Life :)

Life :) - Tennis

The final lap

July 30, 2023 by 0 Comments

This time next week I should be on the first leg of my journey, from Budapest to Istanbul (2 hours). That entrée will be followed by flights to Singapore (nearly 11 hours), Melbourne (7½ hours) and finally Christchurch (3½ hours). That adds up to almost 24 hours in the air, plus several more on the ground in between. I’ve decided to take the train to Budapest, then the bus to the airport. People have asked me why I didn’t book a door-to-door bus to the airport, and I probably should have done, though the train trip (the reverse of the last leg of my Cambridge-to-Timișoara train journey in 2016) should be enjoyable.

The very nice plumber has done his bit for now; yesterday I gave him a chunky wad of lei and we had a good chat before he left. He had to gouge holes in the thick walls to poke the pipes through, and some parts now look quite unsightly. Also he somehow knocked out the power in two of the sockets that I use all the damn time in my office. I’ll have to get an electrician in, and when I get back I’ll probably need to do some plastering. In Romania the “making good” bit seems to be the responsibility of the customer … sigh. There’s still a swamp of hopelessly opaque admin to wade through with the gas company and whatnot before I get the central heating up and running.

I played tennis tonight. I enjoyed it much more than last week because Gabriela wasn’t there. That sounds bad – I’m sure that if you take away her cheering of opponent’s mistakes on the tennis court, she’s absolutely lovely.

Life :)

A must-see video, and how to quickly spot idiots

July 26, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I had four lessons – my students were Andreea, Alexandru, Adrian and Alin. By rights, I should get Bianca, Barbu, Bogdan and Beatrice today. Alexandru was a new student, aged twelve. He lives in Madrid and was born there, but is on holiday in Romania where his extended family are. He’s football mad – he dreams of being a professional footballer – and came wearing a bright yellow Ronaldo shirt from the Saudi team he apparently now plays for. We worked from the Cambridge book he brought – he was desperate to finish the book before I go away.

Dad likes to send me videos. This one of Maramureș in northern Romania, nearly 40 minutes long, is a must-see. It was shot in the summer of 2019, and gives an incredible window on village life in that part of the country. The first half of the video was so achingly beautiful that it almost brought a tear to my eye. Seriously. Someone asked in the comments what brings people to turn their backs on a life of peace and beauty to live in soulless, overcrowded cities. The answer to that is complicated. It’s a life of peace and beauty but also back-breaking work in many cases. The second half of the video showed the Mocaniță that I went on two years ago, with extra drama that I managed to avoid. Jenny Parsons, the British woman who made the video, seemed lovely. The camera work was great too – the close-ups of the butterflies in all their varieties, or the way she focused on the opinci – the traditional leather shoes. “The best holiday ever,” she said. I wanted to buy a car so I could see all of this more easily, although I’m now glad I didn’t buy one before going away. The central heating business has pretty much forced me to be at home.

On Sunday I saw a great piece in the Guardian entitled “Want to quickly spot idiots? Here are five foolproof red flags.” Yes, I know, it’s the Guardian which is left-leaning, but it was hard to disagree. These were the big five:
1. People who are proud non-readers of books
2. People who think that all books should just be short blog posts
3. People who think that wealth is directly linked to intelligence
4. People who go on and on about AI or ChatGPT
5. People who obsess about their IQs

Loads of people fall into number 3, and that’s half the reason why the planet is increasingly fucked. This guy is a gigantic twat but he’s a billionaire so he must be super smart. So I’ll vote for him. To number 4, add crypto. I dealt first-hand with number 5 when I did interview practice with this guy in his twenties who kept going on about his IQ. (Come to think of it, why do women never talk about their IQs?) “What’s the best way of talking about my IQ in the interview?” Don’t talk about it at all! But, but, but, it’s 145. No! To get the message across I wrote IQ in six-inch letters, crossed out. To be fair, I don’t think this guy was an idiot, he was just decidedly weird. I would add a number 6 – people whose favourite travel destination is Dubai or somewhere else that’s similarly fake and extravagant. A huge red flag.

