I suppose the big news from me is that the roof of this apartment block is leaking and needs a repair pretty urgently. We’ve had a quote for 65,000 lei, which (assuming it’s split evenly between the ten owners) means we each have to pay the equivalent of £1100 or NZ$2300. Now that I’ve left the world of money far behind me, that feels like a lot. It’s a lot of lessons, certainly. A lot of trying to explain to a ten-year-old boy the rule for adding an S to verb forms while a parrot is screeching his head off in the room next door. That actually happened yesterday.
I’m now teaching more kids than ever before. Fitting them all in is a major headache. At some point I may have to switch to group sessions. Tomorrow I’ve got four sessions scheduled, running from 7:45 till 4:30. One adult – the priest – followed by a trip to Dumbrăvița for the three kids.
There’s just a month until the terrifying US election. So consequential, but nothing any of us can do about it. I suppose I should at least be grateful that Harris has a fighting chance. Biden was heading for a drubbing (by recent standards) until mercifully he pulled out. I heard that John Key, former prime minister of New Zealand, has come out in support of Trump. Remarkable, isn’t it? He was leader of one of the most peaceful and least corrupt countries on the planet for eight years, and now he’s backing that way-too-old hate-filled criminal. He’ll be better for the economy, Key said. Even if that’s true (and it’s a big if), that tells you all you need to know about Key. As prime minister he emphasised economy at the expense of society, and now he’s even prepared to dispense with global stability. (And yeah, his fingers are in a lot of pies, and it might well be better for his personal economy if Trump were to win.)
This afternoon I had a session with two new girls aged 15 and 16. One of them is the daughter of my first-ever student and is clearly a voracious reader in English. Her vocabulary was unusually good. They both have Hungarian, not Romanian, as their first language, so when they spoke to each other I didn’t have a clue what they were saying. That felt weird. And weird is probably the best word to describe Hungarian. It’s almost what is called a language isolate: a language that shares no ancestors with any other. It doesn’t quite qualify because it shares roots with Finnish and Estonian, but it took a sharp left turn many centuries ago and is now firmly on its own. If Romanian, French, German, and even Serbo-Croat are animals of one species or another, Hungarian is a fungus. Because Hungarian is written using the Latin alphabet, I expect to get some kind of read on it, but it’s worse than Greek to me.
On the way back from Vienna, we stopped in the city of Kecskemét. It’s pronounced “ketch-keh-met”, but with a lengthened final syllable. That’s what the acute accent does. Just like in almost all Hungarian words, the stress goes on the first syllable. For us English speakers, we’ve already got a problem here. In English, long vowels tend to be stressed too. Take the word believe. The vowel in the second syllable is long, and happily the second syllable is also where the stress falls. It would be quite hard to say be-lieve while keeping the vowel lengths the same, but that’s exactly what Hungarian requires you to do.
Three signs on a loo in the Kecskemét bistro. Good luck!
Kecskemét means “goat pass” (simply, kescke means “goat” and mét means “pass”). So let’s look up kecske in Wiktionary, an extremely handy multilingual dictionary. It says goat, with some stuff about an uncertain etymology. It even gives me a picture of a goat. Great.
But when I click on the “inflection” arrow, I get this, a veritable explosion of word forms in both singular and plural:
All those endings tell you whether you’re doing something to the goat, with the goat, on the goat, near the goat, or whether something is being put inside the goat or falling off the goat or the goat is transforming into something else. It’s mindblowing that a noun can even have this many inflections. By the way, all the things in blue in the first column – dative, instrumental, adessive, and so on – are cases. English and French ditched cases, which were part of Latin, a long time ago. Romanian still has them – five, unlike the crazy number Hungarian has, and because two pairs of them share the same form, you can think of Romanian as having just three, of which one isn’t used all that much. Serbian has seven, and they’re all distinct.
It’s not just nouns. Hungarian verbs are fiendishly complex, too. There’s the whole concept of definite and indefinite conjugations. Definite would be eating a pizza, say, while indefinite would be just eating. At least I think that’s what the difference is.
When I got back from Vienna I fired up Duolingo in Hungarian. By the fourth lesson I realised it was hopeless and gave up. I can’t hope to even scratch the surface of such a language by playing a game, which is what Duolingo is. It doesn’t help with pattern recognition, which is vital when the language is so complex and alien to anything I’ve seen before.
