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Spring, Mum, and Arad pictures

March 13, 2025 by 0 Comments

No more news from the publishers. I can’t even get through to them. I don’t think they’re malicious in any way (though I might be wrong); I just think they’re hopelessly disorganised, even by Romanian standards.

Mum and Dad just Skyped me from the hotspot in Hampden. (There will be no more Skyping after 5th May when Microsoft are pulling the plug on what has been an extremely handy – and simple – communication tool.) They seemed mostly fine, though Mum had low-level stomach pain. She had her colonography scan on Tuesday. It involved her taking a barium meal and being inflated via a tube stuck up her bum. She should get the results soon after they get home on Saturday. (They’re in Moeraki at the moment. They’re always more relaxed down there.)

On Tuesday I helped Dorothy take a bunch of old electronic bits and pieces to the tip. Her husband was something of a hoarder. One of the contraptions emitted UV rays, she said. The man at the tip was very helpful, as these sorts of people usually are. After visiting the tip, she came back to my place for a coffee and to meet Kitty. We talked about spring. I miss being in my old flat and seeing everything come alive outside my window at this time of year. The green and then the blossom. I could take in three parks and the river on a short walk. A slightly longer walk would take me over to Iosefin – where Dorothy lives – with its beautiful old buildings (albeit unrenovated) and tree-lined streets. I think back to the early days of Covid, this time five years ago. Weirdly it improved my mental health. The quiet, the total lack of expectations, the simplicity of it all. The Monday morning shopping. Mask, gloves, job done as fast as possible. No queues, unlike in the UK. I felt strangely calm then. Mum still talks positively of that time. Nobody cared what I looked like. I could just hide behind my mask.

When I talk to my parents now, 60% of our conversation is about politics and world events. How did we get here? One thing I don’t understand is why we haven’t heard a peep from the Obamas or the Clintons about this utterly destructive shitshow. Is their silence on the matter part of some grand scheme? It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a rather different story north of the border. The Canadians have decided it’s gloves off, and rightly so. I’ve become quite a fan of Canada in the last few weeks. In fact I’ve always liked Canada, ever since I was lucky enough to visit in 1998. Yesterday I read this comment about Trump’s economic “strategy”, which sounded pretty accurate. It takes some talent to even write this:
I don’t see Trump as having even the remotest concept of economic and/or foreign policies. He rules by diktat tweeting out his edicts while taking a dump on his gold toilet with all the forethought, consistency and strategising of a squirrel cranked up on crystal meth. That’s what happens when big money buys the seat of power when it should be left to sober administrators who have a genuine sense of duty for the public good.
This week I’ve realised how little I know about tanks and fighter planes and aircraft carriers and warships and Britain’s (or anyone else’s) defence capabilities. They just aren’t things I think about on a daily (or even yearly) basis. Luckily I have a brother whose job is to know about this stuff, so I can always ask him.

Kitty. She’s changed in the last ten days or so. She’s become more comfortable with me around. I honestly think she was fearful of me. She’s now sleeping noticeably more too. The best thing is that she’s stopped biting me, unless I rub her tummy when biting is a reflex action for her. Due to the warmer weather (I presume), she’s now shedding a lot more hair than she did at the beginning.

Here are some pictures of Arad, where I went on Sunday. In some ways I like Arad more than Timișoara. It sits on a proper river, the Mureș, unlike the piddly Bega we have. Although they have a boat club, I didn’t see a single boat out on the river. Just imagine a river of this size in the UK on a lazy Sunday morning. Boats just aren’t part of the culture here, with the exception of canoes and rowing boats that are used for serious sport.

A plaque on the wall of the boat club showing where the River Mureș got to in 1970

The mishmash of languages in these places is always fascinating. Romanian became the dominant language in these parts pretty recently in the scheme of things. This inscription in Hungarian, from the gospel of Matthew, is hard to read. So the double letters in the first word are zeds, right? No, they can’t be, because that must be a double zed in the second word and these look different. So what are they? Gees? Jays? Does double J exist in Hungarian? Sure enough it does. This says Jöjjetek énhozzám which means “Come to me”. Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be learning Hungarian anytime soon.

Sunset over the Bega on Sunday

Kitty sleeping next to the giant mirror in my teaching room

Cat - Family - Life :) - Other sports - Writing a book

B is for bombshell

March 9, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a WhatsApp video chat with my brother. He called me. His son, not so little anymore, was still up and about. My brother is very proud of him, and why shouldn’t he be? He’s been teaching him letters of the alphabet using wooden blocks. D is for daddy, O is for orange, X is for … he struggled a bit there. I showed him Kitty and asked him what he thought of his little sister. My brother and I got onto the weird subject of how many stillbirths Mum’s parents had in addition to the seven live births. We think that, from talking to other family members over the years, it’s between three and six inclusive, including a set of twins. Mum has never broached the subject.

