Language teaching

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:

Dreams - Language teaching - Music - Politics

14/10/15

October 14, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s ten years since I started this blog. If I hadn’t decided to radically change my life at that point, I might not even have made it this far.

Last night I had another strange dream. Mum had to see a lawyer – a rich and powerful woman – in connection with one of the flats in St Ives. The only snag: this lawyer didn’t speak a word of English, only Irish. Her son Sam did the job of interpreting. After the meeting Mum described the lawyer as “the most horrible woman I’ve ever met”.

Dreams are so often a summary of the previous day. I’d had a late online session with a new guy who knew very little English so the whole lesson was conducted in Romanian. In an earlier session we discussed phrasal verbs and I gave an example of someone collecting their son from school. Sam was his name, of course. I explained that you can pick Sam up or you can pick up Sam, but when you use a pronoun instead of the name, things change. You can pick him up but you can’t pick up him.

I’m slowly getting over this cold, but I’m still low on energy. Outside my lessons but inside my life, not a lot is happening. I meant to say that the Moldovan parliamentary elections took place at the end of September. Maia Sandu’s pro-EU party won handily. That was a relief. In other news, Jane Goodall, the eminent primatologist and a thoroughly good person, died two weeks ago at the age of 91. Her love for primates was sparked a young age when she was given a stuffed toy chimpanzee.

Dad recently sent me this video of a Tiny Desk concert featuring the band Big Thief. It dates back to the early days of this blog, when Obama was still president. It’s excellent. My favourite Big Thief song (that I’ve heard so far) is Double Infinity, although Grandmother gives it a good run for its money.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Scrabble

Catching up

September 25, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’m struggling a bit this morning with a cold. It’s possible I even have Covid. (Remember that?) There’s a lot of it flying around.

I’m in the middle of a catching-up-with-people period. On Sunday I had a Teams call with my cousin in New York state. His wife briefly came on the line too. We talked about our parents. His father (whose 84th birthday it is tomorrow) recently lost his driver’s licence after badly flunking a memory test. I’ll have a chat with him and my aunt tomorrow. On Sunday I plan to catch up with my Wellington-based cousin who seems to have recovered from her jaw cancer. I was very pessimistic about that, but I was just speculating; she didn’t tell anybody, not even her immediate family, what was happening, so I feared the worst. Last night I spoke to the lady who lives above me (she’s in Canada and will be until January) on WhatsApp. Then yesterday morning I got a very quick call from my parents who are in Moeraki. They said they’d been sleeping a lot, which is fantastic. Something about that place allows them to relax.

And that’s not all. Yesterday I went to the local produce market (which runs twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays) and bumped into Domnul Sfâra who I used to play tennis with. He’s now 90; he told me about all his birthday celebrations with friends. Though frail and diminutive, he’s still as sharp as a tack. I mentioned that I passed the halfway point to his impressive milestone earlier in the year.

I’ve had some interesting lessons this week. On Monday I had my fourth lesson with a 16-year-old boy. What different worlds we inhabit. The idea of visiting a local produce market wouldn’t even cross his mind. In fact I showed him some pictures of people eating in different places (this was part of a Cambridge speaking test) and he said he’d never had a picnic in his life and never intends to do so, opting for restaurants instead. I figured he’d been to more restaurants than I have, despite me being nearly three times older. (At that age even the word restaurant sounded so damn fancy to me.) We then talked about social media. I think he was surprised when I said that social media (an indispensible part of life for him – no, let’s rephrase that, it is his life) was the worst invention in the last 80 years. Or maybe he just thought, here we go, another old man yelling at clouds. He was also amused when I said I manage to avoid it pretty much entirely and have never even been on Instagram. But I’m utterly convinced of its toxicity. I’d love to nuke it out of existence. He said that any news he gets (which isn’t much) is via social media. How do you know it’s true? I just assume it is true, and even if it isn’t, I don’t care. And besides, what goes on in the world doesn’t affect me and I’m too young to vote anyway. That’s why you’re too young to vote. There’s been a push in some countries to lower the voting age to 16. (In Austria, for example, it is now 16.) Sometimes I think it should go up rather than down. Maybe it should work like driver’s licences and you get tested at both ends of the age range.

