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Beating the drop

March 4, 2024 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I spent some time in the park near the cathedral, reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. Someone once recommended it to me. Whenever I go there I get a twinge of sadness as the trams and trolleybuses clatter by and the cathedral bells chime four times an hour. Now I just feel the occasional mini-earthquake when a large truck goes past. As for the book, my initial reaction was, I don’t think I can stick this, but now I’ve reached chapter four I think I’ll persevere. I went back via Parcul Regina Maria and sat in the gazebo there. A girl of about 14 was with her parents. Her mother kept quizzing her, presumably for an upcoming history test as school. What happened in Philadelphia in 1774? Poor girl. I found this distracting and went home.

Kaufland has become my go-to supermarket of late. As the name suggests, it’s German-owned, so I get to pick up odd snippets of German there, like erbsen for peas. The signage in the shop (and outside it) is sensibly all in Romanian though.

On the sign above you can see both plural forms of monedă, which means coin. (It’s quite obviously related to the English money.) Should the plural be monede or monezi? From what I gather (and the Romanian academy would agree) the plural should be monede, but people often plump for monezi because most Romanian nouns ending in -dă form plurals in -zi (oglindă – mirror – becomes oglinzi; ladă – crate – becomes lăzi; livadă – orchard – becomes livezi, and so on). Debates about plurals of nouns abound in Romanian. I’ve found an excellent YouTube channel on languages, hosted by somebody called K Klein. Imagine being as clever as him.

On the way back from Kaufland I passed a small market where people (often gypsies) sell old jewellery and other mostly low-value bits and bobs. Two of the stallholders (men) were having a fight. One threw something at the other and hit him in the face. Great.

Saturday was my usual busy day. My final lesson was a two-hour maths session with the 15-year-old girl. After a calculation involving a flight from Bangkok to Melbourne, she told me how much she loved travelling and that she goes on a family holiday to Dubai every year. Dubai. Please make it stop. After our session I checked the football scores. Birmingham were 3-2 down, and a man down, against Southampton. The situation sounded hopeless. But then Blues equalised. A miracle. With ten minutes of normal time left I found a stream for the match. There was wave upon wave of pressure from Southampton. Blues hardly saw the ball. Could they hold out? Nine minutes of added time. Oh lord. After five additional minutes Southampton fired in the winner, and Blues are now in relegation peril. This is what the table looks like from 12th place down:

Rotherham are done. Two of the twelve other teams on the list will join them in the league below, unless something very weird happens to one of the teams above this truncated table. (Blues could well be one of them; they have an extra game to play relative to the teams around them, but their manager being out of commission is a massive blow.) Calling this a relegation dogfight doesn’t do justice to how tight it is. And that’s why the system of promotion and relegation is the best thing about club football. (Much of the rest of it leaves me cold.) Ten years ago Blues avoided the drop by scoring with just moments remaining; a 2-2 draw at Bolton kept them up on goal difference over Doncaster. Most dramatically of all, in 1999 Carlisle (sponsored by Eddie Stobart, a haulage company who had a cult following) were seconds from dropping out of the football league entirely when their goalkeeper scored the winning goal deep into injury time, relegating Scarborough instead. Part of the drama on the last day comes from following scores of other games. In the pre-smartphone age this was quite something: news of goals would filter through the crowd Chinese-whispers-like and you’d see players crowding around radios, agonisingly in some cases, at the end of the game.

Books - Dreams - Family - Life :) - Other sports

It could have been curtains

February 20, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had an online lesson with a young woman in the final year of university. She’s also working part-time in IT as a tester. She shared her screen and described some bugs to me, saying that she’ll need to ask her colleagues before attempting to fix them. I asked her if her colleagues are approachable. Oh yes. I thought back to the early days of my insurance job in Auckland and how unapproachable they were. Day in day out, I felt unable to ask anybody and had no choice but to guess. For more than two years, until I got shunted off to a different department, I felt terminally stupid. My first real job, dealing with flood maps in Peterborough, wasn’t like that at all. People were happy to help, and guess what, I learnt stuff.

So I spoke to my parents after breathing that sigh of relief. Damn well tell us next time, I said. I was lucky enough to get five minutes of just Dad, as Mum dealt with a delivery man. Dad wasn’t too happy either. He said that Mum had had the lump for bloody ages before seeing a doctor, and if it had been melanoma she’d have been toast. Mum came back on the line to say she’d been back on the golf course, playing in some competition or other, going round in exactly 100. Nice to know she’s got her priorities straight.