Late last night Dorothy dropped a major bombshell on me. She said, you realise you’ll probably have to pay for the book publication? What? They’ve been talking about distribution and EU funds and all sorts. If Dorothy’s right, then I’m just about out. Get them to run off two dozen copies or so, pay them whatever that costs (not much, hopefully), pick them up in a box, and give them to my students. Then try and find another publisher who’s actually serious and draws up proper contracts and stuff. Self-publishing, or vanity publishing, does not interest me in the slightest, especially if the self-publishers are then going to sell on the copies that I’ve previously paid for! If she’s right, this “publisher” is even shittier than I thought. She also thinks this is somehow normal. She’s been in Romania too long.

That potential crappiness and subsequent lack of sleep made for a strange Saturday of work. Matei’s mother didn’t have enough cash to pay me after our maths lesson. Look, pay me next week, it’s fine. She insisted on going to the cash machine that obviously wasn’t just round the corner. This almost made me late for my next lesson and deprived me of the bite to eat that I would normally have. (I ended up eating during the lesson. My student didn’t seem to mind.) While I was waiting, I saw Matei’s mum had flowcharts from her job sitting on her desk, all full of pompous language that just about killed me. Their huge TV was tuned to an American version of the Living Channel. They were redesigning the interior of a house that looked perfectly fine to me as it was. Just before the lesson I’d given Matei’s mother a bouquet of nine roses. Even numbers are unlucky, for some reason. March 8th is International Women’s Day, which has really become a thing.

When I got home, the Six Nations rugby match between Ireland and France (being played in Dublin) was on TV. The last time I watched that, it still would have been the Five Nations. France led 8-6 at the interval. I saw the second half – a veritable barrage of tries, mostly by France who were (using a word that commentators like) rampant. They won 42-27. I thought, hmmm, this is actually pretty watchable. I found the TMO (video replay) confabs quite amusing – the Aussie referee said maaate a lot. When that was over, I saw what was left of Blues against Lincoln, with the commentary almost a minute behind the picture. On 70-odd minutes, with the score at 0-0, Blues were awarded a penalty. Up stepped Kieran Dowell (not Jay Stansfield who normally takes spot-kicks). Straight into the top-right corner. I half-expected the commentator a minute later to say that he’d missed, with all the nonsensical stuff about the book still going around my head. That was the only goal of the game. The football was a lot less interesting to watch than the rugby.

Tomorrow I’ll probably take the car to Arad. The last time I went there was in January 2024, which already feels a world away.

I now realise that when I feel shitty, it’s rather nice having Kitty.

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

Book stuff and the end of the old world

March 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

Today was a searing hot day for early March as we hit 24 degrees. When the calendar flicked over to March, I immediately thought, oh shit, just three months till summer. Last summer practically messed me up. I hung around a bit in Piața Victoriei and Piața 700 before my 1pm meeting at the publisher’s. These were my old stomping grounds back in the old days. The kiosk that sells pleșkavițe in Piața 700 is still there. I remember when they bumped the price of a pleșkaviță up from 5 lei to 6. It’s now 17. Taverna lui Romică, which didn’t exist back then, was doing a roaring lunchtime trade, selling mici and other traditional Romanian food.

The book meeting. Four of us were there: both ladies from the publishing house plus Dorothy and me. As always, the older lady didn’t stop talking. She started by asking Dorothy and me if we’d be keen to do a 1050-page (!) translation from Romanian to English on something to do with sociology. We both said no. When we got on to the book, they said they’d probably only do 100 copies in the initial run. That’s a tiny number, and it’s laughably few considering how it could be distributed to schools all over the country if they had the wherewithal to do that, but at least it seems something will happen. The younger woman clearly liked the book; you could see she was suitably amused by some of Dad’s pictures. They brought up the book on their screen. It looked all wrong. They’d set it to a crazy big page size and one of the fonts wasn’t right either. The old lady played with the settings, flailing around, hopelessly guessing. I insisted on coming back the office myself on another day, armed with my own laptop, so we can properly sort it out. At one point Dorothy and I were served strong coffee with some kind of pink ice cream on the top. It was my third coffee of the day. The kid I taught at his home after the meeting usually makes me a coffee, but this time I asked him not to.

