Month: June 2023

Life :) - Music

Fade to grey

June 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I read an article by Adrian Chiles – I remember when he presented the business news on the BBC – about how everything is turning grey. “Why has the world been drained of colour?” he asks. The comments were almost unanimous in agreement with him. With the exception of undies and socks, I never buy actual new clothes from actual clothes shops, one because I want to save money, but two because I want to avoid all the drabness. And cars. When I looked at cars before giving up, I didn’t want a grey (or “silver”) one. It didn’t use to be like this. Go into the men’s section of H&M in 2003 and you’d find clothes with every combination of colours and patterns you could imagine. Go back another decade and mad dayglo ski jackets were all the rage among blokes whose idea of piste was something else. I really wanted one, but I was still a kid then – “you’re not having that” – and I ended up with something frustratingly tame, though probably still much brighter than what just-teenagers would wear today. One theory for the modern world being sapped of colour is all the in-your-face advertising and blinking screens we get at every turn; perhaps we all just want to dim the lights. Another theory, relating mostly to our homes, is that we’ve become so obsessed with viewing a home as an investment rather than a place to live that we don’t dare inject any colour it lest it affect its resale value.

Ten percent of fifty shades of grey – this afternoon

This morning I listened to the whole of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium double album. It took me back to early 2007 when I regularly put it on while studying for professional exams. (Music and study didn’t usually mix, but that was an exception for some reason.) I took those two exams – the latest in a long line – in April, then I fell out with my Japanese flatmate and I moved into a place by myself, and (with a couple of exceptions) I’ve lived alone ever since.

Mum and Dad just gave me a surprise Skype call at 11pm their time. It was 3 degrees there and soon to go negative. (I’ve got that to look forward to.) The call was all about their banking and power bill craziness. Their building work is now in full swing – Dad showed me a photo of the impressive long arm of the cement mixer truck.

We’re half-way through 2023 – Timișoara’s reign of supposedly being the cultural capital of Europe.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :)

You can’t win ’em all

June 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a longer walk than I planned this evening, making it to (and beyond) a cemetery I didn’t know existed. The cemetery is called Mătăsarilor; it’s on a street with the same name, which means “silk workers”. (There are a lot of streets in the city named after industries or workers, and there used to be even more before their names were changed to those of local figures.)

My hours are down as people start to go on holiday. I don’t mind that too much. I can work on the book I’ve neglected for months and brush up on my Romanian. Our last session on Tuesday was pretty good, although both Dorothy and I said that the game our teacher devised for us – guessing things you find in a city, based on clues – was a bit easy. The information about the imperfect tense was extremely useful though. Also on Tuesday, I had my first (and almost certainly last) lesson with a nine-year-old girl. Her elder brother has been coming since last autumn, but this week he was away on a camp, so his mother suggested his sister have a lesson with me instead. Fine. I chatted with the girl and tried to make her feel at ease, then gave her some sheets to colour in, as well as a few exercises where she had to count coloured stars and match farm animals. She smiled the whole time and did pretty well with all the exercises, so I thought the session had been a success. “Did you like it?” No. “You don’t want to come again, then?” No. “Was it boring?” Yes. But don’t worry, Mum does English with me sometimes too, and it’s boring with her as well. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

Dad turned 73 yesterday, and is now back to just one year behind Mum again – her birthday was two weeks earlier. I can’t get my head around them being that old. They certainly don’t seem it or feel it, even if all their stuff has been dragging them down in recent months. As I’ve said so many times on this blog, they’ve got to extricate themselves from their life admin mire, and that means selling their UK properties as a first step. At this point, who cares if it’s the “wrong time” to sell? If I’m still hearing about meter readings and property managers as they approach 80, my sympathy will start to wear thin. (Earlier this week they got an estimated monthly power bill of £3300 for one of their UK properties.)

Books - Life :) - Photos

Human nature, and some pictures

June 25, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I just put on Al-Jazeera to see what was going on with the rebellion in Russia, and didn’t imagine I’d see Tom McRae presenting. I remember him as the “Christchurch guy” on Paul Henry’s TV1 breakfast show in New Zealand; he later moved to TV3.