On Sunday I had dinner with Mark at the Timișoreana beer factory which is a five-minute walk for me. We both had bulz bănățean – a substantial, very Romanian dish consisting of mămăligă (polenta) with cheese, a fried egg, sausages, mici, pork, gogonele (pickled green tomatoes) and pickled cucumbers. We had two beers apiece. It was busy there, though you’d never guess it from the outside, and as is typical for Romania it took us 40-odd minutes to get served. He told me about his girlfriend’s family, which made any issues I might have with my mother pale into insignificance. She grew up in a poor part of Yorkshire as the middle of three sisters; they suffered constant mental abuse at the hands of their father who committed suicide soon after they left home. Understandably this has left her badly scarred. (If you ask me though, she’s done remarkably well. She’s carved out a successful teaching career for herself.) Now 37, she is unable to have children; he said she will have IVF treatment. Next month (I think) they will get married in a registry office in Scotland. That’s because England requires you to be resident in the country to get married, but Scotland doesn’t.

I’ve almost finished reading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Dad gave me it – an 1896 edition – when I was over there six months ago. Defoe himself was only five when the bubonic plague struck London in 1665, so I wonder where all his facts and (extensive) figures came from. There are clear parallels with Covid, and the good and bad of humanity have changed remarkably little since that time. Just like with Covid, the plague’s long incubation period meant that people transmitted the disease asymptomatically, killing many others in the process. The lack of anything approaching modern medicine made the whole thing harrowing beyond belief. Doctors, such that they were, tried to break the swellings – or buboes – by burning them. Pure torture. In the autumn as the figures improved, people got blasé, thinking they were out of the woods. That brought about a second wave. Sounds familiar. The plague was followed by the Great Fire of London in the following year.

I watched Birmingham’s home game against Sunderland at the weekend. They came from a goal down at half-time to win 2-1 in front of a packed stadium. (The club had put on some kind of promotion.) Once young Jordan James bundled in the equaliser on the hour mark, the home side were galvanised and were clearly the better team. They were lucky though; Sunderland were really sluggish in defence in the second half. Now for the bad news. A serious medical issue has forced Tony Mowbray to step back from his managerial duties. Let’s hope he makes a full and speedy recovery, obviously. Mowbray strikes me as a thoroughly good bloke.

Finally, a totally mental dream I had last night. It took place at night in St Ives, the town where I grew up, except the streets were full of LED screens showing animated pictures of every colour imaginable. I met the young guy who ran the show, having learnt the trade from his father. He explained that the animation in St Ives was “three years out of date” compared to what other towns had. I said I preferred the older stuff. Then he invited me into the control room, where for some reason he was also broadcasting images to Mindanao in the Philippines. Where I got that from I have no idea. (This morning I found out that Mindanao is in fact an island, not a city.) I hope I have more dreams like that, not the ones where I trek around the city to do some life admin task, only find the place boarded up and overgrown by weeds.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music

Stubborn refusal and songs about trains

January 26, 2024 by 0 Comments

I felt sad after talking to my parents yesterday. Seeing them was something to look forward to. They can justify it all they like, but refusing to come after the dozens of times my brother must have asked them – I mean yeesh. We’re talking some serious stubbornness here. Steely determination. OK, they’ve got their self-inflicted house shite to deal with, but the trip would still be very doable. Hopefully my brother will make the journey in our late summer and the rellies (do people still say that in NZ?) will get to see and hold the little man.

This morning, after the lesson with the priest, I had back-to-back lessons with a woman in her late forties and her 13-year-old son who’s a piece of work. I feel sorry for her. Before that I watched a spot of Romanian breakfast TV and they talked about digitising the post office here. Not before time, because right now it’s a clunking wreck. But there are bound to be teething problems (to put it mildly) when the new system doesn’t function properly and the system grinds to an even screechier halt than it does at the moment. And in 2024, talk of computerised post office systems will frighten anyone with even half an eye on the UK: the post office scandal there, which took a four-part docu-drama for people to sit up and take notice, has been appalling. Here’s what an American who lives in the UK, and now has British citizenship, has to say on the matter.

Music. I’ve been listening to a lot of R.E.M. lately. Their song Driver 8, which I mentioned in a previous post, made me think of other great train-based songs. Here’s a few I can think of:
Marrakesh Express by Crosby, Stills & Nash
City of New Orleans by Arlo Guthrie (I’ve actually been on that train)
Downbound Train by Bruce Springsteen
Last Train to Clarksville by the Monkees (yeah I know)
5:15 The Angels Have Gone by David Bowie
Long Train Running by the Doobie Brothers
Midnight Special by Creedence Clearwater Revival
I thought Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show was about a train (it does say “southbound train” in the lyrics) but it turns out I was wrong.

