Language teaching

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We’re in Deep S***

January 31, 2025 by 0 Comments

Kitty. Yeah, she’s pretty good. Especially when she’s asleep, which isn’t very often. The last few days she’s shown plenty of affection, so I think she’s getting used to me. Tomorrow I’m taking her to the vet to her screened, or whatever they do, in preparation for next week when hopefully she’ll have her bits removed. I feel slightly sad about that. I mean, how much does the process hurt?

I had five lessons today instead of my usual seven on a Thursday. My mother-and-son combo got shunted forward a day. When I saw Filip in Mehala, I got the usual. His mum gave me a pair of size-seven slippers to put on as well as a perfectly good cup of coffee. Then I went up to his room where his thermostat was jacked up to 28 degrees. Even when the conditions for teaching aren’t ideal, I remind myself. Life insurance? Open-plan hell? This is orders of magnitude better than that.

DeepSeek. The new Chinese AI app. Even the name scares the crap out of me – X-ray eyes, watching your every move. It managed to knock a trillion dollars off the Nasdaq in a single day. A trillion dollars! I can’t make sense of 2025 at all. $600 billion of that was a single company called Nvidia who apparently make chips. So they must be in the fast-food trade or else they’re some casino outfit. Nvidia joins a long list of bland made-up modern company or product names containing a V and ending in A. Off the top of my head there’s Aviva, Arriva, Aveda, Veolia and, um, Viagra. Nvidia goes one step further though in breaking the rules of English phonotactics – it starts with N followed by another consonant – for increased fakeness.

Maybe that’s why so many people have tattoos now. In a world of artificiality, at least they’re real. You can see them, touch them, and for a time, feel them. (I imagine you can smell them for a time too.) I’m not tempted, because there’s nothing I identify with strongly enough to get it permanently stamped on me. And frankly, being a native English speaker in Timișoara, teaching English and maths, with a beard and a fair old mop of hair, is plenty. Getting inked would be overkill. But the real thing is something that is very important to me. My job feels very real. So does this city, even if certain parts (like bloody Dumbrăvița) are so depressingly fake as to be unlivable for me.

I read something yesterday about how unhappy Generation Z are in the UK. They defined Gen Z as (currently) between 13 and 27. There were comments that said “I remember 1977 and the Sex Pistols. Nothing new here.” Even though I wasn’t born in ’77 I’ve read plenty about that time, and I disagree. Back then, at least young people were united through music, how they dressed, and even their football teams. (Though it could be unpleasant and even dangerous to see live football then, at least it was affordable.) Now society is too fractured for that sort of unity to be possible. Blame smartphones and social media.

Lately I’ve been reading a post-apocalyptic sci-fi book called A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was written in the 1950s by Walter M. Miller Jr and has strong religious themes. I’m two-thirds of the way through it. Having got this far I’ll stick with it, but in my fairly simple brain I’m filing it under the “too clever for me” category. Some of the themes resonate today, in particular the anti-intellectualism, called the Simplification in the novel. (Right on cue, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved their “Doomsday Clock” forward to just 89 seconds to midnight.)

I had a strange dream last night which involved a game of cricket in a park in Timișoara. Several games, in fact, and I had great difficulty walking through the park without being hit by a ball. (Nobody plays cricket in Romania, as far as I’m aware.) Games come up a lot in my dreams. A few nights ago I had a dream involving my aunt (the one who passed away last April) and the card game bridge. I know next to nothing about bridge. I only know that it’s a trick-taking game that involves bidding, compass points and 13-card hands. This dream probably came about from something my aunt once said about endless parties and games of bridge in the RAF officers’ mess. She tried to make it sound glamorous, but I thought it sounded awful.

Earlier this week I wrote my first proper letter since 2009. When my friend from St Ives surprised and delighted me by sending me one, I decided to reply in kind. It would be wonderful if she and her husband could make a trip to Romania (they came in 2017), but they’ve got so much stuff going on and he narrowly escaped death in 2022. I don’t know how feasible it would be.

A football score from the Cypriot league that caught my eye earlier this month:

“Have you heard about Jim?” What’s happened? “He’s only just got over his omonia, and now he’s come down with a terrible case of anorthosis.” Poor Jim. I hope he pulls through.

I’m pretty sure the name Anorthosis has the same ortho- root as in orthopedic, orthography and orthogonal: it means straight ahead or correct. But at first glance it looks like something I’d want to steer clear of.

Some pictures from Sunday:

I had a bit of time on Monday before my lesson. I hadn’t noticed this chimney before:

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Other sports - Photos

Phase five (plus Kitty pics)

January 13, 2025 by 0 Comments

We’re all waiting for my brother’s second child to arrive. It can only be a few days away now. If my niece is born on Thursday, all three of the numbers in her date of birth (day, month and year) will be square. (That’s with the year as 2025, not just 25 which of course is also square.) That’s obviously the last thing that matters. Her name doesn’t even matter all that much. All that really matters is that she’s healthy.