The Titanic sub which dominated the airwaves for a few days has given us another window on human nature. Hundreds die trying to reach Europe on boats, seemingly every week. Just ten days ago, as many as 500 perished on an overcrowded fishing boat as it sank while they tried to reach Italy from Libya. That tragedy did get international coverage, but not nearly as much as the Titan sub which had five people on board. The story of the submersible had everything to draw you in – the Titanic (it’s been the subject of some of my lessons, and who hasn’t seen the film?), rich businessmen (just like on the Titanic itself), and a race against time as their oxygen levels ran out, although as we know, that last factor was irrelevant. I was as guilty as anybody as I watched it all unfold. Then you had some people who thought, you had more money than sense, so it serves you right.

I’ve just started reading Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. It’s extremely funny; I’m amazed how well his humour of 134 years ago works today. On Thursday I finished The New Nomads by Felix Marquardt, a book I picked up at Luton on the way back. It’s an interesting book about the (mainly) positive sides of immigration. The two aspects I really like are that: (a) the author admits he used to be an arrogant dick and is now more humble – how many people actually do that? – and (b) he says that the ultra-connected jet-set elite who attend conferences in places like Davos do more harm than good. The only thing I didn’t like was that of all the great examples of immigrants who made positive differences to both their own lives and the countries they moved to, I don’t think one of them was over thirty.

Tennis got cancelled again today; it tipped it down late this afternoon. This evening the sun came out and I went for a walk by the lock. It was lovely down there. People were milling around in parks and in a bar that I didn’t even know existed. I see beauty – simple beauty, I suppose, everywhere in this place.

I’m feeling better now after the Barclays business. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to buy a car a few weeks ago; getting out on the open road and seeing more of this wonderful country would have been great.

Matei had gone to the loo when I took this picture this morning

The old tram on display in Piața Traian

If I remember rightly, these lilies were on Strada Garofiței, or Carnation Street

The sign means Bad dog, in the pre-1993 spelling, but which one?

The river by the lock this evening


Autism - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Real millennials

June 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a lesson with a 22-year-old university student who, when she ties her hair back, looks like Martina Hingis. She also has a part-time job in IT testing; she has ambitious plans for a career in that field. At the end of the session, she said she wanted to drop from two meetings a week with me to just one. I wonder how long before she plumps for zero. How ever hard I try, I find it hard to connect with her. I get a lot of people of around her age – the real millennials, those born around 2000 – and they’re the hardest to build a rapport with. Older adults are easier, as are kids, but with these real millennials we’re often transmitting on different wavebands. It doesn’t help that this particular student is very normal for someone of her age, and I’ve always found very normal people hard to relate to. (I’ve always thought that Normal People Scare Me, a 2006 documentary about autism, is one of the best titles of anything ever.)

My cousin had her eight-hour cancer removal operation on Wednesday. Apart from the extraordinary length of the procedure, I haven’t had any news about how it went.

Tomorrow my brother, his wife and their son are going on a one-week cruise. When I spoke to him on Tuesday he clearly didn’t want to go. (He wife wasn’t there.) When I asked him where he was going, he said he didn’t know. “How do you know it isn’t Somalia?” I asked. He had been to Somalia, or at least past it, on one of his army excursions or missions or whatever the right word is. I do know that at some point he’ll need to attend a black tie dinner. Not his thing at all, nor mine. His wife would dress the little one up in a black tie too, given the chance.

This week I’ve sent two letters to Barclays, first to the CEO, and then (changing the wording slightly) to their complaints team. Each letter ran to 2500 words, so it was a big effort. I’m glad to get that out of the way.

The biggest news story of the week has probably been the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible near the wreck of the Titanic, killing its five occupants. They were all super-wealthy men, aged from 19 – tragically, a boy really – to 77. Because it operated in international waters, the Titan could bypass all safety regulations. (It was controlled using a modified game console.) If you ponied up US$250,000 and signed a long waiver that mentioned death three times on the first page, you were good to go. This incident reminds me of conversations we had when I worked in life insurance. As well as administrative cost savings for larger policies, people who insured themselves for larger sums were wealthier and, on average, in a better state of health. We priced our policies accordingly: $1 million of life insurance did not cost five times what $200,000 did. However, when you got to really large amounts – say, $10 million – you were into the realms of Learjets and adventure tourism. Also, rich people often get into that position by taking risks that pay off. They’re risk seekers by nature.

