Life :)

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I wish I could have known the story

February 3, 2026 by 0 Comments

Earlier today I went to the supermarket to get one or two bits and pieces. There was a very old lady, dressed in not much more than rags on a zero-degree day, and all of about four foot nine, looking at the sachets of hot paprika. “Not hot,” she said, “I want the not hot.” These sachets were on a special stand, away from the rest of the herbs and spices. I didn’t know where the mild paprika was, or even if they had any. There are supermarkets everywhere in Timișoara. That’s convenient, but it means that each of them has hardly any staff. I got frustrated. Can’t somebody help this woman? Eventually a young female member of staff located the lady’s non-spicy paprika. Then the old lady asked me where the small tins of tomato purée were. This time I could help her. Is there anything else I can help you with? She didn’t reply. I wanted to ask where she lived and whether she had children or grandchildren. There was a story there, spanning eight or nine decades.

Some good news – there has been a development with the books. The other lady (not Dorothy) with whom I went to Vienna in 2024 has put me in touch with a woman who runs a publishing house. She’s based some way south of here, close to the Danube. She seems to like both books, based on the samples I sent her. Today she asked me why the font size I used for the headings in the small book (the one that Dad illustrated) is so much larger than the body text. Well, it’s simply to make an impact, rather like a newspaper. After all, it’s not a textbook designed to be ploughed through from beginning to end. I’ll see what happens next, but the fact that she’s even asking about these sorts of details is encouraging.

More good news – my brother and I had practically given up on Mum and Dad coming over, but now they’re at least considering it. If they do make the trip, it won’t be for nearly as long as last time. A lot will depend on what happens with the flat in St Ives. Yesterday I had a chat with my brother. My nephew was running around constantly while my niece is very nearly walking. I don’t always get to see the kids, so that was great.

I watched the third and fourth sets of Carlos Alcaraz’s history-making win over Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open final. I missed the early stages when Djokovic apparently played lights-out tennis (at the age of almost 39!) and Alcaraz was in second gear. The age gap became pretty apparent as the match progressed, but even then Djokovic found a second wind of sorts in the fourth set and came close to sending the match to a decider. Djokovic also served pretty damn well. Amazingly that was the Serb’s first loss in a final at Melbourne – he’s won it ten times. But for Alcaraz, whose lack of weaknesses borders on terrifying, the sky’s the limit. That was his seventh major title and he’s now completed the career grand slam before his 23rd birthday. The match reminded me a bit of the 2005 US Open final, in which Agassi at 35 faced, and ultimately lost to, Federer who at the time was all-conquering. That was a great tournament. I was flatting then. We had no Sky TV so I just listened to it on the radio in between studying for my professional exams. The American commentator referred to the net as the twine, I seem to remember. Saturday’s women’s final wasn’t too shabby either, but with a busy work day I had no chance of seeing it.

In the latest round of the Scrabble league I’ve so far won four and lost four; I’m up in five of the six remaining games, so you never know… They may tweak things a bit soon – when experts join the league, they enter in the bottom division, mostly thrashing the poor schmucks who aren’t at that level. That isn’t fun for anybody.

At the weekend I was reading an article about UK salaries and pension plans and the expense of living in London and I thought about how much I’ve checked out of what you might call normal life. The great thing about living Romania – well, one of them – is that being here makes checking out perfectly fine. If I went back to New Zealand I don’t think it would be anymore and I’d likely go back to thinking that something is drastically wrong with me.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Taking a tumble

January 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve just finished my lesson with Matei. Not that Matei, the one who will have maths lessons with me for another few months until he goes to Germany, but another Matei, who wears gallons of after shave and will be doing a Cambridge C1 exam at some point. Kitty scratched me seconds before our lesson, so I had to get a plaster as soon as we started. We did reading exercises. One of them was about Olympic medallists who give motivational speeches at companies, after which the employees think, yeah, that was kind of fun to listen to but how will it help me in the slightest to do my job better?

Yesterday afternoon, when we reached our top temperature of minus 5, I went for a walk. Having got to the river (which was partly iced over) and turned for home, I took a pretty big tumble on the ice. I fell on my back and must have hit my head, though I don’t remember. I got up OK, but I was dizzy and felt absolutely terrible. I was winded and stood up against a window ledge for five minutes before feeling able to carry on. I walked the kilometre or so home very gingerly.