Ten days to go, not that I’m counting or anything.

Life :) - Music

Health stuff and a few tunes

July 22, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve had an inch-wide ball-like lump on my back for the last few weeks. On Tuesday I was seeing the doctor anyway, so I showed it to him. He said categorically that it was a benign cyst. I hope he’s right. I’ll try and have it removed when I get back to Romania in September. He also wrote me two prescriptions for my antidepressants so I can stock up for my trip. Then I’ve got my incessant sinus problem to contend with. I was always a one-pillow person. Lately I’ve been using two. Last night I added a third, so I could really prop myself up. Two other rules: drink camomile (should I include an h?) tea before bed, ensuring I inhale plenty of steam both from the kettle and the mug, and no screens after 10pm. The heat hasn’t helped. Last night was just a couple of degrees cooler and got by without the fan; I had my first proper night’s sleep for ages. But I didn’t feel fully refreshed, even after that. I’ve been fumbling in a fog of near-permanent fatigue for weeks on end.

This morning I had a two-hour session with David (one of two Davids I now teach) who had his 16th birthday when he was in Tunisia with his family. He didn’t think much of the place; he showed me a beach strewn with camel shit. (Here’s David Bowie talking about camel shit in a song from Scary Monsters.) We played the skyscraper board game I came up with last summer; he suggested a rule change which I was a big fan of.

I recently listened to Too Many Friends by British band Placebo. It opens with an impressive “My computer thinks I’m gay” and then goes on to say “This is my last communiqué down the superhighway.” It’s about social media, and it’s no coincidence that it came out in 2013 when social media stopped being an ignorable sideshow and noticeably – depressingly – took over from everything else. Superhighway appearing in the lyrics is interesting. In 1995 the internet was this newfangled thing often termed (in the UK at least) “the information superhighway”. Placebo have been around for ages; they were already in business by ’95.

I heard a couple of other interesting songs last night on Muzicorama. One was the satirical Short People (1977) by Randy Newman. The other was the brilliant Fire Lake (1980) by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band.

Fifteen days to go.

Environment - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Time to stop the willy waving

July 18, 2023 by 0 Comments

I read this morning that the Australian state of Victoria has pulled out of hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games. My reaction to that was Good. How sensible. The earlier cost estimate of Au$2.6 billion – already ridiculous – had blown out to $7 billion. Sanity has prevailed for once. If memory serves – it might not – the 1990 Auckland games came in at NZ$14 million (under budget and ahead of schedule). That’s $30m in today’s dollars using CPI inflation. That might not be the best measure when considering the cost of building materials, so let’s call it $50m. So why on earth are these events now costing billions? Is it all just ego? A dick-waving competition? Last year’s Birmingham games, which I attended and thoroughly enjoyed, cost about £780m, or Au$1.5 billion. I suggest they save some cash by going back to Birmingham in 2026. (Some view the Commonwealth Games, and the commonwealth itself, as an anachronism. It’s possible that last year’s games were the last.)

Yesterday was a steamy, smelly day. My main objective was getting out of the heat and not losing my mind. That’s hard to do when you have lessons in other parts of the city and you haven’t slept well. I probably had my last lesson with the single pair of twins until the autumn. It was productive: two vocubulary exercises, then some exercises where they had to match phrasal verbs (written on cards) with their definitions, then a “correct or incorrect” sentences game, then (because it was our last activity for a while) the Formula 1 racing car game.

There are now endless apps and sites for exploring the weather in great detail. As the climate has got increasingly crazy – Sardinia and Sicily are heading for the mid-40s today – the demand for this information has also shot up. A good site I found is ventusky.com. It has historical, zoomable weather maps going back to 1979. Mum often talked about 1st October 1985. (We had the paddling pool out! In October!) Here’s the section of the map for our neck of the woods on that day. You can see the wind coming from the Mediterranean:

Back then, we normally topped out at that kind of temperature in summer. TV weather maps showed temperatures in orange (instead of the usual yellow) at 25 and above. Orange, at any time of year, was rare.