It’s hot. A top temperature of 35 is forecast for today. I went to the market before my lesson with the real millennial, and that will be my only venture outside.

The UK

Making the most of the trip I didn’t want — part 2 of 2

June 21, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Monday I spoke to my parents, then made a trip to Cambridge where this time I had an appointment with Barclays. This was nerve-wracking for me. I noticed that the branch was about to reduce its hours by 20%; in a few years it probably won’t exist at all. (Up until two years ago, a St Ives branch also existed.) I was ushered into a small glass-walled office where I saw the same woman as on Friday. I told her that I had no more documents, despite my best efforts. “We’ll see what we can do.” Some time later, after talking to “management”, she gave me the OK. My power bill would suffice. I then filled in a form to get the funds paid into my New Zealand account. That was a huge relief, though she did say it could take me a ridiculous 12 weeks to receive the money (seriously, how?), and there was no hope of an interest payment or any compensation. My expectations had been lowered to a level where I didn’t care at that point. I did however express my disgust at the way I’d been treated by Barclays throughout the whole saga. The call centre staff weren’t too bad – they were just doing their rather awful jobs – but the organisation as a whole completely failed to help me. I could not talk to anybody at Barclays who dealt directly with account closures, and the whole time I was left guessing and wading through literally impossible bureaucratic treacle. The woman I saw at the Cambridge branch, while competent at the ins and outs of her jobs, showed no empathy whatsoever with what I’d been through. Tomorrow, while I have some time, I’ll write to the Barclays CEO and to the ombudsman. (Ombudsman. What a wonderful word.) This blog is a great help with that. I can just search “Barclays” and find the dates of my phone calls and pointless queuing to create an accurate litany of terrible experiences.

When I got back from Cambridge I dropped in on my family friends who were back from their traffic-jam-ridden trip to Southampton, and we went to Wetherspoons. This is a massive chain of pubs run by a famous (or infamous) Brexiter, even though all of us voted seven years ago (that long?!) to prevent that outcome. We plumped for Wetherspoons because of the price; they’re the cheapest option around. They save money by buying up kegs of beer in bulk just before their expiry date, knowing that they’ll still shift them. I had a steak and kidney pie, a beer, and a chocolate fudge cake, all for £15.

On Tuesday I had an evening flight back home, and met my university friend in London on the way to the airport. After dealing with a broken-down train and being told off for then boarding a train from a different company (why is it so complicated?), I met him at a bar at St Pancras. Surprisingly for me, the bar was almost empty. We had a chat about his girlfriend’s upcoming cancer treatment and his ongoing battle with the cladding on his apartment block and the other (unmotivated and uncooperative) owners. A double nightmare. He, and his girlfriend for that matter, have a great attitude to these kinds of setbacks, but they’re in for a very trying second half of the year regardless. We ambled down the river, past Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace, the very centre of London which I saw often as a kid and seemed magical back then. (Dad had galleries and exhibitions in London, so made regular trips there.) We parted ways close to Victoria Station where I got the coach to Luton Airport. I had plenty of time to kill there before my flight. I arrived home at 2:30 in the morning and was relieved not to have any lessons until the afternoon.

The weather in the UK was extraordinarily warm when I was there – 30 degrees every day – and without a hint of rain. While I was away I got phone alerts warning of torrential storms in and around Timiș. People thought it was funny that by visiting Britain I got away from British weather.

The UK

Making the most of the trip I didn’t want — part 1 of 2

June 21, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

The sweet aroma of tei – lime – is now permeating the whole city, as it always does in June. It’s now 46 days until I really go away – this summer will be a short one for me.