And that’s my lot.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Writing a book

Food for thought

January 24, 2024 by 0 Comments

So I’ve just had a long chat with Mum and Dad. It would now be a massive shock if they came to Europe in 2024. Their vanity project is more important than seeing their family; that much is clear. They even talked about what a hassle their late-2022 trip was because it was spring in New Zealand and, you know, plants grew while they were away. So inconsiderate of them. They did see their family in that time including their tiny grandson, but whatever. A minor detail. These conversations get progressively more bizarre. The bright spot is that my brother and his family are likely to make the trip to NZ in August or September; Mum said they’d help them out financially. Help. I’d say a fair level of help would be 100%.

I had a fascinating chat with my brother at the weekend. He was in St Ives, dodging the storms that are battering the country, and had just seen our aunt. He said that for the first time in his life he’d had a proper conversation with her. Her responses were dependent on what he had just said. She went cold turkey on booze and fags when she got to the home; half a lifetime of brain-addling drinking gone at a stroke. Her muscles have atrophied to the point where she doesn’t get out of bed, but he said she was strangely content.

I saw the doctor last night, as I do once a month, to stock up on pills. He told me that he’d divorced from his wife last summer; she’d been cheating on him for two years. They have a ten-year-old son. It’s still all extremely raw. Then he said that their surgery would be moving to one of those horrible new glass buildings next to the mall. Ugh. That will mean more of a trek, and having to enter a depressing building to get my antidepressants. Some people even work there. Just imagine. The building is called UBC 0. United Business Center zero. It’s number 0 presumably for the same reason that King’s Cross built a platform 0 in 2010, leaving me momentarily baffled when I needed to catch a train from there. I could transfer to another surgery but that would be a pain too.

Five lessons yesterday. At least three of them are making no discernible progress; that’s the harsh reality. One of them is a university student who seems quite content with not improving. Not much I can do about that. One is a kid who’s got way behind at school and doesn’t quite realise it. And one needs to up his level of focus in my lessons by at least 300% to have any hope. I need to change tack entirely with him.

My high school didn’t do much for me (I was glad to leave at 16) except in one important respect. In a country where school food had a terrible reputation, my place provided substantial, nutritious cooked meals every day. Then I’d have another cooked dinner when I got home. On a Friday I’d get fish twice. At that age, both my brother and I packed it away. We had a proper breakfast too – porridge and toast, usually; going without breakfast would have been unthinkable. Importantly, we practically never ate between meals, apart from pieces of fruit which were in plentiful supply. Mum was in control of 90% of this – no surprise there – and the values that she’d gained from growing up on a farm, thousands of acres and a couple of decades from any fast food outlets, helped us boys considerably. Yesterday I was talking to a kid who skips breakfast, practically inhales a rudimentary sandwich and a few wine gums at school, then finally has something meaningful – schnitzel or the like – when he comes home. The boy who is falling behind at school only has a single meal per day as far as I can tell. And it’s not like the parents of kids I see can’t afford it. So what’s going on? It’s probably a number of things. Blame modern society, blame TikTok, blame the messed-up Romanian education system that forces kids to spend hours cramming pointless facts about lakes in China in order to get the coveted 10 grade.

Writing the book. It’s hard. I finally planned out the chapters, 19 of them, something I should have done years ago. I’m still learning, right. It’s tough because you can spend hours plugging away, moving words and paragraphs around, and it just doesn’t work. I should think of it as the new online poker.

I’ve bought seven new records and will grab a few more. I’m getting them delivered to a single location in France to be forwarded on to me. Ups the cost slightly, but it’s worth it for the huge increase in convenience.

Life :) - Music - Other sports

Going back in time

January 16, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Elena, the 80-year-old lady who lives above me. On Friday she flies back here from Toronto. She told me that the man who lived on the ground floor and had a stroke just before Christmas had passed away at the age of 74. Very sad, though I never knew him.

I got new my record player up and running on Sunday. The 460 lei (£80 or NZ$160) I’d made the previous day barely paid for it. The first record I put on was Chicago’s 18. When I bought it I didn’t realise it was literally the band’s 18th album. So it was all very eighties. Even the brilliant – if cryptically titled – 25 or 6 to 4 had been brought kicking and screaming into the Reagan era. Slightly disappointing, but at least the damn thing worked. Then I put on Leonard Cohen’s greatest hits album from 1975 – before he came out with other hits that were just as great – and that was pure poetry from start to finish. Of the other three albums I bought, the wonderfully ethereal Oxygène by Jean-Michel Jarre is my favourite. I’m now eyeing up a dozen or so other LPs online, mostly from the seventies. I associate vinyl with older music; something like MGMT or Arcade Fire (already both 15-odd years old) on vinyl would feel weird to me.

