, which had a certain irony given how I was feeling.

What I’m dealing with meets all the criteria for ME, with one exception which I hope will remain so: having it for at least six months. I read that three-quarters of people with ME aren’t able to work, which doesn’t surprise me. There’d be no way in hell I could hold down any sort of normal job at the moment. This afternoon I drove to the supermarket – usually I’d walk, but walking has become more of a shuffle, and anyway I needed to get heavy bags of litter for Kitty. I started off putting items in a basket as I’d normally do, forgetting that I’d need a trolley this time. I was able to exit the place without buying anything and start all over with a trolley. When I got to the checkout, the lady accidentally scanned the cat litter three times (I’d bought two bags). To resolve the problem, she had to communicate with someone using a kind of walkie-talkie, then that person (presumably) had to come and unlock something or other, then she pressed a metal security tag against some kind of reader, all while the queue was backing up. I thought, no, there’s absolutely no way I could do this job. Or almost any other job.

My actual job I can handle, but only just, because my hours are way down. Yesterday for instance I only had one 90-minute session with the boy in Mehala. I took the bike there and deeply exhaled the whole way. I needed some stationery and rather than go to the mall on the way there under impossible time pressure, I went on the way back. Malls are always, um, interesting, when I’m like this. I must have walked around the same two aisles half a dozen times before deciding that no, they really didn’t have the coloured card I wanted. There were various stationery items with “good vibes” written on them, and even a young woman browsing them with “summer vibes” on her top. Seriously, take your vibes and shove ’em. There was a L’Oréal ad featuring Nadia Comăneci. This stuff revitalises and nutrifies (or something) your hair for 100 hours. Because you’re worth it. A hundred hours. See you in a hundred hours. Does anyone really think of time like that? It’s like when Vodafone offered 500 “free” minutes on the HomePlus plan. A deliberately meaningless number. I did get some bits and pieces and paid for them at a self-service kiosk. I was pleased to manage that. As I was sorting that out, Gloria Gaynor’s seventies hit Never Can Say Goodbye was playing. On the way out I passed a morbidly obese man wearing a T-shirt that read “Football’s coming home” in large red, white and blue text. Not something I would have expected there and then.

It was a slow ride home. I went down streets I hadn’t been along in years, or in some cases at all. Which was quite nice. When I got home I had spaghetti with bacon, mushrooms and other vegetables. That was easily the highlight of the day.

Tomorrow Dorothy is celebrating her 72nd birthday at Buzad. She said there would be 30 to 40 people there. I don’t know whether to go. That’s a lot of people at any time. If I could go for a couple of hours and then leave, maybe. I called her last night to say I didn’t know for sure if I’d be going. I did that because I knew she would write me an instant message in Romanian and expect me to reply, and that would generate another message, and so on, and it would all be too tiring.

Mark had to bring his exit from Romania forward a few days because of the movers, so my catch-up with him last weekend sadly ended up being my last. Until (hopefully) I get to see him sometime in the north of England. Not having him around is going to be a real bugger, let’s be honest.

I spent a lot of yesterday catastrophising. If this goes on until September when the new academic year starts, I certainly won’t be able to carry out full days and weeks of work. My earnings will no longer cover my expenses. My mental health will be shot to pieces by then. It’s already teetering. And then what? Go back to New Zealand, where everything is so damn expensive now, and do what? Would I even be in a fit state to make the move? How would I go about selling or renting this place at that point? But then again, if someone had told me when I moved to Romania that I’d see a big improvement in my life until something happens in year ten which will bring it my time here to a close, I’d have bitten their hand off.

Lately I’ve been listening to The Rip by Portishead. It’s a beautiful song. The band took their name from the seaside town just down the road from Bristol.

Mum and Dad are now in Poole, as far as I know. They’ll be down at my brother’s place until (I’m guessing) Tuesday or Wednesday.

Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Scrabble

Vital vitamins

July 21, 2026 by 0 Comments

I thought I was coming right, but today I’ve been dragging myself through life once again. This morning I walked to the market – with all the road works it’s like a maze – and a young woman powered past me on foot. Normally I’m a fairly fast walker, but today I was at a crawl. I barely outpaced an old lady with one of those Zimmer-trolley things. When that was done I walked to the well to fetch 20 litres of water. A bit later I sorted out my bike. This all felt like a huge physical effort.

