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Cat - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Scrabble

Loss of a family friend

February 18, 2026 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother last night. He told me the sad news that an old family friend had died. She was born and bred in Ireland and was the mother of two boys who were friends of my brother’s and mine. Growing up, we saw a lot of her. She had a number of health complications in later life (and earlier – she had a heart valve operation, similar to what my father had, at a pretty young age). She was a little older than our mother – we reckon she must have been 80, give or take a year.

I’ve had some problems with my bike. When I took it into the shop, they told me they had no choice but to fit a whole new front gear system and pedals. That’ll set me back 350 lei (£60 or NZ$135). So that means I’ve done more walking than usual. The benefits of that are that I see more. Even practical things at times, like a handy appliance repair shop which I didn’t know existed, and the fact that I can my pay local rates bill across the road.

In a recent English lesson, an eleven-year-old boy showed me his maths homework. “I don’t like maths,” he said. I asked if I could take a picture of his homework, which you can see below. It’s a bit grainy, but you get the idea. I’m not surprised you don’t like maths. Who in their right mind would set something so boring and intimidating? So much is wrong there, I don’t know where to start. There are far too many questions, there’s far too little variety in them, the font size is way too small, the font itself – Times New Roman – is hopelessly unfriendly for kids, it’s not even typeset properly (it uses the letter x for times and a hyphen for minus), there are triple brackets (why inflict that on them?!), there’s nowhere near enough white space, and so on. I’d never dream of producing something like that. (Yes, fonts matter. The two I avoid at all costs are Times New Roman and the ubiquitous Arial.)

What happened to questions 31 to 42?

Crappy assessments aren’t limited to Romania, sadly. On Friday I had a lesson with a 17-year-old girl who will take the C1 Cambridge exam in about three months. I really can’t stand the reading part of the test, and neither can she. The first part of the reading we did was a text about the UK shipping forecast which I actually wrote about on this blog in 2022. A slightly bizarre topic for a young person with no connection to the UK, and although it would have been interesting for me in theory, the text was made to be utterly tedious; virtually nobody would want to read something so vapid. If you knew nothing about the topic before reading the next, you’d still know next to nothing afterwards. After that, we did another text – I can’t remember what that was about, though my student said it was even less inspiring than the one about the shipping forecast. The grammar part of the text isn’t quite as bad, but at times it spectacularly fails to test 21st-century (or even late 20th-century) English. In one question, it expected my student to come up with “Despite my not having spoken to him.” Practically nobody talks or writes like that anymore.

I was pissed off with Mum last week, but I’m over that now. As my brother said last night, you never quite know what she’s thinking. He also told me to save my money rather than make a costly trip to New Zealand this year. I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ll do. A bit sad in some ways, especially because Dad would clearly like to see me and even sent me some fares from Flight Centre (a NZ travel agent), mostly with China Airlines who are in fact Taiwanese.

I’ve had some more weird dreams. Two in the same night, in fact. In one of them I was working in some office job and went to the wrong floor and had to move a chair whose owner I didn’t know. When I asked who the owner was, I got a patronising reply. “Who do you think that chair belongs to?” Then in an even worse dream, I was transported back half a lifetime to my early twenties and another job which had some sort of initiation camp involving thousands of employees in a field. Everyone had special clothes delivered (By courier? Post? This wasn’t clear), but Mum and Dad came to deliver mine in person. I said to them, “I can’t do this,” to which Dad replied, “I know you can’t” and then I woke up. So often, the theme of these dreams is embarrassment.

A new café has opened up in the middle of town. I saw it on one of my walking trips last week. Whoever the clientèle is for this place, I’m very much outside it.

In Romania, avoiding places with bullshit English text is good policy. It’ll save you money for a start.

Scrabble. Last night I was able to see (on YouTube) the tail end of a fairly major tournament based in Canada. With seconds left on both players’ clocks, world champion Adam Logan was barely able to hold off Josh Castellano in the deciding seventh game of the final. He won that last game by twelve points. After the game, rather than just congratulating and commiserating, these elite players discussed potential moves in great depth, as if winning and losing were secondary to solving a fiendish puzzle. Adam is one of the best mathematicians alive, while Josh has a top job at Google. As for my progress, I started the latest round of the league with a good number of wins, but it’s an uphill struggle in the latter stages and I may have a fight on my hands to avoid relegation. We’ll see.

It’s five weeks since I fell over on the ice, and my back still hasn’t fully recovered. The pain (which luckily isn’t too bad) comes and goes. I’ll mention it to my after-hours doctor when I see him tomorrow to get my monthly supply of pills.