Before Hungarian there was German. I felt almost ashamed at how little I knew of such a well-known language. While clearly much easier than Hungarian, German seems full of traps. Langsam, meaning slow, sounds slow. But then so does schnell (snail?), meaning fast. Then there are the crazy-looking space-bar-free words. Even some sensible-length words like Borschtsch, a kind of soup, look completely ridiculous. I saw a sign for Schifffahrt – a water taxi on the Danube – which looked pretty damn silly too.
Then on my trip to Maribor I was confronted with Slovenian. Just like Serbian and the other Slavic languages, it’s highly inflected, though nowhere near as extreme as Hungarian. Slovenian has six cases, one fewer than Serbian which also has the vocative. (The vocative is used when a person or thing is addressed directly; Romanian also has this case to a limited extent.) One major phonetic difference between Slovenian and Serbian is that Slovenian has final devoicing. This means that voiced consonant sounds at the end of the word, such as b, d or g, are replaced by their unvoiced counterparts, p, t and k respectively, even though their spellings may remain the same. Most Slavic languages and many others like German have this feature, and I can’t say I’m a fan. I like a nice strong b or g at the end of a word.
Just like Serbian, Slovenian is full of prefixes and suffixes. The cases give you the suffixes, while the prefixes are attached to verbs to denote completion or direction or a bunch of other things. A common prefix in both languages (I think) is po-, while -om is a common suffix. That meant I kept seeing pom a lot. It caught my eye because I now see that word every time I get in my car.
It was only when I returned from Slovenia, many months after my purchase, that I saw another car with POM on its plate, registered in Timiș. It was a sporty red Fiat with the top down. Then yesterday I saw a rather more prosaic POM – a white van – registered in Bucharest. It’s nice to know I’m not alone after all.
I said last time that seasons in Romania change with a sudden bam!, and what a bam! this has been. Its real name is Cyclone Boris (yes, these things have names now) which has dumped months of rain on us in a few days. In the county of Galați in the east, flooding has claimed six lives. I wonder how many Romanians died from the heat waves that immediately preceded all of this. Climate change is real. On a personal note, I haven’t minded the deluge. I feel I’m built to handle it, in a way I’m simply not with the extreme heat. Yesterday I met Mark in town. I got there early. Piața Victoriei was almost deserted, lockdown-like, so I could take in the architecture without worrying about bumping into people. We ate at Berăria 700. Obviously we didn’t sit outside as we normally would. Inside means you’re in part of the old fortress, which has a real cosy feel about it.
In town yesterday afternoon
Work is getting back to normal, though it’s a different normal. So many kids now. They all want (or their parents want, let’s face it) lessons just after the school day finishes and it’s impossible to accommodate everybody.
Part of a lesson on Friday
Last week I heard some dreadful news. A 17-year-old student of mine (we started when he was just 11) has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. His mother messaged me with the news. His English is excellent; he’s come on in giant leaps in the six years I’ve spent with him. He wanted to be a pilot. We often discussed planes, routes, accidents and incidents. Sometimes I’d talk about planes that I flew on as a kid, such as the three-engined DC-10. This diagnosis has surely scuppered his plans. For someone so young (and he had an old head on young shoulders) it’s so sad.
I saw snippets of last week’s presidential debate. Kamala Harris performed very well. She knew what buttons to press. The “rally size” button was particularly effective. She made Trump seem even more egotistical and unhinged than usual. Trump went on about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating cats and dogs. That was the clip played around the world. What didn’t get so much airtime was his admiration of Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. I doubt many in the US would even have known who Orbán was. But it certainly got some attention here in Romania. The prospect of Trump getting back in again is scary as hell. Harris needs to get herself out there more. More rallies, more interviews. She’s shown she can perform. Just seven weeks to go now. (I’ve just seen that apparently there was another attempt on Trump’s life while he was playing golf, though it didn’t get nearly as far as in July.)
Yesterday I saw my nephew on a WhatsApp video call with my brother. It was his second birthday. There were balloons and streamers and all sorts. Mum and Dad are now serious about a trip to Europe, probably next May. So that’s good.