Last Thursday was the most ridiculous day of all. The woman in Italy cancelled her online lesson because her laptop wasn’t working. I didn’t mind that because I felt terrible and I still had to plan the rest of the day’s lessons. Then Dad called me, as he has done a lot while he’s been in the UK. Maybe he’s just bored. At lunchtime I went to a restaurant just off Piața Unirii to meet Dorothy and the other woman who did the Vienna trip two years ago. I had no idea what this place would be like, but it was actually rather nice. It was all you could eat for 40 lei, something I’d never experienced before in Romania. (They had signs telling you not to take food you wouldn’t eat.) Under normal circumstances I’d have enjoyed it, but even though the food was great I wasn’t in the mood when I was feeling like crap and on such a hot day. This other lady is fairly in-your-face and I couldn’t cope with that at all. At one point she called someone who wanted English lessons for her daughter and then handed the phone to me. Oh jeez, not now, please. I was relieved to hear that any lessons wouldn’t be starting until September.

Dorothy and the other woman went off to Piața 700 while I decided I’d prefer a break before my lessons with the brother and sister in Mehala. Just as I got to that part of town, I got a puncture in my back tyre. Damn. I lay in the long grass under the plum trees for half an hour, then chained my unusable bike to a lamp-post near where I had my lessons. The kids’ mother greeted me. Where’s your bike? Don’t ask, I said. I did the lessons – a struggle – then their mother insisted that their boy fix my puncture. He’s really into bikes now. I know – we did half a session on bikes recently. My plan was simply to leave the bike there to be picked up the next morning in the car, and to walk the 5 km home. Even with my low energy and the heat I’d just have time to do that before my next lesson. The boy though insisted he would repair my puncture. The time it took me to persuade him not to bother in the searing heat meant I had even less time to walk home. I had to jog in places. I got home just in time, absolutely dripping in sweat. The bell went as I was in the middle of having a pee, as it so often does.

After the lesson I saw the after-hours doctor. I was in and out quickly. I asked him if I needed blood tests but he just wrote me a prescription for Astenor “energy and tonic”, vials of liquid that contain a bunch of stuff: arginine (a semi-essential amino acid), vitamin B6 (which helps with the immune system), biotin (which helps maintain normal hair skin), and magnesium (which has had a lot of attention recently: it helps with your bones and teeth but is also said to be beneficial to your sleep and general mood). He also put me on a double dose of vitamin D as well as vitamin K. Whether all of this will make any difference I have no idea, but I doubt it will do me any harm.

I only watched snippets of the World Cup final. There was something dystopian about what I saw. Donald Trump up there in his ivory tower, the word FIFA spelled out every five seconds, music blaring. I didn’t see the Super Bowl-style half-time show which had a load of famous people and the Muppets. The Muppets are too good for something like that. Half-time went on nearly twice as long as it normally does, which is really crappy for the players (as well as breaching the rules of the game). This tournament also had hydration breaks – fine if they’re actually about hydration, but of course they were all about advertising. Then you had the Argentinians – nasty shits who constantly disrupted the game. Incredibly, they didn’t even have a shot on goal until well into extra time. It was after midnight when I decided I couldn’t take any more and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep though. Hmmm, it must be over now. I wonder who won? I was very glad to wake up to find that Spain had beaten the bastards, and better still without needing penalties. I also missed those Argentine fists fly after the match. Any Americans tuning into that game to watch football for the first time will be sticking to baseball and basketball in future, thank you very much.

As for Ryan Fox, winner of the Open in spectacular fashion, I had no idea he was the son of Grant Fox, one of the greatest All Blacks of all time. Fox is a fairly common surname, after all. I think Grant Fox’s father may have played cricket for New Zealand too. Talk about sport being in the blood. One thing I neglected to mention last time was that I watched commentary of the golf in French. Canadian French, to be exact. Listening to the commentary and picking up on the differences in vowel quality and vocabulary between Québecois and French French was as fascinating as any of the actual golf.

Scrabble. I’m almost certainly getting relegated this time around. I’ve played decently enough but my opponents are just too strong and I haven’t drawn all that well. My most enjoyable game was with an American guy named Ben who regularly plays big tournaments, with some success. He’s also a moderator on the site and a really nice guy. He wound up beating me by just eleven points in a high-scoring game. In another game I played this guy who constantly talks trash in the chat, to the point where I blocked him. He seems a total arse, just like the sort of boy I’d have avoided at school. Well I beat him at my third attempt. It looked like the game was up for me, but I found EBONICS which is a decidedly racist term (combining ebony and phonics) meaning how Black Americans speak. Last week I saw a YouTube video from someone preparing for the American national championships which are taking place right now. He still studies words using physical cards rather than apps. (Maybe he uses apps too; I couldn’t tell.) He showed a fat stack of cards, pointing to the number 512. No, that wasn’t the 512th card, but the 512th stack of cards. Wowee. He mentioned that he had high-functioning autism, which I suppose checks out. He said the best he could hope for in the tournament was a small prize in the hundreds which would be dwarfed by travel and accommodation costs for him and his husband.