Kitty has been exceptionally friendly this week. Long may it continue.

Family - Language teaching

Looks like I’m making the trip

February 11, 2026 by 0 Comments

We’ve had a sudden drop in temperature today; it briefly snowed this morning.

So last night I called Dad. I waited till half-ten (my time) to make sure that, barring something unforeseen, Mum would be out. He brought up the subject of Mum without my prompting. At one point the electrician showed up at my parents’ place, so our call was interrupted and went even later than expected. So, does Mum want me to come or not? Yes, he assured me, she absolutely does. He said that he could certainly see where I was coming from though, and she was just in a funny mood the day before. I’ll take his word for it. He even said that she’d now be quite upset if I didn’t make it over. So I guess that’s settled. I can safely book the trip. I really do want to see both Mum and Dad over there, as well as extended family and friends. Plus it’s just a great country to spend a month in – that’s the plan. Mum and Dad have virtually decided to spend two months in Europe, arriving in the middle of May, so I’ll likely be spending more time with them than I imagined. That can surely only be a good thing. As for Mum’s golf, she’d only played five holes when one of her playing partners took ill, so they called it a day.

Some other family news: my brother got a distinction in his master’s degree. His academic exploits appear to be limitless. It’s all mighty impressive, firstly because he didn’t have an academic bone in his body as a kid, and secondly it’s in business management, something that would bore me to tears (and I assumed would bore him to tears too, but clearly not). Mum is keen to attend his graduation in July, just before they go back home.

I’ve lost a student. She questioned my lack of relevant credentials. So, would you seriously prefer a teacher with a TEFL qualification but without all the practical experience I have? Yes. OK then, I’m sure you can find someone who fits the bill pretty easily. That was my second and surely my last session with her. If it’s taken over nine years for someone to be bothered by my lack of a formal qualification, I’m glad I didn’t get one. (I did want to take a course in Wellington, but the sheer expense and the fact that I’d have needed to take time off work put it beyond my reach.) I had a funny lesson last night with a woman in her late thirties. I’ve got a new sink. I hope you like it, she said. Bathroom or kitchen sink? Chiuvetă. I said the Romanian word to confirm that I’d understood her. No no no, sink, like when you sink music. God! Oh, you mean a new song! Of course I do. You need to guess what I mean. No, sorry I don’t. Often you can make a mistake and still get the message across perfectly fine. But what you said was too far away for me to reasonably guess, and sounded like another word that was totally plausible.

In yesterday’s Romanian lesson, Dorothy talked about her time as a Latin teacher and her use of mnemonics. She mentioned this because some of the Romanian imperatives come straight from Latin and form a nice mnemonic in that language. I find mnemonics extremely handy. Most recently I’ve used them to learn Scrabble words. In that crucial game in the recent league I played DISPONE to give me a narrow win, a word which I’d learnt as ONSIDE plus a P. (SPINODE is a valid anagram.) Soon though I’ll have to shift away from these memory aids, otherwise there will be too many phrases to remember.

Cat - Family - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Scrabble

The attraction of a cat

January 19, 2026 by 0 Comments

In family news, today is my niece’s first birthday. It’s also the eve of Mum’s cataract operation on her first eye. She’ll get the other one done next month. I think the bill for both eyes is around NZ$10,000, a staggering amount. In Romania it would cost a fifth of that. Mum is pretty dire need of this surgery (which only takes ten minutes per eye, though there’s considerable faff when you get to the clinic). Her eyesight was pretty terrible when I saw her last May and June, and has deteriorated further since then.

Yesterday was a reasonably busy day for a Sunday. The twins, whom I normally see at their place on Wednesdays, came to my place yesterday morning instead. They seemed to enjoy the lesson because they got to see (and play with) the cat. Kitty has been a boon to my face-to-face lessons at home. Later I met Mark for lunch at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. He tried a few words of Romanian with the waitress but she didn’t understand him. You can see why I hardly bother. It can be like that sometimes. It’s rare for a non-native to speak Romanian, so Romanians aren’t “tuned in” to imperfect, non-native versions of their language. That’s in sharp contrast to us native English speakers who hear imperfect second-language English all the time to the point where we don’t think anything of it, and it creates a barrier for anyone trying to learn Romanian. You have to reach a certain level before you can even cross the start line. The barrier has even been raised somewhat in my time here; Timișoara is fairly cosmopolitan by Romanian standards and as a result more and more people are gaining a command of English, so if you’re not careful you can find yourself dealing almost exclusively in English even after living here for years. That’s especially true of someone like Mark who works at a British school and lives a far more “expat” lifestyle than me. Our lunch was done and dusted in a very swift 50 minutes; quite often it’ll take you that long just to get served.

