Month: December 2022

Family - Life :) - Poker

A new friend, and New Year dread

December 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

The building work in the bathroom is done; next week the plumber will do his bit. My teaching room, and just about my whole flat, is a mess.

This morning I had a good chat with my parents. We talked about festive seasons past. Ten years ago (can it be that long?) my brother had all his mess with that crazy woman. Twenty years ago my grandfather (Mum’s dad) died, so Mum was over in New Zealand for that, and the rest of our family had a go-through-the-motions Christmas in England. What a crappy time that was for me, those first few months after university, applying for jobs I didn’t really want and getting nowhere while I packed boxes of CDs in a business park.

Nearly three years ago, just before Covid, I met an elderly couple who had arrived in Romania in 2001. Late in 2020, the husband died of pancreatic cancer. This morning I met his widow, who suffered badly from depression after her loss. She lives in a flat in Iosefin, or is it Elisabetin, the area I used to spend a lot of time walking around when I lived in the old place. It’s just over the river from there. Her block, which is something of a rabbit warren, was built in 1919. It has eleven-foot-high ceilings, what she described as “don’t look” wiring, and a courtyard where people have dumped their lives. Her place looks far more lived in than my bare-bones apartment. Her living room has around 2500 books, most of them bought by her husband, some of which you can’t reach without a stepladder. She is involved in the Baptist church which has been a source of friendship for her. She speaks good Romanian and has worked as a translator here. We talked at some length about language, and Romanians’ struggles to differentiate chicken and kitchen, Tuesday and Thursday, or fifteen and fifty.

I’ve just received the details of tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve party. Seven o’clock start. Jeebus. Why so early? I’ll have hit the wall multiple times and it will still be 2022. In Abu Dhabi. I’m dreading it.

On the 27th I played a whole suite of badugi tournaments and made $67. I might have to knock the online poker on the head because, when I’m trying to write a book, it’s too much of a time sink.

Family - Films - Life :)

Being alone at Christmas is actually OK

December 27, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

The worst thing about being alone at Christmas isn’t being alone. That bit’s fine. No, the worst part is people telling you if you’re alone at Christmas, then something must have gone wrong in your life. I could have gone over to England, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. (It’s chaos there at this time of year normally, even without everyone going on strike.) It was nice having three days to myself, not having to talk to students or to the builder, and certainly not to a dozen people all at the same time. On Friday (the 23rd) I went over to the English couple in Dumbrăvița, where we ate the sarmale and salată de boeuf I’d made earlier that day. They gave me a present: a book of Romanian recipes, in English. The book has a very pleasant rustic feel to it. Whether I’ll actually cook many of the recipes is another matter though. Here are the ingredients for “toba”, for example: 2 pig’s trotters, 2 pig’s ears, 2 kidneys, 1 tongue, 1 heart, half a pig’s head, 1 pig’s bladder or a thick cow’s intestine, … The list almost entirely lacks anything that doesn’t gross me out. I’m now reading Homo Deus, the sequel to Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, and every page I read makes me think about becoming a vegetarian. More and more people I know are making the conversion. There’s one snag right now though: I live in Romania which is just about powered by pork. In summer I get by with very little meat, but in winter I’d be struggling.

Those three days gave me the chance to reflect on a few things. Like, wouldn’t it be nice to have a cat? When I go out for lessons I’m often surrounded by cats and other furry friends; the companionship is clearly beneficial. Pets haven’t been a big part of my life until now. When I was little, though, we had a tortoiseshell cat. She was mute and had virtually no interest in chasing mice or anything else. A zen cat. My parents adopted her as a kitten – there had been a plague of kittens near their old house. When I was nine, and the cat was two years older, we spent six months in New Zealand, so Mum gave her to one of the teachers at her school. A few weeks later a letter arrived at our Twizel house in Temuka. I’m sorry but we seem to have mislaid your cat. The big negative of getting a feline friend is what I’d do if went away. I’m planning to spent three or four weeks in New Zealand during our summer, so perhaps I’ll wait until after then. Four wheels first, four paws later.

