Month: February 2023

Life :) - Other sports

They’re all popping off

February 27, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It felt good to give this flat a proper clean this morning while listening to the local radio. The rain hasn’t abated, and the main headline was the flood alerts, in all their lurid colours, all over the country. There was also (following our recent shaky spell) plenty of airtime given to all the earthquake-prone buildings in the area. It was as if I’d been transported back to whence I came. They then had a sports programme on. All three local second-division football teams are doing terribly. Even the best of them, the announcer said, may still avoid avoiding relegation.

This morning my parents told me that their indoor bowls club had packed in because so many of the players had died. I suggested that dying isn’t a new thing, but of course there are no new players to replace those who have bitten the dust. My parents couldn’t have given a damn about indoor bowls, but it highlights a bigger problem. All these clubs that used to bring people together are folding. Dad’s model aero club consists of a handful of blokes with an average age of 70-odd. At one time, people came from far and wide to see other people fly their model planes. Even Caroline Bay, which would have been heaving in the summer when Mum was a girl and was even very popular as I remember it, doesn’t attract many people these days.

John Motson, the famous English football commentator, died last week. He was catapulted into the limelight as a young man in 1972 when he covered the greatest FA Cup shock ever, as Hereford beat Newcastle. There are very few of the great commentators left; those distinctive voices beamed into millions of living rooms, bringing people together. (See previous paragraph.) Here is Formula 1 commentator Murray Walker (1923-2021) trying his hand at snooker commentary; it’s hilarious.

Today I’ve been wondering what on earth happened to Matei’s dog. They didn’t really seem to know. Yesterday I saw him with his head poking out of a thick plastic bag, ready to be buried.

Life :) - Maths teaching - Photos - Writing a book

Trying not to get sucked under

February 26, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Unusually for a Saturday, I only had one lesson today – maths with Matei. He and his family got back from their trip to beautiful Valencia on Thursday, then yesterday their five-year-old dog died suddenly. At his parents’ request I’d given him a hard test to complete for homework. He got 6 out of 23 but thankfully was unfazed by that. On my way home from the lesson, the rain pelted down and I got soaked to the skin.

Yesterday wasn’t a great day to put it mildly. I didn’t have any lessons until 3pm, but I had plenty to be getting on with. Preparation for Matei’s lesson, the dictionary, cleaning my flat, going to the notary to get yet another authorised copy of my passport so I can maybe retrieve my tens of thousands of quid from Barclays. The only problem was that I was low on both mental and physical energy. I was slow to get going. I decided to work for a while on the S and T sections of the dictionary, then see the notary in Piața Unirii. When I got to the notary’s office, I was met by a sign: “Closed. Back on 6th March.” I thought, this is just like one of those dreams, only there weren’t any tangled weeds, nor was there a year – something like 2098 – appended to the end of the notice. No problem, there are other notaries in the vicinity. I visited another office, but doamna – the notary lady – had popped out. Then I tried a third office, which the sign strongly suggested was upstairs. I climbed the rickety stairs to a courtyard, but there was no notary up there, but then there was an archway and some even shakier wooden stairs leading to the second floor – this was quite beautiful in its way. No, this definitely isn’t it. It was on the ground floor all along, but once again doamna wasn’t there. At the fourth place I tried, doamna was there, but “you need a translator, not us, those are the rules” and with that I went home. On the way back I must have shouted, hit a road sign, and nearly hit several pedestrians. Once again, I was out of control. I stopped off via the market, and that helped calm me down a bit. I bought a loaf of bread, some goat’s cheese, some mandarins and some onions, then went to get some spicy sausage from one of the meat stalls. The youngish woman thought I was pointing to the pork scratchings, and I thought, what the hell, I’ll get them instead. Three hundred grams.

Last week was a bad week for cancellations. It was half-term, or the Romanian equivalent of that, so some people were away skiing as Romanians with money like to do at this time of year, then others got sick, and a few cancelled at the last minute for some unknown reason. Not much fun for me, because it’s really my work that’s keeping me from going under right now. I thought going back to my old antidepressants might have steadied the ship, but yesterday was another shocker.

Though I now have a diagnosis of sorts for my “sinus” problem, my nose runs like a tap and I have a lot of low-level pain, so even when I don’t have one of those debilitating migraines, my quality of life takes a hammering. Monday’s diagnosis didn’t do much to solve that.