In the evening I went to Dorothy’s for our monthly English Conversation Club meeting. She managed to start it up again in November. There were ten of us, of whom eight were women. (Language learning – and teaching – can skew pretty heavily in that direction.) I had to cycle home, and by that stage the temperature had plummeted to −6. First thing this morning we were at −10.

On Saturday I had my first lesson with a seven-year-old boy called Noah. I don’t really like teaching kids that young, but he was very nice and our session went well. Unusually, he was happy to see me. (Most small children have a look of either puzzlement or fear on their face the first time I see them.) The name Noah is very un-Romanian; the Biblical Noah is called Noe in Romanian, while a final h is pronounced here with a guttural sound like the ch inloch.

In a recent conversation with Dad, he mentioned his decision in the late seventies to quit his job as an illustrator for the Ministry of Defence and go his own way as a painter. It takes a lot of courage to step away. As you also did, he said. It would have been so easy to have stayed where I was, he then said, rather than take that leap. Ah, I said, this is where we differ. The idea that insurance was any sort of comfort zone for me is laughable. I simply couldn’t have stayed there; it would have been dangerous to have done so. Staying there might literally have killed me; I had to leave. Moving to the water company was a useful stopgap – it got me away from a lot of that corporate toxicity – before I decided what I really wanted to do. (I was also several years older than Dad was when he made the move.) Talking of the corporate world, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comics, died of cancer last week. Those comics were extremely popular and funny; they did a great job of satirising office life and the practices that came to the fore in the nineties. Sadly in later life he became a Trump-supporting attention-seeking twat. (It’s quite possible he was always a twat, but only with the advent of social media did he gain an avenue for his twattishness.)

Scrabble. I’ve had three wins and five losses so far in my latest round of league matches, but my six outstanding games aren’t looking too bad. I’ve also got a decent tie-breaker this time if I happen to finish on the same number of wins as another player. There has been some controversy this time around as one player in our division has been kicked out, presumably for cheating. Before his expulsion he managed to beat me. Six of his matches were still outstanding, so I’m guessing his opponents in those games will be given walkover wins, but I don’t know if his earlier victims (including me) will be compensated in any way. Last week I had a crazy game on ISC, the other site. I put down a bingo only for my opponent to respond with the huge 158-point triple-triple TIDYTIpS, a word I didn’t know. (It’s a very pretty yellow flower found in America.) But a couple of turns later I put down BURTHEN (an old form of burden that I’d seen in books) for 97. A very close finish ensued, and eventually I won by a single point, 428-427.

I’ve just got one episode of The Queen’s Gambit still to watch. It’s been great so far. Obsession with something like chess can certainly drive one to madness. In addition to the story I’ve been enjoying the sixties music as well as the cars and decor of that time.

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

Taking a tumble

January 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

Cat - Family - Language teaching - New Zealand - Other sports - Photos - Scrabble

The Year of the Cat

January 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s properly cold now. We’ve had flurries of snow both yesterday and today. When I went off to my lesson with an eleven-year-old boy – my 862nd and final lesson of the year if my records are correct – it was minus six. I drove, when normally I’d cycle. I took a detour after the session, and stopped for sandwiches at Bobda, a place I went to four years ago to the day, that time on my bike. It had just gone 1pm – midnight in New Zealand – so I called Mum on WhatsApp, thinking she may have already gone to bed in which case she just wouldn’t answer, but no, my parents were still up and about. They’d just seen the Sky Tower fireworks on TV. Sometimes they’d go down to Caroline Bay, but not this time.

This extraordinary Catholic church in Bobda hasn’t been divinum or nobiscum for quite some time

I got Kitty at the start of the year. She hasn’t totally wrecked my life as my parents predicted. She’s certainly much more comfortable here than in those first couple of months – the biting-and-scratching-and-cowering phase. But last night I thought, there’s still something off about you, Kitty, isn’t there? Your body is so damn tense all the time. Why can’t you just relax? Sometimes she’ll sit on my lap or I’ll hold her in my arms, but never for more than a minute or two. As I said, her body isn’t relaxed and she wants to wriggle away all the time. That makes it hard to build up much of a rapport with her, which is a shame. I’m trying to play with her more and may even get a harness so she can go outside. I hope that she calms down a bit as she gets older. Here’s Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat.

