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A hot mess

August 20, 2024 by 0 Comments

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.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Travel: Romania

The do and now for some time under canvas

July 30, 2024 by 0 Comments

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.

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

Keeping out of the outside world

July 14, 2024 by 0 Comments

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).

Language teaching - Politics - Writing a book

Democratic drama begins in 53 hours

July 3, 2024 by 0 Comments

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.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Writing a book

Wouldn’t it be nice

May 29, 2024 by 0 Comments

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.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Travel: Romania - Writing a book

Get rid of them please, and an important day beckons

May 28, 2024 by 0 Comments

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.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Not a moment too soon

May 24, 2024 by 0 Comments

I haven’t talked about politics much of late, but then yesterday British prime minister Rishi Sunak called a general election for 4th July. It was an absurd scene as he made the announcement, dripping wet in his suit, to the backdrop of D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better which was a number-one hit in 1994 and the theme tune to Labour’s landslide win in ’97. Why he called the election in six weeks’ time rather than waiting until the autumn is beyond me. I even thought he might wait until the latest possible date, which would have been January 2025. The British economy was looking a bit brighter, or at least a bit less dismal, and there was always the chance that something might happen. I honestly think Sunak was just over the whole business of being prime minister. Let’s slam the plane into the ground, and who cares about the hundreds of passengers I take with me.

I’m not sad about four months being lopped off the term of the parliament. The Tories have been in power for 14 years and have left the country in a much worse state than when they took over. Takes some doing, really. It’s long past time they vacated the stage. My fear is that Labour (if they win) won’t be nearly ambitious enough. At least I trust them to halt the slide though, and right now that’s something. I also look forward to a much greater working-class contingent among the governing party. Ever since Tony Blair’s government gained power in ’97, there’s been a deeply damaging Etonocracy (“born to rule”) – let’s knock that on the head for a start. I’d love it if the whole UK political system could be overhauled, but sadly I don’t see that happening any time soon because those in power benefit from it staying this way.

This morning I had a lesson with the priest who gave “relationship with God” as the main reason why women are having fewer children. He’s the eldest of six and wasn’t sure that the reduction was such a good thing. “A balance would be good. Some parents could have just one child, others four or five. And the statistics show that women live longer and suffer from fewer diseases when they have more children.” I gave him my opinion on the matter. I said that when he was born in 1963 there were 3.2 billion people on the planet (I looked that up); there are now two and a half times as many, and that’s been a complete disaster. A lower birth rate will cause short and medium-term pain but is one of the very few bases for long-term optimism.

I’n feeling much better now, despite an annoying number of cancellations this week. The lower workload has at least given me the chance to work on the novel. On Monday I spoke to my brother. At the weekend they had a barbecue and when it was still hot my nephew burnt his hand on the side of it. They rushed him off to A&E where he got bandaged up. He’s such an active boy all of a sudden, and these things happen in a split second. My brother said that when you have a child to look after, every day is the same with the exception of injuries and other mishaps, and you never have a moment to yourself. Sounds awful.

I’m enjoying the last few days of not-quite-summer. The smell of the lime trees is in the air, the strawberries and cherries are ripe, and the temperature is comfortable. On Tuesday night we had a downpour and a thunderstorm.

Language teaching - Life :) - Photos - Travel: Romania

Keeping those tourist numbers down

May 20, 2024 by 0 Comments

Things are certainly much better – and calmer – than a week ago. Not fantastically wonderful or anything, but I no longer feel hopelessly overwhelmed. My hours are down a bit, so I’ve been able to spend some time on my novel, though I’m constantly having to rework sections so that it meshes together properly, and even then I have doubts. Is this bit simply too boring? Then I’ve got the meeting for the other book, which was supposed to be last Tuesday but I’m glad got put back because things were still pretty messy then.

The last few days have been nondescript, which is no bad thing. My most interesting lesson was probably on Thursday, when my student of 22 or 23 showed me her CV. I’d put her at a 5 on my 0-to-10 scale. Her CV began with three introductory paragraphs where she blew her own trumpet and the rest of the brass section along with it. In included such phrases as “I wield automation tools”, “technical prowess”, “foster strong team collaboration” and “peak performance and user delight”. I asked her what “wield”, “prowess” and “foster” meant; predictably she hadn’t a clue. Then I told her to stop using AI to write her CV. Anybody with half a brain could tell that those weren’t her words.

I’ve had the usual chats with my parents. Lately Dad has spent a lot of time talking about UK immigration, which to be fair is a massively important topic, but sometimes I want a break from all the negativity associated with it. Yesterday he sent me a 35-minute YouTube video of a speech on UK immigration by someone from a right-wing think tank. Oh no, I have to watch this. The speaker made some perfectly valid points and some which I saw as invalid.

Yesterday I played tennis with Florin, as usual on a Saturday. We were surrounded by six beach volleyball courts; a noisy competition was in full flow. When things had calmed down half an hour into our session, we started a game. I was up 6-3, 1-1 when we finished. The most pleasing thing was that I didn’t suffer from the wobbly feeling on my service games.