On Friday Elena (the 82-year-old lady who lives above me) got back from Canada. Yesterday she invited me up for coffee. She seemed to be coping extremely well with jet lag. I brought Kitty along; for whatever reason she wasn’t a happy camper.

Last night I had a 55-minute chat with Mum and Dad. They were about to make another trip down to Moeraki, and then on to Wanaka, to retrieve a painting that didn’t sell at an exhibition. I’m not sure any other paintings sold there either. I came away from the call feeling quite worried about Mum, whose digestive issues are still very unsorted, and coupled with all of that she’s now practically blind in one eye. She’s also been full of cold the last few days. She hasn’t been to golf for a while and yesterday she didn’t even go to church. From 11,000 miles away where I can do absolutely nothing, it’s all a bit of a concern.

Family - Life :) - Music

A quiet Christmas

December 26, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s been a very uneventful Christmas Day which I don’t mind at all. The living room looks halfway decent now so I attacked the bathroom. Then I made a salam de biscuiți – well two of them, actually – and a salată de boeuf to take to Dorothy’s tomorrow. I’ve had a lot of Merry Christmas messages with a couple of Marry Christmas ones thrown in. No Mary Christmas ones yet, but there’s still time. A bit earlier I had a chat with my neighbour Elena who is still in Canada bit will arrive back in Timișoara on 9th January.

I haven’t spoken to my brother today, though we had a chat last night. I imagine it’s pretty full-on for him, with his son now three and a quarter and amped all of a sudden by Christmas. Mum and Dad had a stress-free Christmas Day which I’m very happy about. They had dinner at Mum’s older sister’s place in Timaru; my cousin, her husband, daughter and son were also there. My cousin is simply a nice person with a great family, so that would have made everything way easier. My parents had been invited to go out somewhere on Christmas Eve, but Mum did something out-of-character (and utterly brilliant): she said no. She had stuff to do for the church and desserts to make for Christmas Day and all the rest of it, so hats off to her for uttering that very handy two-letter word.

Another of my twenty cousins, the one who lives in New York state, is over in New Zealand with his wife. Just before Christmas they went to Stewart Island with my cousin’s parents. My uncle is 84 and is suffering from memory loss, so I’m not sure what the trip would have been like. My cousin is a keen golfer and recently got a super-rare two on a par-five, known as an albatross. Holes-in-one are ten a penny when compared to an albatross. I’m impressed he was even able to drive the ball far enough to reach the green in two. Yes, I have exactly twenty cousins, just two of whom are on my father’s side.

Yesterday I ended up watching a YouTube video about the 1996 Ethopian Airlines flight that was hijacked. Not long after the plane took off from Ethiopia, three men stormed the cockpit (as you could do in pre-9/11 days) and attacked the pilots with an axe and a fire extinguisher. They beat up the co-pilot, then ordered the pilot to fly to Australia, which was impossible – the plane didn’t have nearly enough fuel for that. Eventually the plane ran out of fuel and ditched off Comoros Islands, near a beach resort. The ditching was spectactularly caught on amateur video – whoever shot the video initially thought it was some kind of air show. Fifty of the 175 people on board survived, including both pilots. I had no recollection of this incident, even though I could remember two other crashes from the same year.

On Monday when I was at Mark’s, they had some music playing. I can’t remember who, but I commented that it sounded rather like Tracy Chapman. Mark’s wife then put on all of her first album, which I much appreciated. I never imagined she’d be a fan. Today I’ve been listening to a few Christmas songs including Chuck Berry’s Run Rudolph Run which I don’t remember hearing before.

I’m still a bit hazy about Dad’s health. Mum’s too, to be honest. Dad told me he was disoriented when he flew his model plane last Sunday. When the plane is flying away from you instead of towards you, left becomes right on the controls and vice-versa. He said he was momentarily confused with that, even though he’s been flying these planes since the late nineties. I can see worries about my parents’ health dominating large chunks of 2026.

Family - Life :) - Music - Scrabble

The game is rigged (and a health update)

December 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

Firstly, Dad sent me a video entitled How to Get Rich. It’s a must-watch. The game of accumulating wealth is increasingly rigged against young people (and even not-so-young people) unless they happen to have rich parents. And upsettingly (and “coincidentally”), people’s self-worth became synonymous with wealth in the eighties, just when the rigging clicked into overdrive. My solution to the rigged game was to walk off the pitch entirely, and I say that as as someone who does have well-off parents, if not exactly rich ones. Honestly I gave up chasing wealth in my late twenties, well before I even thought about living anywhere near Romania.

