Month: September 2021

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker - Politics - Tennis

How exciting!

September 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My uncle – another one – is celebrating his 80th birthday today. He and my aunt visited Timișoara after coming to the UK for my brother’s wedding. A retired (or semi-retired) farmer, he still does a ton of physical work. The idea of slowing down is alien to him. I guess he’s been lucky – he’s lived ten years longer than either his older or younger brother, who both died of cancer. Ten years ago I went to his previous big birthday bash – in the middle of the rugby World Cup, and we watched the All Blacks’ first match against France. Israel Dagg (what a name) was probably man of the match. The world has spun off in an altogether darker direction since then.

Mum and Dad are now in their new place. It was weird seeing them on FaceTime with the new backdrop. So much wood everywhere, including on the ceilings. Dad described parts of the new house as “horrendous” and in dire need of renovation, but his horrendous is my kind of meh. I would just about kill to have their new place, as long as I could transport it out of Geraldine. Just before the definitive move, they had a horrendous day where their lawnmower broke down and my uncle’s (birthday boy’s) trailer, which Dad had borrowed, also needed expensive repairs.

I need to move away from this flat but I don’t want to. That’s the situation I’m in. Again, I’m having flashbacks to 2011, although then I didn’t actually need to move. It’s just that society had told me that someone of my age should buy a property – you’re a failure if you don’t – and my job, which gave me the licence to buy, was a ticking time bomb. And yeah, I thought it might actually make financial sense. But there was no excitement then, and neither is there now. The phrase “How exciting!”, as it relates to buying property, drives me mad. My biggest worry with this move is that it could kill my mental health, which has been so much better ever since I moved to Romania.

Last Monday I did have a look at a place in the Bucovina area, near where I once had lessons. The agent led me up to the fourth – and top – floor of a Ceaușescu-era block. Pinned to the walls of the staircase, bizarrely, were pictures of islands and beach resorts with golden sand and deep blue sea. It was something you might have seen in a prison cell. At the flat I was greeted by an elderly couple who had lived there for 35 years, and a very yappy dog. Everything in the flat had a seventies or eighties feel about it. There was even an old typewriter. The flat was easily big enough, but it would have needed serious work. I mean, it would have been OK for me, but potential students would have found it a turn-off. No lift either (again, I would have coped), and perhaps the biggest minus was a lack of any sort of view.

Then on Thursday I tried to visit some agents. This isn’t like New Zealand or the UK; they’re not really interested in dealing with the public. The first place had an intercom system which nobody answered. They didn’t answer their phone either. Fantastic. Just round the corner was another agency, located in a modern fourth-floor office. It was the same company that I rented this place from when I arrived. A woman took down my details and we had a chat. She told me that the young employee who had just two lessons from me in 2016, but honestly changed my life by tipping me off about the flat I’m in now, had left the company to train as a psychologist. I told her about some of the areas I liked, then inevitably she started peddling brand new apartments in the south of the city. I’ve been to that area, and nothing is more than five years old. I’d worry that living there, even if it might be good for business, would leave me depressed. Maybe not, but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

What else? There’s a Hungarian festival on in the city, perhaps the last thing that’ll be “on” before the plug is pulled. Last night we had country music at Piața Operei and there was even a re-enactment of a battle. They’re selling various bits and bobs, Csiki Sör beer, and overpriced food.

I played singles tennis last night, again with that super-fit near-60-year-old. We only booked the court for an hour, and at the end I was up 6-4, 4-2. I lost the first three games. The first game went 16 points but was almost devoid of rallies. In the third game I had a break point, and hit a shot I thought he might struggle to return, but he ripped a cross-court forehand that was out of the top drawer, and the next two points slipped from my grasp too. It was all happening too damn fast. I made sure I had a good sit-down before coming up to serve. The games had been close, and there was no reason why I couldn’t come back. It was overall a good game with plenty of winners from both of us, although he lost concentration in the middle.

Poker. Back-to-back second places, and big comebacks, on Friday, though I made such bad starts to both tournaments that I couldn’t get many of those damn bounties. After blanking all three of last night’s attempts, my bankroll is $979.

Work. It’s OK but I could do with more of it. (Someone called me wanting only face-to-face lessons. Um, there’s like this thing on the news that you might have seen.) Thursday was a good day, however. One boy in particular has come on so far in his English since I started with him that it blows me away. He’s gone from a kid who knew a few words and didn’t say boo to a goose to an intelligent teenager who has a bloody good command of English. It’s so pleasing to see.