When I was discusing “intrusive r” with my young student on Saturday, I gave the same example I always do: Pamela Anderson, because it’s slightly amusing. (Non-rhotic speakers – people who don’t normally produce an audible r in words like hair – often introduce a rogue r sound between Pamela and Anderson. That’s an intrusive r.) Of course because he was so young he didn’t have the foggiest idea who Pamela Anderson was, so my example didn’t exactly pack the punch it does with older folk. I then gave him law and order (“Laura Norder”) instead.

One of the great things about this blog is that it stops me from forgetting things. I’d totally forgotten the unhappy feeling of cabin fever I had in June 2021, before I made the trip to Iași and into the mountains the following month.

Books - Family - Life :)

The christening

July 17, 2023 by 0 Comments

Earlier today I saw my nephew’s christening. My brother had set up a Skype link to the church; our parents also hooked up to it (eventually – Mum had got the time wrong). It wasn’t a traditional christening – Dad called it a Butlin’s service. Apparently I was the godfather. (I didn’t even know you could be a remote godfather.) There was some weird “action song” which started off like a haka. The flamboyant vicar said “This is like a hooker, isn’t it?” before my brother corrected him. The vicar checked in regularly to see if the connections to New Zealand and Romania were still live. A baby, but not my nephew, cried almost incessantly. After the anointment (if that’s the right word), they sang the five verses of Lord of the Dance, which reminded me of school assemblies but in a good way, then after an hour it was all over.

It’s hot. It’s currently 35, and tomorrow we’re forecast to hit 39. I struggled at tennis last night and don’t expect to do any better tonight. New Zealand can’t come quick enough. Southern and eastern Europe is smothered in infernal heat, and parts of south-western US are dangerously hot. Many thousands will die as a result.

The men’s Wimbledon final between Djokovic and Alcaraz is about to get under way. This year’s event has almost passed me by. I saw that Barclays are sponsoring Wimbledon. Bleugh. Clothing and other official merch are selling like never before this year. It’s almost like the cost-of-living crisis only affects certain classes of people, or something. (To be fair, a ground pass costs £27, which is very good value. When I went to the Australian Open in 2008 I bought a ground pass for the first four days, and that was excellent value. Ditto the US Open – first two days – in 2015. It’s all that non-tennis stuff, which I avoided, where they get you.)

I’ve watched a few more YouTube videos about the Titan sub, and it now appears the occupants were – agonisingly – fully aware of what was about to happen. Since the disaster, the focus has understandably been on the egomaniac CEO Stockton Rush, but 77-year-old PH Nargeolet also played a major part. A veteran of 37 dives to the Titanic, the company used him to legitimise the whole operation. One of the videos drew parallels with the 1996 Everest disaster in which esteemed New Zealand climber Rob Hall and seven others died. I recently watched an incredible presentation (it’s incomplete, unfortunately) on that disaster, which climber and writer Jon Krakauer gave the following year. I also watched a Netflix documentary on the 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanches that occurred during climbing season. The most moving part of that for me was the Buddhist ceremony that took place the night before the earthquake in the village of Tanglang. The whole village came together for that. Within hours, the earthquake would strike, causing a landslide that would wipe out the entire village and everyone in it.

The plumber came back yesterday for a fourth day. That means he’ll have less to do when I see him again a week tomorrow. I’ll sort out the mess on Tuesday. Tomorrow I’ll be too busy with lessons and today I feel utterly lethargic.

Yesterday I had my second two-hour lesson with the young guy. He wants to learn to do different accents; that’s a new one on me. After that I finished Day of the Triffids. An enjoyable and thought-provoking book, and an ending I didn’t expect. Well worth the read.

Update: I survived tonight’s tennis in the heat; I coped a bit better than yesterday as the sun went behind a cloud, even though the ambient temperature was a notch higher. But there was other tennis going on at the same time, and what a match I missed. Alcaraz, just wow. Getting the better of the master, somehow, after dropping the first five games. I’ll have to catch up on that ludicrous game in the third set which went 13 deuces – 32 points – tying the marathon that Graf and Sanchez-Vicario produced in the latter stages of their 1995 final. Alcaraz turned 20 in May and he already looks the complete deal. He’s scarily good. And now he’s won the biggest prize of them all.

Life :) - New Zealand

Getting plumbed in

July 14, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve got the plumber here for the third day running. He’s a really nice guy, and he’s doing a good job as far as I can tell. But with the exception of my students who are confined to one room, I’m used to having this place to myself. He has to constantly flit between all the rooms to replace the old heaters, and I can’t relax. Not his fault, obviously. Nor was it his fault that he locked me in on Wednesday night. When he left I was giving an online lesson. He locked the front door behind him with the spare key I’d given him, turning the key twice. When I tried to leave at 9pm, I couldn’t. I found out that if you turn the key twice, whoever is inside can’t open the door. Before Wednesday I had no idea about that. (I live by myself. There isn’t normally a ‘someone else’ to lock the door behind them.) Thankfully there was no fire that night – my only option would have been to jump – and when he came back the next morning I was a free man again. This place is now a complete pigsty, and of course there’s the noise too. I’m grateful for the thunderstorm we had in the middle of last night; it has (temporarily) taken the edge off the temperature, so I could comfortably escape for a bit earlier today. I think (hope!) he won’t come back again tomorrow, and will start getting everything piped up on the 24th when he comes back from his break. Wednesday was an expensive day – I forked out 11,645 lei (£2000, or NZ$4100) on all the materials. I’ll give the plumber 2000 lei today, and the remainder (a little over 2000 lei, I think) when he finishes the job.

This morning I spoke to my parents from the café next to the market. It was 10:15 and I was the only person not drinking beer or whisky. Their builders had had the day off; it was the newfangled Matariki public holiday. (I always get that word muddled with tamariki, which means ‘children’ in Maori.) Matariki doesn’t shine very brightly in their part of the country, though I’m sure people don’t mind the extra day off in the middle of winter.

I read a couple of articles this morning on the local news website. The first was about a musical instrument called a duduk which will be accompanying an organ at an upcoming festival. My first thought was, ah, it’s Indonesian or Malay. I thought that because on all those Garuda and Malaysia Airlines flights I took many years ago, I saw the native word duduk – which meant ‘seat’ or ‘sit’ – all the time. It’s a distinctive word. Your life vest is under your duduk. Please fasten your duduk belt. Maybe the duduk is similar to an organ, and has that name because you have to sit down to play it. But no, it’s actually an Armenian woodwind instrument.

The second article was about the International Maths Olympiad which had just taken place in Japan. Romania finished an impressive fourth of the 112 countries who took part, behind (in order) China, the US, and South Korea. (New Zealand came 64th.) Maths olympiads are a really big deal in Romania – they’re treated a bit like American spelling bees – and some teenagers spend many hours priming themselves for them. (The test/exam takes 4½ hours, by the way. Are you allowed to pop out for a pee?) So I’m not surprised that Romania did so well. Each national team consisted of six students, and (this is the bit that blew me away) 59 of the 60 participants from the top ten countries were male. You expect a skew towards boys – they have a thing for largely pointless competitiveness – but that stat is just nuts. An important takeaway is that just because Romania did well in this olympiad thingy, Romanians aren’t necessarily good at maths as a whole. It was nice when Andy Murray won his three grand slams, but it didn’t make Britain any better at tennis.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

A video to watch, some non-competitive word games, and some traditional pics

July 12, 2023 by 0 Comments

Here’s a 15-minute video of Timișoara that an intrepid American couple recently put up on YouTube. It showcases my picturesque city (I think of it as my city) pretty well. I wouldn’t recommend you come right now because of the searing heat, but in autumn or spring, or even early summer, an enjoyable and relaxing time in this beautiful place is just about guaranteed.

This is what my whiteboard looked like at the end of Saturday morning’s lesson.

I explained that we sometimes use so-called delexical verbs such as get, give and take, where the meaning is taken out of the verb and put into the noun, for example “give the house a clean” as an alternative to “clean the house”. I notice that I mistakenly wrote “give my house a clean” rather than “…the house…”. We love possessives in English, but we wouldn’t normally use one there.

Today I played Bananagrams with a boy of (I think) eleven. This was how it panned out (his effort on the left, mine with excessive wind on the right):

Kids seem to like the game. There’s no scoring, it doesn’t feel competitive, and they I know I’m always there to help them (and say no every time they ask me if AI or PC or any other ridiculous abbreviation is a word). In this game I also had to say no to MICES. Why can’t you have that? C’mon, think about it! By the way, if you ever play Bananagrams, try and make some longish words off the bat – I started with FLOODING and FARMER – to improve your chances of being able to join on later.

Another non-competitive word game I play sometimes with kids is Hangman. I recently watched a surprisingly interesting video about some of the oddities of the game. Yes, you literally draw a decapitation as an education tool for little kids. When I was six, I had a Milton Bradley boxed version of Hangman which was competitive. Both you and your opponent (seated opposite each other) chose a word of up to eight letters; the first to guess the opponent’s word was the winner. At the start of the game you put the letter tiles into slots, facing yourself. You turned them around as your opponent guessed them; this meant you had to insert the letters in reverse. Every time your opponent guessed a letter that wasn’t in your word, you turned a dial that showed an additional limb on a stick figure. When I played with Dad, he’d often forget to reverse the letters, leaving a six-year-old boy hopelessly struggling with complete gibberish.

I’ve watched almost none of this year’s Wimbledon so far. I saw half an hour of an Alcaraz match (not a bad player, that guy) with Serbian commentary, and that’s been it. Last weekend I found myself more interested in the Ashes cricket, for some reason. I listened to two of the players being interviewed after the match. They both invariably appended a –y onto the ends of their teammates’ names. Brooky and Broady and the rhyming trio of Stokesy and Woakesy and Foakesy. No first names at all. What are the rules for this stuff? What if you have a multi-syllable surname? What if your surname already has a –y stuck on the end, like Batty or Hardy? It’s something that smacks of British public schools to me, but maybe I’m overthinking it. (Aussies stick an -o on the end instead: Johnno and Thommo and Deano and Wayno.)

Here are some pictures from the open-air concert on Friday night:

A local group

Remembering the founder who had passed away

A Turkish group

People getting mici or maybe a frigărui

Tomorrow morning I have to go to some depot with the plumber to select pipes and what have you. He’ll start putting my central heating in on 25th July.

Life :) - Music - Tennis

New Zealand: where to go

July 10, 2023 by 0 Comments

My brother called me last night. As usual, he had a beer bottle in his hand. He said that his knee operation, scheduled for this coming Thursday, had been put back to 2nd August.

This morning I took the bike to Sânmihaiu Român in a repeat of last Sunday. Once again I grabbed a coffee from the bar, then sat on a bench and read, before moving to the gazebo when the hot sun drifted onto me. Next week will be properly hot; the dog days are now upon us.

With just 27 days until I get on the plane, I’m thinking of where I might go when I’m in New Zealand. Much will depend on my parents. They’ll want some respite from the building work in Geraldine, so I’m sure we’ll spend some time in Moeraki. I have a friend in nearby Naseby whom I obviously haven’t seen since I left NZ seven years ago, and I’ll certainly want to catch up with her. Central Otago as a whole is quite magical. I spent a few days with my parents there in the blistering dry heat of December 2014 – we camped at Omarama, where they have the gliders, and then at Omakau. I remember Ranfurly and Wedderburn and lovely Ophir. Maybe one day I’ll do the bike Rail Trail where you can ride from Hyde to Clyde and much more beside. The West Coast could be an option – I don’t think any of us have been there since 2009 – or how about the Catlins in the south? I’ve never been down there. A top priority would have been Wellington, but now that my cousin has cancer I might end up giving the North Island a miss completely.