I didn’t get up to much over the three days. I went for a bike ride, read my book, watched Doctor Zhivago for the first time (great film), and did a really good job of busting out of poker tournaments just before the money. Of course I caught up with family. My sister-in-law sent me photos of my nephew at his first Christingle service. Christingle. Such a funny word, isn’t it? These oranges with candles poked in them weren’t a thing when I was a kid. Then it was his first Christmas. I suspect I’ll receive lots of pictures of firsts over the coming months and years.

Dan the builder is back now. He’s a nice guy. We just had a chat about the mildness of our current winter. It’s a far cry from what I experienced six years ago when I learnt all that winter vocabulary such as țurțuri (icicles) and chiciură (hoar frost). He said that during the Ceaușescu period they used army trucks to clear the chest-deep snow. This year it seems all the snow has been dumped on the US. It’s like a war zone in New York State. My cousin and his wife, who live near Albany, are now in New Zealand, but they had a heck of a time getting a plane out of America. Dan should be finished tomorrow, when Bogdan the plumber will also come back. Soon I’ll have a new fully-functioning bathroom (I hope), then I’ll need to give this place a damn good clean.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

A low ebb

December 19, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

At about the time I wrote my last post, my nephew was in hospital. He was having trouble breathing and his oxygen saturation was down, so he spent the night there. He now appears to be fine, but it was a scary day or two. At that age, things can go so wrong so fast. This incident made me wonder if having kids is even worth it. From day one to day 10,000 or 15,000 or if you’re really (un)lucky 20,000, they’re a source of constant worry. How do you sleep at night? There’s gotta be some, I dunno, benefits to counteract the neverending stress.

Last week was probably my worst, from a mental health perspective, since I washed up in Romania way back when. Loads of lessons despite some last-minute cancellations, and those I coped with even if I sometimes got drenched on the way to them. But I’ve also had the builder here to help sort out my bathroom and at the same time throw everything out of balance, and I’ve just been, well, low. Those books, what’s the point exactly if (as is very likely) they never get published and hardly anyone reads them? Yet another exercise in futility, as if I haven’t had enough of those already. And of course I’m stuck here on my own, getting older, seeing my parents get older, wondering if and when I’ll need to go back to New Zealand and how on earth I’ll afford to live in a place where the average house costs a million dollars.

Yes, the bathroom. Last week the builder, a heavy smoker in his late forties, spent four days here gutting everything and making a start on the tiles. The builder’s name is Dan, and he’s back again today. The plumber, who should be coming on Wednesday, is Bogdan. So just like Dan, but he has to deal with the bog. Nominative determinism in action. It would have been easy if I could have just left Dan to his own devices but at times I’ve had to make decisions. Friday was a bit fraught. In a gap between lessons I went with him in his van, first to the tip, then to Dedeman where we spent well over an hour. That place, where everything is orange and blue, reminding me of Uncle Ben’s sauce, is disorienting at the best of times. In places like that I freeze, or even worse I concentrate on all the wrong things, like why it is that Romanians call the middle traffic light galben, or yellow, when they’re clearly orange. Is it because portocaliu, the Romanian word for orange, has too many syllables? (Officially in the UK, the middle light is amber, but nobody actually calls it that unless they’re trying especially hard to be an annoying twat. In the New Zealand road code – I’ve just had a look – it’s officially yellow even though everyone in NZ surely calls it orange. I see that Toby Manhire, writing about the Covid traffic light system, is no fan of the yellow designation.)

Back to Dedeman. I first had to choose some floor and ceiling tiles without pissing Dan off too much. Which browny grey or bluey grey or whitey grey do I choose? Shiny or semi-shiny or non-shiny? I almost thought, sod it, I’ll get the one with the bright pink fish. Then I chose a loo and a sink and a cupboard and so on and so forth. We made several stops as Dan got his quarter-tonne of cement and gypsum board and many other bits and pieces. I got so lost in there. “Get the trolley and bring it back to me,” he said. But, but, that’s like eight aisles away and I wasn’t paying attention. Back home, we had to haul the vast bags of cement up the stairs to my flat. I managed, but struggled to keep up with the smoker half-a-dozen years older than me.