Kitty on Christmas Day

There are still seven hours of 2025 left where I am. I don’t think I can face going into town for the New Year celebrations where it’ll be rammed as Brits say, and any sort of party is out of the question. Spending less time with people over the festive season has been wonderful, and I don’t want that to stop for another few days at least. As for 2026, it feels like a very hard to predict year. There are so many imponderables both on a worldwide level and for my family. The business with their flat in St Ives, their health (which is often hard to ascertain), whether they’ll make it to Europe, so much is up in the air. On Christmas Day I mentioned to Mum that I’ll need to get round to booking some flights. She asked where to. When I said New Zealand, she seemed surprised. It was almost as case of “Why would you want to do that?” Wouldn’t it be really cool if she said, “That would be absolutely lovely.”

I finished the latest Scrabble league with a record of eight wins and six losses. That means I’ll be back in the same division for the third time running. I was pleased with how I played overall. The lady from Palmerston North was one of two weaker players in the division; they will both be relegated. The next round starts tomorrow. I thought if I’m ever going to play a real-life Scrabble tournament (against the clock and with challenges) I should at the very least try an online version, so yesterday I tried my hand at one that was run by someone in Sri Lanka, scheduled for eight games each. It turned out to be a shitshow. It was due to start at 11:30 am my time (3pm for the organiser; India and Sri Lanka are on a half-hour time zone, just like the central third of Australia and a few other places). But most of the entrants didn’t even show up. Blame the ridiculous registration process for that; one click and you were committed, with no way of backing out. The organiser delayed the start for half an hour in a vain hope that more people might present themselves, but they never did. Eventually I played a game. A good game it was too. My opponent drew fantastically and I lost by 50-odd – no shame in that – even though I successfully challenged off his play of DOUG which as I suspected is just a bloke’s name. In the second game my opponent played ANECDOTA. I’d never seen that word before so I challenged, but it was valid. A little while later he said he had an emergency. Could I cancel the game? OK then. Five minutes later the game restarted from the beginning. Emergency over, he said. What the heck is this?! He wasn’t a good player, he was quite possibly cheating, and he definitely seemed to be a complete dick. Thankfully I was able to beat him. In game three I played someone better than me but was fortunate in my draws and ran up a big lead; despite my best efforts to blow it, I hung on to win. Then the organiser mercifully called a halt to proceedings. If real-life competitive Scrabble is anything like that, you can count me out.

Yesterday I watched some of the darts. I hadn’t watched any of this year’s tournament prior to that. One of the matches featured Krzyzstof Ratajski of Poland. I guess Polish Scrabble might be quite interesting. Another match involved a debutant called Justin Hood who remarkably hit all of his first eleven attempts at a double. His twelfth was match dart which he missed, but he completed a 4-0 whitewash over the much higher ranked Josh Rock all the same.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Music - Photos - Scrabble

Loads of lessons — time for a break

December 15, 2025 by 0 Comments

I took Kitty to the vet on Friday for her latest round of flea treatments and a general warrant of fitness. As I suspected after changing her food, she’d put on a smidgen of weight: according to their scales (which have 50-gram precision) she was exactly three kilos. She’ll always be a little kitty.

Last week was a very busy one with 35 hours of lessons. That’s a lot of contact time. A lot of talking. When you add in all the preparation, it was a pretty draining week. I’m now staring at my diary for tomorrow; after my early-morning lesson with the Romanian teacher I’ve got six sessions, finishing at 9:30 pm. I’m seriously looking forward to the Christmas break, in particular the days between Christmas and New Year when not a lot happens. This morning I bought an artificial Christmas tree from the supermarket. In some ways I’d have preferred a real one – I like their smell – but I had a look at them at the market and decided they weren’t really cost-effective for a single person. I’m glad I got to the mall this morning at nine, before it became impossibly busy for me. (Only the supermarket is open at that time; the other shops don’t open till ten.) I wondered what the heck was going on with the decorations you could buy in beige and other pastel shades. “Billy, I’ll put the oatmeal candy cane on this side just above the pale lilac Santa hat, and you can put the taupe reindeer over there. There’s a good boy.” Is it because it looks better on Instagram?

Mum and Dad went to Moeraki last week. They called me from outside the fish and chip shop in Hampden, which is the only place they can get a signal. They enjoyed themselves down there, as they usually do. Mum slept a lot. They plan to spend a few days there straight after Christmas.