Andy Burnham has taken over as British prime minister. I like the guy. He’s got the cards stacked against him in so many ways, with an unstable world and a rabid media, but let’s see what he can do.

My parents are going down to see my brother on Friday. Next Monday will be his 45th birthday. Then they fly back to New Zealand on 1st August.

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.

Books - Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Bully boy

July 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s 39 degrees here as I write this. I’m pretty much confined to just the living room, which has air con. At one stage the air con was dripping like a tap but clearing the outlet pipe thankfully stopped that. Nights aren’t easy. The night before last I had Bic Runga’s Get Some Sleep in my head for some reason. She sang of being “stranded in June”. It still is June here. In this part of town the heat has meant that people are out and about pretty late. Even small children. The nearby park was a hive of activity at 10pm on Sunday.

On Saturday I went to Buzad and drove Dorothy and her friend back to Timișoara. It was such a hot day, not far off today’s temperatures, and when I got back home at nearly four I was basically gone for the day, I was so exhausted from the heat.

Mum and Dad are back in St Ives after their tough time down south. Mum has picked up a cold. The good news though is that my brother’s commanding officer has gone into bat for him and it looks like he’ll be able to leave the army – and start his new job in early August – after all. I spoke to him this morning and he certainly seemed a bit perkier. He said he’s been through a horrible three months, not knowing what the hell was going on. Our chat lasted 20 minutes – much longer than anything we’ve managed of late.

It’s not just the job stuff. His son is incredibly demanding. Probably similar to me and my brother combined when we were little. There’s just no downtime with him. He’s extremely bright, and that poses a problem. My brother is extremely proud of him, and why shouldn’t he be, but I think he’s a bit too proud, to the point where the sun shines out of his arse and he can do no wrong. In reality my nephew is a bully; he often hurts his little sister and enjoys it too. He receives no real discipline from either of his parents. There’s no wooden spoon like me and my brother got. I suppose you just can’t do that these days. In around 14 months my nephew will start school. He’ll be one of the oldest in his class, and inevitably one of the biggest. In contrast to all of this, my niece is lovely. I don’t know when I’ll next get to see them.

I did win that Scrabble game with the 16-year-old Australian, by just six points. I didn’t exactly navigate that endgame in optimal fashion, but I find endgames particularly difficult because I simply don’t know enough words. I finished second bottom of the league, he finished bottom, and we’ll do battle again in the division below, starting on Thursday.

I’ve ordered a new laptop. The mouse pad on this one is starting to hurt my hands after nearly five years of use, and it’s been compromised to some degree ever since Kitty spilled water on it, so really I had no choice. It’s coming on Thursday, which will be quite a busy day. I paid 4850 lei (£800 or around NZ$1900) for it. Far from the cheapest, but I really can’t skimp on a laptop which is vital for my job.

Andy Burnham can do human, which means that he’s halfway there. Whether he can do the other half (and be allowed to do it) remains to be seen, but I’m optimistic. I totally agreed with Dad when he said they should hammer the banks who are making huge, unjustified profits. Especially after my debacle with a UK bank in 2022-23.

I’m glad to got to the end of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, whose title is about as misleading as it gets. It was hard to properly empathise with the author. He was born in 1982, just two years after me, but we’re poles apart in just about every way. He’s also very different from my brother, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, just like he did.

Kitty is great, but the heat is even getting to her.

Books - Family - Life :) - Scrabble

A deep, dark, hot place

June 27, 2026 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad called me yesterday. They’re still at my brother’s place, but he was out at the time. They told me what’s been happening with my brother who has entered a deep, dark place. Worse than when he had the business with his ex, I wondered. Yes, far worse, they said. And for the love of God, don’t come here later in the summer.