Kitty is now asleep on the sofa, on top of an open file which I’ll have to pick up before my next lesson starts. I often get envious of her life’s simplicity. She’s become a real positive in my life – a calming influence – as well as just part of the furniture. She’s a boon to my face-to-face lessons at home with kids; the majority of them like her being around. It’s all a contrast to the early days of Kitty when she was fearful of me, prone to biting at any moment, hyperactive, and a general pain in the arse.

Scrabble. I played two games last night. In the first I began with a blank but complete junk alongside it. I exchanged all but the blank and drew six vowels, giving me no sensible options other than to exchange again. Meanwhile my opponent hit bingos on his opening two turns, putting me 158-0 down. In the end I was able to score well, losing a high-scoring battle 505-441. Despite the loss I was happy with how I played. Then came the second game which was ridiculous. I obliterated my personal best score with a 650-253 win, slapping down five bingos. My play certainly wasn’t perfect in that game – at my level of experience, it’s never going to be – but hitting a mammoth total like that was encouraging all the same, even if it was the definition of a massive outlier.

Update: I’ve just taken a test for Covid and the flu. I’m negative for both. I still haven’t knowingly had Covid. Summer is properly over now; a run of unseasonably high temperatures (30 or above) came to a welcome end today.

Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

The land of no nod

September 15, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ve got five English lessons today (two down, three to go). My next session is with a new student who wants to do the Cambridge exam. Having more work is usually beneficial to my sleep and mental health, but it doesn’t always pan out that way. I was pretty busy on Saturday with all my maths lessons, then after work I had dinner at the beer factory with Mark. (I just had a chicken salad, but he wolfed down a meat-heavy local dish in no time.) I thought I’d sleep well after that, but I was up most of the night. There was a lot of dark matter floating around my head. At one point I got up and read a Wikipedia article on suicide rates in people with autism. The next day – yesterday – was pretty much a write-off. I’d planned a bike ride but had to flag it. Last night I slept rather better, and that’s keeping my head above water today. Tomorrow I’ll see the doctor. It’s unusual for me to go through a rough patch at this time of year – September is normally a good month for me.

In this morning’s Romanian session, after running through a bunch of verbs beginning with D, we talked about some subjects pertinent to our time: how advertising sucks people in, and whether you can trust anything you read online. In our previous session we discussed travel. When asked to name the most wonderful place I’d ever visited, I quickly said Bali. It really was magical for a nine-year-old boy. If I asked my brother, he’d probably give the same answer.

I played three games of Scrabble yesterday. In one game I was accused of cheating. I was definately using an annagramer, my opponent said. He (or she, but it’s always he, isn’t it?) could do with using a spell check. I won that game (in fact I won all three, one of them by just two points), but it left a sour taste in my mouth all the same. There’s no incentive for me to cheat. My motivation is to become better at Scrabble in the long term, not to win random games against people I don’t know from Adam.

They’re about to work on the bottom of this handsome building near me. It’s been stripped back to reveal what used to be a tailor’s (croitorie). That hand-painted signage is very Romanian; 30 years ago it would have all been like that.

The blade sharpener at the market near me. The man in his fifties who runs this stall is usually pumping out Depeche Mode and other similar music from his era.

Update: I’ve just had that lesson with the new guy. Only 16, he’s the tallest student I’ve had so far; he’s got to be at least six-four. (Come to think of it the guy who lives in London might well be taller, but I only see ever him sitting down so it’s hard to tell.) His English wasn’t too shabby either. In fact he hardly put a foot wrong. Will I be able to teach you anything? He said that he’s been speaking English since he learnt to walk and he intermingles English with Romanian when he’s with his friends. Ah, you’re one of those. Cool and sophisticated young Romanians like to show off their coolness and sophistication by using a cooler and more sophisticated language, as they see it. We just talked for the first half of the session. Then we did some Cambridge “use of English” exercises and he met his match when he hit the challenging part 4. (Some of the reading exercises are challenging even for me as a native speaker because they’re gamified; I’m not used to playing the game.) According to my records, which could easily be wrong, he’s my 200th student so far. I don’t get new students at the rate I used to; my existing ones tend to stick around longer. I still remember my 100th which was in January 2020, just before Covid and long before I got a car. I took tram number 4 to the end of the line, then trudged all the way to this young girl’s house in Urseni for our first and only one-hour session.

Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Mum’s good idea

August 9, 2025 by 0 Comments

Mum has always just wanted the best for me, even if she sometimes hasn’t known what “the best” is, which isn’t entirely her fault. Last week she said, wouldn’t it be nice if you were earning a bit more, and couldn’t you do that by giving online maths lessons? To Brits and the like, and be getting three times what you’re making now? That’s actually a very good idea, Mum. One of your best, in fact. Now, implementing it is a whole different matter. Drawing graphs, drawing shapes, writing equations – so much of maths is outside the realm of simple text, making online teaching quite challenging. I’d need a bunch of equipment, such as a stylus pad and a camera that focuses on my desk. That could get expensive. I’d also have the job of rigging up and dismantling all those gizmos as I switch from online maths to face-to-face English or whatever I happen to be doing next. Then there’s getting the students in the first place, and if I do, finding time in my schedule for them. I can envisage some late nights. Finally, if I go down this route, the stakes increase. I’ll probably have to set up my own company. I mentioned this to a student of mine (an accountant) on Wednesday; she said there were two ways of doing this that each come with their pros and cons. It would be fantastic to be earning enough to bomb around Europe for a month every year without feeling guilty about it, but although I’m often busy with work and don’t take much time off, my work life in Romania has so far been pleasantly low-octane, and online maths teaching would certainly change that. The idea is worth considering, all the same.

On Thursday I had a new student of English, my first for a while. He’s 16 and wants to do the B2 Cambridge exam in November. He was a nice enough guy, though I couldn’t help look at his tattoos. He had two Roman numeral dates (day, month and year in full), inked conspicuously just below his knees. They were dates in the seventies I think, so I’m guessing they were his parents’ birthdates. I have no idea why you’d want to do that, but each to his own I suppose.

This morning I picked some plums from the trees in Mehala. I picked a fair few from outside the cemetery, because they clearly didn’t belong to anybody. (Last year one lady complained that I was stealing them.) As well as the usual purple plums, there was also a greengage-type variety. They’ll mostly go into a crumble. I also went to the market there for the first time in ages – it was like stepping back in time in a nice way – then bought some eggs from a vending machine on the way home. I won’t be going anywhere for the rest of the day. It’ll simply be too hot. As for tomorrow, forget it.

The football is back up and running again. Birmingham and Ipswich were two divisions apart last season, but last night they faced off in the opening Championship fixture. I didn’t see the game, but Ipswich scored from a last-minute penalty to eke out a 1-1 draw after Blues had dominated. I don’t know much about footballers these days; I often just go by their names. Blues looked likely to sign a striker, currently at Ajax, called Chuba Akpom, which I thought was a great name (it even has pom in it), then Ipswich looked like they would get him instead. Maybe they still will. (That’s one reason why last night’s game was fairly high-profile.) Blues did ending up getting someone called Marvin Ducksch, which is a pretty fun name too, if hard to type. I doubt I’ll be watching much football this season. It’s too much of a time sink. And then next summer there will be the World Cup, now bloated to the max. It’ll never stop.

Last night I played Scrabble online for the first time in ages. I was strangely nervous; there were some crazy people on there the last time I tried. I just played one game and won by 130 points. I put down one bingo: SLATERS, another name for woodlice. (I just looked it up. It says the word “slater” is only used in that sense in Scotland, Australia and New Zealand. All that time in NZ made me think it was a universal name for the little bug.)

I’ve had a good few weeks on the weight-loss front. I’m down to 72.5 kg, or eleven stone six. I’ve dropped twelve pounds since March.

On Thursday there was a national day of mourning after Ion Iliescu, the controversial first post-revolutionary president of Romania, died at 95.

Cat - Family - Language teaching

Mum and Dad back in NZ, plus the benefits of benign weather

July 30, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s a busyish day for the time of year: three lessons down, two to go. At the start of the first lesson, Kitty was energised by the intercom bell as usual. My student’s father came up to my door, apologising for being late. Could I extend the lesson beyond our scheduled time? Doorstep chats don’t work very well with an energised Kitty, and sure enough she ran out the door and up the stairs. No harm done – I picked her up easily – but it was a dramatic start to my work day all the same.