I don’t mind if this dreadful weather continues tomorrow, because after my early lesson I really have to tidy this place up. On Tuesday I bumped into Bogdan – the guy who lives in my old apartment block. He asked why I moved out of there. I sometimes wonder the same thing. He was heading home – via yet another pub – to watch the snooker on TV. I said we should try and meet up for a drink this weekend. It might be nice to spend time with someone who isn’t coping with life either but doesn’t care. I called him this morning but got no reply.

Family - Life :) - Photos

A real headache

February 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Nothing much has changed since I last wrote. I’m managing fine with work (and now have a stash of cash that I haven’t had since pre-Covid), but all the life admin stuff is still giving me nightmares. Literally. I’ve had dreams lately where I’ve trekked across the city to find that the bureau (or wherever I’m supposed to go) closed years ago and is now overgrown with weeds. Silly me. I really can’t cope. Last night I woke up at half-three and thought, shit, where did I put all my ENT stuff? Mad panic, then I found the envelope, popped it in a file, and took ages to get back to sleep.

The ENT stuff. I saw the neurologist on Monday. He was in his mid-thirties and spoke near-fluent English and French. I wasn’t at my best that day, and he seemed aggressive and sarcastic. I had to cycle home and back to get information that I hadn’t brought with me because I was too disorganised because, well, everything. At least he was still willing to deal with me at that point, and I got used to his manner. I started speaking Romanian but switched to English when his command of the language became apparent. On my trip home and back I collected some snot, then he read my recent MRI scan and my CT scan from four years ago, and concluded that I almost certainly didn’t have a fistula or anything of the sort, but instead had migraines. I was one of the 90%-plus of patients complaining of “sinus headaches” who actually have migraines. All the symptoms are there – fatigue, nausea, sensitivity to light and sound – plus I’m dripping with family history. He gave me advil, or ibuprofen, saying there was only a 30% chance it would do anything for me. Dad reckons I should take a triptan, one of a class of drugs that does have a fairly high success rate at treating migraine pain.

My brother called me on Saturday night. When are Mum and Dad coming over? He was upset that they’d made no firm plans to visit him again. His son will only really have one set of grandparents, he said. My take on it is, yes it’s sad, but making the trip is harder for my parents than my brother thinks. Apart from the bits where they saw family, including the excitement at seeing the new addition, they really didn’t enjoy their trip at all. Flying, travelling within the UK, breaking down and getting parking fines, sorting out stupid stuff like a mix-up with power meters in their flat in St Ives – it was all a chore. Now they’ve got their overly ambitious building project on their hopelessly impractical house to deal with, so making a trip over is even harder. Between the time Dad’s mother died (early 2012) and when Dad got cancer (mid-2019), they did toy with the idea of spending six months in the UK every year, but that A380 has well and truly departed. My brother put the cost of a trip to New Zealand (he, his wife, and the little one) at £3500 which he said was unaffordable.

Here is some of the newer street art in Timișoara. Much of it is on the university campus. I wonder if the residents of Pac-Man Heights or Rubik’s Block have a clue what their enormous murals represent.

This one from 2013, near all the campus fast food outlets, is nice and familiar
Autism - Language learning - Life :)

On shaky ground

February 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

A 5.7-magnitude earthquake struck yesterday at 3:15, during a face-to-face lesson. My 16-year-old student, the girl whom I also teach maths, felt it before I did. Its epicentre was in roughly the same place as the day before; in the vicinity it cracked the odd wall and removed a few roof tiles. The whole thing only lasted a few seconds, but enough to give me pretty severe feelings of déjà vu.

Last night there was a documentary about autism on the BBC. I couldn’t watch it here, unfortunately. Before it aired there was a comments section open where people talked about their experiences of autism and tried to second-guess the angle that the programme might take. A frustrated parent said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I bet it’ll be slightly awkward kids who wear funny hats, unlike my son who drinks the water in the toilet bowl and throws faeces around. They never focus on the people who are really disabled, because that isn’t sexy.” It’s heartbreaking to hear a parent describe his or her experiences in those terms, but life is often an immense struggle for so-called high-functioning autistic people too. As another commenter said, it’s actually harder for them, because of their profound awareness that they don’t conform to societal norms. If you’re high-functioning, you know why you don’t have many friends, why you don’t have kids, why you can’t hold down a job. None of that is sexy in the slightest.

Yesterday I called Barclays again. If there’s anything that’ll send me into a steep nosedive, it’s calling Barclays. I feel I need to take a whole damn box of my antidepressants before I call them. My god. A company that makes billions each year in profit has no customer-facing team to deal with people like me whose accounts have been closed. I’m left with no option but to guess what documents I need to send, and who if anybody should stamp them, so that I can confirm my identity. The whole situation is appalling.

