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Not too smart right now

September 10, 2025 by 0 Comments

I put on the TV this morning. A normal day in Romania. Another fire in an apartment block – this time nobody injured. A report stating that 30% of adult Romanians have no bank account. Then they dropped in on a factory that processes 20 tonnes of pickled cabbages a day. (Cabbage season has just started.) But nothing feels normal to me. Since Saturday night I’ve been stuck in the crawler lane. I’ve been sleeping poorly and constantly fatigued.

Yesterday was a case in point. My Romanian lesson started at eight and I knew I’d be buggered for that. I set my alarm for seven. As soon as it went off I killed it, intending to get up. I hadn’t slept well. Next thing I knew it was almost eight. No time for breakfast or even a cup of tea. The lesson, which overran a bit, was really a waste of time. Luckily I had no lessons until later. After a belated breakfast I knew I needed to pick up my bike which I’d taken in to be repaired last Thursday. The bike shop was five kilometres away. Walk or drive? I decided to walk, thinking the exercise could do me good, and there were a few things I wanted to pick up from the mall on the way back. The walk to the bike shop took me just over an hour. It took me past, among other things, the shaorma kiosk I frequented when I lived in town. Back then, a shaorma cost 11 lei. Now it’s 28. Yes, I’m putting my prices up for lessons again – I have no real choice. The repair – a new chain and a whole new set of gears – set me back 240 lei (£40 or NZ$95).

Then the mall. A bad idea when I’m so tired and I can’t face noise or bright lights. What I felt wasn’t far off what I experienced in a supermarket in 2001 when I’d just started taking medication for panic attacks. It struck me that most of what you find in a large mall like that is pure unadulterated shite. And these days a lot of it has an added sinister edge to it. A crypto ATM, for instance, with flashing surrounds. I’ve never even liked the Americanism ATM. The Samsung shop, if it was even a shop and not just a display, was even more frightening. SmartThings. AllOneWord. Start your SmartThings journey. In English, of course. The display included a smart washing machine and a smart fridge and a smart TV showing Aardman-like claymation figures watching their smart TV. Presumably there are people out there who want this stuff. There must be; I recently had a lesson in Dumbrăvița with an eight-year-old girl in their smart kitchen and she explained her mother’s smart electric cooker to not-very-smart me. Her mum was in the middle of baking something smart. I think I’d rather have one of those ubiquitous seventies gas cookers you saw all the time in New Zealand, the ones with the digital-dial clock. Similar cookers were made on a vast scale in Romania, all in a single factory in Cugir, 200 km east of Timișoara, not far from Deva. That factory also produced arms.

I walked past all of that crap – all I wanted was some bits and pieces from the Auchan supermarket. I found the tablecloth I needed, eventually. Next stop electric toothbrush heads. These aren’t cheap and I couldn’t find the price anywhere. They used to have barcode scanners dotted around the place but now people have become too affluent to even care… Look, this is too hard. Getting everything on my list will take me hours. I came out with only the tablecloth. At least its price will mean I’ll have change for the coffee machine once I negotiate the smart bloody self-checkout. A woman had to help me with the initial screen. The shops around the coffee machine were in a quieter area and not sinister at all. A dry cleaners’. A shop selling detergent. A place that does printing and medals and trophies. Then I went home.

This really isn’t great. What’s causing it I don’t know. It’s still pretty damn warm; today we’re forecast to reach 32. I hope I’ll be better when the temperature drops, but who knows, I might be low in magnesium or something. I’ll ask my doctor the next time I see him. At the moment I’d struggle enormously to hold down a normal job. (I have had spells like this while in a normal job. That was horrible.)

On Sunday I met Dorothy in town. We had a simple lunch, eventually – it took an age to get served. Nothing new there. But I was very happy to be eating inside especially on such a sunny day – I couldn’t face the brightness.

Some sad news from Dorothy. Her five-month-old kitten has died. She had a virus that she couldn’t recover from and on Friday she was put down. I hope that day she spent with Kitty (14th August) didn’t permanently traumatise her. You just never know. As for Kitty, she’s still going strong. You really notice your fatigue when you have such a bundle of energy around the place as Kitty.