Mum and Dad arrived in Christchurch on Tuesday morning, their time, having been away for the best part of three months. They said their flight from Singapore was the worst they’d ever experienced in terms of turbulence. These storms have been occurring at higher altitudes for some reason and planes are unable to fly above them. The day they left Singapore, they had an 11am checkout from their hotel. They both slept in until then, which was only 4am in the UK, entirely by accident. It didn’t seem to be a problem, and they could even use the hotel pool until they were ready to leave for their early-evening flight. My parents are fans of the city state. It’s clean – the draconian litter laws help there – and, for them, predictable: they’ve stayed there several times before. I’m on the fence about the place; criticism of the governing party (which has been in power for just about ever) doesn’t go down too well. I’ve been there twice: once when I was nearly seven (the colossal plazas and space-age-seeming tech were fascinating for a small boy) and again in 2008.

Temperatures in Timișoara approached 40 towards the end of the last week. Pure hell, in other words. My sleep was broken at best. Doing anything became a real challenge. Then on Saturday night a storm ripped through. The temperature nosedived by 15 degrees in a couple of hours. A number of concertgoers were injured in the storm and ended up in hospital. Since then, our highs have remained in the mid-20s and there’s often been a nice breeze. What a welcome change. It’s helped me think more clearly and get some odd (but important) life admin jobs done.

Last weekend, when I was still reeling from the hot weather, I attempted to solve some sample problems from linguistics olympiads. Yes, the linguistics olympiad is a real thing in which high school students compete both individually and in teams. (I like that they do both.) This year’s edition has just taken place in Taiwan, while next year’s will be in Romania. There were 15 or so problems, ranging from very doable to (for me) impossible. They’re really just logic puzzles. If word A in some obscure language means X in English, and word B means Y, what does word C have to mean? No prior knowledge of the language is required, which is why they choose obscure languages (so speakers of that language don’t gain an unfair advantage), but knowledge of how languages work in general, and the features they can have, is a must. There was one problem involving seven fishermen each describing their catch in the language of their remote island, with accompanying pictures (out of order) of what each man had caught. You had to match them, with the added wrinkle that one of the men was lying. I was all at sea (!) there. The language clearly had features that I’d never seen before, and I couldn’t make head nor tail of it in terms of how the size and number of fish were expressed.

I hope people didn’t go down to Caroline Bay to see the tsunami generated by the earthquake off Kamchatka (which I only know from the game Risk). In 1960, tens of thousands did just that following the massive Chile earthquake. The tsunami, which they called a tidal wave back then, never came.

I still need to decide if I’m going anywhere and what to do with Kitty if I am.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Taxing times

July 18, 2025 by 0 Comments

Kitty keeps changing her happy place. Right now she has two. One is my bed. The other is the well of the printer that I got fixed recently. Yes, it’s got a Kitty-sized pit. This weekend I’ll take her for a test drive – an hour in a box to see how she copes. My guess is not very well, but you never know.

It’s hosing it down right now. Much rather that than 35-plus. So I’ll be probably driving to my upcoming lesson. It’s nice to have that option I suppose, although I did manage perfectly well for over seven years without it. This morning I had a two-hour lesson with the girl who once wrote that she was bored. Two hours. An aeon. I resorted to giving her a 100-question test that took up most of the session. She got 77%, a commendable effort considering she was visibly tired by the end of it. (I rarely give tests, but when I do, they’re nearly always harder than what the kids get at school. Often these kids are used to perfect or near-perfect scores, so I can have a job convincing them that they haven’t failed calamitously.)

On Monday I had my weekly Romanian lesson. I’m not sure how much it’s really helping. My Romanian has stalled, at best. This time I asked the teacher about a sign I’d seen at a market stall: Avem mațe. Hmm, mațe means intestines, doesn’t it? The sort you make sausage skins out of. We have intestines. Nice. I guessed that because the stall sells mainly booze and tobacco, it must mean something else. Cigarette papers or something. But no, my teacher assured me that it really does mean intestines for making sausage skins, and those visiting would know the stallholder personally. Stuff like this, or the clatter of the backgammon pieces if I visit the market on a Saturday, makes me feel more alive.