Kitty. Yikes. She’s so damn active now. After four days of relative calm when she’d happily jump on cupboards and just sit there, she’s now darting through my flat at breakneck speed, often dragging something noisy. Especially at night. I just know she wants to be outside, running around chasing stuff. I hadn’t been sleeping well even pre-Kitty, and my doctor prescribed me Optisomn which has magnesium plus a concoction of other ingredients: melatonin, hops, vitamin B6, and passionflower. But hyperactive one-year-old Kitty isn’t helping me. Last night was pretty much a write-off, sleep-wise. Today I went (for the first time) to Jumbo, a Greek-owned hypermarket near the airport which sells cheap kids’ toys, cheap household stuff, cheap decorations, cheap stationery, and yes, cheap pets’ toys. I don’t know if I’ll go back there in a hurry because the floor was lethally slippery and it has a horrible layout where there’s only one way of getting from any point to any other point and you end up walking miles. I must have spent an hour there, all the time in a complete daze. I did however get Kitty a bed and a bunch of things that go rattle and ding, to go with the scratching post and few toys she already had. With a bit of luck (!) she might stop thinking that plants or flash drives or grout around the bath are toys.

Kitty pics, including the trip to the vet

I’ve had a good week of lessons, including (unusually on a Sunday) one today. No sessions with those “AI bot” young women, that’s probably why. I won’t be so lucky in the coming week. And in between I’ve had some brilliant customer service. The vet was simply a lovely person, the little lady at the pharmacy was extremely pleasant as always, and even at the mall (which I tend to avoid) I got service with a smile. I often lament Romania’s poor customer service, so when it’s the opposite it deserves to be mentioned too.

There was an interesting moment in my lesson with the 14-year-old twins on Thursday. They played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in a joint effort. For the £8000 question, I asked them what Concorde was. A very fast what? Plane, train, car or boat. They used their 50/50 lifeline which gave them just plane and train as options. They went for train and it was game over. While I was in the middle of explaining what Concorde actually was, the boy said “who cares”. Seeing my face, he then said “only joking”. Ah, but you’re not really joking, are you? You actually don’t care. And that isn’t your fault. It shows that when you move 20 years forward and 1000 miles east, something culturally pretty damn important (there was the crash in 2000 too which was a massive news story at the time) becomes a total nothing.

Football. Birmingham beat Lincoln 2-1 in the FA Cup. They took the lead after just 30 seconds, then with 15-odd minutes to go, Lyndon Dykes rifled home the sort of volley they use the word “exquisite” for. It was a brilliant strike. Lincoln got a late penalty that probably shouldn’t have been a penalty, but Blues held on for the win. They’ll be at home to Newcastle in the fourth round. Quite a fun draw. Another game that caught my eye was Tamworth against Spurs. It was 0-0 after 90 minutes. Up until last season, that would have meant a replay at one of the best grounds in the country, a heck of a day out and a nice big windfall for plucky little Tamworth. But no, replays have been scrapped. The game proceeded to extra time, and Tottenham won 3-0. In a few years, they’ll probably ditch extra time too. Everything just gets that tiny bit more crap, doesn’t it?

In my head I can split my time in Romania so far into four stages. The fourth stage has been the longest, starting at around the time Russia invaded Ukraine. But I’ve just had the feeling in the last few days that phase five has begun. The books, the cat, tuning out of the news, thinking about what the hell I’ll do if and when I leave Romania, and even maybe studying again.

Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Other sports

The paint police

January 4, 2025 by 0 Comments

It was like a war zone here either side of midnight on New Year’s Eve as people let off bangers all around me. And now we’re in the second half of the twenties. The world took a leap backwards in the first half, and I can’t see where even a baby step forwards is coming from. Why I think we’re screwed is pretty simple. We absolutely aren’t going to innovate our way, or “tech” our way, out of this hole. (Tech is a lot of the problem.) Our only way out is to accept being poorer in the short term, maybe even the medium term, to benefit society and the environment in the long term. (The long-term economy would benefit too.) But most people won’t give an inch. Just look at Covid. It’s my right to travel abroad every summer, come hell or high water. I deserve it. No you bloody well don’t.

Yesterday I had my first lesson of 2025, a two-hour session with an English teacher in her late forties. I got her to do the same exercises I’d given a 15-year-old boy. Despite being a teacher, she was nowhere near as good as him. Then I saw Mark in town. We wandered around the Christmas market which is still running for another few days. I noticed stalls were selling things like “Dubai cakes” and “Dubai chocolate”. People here are so obsessed with the otherworldly glitz and opulence of Dubai that the word has taken on a meaning of fancy. Wouldn’t Dubai chocolate melt, though, given that the place is practically an oven? Mark then asked me if I wanted a cat to look after. In theory it would lovely to have the company of a cat, but it’s extra work, and what if I go away? That’s the real killer. Who would I have to look after him or her? I think it’s a her.

Later I spoke to Dad. He talked a lot about the appallingly cruel US healthcare system, having watched a YouTube video starring Michael Moore. He sent me the video with a note: “This will make you angry.” I suppose I’ll force myself to watch it tomorrow, when my self-ban of YouTube is lifted.