I managed three games of Scrabble yesterday, winning two. In one of them I scored 527 – my highest since I got back into it.

Family - Life :) - Travel: the US

My US trip a decade ago and news from an ex-student

August 31, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s ten years since I took the train from Boston to Albany, New York to meet my cousin and his Italian wife to be. I spent two nights with them. We chatted over dinner and the Sam Adams beer that I’d brought with me from Boston, then they showed me around the local area. Best of all, we went for a hike in the Adirondacks, where the views were breathtaking, and visited Lake Placid. Then we made a trip to Flushing Meadow to see the opening day of the US Open. It was the first time they’d been to a grand slam, but for me it completed my set of four. I had a lovely time with them. I spent four weeks in the US in all, and when I got back I felt great. That trip – my first overseas trip for five years – gave me the impetus to do what I’ve done since. There’s a big world out there! Options. Ways to escape the cycle of hopelessness that had felt interminable. That was before the US went totally crazy. Even during Trump’s first term, it seemed his bark was worse than his bite. I felt some affinity with the US, having been there not long before. I followed baseball. I read Fivethirtyeight, my favourite website at the time. (It no longer exists.) Now I don’t follow US-based news because it’s just too appalling.

Yesterday I was in contact with the lady whom I gave nearly 200 lessons before and during Covid, until I said we couldn’t carry on. She was downright weird. And obsessive. And bored. Since then she’s become a hairdresser – having an actual job has helped her no end. Last year her son, whom I also used to teach – he got very good at English – was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Heartbreaking, really. He was a very smart cookie who wanted to be a pilot. We spent large chunks of lessons discussing passenger planes and routes, and often watched videos on the subject. He seemed to have all the right attributes for captaining a triple seven, including his excellent English. Then disaster struck. Dream over. His mother said he’s handled the last year remarkably well with all his treatments and analyses and tests. He’s just got his driving licence – his parents have bought him a Mercedes, as you do when your kid is 18, though I think in this case it’s a form of recognition for the very shitty time he’s had. They’re in the final stages of getting a house built in Mehala, one of my favourite parts of Timișoara, and should move in before Christmas.

I had another video call with my parents yesterday. Mum looked a lot better – on Wednesday she looked like death warmed up. So that was a relief, but sadly it’s just a matter of time until the next episode.

Family - Life :) - Music

Just before I go…

August 16, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’m just getting packed up for tomorrow, having finished my last lesson. It’s much easier when I’m not having to fly anywhere. I’m including a kettle; in Romania there’s no guarantee you’ll get one and I have a feeling Poland will be similar.

I’ve spoken to all my immediate family today. My brother said he had a go at Mum for still driving even though her eyesight is equivalent to downing five pints. Don’t blame him – it’s inexcusable – but I’ve decided not to go there with Mum. He also mentioned his frustration with Mum and Dad’s negativity whenever he speaks to them. I feel the same as him. As an example, I got the Maori stuff again recently. Even though I broadly agree with them, I don’t want to hear it for the 85th time. If it was impinging on their quality of life to even a remote extent, I’d be a bit more receptive. Maybe negativity is something that comes with old age.

When I saw Dorothy on Tuesday, she had the order of service for the funeral of Samantha, a medical student from India whom I met twice last year at Dorothy’s church. I didn’t know she’d died in May at just 27. Around Christmas she contracted a rare disease – some kind of inflammation of the brain, Dorothy said – and was put in an induced coma. Even though I didn’t know her well at all, she seemed a very nice young woman; to have two-thirds of her expected life taken from her is very sad. Dorothy said she’d gone to a better place and so on, but that isn’t at all what I believe.

Today is Sfânta Maria, or St Mary’s Day. If you’re one of the millions of Romanian women called Maria or men called Marian or Marius, or numerous other variations, you get to celebrate your name day today. It’s one of the two biggest name days on the calendar, the other being St John (Ion, Ioan, Ionuț, Ioana, …) which is in January.

I don’t think I mentioned that the plumber had been. He created a U-bend under the sink, and after fiddling around with the shower for a while, seems to have got rid of the stench. Which is great.