As for my mini-trip to England, it wasn’t much of a holiday. I’d been struggling with sleep all week, and then on Friday I had to be up just after four to catch the plane. When I called the taxi at that ungodly hour, it was here in under a minute. The flight to Luton was as about as fine as it can be when you’ve hardly slept a wink. I took two comfortable buses to Cambridge and I was happy that they took a while. I arrived in Cambridge just before midday, and my first stop was – ugh – Barclays. The lady at Barclays didn’t accept my Romanian power bill as proof of address, so she asked me to provide a Romanian bank statement with my address at the top. Slight snag: my bank statement didn’t show that information. Oh god, what do I do now?

I took the guided bus to St Ives. The small market was on, and in a very British conversation, two stallholders were discussing the amount of jelly they liked in their pork pies. Up to the flat. Cup of tea time. Alas, no water. My brother had turned it off. I scrabbled around and eventually found the tap. Phew. A cup of tea and then off to the library. I needed online access to my Romanian bank, but I couldn’t receive text messages. After an enormous amount of faff, and two separate payments, I had roaming access. Whatever I did though, I couldn’t find anything on my online bank account that gave proof or even the merest inkling of my address. My only option was to phone my bank and hope they could email me something. Phone calls to Romania didn’t work, so I used Skype. I was on hold for ages but got through to a woman who said that, yes, they could email me something. After complimenting me on my Romanian she said she’d need to put me through to a colleague. While I was on hold for a second time, my Skype credit ran out, and after two hours in the library I left, defeated.

I went over to my parents’ friends’ place. They were working in the garden. He had improved since his I saw him last summer following his near-death experience, though he was still underweight. She was now quite frail. They let me use their laptop, and on my third Skype call (I got disconnected after 25 minutes on both my first two attempts), I got through to the bank. Yes, we can send you something, but it won’t be a statement as such, and anyway you won’t get it until you’re back in Romania. Fantastic. (Unlike the UK, where it’s a legal requirement for bank statements to show addresses, in Romania it’s a legal requirement for them not to show addresses. I was in something akin to a Catch-22 situation.) I didn’t want to outstay my welcome with my parents’ friends because they were heading down to Southampton the next morning for a surprise family birthday party.

That evening, and most of the next day, I felt shattered and didn’t want to do anything. The sinus pain wasn’t helping. I read and tried my best to complete a puzzle book that Mum had started in 2017. I could see that Mum had struggled to fill in the names of celebrities, and I was no better on that score. In the afternoon I forced myself to cycle to my aunt’s place in Earith, six miles away. I knocked on her door. No answer. The back entrance was unlocked, and I tapped on the window. My overweight, hobbling aunt appeared in a pink dressing gown. This was 3pm. As usual, she was aware of what was happening in the world but showed little interest in other people’s lives. She did however give me a beer while she smoked and drank, and then gave me a pizza to take home.

On Sunday I went for a longish bike ride to the Godmanchester nature reserve, and otherwise just read and hung around St Ives; the area around the river where I grew up, and away from the housing estate to the north, is very nice indeed. My brother would like to move back there, to the place where he grew up, and I could see why. I recently read an article about the other St Ives, the more famous tourist hotspot in Cornwall whose numbers swell every summer, and someone left a comment saying that people would have a better time in the less renowned (but just as interesting) historic Cambridgeshire town.

Life :) - Maths teaching - Music - New Zealand - Photos

More sad news, and some happier traditions

June 18, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a marathon – 81-minute – Skype call with my parents.

We spent the first part of our call discussing the latest shocking news, that my Wellington-based cousin has cancer in her jaw. My parents had noticed something was up when they met her at their tragically young relative’s funeral in late April, but never imagined it was cancer. Googling “jaw cancer” makes for sobering reading. Jaw cancer is rare and doesn’t exist per se; it nearly always starts somewhere else in the mouth and spreads to the jaw, meaning it’s usually in an advanced stage. The prognosis can’t be good. On Wednesday she’ll have an operation to remove flesh from her jaw and replace it, probably from her arm. I must send my cousin a message, but what do you say?