We all thought it was family-related. His wife, her family (who come over all the time), his son being particularly hard work, and so on. But no, it’s to do with his job. He was very excited to get that job with BAE back at the beginning of April; he’d be starting in early August. I was very happy for him too. But now the Army won’t release him in time, mainly (from what I can tell) because his boss’s boss is being a bastard. He’ll be forced to stay for an extra six months, doing very little of importance, so he’ll miss out on that bright future that he’d studied so hard for. The military is a very weird place, and my brother has no time for it anymore. It’s all so upsetting. Not just that it has happened to him, but that it’s affected him so profoundly. This is my brother, whose mental health has always been unimaginably good. Every disappointment like water off a duck’s back. And now this.

My parents said he is hardly talking to them. Or anyone else. It’s been a crappy week down south for them. The searing heat has left them practically imprisoned in a single room, and they haven’t been able to travel back to St Ives because it’s been dangerously hot for them (especially Dad) to do so. They did go to the cinema on Thursday and see Toy Story 5, a sad film about kids being glued to their screens and no longer playing with toys, but that’s then only “thing” they’ve done. (They took my nephew. It would have all been beyond him.) Tomorrow is Dad’s 76th birthday. The following day, with the temperatures down in the 20s, they’ll finally get away.

In the last few days my parents and I have compared notes, all of us becoming very heatist. Yes, it’s been hellishly hot all over Europe, including the UK, where they broke the 1976 record for June three days running. (Mum can’t stop talking about that freakishly long heat wave fifty summers ago. Even Mark mentioned it last weekend – he’d just started school. Damon Albarn referred to it in one of his songs. It’s certainly part of British lore.) This weekend we’ll hit at least 37; on Monday and Tuesday we could just about melt in 40 degrees. The worst thing about the heat isn’t the days but the nights. Broken sleep, leaving me exhausted. On Thursday afternoon I had my first lesson with the girl who was in the ballet. An hour and a half with her big brother, followed by an hour with her, and that got me a useful 200 lei. Their mum asked me if I wanted to do two sessions each next week, but I couldn’t face the idea of cycling to Mehala in the early part of the week. Maybe on Thursday (when it should be cooler) I’ll ask if we could meet on Friday too. (The 200 lei…) I gave the boy a test, which isn’t something I do very often. He took it super seriously and got 93% – very impressive. His little sister seemed to be excited at the prospect of having me as her teacher; that isn’t something I always see.

What else? I’ve seen the devastating pictures from the already devastated Venezuela following the two huge earthquakes there. You always see the amazing scenes of children being extricated from the rubble, but those are the all too rare exceptions. Tens of thousands are missing.

I’ve been reading Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, which is all about the author’s time as an army officer, first training at Sandhurst, then serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gripping stuff, but a bit too close to home for me, and all the unnecessary pop culture references – look at me, how worldly I am – grate after a while, even if he writes extremely well.

Scrabble. I’m getting relegated again. I’m sure it won’t be the last time. My opponents are just too good. I’ve had four wins and nine losses, with one game still outstanding (and very close in the endgame) against a 16-year-old from Australia who will go down with me. In one game against a guy from Hungary I scoured the board looking for what he could do before playing my final move. Surely this will win it for me, won’t it? But then he stuck a D on the end of QUICHE on his last move to beat me by three points. Really? That’s a word now? I felt well and truly quiched. What’s more, earlier in the game I’d got 102 for BRATTISH and 92 for sATIRIC and I still couldn’t win. In the 14 games my opponents played 33 bingos. (By the way, heatist isn’t valid, but it has two anagrams that are: atheist and staithe, which is a kind of wharf.)

Life :) - Photos - Politics - Travel: Romania

23/6/16 (plus photos)

June 23, 2026 by 0 Comments

Ten years ago today, the Brexit vote happened. I’d expected it to be close, as you can see from my blog posts in the days before the referendum. (My uni mate, who is far more intelligent than me but lived in a kind of bubble, said that Remain would get 60% or more.) I was at work, on a Friday in Wellington, when the results came through. The first two declarations in the north-east were earth-shatteringly bad for Remain. Oh shit. When the next ten or so councils had announced their figures, it was basically all over. (The numbers were very close at that point, but if you had any idea at all of how voting in Britain plays out – rural areas declare later – you’d have known the writing was on the wall. And I’d been through it all a few dozen Fridays before when David Cameron won an unexpected majority, initiating the referendum in the first place.) My boss had scheduled us all to give sodding talks that afternoon, and I had to do mine and half-listen to everyone else’s, when my mind was well and truly elsewhere. I was halfway round the world and very few of my colleagues gave a damn, while there was me wanting to move to an EU country a few months later.