Last night I had an English lesson with someone at a beginner level. This meant I ended up speaking a lot of Romanian, but what we worked on had pronouns popping up all over the place, and I still struggle badly with them. Part of the problem is that I live and work by myself, so my life doesn’t involve the sort of interdependency that means I use lots of pronouns in my everyday life. I rarely have a need to say “She told me to give this to him before I talk to them”. I wouldn’t even know where to start with that. Hmmm, let me think. Mi-a spus ea să-i dau lui asta înainte să vorbesc cu ei. That might be close, but it took me a couple of minutes of thinking time, and in speaking I’ve got no chance.

Environment - Life :) - New Zealand - Photos - Poker - Travel: Romania

Earthquake weather

February 14, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

At around 5pm yesterday, a 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck about 170 km east of here, at a depth of 15 km. I didn’t feel it, but many in Timișoara did, and I think the recent scenes from Turkey and Syria spooked some Romanians more than normal. Yes, earthquakes are common in Romania, mostly in Vrancea in the south-east. About 1600 people were killed in the 1977 Vrancea quake, which Ceaușescu took advantage of by clearing out swaths of Bucharest to build even more brutalist concrete blocks. There’s often talk of building codes and yellow stickers which is all hauntingly familiar to me.

It’s an absolute mess – once again – in New Zealand’s North Island. The floods caused by Cyclone Gabrielle have displaced thousands, destroyed homes, and cut off whole towns. I worked for a water consultancy company twenty years ago; we produced maps that were fascinating in their way, delineating the extend of flooding at various levels of likelihood: once every 5 years, then 10, 25, 50, 100 and 200. Then there was a “climate change” line that blew everything else out of the water, so to speak. A 1-in-200-year event would be more like a 1-in-2, if the doom scenario came to pass. It already has. I was pleased to see James Shaw, the minister for climate, give such an impassioned speech in parliament.

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos on cities (mostly American and Canadian ones) and public transport. One word that keeps coming up is stroad – a hybrid of a street, which has shops and bars and other stuff that people actually want to visit, and a road, whose purpose is to transport people from one place to another. A stroad tries to be a street and a road, and fails at both. Stroads, with their mega-center malls and drive-thru everything, are all over America and Canada. They’re depressing places if you’re in a car – you’re constantly stopping – and even more depressing if you’re not in a car. When I watched the videos I thought how I often found myself on one of sprawling Auckland’s soul-crushing stroads – Wairau Drive or whatever it was called. Wellington seemed almost free of them. Romania is pretty stroad-free I thought, until I suddenly realised something when I was cycling to my maths lesson on Saturday morning with the temperature hovering around minus 6. I cycled past Iulius Mall, which now has what the videos call a lifestyle centre (ugh), then went down the two-kilometre-long Calea Lipovei until I hit the roundabout at the edge of Dumbrăvița. Hey, now I’m on a stroad. There you’ll find a big supermarket that existed six years ago, and the Galaxy shopping centre that certainly didn’t. It’s already a big choke point, but now they’re also building a drive-thru McDonald’s. Just what we all need.

On Saturday I went back along the stroad again – all of it this time, because I was meeting the English guy Mark who lives at the end of the four-kilometre stroad and down a long, muddy, unpaved road where nothing is more than five years old. I think that would mess me up mentally. We, and the two dogs he and his girlfriend now have, went in his car to a village called Bogda, 45 minutes away. In the village was a camp that was used by schools and had clearly flourished in communist times, but was now abandoned like so much else around here. There was a good walkway and we trekked along and back with the dogs. It was a bit higher up and there was snow on the ground. I struggled with sinus pain, especially as we got back to the car, but subsided and when I got back home I felt much better after all that exercise. In fact I’m a bit better all round now.

I played poker yesterday for the first time in a while, and made $41 thanks to my first ever outright win in five-card draw. Here are some pictures.

The abandoned camp buildings and bandstand

This well is still functional

Some street art

The stroad
Life :) - New Zealand

New Zealand flights booked!

February 11, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I found the early part of the week a struggle, but have bounced back since. I think the trick is recognising that life admin is a bit of a challenge for me, and if my less urgent tasks spill over into the following day or even week, that’s nothing to beat myself up over.