This morning I saw I’d missed a message about a lesson. I was still able to go to it in Mehala. It was tipping it down so I drove. On the radio I heard a new song by the Romanian band Vunk, as well as Dust in the Wind by Kansas. A beautiful song.

The darts. The final between Luke Littler and Michael van Gerwen (MVG) is an hour away. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay awake for all of it; I have lessons in the morning. Littler, still not 18, is a phenomenal talent who has hit international headlines. He must go into the final as a warm favourite. On New Year’s Day there were two fantastic quarter-finals back-to-back. First was Chris Dobey against Gerwyn Price. When I got back from seeing Dorothy, Dobey was two sets down, but he worked his way into a 4-2 lead in a race to five. He then missed five darts for the match before finally, mercifully, getting over the line in a 5-3 win, hitting two double 19s to seal the victory. Then came MVG against Callan Rydz. Super high quality throughout, and honestly Rydz was marginally the better player, but MVG’s timing and the vagaries of darts’ scoring allowed the Dutchman to run out a 5-3 winner.

One of the matches I watched thanks to a stream I picked up from New Zealand. It was weird seeing all the ads featuring rugby and barbecues and Wattyl paints. I see they’re still doing the thing with jillions of overpriced shades of paint that nobody needs or, let’s be honest, even wants. Ask a four-year-old boy what colour he’d like his bedroom wall to be and he might say blue. What shade of blue, Tommy? Horizon blue? (Just looking on the Wattyl website now.) Londonderry blue? (Makes me think of the IRA.) Hamilton blue? (The blue of the future.) Out of the blue? (Now that’s a good name.) Whaaat? Noooo! Blue blue! Thomas the Tank Engine blue! We’ve even got the same name! I’m convinced that adults’ colour preferences are really just the same as kids’ ones. When was the last time you heard anyone of any age say their favourite colour was sodding magnolia? But millions of people paint their walls various hues of beige or taupe because they’ve convinced themselves that they like them. It’s what they should like and should have. And of course a real colour might make the value of their house go down. It always comes down to that, at the end of the day. If I was in charge of this stuff in NZ, I’d enact a law that only permitted ten shades of paint. That’s your lot. If you want some pastelly crap, mix white with one of the other permitted colours. That’s what a pastel shade is anyway. There’d be border police and special dogs trained to sniff out contraband paint. Beige beagles. You’d still face a $400 fine for a rogue apple left in your bag, but a $4000 fine for a pot of beige. It would be fantastic.

Family - Language teaching - Other sports - Photos - Politics

Darts and car parks

December 30, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve just got back from my lesson with ten-year-old Filip. (They don’t mess around with ph in Romanian, let alone poncy French spellings like Philippe.) We had our session in his little sister’s room, which was full of shelves piled high with books that obviously weren’t for her immediate benefit. There were novels that would have been bought in the seventies, travel books, and medical books including a fat tome all about excretion.

Yesterday my brother called me on WhatsApp. The little one was still up and about. I had my first-ever verbal interaction with him. I picked up the word Christmas and a whole load of babababa-sounding words which my brother translated for me; he was talking about family members.

Because I had a cold (and still do), I drove to Dumbrăvița on Saturday for my pair of two-hour lessons, instead of cycling there as I normally do. It’s my only work destination where driving is a significant time-saver. I came back via the mall, because my doctor’s clinic is now attached to the mall and I knew he’d be there. (I wanted to pick up my monthly allocation of pills.) But being a Saturday between Christmas and New Year, the multi-storey car park was a nightmare. I entered through the barrier, drove up and down and around in circles for ten minutes, then decided the whole thing wasn’t worth it and headed through the exit. They give you an hour’s free parking. My doctor’s next stint is New Year’s Eve so I’ll see him then instead. I got flashbacks of the Park Street multi-storey car park in Cambridge, which was even worse. When I was little, Mum went shopping in Cambridge on a Saturday (she often brought me along) and parked in that horrible car park which was built in the sixties, as so many architectural monstrosities were. Its levels were called “decks” which were denoted by letters going up to L, if memory serves. She mostly parked on Deck F. Then we walked down the staircase which stank of pee. I don’t remember Mum being all that stressed by it; she must have got used to it. I’m happy to report that a wrecking ball was taken to that hellhole a few years ago. (I once read a book that was partly set in a different Cambridge car park, sometime in the nineties. This was the Lion Yard car park, which no longer exists either.)

Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. I was born towards the end of his only term, so obviously I have no memory of him as president. But it’s clear to me that he had more compassion and integrity in his little finger than the thought-free, morality-free president-elect has in his entire body. Carter was a victim of circumstance and America’s celebrity culture. America boomed under Reagan, and later Clinton, but you have to wonder at what long-term cost.