My first round of the Scrabble league finished last Tuesday. To my surprise, I narrowly avoided relegation with a record of six wins and eight losses. That might not sound great, but I was delighted with the result. It all came down to my final game – with four of the five relegation spots already taken, it was a straight shoot-out, with the winner avoiding the drop. The correspondence format, where you often have to wait hours between moves, made for some nerve-wracking moments. I’d built up a handy lead in that last game but, partly thanks to my total lack of experience in these sorts of situations, did my best to blow it. My last two tiles were Q and J, and I could only play one of them. I decided to play the Q, but that allowed my opponent to play MEOW which a J play would have blocked. (I really should have seen that word.) He then played one tile at a time to maximise his score while I was stuck with the J. I just had enough of a buffer though, and I won in the end by 19. It’s possible they’ll rejig the divisions and I’ll be relegated anyway, and if that happens I’ll be pretty peeved – eking out those six wins took a real effort. The next round starts this Thursday.

On Friday I met up with Dorothy and another friend in town for coffee. And three-way Romanian Scrabble. The café has an upstairs bit, so we took the Scrabble up there. Our friend hadn’t played before, so despite playing in her native language, she wasn’t tuned into triple word scores and the like. In the end I won, finishing just seven points ahead of Dorothy. At one point I had a bunch of vowels and I queried whether AIOLI was valid in Romanian. Our friend asked the waitress about the validity of AIOLI. Unsurprisingly, this was met by a Huh?

A song I’ve been playing a lot in the last few days is John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels, one of his last songs before he was murdered.

It really does feel like time for a break.

Family - Language teaching - Music - Photos - Romania - Scrabble

December in Timișoara and being out of my league

December 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

A lot of stuff happens in Romania in December. The first of the month is the national day with all the parades of military and emergency vehicles. I wasn’t able to see the parade this time, but in the early evening I saw the bit where they march through the city carrying torches and stop every few minutes to sing the national anthem. A few days later there’s St Nicholas’ Day where all the kids get goody bags which always include a stick. Then on the 16th and for a few days afterwards there are commemorations of those who died in the 1989 revolution – that gets particular attention in Timișoara because it all kicked off here. Not long after that it’s Christmas, which is huge, though thankfully still not quite at the level of the UK. After a few blissful days it’s New Year’s Eve which is massive. As the clock ticks towards midnight, it’s practically impossible to move in town for people, as I found out nine years ago. (That was only my second night in my old flat.) Through it all and into January there’s the Christmas market which was very exciting to be among that first time with all the lights and smells. Though it seems far less exciting now – it all just feels normal – it’s actually got bigger.

On Saturday I met Mark in town, in the thick of Christmas market action. There were jazz Christmas songs booming from the stage. Things had all been rejigged to accommodate the extra stuff. We decided to get away from the chaos and go to Piața Unirii where the Museum of Banat was looking quite spectacular with all its Christmas lights. We tried a new restaurant. Predictably, it wasn’t worth it. It rarely is. One young waiter seemed to understand neither Romanian nor English. We sat there for over two hours and all I had was a burger and chips and two beers. Mark also had a dessert – some sort of pancake topped with a meringue which was supposedly some Banat speciality, though I’d never seen it before. I didn’t order a dessert and hoped Mark wouldn’t either because I knew it would mean sitting there for almost another hour.

I went to Ciacova yesterday – one of my favourite small towns around here – but the weather was pretty atrocious and I quickly came home. Other than that there’s not much news. Mum and Dad are currently in Moeraki. I’m glad about that because they manage to relax down there in a way they can’t at home.

Last week I had a session with a 25-year-old woman who said that making a lot of money is important to her. I told her that I gave up on that some time ago, and in fact I earned more at her age than I do now, 20 years later. She wants to move on from her job, not just in the pursuit of wealth but because she currently does shift work and the schedule is horrendous.

I had a difficult moment last week with a 17-year-old girl who in her last session with me made it clear that she didn’t believe in evolution. I find that hard, because to me evolution isn’t something you believe in any more than the result of two plus two is something you believe in. Anyway, on Wednesday night at close to eleven when I was halfway into bed, she sent me a message needing urgent help with an online test. At that time of night. Ugh. Reluctantly I agreed to help her. It was a 15-minute reading comprehension test that was part of the application process for an exchange programme in America. The problem is, her English level is well below what they require. She read the text and the possible answers to me but I struggled to understand what she was saying. If I’d had the text in front of me it would have been easy. In the end we ran out of time. I felt bad for her, but what could I do?