I went to the very popular Festivalul Inimilor on Friday night – another open-air spectacle of traditional music from Romania and beyond. It was in Parcul Rozelor, next to where we play tennis. There were huge groups from Turkey and Serbia as well as my local Banat region. There was a sombre mood when the local group came on, because the man who founded it back in the sixties had passed away. The festival is free to attend, although there are a lot of food and drink stalls and even some selling traditional costumes. It was on again last night, and provided a noisy backdrop to our game of tennis. In the first set, I played with a woman slightly older than me named Gabriela against two men including 88-year-old Domnul Sfâra. It’s surprisingly hard to play against him, because you have no choice but to go easy on him. After winning a long opening game on my serve, we duly lost 6-1 without ever getting to deuce again. Then Domnul Sfâra exited stage left, and Gabriela and I found ourselves up against two guys both called Florin. We beat them 6-1 6-4 6-1.
Update: I also played this evening, again with musical accompaniment as Festivalul Inimilor entered its final night. This time I played five (extremely one-sided) sets. First I played with Domnul Sfâra, and we won 6-1 after losing a close first game – a repeat of last night. Then I played with one of the Florins against Gabriela and the other Florin, and from our perspective it finished a bizarre 6-0 1-6. Then I teamed up with Gabriela against both Florins, and we won 6-1 6-0.

Books - Life :) - Music

When being bored was OK

July 4, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday morning I got a message from Dorothy to say that she’d left her suitcase on a National Express coach after flying from Timișoara to Luton for a funeral. The case contained her laptop and medication. What a nightmare. I’m always paranoid that I’ll do something like that. She was still able to attend our online Romanian lesson, and seemed remarkably calm under the circumstances. The lesson was on the relative benefits of living in the city and the country. We spent half the session studying the famous 1981 song Vara la Țară (“Summer in the Country”) by the folk rock group Pasărea Colibri; the song is really a piss-take of unsophisticated country living, and was adapted from a late-19th-century novel of the same name which had a far more positive take on rural life.

I’ve now read the bit about “solitude deprivation” in Digital Minimalism. As the author says, as recently as the nineties you often had no choice but to be alone in your thoughts, but first the iPod – just after the millennium – allowed us to be surrounded by constant noise, and then the smartphone gave us constant visual as well as auditory stimulation, often with the added pressure to respond to it. Those born after 1995 – the “real millennials” I mentioned in another post – won’t even know what it’s like to be properly alone. This near-constant smartphone use seems to be responsible for young people’s mental health falling off a cliff.

A massive change I’ve seen is people’s attitudes to boredom. Being bored used to be OK. Expected, even. When I was a kid, we stayed at my grandmother’s cottage in mid-Wales once or twice a year. The 190-mile drive from Cambridgeshire was doable in four-and-a-bit hours if you went the quickest route that skirted around Birmingham. Dad, being a painter and all that, always took the scenic route; the drive through Warwickshire and Worcestershire was really quite lovely. Being a painter, he also liked to make regular stops to take photos of views that would make nice paintings. Once I timed our journey back from Wales at one minute under seven hours, including a stop at a service station. Yes, it was boring, especially from the bit where we entered Northamptonshire, although we probably had fish and chips that time in the picturesque Warwickshire town of Southam. Occasionally I might have had a book or a hand-held LCD game, but most of the time I just sat in the back of the car. Would that even be acceptable today?

Yesterday I dropped in on Elena because I had to sign something central-heating-related and give it to her. She said she walked 18,000 steps earlier that day. (She has an actual pedometer to work that out, rather than a smartphone.)