I spoke to my brother last night. His wife’s family really go to town with Christmas activities, and he seemed almost envious of the non-Christmas I’ll end up having. He was grateful for the lockdown two years ago. We talked about our aunt who seemed pretty good on the phone when I spoke to her last week. But physically she’s a mess; my brother doesn’t think she’ll be around much longer. We discussed, of all things, the new notes and coins with King Charles’s portrait. He said that monarchs alternate the direction they look in, so Elizabeth faces right while Charles will face left (I knew that), and that queens wear crowns but kings don’t (I didn’t know that). Soon this will all be moot – cash is rapidly disappearing from Britain.

The deadliest and stupidest football World Cup ever is over. The football – none of which I watched – was a roaring success, as it was always going to be. Yesterday’s final surely ranks as one of the greatest games of all time, but why can’t they damn well decide it properly? (Five of the knockout matches, or about a third, went to penalties at this World Cup.) “Nobody has come up with a better way” is such a lazy argument. There are no end of better options. My favourite is to gradually remove players from each side after 120 minutes until someone scores. With all that space, someone is bound to. I’m aware here that I’m over 40 and younger people think shoot-outs are “sick” or whatever, so they’re unlikely to go away any time soon. By the way, I only maintained a vague interest in the World Cup (go Morocco!) because of the boys I teach, many of whom had never seen a normal World Cup before. For them, this is normal.

Life :) - Tennis

Thirty days hath December

December 12, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I miss my old place. This morning is a good example of why. Until I started my lesson at eight, I didn’t even notice it was snowing. Last December I was surrounded by parks and trees and the clatter of trams and Christmas lights and strange blokes dressed up as goats, but now the outside is sadly much more ignorable. As I type this I can see a tree.

If there’s one day I’d happily scratch from the calendar, it would be New Year’s Eve. It’s just far too social for someone as asocial as me. In Romania it’s particularly bad because people don’t call it a day (or a year) soon after midnight. Oh no, they power right through till four or something ridiculous, so the whole monstrous thing might last eight hours. Imagine being stuck at an airport for eight hours. It happens. In fact it happened a lot in Europe this past summer. But picture this: at regular intervals during your ordeal at Gate 29, to avoid being bumped off the flight, you’re required to talk to one of your fellow passengers. Someone you don’t know from Adam. What’s more, every third time you say something, you must make that other person laugh. After first grabbing an alcoholic drink, obviously. You must also laugh every third time the other person says something, no matter whether you think it’s funny, because you know he or she will be kicked off the flight if you fail to do so. There’s a mutual understanding. Then, at the five-hour point, you’re suddenly obliged to dance with your fellow travellers. Imagine that! Fail to tango with these complete strangers and you might as well be carrying explosives. At New Year, millions of people choose to do something pretty similar to what I’ve described. They’re obviously barking mad. Off their rockers, the lot of them. Recently someone from tennis invited me to a New Year thing at a restaurant not far from where I live. Oh god. It costs 300 lei. (Pay extra for the privilege of being stuck at an airport for eight hours and having to make jokes with other passengers. Utter insanity.) I ummed and ahhed for a few days and then said yes because I didn’t want people to hate me. There will be food, that’s something. And maybe they’ll let me off if I duck out at around two. He’s not from here, he does things differently. I can always play that card, the joker up my sleeve.

I’m tired all the bloody time. I look back at early 2018 when I had a two-month spell without a single day off. Nearly five years on it’s all much more of a struggle. Getting to lessons from my new place takes longer, but it’s the regular headaches that really wear me out. I also changed my antidepressant recently – I was forced to – and who knows what that might have done. It’s hard to know what’s what. Last week I visited my doctor who gave me some pills for my high liver enzyme levels. Why they’re high I have no idea; I drink copious water, I hardly ever have fizzy drink, and as for alcohol I average something like two drinks a week – I work late every evening from Monday to Friday, and the last thing I want at 10pm is a beer. These pills contain silymarin, which is a flowering plant, and cynarin, which is extracted from artichokes. I’m also taking vitamin D again.