The arguments by both sides in the lead-up to the vote were facile. From the Leave side, it was all emotion, take back control, big unproven numbers on the side of a red bus. The Remain camp demonstrably failed to make an emotional case for staying in. (And it was easy to make! Peace was all they needed to say.) Instead you had remainers talking about falling house prices if they left the EU. I dunno, if I was a 23-year-old with little prospect of ever buying a property I’d have thought, sounds good to me. And then there were the remainers who called leavers stupid. But the whole campaign was just awful from start to finish. It whipped people up into a frenzy, creating divisions that hadn’t previously existed. EU membership just wasn’t that big a deal beforehand.

Then there was the aftermath. It was like an earthquake that nobody had prepared for, and nobody was there to clean up the mess. Cameron announced his resignation within hours of the result. Since then, Britain has gone through a slew of prime ministers including the laughable Liz Truss. They’re about to get another one who I happen to really like, but dammit he’s facing a tough task. Dangerous enemies to the west and east, the enshittification of everything thanks to toxic social media and AI slop, a stagnating economy, and still very much out of the EU where Britain has, guess what, some actual friends.

Ten years later, the Brexit vote is still a common topic of conversation. It came up with my parents when they were here. To my mind, where Brexit has done the most damage to Britain isn’t actually that they’ve left the EU, it’s the way is was done and how divided it has made the country. It was all so terribly unnecessary. And now, many of those who voted to leave are angry that it isn’t working and want an even more extreme option in Farage.

I spoke to Dad yesterday. He was struggling, as he so often does, with the heat. My brother has a conservatory which turns the whole place into a heat trap. He would love to replace it – it makes summer uncomfortable for him too – but doing so would be horrendously expensive. I saw my niece and my nephew who were both nonplussed. That’s your uncle, look at him! My nephew is still an extremely live wire.

As great as Mum and Dad’s visit was, it’s good to have my own space again. Washing and cleaning have gone from being front and centre, as Mum made them, to a gentle drum beat once more. I also no longer have to worry about putting things on shelves that Mum can’t reach (which was quite easy to accidentally do). They said that if there’s a next time they’ll try and come earlier and go straight to Timișoara as they did last year. Coming later though meant that they benefited from all the fruit that they really enjoyed, and even the sweet scent of the lime trees, so there are always pros and cons. When we were in Cluj I said, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a swimming pool? I haven’t swum in a pool for absolutely ages. I might try and go to the ștrand (basically a pool) in the coming days. I just hope I can cope with the music they play.

I just hope I don’t get any more bad headaches for a while. Dad wondered why they’re becoming such a feature of my life at my stage of the game.

The Opera House

Timișoara at dusk

Lipova

The war memorial: the Romanians, Serbs, Germans and Hungarians are on separate sides

A couple of cat pictures

Family - Headaches - Life :) - Travel: Romania

A night at the opera, and more

June 22, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s the longest day here – the shortest in the southern hemisphere – and it’s been an eventful one weather-wise. In late afternoon we’ve had a thunderstorm and driving rain that have sent the temperature tumbling 15 degrees from a high of 34. It’s sheeting down as I write this.

Mum and Dad took the WizzAir flight from Timișoara to Luton very early on Friday morning. Later that day my brother arrived in St Ives, and then the next day Mum and Dad were whisked off to Poole. Great that my brother picked them up, saving them either a bus or a train journey, but they might have preferred a couple of days to recuperate.

Yes, I was really happy with my parents’ stay. I was far better prepared than last time. Fewer lessons certainly helped. After we’d got back from Cluj – I’ll remember that epic journey for a while – I tried to give them interesting things to do and places to go. There was Ciacova last Saturday, with those huge pastries from the bakery, then the following day (Mum’s birthday) we had a meal at Berăria 700 before settling down to a night at the opera. My parents had been before a long time ago, but it was a totally new experience for me. We saw Adriana Lecouvreur, not exactly a well-known opera and probably not the best for a first-timer to see. When I read what it was about before I went, it said that I would be utterly baffled by the plot. Which indeed I was, even though it subtitled in both Romanian and a particularly flowery (though correct) version of English above the stage. Adriana was a real French actress 300 years ago, but her story in the opera was entirely made up. To be honest though, the plot was secondary to the talented singers, all extremely colourfully clad, and just being there in such a beautiful building. The performance was made up of four acts, with intervals after acts two and three, and took just over three hours. The sheer scale of the production was impressive. We sat at the bottom, but I think I’d have preferred being higher up so I could have seen the orchestra pit. The first half dragged a bit, but the dancing brought the show to life in act three. Tickets were 70 lei (£12 or NZ$27) each – extraordinary value.