Yesterday I had a 57-minute Skype chat with Mum and Dad. It was mostly talk of the imminent apocalypse. We all fed off each other because we all feel that way. If it wasn’t already apparent, what went down last Friday in the Oval Office made it crystal clear that it’s over. The world as we knew it, the shape of it, it’s over, and what happens next could be terminal. Change is happening so damn fast. It reminds me in some ways of this time five years ago, a week into March, where people were milling around Timișoara in denial as to the tsunami that would hit us within a few days. That time it was awful but temporary. This time it could be permanent. I hear parents of 14-year-old kids talking about this or that university and I’m thinking, do you realise that there’s a decent chance (20%? How do you estimate such a thing?) that all that talk will be meaningless?

Before our chat I went to the office adjoining the dreaded immigration centre, to apply for a cazier judiciar, whatever exactly that is. It turned out that I needed one to renew my resident’s permit for another five years. The expiry date is over a year away – 22/4/26 – but I really want to renew it before the rerun of the election which takes place in May. If Georgescu or someone of a similar ilk gets in, there may no longer be a renew. Plus my current permit still has the wrong address on it, so it would be good to rectify that.

Mercifully, I’ve just finished American Psycho. I was a bit harsh last time when I said there were very few funny bits. There are a few sprinkled through the novel, but not enough to compensate for the unremitting gore and torture. The scene with the rat for instance, it was almost too much to keep ploughing on with. And I was well and truly over the designer labels and pretentious restaurant food, even though I know they were necessary to get the vacuity of eighties yuppiedom across properly. All the Trump stuff though, my gosh. The sick protagonist of the novel idolises someone who we now know is sick beyond belief. My copy of the book has an afterword by the author Bret Easton Ellis who mentions the abuse, including death threats, he received by women he describes as feminists. That’s obviously horrifying, but when he says that “I wasn’t a misogynist when I wrote the book but the unearned feminist hysteria briefly turned me into one” I’m thinking, yeah right. I don’t get the feeling that Ellis is a particularly nice man.

On Tuesday night I watched Birmingham fall to a rare defeat at Bolton. They were well beaten, too. After Blues took the lead, Bolton were totally dominant in the second half and ran out comfortable 3-1 winners. The home crowd were on good form. Blues looked lethargic, as if their busy schedule had finally caught up with them. Blues still have a nine-point lead at the top of the league with a game in hand. Surely – surely! – they can’t mess it up from here.

Books - Cat - Family - Life :)

Bad memories

February 18, 2025 by 0 Comments

Kitty is currently perched in her favourite spot, atop the cupboard at the end of the living room, looking out the window at a wintry scene – we had light snow yesterday. I’m sure that young, active Kitty would prefer to be out there running and chasing than stuck inside with me. I still don’t know what she thinks of me, if anything. I get contradictory signals. Yesterday she was just lovely, purring away, licking and snuggling up to me, until the evening when she got the sudden urge to bite my hand over and over.

I’m just getting over a cold which I’ve had for five days. Dad had the lump taken out of his leg on Friday. As for Mum, she’s just had the results of her blood tests – they’re all fine. They had an ordeal at A&E in Timaru last week – they waited five hours for Mum not to be seen, then went home. She was due to see the doctor today; she still isn’t right.

In the middle of a maths lesson yesterday I got a message from Dad. But it’s four in the morning there. What’s going on? He couldn’t sleep, he said, because we was worrying about his digital devices that he didn’t understand, as well as one of their flats in St Ives whose annual management fee was due and they might face a fine for late payment. It’s well past time they sold those blasted flats.

I’ve just finished reading The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. It’s a sort of prequel to American Psycho which was made into a film that lots of young people seem to go on about. (I’ve got that book too.) The Rules of Attraction is set at Camden College, a made-up university somewhere in the north-east of the US, and is story of mostly well-heeled students drinking, taking drugs, and shagging. (Only it wasn’t called shagging. The term used was screwing or simply fucking.) The story is told in the first person, from the perspective of the various students: Paul would write from his point of view, then Lauren, then Sean, then back to Paul again, and so on. My main problem was all the characters were distinctly unlikeable, so I didn’t care what happened to any of them, and because the story was all about the characters (rather than some outside events), I found it hard to maintain interest. However, the book was written and set in the eighties and I enjoyed the constant references to the music of that time. Music was good back then, wasn’t it? It also gave me flashbacks to my first year of uni; I was like a fish out of water. I remember all the clubbing, which did less than nothing for me, and how everyone else except me instinctively knew what to do. Getting changed to go clubbing was serious business. If I remember rightly, all the guys got changed in the same double room. Fifteen minutes before the taxi was due to arrive, someone would put on dance music. This is it, this is game time. It happened like clockwork, always with 15 minutes to go, and it was instinctive. How did they know to do that?

