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Windfall and new (and old) balls

July 15, 2025 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect storm

July 12, 2025 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cat - Life :)

Trip report to come…

July 5, 2025 by 0 Comments

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

Books - Cat - Family - Life :) - Music

Rubbing along and a simpler UK plan

June 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow is the longest day. Then it’s all downhill from there. Right now it’s a beautiful evening – I’ve just been down to the river. Only three full days till I go away. I’ve chosen a good time for it: a pair of ghastly 37s have popped up on the long-range forecast.

I’m grateful to Elena, the lady above me, for agreeing to feed Kitty. For a while I was cursing my lack of friends. After nearly six months, Kitty has become part of the scenery. Our start was somewhat rocky. She’d bite or scratch me, or cower in the naughty corner. She just wasn’t comfortable here. Combine that unease with her pent-up energy and she’d drive me to despair. Now she’ll sit beside me or on my lap, sometimes nuzzling up to me. She sleeps a lot more now than in the early days. As my grandmother would have said, we rub along pretty well together. I just wish she had a proper name. For some reason the Genevieve film came into my head this week – wouldn’t that be a nice name? – but she got saddled with Kitty, a non-name really, and that was that.

My UK itinerary has changed once again. My brother thought that going to London wouldn’t give us enough time to properly see him – he’s probably right there – so Mum (who is masterminding this) has deleted London from the schedule. Thinking about it, I’m glad. Meeting up in London but getting lost, phones not working, staying in shitty accommodation (they might not even have had fucking slippers), going to a show that may or may not have been any good, it was all a recipe for stress and falling out. Not worth it. It now looks like I’ll spend two nights in St Ives, then we’ll go down to Poole next Thursday. We’ll spend four nights there before returning to St Ives. A week on Tuesday I’ll catch an early train from Cambridge to Birmingham and spend the day there, which should be fun.

What other news? Well, the roof on the block opposite me has been replaced, and now looks pretty smart. We might get ours done too if all the owners can agree. The Praid salt mine, similar to the one I went to in Turda last summer, flooded last month, with disastrous effects both economically and ecologically. When I met Dorothy last Monday, I saw she had five copies of The Picture of Dorian Gray on her bookshelf. She happily lent me one to read while I’m away. (I’ve almost finished Wessex Tales.) And my colour printer is back in working order.

To give you some idea of how crazy simple things can be in Romania, I tried to get a copy of my front door key to give to Elena. Three useless keys and five trips to the key cutter later, plus waiting around for her to show up, I still haven’t got a spare key that works. Eventually she gave me my money back. (Luckily my front door has two locks, and I do have a spare key for the other lock which normally I don’t use.)

This week I took delivery of Tracy Chapman’s first (1988) album on vinyl. It’s one of my favourite albums, so that was cool.

Books - Life :) - Photos - Travel: Romania

Jimbolia and how tech is wrecking us

June 17, 2025 by 0 Comments

This time next week I’ll be meeting Mum and Dad somewhere in London, hoping that my phone works over there. You can never be 100% sure. Blame Brexit for that.

My hours are now dropping like a stone. The end of the school year has that effect when kids make up a higher proportion of my students than ever before. As always, this time of year means more trips to the market. The strawberries will be done in a few days. Stone fruit is now in abundance. Before I go away I’ll buy a few kilos of sour cherries to preserve in jars for the winter. (In Romanian, sweet and sour cherries are completely different words: cireșe and vișine, respectively.) Yesterday I met up for lunch with Dorothy at one of those basic but good Romanian places in her neck of the woods. I had quite a substantial meal: bean soup with bread, chicken schnitzel, rice, and mashed potato mixed in with spinach. The temperature had climbed to 30 by then. As always, she was unfazed by the heat while I was constantly looking around for shade.

On Sunday I went to Jimbolia (a fun name to say), a town of 10,000 people which sits close to the Serbian border. It was a typically Romanian town, mostly unmodernised, its wide main street lined with trees painted (as always here) white on the bottom. They do that, as far as I know, to stop the trunks from absorbing too much heat when the temperature quickly rises in the spring. The main street ends in the railway station, a border crossing between the EU and the wild exterior. The station was practically deserted, but to my pleasant surprise there was a toilet inside. In Romania this is a big deal. Those in Loo Zealand don’t know how good they’ve got it. (That’s just reminded me that there was a Lew Zealand in the Muppets.) Mostly I sat in the shade and read Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories by Thomas Hardy that Dad gave me. It took me a while to “dial in” to the late-Victorian English and obsession with marriage, which was the norm back then. (In Romania, it’s still kind of the norm now. I’ve got used to brushing off the “Why aren’t you married?” question.) The tales take place in towns and villages near where my brother lives, though the names are changed in the book. I’d hoped the stories would be more focused on the places themselves, akin to Wild Wales, but they’ve been worth reading all the same.

