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Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports

Trying not to sweat the small stuff

April 30, 2024 plutomanby 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.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

Dreary and weary

April 19, 2024 plutomanby 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.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

The warmest everything ever, everywhere

March 8, 2024 plutomanby 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.

Books - Language learning - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports

Beating the drop

March 4, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It could have been curtains

February 20, 2024 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

And that’s my lot.

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

Food for thought

January 24, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life :) - Music - Other sports

Going back in time

January 16, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

Life :) - Music - Other sports

Lukes that kill

January 4, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Searching for inspiration

January 3, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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