In this morning’s Romanian lesson, our teacher asked me what time I’d like to go back to if I had the chance. I thought for some time about this. Maybe I could go back almost a millennium to witness the building of Ely Cathedral, just down the road from where I grew up. How and why did they build that? But I settled on something far more recent: the sixties and seventies. My teacher was surprised, but I’ve always thought of that era as an incredible time to be alive. The music, the energy, everything seemed limitless. Born in 1980, I missed out. Go back any further though and I think I’d be struck by the harshness of life, if Dad’s descriptions of the UK shortly after WW2 are anything to go by.

I always have to talk about football with my 14-year-old student. I don’t mind too much, but I’m far out of the loop these days. He’s recently taken a liking to Aston Villa, a side I saw play twice (if memory serves) when I was student. One of those games was a real belter: in the FA Cup against Leeds in January 2000, Villa won 3-2 with Benito Carbone scoring a hat-trick. I remember Paul Merson playing a big part in Villa’s win too. The place was rocking. Villa are now flying high, third in the Premier League. To be honest I preferred their rivals Birmingham City, known as Blues, and saw them more often. (Probably because they were cheaper.) Earlier this season Blues were sixth in the division below when their new American owners decided in their wisdom to sack their popular manager, a local lad, and bring in uber-famous Wayne Rooney. Turns out Rooney was rubbish. Once Blues were brushed aside on New Year’s Day at Leeds, Rooney got the boot after just 15 games (and only two wins) and the fans breathed a collective sigh of relief. In came ultra-pragmatic Tony Mowbray. When my lessons were over on Saturday, I saw that Birmingham were 2-1 down at home to Swansea in Mowbray’s first game in charge. Deep into added time, teenage Jordan James struck a pretty sweet equaliser, and Blues escaped with a point. Tomorrow Blues have another home game – an FA Cup replay against Hull. The cup is nothing like it was, sadly, and they’ll struggle to get much of a crowd.

Life :) - Music - Other sports

Lukes that kill

January 4, 2024 by 0 Comments

Last year it was the two Michaels, this year the two Lukes. They didn’t disappoint. Humphries took the first set and was all set to make it two sets, but Littler smashed and grabbed. One apiece. From there the youngster was in the ascendancy, and Humphries looked a beaten man. Despite maintaining a three-figure average, there was a distinct weariness about him. Every big treble (all those treble 19s!) or big finish by Littler was a gut-punch. In the deciding leg of the seventh set, leading 4-2, Littler needed 112. He can recite his out-shots in his sleep. Treble 18, single 18, double top. His first dart found the intended target, but then his second clattered into it, joining it in the treble. He could still finish – on double two – but he was knocked off his stride. He missed the double two by a whisker, Humphries mopped up to go just one set behind, and from there the “older” Luke (born 11/2/95) never looked back. He won 7-4 to lift the title, pocketing half a million pounds for doing so, while Littler won £200,000. The remainder of the match was hardly plain sailing for Humphries though – there were deciding legs and crisis points with great regularity. Humphries averaged 104, Littler 101. They both hit a maximum 170 finish. The legs and sets zoomed by, such was the standard. The whole thing was done and dusted in under two hours, including seven annoying ad breaks.

It might be for the best that Littler didn’t win. Call it the Emma Răducanu effect – win an enormous prize when you’re oh so young, then the pressure of expectation is heaped on you and it’s all too much. Littler was extremely popular with the crowd, and got people tuning in from around the world. Even Romania. ln large part it was his extraordinary talent for someone so young, but also it was the way he looked so comfortable on the big stage and how he already had the doner-kebab-eating darts player look down pat. It’s scary that he could still be challenging for big titles in 2060, when I’ll either be pushing up daisies or won’t know a bull’s eye from a cat’s eye. As for Humphries, he was pedestrian in his first match, then stared down the barrel in both his next two, at one point surviving two match darts. From there he put together three sublime victories and was a worthy overall winner. In his speech he cited his battles with mental health problems. Good on him for opening up. It was also referee Russ Bray’s last match in charge. His incredible 180 call will be missed. The whole tournament was a huge success. The international players added a lot of intrigue to the early rounds, and were often victorious. Germany is now a powerhouse in the game. Let’s hope darts, which still reminds me of beer and fags on telly when I was about seven, continues to grow.

The adverts between sets were at times horrifying. The Barclays one gave me conniptions. It gave a litany of financial stresses that modern, economically active people face: school uniforms, gym memberships, phone bills, yoga classes, getting a wonky shed door fixed, swimming lessons, more school uniforms, I can’t remember how it went exactly. Apart from the idea that Barclays could help you with any of that being laughable, it made me consider how far I’ve drifted from normal, mainstream life. And just as well – I wouldn’t bloody cope with all of that. Not even close.