I spoke to Dad on Sunday night (Monday morning over there). Mum happened to be at the supermarket. Dad looked terrible. He felt dizzy and spoke of an attack of some sort, less than an hour before we spoke and just before Mum went out. His symptoms sounded akin to a mini stroke. While we were talking, Mum came home looking as happy as Larry. She asked me why I looked so worried. Dad later emailed me to say that he and Mum had managed to go for a walk, which was good to hear, and other than that he’d spent the rest of the day working on a painting in the studio. Mum, for her part, hasn’t been great either.

I’ve been on a go-slow today. I just felt so tired. Yesterday I only had a single two-hour lesson and then had a Christmas dinner of sorts in Dumbrăvița with Mark and his wife. Our last one – they’re moving back to the UK, probably in June. Mark, who (unlike his wife) enjoys cooking, made a risotto, while I brought over both my leftover cottage pie and a salată de boeuf I’d made earlier in the day. We had some interesting conversation, a lot of it (inevitably) about teaching because we all do so much of it. Mark’s wife at one point commented that eating out in Romania has got so much more expensive, saying she’d recently been out for sushi with one of the other teachers; it cost the equivalent of £80 each. What?! I said that I’d never spent eighty quid on a meal out in my life, which was certainly no lie. Unexpectedly, the three of us ended up playing Texas Hold ’em poker. Mark busted out early, then his wife won heads-up against me. Really I just wanted to get home by that point.

Scrabble. I’m back playing the Romanian guy again. He says he wants me to play real-life Scrabble. There’s a tournament in Cluj (which is where he lives) in February. Just weeks away. Playing serious Scrabble over the board would be a pretty nerve-wracking experience for me. Top players don’t just put down words, they also do admin stuff like tile-tracking so they can later figure out the endgame, which is something I’ve never done because when you play online that’s all done for you. Plus I might just be too busy for something like that. I’ll have to think about it. Overall I haven’t done badly in the league this time around. I had two surprise narrow victories (by ten and five points) which have certainly helped me.

I never mentioned the Bondi Beach shooting that happened last week, killing at least 15 people including a ten-year-old girl. I stayed at Bondi Beach in 2000, a few weeks before the Olympics, while my parents were living in Cairns. I think of Australia as being a safe haven of sorts, but it’s just as vulnerable to terror attacks as anywhere else; there have been a number in the last decade or so.

I heard that Chris Rea has died. He’s most famous for Driving Home for Christmas which is an excellent Christmas song, though I really like his Road to Hell and especially Auberge.

We’re losing pop and rock stars at a rate of knots now. It’s hard to believe that nearly ten years have passed since David Bowie died. Lately my go-to song has been his Sound and Vision.

Tomorrow will be my cleaning-up day.

Cat - Films - Life :)

The absence of people

December 22, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’m absolutely desperate right now to not see anybody. Gagging for the total absence of people, and as such, to recharge my batteries. From the 27th to the 31st I might have one or two online lessons, but apart from that I will not see anyone over that period.

I get about 95% of my recommended daily human contact from work alone. I hardly need anything else. Dorothy invited me to church today. Not just the service, but also lunch afterwards. That meant I had to make something. There would be people of all nationalities, so people had to bring something from their home country. I made something British – a cottage pie. As I was making it last night, I felt exhausted. Making sure I have all the ingredients, buying those few ingredients I didn’t have, then making the pie which nobody was going to bloody eat (let’s face it), then going to the service and the lunch and getting there and back – all in all it was nearly six hours. Six hours that I’ll never get back. During the service itself, I felt pretty out of place. And very tired. I ended up next to a large man who told me his first two names were Cristian and Emanuel. Very Christmassy, I said. “If there’s anything in Romanian you don’t understand, let me know.” “I’m sure I’ll manage.” Eventually we came to the sermon which of course was in Romanian. (At 80-something minutes, the service was shorter than I expected.) The moment the sermon ended, Cristian Emanuel asked me in English, “So what were the three truths?” Oh god, you’re literally testing me?! Don’t you realise that I’m simply going through the motions here? The food bit wasn’t so bad, but I was still dying to get away. The Australian woman was there. She’s virtually my age and incredibly now has a three-month-old son. We talked about Antipodean expressions. She brought a pavlova which was very good. It reminded me of all my Kiwi Christmases. (Well, Mum made a lot of pavlovas even when we were still all in the UK.) A young woman from Ethiopia showed me how to type in Amharic on her phone. They have an alphabet (or really a syllabary) that works rather like Japanese hiragana but with far more symbols (over 200), presumably because the language has a larger inventory of sounds than Japanese.