It’s hard to see, but Avem mațe is in the red circle. Avem tutun means “We have tobacco”. I wonder where the name Bampoa comes from.

It’s melon time. Marius Oltean, the melon man from Dăbuleni, even has a TikTok account.

My brother and I have been in contact with our aunt. Partly we’ve talked about her and our uncle’s recent house move, but the hot topic has been our parents. That’s great because we all agree on our parents’ urgent need to downsize and simplify the heck out of their lives. It’s also great because Mum respects our aunt a lot. I’ve been telling our aunt to badger Mum about the seeing the doctor when my parents get back ten days from now. There’s also the matter of Mum’s cataracts when she’ll need to get removed. Right now she’s as blind as a bat. You can point out a bird on a branch a few feet away and she won’t see it. Though both our parents are remarkably fit physically for their age still, a lot of things have come to a head quite suddenly, and my brother and I will have get far more involved.

Mum said something recently which made it clear that our attitudes to money are poles apart. She was talking about the verges – berms, as Kiwis might call them – in and around St Ives which the council had left unmown. Example 574 of how Britain has gone to the dogs. Fine. But then she specified. It was the verges beside the most expensive houses that bothered her. Their owners pay massive rates (or council tax) bills, she said, so they should be the ones that the council prioritises. The verges near the cheaper houses can basically go hang. Her idea might be a really common one for all I know, but it’s not one that’s ever crossed my mind. Owners pay rates based on the value of their property, then all that money gets pooled together and spent on libraries and playgrounds and rubbish collection and mowing (or not mowing) verges. Across the board throughout the area in which the council operates, irrespective of the proximity of a particular service to high-value properties. Isn’t that how it works, or am I being hopelessly naive? I wonder if Mum thinks that access to treatment for, I dunno, stage 3 cancer, should be based on one’s earnings to that point.

Council tax (i.e. rates) in the UK is weird. And unfair. Even though I’ve never owned a UK property, I know about council tax in some detail because my student, that one who’s getting a divorce, tried to get his bill lowered. It went to court, he didn’t win, and it set him back £10,000 in court costs. Not great for their marriage, I imagine. The weirdness and unfairness are twofold. One, the big one, is that council tax in England is based on the value of your property in 1991. Unless some government decides to change the law, that 1991 date is set in stone. In perpetuity. For anything built after that date, they estimate what it hypothetically would have been worth then. As for extensions and so on, don’t ask. Of course prices haven’t gone up uniformly throughout the country since ’91. They’ve skyrocketed in London and the south-east but have risen more slowly in the north. So if you’ve got a house worth £700k in some fashionable suburb in London, you’ll be paying a lot less tax than someone with a £700k house in a less swanky part of Yorkshire, because of its much lower ’91 value. Absurd, isn’t it? The second problem is that council tax has eight bands, A to H, with A being the lowest. Once you’re in H, you can’t go any higher, so someone owning a house worth many millions in London doesn’t pay any more than that owner in Yorkshire. (Some very expensive houses aren’t even in H anyway.) There really should be bands stretching into the middle of the alphabet at the very least. Oh, and for rental properties, it’s the tenants that have to pay council tax, not the landlords. The whole system needs a huge overhaul. Maybe it shouldn’t even be based on property value at all. They should probably hammer AirBnBs and second properties left vacant. Someone far cleverer than me could dream up a fair and workable system. What they have now clearly isn’t it. (New Zealand’s, with its rateable values updated every three years, is certainly better.) By the way, this all came about after the ill-conceived poll tax (a uniform tax per adult, brought in at the end of Thatcher’s time) which resulted in riots. Anything is better than that, which I could tell was appalling even though I was ten years old.