I recently picked up a newspaper called Dilema Veche. That second word means “old”; their house style is to use the pre-1993 spellings – î instead of â, except in the name România and its derivatives. The headline – Bohemianism in Romania – caught my eye. There are several articles in the paper on bohemia and its origins, some of which I’ve yet to read. A bohemian lifestyle, which I partly have now, has always been attractive to me, as long as it is accompanied by a good deal of actual work. That’s really what I wanted 20 years ago or more, but I ended up doing the corporate thing because there was no alternative that I could see. The paper bemoans the loss of bohemia in society, and blames this at one point on conformity caused somehow by woke culture. I’d say the real culprit is hyper-capitalism. A consumer-based society runs counter to bohemian values. So do skyrocketing property values. Devonport in Auckland was a hotbed of alternative lifestyles in ther eighties and early nineties, but seven-figure house prices had put the kibosh on all of that by the time I arrived there. The cost of university education isn’t helping either.

What a start to 2024 in Japan. First a huge earthquake off the Sea of Japan and resulting tsunamis killed dozens. Then on a runway in Tokyo, an Airbus with 379 people on board struck a small coastguard plane which was headed to the west coast of Japan to help victims of the earthquake. Five of the six on the small aircraft died, but miraculously everybody escaped from the burning passenger jet. I still remember as a small boy the grainy TV images from Japan after a domestic 747 crashed into a mountain, killing 520 people. That number felt unthinkable to me then. This was 1985, the deadliest year in aviation to date.

Edit: Talking of 1985, Driver 8 by R.E.M. just came up on my YouTube. It came out in that year. A fantastic train-country-folk-rock song. Did train drivers not have names back then?

Life :) - Music - Other sports - Writing a book

Searching for inspiration

January 3, 2024 by 0 Comments

Today I’ve been working on the book. The book about him. A second crack, after my aborted effort a year ago. (I did do one chunky chapter then, plus I made a load of notes that are extremely useful.) None of this is easy. A novel isn’t a task you can just plough your way through. It relies on inspiration, and sometimes you just don’t have it. And then you write a few hundred words, and think, are you sure this isn’t boring crap that nobody would ever read? Page upon page of self-doubt. One of the fun bits is thinking up names of characters. I’m proud of Felicity Lee, the club vice-president who’s always everywhere all at once. Her name sounds like a butterfly.

Yesterday I did two important things. First I booked flights to the UK around Easter. Leaving on 28th March, coming back a week later. Top priority is seeing my brother, sister-in-law and nephew. It’s a pain that the only flights back are in the early morning, so I’ll have no choice but to stay overnight in Luton on 3rd April. The other biggish thing I did was order a record player. I hope to have a lot of fun with that when it arrives. Buy up a load of old albums, basically go mad with them. I can see why vinyl has come back – the whole experience beats Youtube and Spotify hands down. A more minor thing I did was order a new laptop charger after one of mine got so hot it started smouldering. I still have one, but I rely so heavily on my laptop for work that having a backup is a necessity.

So a new year is upon us. I didn’t stay long in a very packed centre of town on New Year’s Eve. Enough to see the fireworks, and that was it. I’m so glad I avoided the stress of an event. I’ve been thinking back to previous years where a 3 turned into a 4. I saw in 2014 with some friends at Owhiro Bay in Wellington – we lit a fire, saw the stars, and felt rather small. I was going through a rough time with withdrawal symptoms, having recently tapered off my antidepressant. Ten years before that I’d only just arrived in New Zealand. We spent the evening with some family friends, played some volleyball which I was spectacularly bad at, and saw the Caroline Bay fireworks. As for 1993-94, that one involved my grandfather, suffering badly from Alzheimer’s, being all at sea during a game of Skip-Bo. Going back even further, I rather doubt I stayed up to see in 1984, and wouldn’t have known what the fuss was about if I had.