The darts. On Friday I saw Damon Heta hit a nine-darter, the second of this year’s tournament. (Christian Kist earlier got one.) Unlike a 147 in snooker, a perfect leg of darts happens in the blink of an eye. Heta got £60,000 for that, Prostate Cancer UK benefited to the same tune, and someone in the crowd also took home sixty grand. Unfortunately for Heta (just like Kist before him), he didn’t win. When I started my maths lesson, he was 3-1 up against Luke Woodhouse in a race to four, but he proceeded to lose the final nine legs of the match. One match that stood out for me was Ricardo Pietreczko, a German who appears rather awkward in interviews, against Scott Williams, who looks for all the world like someone who I’d have avoided like the plague at school. Maybe I’ve got him completely wrong and he was the shy and retiring type, but I doubt it. No wonder I wanted the awkward guy to win. Which he did, 4-1, after a very solid performance. Another match I had my eye on involved Ricky Evans. A cartoonish figure, his face is a picture every time he throws, which he does at lightning speed. He was beaten yesterday by Robert Owen of Wales, 4-2. I was glad to see Chris Dobey get through, but the real story must be last year’s champion Luke Humphries who lost 4-1 to Peter Wright.
Update: I’ve just watched a dramatic match between Dobey and Dutchman Kevin Doets. Dobey was looking good but it almost slipped away from him. He scraped through in a deciding set to make the last eight. Both players missed a plethora of doubles, adding to the drama.

The book. Lots of monkeying around with fonts and formats, but it’s coming together.

Standing on the new footbridge over the Bega, with the old one just in front of me.
Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Something on the horizon

December 23, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’m feeling reasonably good at the moment, maybe because I have two things to look forward to. One, the books getting published, fingers crossed. And two, Mum and Dad coming over in May. When you live by yourself without a family, it’s quite easy to be staring at miles and miles of barrenness. An endless desert, with not even a tree in sight. This is especially true when it seems that everything in the wider world is going to the dogs; you can be totally bereft of anything on the horizon to latch onto, whether personal or collective. So I’m grateful for these two things.

Recently Dad sent my brother and I a pair of tape recordings of us when we were little. They were dated 1984 and 1985. The ’85 one was mostly me, making up a story as I went along. I was surprisingly eloquent for just five years old. I had a habit of repeating myself, but some of that was because I was big into rhyme, which is to an extent repetitious. Dad would read me Edward Lear or something in that line, which I really enjoyed. In fact, by five I was perfectly able to read it myself. Sometimes I think I peaked then, and my life since has been four decades of managed decline.

Yesterday I only had one lesson – maths with Matei – and since then I’ve been cooking. Salată de boeuf, salam de biscuiți, and a crumble which I made with quince and four enormous apples, a variety of cooking apple I’ve never seen before. (On the market they were just called mere acre, or sour apples; in fact they’re not that sour.)

I’m going to beat last year’s number of teaching hours by a small margin. According to my records, I’ve so far done half an hour more this year than in all of 2023, and I’ve still got some sessions tomorrow and a few between Christmas and New Year. I’m glad I’m coming to the end of my Christmas-themed worksheets and spot-the-difference pictures. I’m reindeered out now, I’m telling you.

A few days ago somebody sent me this video of Michael McIntyre’s “Silent Letter Day” skit which he performed at the London Palladium. I know I’m biased because I’m a word-obsessed English teacher, but I thoroughly recommend it for McIntyre’s extraordinary timing and delivery. I’ve had all kinds of fun and games with silent letters in my lessons. A student will read psychology and say “p-see-hhho-lo-jee”, with a pronounced p and a guttural h, just like how the equivalent word (psihologie) is pronounced in Romanian. I then ask my student to have another go, interrupting him or her as soon as I hear the p-s. “P-see…” No. “P-sigh…” No. “P-s…” No. Then I tell them that the p isn’t pronounced at all, much to their surprise.

The darts. It’s been a mixed bag so far. Often I’ve seen either both players performing well together, or both struggling (by their standards, of course). Darts is a funny game in that it has an objective measure of one’s performance (your average score per throw) but it’s perfectly possible to have a better average than your opponent and still lose the game. The best example of this was Jim Williams, the Welshman who was visibly better than Paolo Nebrida, his Filipino opponent. He averaged 7½ points better than Nebrida – that’s a lot – but missed five darts for the match, losing in a deciding leg. He also spurned a bunch of chances earlier on, otherwise the match wouldn’t have been so close in the first place. Another match I thought might go the same way was Matt Campbell’s against Mensur Suljovic. They’re both likeable characters and I didn’t mind who won. Campbell was clearly the better player, and eventually he did win, 3-2 in sets. Last night I saw Luke Littler’s first match. It took him a while to kick into gear but when he did so he produced a record-breaking 32-dart fourth set, coming millimetres from a nine-darter. Such ridiculous talent. Ryan Meikle, whom he beat 3-1, played very well too but couldn’t do anything at the end there. Yesterday’s final match saw Aussie madman Damon Heta win. Heta was lethal on the doubles and also came very close to a nine-darter.

Dorothy has invited me to church; I’ll be leaving any minute. Tomorrow she goes to England for Christmas. After the church service there will be food. I’ll be taking some of my salată de boeuf along.