I got away. Earlier this evening there was the English conversation club which meant yet more talking. Yesterday the 17-year-old girl wanted her third maths lesson of the week with me. I was seeing Matei at ten, then I had lunch with the tennis people at one, so I agreed to meet her at four. I got back home with a few minutes to spare and the bell went immediately while I was having a pee. Oh jeez, give time to have a pee will you, and preferably make a cup of tea and feed Kitty too.

Water, a two-year-old cat and a laptop really don’t mix, as I found out on Friday morning, ten minutes before I was due to start a lesson. Kitty jumped up and knocked a glass of water, mostly over me and the sofa, but a small amount went over the laptop keyboard. I wiped the keyboard – surely it’ll be fine – and quickly got changed, then bugger. This keyboard really isn’t working. For a while the digits were stuck, then M gave me H and G gave me V and the space bar wasn’t working properly. It still isn’t quite right now. The forward and down arrows aren’t working, and neither are some of the keys on the numerical keypad, but at least all the normal keys (if you like) are fine. Maybe those other keys will come right after I next shut down. I have no idea how any of the circuitry, or what have you, works. What a pain though, and for a while on Friday I was worried I’d have a keyboard that was completely out of action – a huge problem when my work relies so heavily on it.

Scrabble. The latest round of the league started on Thursday. It’s tough. My opponents are just too good. They’ve played proper tournaments – nationals and even world championships in some cases. The top divisions feature a world-class line-up. Last time I was fortunate to eke out enough games to escape the bottom five, but this time I don’t think I’ll be so lucky. As well as the Romanian again, there’s a New Zealander in my division this time – she’s from Palmerston North – as well as some Australians.

On Friday I went with Dorothy to Cinema Timiș to see The Yellow Tie, a film all about the Romanian conductor Silviu Celibidache. A brilliant film, and I realised how lucky we now are to have these proper cinemas in the city that don’t necessitate going to the mall. The acoustics were great, which for that sort of film you absolutely need. And at just 25 lei, it’s frankly a steal.

This flat is a complete mess. Christmas Eve will probably be my tidying-up day. I’ve got nothing planned for Christmas Day. On Boxing Day there’s something going on at Dorothy’s place. Then after that all I’ve got planned is a whole load of not seeing people.

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching

Well that’s a relief…

November 20, 2025 by 0 Comments

I had a good night’s sleep last night. I had an easier than average work day yesterday. And I still feel absolutely shattered.

Last night I met up with Mark at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. We both had spätzle which Mark had had before but was totally new to me. Spätzle are a kind of German egg noodles; mine were topped with minced beef in tomato sauce, so the dish was very much like bog-standard spaghetti bolognese. Very good though. We both drove there so neither of us could drink anything. Hopefully next time we go there, if there is a next time, we’ll be on our bikes. I say if there is a next time because Mark won’t be in Romania much longer. He and his wife are heading back to the UK. They may stick it out until the summer, but his wife has just applied for a deputy head position at a school in Cardiff; she’d start in three months’ time. Saying goodbye to Mark isn’t going to be much fun.

When I got back from Dumbrăvița I called my parents. Good news. Dad just happened to be closest to the phone when it rang, and he unilaterally accepted the offer of £245,000. A straight accept, no halfway house or anything. I don’t blame him. The risk of having the sale fall through is simply too great. Lately Mum has been attending an exercise class on Thursdays. This meant Mum had to leave in the middle of our chat, so I got the chance to talk to Dad alone. He said that for the past two days he’d had to deal with a permanently angry Mum. Angry with him, mostly. During these spells, which are all too frequent, Mum becomes practically impossible to live with. As I’ve said to Dad before, 80% of blokes wouldn’t put up with it as he does.