I hadn’t meant to write so much about bloody council tax! Mum and Dad often talk about the UK going to the dogs. Dad is worse than Mum in that regard. It’s not great, but I wouldn’t say it’s quite as bad as they make out. (Dad would feel better about his homeland if he stopped reading the Daily Mail.) Part of it is just a general negativity about the present. We’re all guilty of that, especially as we get older. I know I am. This week I saw a news presenter (a bit older than me) interviewing an aviation expert about last month’s Air India crash. He said, it seems there are more crashes now than there were in the past. I was practically shouting at the screen, even before the expert replied. Flying is far safer now than say 40 years ago.

Family - Films - Language teaching

Getting on and a great film

June 14, 2025 by 0 Comments

Today is Mum’s 76th birthday. I’ll be down at my brother’s place for Dad’s 75th in two weeks. (Yes, my brother has managed to get a week off work so I’ll see him and his family after all. That’s great news.) I still can’t get over my parents being this old. They’re in great physical health for their age. I mean, Dad almost died 20 years ago when his aortic valve replacement surgery got complicated, then in 2019 he had bowel cancer. Mum is in excellent health too, even with her digestive problem which needs to be looked at when she gets back to New Zealand. They’ve been walking up hillsides in Romania and going for bike rides in the area around St Ives. They just seem much younger. But then I hear Mum calling the computer you have on the end of your arm a “telephone” and Dad calling a conflict that ended 80 years ago “the last war” and yeah, they’re getting on a bit. It’s a crying shame they can’t just enjoy this period of their life, being better off than about 95% of couples of their age both financially and health-wise, but after Dad gave his “resignation” speech at the pub round the corner from me, it’s clear there’s little hope of that. This affects my parents a lot more than me, but since I’m literally the only person on the planet other than Dad who sees how bad Mum can get, I sort of have a special relationship with him.

I’ve been thinking of how to “play” the time I spend with my parents in the future. My UK trip coming up should be fine. We’ll be on somewhat neutral territory. I can let Mum make most of the decisions and when we’re on a bus or a train I can keep quiet, maybe with my nose in a book. Then when we’re down at my brother’s, Mum – fake Mum – will be fawning over her grandchildren and everything will be sweetness and light. Next year will be a challenge, though. I plan to make a trip to NZ. Part of the trick will be minimising the amount of time spent in their house, which is where most of the stress and life admin lies. I hope they let me borrow their (non-electric) car. Then they might come to Romania, in which case I’ll want to simplify everything. Mum and I get on fine when we’re on our video calls, but when we see each other there’s always the potential for things to get really shitty.

Conclave. I watched it this week over two nights. What a film. Brilliant acting throughout. Thought-provoking at about a dozen separate moments. I loved Cardinal Lawrence’s (Ralph Fiennes’) sermon. There is indeed far too much evidence-free certainty and too little doubt in our world. But then the ending. Controversial and a big negative for a lot of people. Dad saw the film on the plane coming over last month, then spoilt the ending for me, not realising I hadn’t seen it. No big deal really – it was thoroughly enjoyable all the same. Then, showing his age, Dad had forgotten that he’d spoilt the ending when I told him I’d seen it. The film got a massive boost from the real conclave that took place just a few months after it was released. Some cardinals even watched the film to glean some tips before attending the real thing.

I’ve just finished my lesson with the boy who wants to be a farmer. He’s been getting 3 out of 10 for English at school. I can see why. (Normally in Romania they give you 4 just for showing up.) His lack of knowledge and interest makes an online lesson with him like wading through treacle. Towards the end, he went to the loo. He was gone for something like eight minutes, coming back with only a couple of minutes left. He lives in a village with clearly a healthy bird population.

I had a funny experience yesterday. Near where I had my lesson in Dumbrăvița (two hours with an eight-year-old girl), I stopped off at a big supermarket for a pee. Getting back on my bike, I ripped the front of my shorts, almost from top to bottom. Great. I tried to tie a knot in them to make it look less bad, but no luck. When I saw the girl’s mum before the lesson, I had my bag strategically placed in front of me. I was sat down the whole time during the lesson and the girl didn’t say anything.

That printer repair was on the verge of taking over my life before the courier came to take it off my hands yesterday. It’s become maddeningly hard to talk a real person. Let’s hope it actually gets fixed.

Good weather right now, by which I mean not too hot. I’ll go to the local produce market now, then I’ll give Mum a birthday call.