I’ve been trying to book flights to New Zealand today, all the time longing for the days (and places) of travel agents who could actually help you. I did visit two agents today, but the antipodes were alien to both them and whatever screens they were looking at. It wasn’t their fault, but their computers really did say no, at least for even a semi-reasonable price. I did eventually find a Turkish Airlines ticket online for just under £1400, but it wouldn’t let me book because it was over my online limit. I’ll try and get through to my New Zealand bank this evening and see if I can get that limit lifted.

Yesterday lunchtime I had pizza in the centre of town with the dictionary woman and another lady who speaks English at a high level and used to have lessons with me. That gave me a welcome, stress-free break in the middle of a busy day of lessons. They want to restart the English conversation club which was a success before it broke up ten years or so ago.

I’ve found two interesting YouTube channels of late. One is called CityNerd, and is all about urban planning and the depressing dominance of the car in North America. The other is called Lord Spoda, and features a guy who visits ghost towns – or close to it – far from any interstate. I enjoyed this video – if enjoy is exactly the word – of half a dozen once-thriving towns in Texas. Now it’s tumbleweed stuff. What names these places have. Motley County is delightful, as the narrator says. Paducah, named after the much larger place in Kentucky that I actually visited in 2015. Rhymes with Temuka. Quitaque, pronounced “kitty-kway”. Turkey. Yes, Turkey. And then there’s the pretty ghastly Floydada.

There have been hellish scenes in Turkey and Syria all week following Monday morning’s earthquake. Tens of thousands dead, and now great anger.

Update: I’ve just successfully booked my flights. I’m leaving Budapest on 5th August, arriving in Christchurch on 7th August and staying until 8th September. There are three stops, in Istanbul, Singapore and Melbourne, and there’s also the business of getting to Budapest. I didn’t expect to feel so excited at making an online booking, but I was practically jumping up and down for a couple of minutes after I got the confirmation.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

I can gather all the news I need on the weather report

February 6, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Edit: I see I’ve used that Simon and Garfunkel song lyric as a post title before. It is one of my favourite songs, so it can’t be helped.

On Friday my UK-based student asked me what “gusts of three degrees” meant on the weather forecast. He said he’d heard it several times. A frost and three degrees, maybe? He insisted that it was gusts. Sorry mate, I’m struggling with that one. But it did make me wonder about weather forecasts. Sometimes they just kind of wash over you, don’t they? If Catriona MacLeod came on Radio NZ and said there’d be “gusts of three degrees, south-westerly fog patches, and moderate to heavy drizzle later in the ranges, rising to 30 knots”, half the listeners wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

Here in Timișoara, the actual weather has been pretty nippy. When I went out today in mid-afternoon, the temperature was zero. Yesterday was one of the windier days I can remember here, with the exception of this day. It was also wet. Getting to my pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița on my bike, worried that my left handlebar grip might fly off at any moment with all the moisture, wasn’t much fun. After my maths lesson I had my 252nd session with Octavian. I feel bad because, although he’s now got a pretty handy command of English, he still has a very non-native pronunciation – he hasn’t got a proper handle on the English r or th sounds, nor can he properly distinguish the vowel sounds in bit and beat, or bet and bat – so I spent almost the whole session on pronunciation drills.

What a horror day last Tuesday was. This blog tells me that 10/8/16 was pretty bad; perhaps 31/1/23 was even worse. I felt so hopeless and overwhelmed by everything, and had lost control of my emotions. When I think about it I’d been feeling anxious for some time, and my memory and concentration had shrunk to comatose goldfish level. It reminded me of the last time I worked in life insurance, when I couldn’t remember what I’d done five minutes earlier, let alone on the previous day. I really need to act on those first warning signs – take a day or two off, whatever – before things spin drastically out of control. Since Tuesday I’ve bounced back reasonably well, I feel. I’m trying to get back to what I did during the initial stages of Covid which, bizarrely enough, were quite a positive time for me because my life became quieter and simpler. I planned each day the night before, went to bed early, got up early, and executed the plan as best I could. Grocery shopping was always first thing on Monday at the exact same place. I’m going back to that routine now. It’ll be harder because of my increased workload and the books – things are bound to get in the way – but if I have to put something off until the next day because of something out of my control, that’s OK. Tomorrow, apart from my four lessons, my list consists of shopping (I’ve made a list), tidying this flat which has become a mess, cooking, booking flights to NZ (I’ve got to bite the bullet on that one, and bugger the cost), calling the plumber, spending an hour on the dictionary, and reading.

Yesterday Birmingham City – Blues – scored twice in the last few minutes to win 4-3 at Swansea, snapping a run of five straight losses in the league. Mayhem ensued when the winner went in.