A bit better today, certainly. We topped out at “only” 35, so that helped, but still almost no energy or enthusiasm. Most of this flat is a mess. I was struggling in my four hours of lessons with various boys. The mother of two of the boys insists on me sending her sheets which she prints out and they fill in. This does not work, unless her goal is to make my life five times harder in which case it works perfectly. I can’t see what they’re doing.
Before my lessons I picked some plums in Mehala. One woman asked me if I’ve I’d got permission from her neighbour. They didn’t look like they were on her neighbour’s (or anyone else’s) property – the tree was on what I call a berm after living in NZ for 13 years – and anyway her neighbour didn’t seem particularly interested in them. They were fully ripe; three more days and they’d have had it. I said nothing and left. There were plenty more trees down the road.
I’m now going to scale the steep berm of language once again. About 30 hours ago a luxury yacht named Bayesian sank in a storm in Sicily, probably killing seven on board. The ship’s name comes from Bayesian inference and Bayes’ theorem, some nifty statistical stuff that Thomas Bayes came up with in 1763. In fact there’s a whole load of stuff named after the man. As far as I see it, Bayes theory is basically this: you have a “prior” or “gut feeling” about something probabilistic, then you get new information that may cause you to shift that feeling in one direction or another by a certain amount. For example, I have a coin in my pocket. My “prior” is that it’s fair: both heads and tails have a 50% probability. Then I toss it ten times and get nine heads. That probably won’t convince me to shift my prior much. Nine heads out of ten is rare, but not super rare. But then I keep tossing the coin, and after 100 flips I’ve got 85 heads. Now I’m convinced that I’ve got a seriously skewed coin. Getting that many heads from 100 flips of a fair coin is one in a squillion dillion, give or take. But what is the real probability of getting a head on this particular coin? The more flips you do, the less notice you take of your original prior (50% in this case) and the more weight you put on what you actually see (85% or whatever). Bayes’ theory tells you how much to weight your prior as opposed to your observed information, according to how much information you’ve observed. Anyway, it seems this Bayesian stuff is very lucrative for certain people, including the owner of the yacht, Mike Lynch, who is now presumed dead. He has had major court proceedings against him, and weirdly his co-defendant was killed by a car while running on Saturday. The word Bayesian has all of a sudden entered the mainstream.
I watched a video on the sinking, or tried to – I’m finding it hard to take in new information. I was struck by the Italian journalist they interviewed named Alina Trabbatoni. Her English, which she spoke with a standard English accent, was extraordinary. Better than fluent. You’d never know she wasn’t a native. With one exception: her pronunciation of innovative when describing the yacht’s mast. She said i-NOV-uh-tiv, with second-syllable stress, pronouncing the “nov” bit just like in “novel”. My students have come up with this pronunciation too over the years; it isn’t a rare word. But as far as I’m aware, native speakers never say it this way. Brits (like me) go with IN-uh-vuh-tiv, while Americans say IN-uh-vay-tiv, sometimes even shifting the main stress to the “vay” part. I checked Wiktionary just in case, and it told me that in-NOV-uh-tiv was the default pronunciation for Brits! I don’t believe that for one minute. I checked Youglish, a very handy tool where they play short chunks of popular YouTube videos containing a word that you specify, and nobody, not even the Brits, ever said i-NOV-uh-tiv.
Finally, scone. How do you say it? I rhyme it with gone, just like about half of those surveyed in Cambridgeshire where I grew up. But I think Mum being a New Zealander made it a sure thing that I’d say it that way. I remember Mum’s mother joking one time about the rhymes-with-bone pronunciation, as if it was ridiculously upper-class for NZ. Mum, as well as her mother, often made scones, but I had to laugh at the bit about people’s preferences for putting the jam or the cream on first. Mum’s scones, though delicious, came with margarine. The idea of having either jam or cream with them, let alone both in either order, would have been absurdly decadent.
Three lessons tomorrow, leaving time for packing. Then a seven-hour drive (but I bet it’s more) to Maribor.