My lower workload will give me a chance to work on my other book, the one based on the bloke I played tennis with in Auckland. I hope to make some serious headway with that over the summer.

Last week I read this comment on AI:

AI is the latest con in a long line of charlatanism from the IT industry. Almost every promise made for how it would improve our lives has been a sham. The speed increase of communication has imposed insane pressures on people in the workplace. Social media has mentally damaged a whole generation. Society has become pornografied and every deranged whack job who previously would have had to stand shouting on a street corner has been given a seemingly respectable platform for their nonsensical hate filled tosh. No-one can read a map anymore – or spell – or write music – without pushing a button.

And now we have vast amounts of money being poured into a concept which is going to steal people’s jobs and just make us even more gullible and stupid. The worst part is being told that AI will solve climate change when in reality it is contributing massively to it! We don’t need a billion dollar computer to point out that we are consuming too much – we are just hoping that it will tell us how we can carry on doing it!

Think I’ll put my foot through the telly and go live up a mountain somewhere (if I can find one not swarming with bloody “influencers”).

I don’t think pornografied is really a word, but this commenter manages to be very funny and absolutely right (as I see it) at the same time. Social media has been profoundly damaging for people’s mental wellbeing. It has also catastrophically accelerated the hyperconsumption and each-man-for-himself “un-society” that started in about 1980. And as my student Matei (a big user of AI) said recently, we’ve now got AI on top of all of this, making us super dumb. (As for me, it’s instant messaging that’s the real killer. I turned off all alerts more than a year ago; it was the only way I could handle it. I couldn’t cope with being part of active WhatsApp groups.)

Here are some pictures of Jimbolia:

The railway station

I was met by goats outside the station

A compulsory charge of zero lei to use the loo doesn’t sound too bad. (It was once 2000 old lei.) But the loo had disappeared. Luckily there was one inside the station.

The main street, with the Catholic church on the left

The very centre. The statue on the left is of St Florian, who was venerated in Austro-Hungary, of which Jimbolia was a part at that time. (Jimbolia didn’t become Romanian until 1924.)

A monument marking 150 years since the 1848 revolution, also known as the Hungarian War of Independence, in which tens of thousands died. The plaque on the right uses the word “Pașoptiști”. That comes from the Romanian for forty-eight: patruzeci și opt, or patrușopt in quick speech. The suffix -ist (plural -iști) is used a lot in Romanian: IT workers are known as ITiști, for instance.

A WW2 memorial. The defaced plaque at the bottom is in German.

The Catholic church

Quite a handsome council building, I thought, even if it needs some TLC.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Bro no-go

June 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

This morning I played squash with Mark in Dumbrăvița. We just rallied rather than playing a game and it was good fun. Though we worked up a sweat we were in the indoor cool, which is a real bonus at the moment.

On Friday I had a chat to Mum about my trip to the UK. Mum’s idea was that she’d book a hotel in London for two nights and I’d catch a train from Luton Airport to meet her and Dad. On one of the nights we’d see a show. Great idea, I thought. The theatre is something they rarely do and I practically never do. Then we’d all go down to my brother’s in Poole for three days, taking us up to the 29th – Dad’s 75th birthday is on the 28th – before heading up to St Ives where I’d stay until 3rd July when I fly back from Stansted. Very well sussed out by Mum I thought, and I was keen to tell her that. But then Mum called me last night to say that my brother has to go to Portsmouth for work during that time, making it pretty much pointless to go down to Poole. So it looks like I’ll miss him and his family. I’ll probably book another trip to the UK in August after Mum and Dad have gone.

Before this morning’s squash session I watched a YouTube video by the wonderfully deadpan Patrick Boyle on American consumerism. He started by saying that in the last 40 years the average American has gone from buying 12 items of clothing a year to 68, an unimaginable number for me. But in the same time the average American’s expenditure on clothes in real terms has halved. People have this idea that being able to buy new jeans for ten bucks a pair is a good thing, when really if they’re that cheap something must have gone wrong. Consumer spending in the US is crazy though. I read that Americans buy 40% of all the world’s toys despite only being 4% of the world’s population. I find it sad that many Romanians see America as the holy grail – what they should aspire to.