Justin Trudeau has been re-elected prime minister of Canada despite his party losing the popular vote. Their system isn’t nearly as awful as the US one (stupid amounts of money, stupidly long campaign, stupid everything basically) but it still ain’t great. The Germans are going to the polls right now.

Boris Johnson resorted to his schoolboy Franglais shtick again last week. “Prenez un grip”, “donnez-moi un break”. Mildly amusing to an Englishman for whom mumbling pointless French phrases for five years was an iconic part of his upbringing, but it would have fallen flat elsewhere.

It might just be me, but I can’t see how we’ll ever escape from the environmental mess we’re in. Humans are just terrible at dealing with problems that happen incrementally over periods of time greater than a lifetime. We still think we can consume our way out of this. We can’t.

Sorry for making this post so long.

Coronavirus - Family - Films - Music

The sights and sounds, soon to be silenced

September 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The Covid Express freight train is careering towards us, and as such, this is probably the last normal weekend we’ll have here for a while. Buskers playing Por una cabeza. Weddings and baptisms on the steps of the cathedral. We might still get the buskers for a little while, but mass-participation events will soon be verboten, or as they say here, interzis. Last week the government agreed to mandate the Covid “green pass”, which you can get if you’ve been vaccinated, had a recent negative test, or recovered from the illness in the last six months. Supposedly you’ll need a green pass to enter a pub, but if and how the various birturi or cârciumi will enforce that I’ve no idea. On the local website, people were up in arms. It’s discriminatory. Yes you’re right, and that’s the whole point.

Yesterday I watched Hated in the Nation, the last episode of season three of Black Mirror. Disturbing, as always, but very thought-provoking. What a monster we’ve created in social media. The writers managed to include the destruction of Britain’s natural environment, hence those creepy swarms of fake bees that reminded me of The Birds. The characters, especially the female Met police detectives, were spot on. Before Black Mirror I tried watching Atypical, a series about autism, but I gave up after a few minutes. Honestly I couldn’t stand it.

Music. I still often listen to Musicorama, the local radio programme, when I get the chance, making sure I Shazam any songs I like. Two recommendations: Heart of Fire by 22-year-old American blues rocker Ally Venable, and Bulunur Mu by Amsterdam-based Turkish folk rock band Altın Gün. Last weekend we had a parade of international musicians that then performed in the Rose Garden. They come every year – except last year, obviously – and they always add considerable colour and joy to the city centre.

Poker. Three tournaments today, including a second-place finish in the single draw which snapped a streak of ten tournaments without a cash. I almost totally missed out on bounties though, mainly because I made such a bad start. After that, my bankroll has ticked up to $946.

Mum and Dad are moving, definitively, a few hours from now. Some neighbours will help them move their bed and sofa, but so far they’ve done almost everything themselves. Tomorrow I’ll get to view at least one apartment, and that will feel like I’m making a start.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Tennis

Making myself move

September 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been on the phone, and I should finally get to look at a couple of apartments on Monday. I need to do this, but motivating myself hasn’t been easy. It’s scary, honestly, and anyway I’m quite happy being slap-bang in the centre of town. While Covid is still ravaging the country it hardly matters that my apartment isn’t ideal for face-to-face teaching or that the cheap-as-chips furniture is on the verge of falling apart. The two I’m interested in are both in a similar area of the city, near a park. If I bought either of them, I’d still have over half the proceeds left from my Wellington apartment, so maybe I could look at buying a rental too.

On Wednesday I started lessons with a seven-year-old girl who lives on the outskirts of Stuttgart. She was born in Germany and speaks both German and Romanian. (By their standards, they’re getting cheap lessons out of me.) With someone that young, it’s never easy, especially online. I mean, keeping your arse on the chair is a skill at that age. In a trial lesson, I only did half an hour with her. I showed her a picture full of stars of various colours. How many blue stars are there? What other colours can you see? When there were still the purple and orange stars to count, I asked her: “Are there any more colours, or gata?” (Gata means “that’s all”.) “Gata,” she happily proclaimed. Her father called me back yesterday to say that yes, she wants to carry on.

The US Open finals. When you think you’ve seen everything in sport, Emma Răducanu goes and rips up the history books. She came from nowhere to win 20 straight sets, one of the greatest prizes in the sport, and $2.5 million. I didn’t stay up and watch her final with Leylah Fernandez but kind of wish I had. Djoković then had his chance to rewrite history too, but he was surprisingly overpowered and outclassed by Daniil Medvedev who hardly put a foot wrong until the last few games. Djoković was flat, and Medvedev, who moved so well for such a big guy (six foot six), took full advantage. The Serb had taken many more hours than his opponent to reach the final and it showed. He might also have been better off skipping Tokyo, where the heat got to him. Still, the crowd, who didn’t know to shut up when a player is about to serve, nearly allowed Djoković back in it. I was glad that Medvedev closed it out in three sets.