It’s all got a bit crappy today. I got up at 6:30 after nowhere near enough sleep (three hours? four? That’s been pretty standard in this heat) and then started shouting and crashing into stuff. It was like 31/1/23 (that date is etched in my mind), but not quite as bad. It’s been coming. Although I’ve been to places and (sort of) done stuff lately, I’ve been going through the motions. Yet again. I’ve got a sodding master’s degree in going through the motions. No enjoyment, nothing means anything, everything feels like an obligation or even a chore, and the cherry on the top is a complete inability to relax.
Today I did actually get some stuff done. Three lessons, totalling 5½ hours, including maths with Matei in Dumbrăvița. Last week he got his IGCSE results; he got a B in maths and maybe I could have got him up to an A but it was a question of too much to do in too little time. It didn’t help that the buggers at his school didn’t let me see his mock paper in which he got a D – that would have been invaluable to me. (By the way, a B is the third-highest grade; the top grade is an A-star.) This afternoon I had two hours with a 13-year-old football-obsessed boy who lives in Spain but is in his native Romania for the summer. His English is good. In other words, he’s pretty much trilingual. We went through a English textbook of his with instructions in Spanish, most of which I could understand without too much difficulty.
Something else I got done today was get my car battery replaced. It was dead when I got back from the UK – the heat doesn’t help. There’s no such thing in Romania (as far as I know) as the AA which I was always a member of in New Zealand. Over there my battery would die, I’d call them up, and a man with a van would be round in minutes. Here it’s more complicated and that stressed me out no end. I’m supposed to be going to Slovenia on Thursday. A man did come over with some jump leads and I drove to another part of the city where I got a replacement. It was early afternoon – already crazily hot – and I felt shattered.
On Saturday they had a free concert in Parcul Civic. I wish I’d known that Zdob și Zdub were the opening act because I really like their music. I did get to see Passenger though. Or kind of. He was a speck in the distance. Passenger isn’t a band, he’s just one Englishman with a guitar. And a distinctive voice. He shot to fame in 2012 with his Let Her Go. You only miss the sun when it starts to snow. Or however it goes. He had three or four other songs on his album that I liked, but that one hit was the making of him. (He talked about what an extraordinary lucky break that was for someone who was a busker up until then.) He started his set by saying, “Is this a normal temperature for you? I’m from England where it never gets this fucking hot.” This was after 8pm and it was 35 at least. The crowd never properly got into his stuff. I don’t think he realised that only 5% of the crowd properly understood him and all his idioms. Even though I really like him, I just wanted to get home. I wasn’t in the mood for anything. Certainly not Rita Ora who came on after Passenger. She’s British too, but her stuff isn’t my thing at all.
Yesterday I met Mark at Berăria 700. I hadn’t seen him for ages. It was great to catch up and have a laugh. That didn’t stop me from feeling like utter crap a few hours later, though. I wish I knew the secret.
It would help if it would just cool down. Being outside in nature or even among the architecture we have here is hugely helpful if you’re prone to iffy mental health. But when the infernal heat imposes what might as well be a curfew on you…
I had a rather brief catch-up with New Zealand on Saturday. Dad had a sore throat and could hardly speak. Everyone else was suffering too. As for Mum, she didn’t have a cold (yet), but she was exhausted. I hope their fortunes improve.
My first lesson tomorrow is at 11am, so I’ll get on the bike beforehand. That’s if I get some sleep first.
I’ve just had a chat with Elena, the lady who lives above me and who almost missed her flight two weeks ago. She safely made it to Toronto but managed to pick up Covid – there’s a lot of it about right now – though she’s now made a full recovery.
Four lessons today including a couple of real tooth-pullers. The one with the near-eight-year-old boy was especially dentisty. Not his fault at all – he’s a really nice boy – but when I give online lessons to kids that young, it’s like having both hands tied behind my back. I asked him if he was bored. A little bit. He was being impressively polite for his age. He counted down the minutes remaining one at a time. I told him that constantly looking at the clock won’t make it go any faster.