Dreams - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports - Politics

Dodging a bullet and getting up my nose

December 15, 2024 by 0 Comments

Last night I had two strange dreams. In the first, I was piloting a small plane and was in trouble (though I was surprisingly calm) until my brother got me out of it. I communicated with him via text or something. Soon after I had another near accident, which made me nervous about flying in small planes again. (In that dream, flying in small planes was a normal part of everyday life.) In the second dream I was in trouble at work for playing some kind of ball game (that I’d invented) during office hours. My boss seemed to quite like the game though, and thought I should market it. In fact he talked enthusiastically about a business opportunity. I was embarrassed about the whole thing and began to skulk around the office.

The “invented game” dream might have come from the board game I played with some of my students last week. This is the one Dad came up with back in 1993 or ’94 – racing cars around a three-lane track, where the fast lane gets you round faster, obviously, but requires more fuel. I refined his idea and a quarter of a century later started using it in my lessons. My 13-year-old student wanted a copy of the game that he could print out and play at home, so I sent him soft copies of the game board, the dashboards (showing fuel and completed laps), and the cards that you have to draw if you land on certain spaces.

On Monday night I started getting pain in my sinuses that continued through Tuesday and Wednesday. I also seemed to pick up a bug of sorts. I was devoid of energy for two days. On Thursday I was back to some sort of normal which was just as well – I had seven lessons that day. The pain hasn’t entirely gone away and I’ve had no choice but to take painkillers. Fatigue has been a major issue for a while; it isn’t helped by my waking up multiple times virtually every night.

On Monday morning I had my weekly Romanian lesson. Inevitably we talked about the election, or un-election. I suggested that Georgescu was similar to Viktor Orbán. Oh no, my teacher replied. Far worse. Cancelling the election so close to the final round was very clumsy and looks antidemocratic on the face of it. Oh shit, it looks like we might elect an anti-establishment figure that we don’t like, let’s cancel the election. But the truth is the election had been manipulated in a big way on social media. Georgescu’s assertion that he spent “zero lei” on his campaign was quite clearly a lie. And his credentials that I mentioned before – that’s he’s a scientist with a PhD – are probably made up too. Invalidating the election may have been cack-handed, but in the short term at least, Romania has dodged a major bullet here. Since I arrived here, the country has been moving, albeit slowly and unevenly, in the right direction. It is less poor than it was eight years ago. It came very close to throwing that progress away. By the way, Romania and Bulgaria have now been fully admitted to the Schengen area. That will mean that I won’t have to queue at the border to get into Hungary, whether in a car or on a bus or train, and more importantly, trucks won’t be held up for hours. There might still be checks until June; I saw contradictory information on that.

I had six maths lessons last week. In one of them I estimated pi using a round bowl, a tape measure and a piece of string. I got a value of 3.129, which was a lot closer than I expected.

The darts World Championship starts in London tonight. There’s a lot to like about the format, the colourful characters, and the fact that it takes place over the festive season. Last year I got fairly into it. This year I expect I’ll watch rather less: I really have to get the picture book finalised.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

Enshittification: it’s pouring out now

November 28, 2024 by 0 Comments

Yesterday some candles suddenly appeared in the stairwell. When Elena (the lady who owns the flat above me) called me from Canada, I found out what they were for. The woman on the ground floor had just died. She was only 68. Her husband died at the beginning of this year.

It’s been looking pretty grim for a while, but 2024 has taken enshittification (Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year) to another level. (How did the en- prefix get there?) At every turn we’re sinking deeper into the mire and I don’t see a way out. We’re now systemically prevented from finding an escape. Most of us aren’t even trying anyway. We’re all ordering up pointless crap on Amazon and sharing memes on TikTok that last about five minutes before the next one comes along. At least I think that’s what people do on TikTok; I honestly don’t know.

On Sunday we had the first round of the Romanian presidential elections. Călin Georgescu, pro-Putin, pro-dictatorship, anti-NATO and a conspiracy theorist on every matter imaginable, came from nowhere to top the poll with just under 23% of the vote. He didn’t run a traditional campaign, but he was all over TikTok and Facebook. Since I use neither of them, his popularity passed me by. Also, in Timișoara where I live, Georgescu didn’t do very well. But now I know. He’s 62 so he’s been around the block a bit. He got a PhD in soil science 25 years ago and has since been involved in sustainable development and held positions within the UN where he investigated the adverse effects of dumping toxic waste. So it seems he’s got a brain on him and he did some good stuff before rapidly morphing into, well, toxic waste.

Second place was also a shock. Elena Lasconi, a centrist pro-European, edged out Marcel Ciolacu of the PSD (one of Romania’s big traditional parties) by the tiniest of margins, 19.18% to 19.15%. Ciolacu had a big lead over Lasconi on Sunday evening but his advantage narrowed throughout the night. I watched the results from the last few polling places (out of about 20,000) come through on Monday morning. Lasconi finally poked her nose in front with just 18 of them left to declare. Surprisingly there was no recount. I was glad Lasconi made it to the final two. She’s inexperienced, but the PSD are mired in corruption.