In my recent session with the twins, the boy dragged out that Pelmanism game that I bought them in Geraldine. This’ll be fun! Um, yeah. It’s nice to look at all the Kiwi pictures, but that’s about it. That’s because, compared to them, I’m terrible at the game. It starts off with 72 cards in a non-grid-like arrangement. While I struggle even to remember what cards have come out when there are that many, both the twins can remember where they saw a particular card, even if it came out ten minutes earlier. To me, that’s a superpower. There’s so system or mnemonic, they can just remember. And how would a mnemonic even help? Say I turn over the pohutukawa card, sort of in the fourth row and seventh column. Position D7, if you will. Maybe I could remember that as December 7th, the day the pohutukawas come out. But that would be a heck of a stretch – there aren’t really rows and columns, and cards are disappearing all the time as people (not me!) form pairs. I just have to accept that I lack that superpower and that’s OK.

It looks like I’ve got a new maths pupil coming tomorrow – an 11-year-old girl. Her mum wants just half-hour sessions but three times a week, and that’s something my schedule can’t accommodate.

A couple more additions to the “brand names containing V and ending in A” list. There’s a great big modern apartment block not far from me called Vivalia. Then there’s Nivea, though I’ll let them off because the name has been around since 1906.

I took the car in yesterday. The guy told me it just needed a new thermostat, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. An older guy took my business card – he said his wife was interested in having English lessons. The car should be ready later today, but I’ll have a few questions. Hopefully they’ll guarantee it for three months like they did when I got the brakes sorted last summer.

The nearby park this morning

Books - Cat - Dreams - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

We’re in Deep S***

January 31, 2025 by 0 Comments

Kitty. Yeah, she’s pretty good. Especially when she’s asleep, which isn’t very often. The last few days she’s shown plenty of affection, so I think she’s getting used to me. Tomorrow I’m taking her to the vet to her screened, or whatever they do, in preparation for next week when hopefully she’ll have her bits removed. I feel slightly sad about that. I mean, how much does the process hurt?

I had five lessons today instead of my usual seven on a Thursday. My mother-and-son combo got shunted forward a day. When I saw Filip in Mehala, I got the usual. His mum gave me a pair of size-seven slippers to put on as well as a perfectly good cup of coffee. Then I went up to his room where his thermostat was jacked up to 28 degrees. Even when the conditions for teaching aren’t ideal, I remind myself. Life insurance? Open-plan hell? This is orders of magnitude better than that.

DeepSeek. The new Chinese AI app. Even the name scares the crap out of me – X-ray eyes, watching your every move. It managed to knock a trillion dollars off the Nasdaq in a single day. A trillion dollars! I can’t make sense of 2025 at all. $600 billion of that was a single company called Nvidia who apparently make chips. So they must be in the fast-food trade or else they’re some casino outfit. Nvidia joins a long list of bland made-up modern company or product names containing a V and ending in A. Off the top of my head there’s Aviva, Arriva, Aveda, Veolia and, um, Viagra. Nvidia goes one step further though in breaking the rules of English phonotactics – it starts with N followed by another consonant – for increased fakeness.

Maybe that’s why so many people have tattoos now. In a world of artificiality, at least they’re real. You can see them, touch them, and for a time, feel them. (I imagine you can smell them for a time too.) I’m not tempted, because there’s nothing I identify with strongly enough to get it permanently stamped on me. And frankly, being a native English speaker in Timișoara, teaching English and maths, with a beard and a fair old mop of hair, is plenty. Getting inked would be overkill. But the real thing is something that is very important to me. My job feels very real. So does this city, even if certain parts (like bloody Dumbrăvița) are so depressingly fake as to be unlivable for me.

I read something yesterday about how unhappy Generation Z are in the UK. They defined Gen Z as (currently) between 13 and 27. There were comments that said “I remember 1977 and the Sex Pistols. Nothing new here.” Even though I wasn’t born in ’77 I’ve read plenty about that time, and I disagree. Back then, at least young people were united through music, how they dressed, and even their football teams. (Though it could be unpleasant and even dangerous to see live football then, at least it was affordable.) Now society is too fractured for that sort of unity to be possible. Blame smartphones and social media.