On Saturday we had Dorothy’s do in Buzad. I drove there with Dorothy. There were maybe 12 to 15 people. Luckily it wasn’t too hot and there was plenty of shade. The weather could hardly have been better. The barbecue and all the other foody bits were great, including a crumble that Dorothy herself had made. I put together a meatless quiche on request – I was surprised to receive a request of meatless anything. This is Romania. There was a good variety of folk, including the large Australian lady (who ended up in Romania for some churchy reason) and her two children. She was good to talk to – we had a fair bit in common culturally, I suppose. Some of the chat did get contentious. At one stage I asked why two of them insisted on peppering their sentences with English words; they said they didn’t know. Ah, but I know. You’re doing it to show off your sophistication, aren’t you? One lady whose native language is German managed to offend somebody by calling Romanian a “poor” language (in a purely linguistic sense). Luckily there wasn’t too much politics. I suggested that Trump now had a 60-70% chance of winning the November election, while one of the sophisticated guys thought it was just over 50%, but in reality there wasn’t much between our assessments. (I put Trump’s chances a little higher because of the inbuilt structural advantages the system affords him.)
My main complaint was that the “do” went on a bit long. Not that it finished too late, but that it started too early. Finally I could go home, with Dorothy and two other women including the very overweight Bobbie. This lady couldn’t be far off sixty but has never married or had children. For some reason she wanted to stay in Buzad as long as possible rather than go home. I found her pleasant enough, though rather odd, and her “chat” with me strayed into some pretty negative territory when you consider we’d never met. On the journey back – it was dusk at this point – she wanted me to stop so she could take photos of churches that in some cases didn’t even exist. (I’ll admit that the Orthodox church in Remetea Mică with the red roof was quite striking.)
So tomorrow I’m off to Maramureș. My first time camping by myself. I’ve had a practice with the tent which packs away unintuitively to say the least. I plan to stay three nights at a campsite near Bârsana which has a famous monastery. It looks pretty remote there; I hope I don’t get attacked by a bear. Then I’ve booked two nights at a guest house in Turda, near the salt mine which people have said is a must-see. Tomorrow’s journey should take 6½ hours, though I expect it to take longer because I’ll need a break. I hope to set off at around 8:30.
I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. They asked me if I’d seen the news. What news? Oh, I see. Someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump. I’ve since caught up with the news and watched the scenes of blood and mayhem. Living on my own, big news can pass me by at weekends – for instance I didn’t find out about the Christchurch earthquake of 2010, which happened on a Saturday, until many hours later.
We’re in the middle of an infernal heat wave. Far from my first I’ve experienced in Romania, but this one is unremitting. The last week has reminded me of Covid. Stay at home during the daytime if at all possible. Outside is scary and dangerous, or at least very unpleasant, between 11am and 8pm. If I visit the market in the morning, I can’t mess around. Make a list and stick to it, just like in the Covid days. Last night I played tennis between 8 and 9; I was glad Florin was happy to just bat the ball around without getting tangled up in a set which would have been brutal. Cycling is a breeze, literally, until you have to stop at a red light.
Last week was a busy and challenging one on the work front. Online lessons with tech falling over everywhere. A maths lesson where I had a girl (who is being taught under the British system) and a boy (doing the bone-dry, difficult and hopelessly impractical Romanian curriculum) at the same time, and felt all at sea. Wanting to print coloured worksheets when I’ve run out of coloured ink. A mother who printed out sheets for her son in black and white where he had to draw arrows to a blue ball or a red shoe. And in between, some much easier sessions with a new lady whom I’d put at an 8 on my 0-to-10 scale. She’s keenly interested in the language, and because she already speaks it so well, these lessons are a piece of cake and fly by in no time.
Apart from shortish trips to England in 3½ weeks and Vienna at the end of August, I don’t know if I’ll be going anywhere. I had planned to visit Maramureș and maybe even Slovenia, but the sudden uptick in my hours and the ridiculously hot weather might make those plans overly ambitious.
Sport. The final of Euro 2024 takes place tonight. England have lucked their way into the final, while Spain have been the stand-out team of the tournament and logically should win. But football doesn’t work like that. England could easily win their first big tournament for nearly 60 years, and it would be huge if they managed it. My brother mentioned a possible public holiday if “we” win, and I realised that for me the whole concept of a “we” in sport feels very weird now. I’ve been out of the UK for practically half my life.
This year’s Wimbledon has hardly featured in my life. Yesterday, however, I watched the deciding set of the women’s final between Krejcikova and Paolini. I thought about how the women’s game has changed beyond belief since the nineties when I watched it far more keenly. The first few games of the final set flew by, then there was a key moment at 3-3 on Paolini’s serve with break point against her. Her first serve was called out. She challenged it but lost, so she had to serve a second ball with her rhythm disrupted. A big double fault and a crucial break. Then Krejcikova just about served out the match in a long final game where nerves clearly got to her. The men’s final between Djokovic and Alcaraz takes place this afternoon.