Tennis is over for at least another three months. I didn’t particularly enjoy my last session of the season. The woman on the other side shouted “yes!” every time we made a mistake (cut that shit out, seriously) and her partner was an explosive player who had all the right gear (an expensive Babolat racket, obviously) and seemed ever so slightly dickish.

This is shaping up to be a really busy week. I hope I can stay awake for it.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Winter is upon us once more

December 2, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

… but right now it’s pretty benign. I’ve just been to watch the parade for Romania’s national day. This time it was outside the cathedral, and from where I stood I looked directly up at the windows of my old apartment. In the past the parade took place outside the Timiș council building, and last year we all congregated in Central Park as the tanks, police cars and fire engines went by in the middle distance. They played the national anthem – one of only a handful in a minor key – and then there was a lot of hanging around as mostly inaudible sermon-like speeches were delivered before all the military vehicles and people in uniform drifted by, and two choppers flew overhead.

I’m now on day two of escitalopram after my vanilla citalopram ran out and all shipments had been halted. No side effects yet, touch wood. I got the results of the tests I had on Monday. My cholesterol is high as it’s always been, and some of my liver enzymes seem to be elevated – hopefully when I see my doctor next Tuesday he’ll tell me what that all means. I’ll also ask him to refer me to a specialist. I continue to be pleasantly surprised by my level of medical care in this country. I could see a doctor at the drop of a hat if I needed to, not like in the UK where I’d be waiting days. I’m baffled by how accepting the Brits are of their increasingly shitty reality. Maybe the easy availability of consumer goods makes them lose sight of the big picture.

I had my latest lesson with the four twins yesterday. They live in the west of the city, a half-hour bike ride away, beyond the road that’s being churned up to lay new tram tracks, and almost right next to the 1000-seater rugby stadium. Yes, rugby is played in Romania; the national side will play in next year’s World Cup. Romanians tend to pronounce “rugby” somewhere between ruby and ribby with no hint of a g, and I try to point them in a more native-sounding direction. The lesson went fine, although the younger boy sat out one of the games, saying he was bored. In the lesson with the single twins on Monday, we discussed what things are supposed to bring good luck in certain cultures, such as a horseshoe, a four-leaf clover, or a rabbit’s foot. We then went on to lucky colours and numbers. What numbers are lucky? The boy said, in all seriousness, 69, without seeming to realise what it meant. Where did you get that from?! “Toma from my class said so.” Tell Toma he’s wrong!

Mum and Dad are back home. Dad said he’d been looking forward to getting back, but felt flat the moment he actually did so. It’s funny how that can work. For him, it might have just been all the chores that they were suddenly confronted with. They told me about the woman they sat next to on the plane. She was Indian, in her fifties, and was clearly far out of her comfort zone. She squatted rather than sat, as if being on a chair was alien to her (perhaps it was in the town or village she came from) and spent the whole journey with a blanket over her head, never eating anything or even taking a sip of water. For ten hours. She had the aisle seat and couldn’t get that she had to move out of the way to let my parents sit down. She didn’t know a word of English. And for some reason she was flying to New Zealand. I found my parents’ account of her fascinating; there’s the basis for a whole novel right there.

The Glass Hotel is great. I’m coming to the end of it. She’s done her research, that’s for sure. I like all the references to shipping, They make me think I’m back in Devonport in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis (which is a major theme of the book). Late at night I’d watch the dockers, lit up like fireflies, from the window of my flat. I became a container spotter: P&O Nedlloyd, Maersk, Hamburg Süd, the occasional Matson. Each colossal container ship carried thousands of these huge boxes, many weighing 30-odd tons, and that made me feel pleasantly small.