I managed to see most of yesterday’s women’s final at Roland-Garros. Coco Gauff was mentally stronger than her opponent Aryna Sabalenka, and that was a big part of why she won a close match. Sabalenka dominated the early running and did eventually win a marathon first set in 77 minutes, but her unforced errors – a whopping 70 of them – caught up with her in the end. The men’s final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz is later today. I don’t know how much of it I’ll see because I have an online lesson scheduled.

Grand slam tennis isn’t immune from the saminess that permeates modern life. When I watched the French Open on TV in the nineties, I felt it was being played in a faraway land even though it was only a few hundred miles away. People were still smoking their Gauloises in the stands; it just looked and sounded wild compared to the lawns of Wimbledon. Now Court Philippe-Chatrier looks tame in comparison; it could be anywhere. There are also signs of dumbing down. The scoreboards now flash up “Ace” or “Balle de set”, when I’d have thought sophisticated Parisians wouldn’t need to be informed like that. That sort of thing is fine in New York, accompanied by the waft of hot dogs, but it’s out of place in Paris.

I noticed on the official Roland-Garros website something called “excitement rate”, a percentage which goes up and down during a match. Near the conclusion of yesterday’s final it reached 97% with a burning flame alongside the figure. I mentioned this to Dad who thought it was silly because it depends on who’s watching: the average Serbian will get more excited during a Djokovic match than the average Spaniard, for instance. But it clearly isn’t measuring that: it’s a measure of how crucial the upcoming point (or maybe few points) are based on the current situation in the match. At 8-8 in a deciding tie-break there’s way more riding on the next point than at 6-3, 6-2, 4-2, 40-15, and hence far more “excitement”. I still think it’s silly though for a whole raft of reasons. One, “rate” is the wrong word: it should be “index” or “level”. Two, “Get excited now!” doesn’t add anything. Three, I never saw it drop below 60-70% when it should be able to drop to practically zero; the “marketers” are never going to say their “product” is boring. Four, it’s really just a crappy way of promoting a data company, in this case InfoSys – I’ve seen these pointless promotional stats and indices in tennis for ages.

I had a funny online lesson yesterday with a boy who was keen to show me his farming simulator. He plays Roblox and Fortnite and Minecraft, but the farming simulator (which is in English) is his go-to game. He’s not the first boy I’ve taught who – refreshingly – wants to be a farmer when he grows up rather than a footballer or an online influencer. His grades in English are shocking, but this game is at least boosting his vocab in a specific area – combine harvester, enclosure, crops, slurry. It has given me ideas for future lessons.

Cat - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

A little rascal

June 7, 2025 by 0 Comments

Today I had a free morning, giving me the chance to cycle to Sânmihaiu Român before it got too hot. But really it was already too hot. I was sweating like a pig and jumped into a cold shower when I got back. The sweet smell of tei – or lime – has now taken hold. Not helping matters was another bout of sinus pain – though not as bad as the one before, it sapped me of energy as always.

Yesterday I didn’t start till ten – unusually – but it was a busy day. It started with a two-hour lesson with a lady in her late forties in which I partly took on the role of a shrink, then I had four more one-hour sessions with kids aged 10 to 13. One of them meant trekking across the city on my bike. In between I took Kitty to the vet to get her latest jab, then got my car back after getting the air con fixed. They put freon in it and also replace a switch that had been playing up. That was an absolute necessity and it only set me back 700 lei (£120 or NZ$260). I’ve also had the battery replaced on my laptop. It’s been a good week for that kind of thing. I’m still waiting for someone to pick up my colour printer which has packed in well within its guarantee. With only a black-and-white printer, my options with kids are limited.

It was interesting talking to Mum and Dad after their trip down to Poole. They really took to their granddaughter. Their grandson on the other hand is proving to be a real live wire. Super intelligent (my brother wonders how he could possibly be so good with numbers and the alphabet) but pretty conniving with it. My brother could be a pain in the neck at that age – I can remember – but there was never any malice in him. So watch this space, I suppose. My brother has been extremely good with his son when a lot of fathers would lose their rag. They were relieved to get back to St Ives and not have to do very much for really the first time since they left New Zealand. (I’d wanted their time in Romania to be a relaxing one, but it didn’t quite pan out that way.)