In some good news, I got rid of one of my old bikes. The guy who nicked it in 2021 did a good job of buggering it up, so I was pleased to get even 100 lei for it. My latest one, by the way, cost 800 lei (£140 or close to NZ$300).
Democracy in Britain can be dramatic, high-octane stuff. I recently watched a clip of the results from Sunderland in the 2016 Brexit referendum. This was only the second local authority to declare; Leave got 82,000 votes against just 52,000 for Remain. The woman who announced the results – to wild cheers – was sitting on market-shattering, tectonic-plate-shifting dynamite. In the general election of 1997, Michael Portillo, a high-profile Tory thought to be a potential leader, lost his seat to a Labour guy named Twigg that no-one had heard of. The declaration came after three in the morning. The announcer (a man that time) stumbled over Portillo’s middle name Xavier, coming out with the four-syllable ex-ay-vi-er. His shock loss became a symbol of the Tories’ crushing defeat, and people still call it the “Portillo moment” now. Credit to him though for slipping away in a dignified manner; afterwards he made some very good documentary series on railway journeys.
We could get this level of drama on Thursday. Let’s hope there are a whole raft of Portillo moments. The Conservatives bear little resemblance to the party I remember when John Major was prime minister. (He was our local MP.) They’re not interested in conserving a damn thing and have made people’s lives measurably worse in their 14 years in power. A dream result, though unlikely, would be the Tories’ relegation to third place behind the Liberal Democrats. My prediction is for the Tories to do catastrophically badly, but not (unfortunately) the extinction-level stuff seen in some of the polls. Unusually many seats are too close to call this time around; Reform have risen and there has been a notable decline in the overall vote share of the two big parties, so just 30% will sometimes be enough to snag a seat. I’d love to see some momentum build for electoral reform – the current system is unfair and isn’t fit for purpose. The exit poll is always a huge moment on election night; it comes at 10pm, or midnight my time, and in recent elections has been deadly accurate.
The big question is what will happen after the election. Look at the surge of the far right in France (their final round is this weekend). Look at America where the most likely outcome this November could have frightening repercussions. I expect Labour and Keir Starmer to be miles better than the Tories and their numerous leaders of late, but they’re being far too timid in their plans. (Yeah I know, they’re way ahead in the polls so want to play it safe.)
This afternoon I had a quick demo session with the lady this firm have given me. I’d completely forgotten that I was being observed in incognito mode by a woman from the firm itself. That was a good thing – I’d have been panicking like mad otherwise. We’ll have our first real session tomorrow evening.
Dad has sent me some more illustrations to go in the book. He’s less busy with painting these days, so he has more time than usual. The illustrations are mostly great, but I need scanned (not photographed) versions.
Edit: The Netherlands have just opened the scoring in the 20th minute of their Euro 2024 match with Romania. (I first wrote that Belgium had scored. I’m not following it all that closely.) Update: Romania were basically thrashed in the end, 3-0.
Today was my aunt’s celebration, the last ever get-together at her house which is already on the market for half a million quid. I haven’t heard from my brother yet to see how it went; I expect he’ll have been part of a small contingent. I’m just so glad I was fortunate enough to see her a week before she passed away. Today would have been my grandmother’s 102nd birthday. I wrote about her 88th birthday here: how time flies.
This afternoon I had a lesson with the boy who wants to be a farmer. So refreshing when so many of them want to be YouTubers. Last week I taught him some irregular plurals, so today I gave him a worksheet on them, complete with pictures. Easy peasy, he said. Seconds later he’d written mouses and foots and sheeps and childs. Tonight I gave my new maths student (a 15-year-old girl) what I called a quick quiz. Target time two minutes, three max. After about twelve minutes she was still slaving away, so I put her out of her misery. She’d forgotten just about everything I’d taught her about prime and square numbers. I wasn’t annoyed by this in any way; maths is just tough and weird for a lot of people.