Dominoes are falling all around. Lasconi must beat Georgescu in the run-off on 8th December, or else Romania will be the next to tumble. A lot of Romanians don’t even care. Does anyone care about anything that actually matters anymore? On the radio yesterday there was open discussion of Romania being under attack. Hypothetical, but still.

Today I had four sessions between 3:30 and 9pm. A boy of eight, a girl about to turn 18, then a boy of nine, and finally a woman in her late forties. Last night I had a nightmarish session with a woman of 23. We discussed success and failure. She said that success to her means having a family and a good career. Fine. A shallow definition, but not an unusual one. But then I put it to her that I have neither a family nor a traditional career. Does that mean I’m a failure, then? Yes. I burst out laughing at that point. The rest of the 90-minute session was like talking to an AI bot. Last week I asked her to name one thing she thought could improve Romania. More cars, she said. Hmm, there seem to be enough cars here already. In fact when I’m getting around the city, I’d really like there to be fewer cars. Are you saying that if Romanians became richer then people would have more cars? Or that if Romania’s road infrastructure improved, more cars could be accommodated? Her responses are one word, no words at all, or just utterly bizarre. It’s the same story with almost all women I see that were born between about 1998 and 2008. When I saw the older woman this evening, I told her how great it felt to finally talk to someone like a normal human being.

I recently saw some photos my brother had taken of the little one in the snow, with a mini snowman behind him. They’ve had a real cold snap over there; snow in November is highly unusual. We had a few flurries ourselves last Friday.

When I finished work at 9:30 last night I spoke to Elena and then watched the rest of Birmingham’s match at Exeter. A pretty nice football ground, I thought. It’s called St James Park, and often comes up in British pub quizzes. (Newcastle’s ground is, famously, St James’ Park. Which other team’s stadium is called St James Park?) Exeter sounds like a pretty nice city too; I’ve never done more than pass through it on the train. I’ve sometimes thought that maybe Exeter should vote to leave the UK. What would that be called? Blues were already 1-0 up when I turned on the game. They were dominant but couldn’t put Exeter away until they got (and scored) a penalty ten minutes from the end. Two-nil was how it finished.

Books - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - New Zealand - Politics - Romania

Pulling teeth

November 22, 2024 by 0 Comments

A storm ripped through last night at 3am; for an hour and a half I couldn’t sleep. It’s still blowing a gale (or something at around a force 6 or 7 at least) now. And it’s raining hard. Either before or after the storm – I can’t remember – I had my first dream to feature Donald Trump. I was in a small town or village on a sunny day, having been on one of my excursions in the car, when he appeared. There was no rally or anything; he was just there, surrounded by a handful of people. It was all very civilised. He seemed to be at least six foot six. My instinct was to get away from him for fear of being shot. In the same dream, or perhaps the next one, my laptop caught fire.

Here’s a map of the weather warnings that were put out yesterday. The combination of high winds and (in higher terrain) blizzards has made for quite a complex picture. I’m in the orange zone:

Last night I had a chat with Mum. What’s happened to your tooth? A crown had fallen out. She’d already been to the new gleaming-white state-of-the-art dental practice in Geraldine; in ten days she’ll get a replacement crown at a cost of $1800. Dad then came on the line to say he’d just sold a painting for the same amount (I don’t know if that was net or gross). It took me three days to do that! As if three days was a long time. I immediately thought, just imagine being able to make $600 a day doing what I’m doing. I told Mum that if she could hang on for six months (!), she could get it done in Romania for a fraction of the cost. Coincidentally I’d just been reading David Walliams’ Demon Dentist with a very bright girl of almost eleven before this talk of dentistry with my parents. After the dental talk, conversation turned to the various haka and hikoi that have been going on lately in New Zealand.

In a lesson on Tuesday my student went through a long article about career choices. The author of the article likened career decisions to an octopus where each tentacle needs to be fed and accommodated. Tending to your “practical” tentacle too much can mean you neglect your “social” tentacle, and so on. It mentioned that as your salary increases, your expectations increase likewise. You’ll never be properly satisfied. Reading this sort of thing emphasises how atypical my own experiences have been. In January 2008 I went to Melbourne for eight days to attend the Australian Open. And to see Melbourne, which I liked a lot. Then when I got back to work everything got pretty crap pretty quickly. I’d muddled along for a few years as one of the young guys, but all of a sudden a bunch of actual young guys and girls joined the department and I was 28, supposedly a level above. The others at my level were suddenly doing life stuff like buying houses, getting married, having kids, and spending proper money on cars. They were progressing. It became obvious, within the space of a few weeks, that it wasn’t going to work for me. So I actually cut down on my spending, squirrelling away $500 a week for the rest of ’08 and the whole of ’09, until the end finally came in December. When I was in New Zealand last year, I stumbled upon some old payslips from 2007. Oh really, that much? That was the last year, in fact the only year, that I was at least somewhat into my corporate job. I was part of a team of just five. That all felt an awfully long time ago.