Today I visited the dendrological park (that fancy word means “trees”) at Bazoșu Nou, a short trip from here. I parked next to a man of about thirty; he was with his small son who rode the sort of bike that didn’t exist when I was little, and clearly enjoyed the interaction with him. (I always feel a tinge of sadness when I see that; being 50% older than many fathers doesn’t exactly make that feeling go away.) To my surprise there was a man at the gate collecting a 10 lei entrance fee. Not far from the entrance were a pair of wordy information boards, one in Romanian and one in French, plus a map with no scale that showed vaguely what you might see. An American zone with sequoias. A giant oak tree. But from there, information was nonexistent. Is the oak tree two minutes away or half an hour? Is this oak tree the giant one or not? Nothing was labelled. The park was pretty and a relaxing place to stroll in, but some sense of what and where wouldn’t have gone amiss. I’d been in the park an hour, sometimes using my birdsong recognition app and wishing I had an app for trees too, when I thought, how do I get out of here now? Luckily I guessed right – all you could do in that rather large, mazy park was guess – and I was spared the Blair Witch stuff. Romania gets few tourists and they’re doing a good job of keeping it that way.

A useful map of cycle tracks outside the park

After the park I ended up in Recaș for the second time in four days – I had my lunch there on Wednesday – then got pulled over by the police. Ugh. “Do you want to know what rule you’ve broken?” I guess so. I expected to get done for speeding; I often don’t quite know what the speed limits are. The rule I’d broken was “headlights on at all times” rule. Only my sidelights were on. Apparently this is quite a new law (and crazy if you ask me, unless you ride a motorbike). He asked me to open the boot to make sure I had a full emergency kit (I did), then I was free to go, with no fine or anything. He was pleasant enough. I then stopped for lunch in a village called Brestovăț followed by a smaller village called Teș where the roads were unsealed and none of them seemed to go through the village despite my 2009 map which said otherwise.

Brestovăț

Teș

I braved the car wash today. It worked by rechargeable card. You had to put at least 10 lei on the card, so I charged it up with the minimum. A 2½-minute blast with a high-pressure hose was supposed to eat up 5 lei, but when that was done the other 5 lei had mysteriously vanished too. I might try another one next time. I must say I’m enjoying the car. It’s my favourite of the five I’ve had so far. I know it’s a diesel, but I’m still blown away by the low fuel consumption. It gets roughly 50 miles to the gallon; my 1984 Nissan Bluebird got barely half that.

I zeroed the trip meter the last time I filled up. 969 km hardly seems possible.
Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Other sports - Tennis

Lucky to have him

April 14, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve now heard that my aunt won’t be having a proper funeral service. Instead they’ll have an informal celebration at her house in Earith in the coming weeks before the place is sold. Her ashes will be scattered in the river in Wales, where my uncle’s also were after he died in 2002.

With family members popping off around him, Dad feels like the last man standing. After what he’s been through health-wise, we’re lucky to have him. We nearly lost him in 2005 – he was only 55 – when his heart valve operation in the UK went awry. Then five years ago he got bowel cancer. He’s just had a check-up on his heart – he was supposed to have them annually but because his operation took place in the UK he slipped through the NZ net. A sleeve was placed over his aortic valve to stop it expanding, but a section was left sleeveless (why?) and that’s a potential problem. He said it’ll be OK for now but he’ll get it looked at every year until he’s 85 (they stop caring at that point) and maybe at some stage he’ll need an operation.

When I spoke to my parents yesterday they’d just been to Ashburton. They dropped in on Mum’s mother’s cousin (aged 106) in the home. Imagine that, three whole decades on top of what my aunt managed. Amazingly, she isn’t even the oldest resident of Ashburton. Her childhood friend, three months older, is also still alive. The two of them, still kicking around today, at odds of zillions to one. Mum had been to a performance of The Vicar of Dibley in Geraldine, which just happens to be the vicar’s name. Very well received, even if Alice was too fat. I suggested that Father Ted, which is bloody hilarious, would also go down well there.

Two big stories came out of America last week. One, the total solar eclipse. A student of mine mentioned the 2000 eclipse which was visible all over Europe and at its most extreme (perigee? apogee?) in Romania. I said that in fact it was in 1999, then he “corrected” me by saying that it must have been 2000 because they came out with a commemorative 2000-lei note. I then pointed out that not even crazy Romanians would have produced a 1999-lei note. The most striking aspect of that eclipse, which took place in August, was the plummeting temperature. The other headline was that OJ Simpson died. Like my aunt, he was 76 (trombones). His car chase in 1994 was one of the most-watched events in American TV history, then for the next year he was never out of the news until he was finally acquitted of double murder. I remember the school cricket team instituted an “OJ award” for getting away with murder.