Darts. A couple of barnburners yesterday, as the Americans would say. Chris Dobey stormed into a 4-0 lead against Rob Cross in a race to five sets. He’d been great all tournament and once again he was dominant here. Until he wasn’t. Surely he’ll fall over the line. But he never did. Watching it slip from his grasp was slow torture. Even in the ninth and final set he could have won as he came from 2-0 down in legs to force the win-by-two tie-break, but it wasn’t to be. Professional sport – even darts – can be cruel. In the evening Michael van Gerwen, who had been unplayably good, had an inexplicable shocker against Scott Williams. He was expected to steamroller his opponent, but the juggernaut never got going. Williams was plenty good enough to capitalise, winning 5-3. Luke Humphries, who plays Williams in the second semi-final tonight, had no such problems, and neither did Luke Littler who plays Cross in the first match. Littler, still a child, is now the favourite. The semis are first to six, and I’ll be watching one of them at most. I need to sleep.
Update: Littler produced a frankly ludicrous performance, averaging 106, to beat Cross 6-2.
Update 2 (next morning): There’s no way I could stay up to watch Humphries smash a 109 average in his 6-0 whitewash of Williams. Those numbers from both Lukes are ridiculous. The final (first to seven) is tonight.

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching

A Christmas mishmash

December 27, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s 5:20 on Boxing Day evening; the sun set half an hour ago. Once I’m done with this blog post I’ll dip into the ample leftovers from yesterday.

On Saturday the 23rd I had my full complement of four lessons. After an online English lesson, I had to get to Dumbrăvița by bike – a struggle on such a blustery morning. I was glad that Matei was finally learning probability. We went through various exercises. One of them asked him to imagine picking two letters, one at a time without replacement, from the word SCIENCE. What’s the probability that the first letter you pick is S? One in seven, he happily answered. What’s the probability that the second letter is S? Now he wasn’t so sure. Doesn’t it depend on what the first letter was? Well yes, but at this stage we have no idea about that. I did my best to convince him that the probability was also one in seven, asking him to consider a lottery draw (the second ball is just as likely to be 17 as the first, isn’t it?) and resorting at one point to tree diagrams. Probability messes with people’s heads.

On Christmas Eve I made salată de boeuf, which despite its name is a chicken-based salad, with potatoes, celeriac, carrots, parsnips and gherkins added to the mix, bound together by mayonnaise. I put a sliced egg, some olives and slices of red pepper on the top. Then I made salam de biscuiți: a pound of simple biscuits broken by hand, to which I mixed in milk, melted butter, cocoa, raisins and rum essence. I rolled the mixture into two salami-like cylinders and put them in the fridge overnight.

Then in the evening I did something I hadn’t done for five years: attend a church service. Dorothy, a regular churchgoer, had invited me. To be polite I accepted, not knowing what I might be letting myself into. I cycled there and got my shoes all muddy as I found something to attach my bike to. I found the church, which didn’t look at all churchy, without too much trouble. Sfânta Treime – Holy Trinity. A Baptist church. I felt out of my comfort zone. Since Covid, I’ve found that any place where there are dozens of people, some of which I may have to interact with, will give me that feeling. It didn’t help that my muddy shoes came close to causing a scene. Mass kicked off at seven; I was amazed how young the congregation was. Many of them could speak English, and quite a few had good jobs in the IT field. At the front of the church, if it had a front, were a guitar, drums, and a viola. We sang several carols, many of which were the same tune as the English but with Romanian words. I must admit that the wordy Romanian version of Silent Night did little for me, though Away in a Manger was fine. (The Romanian for “manger” is iesle.) Some of the language was new to me; religious Romanian tends to be older and more Slavic-based than what you encounter day-to-day. In the middle of the service, the children acted out a short nativity play. There was a sermon in which the priest, dressed in civilian clothes, lost his thread on more than one occasion. The service took 1¾ hours. Afterwards there was lots of chitchat – I ended up talking to an Australian woman among others. Dorothy, who had gone to the church since 2001, was in charge of food and drink duties, as out came cozonac (a traditional Romanian cake which I’ve tried to make in the past) and non-alcoholic mulled wine. It was an interesting experience, but I was glad to finally get home at 10:15.

On Christmas morning I spoke to my parents who’d been over to my aunt and uncle’s place in Woodbury for dinner. I then called my aunt in England. I was happy to get through to her, but what do you say, exactly, when she’s stuck in a nursing home for what will almost certainly be her last Christmas? Have a good Christmas, I said. I think I’ll have had better, she replied. She got calls from Dad and my brother, and thankfully a visit from her son. I worried that she might spend the whole day alone.