Today is the fourth of July. Here is Simon and Garfunkel’s wonderful America, from a time when boredom was definitely still OK.

Books - Family - Life :) - Music

We’re asocial creatures sometimes, too

July 3, 2023 by 0 Comments

The time until I go away has now dipped under the length of time I’ll be away; I generally get excited about a big trip when I hit that milestone.

Yesterday I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român where I called my parents, had a basic lunch, and finished Three Men in a Boat. Dad marvelled at my ability to make video calls to New Zealand while out and about in Romania. If they tried to do the reverse, their data would be chewed up in no time. We agreed that this is an island of great benefit in a sea of toxic tech. I’d only just finished saying how wonderful my internet is in Romania when a message flashed up to say that my phone was getting too hot and the app would need to close (before, presumably, it caught fire). Before that, I told them that they really do need to book some flights to Europe, even if they’re ten months away. Just think how happy my brother will be if he knows they’re coming over.

Last night I spoke to my brother – he’d just got back from his cruise with his wife, the in-laws and the little one. They’d been to Spain and Portugal, not Somalia. My brother had a better time than he was expecting. They’re already planning Christmas. Would you like to come over? I’d love to spend time with my brother, sister-in-law and nephew, but jeez, British Christmas is so depressing. Getting to my brother’s place will be arduous and expensive. I don’t know whether I can face it. I did toy with the idea of flying to England from Budapest for my nephew’s first birthday after I come back from New Zealand, but when I land in Budapest all I’ll want to do is bloody well get home. Going over there and having to talk with family when I’m absolutely knackered would wreck me. I told Mum this, and she recalled the time in 1994 when she and my brother flew into Auckland from London and immediately attended a funeral. She had to make sandwiches and cups of tea and chat with third cousins twice removed, all while badly jet-lagged; it was nightmarish. I asked my brother if we could all meet up in St Ives sometime in October. It’ll be a push with the extra little person, but we should manage it.

The big thing I have to contend with right now is getting central heating installed. Last winter – albeit a mild one – the city heating system was more than adequate. Unfortunately the cost of that is going through the roof, and everyone in this block now has no sensible choice but to install their individual central heating if they haven’t already done so. It’s a major expense (NZ$6000, or £3000) and hassle I could do without. One little benefit, however, is that I’ve got to know Elena, the old lady (she turns 80 later this year) who lives directly above me. Her children emigrated to Canada some time ago and have grown-up children of their own. She said that all her friends in Timișoara have passed away. She seems a lovely lady and we’ve had some good conversations.

Three Men in a Boat is very cleverly written, and amusing all the way through. I was surprised by how little the author’s English of 1889 differs from that of today. He talks of dudes, which I didn’t think existed back then, least of all in Britain. On the other hand, he uses superlatives like pleasantest (which would be odd today) and peacefullest (even odder). He uses five-and-twenty and twenty-five interchangeably, indicating that the switch to the modern version was incomplete at that time. He also says four hours and a half; this is now incorrect and a bane of contemporary learners of English. His tales are peppered with constructions like despite his having seen me, which exists in some people’s modern English – my British friend Dorothy’s, for instance – but certainly not mine. (Dorothy’s English is interesting. She also says “One must do blah blah blah, mustn’t one?” and pronounces suit with the y sound of yes. This is not only a question of age – my parents don’t have these traits even though they’re a few years older than her – but one of education and class.)

I’ve started reading Digital Minimalism, a book all about pulling the plug on unnecessary and pernicious tech. I haven’t read the chapter on solitude yet, but I’m looking forward to it. Almost every day I hear “we’re social creatures!”, with the implication that we all need social interaction, online or offline, all the time. Piss off with that! All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, also need the absence of social interaction sometimes, and now many of us aren’t getting it.

Because my hours are down a bit (it’s summer), I now get the occasional chance to listen to Muzicorama on the radio. Last week they played some tracks from the wonderful War of the Worlds musical that came out in 1978, including the beautiful Forever Autumn.