I recently joined an online Scrabble league. They split the participants up into eight divisions of 15 players each. I was put in the sixth division. It has a correspondence format in which you have to play the other 14 players in your division in 14 days. You get ten hours per move. Exceed that and you dip into a three-day time bank. If that runs out too, you lose the game. So there isn’t much time pressure. There is however significant pressure from my opponents who are mostly better than me, even in my lower division. You click on their profiles and they’ve played national and world championships, often with great success. So it’s a real uphill struggle for me. I’m currently on three wins and six losses, with five games still outstanding. Because this league is pretty new, they have an aggressive promotion and relegation system – five up, five down – so that people sort themselves quickly into the right divisions. It’s possible I can still sneak into tenth place and avoid the drop, but I may well end up being relegated. Though my play is sound strategically (I think), my word knowledge is my biggest handicap. As luck would have it, a Romanian player – one of the top-ranked English-language players in the country and a participant of two world championships – is in my division. We chatted in Romanian during our game. At one point he played cAEOmAS. Yes, using both blanks, as if he needed that advantage on top of all his others. I have no idea what that word means or how to pronounce it. I ended up getting stuck with the Q and he beat me by “just” 46. One of my other losses was by five points. My last play was MAN, and then my opponent went out with yet another word I didn’t know. I then remembered that NAM was also a word, and I could have played that instead. That would have given me four extra points, so fortunately it didn’t cost me the game.

On Saturday, the Beatles’ I’ll Follow the Sun came on the radio. Such a beautiful song, and all in a minute and 48 seconds. When I hear something like that (this song is from 1964), I always wonder how older people possibly manage in the modern world.

I’m trying to decide whether I can be bothered to get a Christmas tree. Here are some pictures of Timișoara in December:

The torch parade on 1st December

The Banat museum on Saturday night

Between the two market squares

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Scrabble

Sometimes your principles need to go out the window

November 19, 2025 by 0 Comments

At 8:30 this morning I met Dorothy at the immigration office. She’d being trying to renew her residence permit, just like I did back in April, but struggling with the online process that (like me) she found impenetrable. This time, to her great relief, the man at the desk allowed her to bypass the inscrutable portal and get her permit processed manually. They probably took pity on her because of her age. (I was lucky that the place was pretty much deserted when I went.) She was there for ages behind a sort of curtain. I couldn’t figure out what was taking so long. The problem was in fact her fingerprints. After many decades of gardening, they had worn flat. Whatever she did, they couldn’t get a reading. Finally they let her through regardless. Afterwards we wandered around trying to find somewhere nearby to have a coffee. My cappuccino was, as always, nowhere near warm enough, but we had a very good chat.

While I was out, Dad had tried to call me on Teams. I didn’t hear a thing; it just flashed up with a message. By the time I got back it was a bit too late, and honestly I was afraid of how the conversation might unfold. Yesterday our aunt emailed my brother and I to inform us that Mum and Dad’s prospective buyers – their current tenants – who had already agreed to buy the place for £250,000, had lowered their offer by £5,000. The English “system” is crazy. You sign, you agree, that’s final, if you then back out you lose your 10% deposit. That’s what sensible countries do. It’s even what Scotland does, as far as I know. But not England. The tenants mentioned something about wear and tear and renovation costs. My aunt said our parents should meet the tenants halfway and come down to £247,500. I entirely agreed with her – that’s exactly what I would do in their shoes. My brother though said that the tenants are in a weak position, the talk of renovation costs is ridiculous, and our parents should stick to their guns on principle. As I see it, Mum and Dad have basically just won Lotto here and to risk losing the sale for the sake of 2% or even 1% of the asking price would be terrible. Any future sale, if there is one, would likely have horrendous chains attached (that could break at any moment) and could involve untold time and stress. I’m meeting Mark for dinner tonight – I have an extremely rare early finish of 7pm – and maybe I’ll call Mum and Dad when I get back and find out what they’ve decided to do.

I’ve got an easier day today and boy do I need it. My recent schedule has been exhausting. On top of the teaching there are lesson plans and debriefs so I don’t simply forget what I’ve done. The scheduling itself is a headache as it’s a struggle to fit everyone in. Online lessons can be particularly tiring because of all that screen time. The biggest problem is not having two free days at the weekend (or even free evenings) to recharge my batteries. I’m not complaining – after nine years this is still the best thing ever – but at times in the last two weeks I’ve felt absolutely shattered.

Yesterday I had my second lesson with the Dubai woman. The latest Dubai woman, I should say – there are so many. She lives in Braytim, a new development in the south of Timișoara. I don’t know where the “Bray” part of the name comes from. Y isn’t even part of the Romanian alphabet. I had a look at a couple of flats in that area and was put off immediately because it all seemed so soulless. I’d have gone stir-crazy there with all the unremitting newness. Plus the flats were all in that open-space format which is hopeless for teaching. I also wouldn’t have Kitty if I lived in a place like that. She’s lovely, but she’s so active that I do need to restrict her access at night. Last Friday I had a two-hour lesson at home with two boys who were blown away by Kitty’s agility.