When my parents were with me, Dad sometimes said “I don’t know how you do it” in relation to my work. He thought it was surprising that I have a job that has a large social element when socialising has never been easy for me. To be honest, the sheer amount of talking I have to do can be exhausting. Sometimes I’m not even talking in my own language. But the social aspect isn’t too bad – it’s hardly going to some packed trendy bar where socialising is the primary goal, I rarely have to interact with more than one or two people at a time (I’ve always been terrible in large groups), and I’m safe in the knowledge that after 60 or 90 or 120 minutes it’ll be all over. And I’m actually helping someone in the process, which is something most humans derive satisfaction from. The social side of an open-plan office is far, far harder for me, even if it involves less actual talking. So much fakeness and playing the game. And don’t get me started on Christmas parties.

It looks like Elena, the lady who lives above me, will feed Kitty during my nine-day stay in the UK. Dorothy just happens to be acquiring a kitten in the next week or two, so that wasn’t an option. I was worried that I’d be forced to find a shelter for her. As for my planned road trip to Poland, I may well end up taking Kitty with me. That thought made me think of the song Me and You and a Dog Named Boo by Lobo. It was a number-one hit in New Zealand in 1971 and they’d sometimes play it on classic hits stations. It makes life in those days seem pretty simple.

Off-the-pitch football news. Birmingham City’s already ambitious plans are going gangbusters now. They plan to build a 62,000-seater stadium in the middle of a sports quarter with transport links to the city. Potentially this could be huge. Blues are already a big club in terms of support – it’s a big city after all – but on the pitch they’ve been very much in the shadow of Aston Villa. This massive investment could turn the tables. They’ve got one trump card up their sleeves that Villa lack – having Birmingham in their name. A successful Blues team could really put the city on the map, giving it a real shot in the arm, as well as revitalising a pretty impoverished part of it. I just they hope they don’t totally down the Manchester City route; I stumbled upon one of their home matches on TV recently and I switch it off – I couldn’t handle the sheer scale of all the advertising.

Continuing the football theme, I had a dream on Tuesday night about a Championship (second-tier) club that lacked decent support or even a decent song. As a joke a supporter composed a song: “Keep the cat flying along” (whatever the hell that was supposed to mean; I think it was a mishmash of other football songs) that ended up becoming not only the club song but a major hit.

I’m currently watching the Roland-Garros semi-final between Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic, though it’s uncomfortably hot in the kitchen where the TV is. Sinner took the first set 6-4 and Djokovic leads 3-2 (on serve) in the second. There was an extraordinary point early in the second set in which both players scrambled to reach near-impossible balls. The winner will play Carlos Alcaraz in the final.

On Sunday I’m playing squash with Mark, and maybe his wife too.

Family - Life :) - Photos

Here we go again… and some trip pictures

June 2, 2025 by 0 Comments

After spending a week at my brother’s, my parents have now made their way to St Ives.

It’s officially the first day of summer, meaning infernal temperatures are just around the corner. This coming Saturday we’re forecast to nudge the mid-30s. That’s still some time away so it could be several degrees out. In either direction. The air con on my car stopped working properly during the trip with Mum and Dad. No big deal at that point, but if I don’t get it sorted (maybe it just needs a top-up of freon) my car will rapidly become unusable.

Today we hit 28 degrees, the warmest day of the year so far. It was supposed to be my first relaxing day since my parents left, but I had sinus pain – not that absolutely crippling pain but bad enough all the same – that didn’t go away until five, after which I felt washed out and weary. I did manage to get through a lot of Brave New World, though.

Yesterday was the deadline for the book “project” submission. There were so many hoops to jump through, understandable in a way, but it made the whole thing (as Dad put it) a slog. I wish I could have gone through a conventional publisher. While I was having lunch in the park in Dumbrăvița between lessons, a 77-year-old man sat on the bench next to me. Unusually, it took him a while to determine that I wasn’t Romanian. He wanted to know what the British reaction to the Romanian election was. I said I bet it passed most Brits by entirely. (Not totally accurate, come to think of it. The re-run definitely garnered more attention than usual over there.) He said he was a retired Romanian and French teacher who had published 15 books. His “publishers” sounded rather like mine: glorified printers and not much more.