Lately I’ve been reading a post-apocalyptic sci-fi book called A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was written in the 1950s by Walter M. Miller Jr and has strong religious themes. I’m two-thirds of the way through it. Having got this far I’ll stick with it, but in my fairly simple brain I’m filing it under the “too clever for me” category. Some of the themes resonate today, in particular the anti-intellectualism, called the Simplification in the novel. (Right on cue, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved their “Doomsday Clock” forward to just 89 seconds to midnight.)

I had a strange dream last night which involved a game of cricket in a park in Timișoara. Several games, in fact, and I had great difficulty walking through the park without being hit by a ball. (Nobody plays cricket in Romania, as far as I’m aware.) Games come up a lot in my dreams. A few nights ago I had a dream involving my aunt (the one who passed away last April) and the card game bridge. I know next to nothing about bridge. I only know that it’s a trick-taking game that involves bidding, compass points and 13-card hands. This dream probably came about from something my aunt once said about endless parties and games of bridge in the RAF officers’ mess. She tried to make it sound glamorous, but I thought it sounded awful.

Earlier this week I wrote my first proper letter since 2009. When my friend from St Ives surprised and delighted me by sending me one, I decided to reply in kind. It would be wonderful if she and her husband could make a trip to Romania (they came in 2017), but they’ve got so much stuff going on and he narrowly escaped death in 2022. I don’t know how feasible it would be.

A football score from the Cypriot league that caught my eye earlier this month:

“Have you heard about Jim?” What’s happened? “He’s only just got over his omonia, and now he’s come down with a terrible case of anorthosis.” Poor Jim. I hope he pulls through.

I’m pretty sure the name Anorthosis has the same ortho- root as in orthopedic, orthography and orthogonal: it means straight ahead or correct. But at first glance it looks like something I’d want to steer clear of.

Some pictures from Sunday:

I had a bit of time on Monday before my lesson. I hadn’t noticed this chimney before:

Driving - Life :) - Other sports - Romania - Tennis

Coming unstuck

January 29, 2025 by 0 Comments

The last few days we’ve had incredible weather. Today it was blue sky all day and we got to 18. I don’t think they’re getting much more than that in Geraldine.

On Sunday I managed to get myself into a slight pickle. I was in Blajova, a small village a half-hour drive from me, when I somehow backed my car out over a culvert, leaving my front wheel hanging in the air. A woman opposite heard me revving the engine (to no avail; I was stuck) and came out. Could you or somebody else help me? No. OK, thanks, have a great day. This is fantastic, I thought. I’m in the middle of nowhere here. I had a weak signal and called some tow truck people. They didn’t even know where Blajova was until I sent them my location. Right, we can come in 45 minutes. It’ll be 500 lei. Ugh, that’s a bit much. More than I earned all day yesterday. Surely someone here can get me out of this. The car isn’t damaged, I’m hardly in the bottom of a ditch or anything, it just needs some manpower. I wandered around and as luck would have it there was a guy in an orange hi-viz vest, the kind that David Cameron used to wear, and he was willing to help. He got his two mates and the three of them pushed but it wouldn’t budge. I’ll get my Jeep then. Within two minutes he’d got his Jeep and attached the rope, and I was free. I tried giving them 100 lei but they wouldn’t take it. In this place we help each other. We’ll help anybody.

These villages are full of farmers and practical people who tow stuff on a daily basis. Before I got stuck, I was walking along the road in the village when an older gentleman wound down the window of his car. He wanted to know how an unknown person could possibly be wandering through his village on a Sunday morning. Being defensive, I said I was a tourist from England. I’ve been to Romania a few times before, that’s how I can speak a bit. He was very pleasant and asked if I was going to the church service which was about to start. When I told him that I thought his village was beautiful, he added, “but poor”.

I was in Blajova because it was close to a nature reserve called Lunca Pogănișului and I wanted to go for a walk through it. After getting stuck I nearly went back home, then remembered the men’s final in Melbourne was going on. I saw that Jannik Sinner had taken the first set against Sasha Zverev and the second was close. If Zverev gets the set I’ll go home because there’ll still be plenty of tennis to watch. If not and Sinner goes 2-0 up, I’ll go for my walk. Sinner won the second set on a tie-break. Walk it is then. But the track down to the Lunca was so hopelessly muddy that I soon went home anyway. By the time I got home, Sinner had completed a comprehensive win. It’s a shame I couldn’t see the women’s final which saw Madison Keys pick up her first grand slam in a brilliant match with Aryna Sabalenka. I was happy that the American won, as was Mum when I spoke to her. Keys came through a bunch of three-setters on the way. Madison Keys, by the way, sounds like some somewhere just off Cape Cod where you’d moor your luxury yacht and that no mere mortals could afford to live in. (It’s getting on for ten years since I visited Cape Cod. That was a good day.)