On Monday my 37-year-old student in Slatina said something I found extremely sad. We were discussing photos. Do you take many photos? Are there lots of photos of you? She said, “I hate people taking photos of me because I’m ugly.” That’s very sad, I said. “It’s not sad, it’s just the truth.” Yikes. I almost cried.

Last week the world Scrabble championship took place in Ghana. It only happens every two years. Over 120 players each played 32 games; the top two then met in a best-of-seven final on Sunday. I caught snippets of it at best until the final games on Saturday and then the final itself. Adam Logan of Canada had already clinched a place in the final with games to spare, while New Zealand’s Nigel Richards, the undisputed best player of all time, won his last three games to sneak into second place and make the final. The final was streamed on YouTube. In a game largely dominated by nerdy young men, it was good to these two old geezers in the final. Every game was drama-packed, not least game four in which Nigel incredibly misplaced two tiles, forgoing 100-odd points, but won the game anyway. Top mathematician Adam took the lead, Nigel came back, but Adam – who completed a stunning fightback in the third game and had slightly better luck, particularly in game six – toughed out a 4-2 win. You could see at the end what it meant. I was fascinated by the fact that neither player had a phone. Scores are normally submitted via phones, but when perhaps the only two phoneless players met in the final, this obviously wasn’t an option. Both players are reclusive, as far as I can make out, and they hardly said a word throughout their battle. The sad thing for me is that Richards – clearly the best player ever in a very popular board game – gets virtually zero recognition in his native country. Maybe if he had to unscramble tiles with his head up other blokes’ arses as in a rugby scrum, he’d get more attention. (That’s unfair I know. NZ has moved on a lot from the rugby-racing-and-beer days. Also, Nigel moved to Malaysia in 2000.) During the stream they put up a poll. If you’re watching this, how old are you? Under 20, 20–29, 30–39, 40 or over. What an ageist poll! I’m firmly in the geriatric category here. But then, look who made the final two.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - The UK

Relieving my parents’ burden, I hope

November 14, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ll start with some very good news. The people currently renting one of Mum and Dad’s St Ives flats want to buy it. In fact my parents have already accepted their offer. A flat £250,000. Outright, so none of those god-awful chains you get over there that break at a moment’s notice and send you back to square one. I wonder how the renters are suddenly in a position to buy. There’s still legal stuff to get done, and it looks like they’ll get a bill for a couple of thousand to fix the roof, but wow, if this goes through it would be huge. I’m very happy Mum and Dad immediately accepted rather than hanging out for an extra five or ten grand or whatever. This all kicked off when they got a call on their home phone at three in the morning from their property manager. Shit, what’s this? Oh really?

I’ve been pretty busy of late with lessons. I’m having a tough time fitting them all in, to be honest, and it’s been tiring. The biggest problem is that my “client base” has become increasingly kid-heavy, and most of them are only available between 3pm and 7pm or thereabouts. On Wednesday I had a lesson with the 15-year-old twins, boy and girl, who live in a ground-floor flat whose lack of daylight would mess me up entirely. They’d just had an English test. The girl (who now has a very good command of English) got the maximum grade of 10 while the boy got a 7, which is still certainly a pass. They both talked at length of their stress of homework and tests and exams, and that’s even though they’re in the ninth class which is supposed to be less stressful than the one they completed last June. (At the end of eighth class, they have two high-stakes exams in Romanian and maths. The scores they receive in those exams determine what school they go to for the final four years. The scores are decimal numbers out of ten like 7.8 or 8.3; the best schools require averages well into the nines.)

It was clear the boy was disappointed with his English grade, and sure enough the next morning I got a message from his mum. Quoting verbatim: “Please be more demanding with [boy’s name]. I’m disappointed in him. He doesn’t study, otherwise I don’t understand how, after so many years of English, he gets a 7 on the test. Please give him homework. He only learns when you do it with him. And I want him to be able to get his Cambridge. Thank you very much!!” His mum wrote this in English. In the past she’d make lots of mistakes in English, but this was perfect, so quite possibly she used AI. I wanted to write back: Leave the poor chap alone! He’s got so many other subjects; just give him a break. He also happens to be on one of the country’s best robotics teams. I did reply, saying that in future I’ll let the girl get on with her work, mostly from a textbook, while being a lot more hands-on with the boy. The fact that they’re at quite different levels does create a problem in our lessons; she’s liable to blurt out an answer before he’s even had time to understand the question. By the way, “get his Cambridge” refers to a Cambridge English test, which you can take at various levels. It doesn’t mean getting into Cambridge University, though his mum probably has that in mind too.