Braytim, that slightly weird name for a suburb of Timișoara that I was keen to avoid that I mentioned in my last post, is in fact the name of the Romanian–French construction company that built the development in the nineties. So it isn’t quite as new as I thought. The Bray part of the name comes from Saint-Jean-de-Braye, which is a place in France, while tim obviously comes from Timișoara. There are names ending in (or beginning with) tim everywhere here. I once thought about setting up a teaching company called Verbatim.

I had an interesting maths lesson yesterday with a 12-year-old girl. For a while we went off-topic. At one point I mentioned car loans, saying that they’re generally a terrible idea. She wondered why. They give you ages to pay it off, right? If you take out a car loan for €10,000, I said, how much would you have to pay back? Well, €10,000, of course. No, it might be more like €15,000. Whatever the figure, it’s a lot more than the original price. This is the sort of thing they should be teaching you in maths classes at school. Well of course they’re not going to teach us that! That’s life stuff, and you don’t get taught life stuff at school. Gosh, sadly you’re absolutely positively right on that point, aren’t you?

Family - Life :) - Music - Romania - Scrabble - The UK

Delta plans?

November 3, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s 23 degrees right now: very warm for early November. I’ve just got back from Buziaș, one of my favourite towns in the vicinity. There were a lot of families milling around, taking advantage of the weather and crunchy golden-brown blanket of fallen leaves. With the ornate covered walkway too, it was quite a lovely setting. I realise I went there exactly 52 weeks ago, just before the US election, when there was still hope that it wouldn’t go, well, how I expected it to. Although Buziaș is great, the initial section of the road that takes you there – a deeply depressing stroad – is anything but.

Before Buziaș I spoke to my parents. Dad had crashed his plane that morning – it was a total write-off. On Wednesday night I managed to get Dad on his own as Mum had gone off on a golf trip. (During my summer, when their 9am is my midnight, that opportunity basically never arises.) First, it’s great that Mum is back playing golf again. Her stomach problems – which still aren’t resolved – had pretty much forced her to stay away from the course. During our long chat, Dad and I inevitably talked about Mum. I asked him for strategies to avoid falling out with her the next time I see her. It’s a real concern. One thing I thought of is humour. Mum has a pretty good sense of humour, and in the past when Dad (or I) has cracked a simple joke, that’s helped to take the sting out of things. Mum has fallen out (again) with her brother over Trump. My uncle is a fan of his. He has little to occupy himself and his unhealthy diet of sport and Fox News combats his boredom. I would have fallen out with him too.

Mum and Dad have finished watching Joanna Lumley’s Danube, a series on TV. They thoroughly enjoyed it, unsurprisingly because Joanna Lumley is great. I could have seen it here too on BBC, but I didn’t know about it; I’ll see if I can find it online. The last couple of episodes were in Romania; the Danube skirts around the country, then forms a delta – a veritable wonderland – before going out into the Black Sea. Having watched the series, my parents are keen to do a boat trip through the delta (if and) when they come here next year. That would be fantastic but would require considerable planning because it’s a long way from me and it’s vital that stress is kept to a minimum. I did a lesson on the delta some time ago.

Last weekend I met Dorothy at Scârț where they had a market of sorts. I picked up a record – produced in 1974 – full of Balinese gamelan music. The record was made in Italy, has a price in Deutsche marks on the front, and has ended up in Romania. It’s been around a bit, in other words. It’s great to listen to; it brings back memories of my childhood trips to Bali, especially the first trip. All the wonderful smells come flooding back too. Visiting in ’74 though, that would have really been something.

My university friend – it was his birthday yesterday – is currently in Morocco, joining his girlfriend’s parents there. It’s his first time out of Europe. His photos are brilliant. Lately I’ve complained of the saminess of modern travel; there’s nothing samey about those pictures, that’s for sure.

My microwave, which was in the flat when I moved in, had packed in (I’d got used to doing my porridge in the pan), so on Friday I got a new one from down the road. It seems wasteful, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t these things be repaired? These days it’s hardly worth the effort. I found one with two simple dials and nothing digital, which is what I wanted. In fact there were two like that; I got the larger, more powerful one because the price difference between the two was small. (It cost me 410 lei, or roughly £70 or NZ$160.) The woman at the checkout insisted that I purchase an extended warranty but I stubbornly refused. I know those things are a waste of money. When I got it home I opened the box, as you do, then removed the polystyrene packaging, as you do, then oh shit, the glass turntable which was hidden inside one of the chunks of polystyrene crashed to the floor into a thousand pieces. Kitty, you stay away. Fortunately the glass plate from the old microwave slotted in perfectly. (Good job I got the bigger one then.) I probably should have been more careful, but don’t they play-test these things? Loosely packing a glass plate inside polystyrene seems beyond nuts.