Sir Clive Sinclair, of calculator, computer and electric vehicle fame, died yesterday. He was something of a hero where I grew up, not far from Cambridge. There was a Sinclair factory just down the road, and every man and his dog got hold of a Sinclair calculator, which took a 9-volt battery, in the seventies. I think my father still has his, with its blinking red digits. This must have been the second version; the first iteration was famous among maths geeks because if you tried to divide by zero it would actually attempt the calculation and go mad. For a short time (I was maybe seven) we borrowed one of his Spectrum ZX81 computers with rubber keys and that badass rainbow logo. I remember getting it to spit out increasing powers of two, and playing a game called Manic Miner on our second-hand TV; this involved hooking up a cassette player which made weird noises as the game loaded. Clive Sinclair was clearly a clever bugger. I remember seeing him on Late Night Poker, a UK-based poker tournament with hole-card cameras, in the summer of ’99. That was the first time I’d heard of Texas hold ’em.

As for my poker, I’ve managed to get nowhere in my last nine tournaments, and I’m essentially even for the month, with a bankroll of $933.

Mum and Dad are about to move. They keep digging things up of mine, or occasionally my brother’s. This morning Mum asked me if I wanted to keep a nineties-era Wallace and Gromit figure which once contained shower gel. In the end I said yes. They’re now looking forward to finally moving out, although Dad will probably miss their home of 17 years.

The virus is ripping through Romania now, as I knew it would. There was never any doubt. While temperatures remain high and the sun is shining it doesn’t feel too bad, but when we’re surrounded by autumnal fog and the ambulances are blaring every other minute, life will take on the stark metallic grey hue that it did last October, but perhaps even bleaker.

Coronavirus - Family - Films - Life :) - New Zealand

Nearly half a lifetime ago…

September 12, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Twenty years ago today I was recovering from a nosedive brought on by recurrent panic attacks. In late June I was basically fine, but by mid-July I was plummeting at a thousand feet per second. But by now the drugs had started kicking in, and in an attempt to clamber out of the pit I’d fallen into, I was working nights at a sorting office. Dad picked me up every morning at four; I’m eternally grateful for what he did. In a few weeks I’d be starting my final year of university. (It looked for a while that I’d have to delay it. I just couldn’t function.) We couldn’t get Kylie’s latest hit out of our heads. So at half-two on a Tuesday afternoon I was at home with Dad, who was working in the studio. Then the phone rang. I picked it up. It was my grandmother, telling me to switch on the TV. I did, and told Dad he needed to watch it. For a few minutes we thought it might have been an accident. And then we saw the second plane hit. It seems that almost every American old enough to remember can remember where they were.

Staggering but true: neither of the two women’s US Open finalists was even born when 9/11 happened. They’ve both come utterly out of nowhere, in particular 150th-ranked Emma Răducanu who qualified and has therefore won nine straight matches to reach the final, without dropping a set. Răducanu (born 13/11/02) has a Chinese mother and a Romanian father (hence her name), was born in Canada but moved to London when she was two, and now plays for Britain. And there I was thinking I was a mongrel. Her opponent Leylah Fernandez (born 6/9/02), part-Ecuadorian, part-Filipino, and playing for Canada (!), is ranked only 73rd in the world and has gone to three sets in each of her last four matches. Far fewer surprises among the men, where Novak Djoković is one win, 18 mere games, from walk-on-water status. Nobody has won the calendar grand slam since 1969 because it’s damn near impossible to do. For one, Djoković had to overcome the undisputed King of Clay in Paris. Now he’s on the verge of being the undisputed King of Tennis.

Mum and Dad have been busy moving, shifting, lifting. They’re almost there, ready to move into their new house, which is actually reasonably old by NZ standards. If it was up to Dad they wouldn’t be moving at all, but I’m with Mum on this. Their current place seems unmanageably big, with a two-acre garden. If it isn’t too much yet, it soon will be, and right now they still have plenty of emotional energy (how?) for the move and everything that will come after.