On Tuesday I had a new student, a woman in her mid-thirties who works as an ear-nose-and-throat specialist. I’ve seen a few of them over the years. We met online; she was smoking a cigarette as we started the session. She had plenty of make-up and jewellery and what I’m sure was a fake tan. At one point I asked her if she’d travelled much. Oh yes. Where have you been? Given what she looked like and the fact that she must be on good money, I knew what was coming. Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Dubai. Of course Dubai. She’s at a beginner level so the lessons won’t be easy at all, but I’m sure I’ll manage.

I saw a video pop up on my YouTube entitled “Why you shouldn’t trust confident people”. I don’t. People who appear very confident and don’t ever say maybe and use very few filler words have always set off alarm bells in me. I was thinking about this when I saw Michael Gove interviewed recently. He was minister of education in the UK from 2010 to 2015 and is partly responsible for the maths GCSE over there being a lot harder now than it was 30 years ago when I did it. When I heard him speak I thought, gosh, you’re using all these big words and speaking oh so authoritatively, but I don’t really think you have a clue. And as a result, you’re dangerous.

When I spoke to Mum recently, she interrupted our conversation twice to visit the loo. She’s still not right down there, is she?

Family - Language teaching - Music - Politics

Taking pride

November 6, 2025 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother last night, just after I’d had a session with a 35-year-old guy who had never heard of Nelson Mandela. This happens quite often in lessons: a huge cultural figure or event that I assumed was universally known (such as 9/11) doesn’t figure at all in my student’s consciousness. Sometimes the reverse happens, too. My brother didn’t say a lot. It sounded like it was just the usual tiring business of looking after two small children. When I mentioned a potential Danube Delta trip with Mum and Dad next spring, he gave me a stark warning: Don’t do it. You’ll almost certainly fall out with Mum on a trip like that. Ugh, he’s probably right, but I’d like to give my parents the chance to see more of the world. And I’d quite like to visit the delta too. He even joked that the damage from the fall-out could be irreparable to the point where she writes me out of the will. (I haven’t watched Joanna Lumley’s Danube series yet, but it’s had some negative reviews, largely because huge swathes of territory – including Serbia – were inexplicably left out.)

Then this morning, after going to the local produce market, I spoke to Mum and Dad. It seems my brother had left quite a bit out when I spoke to him. My sister-in-law isn’t coping that well with the two kids. She relies quite heavily on her own parents, who often visit. She might well be suffering from depression. If so, at least she goes back to work soon. That so often helps.

Back in April I was extremely fortunate to find one of the immigration officers on a good day. This young official allowed me to bypass the inscrutable online system and get my ten-year residence permit processed manually. In May I had the new permit in my hands. Dorothy hasn’t been so lucky. She’s been forced to navigate the online process, which takes months and is truly awful. One problem is that her passport wasn’t stamped when she flew back from the UK in September. I might well end up taking her over the border into Serbia in the car, just so that she can have her passport stamped. It isn’t that far.

Last week during my chat with Dad when Mum had gone off to golf, I asked him what Mum really thought of me. She’s very proud of my brother, and why shouldn’t she be? I’m very proud of my brother. But what exactly does she think of me? No family, no big house, no illustrious career, no first-class degree. A cat and that’s about it. And that’s after all the promise I showed as a kid. Does she think I’m a failure? I was quite moved by what Dad then said, which is that Mum in fact thinks very highly of me and is extremely proud of how I took the bull by the horns and made a drastic – positive – change to my life. He said she often mentions me to her church friends in glowing terms. He said she’s very proud of both of us. That was lovely to hear.

Some excellent US election results overnight. Hopefully it’s the start of something. The soon-to-be New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s line was pretty effective: “So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up!”

Talking of elections, Dad mentioned that yesterday he wanted to use the loo in (I think) Mitre 10, when someone told him: “Don’t go in there. Someone’s just crapped in the sink.” Lovely. Guess what, I said, the bloke who crapped in the sink also gets to vote in elections.

After getting that gamelan LP, I’ve been thinking how great it would be to visit Indonesia again, if perhaps not Bali. I wonder if it would be possible on the way to or from New Zealand, assuming I make a trip out there next year.

Taylor Swift’s Fate of Ophelia came on the radio on Monday. I hadn’t heard it before. I’m very far from a Swiftie, but this was particularly good.

This was from yesterday’s final session. I didn’t even notice until this morning that he was somewhat confused as to the past tense of the verb to like. You can see the bottom half of Kitty here too: