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Positive plumbing and my latest trip

May 9, 2024 by 0 Comments

Good plumbing news. It turned out that the previous guy did a botched job of the seal around the bath, so we won’t need to smash the tilework after all. Or at least I don’t think so. The plumber put some silicon around the edge which the other guy didn’t bother with. I also got him to fix the loo in the small bathroom. I went with him to Dedeman in my car; we picked up a cistern and some other bits and pieces. He told me to go a completely different way there to what I would have done – he clearly knew better than me. He should finish the job tomorrow.

I had my first maths lesson last night with a 15-year-old girl who goes to British School. She’s struggling a bit with the subject; her almost nonexistent mental arithmetic isn’t doing her any favours. But I found her very personable and that makes her very teachable. I’m glad to suddenly have her as a student, right when my proportion of pointless lessons (which don’t help my mood) is at an all-time high. Teaching her will be far from pointless, and quite a challenge.

Monday was a warm one. I went for another long drive – about 250 km, skirting the borders of both Hungary and Serbia. My first stop was Periam, a town (or large village) of about 4000 people; a lot of our local stone fruit comes from there. Being a public holiday, it was extremely quiet there. I called my parents from a café: though it was closed I could still sit at one of the tables in the shady outside area. I then made a short stop at Sânnicolau Mare, a bigger town, before going back to Dumbrăvița via Jimbolia which is a fun name to say. At 4:30 I had maths with Matei on the eve of his final maths exam; we went through a bastard of a past paper from 2021.

The snooker is over. After a tournament in which the big guns didn’t really show up, Kyren Wilson is the champion, beating Jak Jones 18-14 in the final. He made a blistering start, going 7-0 up, but in the end he flopped over the line. Wilson won a drama-packed frame on a respotted black to put him one away, but Jones – the pressure off him – started reeling off frames. Jones was having fun and the crowd warmed to him, while for Wilson it wasn’t far off becoming his worst nightmare. Finally he got there. His reaction to winning was worth watching in itself, as was the very cute bit when his two sons joined him on the stage.

Forty years ago, snooker was massively popular in Britain and had a serious following elsewhere. Steve Davis, Alex Higgins, Dennis Taylor, a young Jimmy White – they were all household names. British football was in the doldrums – attending matches in crumbling stadiums was dangerous, the government of the day treated fans as animals, and very few games were televised. Snooker filled the gap. It was perfect for colour television – still pretty new – and back then there were only four channels, with few of the endless entertainment options we have now, not to mention social media which is a disaster zone. If snooker was on the telly, with its colourful characters, there’s a good chance you’d watch it and get hooked in. Nobody cared if a match took several hours; what was the rush? How the world has changed. Football is now a global gazillion-pound machine, while snooker is down to just one and a half household names in Ronnie O’Sullivan and maybe Judd Trump. Both sports are in grave danger of being Saudified.

Trains still stop at Periam

The Orthodox church in Periam…
…and the Catholic church

Romanian trees are often dați cu var, or whitewashed with lime, to prevent their trunks from cracking as a result of the extreme temperature variations between summer and winter.

Plenty of Serbian in Sânpetru Mare
Miloje Polić
Life :) - Other sports - Photos - Travel: Romania

Church, flowers and balls

May 6, 2024 by 0 Comments

This morning I went to Dorothy’s church, a 25-minute bike ride from here. Church has the potential for all sorts of awkwardness. Just like the Orthodox adherents, Romanian Baptists say Hristos a înviat, or “Christ has risen”, in place of “Hello”. Any reply from me, even the “correct” one, would instantly mark me as an outsider. I was surprised that they also celebrate Easter according to the Orthodox calendar. The service lasted two hours – even longer than the Christmas one – and was capped off by an extremely wordy sermon. In between were hymns accompanied by a guitar, a violin, and drums. All the way through were churchy Romanian words I didn’t know and have already forgotten – it’s not like I could look them up or note them down very easily. The congregation was half the size of the one at Christmas, but included kids who were all called on to read the odd verse or two. Communion, which I didn’t partake in, consisted of normal red wine and scraps of pita bread, not the special communion wine and wafers that we got at the Catholic church many moons ago when I did church. We had coffee and biscuits outside – once again I met that bubbly Australian woman who had sung vigorously.

When I got home the lady above me gave me some Easter food: drob (usually this contains lamb offal, but the one I got has chicken instead; it tastes good), sarmale (filled cabbage rolls), several slices of cozonac (a traditional bready cake), and another cake whose name I don’t know. She might have actually made all of that herself, so I have no reasonable way of returning the favour. Then I got in the car and went north to Fibiș (which is on the way to Lipova), then west to Orțișoara where I stopped for just a few minutes – there was a lovely hailstorm – before returning home.

Snooker. Some long scrappy frames last night. Stuart Bingham seemed to mentally check out at the end, allowing Jak Jones to win 17-12 when a very long night had looked in store. In the 27th frame Bingham laid a fiendish snooker behind the green. Jones’s first escape attempt clattered into the pink, sending reds flying. The referee and his assistant spent several minutes replacing the balls. Remarkably Jones hit a red on his second try, sparing everybody a repeat. Bingham won that frame in the end, but that was his last hurrah against a dogged opponent. It’s not going quite to well for Jones in the final – he took a pummelling in the first session against Kyren Wilson; at least he won the final frame to trail “only” 7-1 in the first-to-18 match. (Update: I’ve just watched a brilliant second session of high quality. There was a dramatic twist in the last frame in which Wilson got the snooker that he needed on the yellow, and then won after a 15-shot back-and-forth on the black. Wilson now leads 11-6.)

Painstakingly putting the balls back. At least they have a top-down camera now.

Palm Sunday in town last weekend

By the river at 8pm yesterday. It now gets dark at 8:45.

Orțișoara: a not-that-old sign for a closed-down ABC, the equivalent of a dairy in NZ

A typical flower arrangement using old tyres

Orțișoara’s volunteer fire department, right next to those flower beds

The war memorial in Orțișoara. Almost all the names here are German; the town was settled by Germans in the late 18th century.
Family - Life :) - Other sports

Down time

May 5, 2024 by 0 Comments

Birmingham City have just been relegated to the third tier of English football, euphemistically known as League One. They put up a great fight against Norwich – and won! – but all the other teams down there were also victorious. They finished on 50 points, which is normally plenty, but this time was one point shy. You can thank Sheffield Wednesday’s manager for that – he performed miracles in dragging the team out of a seemingly impossible hole. Blues’ season on the other hand was a car crash of chaos, right from the appointment of Wayne Rooney in October. Then Tony Mowbray fell ill – that was extremely bad luck. The last time they were out of the top two divisions was in 1995. I do remember that 1994-95 season when they were managed by Barry Fry – a total headcase – and won the league amid the madness. A whole lot of fun for the fans. Hopefully the trips to Lincoln and Shrewsbury and Burton Albion will be as enjoyable this time around. So Plymouth Argyle (cool name) stay up in all their greenness, while Ipswich have made it to the Premier League after two barnstorming seasons. Good to see them back in the big time. It’s been fun to follow football for a short while, and I’ve realised that all the intrigue and excitement lies outside the Champions League and the top handful of teams. The Championship (the second English tier) is about as good as it gets.

Snooker. The corner pockets really are drum tight this year. Jak Jones, who has been unflappable throughout, now leads Stuart Bingham 13-10 with one session to play. Kyren Wilson and Dave Gilbert are now back for their final session; Wilson looks to be edging closer to the final. (Update: Wilson won 17-11 to book his place in the final.) On Thursday I watched a session on some site called Kick which had a chat facility off to the side. One of the viewers was Finnish, and people were talking about Karelian bear dogs. I didn’t know that Karelia was a region that straddles the current countries of Russia and Finland. Watching snooker is relaxing – I’ve struggled with that in recent weeks – but following any kind of sport is such a time sink. Not long now until it’s all over.

Mum was in a good mood last night. She’s had a decent run of late on the golf course. She’d been reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a book about the famous Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős – I bought it at university and she must have picked it off the shelf. He was a right nutter, she said. I didn’t expect her to read a book like that, and it’s given us something extra to talk about.

I had maths with Matei this morning. His first exam on Thursday seemed to go pretty well; I’ll see him again on Monday, the day before he tackles the second (longer) paper. His mother gave me a crème brûlée during today’s lesson; I sometimes get these unexpected freebies.

Yesterday I met Dorothy and Sanda for coffee in town. I hadn’t seen Sanda for months. We met at a place called Wise, very close to where I used to live. We talked about education systems and the Epoca de Aur, the last years of communism. Sanda mentioned her 82-year-old father’s pacemaker fitting which was done at the drop of a hat and took half an hour. Mindblowingly fast if you ask me. The walls were full of slogans in English; I normally avoid places like that because you know you’ll have to pay 50% more. I pointed out to Dorothy that there was a preposition error in one of the slogans – “bring her at Wise”, when it should have been “… to Wise”. It took an age for the staff to even notice us so we could pay our bill, despite vigorous arm waving and the fact that we were almost the only customers there. If you ever come to Romania, crappy or non-existent service is something you have to get used to. Sanda then told the (young) staff about the error on the sign; they were surprisingly good about it. (I wouldn’t have mentioned it myself, one because I don’t like to go there, and two because a slogan is just like wallpaper – it doesn’t provide information.)

I’m enjoying the quiet of the Orthodox Easter weekend (which has merged with the 1st May public holiday) and hearing the birds outside instead of the constant rumble of trucks. It reminds me of lockdown. On Wednesday I went down to the deserted riverside and bumped into the lady who lives opposite me. I enjoyed our chat on a day in which I’d been struggling. Tonight will be the Easter vigil with huge crowds, but I won’t be attending. Instead I’ll be going to the service tomorrow morning at Dorothy’s Baptist church.

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A sound decision

May 3, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve been teetering for the last two and half weeks. Yesterday I turned off my WhatsApp alerts because they’d become so bloody exhausting. I can’t concentrate on anything or appreciate anything or properly do anything while I’ve got my phone and laptop beeping and pinging away. I’m already feeling the benefits of pinglessness. It should also mean I’m less likely to drop my phone, although that horse has bolted.

I got the plumber in on Tuesday. To get at the leak he’ll have to smash the tilework in front of the bath, and also temporarily remove the sink. Luckily I have a stack of spare tiles left over (they’re in the small “junk” room next to my office, which needs clearing out), and I have a second bathroom, but what a pain. My package did arrive, but not as hoped. I was supposed to get some bedding, a second-hand backpack costing £30 or so, and a few items of clothing, but I somehow ended up with a cheap fleece instead of the backpack, and one of the other items was missing entirely. Because I live in an off-the-map country, I got everything delivered to France and then forwarded on to me. I’d done this before without too many problems, but it’s risky, mainly because you’re forced to say that everything is fine when the items are still 1000 miles from your doorstep. I’ve contacted the forwarder but I imagine there’s not a lot they can do.

I spoke to my brother last night. Whenever I speak to them, either he or his wife or their son has a cold. There are bugs going around all over the show, and people’s immunity levels are still shot to pieces after the Covid isolation. He tried to dissuade me from coming over again in July, though not in as many words. He said they’ll be too busy in the lead-up to their trip to New Zealand in early August. Why not come over at Christmas? No thanks. I might still go over anyway, even if I don’t see my brother, to get out of the searing Romanian heat.

Yesterday Matei had his first IGCSE maths paper. I got this message from Octavian who also sat the exam: I did excellent at maths, I even added bonus questions that I have solved because I was bored. You don’t need the present perfect there, mate, but much more importantly you’re nearly 17 and it might be time to ease back on the conceit dial just a tad.

I’ve made some socată – elderflower champagne – and it’s now fizzing away in three 3-litre jars which I bought from Dedeman in Lugoj last weekend. Heaven knows what it will end up like.

Snooker. The semis are Dave Gilbert against Kyren Wilson, and Stuart Bingham versus Jak Jones. Both matches are locked at 4-4 after the first of four sessions; the semis are the first to 17 frames, so we’re talking proper marathons here. (Update: Both matches are tied at 8-8 after two sessions. The 16th frame of Bingham and Jones was quite ludicrous. Update 2: Wilson now leads Gilbert 14-10 after their third session.) It’s a final four that nobody expected; no members of the much-vaunted class of ’92 (no Ronnie O’Sullivan in particular), no Judd Trump, and no Luca Brecel who won it last year. Three of the four (all except Wilson) were unseeded and had to qualify. The rather portly Bingham (champion in 2015) was on the verge of defeat in the qualifiers, but after making it has done brilliantly. He held his nerve to beat Jack Lisowski 13-11, then barely put a foot wrong in the last few frames against O’Sullivan as he won 13-10. I missed the match of the tournament so far, however – John Higgins’ 13-12 win over Mark Allen in round two. Higgins won a dramatic penultimate frame before completing a remarkable clearance in the decider. The double he took on to start the break, knowing that he’d be out if he missed it, was something else.

Football. Tomorrow is judgement day for Blues. Don’t win against Norwich and they’re gone. Do win and they might still be gone. I put their chances of staying up at between 25 and 30%. If they do survive, the most likely team to go down are Plymouth. My brother got married there. The Plymouth fans seem a nice bunch, and it benefits the Championship to have a team in that part of the country. If I hadn’t studied in Birmingham and seen Blues play a few times 25 years ago, I’d probably want Plymouth to stay up instead.

When the snooker finishes on Monday, it’ll be no more sport for me for a while. I expect I’ll dip into Romania’s matches in Euro 2024 but that’ll be it. Fantastic.

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Trying not to sweat the small stuff

April 30, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’m struggling a bit. Not at the level of last January or February, but struggling nonetheless. So many small things that add up to a big mess, with no resilience and nobody to share the load with. For instance, I made an online order and got a message to say it would be delivered today, but because I knew I’d be out for lessons I called their number and asked them to deliver it tomorrow instead. But now I’ve just had an email saying (in Romanian) “Great! Your package has been delivered! Mission completed! Give us a review.” So now what, apart from maybe zero stars? Perhaps I’ll still get it tomorrow (the last day before a public holiday) but who knows? Last night at eleven my doorbell rang. It was Domnul Pascu, the man of nearly 80 who lives directly below me. Water was leaking from my bathroom, through his ceiling, and in danger of electrocuting him. A plumber is coming tomorrow morning.

As I cycled to my maths lesson with Matei today I realised I hadn’t yet washed my car. There are car washes all over the city in beyond; they make me think of Sheryl Crow’s mid-nineties song about Santa Monica Boulevard and Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy and a giant car wash where people scrub the best they can in skirts and suits during their lunch breaks. On this sunny afternoon I had five spare minutes so I dropped into Car Wash Point, one of many car washes on the same stroad, just to see how these things work. There was a wash bit and a hoover bit and a blacken-your-tyres bit. There seemed to be a central machine where you obtain and then charge a card which you insert at the various stations. Just the wash bit had six buttons: pre-wash (what does that involve, I wonder?), normal wash, extra foam, wax, something else, and STOP. I wish I could wash the damn thing myself like I used to, back when life was simpler.

Matei has his first of two IGCSE maths papers this Thursday; the second paper (which accounts for 130 of the 200 marks) is next Wednesday. He’s fine with anything that involves a tried and trusted method, but his problem solving (a hard skill to teach) isn’t quite there. I felt powerless today as the sands of our two-hour lesson ran out. We’ll have two more lessons between his two papers. The I of IGCSE stands for International, and interestingly there are three versions of each paper; you get a different one depending on your time zone, so those in later zones can’t gain knowledge of the exam a few hours beforehand.

Yesterday I visited Lugoj, a large town 70 km from here. The river Timiș, and small island between two branches of it, makes for a picturesque setting. In the island there was, as always, an abandoned swimming pool. I could make a niche YouTube channel in which I travel around Romania showing nothing but abandoned swimming pools. The temperature was in the high 20s, hotter than forecast. Had it been 1984 I would have had a dip in that pool. My car heated up spectacularly and I was glad to get home. I should mention that I recently got my old winter tyres replaced with all-season ones. The old ones were nine years old and cracked, and only good for the gunoi (rubbish) according to the mechanic.

Yesterday morning I had my first chat for ages with my cousin in Wellington. Though I spoke to her after her cancer diagnosis and operation, I hadn’t seen her like this with her drooped jaw. Her bilabial plosives – Bs and Ps – became Vs and Fs respectively. As expected, there was no mention of her health. She doesn’t even broach the subject with her three younger sisters. I wasn’t sure how much she really wanted the chat, and we were done in twenty minutes. It was good to see her youngest boy who wants to be a policeman. Then I had a long chat with her husband who was far more, well, chatty than her. We talked about his business plans (the bottom has dropped out of the manuka honey market, he said) and driving in Romania.

On Saturday I watched the relegation battle between Huddersfield and Birmingham. Not a whole ton of quality, but Blues took the lead on the stroke of half-time through Koji Miyoshi. I don’t know what the Huddersfield team talk was during the break, but it worked. They equalised immediately and for a few minutes were rampant. Blues weathered the storm though, and the game rather petered out. One apiece. The draw sent Huddersfield down, while Blues themselves are in the mire. Realistically they now must beat Norwich in the last game of a zany season, and hope that either Plymouth fail to win, or one of Sheffield Wednesday and Blackburn actually lose. There’s all kinds of football vocab now that didn’t exist when I followed the sport more closely. In the nineties, wild goal celebrations in the crowd with arms and legs flailing weren’t known as limbs, and teams with nothing to play for weren’t on the beach. I saw that UB40’s Food for Thought (heck of a song, with the saxophone) is now a Birmingham City anthem of sorts. The song is supposedly about the genocide in Cambodia. In a similar vein, the Cranberries’ brilliant Zombie, which references IRA violence in Northern Ireland, was a favourite of Irish supporters during the last rugby World Cup.

When the football was on, I had one eye on the snooker. The corner pockets are noticeably tighter than last year, and century breaks have been at a premium. I particularly enjoyed the match between Jak Jones and Si Jiahui, which the Welshman won 13-9. Every other frame went down to the wire. In a week’s time both the football and the snooker will be over, and I won’t mind that one bit.

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Dreary and weary

April 19, 2024 by 0 Comments

I watched my brother’s graduation ceremony this lunchtime – they had a live stream from Lincoln Cathedral, an incredible setting for it. After they got through many dozens of postgraduates who almost all originated in Africa, finally it was his turn. A huge achievement, and not something I could have done. I mean, business management, c’mon. I would have lasted ten minutes on that course. Where his motivation came from is beyond me.

My brother is now staying in St Ives and he asked me what I did with the parking permit. Sorry, what? The parking permit I gave to you and asked to leave in the flat after picking you up from Luton. I had zero recollection of that until he mentioned it, and even then my memory of it was pretty vague. I’m talking a level of memory loss I often had at work. I really should have made a note; without notes my life would be an unholy mess of forgettory. Sure enough I’ve found the permit, right here in my flat in Timișoara. So I guess that means he can’t park there legally and I’m in the shit. Looking back, that trip was a real struggle for me. It was too short and I had nowhere near enough time to myself.

It hasn’t been a great few days because I also managed to drop my phone while on my bike and crack the glass. I often wondered how people ended up with spider-web-looking cracked screens, and now I know. I went into the shop to ask if they could swap out the glass without an expensive replacement of the whole display – it’s still fully functional – but I got a pretty firm “no can do”.

A combination of all this and the weather – now dull and dismal, or mohorât as they say here – means I now feel a million miles from where I did four weeks ago when I drove to Recaș on that beautiful day and just sat in the park.

Last year I watched the final qualifiers of the world snooker, and all the drama that involved, but this year my work schedule has made that impossible and I’m not sure I’d have bothered anyway. I hope I can watch some of the real tournament because it’s a nice relaxing thing to do. There’s also the football. Can Blues stay up? They have three games left. First up is a trip to Rotherham, the worst team in the division by some distance, on Saturday. A win would be massive, but it’s far from guaranteed – Blues’ away record is atrocious.

I feel tired. I can’t wait for the Orthodox Easter weekend, now two weeks away, and a general lack of having to see or communicate with people. The curse of instant messaging means those blissful spells are fewer and farther between.

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The warmest everything ever, everywhere

March 8, 2024 by 0 Comments

After a six-week winter we had the warmest February on record (warmest X on record is something we’ve been hearing a lot lately, right?), and now spring has well and truly sprung. Saying that, it’s tipped it down all day today.

A funny week of lessons, and it’s far from over. On Monday I had the 17-year-old mall rat again, though this time she seemed actually human. We had something approaching a chat, mostly about the Ukraine war. After two years, people here have become dangerously blasé about it all, but she was rightly concerned. One oddity was that she’d never heard of the September 11th attacks. I say oddity – for me it’s the where-were-you moment when the world changed at a stroke – but in Romania it had a much smaller impact on the collective psyche than in the English-speaking world or western Europe. And of course she wasn’t even born then. On the same day I had an online session with the senior manager (a 35-year-old woman) who lives somewhere near Bucharest. Saying these sessions are like talking to a brick wall would do a disservice to the responsiveness of masonry. Just an utter waste of time. The good news is that pointless work makes up just 20% of my hours; 15 years ago it was up near 90%.

A student from 18 months ago has also rejoined the fray. He goes by Italian-sounding name of Marco. I don’t know how you get that out of Dumitru, his real name. I’ve had three online “lessons” with him already this week. One of them he spent lying in bed; during another he smoked the whole time. (I recently had a guy vape during a face-to-face session at home; things suddenly got very strawberry-ish.) The sessions with Marco aren’t pointless exactly, but he’s on a different frequency to me somehow, and I struggle to pick up a signal.

It was 10pm when I finished with Marco on Tuesday. With no lessons the next morning, I put on the game between Hull and Birmingham. Hull, predictably, took the lead just after I tuned in – a goal that should have been disallowed for handball. Hull were dominant and it had all the makings of a stonking win for them, but Blues clung on and in the 82nd minute conjured up an equaliser as Lukas Jutkiewicz who had just come on as a substitute headed the ball home. A good point for Blues but they’re still very much in a relegation scrap. (Today I saw a simulation model that gave Blues a 15% chance of being relegated. Having seen a few of their performances, that feels low, even if they do still have a game in hand. They go to Millwall on Saturday, a huge game for them.) When the Blues game was over, I switched over to Ipswich – the Tractor Boys, as they’re affectionately known – at home to Bristol City. It was 2-2 with ten minutes left and the place was rocking. Ipswich were awarded a penalty, and a shocking kick was easily saved, but not to matter. They scored the winner a couple of minutes later, and it’s a wonder they didn’t add to their tally in stoppage time. That was fun to watch.

Not much other news. In my next post I’ll give a run-down of all the vinyl I bought recently. In the meantime, here’s a video from CityNerd on the world’s top ten music cities (by the metric he uses). Very interesting.

I’m extremely proud of my brother for getting his first-class degree. His graduation takes place on 18th April, a couple of weeks after I go to the UK. It’s a shame he won’t have family there for it. My graduation ceremony in 2002, which my parents and grandmother attended, was quite lovely really.

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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.

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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.