Tuesday was when some of the more notable lessons happened. In the morning I asked a 28-year-old what he thought the worst (or most destructive) invention in modern human history was. He quickly shot back: social media. There are several other contenders: leaded petrol, cigarettes, landmines, nuclear weapons (though they may have prevented destruction), and plastic. But all of them were invented even before my parents were born, in some cases centuries before. If you’re talking about the worst invention in the last 75 years, social media must be it. It’s destroying the fabric of our society like nothing else, and it’s horrifying to watch this destruction unfold in real time. That evening I had a 90-minute session with a 23-year-old woman. Teaching women of that age is invariably hard, but this session was excruciating. I got one-word answers from her, if that. Look, this isn’t working. I’m saying five words for every one of yours. (I was being generous.) I was getting a real Demon Dentist feel about the whole thing; it was like pulling teeth.

It’s been a slightly frustrating week, with an above average number of cancellations. I’ve tried to make the most of the annoying downtime by making new games and exercises, for both English and maths. I made a set of cards with the numbers 1 to 100, to help with understanding factors, multiples, primes, and all the rest of it. I’d planned just to go up to 40, but then thought I may as well go the whole hog. I’m happy with the system I came up with. Black for odd, red for even (like the suits of a normal pack of cards), a purple border if the number is prime, squares in the corners to denote a square number, and a small triangle on the right if the number is triangular. It was important not to make it too busy. On the back of each card I wrote the prime factorisation and all the factors of the number.

I’ve been playing my Primitive Man LP by Icehouse (an Aussie band who were big in the early eighties) a lot lately. Icehouse came on Radio Hauraki a lot back in 2007, that one year when my job was meaningful. It was usually Great Southern Land, or sometimes Hey Little Girl. But there are other very good songs on that record too, like Goodnight Mr Matthews. A lot of the tracks remind me of Split Enz who were big at around the same time.

I gave up on Honey & Spice in the middle of the fifth chapter. Whoever the target market is for the novel, I’m as sure as hell not it.

It’s an important time for Romania right now. Citizens (i.e. not me) go to the polls three weekends running. This Sunday is the first round of the presidential election. The parliamentary elections follow on 1st December, which happens to be Romania’s national day, with the second round of the presidential election taking place on the 8th. The far-right anti-everything-except-Trump-and-Putin party will surely increase their vote share. If they gain power, Romania could go the same way as Hungary. Let’s hope not.

I’ve got an important meeting this evening regarding the book(s) I’ve been writing with the help of Dad. More about that next time; it’s been a long post.

Language teaching - Other sports - Politics - Tennis

Pretty vacant

October 26, 2024 by 0 Comments

Seven lessons yesterday. It’s rare to have that many. All that talking gets quite tiring, especially when it’s online. I’m hoping to keep Sunday free (unlike last weekend) and hop over the border to Szeged in Hungary. I’ve heard good things about the city. I may even make a detour on the way there or back to take in the beautiful autumn colours.

When I spoke to Dad this morning, I mentioned the difficulty I have in connecting with young women aged between 15 and 25 or thereabouts in my lessons. Dad said that’s to be expected on account of the age gap between us, but I disagreed. There’s a certain vacancy there. The lights are on, but nobody’s home. Eight hours a day on Instagram, with its laser focus on image, will do that to you. When my university friend came to stay we talked about this. He reckoned that 10% of young women will suffer long-term damage – they’ll be confined to a (permanent?) zombie state – as a result of their social media use. Yes, boys and young men have their own issues, mostly around gaming. They’re up half the night and can’t stay awake in class. But I get the feeling that it’s something they’ll grow out of. They also do normal stuff like go out on their bikes or play football. One teenage boy had just been to football practice before our lesson. I got him to do an exercise where he had to choose between two verb tenses. Sometimes he wanted to use a different one. “Sorry mate,” I said, “You’re offside!” I raised my arm as if I was a linesman. He thought that was funny. With most girls, that sort of interaction just isn’t possible.

Talking of sport, Mum was pleased that Team New Zealand had won the America’s Cup. I think of it as an obscene waste of money. In other sporting news (from probably two weeks ago now), Rafael Nadal announced his retirement. The extraordinary two-decade-long rivalry between three titans of the game is now over; only Djokovic still remains. I also saw that Wimbledon is doing away with line judges in favour of automated line calling. I’m surprised they didn’t do this back in 2021 for the first tournament after the Covid cancellation; the tech certainly existed then. I read an article by an ex-line judge at Wimbledon. It’s something I wouldn’t have minded doing. As for being a ballboy though, bugger that. I’d have been terrible anyway. As a kid, trying to coordinate myself with other kids just wasn’t going to happen.

I should also mention football for the second time in this post. Earlier this year I wrote regular updates on Birmingham City’s eventual tumble through the trap door into the third tier of English football. A lot had to go wrong for that team to be relegated. A lot did go wrong. In their first season in such a low league since 1995, Birmingham have so far played eleven games, losing one, drawing one, and winning all the rest. They spent big over the summer and getting sell-out crowds to watch some pretty exciting football. There’s a sense of optimism around the club not seen in more than a decade. It’s funny how things turn out.