I had a 45-minute walk to Dorothy’s place. The food and bottles of drink and (admittedly basic) presents were too much to carry on my bike. When I arrived, I was greeted by Dorothy and a 65-year-old man called Ionică who lives in the same apartment block and has recently retired from 44 years of working as a baker. A real job. He left school at 14, he said, and did military service which was compulsory back then. He had made enough apple tart for a dozen people or more, explaining that he either bakes in proper quantities or not at all. Ionică and I were tasked with decorating Dorothy’s (real) Christmas tree. When that was done, Gabriela (a woman who attends the same Baptist church as Dorothy) arrived. Although she has an 18-year-old son, she said she wasn’t yet born when Ionică moved into his flat in 1982. Her son didn’t come, apparently because he’d injured himself playing football. The food came out. I was slightly bemused by how gingerly Gabriela approached my salată de boeuf. What? A man cooking? A British man cooking? Romanian food? Despite being quite young and (you’d think) more open, that didn’t quite compute in her mind. In the end, she seemed to quite like it. Then came Dorothy’s roast dinner – chicken, stuffing, potatoes, parsnips, and so on. The British stuff, in other words. Finally we had dessert – the apple tart, my salam de biscuiți, and some Christmas pudding and mince pies that Dorothy had made. We had plenty of food left over. Ionică’s fact-free musings on mental health were interesting, shall we say. “I don’t take any pills,” he said with an inordinate level of pride. Lucky you. “Depression isn’t real. You shouldn’t have time to be depressed.” It’s all a lot more complicated than that, I’m afraid, I said. I’m glad I went no further. I found Ionică to be a very pleasant chap, but on that issue he was badly misinformed. Hardly surprising, because he comes from a time and place where things were simpler. Not easier certainly, but simpler. Probably the best thing about Christmas Day was how much Romanian I spoke. Pretty much all conversation was conducted in Romanian; a few more days like that and I might get reasonably good at it.

When I got home I spoke to my brother who showed me his son, dressed up in a Father Christmas costume. He has an outfit for every occasion, it seems. He’s just started walking and is a happy chappy whenever I see him. I’ve made up my mind to visit the UK for Easter, so it won’t be too long before I see him in the flesh.

Today I’ve finally got round to finishing George Borrow’s Wild Wales, including the interesting bit at the end on the Welsh language. We’re getting warm weather for the time of year, and tomorrow I’ll take advantage of that by going for a bike ride.

Language learning - Life :) - Other sports

Strange games

December 23, 2023 by 0 Comments

Last night I met Mark at the Christmas market. It wasn’t as busy as we expected. Whether it was the prices or the too-loud music or something else, we couldn’t tell. Mark wanted to buy his girlfriend a present, so we visited one of the souvenir shops. An ie – a traditional tunic, embroidered in red and black – caught his eye. It was 550 lei (nearly £100 or NZ$200), so not cheap. Unlike other cheaper versions made in India, this one was handmade in Romania. A ton of work. He got me to ask the sales assistant about washing and the like, and when he was satisfied he made the purchase. We had langoși (deep-fried flatbread) and mulled wine, and talked about how lucky we are to be living in a city as nice as Timișoara. You really can’t beat the three beautiful squares in the city centre, and while it isn’t quite as developed as somewhere like Cluj, that actually adds to the experience. I don’t think I could be me in a city that was all perfect and pristine.

In English, two-letter words are almost entirely restricted to function words: prepositions (at, by, in, of, on, to), conjunctions (as, if), pronouns (me, he, it, we, us), and forms of very common verbs (do, go, am, is). Two-letter content words are very thin on the ground: there’s only really ox and (if you’re American) ax. In Romanian, that isn’t the case at all. Of the top of my head, as well as ie (plural ii), there’s iz (a whiff), ac (needle), șa (saddle), as (ace), in (linen), os (bone), om (person), ud (wet) and uz (use, noun), in addition to a whole bunch of function words. You could imagine a simple Romanian conversation in a shop consisting of only two-letter words.

Having a lighter work week has given me a chance to brush up my Romanian a bit. I’ve added hundreds of words to my Anki deck (a spaced repetition tool), and several cards that aren’t words as such but instructions: conjugate this or that verb, think of all the ways to say this or that, find four words that begin with zg-, and so on. On Monday in our Romanian lesson, the teacher gave us a story to read entitled Puiul, or the chick. It’s a sad story. Although I got the meaning, there were a number of new words for me, and they all went in the Anki deck. I need to start reading properly in Romanian again.

Today at the darts there was a match that went all the way to a sudden-death leg, but the big story so far has been 16-year-old Luke Littler who was out of this world in his first-round victory and won again in round two. He looks considerably older than 16 and has already developed a good paunch; he’s got “darts champion” written all over him. Watching not-so-young members of the crowd swaying and braying to a version of annoying nineties hit There’s No Limit made me think, some of these people must have kids. Imagine if I’d been “blessed” with a dad like that. Just imagine. Watching that, and visiting the mall today to grab some simple presents, made me consider the idea of some super-intelligent species watching humans in intrigue or perhaps horror at their behaviour, and making documentaries on them. “Once a year, they practically fall over each other to buy so-called knick-knacks made in China, without ever wondering why. Look at how this female extends her arm. You can see she is practised in the art.”