This June-like weather – high 20s most days, 31 forecast tomorrow – will soon end. It’s been a heck of a run. Romanians are used to weather being predictable, and if it’s out of kilter with the time of year – even if that means bluer skies and beautiful sunshine – they don’t like it. As for me, I was brought up in the UK and spent 5½ years in Wellington, so I take what I can get. Yesterday I had only five hours of lessons, all in Dumbrăvița. First up was maths. Circle theorems – not my favourite topic. I learn them, then forget them. And I’m supposed to teach them. If I have time tomorrow I’ll spend an hour on them before I see Matei again in the evening. After that I saw Octavian’s sister who is coming on in leaps and bounds, then Octavian himself. My lessons with him always frustrate me; he’s doing an IGCSE which forces him to study literary devices, when improving his pronunciation and intonation (still nowhere near good enough) would be far more useful.

After teaching I played tennis with Florin. Whether it was a panic attack or a kind of derealisation I wasn’t too sure, but I felt shaky out there in our 90-minute session. In the first set I led 4-1, but felt unsteady in the next game in which I opened with a double fault and dropped my serve to love. Leading 5-3 on his serve, I had two set points at 15-40, then another two, but couldn’t break him down. He was zoned in. After a torturous rally in which I finished second best, I let out an Andy Murray-like screech, to my slight embarrassment. In the following game I was lucky; he had a point for 5-5 and I clipped the tape to keep myself in the game, then closed out the set on my sixth opportunity. I got that same wobbly sensation in the second set, especially on serve, but I won it 6-3. The whole time I was battling the heat and my inadequate-sized water bottle. Florin hardly broke sweat. In a little while I’m meeting him and some of his friends down by the river.

Football. I watched Blues’ home game with Cardiff on Wednesday night. They weren’t terrible but they were uninspiring and lacked creativity. When Cardiff scored midway through the second half, I was done watching it. There were no further goals, and Blues were plunged deeper into the mire. On to yesterday’s game at home to Coventry, a local rival still fighting for promotion and with an FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United in the pipeline. To everyone’s surprise a hungry Blues gobbled up Coventry 3-0 in front of 27,000 fans – a huge result as they try to dodge the drop in one of the weirdest seasons ever. There were fireworks before the game – what relegation battle? If they do stay up, the future is very bright for the club; the new owners have near boundless ambition.

Language teaching - Other sports - The UK

Easter trip report — Part 3 of 3

April 7, 2024 by 0 Comments

I slept well on Tuesday night, but on Wednesday I was shattered. I met my friends again, and we went back to Wetherspoons where this time I had fish and chips and cider. Extremely good value. But really I wanted to crawl into a hole and not see anybody. My batteries were almost flat. I had a short nap, then packed up and got on the bus to Cambridge. During that time I got a message from National Express saying that my bus to Luton would be replaced by a taxi. I called their number – is this true? – and after a long wait I was assured that yes, a taxi would show up at the same time and same place, which it did. There were just two passengers. Our twilight taxi ride through South Cambridgeshire – I liked the name Bassingbourn cum Kneesworth – was very pleasant. I got to the airport at 8:45 and hunkered down on a bench, trying to position myself vaguely comfortably amidst the armrests. (I didn’t book into a hotel. I didn’t feel I could justify the eighty quid.) Later I moved to the floor near the check-in desks which are now dominated by the pinkness of Wizz Air.

I didn’t sleep much. At 4:45 I got myself a coffee from Pret A Manger and accidentally tried to pay with a Romanian coin which the Romanian cashier immediately spotted. We struck up a conversation; she was from Iași and had lived in the UK for 22 years. She asked me if I could speak Romanian but a combination of tiredness and surprise meant the words wouldn’t come out. Feeling embarrassed, I lied that I’d only been living in Romania for three years. I then called my parents from the café. Finally it was time to board. No problems with the flight, though half-way through there was an announcement that the lucky seven millionth Wizz Air passenger to Timișoara was on board and would win a bunch of free flights and have a photo shoot on the tarmac. The winner sat four rows behind me. I was mostly relieved; I must have looked terrible and really I just wanted to get home. Frustratingly I had a 70-minute wait for my bus, but I was home at last, back to the sunshine and the warmth. That felt good, I must say.

The trip was worth it for the time I spent with my brother and his family. Seeing my nephew grow up is a wonderful thing, make no mistake. Also, there was something special about seeing my aunt – I thought I’d never get the chance again. But I needed an extra two days of not going anywhere or seeing anybody or even having to communicate. Without that, it’s not really a holiday for me. I might well go back in the summer, and hopefully I’ll factor that in.

Since I got back I’ve given my car a spin (another trip to Recaș) and am planning a longer, cobweb-busting trip tomorrow. Today was a busy day of lessons. In between them I managed to fit in a one-hour tennis session. I was relieved not to experience a panic attack this time; only rallying rather than playing a set helped there I’m sure. A weird thing happened in a two-hour English lesson. My 16-year-old student told me to stop shaking my leg. God, I am shaking my leg and I wasn’t even aware of it. “You’ve been doing it for the past month!” Yeesh, really? I know it is a nervous tic of mine, but it’s alarming that I do it without even realising. In this evening’s two-hour maths lesson I was watching my legs like a hawk.

Blues lost 2-1 at Leicester today after conceding yet another late goal. No disgrace in losing narrowly away to one of the best teams in the league, but other results went against them, and with five games remaining they’re now inside the bottom three.