Just eleven days until the US election, and I have a strong sense of impending doom. (I wonder if anything else but doom can be impending. I never hear anyone talk of an impending root canal, as frightening as it must be.) This morning I saw two polls, one showing a tie nationally, and another showing Harris with only a three-point lead in New Hampshire, a state outside the “swing zone” which Biden won by more than seven points in 2020. Just two polls, but there have been several now that depict a race inching slowly but surely in Trump’s direction. My gut feeling, and that’s all it is, is that Trump will win the seven swing states 6-1 or even 7-0, perhaps even taking a “non-swing” state in the process. He may even win the popular vote or at least come very close. In that case (or any other of the many scenarios that see Trump elected again) I’ll want to log off from global news for my own sanity, keeping just my Romanian news app. I don’t think I could bear to see that grotesque excuse for a man day after day. Dad said that Harris hasn’t been charismatic enough, and charisma is all that matters over there, but what would “acceptable charisma” in a woman even look like in the US? A very “charismatic” woman would be perceived as too boisterous or not feminine enough. No matter what she does, she’s facing an uphill battle in those swing states simply because she’s a woman.

Last Sunday an important pair of votes took place in Moldova, Romania’s baby sister, which I would like to visit one day. (My first introduction to Moldova came from reading Tony Hawks’ Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, a funny but thought-provoking read.) The first round of the presidential election saw pro-European incumbent Maia Sandu come top with 42%, but she now faces a second round in nine days’ time against Alexandr Stoianoglo who is pro-Russia. There’s no guarantee that Sandu will win. There was also a referendum on amending Moldova’s constitution to include a path towards EU membership. The vote passed, just: 50.4% voted in favour. If Sandu doesn’t remain president, I expect that will be knocked on the head.

Any way you look at it, we’re living in fragile, unpredictable times.

Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Politics

A day in monotone

October 17, 2024 by 0 Comments

It’s been a slow day today. In mid-morning I got an attack of sinus pain which I staved off with an Advil and several paracetamol. So I didn’t get the excruciating pain I suffer on rare occasions, but I became sensitive to light and sound, and energy drained from me. I lay on the sofa and dozed until 20 minutes before my first lesson (of four scheduled) started. This was an online session with an eight-year-old boy. He’s a nice boy. But because I was more sensitive to sounds than usual, the monotony of his reading voice got to me. What Does Jack Want To Do He Wants To Play With His Dog What Does Sam Like To Eat… All at one note – Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba – without any pauses between sentences, like a helium-fuelled robot. Native-speaker children are like this too when they learn to read, but Romanians take it to another level because their native language stays at a more constant pitch than English does.

Annoyingly I only got two of my four lessons. One of the two “real millennial” girls completely forgot, while the Bucharest-based guy in his forties cancelled with 50 minutes to go. (I told that young lady she’d need to pay me, then changed my mind because she’s still pretty new and it was her first “offence”.)

Tomorrow I’ve got seven sessions in my diary – that’s a lot – but the odds are against me actually having that many. One of them is with Alex, a boy of nearly 14. In a recent session he told me how his grandfather had just bought three of the latest Samsung phones (for himself, Alex’s mum and Alex) for €1100 apiece. (Well-off people talk in euros; poorer people talk in lei.) He wanted to know if it was true that black Air Forces had been banned in British schools. Black Air Forces? Are these shoes, or what? And how the hell would I bloody know?

Yesterday I got my hair cut. I went to a place at the other end of the (long) street where I lived for two months in a guest house. I was the only customer. The hairdresser was a lady of sixty or so. She went on about how bad things were in Romania compared to the “old days”, then she talked about all the people she knew who had become ill from the Covid vaccines. I asked her how she knew it was the vaccines. By this time she was in full flow, so much that she’d stopped actually cutting my hair. Mercifully she got off the subject and resumed my haircut.

Song of the week – Demons by the Welsh band Super Furry Animals. The song, which came out in 1997, makes an inauspicious start (I’d say), but then gets much better. The video is fantastic throughout. It features the Colombian capital Bogotá. It makes me really want to visit South America. Another Super Furry Animals song I like (in fact there are a few) is Y Gwyneb Iau, sung in Welsh.

Two posts ago I mentioned tetrahedral numbers. I neglected to mention that they came in handy for me in my online poker days. How many different seven badugis are there? That’ll be 20, the fourth tetrahedral number. What about eight badugis? That’s 35, the fifth tetrahedral number. And so on. If GG Poker ever get round to adding draw games and the like, I’ll probably give it a whirl, but otherwise I’m not going back there.

Kamala Harris is going on Fox News in a few hours. Great move, I reckon. More eyeballs on her, wherever they come from, are what she needs. And it makes her appear unfazed. It is risky of course, because she could completely bomb, but the upside outweighs the downside. No matter what, I still have a nasty feeling about 5th November.