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Life :) - New Zealand - Photos

Off to Moeraki

August 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

We’re about to head off to Mum and Dad’s holiday home ⁠–⁠ you could hardly call it a bach ⁠–⁠ in Moeraki. On Thursday I’ll drop in on my friend in Naseby whom I haven’t seen since 2016 when she still lived in Auckland.

Last night I had my Romanian lesson in which ⁠– predictably I suppose ⁠– I talked about New Zealand. When prompted by the teacher to talk about a news item, I said the wildfires in Hawaii which were horrific ⁠– the death toll, currently at about 100, will climb substantially. I got the impression that the fires hadn’t received the same level of coverage in Romania as here. After Romanian, I had my first English lesson with a woman in her late thirties who lives just outside Bucharest and works for Deutsche Bank. As is often the case, she underestimated her level. She’s a very competent speaker.

I don’t have much time to write because we’re shooting off any minute. I will however say that traditional New Zealand showers – the zinc ones with the big intuitive red, blue and black dial – are amazing. When I came over as a kid I thought they were in a different league from the pathetic drizzly ones we had in the UK with mastic surrounds that always eroded. My parents have a proper Kiwi shower in this place, and when I first stepped into it following my two-day journey, I didn’t want to get out.

On breakfast news this morning I heard “if it gets back into power” (referring to the Labour Party) and that Chelsea (the football club) “has been spending up large”. Oh, is that how we do things in New Zealand now? I go away for seven years and now you go all American by treating clubs and teams and political parties as singular.

Yesterday I took Dad’s bike for a trip around Geraldine and Orari, going back via their old house. Here are a few pictures:

Mum and Dad’s old place

The stream that runs through Mum and Dad’s old piece of land. It often ran dry.
Life :) - New Zealand - Other sports - Photos

A smashing time

August 14, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday morning was bright and sunny, and while Mum went to church and her after-mass coffee meeting, I joined Dad at the Model Aero Club near Pleasant Point. It’s a nice drive out there. I saw that the Pleasant Point taxidermist had sadly closed down. Dad was one of six flyers at the club, all aged between 60 and 80. Dad and one either guy make their planes painstakingly from balsa wood – for Dad, that’s the whole point, and having spent decades honing his fine motor skills, he’s pretty good at it. The others use ready-made planes, often made from foam. Unlike Dad, their focus is servos and resistors and diodes and all that technical stuff. (I was impressed that Dad had got a sufficient handle on all of that, because it isn’t his thing at all.) Dad’s blue plane was up and away, then after two minutes the engine cut out. Not to worry, he should be able to glide it in … but he was flying into the sun which blinded him, and the plane nosed into the ground. He says it’s fixable, but for that particular morning it was game over. I had a chat with one of the guys about Windows 10 and 11 (don’t upgrade to 11!) and Covid in Romania. One (British-born) bloke had a smart Commer van that his in-laws bought new in 1965; he regaled me of his road trips around Europe in it as a young man. (Commer vehicles were used in WW2. One time the comedy writer Frank Muir was driving a Commer which spluttered to a halt; he famously said over the radio, “The Commer has come to a full stop.”)

Before

After

To my mind, the most impressive of the planes on show, but engine trouble prevented it from flying

The Commer van

We went home via Hanging Rock. I hadn’t been there for ages. I probably swam in the Opihi there during our 1986-87 trip. When we got home, Mum opened an official-looking letter that had been sitting there for a couple of days. Dad had been hit with an $80 speeding fine. She took it pretty well; had she opened it the previous day when she was in an especially vile mood, she’d have hit the eleven-foot-high ceiling. I showed Dad a picture of the damage his Piper Cub sustained when it crashed when I came to the club in 2009 – he’d forgotten about that. I’m a jinx, it seems.

Hanging Rock

The day before yesterday Dad and I tried to sort out my crap in the garage. Boxes of books, mostly. I’ll take a few back with me, but I was happy to see most of them go to a charity shop. I’d also accumulated a surprising number of shoes that were all in a blue sack. Many of them will go too.