Before all of that the plumber came and put in the new pipe. I had to go to Dedeman with him to pick up some blocks to which the tiles will be attached in front of the bath. I’m getting used to being actively involved, even though it’s bloody annoying when I have lessons.
I forgot to mention that I got stung by a bee at Șag on Sunday. It was my left middle finger. As a kid I got stung quite often on my foot. I was barefoot most of the time in summer – my Kiwi mum encouraged that – and the bees would be in the clover. That was back when the UK still had bees. When I was in the car I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if my parents were with me, but my blog posts for June 2017 have given me second thoughts. That got pretty fraught. If my family friends from St Ives came over, that would be quite wonderful. Even when I wander around my little patch of a warm evening I think it would be lovely if they were here, doing simple things like wandering from one funny little bar to another. It’s sad that I never get the chance to do that.
Yesterday I had a lesson where my student (a manager at a big bank) read an article about giving feedback to low-performing employees. I said that a lot of this poor performance comes from low engagement which shouldn’t be a surprise. She said that the objectives and deadlines are all there in black and white, so there’s no excuse. I replied that frankly who cares if xyz has to be done by 31st May if xyz seems pointless. How do you get motivated, when most of what you do all day is meaningless crap? The answer to that of course is that people are motivated by money and status and power, or simply job security when they have family members who depend on their income, but the “pointless shit” aspect (which is more salient than ever before) can’t help.
The book meeting, which I had to reschedule two lessons to accommodate, has been postponed again to who knows when.
First of all, Wednesday could be a very important day because I’ve got the meeting about the English book with the publishing house.
A follow-up on the UK election. My view of it lacks nuance I’m afraid. It’s simply get the buggers out by any legal means possible. If I lived in a swing seat, I’d vote for whichever party (probably the only party) able to beat the Tories. First-past-the-post makes tactical voting a must. If I lived in a safe seat where my vote didn’t matter, I’d probably vote Green. My ideal scenario would to the see Tories obliterated to the point where they aren’t even the official opposition anymore, because that’s what they deserve. They’ll mop up enough blue-rinse votes to make the final outcome far from that I’m sure. You can but dream. Dad said in an email that he still has misgivings about Labour because of the way they were controlled by the unions in the seventies, and even mentioned links to Russian spies. Wow. How much time needs to pass for you to finally let it go? And didn’t you actually vote Labour in ’97? I’m no great fan of the current Labour party – they should be far more ambitious – but anything has to be better than the current lot.
The Conservatives have announced plans for national service if re-elected. They’re trying anything now. As I read on a forum yesterday, “put down your books, pick up a gun, you’re gonna have a whole lot of fun”. Here’s Country Joe McDonald singing that Vietnam protest song at Woodstock.
Today I had the plumber back in. He removed the sink and smashed half the bricks and tiling to get at the bath, then found the pipe to the bath had a hole in it. A relief; I worried that the eighties cast-iron bath itself might be leaking. Tomorrow he’ll put the sink back in place and then I’ll need a plasterer to fix up the bricks and tiles. (I still have leftover tiles from the original work 18 months ago.)
This morning I had my weekly Romanian lesson. Lately Dorothy and I have compared notes. She has much greater fluency than me and better intonation. (She has been here longer and gets more opportunities to speak Romanian than I do, but she might just be better.) Even though my pronunciation of individual words is mostly fine, I rise and fall too much and overemphasise syllables. It’s hard to get out of the habit. I wrote on here 8½ years ago that Romanian, like French, is syllable-timed, while English is stress-timed. Romanianising my intonation is especially hard for me, I’ve realised, because I’m actually pretty expressive when I speak English. (When I accidentally recorded part of a video lesson, I couldn’t believe how much head-shifting and arm-waving was going on. Plus being a teacher incentivises me to be more animated and emphatic.)
Yesterday I went out in the car. I didn’t go very far; I stopped at Șag (pronounced “shag”) on the bank of the Timiș. It was a popular place for picnics and barbecues. My parents Skyped me when I was there. I spent the rest of the time either walking, eating lunch, picking mulberries, or listening to music on the radio. This great (if slightly depressing) song came on, telling me that death doesn’t have a phone number. It reminded me a bit of the French singer Renaud, and I imagined it was from the eighties, but then I heard “roaming” in the lyrics and found out it was from 2007.
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