I played four games of Scrabble on Thursday night and another four yesterday. Both times I won two and lost two. Gamelan is valid, and a useful high-probability word. It’s good to know because it doesn’t follow the expected patterns of a word containing those letters. Naturally I’d want to put ng or age or man together when anagramming those seven letters, but gamelan doesn’t do anything like that.

In news very local to where I grew up, there was a stabbing last night on a train near Huntingdon station, a train I’ve been on dozens of times. Eleven people were injured, two of whom are currently in a life-threatening condition. Two men have now been arrested. It’s eerie to see the pictures of the familiar station with police cordons.

A busy day in store tomorrow. I’ve got the Romanian lesson starting at 8am, then a trip to the supermarket, then I’ll try and contact the woman with publishing contacts from years ago (no harm in trying), then I’ve got five English lessons finishing at 9:30.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Spelling it out

October 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s a dark, dank, windy Friday here. Tomorrow night the clocks will go back, meaning any final summery vestiges will be officially gone. I got up later than usual this morning; I woke up in the middle of the night and went into the living room where Kitty was being particularly affectionate. In fact, she’s chosen to clamber and walk over me, blocking the screen, as I attempt to write this. She’s purring loudly. This is all a far cry from when I first got her. Back then, she was unfriendly at best and positively evil at worst.

On Tuesday night I talked to my brother about his ambitious golden wedding plans for Mum and Dad, even including a blessing at the church. When I told him what I thought, he said I was being overly negative. “I’m not annoyed with you, but I just won’t talk about it anymore.” Actually, you are annoyed with me. I wouldn’t want to fall out with him over something like this. (Normally if he and our parents disagree on something, I end up siding with him, but not this time.) Thankfully we moved on from the subject and reminisced about our childhood Guy Fawkes nights. Yesterday I talked to Mum and Dad. It was pretty clear what they thought of the golden wedding business. Nice in theory, but wholly impractical. And I said to my brother, what even is negative about a simple meal with just the immediate family? Dad even said that after travelling halfway around the world, it would be another bloody thing that we could do without. That’s assuming they come at all.

Dad has been renewing his passport. He got an email back from the British authorities with a name change form attached. Huh? He’d misspelt his middle name on the application form. He’s also been trying to get a new gravestone made up for his mother’s grave in Wales. When the stonemason was about to get to work, Dad realised (or more likely Mum did) that he’d misspelt his mum’s name. He’s almost certainly dyslexic, though kids weren’t diagnosed back in his day. Thirty years later, my brother was diagnosed as having dyslexia, but wasn’t given much in the way of help. Yep, you’re dyslexic, now deal with it. Things have moved on since then.

Loosely on that theme, I had some annoying cancellations yesterday, though they allowed me to play Scrabble last night. It was a good session for me: five wins out of six. The first game was the tightest. I’d built up a healthy lead, but with the bag empty my opponent had great tiles including a blank. He (or she) would clearly find a bingo to end the game. I made a low-scoring play to offload as many of my tiles as possible – not a bad idea sometimes, but here there was higher-scoring play I should have made, even though it kept more tiles. It was easy to spot and I had plenty of time, so there were no mitigating factors. After my opponent went out with a 77-point bingo, I scraped home by five points. I noticed he could have scored 82 with a common word, leading to a draw, so I was lucky to still win after my blunder. In the second game I lurched from one crappy rack to the next and unsurprisingly lost, but then I won the next four games. One play of note from my side was the opening move of UMIAK. I’d learnt a few useful Q words including UMIAQ which is a boat used by Eskimos. It has an anagram of MAQUI which is a kind of shrub (with edible berries) found in Argentina and Chile. I was happy to remember that UMIAQ could also be (and is more commonly) spelt with a final K instead of the Q. (The dictionary tells me that there are seven valid spellings: OOMIAC, OOMIACK, OOMIAK, UMIAC, UMIACK, UMIAK and UMIAQ. How you’re ever supposed to remember this stuff, I have no idea.)