At the market this morning I went past the stall where the guy often pumps out Depeche Mode on his speakers. Today he was playing something Depeche Mode-esque that I liked but hadn’t heard before. I Shazammed it; I was only the 183rd person to do so, it said. It was a British band called the Recreations with a song called Neoprene which came out in 2016.

It’s 36 degrees right now. Yeah, bugger this.

Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Mum’s good idea

August 9, 2025 by 0 Comments

Mum has always just wanted the best for me, even if she sometimes hasn’t known what “the best” is, which isn’t entirely her fault. Last week she said, wouldn’t it be nice if you were earning a bit more, and couldn’t you do that by giving online maths lessons? To Brits and the like, and be getting three times what you’re making now? That’s actually a very good idea, Mum. One of your best, in fact. Now, implementing it is a whole different matter. Drawing graphs, drawing shapes, writing equations – so much of maths is outside the realm of simple text, making online teaching quite challenging. I’d need a bunch of equipment, such as a stylus pad and a camera that focuses on my desk. That could get expensive. I’d also have the job of rigging up and dismantling all those gizmos as I switch from online maths to face-to-face English or whatever I happen to be doing next. Then there’s getting the students in the first place, and if I do, finding time in my schedule for them. I can envisage some late nights. Finally, if I go down this route, the stakes increase. I’ll probably have to set up my own company. I mentioned this to a student of mine (an accountant) on Wednesday; she said there were two ways of doing this that each come with their pros and cons. It would be fantastic to be earning enough to bomb around Europe for a month every year without feeling guilty about it, but although I’m often busy with work and don’t take much time off, my work life in Romania has so far been pleasantly low-octane, and online maths teaching would certainly change that. The idea is worth considering, all the same.

On Thursday I had a new student of English, my first for a while. He’s 16 and wants to do the B2 Cambridge exam in November. He was a nice enough guy, though I couldn’t help look at his tattoos. He had two Roman numeral dates (day, month and year in full), inked conspicuously just below his knees. They were dates in the seventies I think, so I’m guessing they were his parents’ birthdates. I have no idea why you’d want to do that, but each to his own I suppose.

This morning I picked some plums from the trees in Mehala. I picked a fair few from outside the cemetery, because they clearly didn’t belong to anybody. (Last year one lady complained that I was stealing them.) As well as the usual purple plums, there was also a greengage-type variety. They’ll mostly go into a crumble. I also went to the market there for the first time in ages – it was like stepping back in time in a nice way – then bought some eggs from a vending machine on the way home. I won’t be going anywhere for the rest of the day. It’ll simply be too hot. As for tomorrow, forget it.

The football is back up and running again. Birmingham and Ipswich were two divisions apart last season, but last night they faced off in the opening Championship fixture. I didn’t see the game, but Ipswich scored from a last-minute penalty to eke out a 1-1 draw after Blues had dominated. I don’t know much about footballers these days; I often just go by their names. Blues looked likely to sign a striker, currently at Ajax, called Chuba Akpom, which I thought was a great name (it even has pom in it), then Ipswich looked like they would get him instead. Maybe they still will. (That’s one reason why last night’s game was fairly high-profile.) Blues did ending up getting someone called Marvin Ducksch, which is a pretty fun name too, if hard to type. I doubt I’ll be watching much football this season. It’s too much of a time sink. And then next summer there will be the World Cup, now bloated to the max. It’ll never stop.

Last night I played Scrabble online for the first time in ages. I was strangely nervous; there were some crazy people on there the last time I tried. I just played one game and won by 130 points. I put down one bingo: SLATERS, another name for woodlice. (I just looked it up. It says the word “slater” is only used in that sense in Scotland, Australia and New Zealand. All that time in NZ made me think it was a universal name for the little bug.)

I’ve had a good few weeks on the weight-loss front. I’m down to 72.5 kg, or eleven stone six. I’ve dropped twelve pounds since March.

On Thursday there was a national day of mourning after Ion Iliescu, the controversial first post-revolutionary president of Romania, died at 95.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Music - Writing a book

We need more Mikas

August 6, 2025 by 0 Comments

On Saturday I made another trip to Jimbolia. My parents called me while I was there. I tried to give them a video tour of the town but they were struggling to stay awake. Jet lag has hit them both hard this time around, though I think they’re just about over it now. After Mum’s ongoing irregularity, she’s all of a sudden very regular indeed. A more pressing problem for her is her eyesight. Dad says it’s got worse since I saw her in the UK, which must mean she’s practically as blind as a bat now. And she’s still driving a car. Yeesh. It doesn’t bear thinking about. As for me, it’s taken me a heck of a long time to get over the bug I probably picked up from my nephew. My doctor gave me some soluble pills last week and they seem to have worked.

On Saturday night I went to a free concert in Parcul Civic. I say free, but there were ample opportunities to buy overpriced food and drink if you wanted. I only turned up for the end of the concert to see Mika, the British–Lebanese artist who had a biggish hit with Grace Kelly in 2007. He’s had a couple of other hits since then that I didn’t even realise were him. I really enjoyed his versatility, his enthusiasm, his humour. He’s a bit mad, which helped. He could even speak a few words of Romanian. I was impressed. I mean, întoarceți-vă (turn around) isn’t the easiest phrase to articulate. He lived part of his childhood in Paris, so he probably grew up bilingual (at least), which would make learning other languages easier. I came away thinking, he’s a good guy, isn’t he. The world needs more Mikas.

Not much other news. The ex-owner of this place left behind an expensive-looking speaker system (and much more: a Gucci watch, a load of books including Grey’s Anatomy and a bunch of novels I’ve since read, and family photos). I’ve only just got round to getting the speakers working. I’m now able to play music through them from my laptop. I’m impressed with the sound quality. (Right now I’m playing Kiwi band The Phoenix Foundation.)

Later today a plumber should be coming over to look at the pong in the bathroom. It’s been a problem since I got the bath leak fixed last year. Dad, who’s more clued up on these matters than me (who isn’t?), couldn’t tell where the stench was coming from any more than I could. I really hope the plumber (not the same one as last year, obviously) won’t have to dismantle the tiles around the bath (again) to get at it.

I’ll try and persuade Dorothy (who now has a kitten) to have Kitty for a trial 24-hour period. If it works, great. I should be good to go to Poland or wherever for a few days and I can offer to take her cat in exchange. If not, well at least I tried.

Only two lessons today. With a bit more free time, I’m getting back to the book about my tennis partner. I had to reread the first five chapters – I couldn’t even remember what I’d written, it’s been so long.

Getting a view of Mika through the foliage

A couple of Kitty pics

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Romania

Roll on September

July 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

Last week I was having a discussion with the 11-year-old girl in Germany when she asked me what my favourite month was. When I said September, she thought I was crazy. End of holidays. Back to school. Homework. Tests. Getting up far too early. That’s what September means to her. But for me it means no more infernal heat for nine months. And yes, back to (hopefully) a full suite of lessons, without which life can feel purposeless.

Last summer messed me up mentally. The heat was relentless. So far (touch wood) this summer has been more manageable. Yes, we’ll be well into the 30s every day until Saturday, but then we’ll get a break. That’s just as well, because I’ve been feeling a bit down ever since my parents came over. Lots of talk about their properties and plans, lots too about my brother (his kids, his house, his career plans, his master’s degree), and then there’s me, stuck out here on my own, my life rather meaningless in comparison. Then there’s the sudden realisation that Mum and Dad are properly old and I’ll have to play a more active role in their lives. Having Kitty is certainly a positive amid all of this.

On Monday I saw a survey in which the majority of Romanians thought that Ceaușescu was a good president and would prefer to return to communism. Anybody under 40 has no memory of that time so wouldn’t know first-hand how awful things got, especially in the final years. He’s become something of a cult figure on social media. A cartoon character. I was shocked to see Ceaușescu fridge magnets for sale when I visited those monasteries four years ago. Older people fondly recall being young and pretty, with lives largely free of hard decisions. It’s still striking to see a poll like that though. People have frighteningly short memories. And we got pretty damn close to going back there in May’s presidential election.

Ozzy Osbourne has died at the age of 76. A legend. And like so many other icons of heavy metal, a Brummie. He held a farewell concert at Villa Park just two and a half weeks before his death. He had a horrific quad bike accident in 2003 that almost did for him. (Those things are bloody lethal. The following year I came off a quad bike on my cousin’s farm on the Coromandel. Not far from Thames. I got my leg trapped underneath it. I wasn’t hurt but it was certainly scary.)

Last week Felix Baumgartner died in a paragliding accident; he probably had a heart attack while he was still in the air. He’s the daredevil who jumped from the edge of space in 2012. I remember that well. There was Chuck Yeager with his “Attaboy” just before Baumgartner leapt into the void. Obama was about to be re-elected. We’d just had the London Olympics. The Queen’s diamond jubilee. Gangnam Style. I felt pretty crap about my own life, but at least the world still made some kind of sense. But within a year, social media had swallowed the lot and spat it out, and here we are. Because of his Romanian girlfriend, Baumgartner’s death has received a lot of attention where I am.

The golf. Scottie Scheffler, easily the best player right now, won the Open easily too. There was just the one slight bunker-based brain fart which resulted in a double bogey, but he soon put that behind him. But for that mishap, he didn’t have any single bogeys in the entire weekend. Best name of the tournament went to Chris Gotterup (‘e’s got ‘er up onto the green); he finished third. Runner-up was Harris English. I kept thinking his first name was Johnny. There were so many vying for second place that if it hadn’t been for Scheffler it would have been an absorbing afternoon and evening. Never mind.

Mum and Dad are off in just 48 hours. I still haven’t worked out where (or even if) I’m going between now and September.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Taxing times

July 18, 2025 by 0 Comments

Kitty keeps changing her happy place. Right now she has two. One is my bed. The other is the well of the printer that I got fixed recently. Yes, it’s got a Kitty-sized pit. This weekend I’ll take her for a test drive – an hour in a box to see how she copes. My guess is not very well, but you never know.

It’s hosing it down right now. Much rather that than 35-plus. So I’ll be probably driving to my upcoming lesson. It’s nice to have that option I suppose, although I did manage perfectly well for over seven years without it. This morning I had a two-hour lesson with the girl who once wrote that she was bored. Two hours. An aeon. I resorted to giving her a 100-question test that took up most of the session. She got 77%, a commendable effort considering she was visibly tired by the end of it. (I rarely give tests, but when I do, they’re nearly always harder than what the kids get at school. Often these kids are used to perfect or near-perfect scores, so I can have a job convincing them that they haven’t failed calamitously.)

On Monday I had my weekly Romanian lesson. I’m not sure how much it’s really helping. My Romanian has stalled, at best. This time I asked the teacher about a sign I’d seen at a market stall: Avem mațe. Hmm, mațe means intestines, doesn’t it? The sort you make sausage skins out of. We have intestines. Nice. I guessed that because the stall sells mainly booze and tobacco, it must mean something else. Cigarette papers or something. But no, my teacher assured me that it really does mean intestines for making sausage skins, and those visiting would know the stallholder personally. Stuff like this, or the clatter of the backgammon pieces if I visit the market on a Saturday, makes me feel more alive.

It’s hard to see, but Avem mațe is in the red circle. Avem tutun means “We have tobacco”. I wonder where the name Bampoa comes from.

It’s melon time. Marius Oltean, the melon man from Dăbuleni, even has a TikTok account.

My brother and I have been in contact with our aunt. Partly we’ve talked about her and our uncle’s recent house move, but the hot topic has been our parents. That’s great because we all agree on our parents’ urgent need to downsize and simplify the heck out of their lives. It’s also great because Mum respects our aunt a lot. I’ve been telling our aunt to badger Mum about the seeing the doctor when my parents get back ten days from now. There’s also the matter of Mum’s cataracts when she’ll need to get removed. Right now she’s as blind as a bat. You can point out a bird on a branch a few feet away and she won’t see it. Though both our parents are remarkably fit physically for their age still, a lot of things have come to a head quite suddenly, and my brother and I will have get far more involved.

Mum said something recently which made it clear that our attitudes to money are poles apart. She was talking about the verges – berms, as Kiwis might call them – in and around St Ives which the council had left unmown. Example 574 of how Britain has gone to the dogs. Fine. But then she specified. It was the verges beside the most expensive houses that bothered her. Their owners pay massive rates (or council tax) bills, she said, so they should be the ones that the council prioritises. The verges near the cheaper houses can basically go hang. Her idea might be a really common one for all I know, but it’s not one that’s ever crossed my mind. Owners pay rates based on the value of their property, then all that money gets pooled together and spent on libraries and playgrounds and rubbish collection and mowing (or not mowing) verges. Across the board throughout the area in which the council operates, irrespective of the proximity of a particular service to high-value properties. Isn’t that how it works, or am I being hopelessly naive? I wonder if Mum thinks that access to treatment for, I dunno, stage 3 cancer, should be based on one’s earnings to that point.

Council tax (i.e. rates) in the UK is weird. And unfair. Even though I’ve never owned a UK property, I know about council tax in some detail because my student, that one who’s getting a divorce, tried to get his bill lowered. It went to court, he didn’t win, and it set him back £10,000 in court costs. Not great for their marriage, I imagine. The weirdness and unfairness are twofold. One, the big one, is that council tax in England is based on the value of your property in 1991. Unless some government decides to change the law, that 1991 date is set in stone. In perpetuity. For anything built after that date, they estimate what it hypothetically would have been worth then. As for extensions and so on, don’t ask. Of course prices haven’t gone up uniformly throughout the country since ’91. They’ve skyrocketed in London and the south-east but have risen more slowly in the north. So if you’ve got a house worth £700k in some fashionable suburb in London, you’ll be paying a lot less tax than someone with a £700k house in a less swanky part of Yorkshire, because of its much lower ’91 value. Absurd, isn’t it? The second problem is that council tax has eight bands, A to H, with A being the lowest. Once you’re in H, you can’t go any higher, so someone owning a house worth many millions in London doesn’t pay any more than that owner in Yorkshire. (Some very expensive houses aren’t even in H anyway.) There really should be bands stretching into the middle of the alphabet at the very least. Oh, and for rental properties, it’s the tenants that have to pay council tax, not the landlords. The whole system needs a huge overhaul. Maybe it shouldn’t even be based on property value at all. They should probably hammer AirBnBs and second properties left vacant. Someone far cleverer than me could dream up a fair and workable system. What they have now clearly isn’t it. (New Zealand’s, with its rateable values updated every three years, is certainly better.) By the way, this all came about after the ill-conceived poll tax (a uniform tax per adult, brought in at the end of Thatcher’s time) which resulted in riots. Anything is better than that, which I could tell was appalling even though I was ten years old.

I hadn’t meant to write so much about bloody council tax! Mum and Dad often talk about the UK going to the dogs. Dad is worse than Mum in that regard. It’s not great, but I wouldn’t say it’s quite as bad as they make out. (Dad would feel better about his homeland if he stopped reading the Daily Mail.) Part of it is just a general negativity about the present. We’re all guilty of that, especially as we get older. I know I am. This week I saw a news presenter (a bit older than me) interviewing an aviation expert about last month’s Air India crash. He said, it seems there are more crashes now than there were in the past. I was practically shouting at the screen, even before the expert replied. Flying is far safer now than say 40 years ago.

Books - Family - Life :) - Tennis

Windfall and new (and old) balls

July 15, 2025 by 0 Comments

Recently Dad found out that his mother had an account in a bank (or was it a building society?) that no longer exists. So he could reclaim the money, which might have been a fiver for all he knew, I ordered my grandmother’s death certificate online, then Dad got photocopies and other bits and pieces. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a few hundred. Even a thousand. Late last week he got a cheque in the mail (cheque – it’s still 1995 in the UK apparently) for about £11,500. A pleasant surprise. Dad will give my two UK-based cousins, now orphans after their mother died last year, a quarter each. My brother wanted Dad to keep the whole thing secret and not give his cousins a penny. He’s not a fan of his cousins – “they’re not nice people and they’ve had enough handouts already” was how he put it – but Dad couldn’t do that.

I was on the phone to my parents for an hour today. Most of that was taken up with money stuff. Not just that surprise windfall, but preparing to sell their third and fourth properties and seeing lawyers and accountants. From my vantage point, it’s all so bizarre. As I’ve said before on this blog, it’s like watching the All Blacks play Romania, 75-0 up in the last minute, desperate for one last push over the line before the final hooter. (OK, it’s more like 75-7 now. They switched off momentarily at the back when they bought the mad house.)

I’m still trying to lose weight. Since I started my effort, I’ve dropped three kilos, which isn’t nothing, but I’ve still got a paunch I’d like to get rid of and a couple of pairs of jeans I’d like to get into. Losing weight isn’t easy. Although I try not to write too much about it here, I still go days or weeks on end of struggling to enjoy a whole lot. Except food. When I’m in one of those spells, resisting the temptation to totally pig out on some big cheesy sausagey pasta-y thing takes some doing.

Yesterday I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român for the exercise. I was just finishing a coffee there when my brother rang. I moved out of the bar, in which some old geezers were playing a particularly loud game of cards, and sat in a gazebo, out of the sun. We discussed the windfall – those bloody cousins – and our parents’ need to offload those properties toot-sweet.

Wimbledon. It’s over for another year. The men’s final was a damn good match, with Sinner the winner and I suppose the grinner. He was the better man on the day. Still, it could have got hairy for him when he faced 15-40 on his serve at 4-2 in the fourth set, especially after what he endured at Roland Garros last month. His serve was brilliant throughout. Alcaraz and Sinner keep producing great matches and right now they’re a league apart from the rest. (I should mention that Sinner got away with one against Grigov Dimitrov in the fourth round. Dimitrov of Bulgaria was two sets up when he was forced to retire with a crippling injury to his right pec.) As for the women, I said last time that Amanda Anisimova’s winning shot in her semi-final – against the world number one – was “sublime”. Well, it went from the sublime to the ridiculous in double-quick time on Saturday. Iga Świątek whitewashed her. It was just the second 6-0 6-0 Wimbledon final; the only other was in 1911. (There was one rather more recent whitewash in a grand slam final, when Steffi Graf beat Natasha Zvereva in the 1988 French Open. Steffi was untouchable that year – she won the calendar slam and Olympic gold.) You had to feel for Anisimova. She had 40-15 in an early service game, I think four chances to win it, then it all just unravelled against an opponent who wouldn’t let up for a second. Please, just win one game…

Mum watched a lot more Wimbledon than me. That’s great. It’s helped to relax her. It’s also given us something nice to talk about. Mum and I often used to watch matches together. (We played a lot together, too.) Steffi and Novotna in ’93. Steffi and Hingis in ’99 at the French Open. I’ve thought today about that first time we were lucky enough to go to Wimbledon, for the first time, in ’98. We were members of a small tennis club that was allocated ten pairs of tickets. We went into a draw and our names came out of the hat. (Because the club was so small, our odds were decent.) Our tickets were for No. 1 court on the first Saturday. We took the train there. Before taking our seats, we watched a pair of clay-courters thrash it out on an outside court. It was jaw-dropping stuff. TV gives you no real appreciation for how hard those guys are larruping the ball. The only match we saw in its entirety on No. 1 court was Petr Korda – champion at Melbourne earlier that year – against Jérôme Golmard of France. Korda won in four close sets. (Golmard, I just found out, died of motor neuron disease at only 43.) Midway through the next match the rain came, as it so often does. There were conga lines and people in ponchos, but that was that. No roof back then. That No. 1 court had only just been built and the atmosphere in the stadium was surprisingly sleepy. Mum actually did fall asleep in the fourth set of the men’s match. I also remember smoke drifting across the court from a fire in a nearby apartment.

I’ve just started reading a book called Ella Minnow Pea. If that sounds like the middle of the alphabet, it is. It’s about a fictitious world in which letters of the alphabet are progressively outlawed. It reminds me that I need to write my series of posts about the alphabet that I’ve had planned for ages.