Life :)

It’s back, as bad as ever

February 2, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

The depression, I mean. I had two terrible days a fornight ago, including the day of my MRI scan, but yesterday was on a whole different level. I was dangerously depressed. I had no lessons until the afternoon, but I had various “life admin” tasks to keep me occupied. It’s the life admin that’s been wrecking me of late. It’s got totally, utterly beyond me. How people cope with all this stuff and bring up a family I have no idea. Yesterday morning I watched the news, which showed a heartbreaking piece about an 85-year-old woman living on her own in Constanța who called 112 because she thought she would die of cold in her hopelessly substandard home. After a bout of screaming in the living room, I forced myself to email my health insurer (could I make a claim?), then again forced myself to call Barclays. I still have a five-figure sum tied up in the UK after Barclays closed the accounts of everybody living in the EU, and nothing has happened since I contacted them in the autumn. I rang the number, needing to use Skype because I couldn’t call it from my phone, and swam through about eight layers of telephonic treacle. “For all other queries, it’s three.” It’s three? That doesn’t make any sense. I eventually got through to a lady who was very helpful. Look, I’m not at my best today, I said. Please go through what I have to do slowly otherwise I won’t remember. She said that if I don’t follow the instructions to the letter and get everything properly notarised, which by the way doesn’t appear to be possible in Romania, they won’t release my funds. I shouted, “But you’ve stolen my money!” She was just the messenger, of course.

I was in an increasingly bad way when I made myself go back to the notary in Piața Unirii, where they certified a copy of my passport last November to no benefit whatsoever. Do you need a translation? Translate my passport, what? They left me alone in the waiting room where I banged my head against the wall, four times I think. Oh jeez. How has it come back to this? I did get the certified copy of my passport and I sent it off with a slightly angry covering letter and other bits and pieces, but when I got home I was a complete wreck. I can’t go screaming and banging my head against a wall, that’s ridiculous and dangerous. I calmed myself down enough to get through my lessons, then later in the evening I saw my doctor. As luck would have it, it was Tuesday. This time he was joined by a younger assistant (a man). I told my doctor that I was struggling and I desperately need to come off my new antidepressant ASAP. He said once again that shipments of citalopram – the old stuff that I first took in 2001 – still aren’t getting here, as a result of the war in Ukraine. Este periculos (that’s dangerous), I said. Then I shouted the word: Periculos! Not to the doctor, not to the assistant, just randomly and very loudly into thin air. The assistant took my blood pressure and pulse – they were both above my normal level – then the doctor wrote me two prescriptions, one for citalopram and one for yet another supposedly similar antidepressant. The assistant said he only knew a few words of English. I thought about asking him if he wanted lessons, but I figured he wouldn’t want a teacher so obviously incapable of controlling himself. God, I felt like a horrible ugly monster.

When I got home I remembered that the FA Cup replay between Birmingham and Blackburn was about to start. Maybe watching that would make me feel better. But none of the channels carried it. Perhaps just as well, because it was a terrible atmosphere (only 7000 people showed up) and a terrible match which Blackburn won 1-0 after extra time. I might watch the Sheffield United – Wrexham replay next week, and that’ll probably be the end of my interest in football for a few more years.

I got up this morning at about six, in a state of absolute anguish. I sat on my office chair and crashed repeatedly into the bookcase and chest of drawers, then lay on the sofa, head in hands, then crawled back to bed. I dragged myself out of bed for good eventually.

Today I’ve steadied the ship somewhat. Most importantly, I’ve managed to get my old antidepressants back. It’s quite likely the new drugs aren’t to blame at all, but at least I can eliminate that. I called up the biggest pharmacy in town, and they said the old stuff was available. I’d never been there before; I went on the way back from the lesson with the four twins. The place had eight counters and people were queuing way out the door. It was all chaotic and a woman accused me of jumping the queue, but I got the pills, that’s what matters.

Last night and today, as the self-inflicted physical pain has gradually subsided, I’ve been wondering where I went wrong and what to do now. Should I have stayed in my previous place? It was sunnier, with that wonderful view, and in such a convenient location. The smaller size made it more manageable, and meant that I spent more time outside – that was surely a good thing. I’ve even been missing the simplicity of the single room in that guest house where I spent two months initially. I could cook simple meals in the kitchen down below; at the time I had everything I needed. Of course I couldn’t stay there. Does living alone mean I’m just doomed whatever I do? Should I take a week off lessons soon? A whole month? It’s not like anyone can sack me.

I’ve got a big day of lessons tomorrow, from 8:30 am to 9:30 pm. I hope I can manage.