Update: Sheer madness in the darts tonight. Florian Hempel, the big German ex-handball goalkeeper, came back from the dead to beat seeded Dimitri van den Bergh. He hit a massive 151 checkout to keep himself alive, then he went ballistic. Two ten-dart legs back to back. Madman mode. It was quite something to witness it. And such great sportsmanship from his much smaller opponent after the match.

I had a strange dream last night about a fictitious sport played in Britain. I visited a centre where this traditional rough-and-tumble sport was played, and talked to a player. The name of the sport began with B and had another B in the middle. Something like burbank but not that. From there I went to a place nearby, where a version of cross-country lacrosse, that also seemed to have elements of golf, was played. I talked to a woman about the game.

Four lessons tomorrow, then a very barren patch until the second week of January. I won’t mind that.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

A room with a view of sorts

December 21, 2023 by 0 Comments
Outside the window of my office this morning


I regularly posted pictures taken out of the window of my old flat, with the view of the park and the square. Not so much this place, though the sky – just before my 8am lesson on perhaps the second-shortest day of the year – made for an interesting shot.

Yesterday wasn’t such a great day. Way back in October 2022 I had a problem with the loo in the small bathroom which I hardly ever use. I went to the UK for a few days, and in that time the cistern ran non-stop. I shut off the valve when I got back, but in that time many thousands of gallons of water had gone through the system. I sent the block administrator my meter readings as I do every month. She misread the reading – 337, when it was actually 377 (an understandable error – how could I have possibly used that much water?) and charged me accordingly, “promising” to correct the mistake the following month. I got a plumber to fix the loo, but the fix lasted about two days. I thought my water bill did get rectified, but obviously not because yesterday the administrator sent me a message, finally asking for the extra money. What’s more, she’s billing me at the current rate (which has gone up in the last 14 months), not the old rate. I’ll pay the bill of course, but only if it’s calculated at the old rate. We’re talking a couple of hundred quid here, which is a massive pain but nothing I have (or had) any control over.

Mum and Dad only made a short stop in their showerless pit in Geraldine, and Skyped me from Hampden this morning. They’re still some way off fully recovered from their bout of Covid. Mum said she’d been sleeping most of the day. No harm in that. Dad used a word – pantechnicon – that I’d never heard before. It’s a British word for a big truck or van used for transporting furniture. I feel I should have known the word, being British and all, but the Pantechnicon company, which the name comes from, ceased trading in the seventies. More often than not these days I’m too old to know a word, not too young, so that made a change. In a previous chat with Dad, we got talking about Auckland for some reason. A city with so much wasted potential. What a disappointment the centre is (or was – maybe it’s magically improved since either of us visited). But there are nice parts, Dad said. I replied by saying, yes, but the nice parts are inhabited only by people who can afford stupidly expensive houses, making for a funny kind of nice that I wouldn’t want anything to do with even if I had that kind of money.

At this time of year I give my students a sheet of paper asking them to write down five new year’s resolutions, then to pick one to focus on. How will you go about achieving it? This afternoon my able 11-year-old student wrote “Make my parents feel proud of me” for one of his resolutions. “Don’t they feel proud of you?” I asked. He replied with a definite no, and that made me feel sad. He also wrote “Be nice”, which surprised me because he’s always seemed perfectly nice around me. He probably feels comfortable around me: a harmless hairy man wearing (today) an orange jumper with a multicoloured llama on it, rather than his classmates. He says all the bullying makes him morose when he gets home.

Earlier today I watched a YouTube video from a guy who goes around decaying British high streets. Once thriving, they’re now struggling up and down the country. Today he went to Slough, which rhymes with now. Not far from Slough are Eton and Windsor, England’s two most famous public schools, and many affluent towns, some of which even (much to their disgust) have an SL (for Slough) postcode. He opens his video by reading a few lines of John Betjeman’s poem that asks for “friendly bombs” to be dropped on the town. Betjeman wrote the poem in 1937, so the bombs didn’t have long to wait. I went through the poem a few years ago in a lesson with a woman who once spent a few months in Milton Keynes, whose reputation is no better than Slough’s.

More drama at the Darts. Matt Campbell, from Hamilton, Ontario, pulled off an upset by beating James Wade 3-2 – he was clearly the better player – and has made it to the post-Christmas stages. Prior to this tournament, he’d never won a match in four attempts. He’s flying back to Canada to spend Christmas with his family. Yesterday afternoon saw a whole host of upsets and wins for players outside the UK – all good for the game. Steve Beaton, someone I remember from my bigger darts-watching days in the nineties, got through his first match. Age is no barrier in this game.