If I’m really lucky I might one day see my parents in their new abode. They’ve managed to contain the latest outbreak in NZ, for now at least, and the South Island has remained Covid-free. No such luck in Romania, where they’ve practically given up. Cases are doubling every seven to ten days, and everyone’s going about their normal business in the NZ equivalent of level one-and-a-bit. The NZ opening-up plan is to vet travellers to the country based on rates of disease and vaccination in their home country and any other territories they’ve visited in the previous fortnight. Romania will surely be blacklisted. My idea, assuming the UK is on the green list by then, is to fly to the UK for two weeks before then flying to New Zealand. I’ll need an internet connection in the UK though. It’s hard not to feel some anger at Romanians. A warm, friendly, welcoming bunch of people, but somehow they’re willing to fuck up people’s health and their economy and their kids’ education and the country’s reputation and everything and everybody just because of their flat-earth beliefs.

On Thursday I called my aunt. I was shocked to get through; she hardly ever picks up the phone these days. I was almost as shocked that we had a normal conversation. She mentioned getting an MRI scan for her painful back, and the extreme difficulty of getting medical attention at all in the UK. The collateral non-Covid-related damage caused by the disease is immense.

Last Saturday I went to the film festival in the Summer Garden just across the road. I saw Nowhere Special, a drama based in Belfast and partly produced in Romania, and I didn’t have to pay a penny (or, as they say here, a ban). I won’t give any spoilers here, but it gets a big thumbs up from me. The Belfast accent isn’t the easiest to get right but James Norton certainly pulled it off.

It’s another glorious day here. I’ll be playing tennis a bit later.

Life :)

Time for a new pooter

September 8, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Writing that blog post about the Mocăniță was the last thing I did before my laptop went totally kaput. A fifth and final variety of blue screen, then something telling me to choose my keyboard layout. Armenian, Assamese, Inuktitut. Whatever I chose I was locked out of the system. I took it back to the repair shop but I decided I really didn’t trust the bloke there. Googling and writing a message on a forum got me nowhere – all the information out there might as well have been in Inuktitut – so on Thursday I cut my losses and bought a new laptop – an HP with plenty of storage space and RAM. At 3700 lei (NZ$1350 or £650) it was hardly the cheapest out there, but a laptop isn’t something I can skimp on, and heaven knows I skimp on enough. I took possession of it yesterday afternoon and ran a successful lesson from it almost immediately. So far I’ve been very impressed with its file transfer speed. My only battle so far has been trying to de-link everything from the bloody cloud. If I could get the old laptop in usable condition (at 4½ years, it’s not even that old), then it would give me protection from any future technical meltdowns.

In the short window between writing that last blog post and everything going phut, I got my old bike back (would you believe). This old, long-haired guy was wheeling two old bikes, including mine, near this apartment block. You’ve got my old bike! You nicked it, didn’t you? I’ve told the police. He said he’d bought it from the market (what a coincidence) and then gave it back to me without putting up any sort of fight. That’s a shame. Yeah, OK, have it back. I’ve just put it on OLX, Romania’s version of TradeMe. My new one is so much better.

On Saturday I met the British teacher again, this time at his place in Dumbrăvița. His wife wasn’t around. We went for a walk with their gangly dog (really her dog) in the wooded area nearby. It’s a popular area for mountain bikes, and there’s even a track that takes you all the way to Serbia. Their apartment, which they’re renting, is in a different league to mine. It was built two years ago on the edge of Dumbrăvița furthest from Timișoara. Next to the development, where the streets are named after scientists like Newton and Kepler, are fields that probably won’t be full of sunflowers for much longer. Housing estates in Romania grow much more organically than in the UK, where you might see 200 virtually identical houses cheek-by-jowl on rabbit warrens of far-too-narrow streets. Their two-storey flat is modern and airy, with all mod cons. They have three bathrooms with spas and jacuzzis and showers where you can have your favourite radio station piped through. They even have a reasonable-sized garden. What I really couldn’t abide though was all the ghastly word art in their living room. I’m guessing it was already there – they don’t strike me as do-the-things-that-make-you-happy kind of people. On the mantelpiece were four plasticky foot-high letters spelling out LOVE. I would have rearranged them to read VOLE. A nice friendly water-rat. On the wall was “Life is short, break the rules.” A sign telling you, ordering you to break the rules, isn’t the irony of that just wonderful? It’s all very corporate, like the company where I started in 2004 in which “FUN!” was one of its values; why people decided in about 2010 to drag that depressingly awful corporate shite into their homes I have no idea.

On the way back home I went through the old part of Dumbrăvița: the old church, the park, the town hall. It’s all very pleasant. Just like in the Mehala area and I’m sure many others too, the main street of old Dumbrăvița has plum trees and the odd quince tree lining the berms. (Now berm is a word I never used before I moved to New Zealand.) I picked four kilos of plums but could have snagged forty.

We’re having sunny and serene early-autumn weather. Calm before the storm that will soon hit us, as Covid numbers keep climbing.