When we got back from the opera, Mum was keen to go back there the next day to see a ballet gala. We booked online, grabbing some of the last available tickets, to sit two floors above the stage. They were just 20 lei each. Before the ballet, I decided to take Mum and Dad out for an excursion. We left at 10:30 and made a stop in Buzad where Dorothy has her house. We did a lap of the village on foot. As always, my parents had a good look at the houses. They marvelled at the sheer number of plum trees everywhere. From there we went to Lipova, which I last went to during the winter. It was slow going with all the road works and potholes. Lipova is a lovely town. We had coffee at the old Turkish bazaar which had furniture made out of old farm machinery. Dad and I wanted to get pastries from the bakery, but Mum vetoed that idea. I thought of going to the fortress at Șoimoș, just outside Lipova, but we didn’t have time. The journey back was long, with constant stoppages. We got back at 4:30; the ballet would start at seven. Inexplicably, Mum then flipped her lid because she’d planned to cook up a chicken for dinner and we might not have time for that. She told Dad and me, “You expect me to produce a meal for you,” when in fact we had no expectations at all, then said, “Most women wouldn’t put up with this.” Yikes. Her behaviour was beyond irrational. Thankfully it all blew over, the chicken did in fact get cooked, and we took the tram into town in plenty of time for the ballet. (Mum got agitated on a number of occasions while she was here, but that was as close as she got to crossing the line. Last time she crossed it twice, and from my perspective that made a mess of my parents’ whole stay.) The gala was basically two and a half hours of girls of all ages doing ballet at all levels. They all went to ballet school in Mehala. One of the girls was the little sister of a boy I teach; soon I’ll be teaching her too.

On Tuesday Mum and Dad went into town by themselves. They came back saying how wonderful Timișoara is now, and I thought, yes, you’re right. So many buildings have been renovated and now look really smart. Because I live here, I get blasé about it all. On Wednesday I’d planned to take Mum and Dad to Recaș – they have a big barbecue there on Wednesdays and Saturdays, as well as the winery – but at around 11:30 I got struck down suddenly by a horrific headache that lasted about four hours. Having my parents here made it harder to deal with. Being in the middle of a bright sunny day didn’t help either; darkness is my friend when I have a bad headache. By the evening I’d recovered sufficiently for us to go out for another meal at Berăria 700. The highlight of that meal were the desserts. We had to wait ages for them. I got papanași which are dumplings with sour cream and a kind of jam, Dad had a stack of pancakes topped off with a kind of meringue (a speciality of the Banat region), while Mum had cremeș which is a puff pastry dessert. They were delicious. And enormous. We took some of it all back in a doggy bag for the next day. On Thursday morning I did take Mum and Dad to Recaș. No barbecue but they still had a good look round the park and the churches, and we got a two-litre bottle of white wine (for just 21 lei) from the tap in the winery.

On Wednesday Dad got an email about roof repairs being needed on one of their places in St Ives – the one on which the sale was agreed ages ago – and that really set things off. If the sale ends up not going through after all – that remains a possibility – I have no idea how my parents will handle that. One thing’s for sure, I don’t want to be dealing with that sort of crap when I’m heading for 80.

Mum struggled a lot with her tummy business; she seems to be perpetually constipated. Because she is rarely keen to visit the doctor, I don’t know how her situation improves.

Mum kept reiterating how appreciative she was of the effort I’d put in to make her and Dad’s stay as comfortable as possible. Mum is a good person and she loves me dearly. I’m very happy with how things panned out with her. And by the way, she seemed to really love Kitty. I shouldn’t have been surprised – she was fond of the cat we had when I was little – but both she and Dad were very anti me ever getting one.

After Andy Burnham winning that by-election by a mile, he’s highly likely to become the UK’s next prime minister. Personally speaking, he’s the most likeable PM (or potential PM) in a very long time. And there have been a lot. He’s not slick, he’s not an amazing orator, he doesn’t have airs and graces, he just talks frankly, which is what you want. Or what I would want, at any rate. If he does become PM, he faces a monumental task. He’s battling a hostile media, endless cynicism around politics, and a highly unstable world over which he has little control. I wish him all the best.

This morning, having slept dreadfully, I met Mark in Dumbrăvița where we played squash for the last time, then had beers outside at the restaurant nearby. He and his wife will be off on their big Africa trip this coming Friday. He’s now done with teaching definitively, and is applying for a cheese-making job (quite a departure) just outside Preston.