On Monday there was a huge outage that knocked out a whole load of Amazon services. Whenever I hear about such things, my initial thought is great. (I don’t use Amazon. Not intentionally, anyway.) I’d love to see the whole rotting tech edifice, dominated by five or six behemoths, come crashing down. The only sad thing about the episode, and it is a big one, is that it took out the payment system for Amazon staff at the same time.

It’s a light day today with just three lessons. Tomorrow I hope to catch up with Dorothy who has just got back from a trip to Greece, and also Mark. Maybe I’ll play squash with him on Sunday.

Family - Life :) - Photos

Golden no-go

October 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

At the weekend my brother messaged me about Mum and Dad’s upcoming golden wedding. It’s under six months away, on April 10th. He thought we should make a big thing of it in St Ives. But there are all kinds of reasons why that just ain’t gonna happen. For one, it’s unlikely they’ll be over in April. Heck, they might not be over at all. Then there just aren’t the people anymore. Most of the guests at Mum and Dad’s wedding are no longer even alive. It’s been half a century! There’s practically no family even. Simply put, it wouldn’t fly. Literally: Mum’s aging relatives in New Zealand are hardly going to make the trip for it. I think my brother still has fond memories of Mum’s parents’ golden wedding in 1989 when we just happened to be in New Zealand. And why not? It was quite the family occasion. All seven children and 18 grandchildren were present; there were uncles, aunts, cousins, you name it. Temuka was pretty much taken over by it. Stuff happened in the church, at St Joseph’s Hall, and best of all at the Tea Pot Inn (three words) where the fifty-odd (maybe more) of us had a celebratory meal.

On Saturday I had my usual maths session with Matei. He told me he’d been offered a university place at Bremen in Germany, assuming he gets the grades. Exciting for him. When he’s flown the nest, his parents will move Bucharest where they lived until 2016 when they moved to Timișoara for work. So after nine years, it looks like my time with Matei (and his family) will be at an end.

My cousin took part in the “No Kings” anti-Trump protests in New York state over the weekend. He’s not massively politically motivated, but that shows you the critical mass that has (at last) built up.

On Friday there was a huge gas explosion in a Ceaușescu-era tower block near Bucharest that killed three people including a pregnant woman. The disaster has since dominated the news.

Yesterday I took the car to Lake Surduc, and hour and a bit from here. Hardly a soul was there. The weather was just about perfect and it the autumn colours made for some nice scenery. Unfortunately there’s no way of walking around the lake unless you’re prepared to trudge through forest, which I actually did with Mark (and his dog) 3½ years ago. The lake is pretty close to that beautiful spot where I stayed with my friends from St Ives even further back. I came back via the town of Făget.

Topolovățu Mare, on the way to the lake

Lake Surduc

Făget
Life :)

Only the basics

October 12, 2025 by 0 Comments

Six days ago I picked up a cold and I’ve been on go-slow mode ever since. I’ve managed another 31-hour teaching week but that’s all I’ve managed. Wash, cook, feed Kitty, give my lessons, but everything else has gone by the board. Today I’m taking things as easy as possible before my five lessons tomorrow. (Kitty makes my lack of energy seem even more acute.)

Because I haven’t been feeling well, there’s not a lot to report. Trump didn’t win the Nobel peace prize. I’ve been reading about butterflies losing their bright colours to better blend in with their environment which is doing the same (ugh) and how the internet is becoming crappier by the minute thanks to enshittification and AI slop. This morning I watched a YouTube video from the brilliant RobWords about the (badly named) NATO phonetic alphabet. The familiar Alfa Bravo alphabet is extremely well designed. My brother must have used it extensively; I remember he once he described someone with undesirable olfactory qualities as having a Bravo Oscar problem. Another time I remember trying to use the NATO alphabet when ordering flowers after my uncle Mick had died. I wanted to include a message. “Sorry, is that Mick or Nick?” Mick, I said, with an M as in Mike. Adding a third name didn’t exactly clarify matters.

My parents are generally good, though when I last spoke to them they were reeling from a strong nor’wester. The forecast here is set fair for the next few days. Plenty of sun, with highs in the mid teens. Pretty much ideal.