In my last post about the FA Cup, I meant to mention the match I saw in January 2000 between Aston Villa and Leeds United in the fifth round. I didn’t (and don’t) support Villa, but that game was one heck of a spectacle. Villa twice came from behind to win 3-2, Benito Carbone scoring a hat-trick. We saw four of the goals down our end. (I went with some other uni students.) I remember Paul Merson being an absolute beast in that game. For some reason I also remember Carbone’s blue boots which I thought looked pretty damn cool. Villa Park was rocking towards the end of that game. The Cup was already on the wane even by then, but 25 years ago it still meant a lot. (Villa made the final that year, losing to Chelsea in the last FA Cup final at the old Wembley.)

When I spoke to my parents this morning, Dad talked about the destructive potential of AI. I don’t use AI myself (I keep meaning to for curiosity’s sake, but I can’t be bothered) and am scared of what it might unleash, outside the realm of medicine where it seems to be beneficial. Dad said that at least he won’t see the destruction in his lifetime. It’s all happening to fast though that I wouldn’t be so sure.

Before I finish, some sad news concerning Romania. A band of thieves blew up the entrance to a small museum in the Netherlands and stole some extremely valuable (and extremely old) Romanian artifacts that had been on show there. It was the last day of the exhibition. One of the artifacts was a 2500-year-old gold helmet which I suppose the thieves planned to melt down, though the value of the helmet far exceeds that of the gold.

I’ve been sleeping better and have had more energy as a result. Not Kitty-level energy or anything crazy like that, but a normal level, which is definitely something.

Family - Life :)

Niece news

January 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

Yesterday morning – on the last day of Joe Biden’s presidency – my niece entered the world. She was eight pounds something, so bigger than my nephew. As far as I know both mother and baby are doing fine. A few hours after my brother sent me the picture with no accompanying text, he told me the name. No zeds, no exes, an eminently spellable and pronounceable name consisting of only four letters. That was a relief. My initial thought was to write a limerick using her name – “There was a young lady called…” – because her name lends itself rather well to that form, but I couldn’t get lines three and four to work.

But heck, they’ll have their hands full now. My brother has been truly incredible with his son, but I doubt he’ll be able to give his daughter the same kick-start in life. And I dunno, the world in 2025 just seems so devoid of meaning to me that I don’t think I’d want to bring any more humans into it. Personally I think I’d be a pretty rubbish dad anyway. A Kitty is about my limit.

Yesterday I caught up with Mark in town. It was his idea to eat at a place in the bastion, but when we got there it was totally dead. After almost coming a cropper on the icy tiling outside, we decided to check out Eat Like a Man just off Piața Unirii. We were intrigued by the name and bearded man logo. It’s basically a burger bar where you can order a normal-sized meal like we both had, or a totally abnormal-sized one. We polished off our burgers and chips in no time, while pondering whether this or that item on the menu was sufficiently manly. It’s quite a small place. The decor is bright yellow and black – Wellington colours – with none of that awful ambient music. So many places are all modern and insipid and hospitally and I can’t handle them.

Dad got an email from the people who manage their flat in St Ives to say that water had been leaking into two flats below. They had to get their friend to check it out. As it happened, there was no leak from their flat at all, but not before Mum and Dad had been sent into a mad panic over the potential cost. They still have their other St Ives flat too. At 75-odd, they shouldn’t be dealing with this. Dad told me recently about one of the model planes he flies, one that he’d designed and built himself a little while ago. (I tried to imagine doing that myself. Yep, I know what planes look like. I could probably draw out a plane and cut the bits out of balsa wood and glue them together. But would the thing fly? Not a chance. I wouldn’t even know what bits and bobs to put inside to make it fly.) This is the man who has made a living from his paintings for 45 years and put together 25 pictures for my small book. A man of many talents. He said he’d like to be in his shed designing and building model planes, but he can’t because of all the work that’s still required on the house. That made me feel sad.

Life :)

An invaluable friend at a trying time

January 16, 2025 by 0 Comments

The best news I had today was when one of the members of the “AI bot” generation said she didn’t want to carry on having lessons with me. I can’t face those teeth-pulling sessions right now.