I had an earlier finish than usual yesterday so I met up with Dorothy at Berăria 700 for a light dinner. The weather was perfect for sitting outside. Among other things, we talked about Dot Cotton from EastEnders and forms of address for tennis players. She talked a bit about woke stuff, a subject that energises her much more than it does me. It’s funny – a couple of weeks ago I had a lesson with the 35-year-old guy who lives in London. He wanted to know why on earth all this trans rights (and related) stuff mattered so much. How is it even news, when so few people are affected? Yeah mate, you’re preaching to the choir here. I don’t get it either. It’s like deciding on what colour to paint the spare bedroom when your house is on fire. And that goes for both sides of the argument. Mark, who’s 54, said something similar last weekend, though he drew the line at calling individual known people “they”. So do I, honestly. The kind of singular they in “Always give the customer what they want” or “What did they say when you spoke to Barclays?” is perfectly normal to me because the person is unknown. “They wrote their first novel at 24” is something I can’t bring myself to say, however, and it takes me aback when I read it. That’s not for anti-woke reasons, but because the grammar of using “they” for an individual known person is just too jarring for me.

Another thing I forgot about our trip was the Romanian film Război în Bucătărie (War in the Kitchen) which we saw on TV in Sibiu. A really weird film, and one I wouldn’t mind seeing again.

Here are some pictures from the trip, as I promised last time. I’ve also included some of the unrenovated buildings near me. Mum said that give it ten years and they’ll all look pristine. That may well be true. But if that also means getting a KFC and bubble tea cafés and overpriced trendy ambient bars with everything in bloody English, I’d rather things stay as they are. Gentrification and saminess make everything deeply dull. I’m glad I arrived in Timișoara when I did, before all of that began to set in.

Outside the Catholic church in Recaș

Porumbacu de Jos, on the way to Brașov

Codlea, just outside Brașov

The immediate vicinity of where we stayed in Brașov

I hope you agree that Brașov is beautiful

The Black Church with its rugs and pewage

More from Brașov

The museum in Brașov

A pleasant village at the start of our journey from Brașov to Râmnicu Vâlcea

Râșnov

The centre of Sibiu in the rain

The Catholic cathedral in Sibiu

Ciacova

Some of the buildings near me
Family - Life :) - Romania

Keeping my arms to myself

May 28, 2025 by 0 Comments

A lighter day today, which is just what I need. Having my parents here was quite stressful honestly, and since then I’ve loads of lessons plus all the book stuff. (I’ve now sent off the cover for the dictionary. That should be it.) Probably the most stressful thing about Mum and Dad being here (well, Mum, lets be frank) apart from the two really shitty bits, was all the washing and cleaning. In theory it should have been a plus having Mum around to help, because normally I have to do it all myself, but while she was here the chores went from being a gentle drum beat that accompanies my life to crashing cymbals constantly in my ear.

On Friday I asked Dorothy if I do have a problem with arm-waving when I get stressed or annoyed. She said yes, she remembered a time when the older woman at the publishing house gushed forth with confusing information, as is her wont, and I waved my arms furiously in frustration, something Dorothy called “concerning behaviour”. She emphasised that it happened just the once. So it’s something I’m going to watch out for and will try to curb. (Mum walking out of the pub because I waved my arms is clearly quite ludicrous, though.) One time I accidentally recorded part of a lesson and I was taken aback by how much I waved my arms and tilted my head, even when I wasn’t frustrated at all. Maybe it’s just a nervous tic. (There’s also the leg-shaking which a younger student pulled me up on.)

My most enjoyable hour and a half since my parents left (so far) has been meeting Mark in town on Sunday. We went to Berăria 700 and had two beers each and plenty of conversation. I liked the simplicity of that.

Yesterday I booked a trip to the UK. I’m taking the early flight from Timișoara to Luton on 24th June, then coming back on 3rd July a different way: I’ll fly from Stansted to Budapest in the afternoon and then catch a train to Timișoara. My sleep-free experience at Luton Airport last summer is something I hope never to repeat.

On Monday I took possession of something pretty important: my permanent residence permit, as they call it, which doesn’t run out until April 2035. That piece of plastic is made even more valuable by Romania’s presidential election result. By the way, Nicușor Dan still needs to pick a prime minister and cobble together a government. He was sworn in on Monday amid a torrential downpour. I’ve been careful not to mention the election to my students unless they do so first, or unless it’s come up before in conversation.