On Saturday night I watched my first rugby match for decade or so. It was a provincial game between Tasman and Auckland, played in Blenheim. Mum was particularly interested because the Tasman team – who ran out quite comfortable winners in the end – included both her sister-in-law’s nephew (if I’ve got that right) and someone she used to teach at Waihi, back when she still did relief teaching. What a weird game rugby is. Scrums and lineouts are really quite bizarre, when you think about it. Tasman’s star player in the first half – a heavily tattooed battering ram – was almost neckless. Auckland’s forward pack weighed 919 kg, or 115 kg per man. After that, England played Colombia in the women’s football World Cup. An end-to-end first half finished with a quick exchange of goals; England won 2-1 to make the semis where they’ll play Australia.

Also that evening we played the card game Skip-Bo. I’d found a pack in the garage; Mum must have bought it in 1993 after her brother in Auckland showed us how to play. It’s mostly (but not entirely) luck-based. While we were playing, I reminded Dad of a five-handed game of Skip-Bo we played on New Year’s Eve ’93, involving his father. He was a couple of years younger than Dad is now, and had quite advanced Alzheimer’s. He needed considerable help with the game. I remember that whenever my grandad had a lot of a particular numbered card, he’d say “I’ve got eights (for example) up the ying-yang.”

Tonight I’ll be taking a Romanian lesson and giving an English one.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music

What was the secret?

August 1, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had two lessons this morning. First I had an hour with the young woman who looks like a similar-aged Martina Hingis when she ties her hair back. Her English isn’t bad, but – as is often the case with the young ones – her vocabulary is a couple of thousand words shy of where it needs to be, and I don’t think she’s all that interested in expanding it. Then I had Alexandru, the twelve-year-old football fanatic who lives in Spain. I asked him whether he goes by Alexandru or Alejandro or just Alex, and to my surprise he said Alek, with a k, a letter that doesn’t exist natively in either Romanian or Spanish – he clearly just wants to be a bit fancy. I’ve got three more lessons planned for later today, and with a bit of luck they’ll actually happen.

On Sunday I had a longish chat to Mum and Dad. How did you get into this mess with the plumber? Well, it’s not that much mess, but the how is because I’m in Romania. The Wild West (or East). You literally just pay for the building or plumbing work, in cash of course, and if there’s collateral damage (that could in some cases be lethal), that’s your lookout. I spoke to my upstairs neighbour who has family in Canada and she said how “civilised” it all seemed over there. I then met Mark for lunch. He also has a Canada connection – his daughter lives in Vancouver – and he and his girlfriend had just got back from there. Later I played tennis, with thousands of squawking crows flying overhead and somebody in a nearby church banging on a toacă. When I got home I called my brother who has his knee op tomorrow. His mood was about what you’d expect from someone about to be put of commission for a while. We didn’t talk for long.

My parents said that they’re unlikely to see their grandson in New Zealand anytime soon because the cost would be beyond my brother’s means. Well then, Mum, how did you afford to fly your two boys – both under two years old – to New Zealand in 1982? My brother is ten years older than you were. They have two incomes, not the one-and-a-tiny-bit you had. Just how? Oh yes, your double-digit (ha!) monthly mortgage which you were able to achieve by, let me see what the trick was, let me think for a sec, hmm, oh yes that’s it, being born at the right time. To be fair, my parents were pretty frugal too, but society somehow allowed them to be.

Muzicorama last night. Big birthdays were the theme. Lobo (born 31/7/43) was first up with Me and You and a Dog Named Boo (1971) – the wonders of a simple life on the road. Most of the rest of the programme was devoted to Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim (born 31/7/63), with those massive hits in 1998-99 that remind me so much of my first year of university. Some I liked, some I didn’t, and that’s OK.

Though it’s now August, we still have long evenings, mostly as a result of our geographical position and time zone. I should make the most of my final four of them. (Sunset tonight is 9:11.)

Life :) - Tennis

The final lap

July 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

Life :)

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

July 26, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Life :) - Music

Health stuff and a few tunes

July 22, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

Fifteen days to go.

Environment - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Time to stop the willy waving

July 18, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books - Family - Life :)

The christening

July 17, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life :) - New Zealand

Getting plumbed in

July 14, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

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

July 12, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A local group

Remembering the founder who had passed away

A Turkish group

People getting mici or maybe a frigărui

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