The last few days I’ve felt a great sadness and a sickness in the pit of my stomach. Plus I’ve felt shattered after consecutive nights of shocking sleep, which of course is related to the previous sentence. Kitty has been a non-factor in all of this; she really just does her own thing.

Yesterday morning I met Dorothy for coffee. I’m realising now what an invaluable friend she is. When I met her at the fish fountain, it was minus five or thereabouts, but sunny and with ice crystals sparkling in the air. It was beautiful. We chatted for nearly two hours and could have managed another two but for our various obligations (five lessons, in my case). She made me aware of two brilliant poems about trains – one by Robert Louis Stevenson, the other by W H Auden. The Stevenson one, from the Victorian era of rail travel, captures the essence of travelling by train quite beautifully. We talked about some of her family members, then we discussed the book – in particular a couple of quizzes I’d put in there that she said I needed to make easier – and then we talked about how the glue that holds society together is now coming apart pretty rapidly. Finally I decided I’d briefly mention this thing that I’d never talked about with anybody before – how certain letters of the alphabet and combinations of letters elicit some pretty strong emotions in me that I manage to keep in check because I know they’re not normal. In one or two cases I can even smell them – for instance Gs and Hs make me think of the smell of horses. The Romanian word for a herd of horses is herghelie which just seems perfect to me. I’ll have to write a series of posts about this because it’s just a big part of my life.

This morning I went to the local produce market for the first time since the autumn. With the temperature well into the negatives, it was pretty low on stalls. I ended up buying a load of prunes which I didn’t expect to see there.

Elena, the lady who lives above me, is finally coming back to Romania tomorrow after six months in Canada.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Other sports

Kitty update

January 9, 2025 by 0 Comments

This morning I took Kitty to the vet to be jabbed. She had a thermometer stuck up her bum (What is normal body temperature for a cat? It’s not something I’d ever thought about. Turns out it’s a couple of degrees higher than for humans), then she got the rabies vaccine. The vet – a middle-aged lady who was lovely – said we were on the verge of being rabies-free after 15 years of no cases, then a case popped up in Timiș two years ago which reset the clock to zero. The vet said that three-coloured cats like Kitty are almost always female, for some genetic reason. I can see there’s a long Wikipedia page all about the genetics of cat fur.

She’s been a pleasure to look after so far. I was amazed this morning how easily she slipped into a pink zipped bag I’d bought for her. Having a pet means you have conversations and interactions that you otherwise wouldn’t have. For instance, my brother called me on WhatsApp so his wife and son could see her. He told me not to put the food and water near each other, and gave me the evolutionary reason why: a cat (whose sense of smell is much stronger than a human’s) may think that its water is contaminated if its food source is too close by. There’s a lot I’m finding out.

Last night I spoke to Mum and Dad. They’d clearly been speaking to my brother who must have knocked some sense into them about the cat. I really didn’t understand it – my brother has had a cat for years. It’s maybe something to do with me living in an apartment, whereas my brother lives in a house. Dad thinks you can’t do anything if you live in a flat. But the way they were talking on Sunday, it was like I’d have to pay to put Kitty through university.

On that note, I’ve been thinking about doing a master’s degree in linguistics. Probably applied linguistics – the practical implications of it – though I wouldn’t mind knowing more of the theory too. I still get confused when it comes to velar fricatives and the like, and I doubt I could accurately diagram a sentence. If I did it, I’d probably do it over two years (I have too much work to do it in one) as a distance learning course from a UK university. The biggest benefit would simply be the knowledge, though having the piece of paper at the end wouldn’t do me any harm if, say, I wanted to go back to New Zealand and work there. There’s one major snag in all this: the cost. It would set me back £10,900. Eleven grand. It’s a fair old chunk of change, especially when I live in Romania and everything is at a much lower level. I might not even get accepted. I’ll ask my brother what he thinks – he seems to be the go-to guy for just about everything right now.

I see that Blues play Lincoln in the FA Cup on Saturday. It’s an early kick-off, so I’ll be busy teaching. Lincoln are known as the Imps – their club crest is a funny imp mascot thingy. All these cool little traditions of English football. Lincoln, by the way, is where my brother did his degree through. His graduation ceremony took place in the picturesque Lincoln Cathedral. The whole city is extremely picturesque if Google Maps is anything to go by. (I don’t think I’ve ever been there.)

One last thing. This morning I saw an article in the Guardian on the unremitting beigeness of people’s homes, a few days after I’d (sort of) written about the subject myself. Dressing your kids in beige is bordering on cruelty to me. One sentence that stood out to me was: “It is difficult to resist being a leaf in the wind of trend and fashion.” I dunno, I seem to find that quite easy.