Some other things I didn’t mention from Mum and Dad’s stay, probably because I’d forgotten them. One was all the dogs on the roadside during the stop-start drive from Brașov to Râmnicu Vâlcea. They were mostly old, scraggy things. Until fairly recently, when there was a drastic cull, Romania had a big problem with stray dogs in cities. Another thing that comes to mind is Romanians’ priorities when it comes to accommodation. This was of some frustration to Mum. She wanted a place with an electric kettle (I agree, for us that’s a basic requirement) but instead these places on booking.com all boasted that they had slippers. “Fuck the slippers!” Mum said. Highly amusing, I must say. Last weekend I saw a YouTube video by the excellent RobWords which delved into the most loved and hated words in the English language and gave the results of a poll. “Ethereal” topped the survey of best words (it’s OK, but it wouldn’t feature in my top ten), while “phlegm” was the most hated. I get why; it doesn’t sound too bad, but it looks disgusting and describes something pretty nasty too. In the Black Church in Brașov, Mum noticed the word “pewage” repeatedly on signs next to the pews: “This pewage is not in use.” Neither of us had seen the word before. That’s got to be up there with “phlegm” if you ask me.

I’m now making a concerted effort to contact Mum more via email. Normally I email Dad, but I think the more I communicate with Mum the better the relationship between us will be. That’s my hope anyway.

Next time I’ll post some pictures from the trip.

Family - Life :) - Politics

Romania, where power is cheap

May 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

If I’ve got it right, Mum and Dad have just arrived in Munich. Or at least their flight has. It was a 13-hour leg from Singapore. Yesterday I was tracking their progress across Australia on FlightRadar24 – one of the best sites out there. They were just west of a village called Camooweal (fun name; Australian outback placenames so often are) which was just west of the mining town of Mount Isa where Greg Norman and Pat Rafter come from, but of course nothing is just west of anything out there. Anyway, in a few hours I should actually see my parents. What state they’ll be in is anyone’s guess. I spent some of yesterday cooking for them. I’ve always wanted to make an enormous pizza covering the whole baking tray and bursting out the sides, and yesterday I did it using Mum’s recipe (Mum has always made very good pizzas). I also made a mix to go with pasta, using the 18-inch sausage I got from the market. So they shouldn’t go hungry. Another thing I did was to start the process of brewing elderflower cordial like I did last year, using 20 or so heads from Dorothy’s plants.

At 3:28 yesterday afternoon, just before I was about to start an online lesson with a young boy, my doorbell rang. God, who is it? It was a youngish man in a uniform. I opened the door. He was from PPC, the power company. “Look, I’ve literally got two minutes.” He told me that prices are going to shoot up because of something the government are doing, then he said a lot of other very fast Romanian that I struggled to keep up with, and he told me I had to sign a contract right there, right then, to get “120% cheaper” electricity. Jeez, 120% cheaper. They do all this mind-numbing abstract shit in maths classes here, you see, rather than anything vaguely practical like percentages. “But that’s impossible.” No, believe me. “No, it really is impossible. You’d be paying me to give me electricity. Anyway I have to work now so I can’t sign anything.” I had lessons until 8:30. The other residents – most of whom are retired – got a visit too. Just after 8:30 I went up to see Elena, the lady above me. I didn’t take Kitty like I normally do. She said I really did need to sign, otherwise my bills would indeed shoot up. Is there any way I could still sign? I’ll try and see someone at the PPC office on Friday, but this is one life admin thing I could do without.

Skype was killed earlier this week. I’d used it since way back, before it was taken over by Microsoft, and I already miss it. Skype had become a verb; Teams (its replacement) doesn’t work so well as a verb, even if it sounds vaguely like times which some kids do use as a verb in elementary maths – “I timesed it by seven and then minused four”. The good news is that they’ve transferred the Skype dial pad over to Teams, so I’m able to use Teams as a phone. Yesterday I had to call my web host (based in America) and that was the only way to do it. That was because plutoman.com is coming up for an automatic renewal but they had my old bank card on the system.

It was good to see Dorothy again before my parents come. As I tried to negotiate the deep potholes coming into her village, she said the tarmac on the road was put there ten years and two presidential elections ago. Vote for me and we’ll tarmac your road. Pork-barrel politics, I think they call that. But it was a crude, rushed job.

I was pleased to see Australia move away from anything vaguely Trumpian in their election. Albanese was re-elected by a surprising margin. It was similar in a way to what happened in Canada. But here in Romania we’re doing the exact opposite. Ten days until the second round.

My parents should arrive in Timișoara around 1:30 this afternoon.
Update: They’re just about to fly over Lake Balaton. Some weird codeshare thingy meant it took me a while to locate their flight from Munich. I’ll make my way to the airport pretty soon. It’s a wet day here; I doubt that’ll bother Mum and Dad too much.