Still no news from the publisher about the fate of my book(s).

Books - Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis

Perfect storm

July 12, 2025 by 0 Comments

We had severe storms here on both Monday and Tuesday. The alert system worked a treat, unlike eight years ago when nobody saw those 15 minutes of mayhem coming, and people lost their lives. I watched the roof opposite like a hawk – it was still gleaming having been replaced just last month – and the tiles held. Further east the storm was much more devastating – buildings and cars were destroyed and people were badly injured. I was grateful for the much cooler weather that the turmoil brought. The few days I’ve been able to sleep, to actually live. Isn’t that great? (OK, I’m suffering a bit from a cold, coughing up thick gunk.)

My brother called me yesterday while I was half-watching the semi-final between Alcaraz and Fritz. (Alcaraz won in four sets following a dramatic tie-break. He’ll play Sinner in the final, a repeat of that match at the French Open last month.) We’d spoken a couple of days before. Oh god, what’s happened? It was to do with our parents’ UK properties which they plan – desperately need, in fact – to offload. Because they don’t live in the UK, solicitors won’t touch them with a barge pole. Increased risk of fraud, apparently. I’m sure they can find someone who’ll deal with their situation, at the right price. It’s hardly rare, after all. My god, my parents’ lives have got pretty damn complicated all of a sudden, haven’t they? This property crap is going to dominate their lives for god knows how long and, as my brother said, it’ll take over a fair chunk of our lives too. They should also get rid of their mad house in Geraldine sooner rather than later. Mum seems hell-bent on selling the Moeraki place even though it’s the only place they have that isn’t either shit or causing shit. And Mum still isn’t well – she goes to the loo every fifth day or something – and is determined not to see the doctor. All their problems are surmountable if they could just be businesslike about things, but Mum stopped being businesslike about anything ages ago. It makes me question the purpose of accumulating all this vast wealth (by my standards, it’s certainly vast) if all it does is cause constant stress in your old age. When I last spoke to Dad, he said he’d lost sleep because of it, and that was before the latest business with the solicitors.

In other news, my London-based student of seven years told me his divorce that was on, then was off, is now back on. He was amazingly matter-of-fact about the whole thing. How will your boys cope? They just will. He said it’s a shame I guess after being married for six years. Six years? I said. But you started having lessons with me seven years ago and weren’t you married then? Hmm, let me see, oh yes, it’s nine years. Time flies I suppose. My wife has a good job, he said, so she’ll be fine. What does she do exactly? I asked. Don’t really know, he said.

I finished The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde’s only novel) earlier this week. I kept flitting between liking it a lot and barely tolerating it, getting it and not getting it. The chapter with all the gemstones and spices slowed me down, as it was meant to, even though I enjoyed all the vivid vocabulary – words like bezoar. Then I rattled through the next few chapters. A wild ride. It must have been highly controversial in its day.

I felt pretty down after saying goodbye to Mum and Dad. Especially Mum. On Friday night I hardly slept. I’ve also had a cold. On the other hand I’ve had a good week of lessons considering it’s summer – I’m just about to have one on square roots. Work is always a pretty useful antidote.

The women’s Wimbledon final between Świątek and Anisimova takes place this evening. There was a great finish to Anisimova’s win over Sabalenka in the semi. That winner to end it, when it could easily have slipped from her grasp if she hadn’t nailed it, was sublime.

Cat - Life :)

Trip report to come…

July 5, 2025 by 0 Comments

I got back last night at 2am, very tired and with a chesty cough that I’ve probably picked up from Mum. Luckily that’s all I’ve picked up from her. (She isn’t great at the moment.) The temperatures today have been horrendous – we hit 39 this afternoon. I don’t have the energy for much, though I will venture outside now that a breeze has sprung up. Lots to write about, but I can’t face doing that now. Dad thought I might come home to find a skeleton on the mat, but no, Kitty had been well looked after. She seemed to miss me, judging by all the meowing. I gave Elena two boxes of biscuits. Next Thursday I’ll take her to the airport for her very early flight.