We’ve had lovely spring-like weather the last three or four days, with temperatures climbing into the mid-teens. We’ll be back down to earth with a wintry bump very shortly, though.

Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Other sports

The paint police

January 4, 2025 by 0 Comments

It was like a war zone here either side of midnight on New Year’s Eve as people let off bangers all around me. And now we’re in the second half of the twenties. The world took a leap backwards in the first half, and I can’t see where even a baby step forwards is coming from. Why I think we’re screwed is pretty simple. We absolutely aren’t going to innovate our way, or “tech” our way, out of this hole. (Tech is a lot of the problem.) Our only way out is to accept being poorer in the short term, maybe even the medium term, to benefit society and the environment in the long term. (The long-term economy would benefit too.) But most people won’t give an inch. Just look at Covid. It’s my right to travel abroad every summer, come hell or high water. I deserve it. No you bloody well don’t.

Yesterday I had my first lesson of 2025, a two-hour session with an English teacher in her late forties. I got her to do the same exercises I’d given a 15-year-old boy. Despite being a teacher, she was nowhere near as good as him. Then I saw Mark in town. We wandered around the Christmas market which is still running for another few days. I noticed stalls were selling things like “Dubai cakes” and “Dubai chocolate”. People here are so obsessed with the otherworldly glitz and opulence of Dubai that the word has taken on a meaning of fancy. Wouldn’t Dubai chocolate melt, though, given that the place is practically an oven? Mark then asked me if I wanted a cat to look after. In theory it would lovely to have the company of a cat, but it’s extra work, and what if I go away? That’s the real killer. Who would I have to look after him or her? I think it’s a her.

Later I spoke to Dad. He talked a lot about the appallingly cruel US healthcare system, having watched a YouTube video starring Michael Moore. He sent me the video with a note: “This will make you angry.” I suppose I’ll force myself to watch it tomorrow, when my self-ban of YouTube is lifted.

This morning I saw I’d missed a message about a lesson. I was still able to go to it in Mehala. It was tipping it down so I drove. On the radio I heard a new song by the Romanian band Vunk, as well as Dust in the Wind by Kansas. A beautiful song.

The darts. The final between Luke Littler and Michael van Gerwen (MVG) is an hour away. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay awake for all of it; I have lessons in the morning. Littler, still not 18, is a phenomenal talent who has hit international headlines. He must go into the final as a warm favourite. On New Year’s Day there were two fantastic quarter-finals back-to-back. First was Chris Dobey against Gerwyn Price. When I got back from seeing Dorothy, Dobey was two sets down, but he worked his way into a 4-2 lead in a race to five. He then missed five darts for the match before finally, mercifully, getting over the line in a 5-3 win, hitting two double 19s to seal the victory. Then came MVG against Callan Rydz. Super high quality throughout, and honestly Rydz was marginally the better player, but MVG’s timing and the vagaries of darts’ scoring allowed the Dutchman to run out a 5-3 winner.

One of the matches I watched thanks to a stream I picked up from New Zealand. It was weird seeing all the ads featuring rugby and barbecues and Wattyl paints. I see they’re still doing the thing with jillions of overpriced shades of paint that nobody needs or, let’s be honest, even wants. Ask a four-year-old boy what colour he’d like his bedroom wall to be and he might say blue. What shade of blue, Tommy? Horizon blue? (Just looking on the Wattyl website now.) Londonderry blue? (Makes me think of the IRA.) Hamilton blue? (The blue of the future.) Out of the blue? (Now that’s a good name.) Whaaat? Noooo! Blue blue! Thomas the Tank Engine blue! We’ve even got the same name! I’m convinced that adults’ colour preferences are really just the same as kids’ ones. When was the last time you heard anyone of any age say their favourite colour was sodding magnolia? But millions of people paint their walls various hues of beige or taupe because they’ve convinced themselves that they like them. It’s what they should like and should have. And of course a real colour might make the value of their house go down. It always comes down to that, at the end of the day. If I was in charge of this stuff in NZ, I’d enact a law that only permitted ten shades of paint. That’s your lot. If you want some pastelly crap, mix white with one of the other permitted colours. That’s what a pastel shade is anyway. There’d be border police and special dogs trained to sniff out contraband paint. Beige beagles. You’d still face a $400 fine for a rogue apple left in your bag, but a $4000 fine for a pot of beige. It would be fantastic.