A good half-hour of our chat was spent discussing life admin. It’s making my parents’ lives a misery. They must get rid of both their flats in the UK. They must move to somewhere far simpler as soon as the building work on their current place is finished. They must do things that are financially sub-optimal, just to simplify their lives. Seeing them buckle under the weight of all this crap is upsetting for me, especially at a time when I’ve been overwhelmed by it all myself.

Yesterday I had my pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița. When I turned up for the maths lesson, Matei’s father told me that the British school is hiring a maths teacher. I very much doubt I’d get the job anyway because I have no experience of teaching in a school, but if I did I’d have to Get Involved and coach football and heaven knows what else, and um, yeah, I’d have nice long holidays but no thanks.

After my lessons we were supposed to have the latest edition of the English Conversation Club, this time at my place, but just about everybody was away. Sanda, who ran the club in its previous incarnation, showed up at five. We chatted about wedding traditions and the word “venue”, and I gave her a Kiwi vocab matching game which she was somehow fascinated by. Then at 6:20 another woman, Ramona, turned up. She had lived some time in the US, and spoke English pretty well. At one point we discussed silent-b words: “subtle”, “debt”, “doubt”, and words ending in -mb such as “bomb” and “lamb”. Ramona told me, and I get this a lot, that “You don’t pronounce the b in doubt because you’re British. Sorry, but I learned American English and in America they pronounce it.” No, no, no, no, no. I may be British, but I’m also a teacher and I’ve taken the time to learn about pronunciation in different English-speaking countries, I also watch American films occasionally, and believe me, they don’t.

At seven, Sanda said she was going to the open-air museum to see Festivalul Etniilor, where performers based in the Banat region, but with different ethnicities, sang and played and danced. After tennis was cancelled because of the waterlogged courts, I decided to join her. There were Germans (Swabians or șvabi), Ukrainians, Serbians, Aromanians and Gypsies (Roma). It was a riot of colour as all the performers were dressed in their traditional costumes. The event was free and completely non-commercialised, unlike the much more publicised Flight Festival also taking place this weekend. The star of the show, Damian Drăghici with his group Damian & Friends, came on later. In the past he’s been a supporting act for the likes of Joe Cocker and James Brown. Towards the end he played the nai (a traditional panflute); the last song of the evening was Ciocârlia (the Lark), a very traditional Romanian tune – I much preferred last night’s version to the one in the link. I really enjoyed the evening; well, at least I did after the start – I was starving but grabbed a large langoș from a kiosk quite a way from the stage.

The Gypsies

The blind pianist

The flower stalls at the market, still open at 10:30 last night

I made a summer pudding for yesterday’s club which barely happened, and still have most of it. (We also discussed the word “pudding”. When I was growing up, we never used “dessert”. “Pudding”, or simply “pud”, covered anything that you ate after your main meal. For me, “pudding” sounds about nine times tastier than “dessert”.) The main benefit of yesterday’s “event” was that I made me tidy up the kitchen, living room, and main bathroom.

I promise I’ll talk about my trip next time.

Life :) - The UK

Approved, finally!

June 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m back in Timișoara after my flying visit. I got home at 2:30 last night, but luckily I didn’t have any lessons until this afternoon. I called Mum this morning for her 74th birthday.

The big news: on Monday, Barclays approved my ID – eventually – so I should get my hands on that money after more than a year. That’s a massive weight off my mind. I’m not counting all my chickens yet as it could take twelve weeks to arrive (why?!?!), but after what Barclays have put me through it’s a jolly good start.

It was only a short trip, but even so it felt good to be back today. I visited the market on the way to my first lesson with the two sets of twins. They’d been recovering from chicken pox, and one of them was still in bed. They were fascinated by my British coins, mainly because they had the Queen on them; I happily donated a few. With the chicken pox and my market purchases (what do you call this?), there was plenty to talk about at the session went by quickly and easily. In the garden their mother was picking marigolds so she could make tea from them.

I’ll write a proper trip report, at the weekend probably.

Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

It’s snot much fun

June 6, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a whole heap more to say last time, but didn’t want to bombard my vast readership with too much in one go.

Last Tuesday I went back to the neurologist for another consultation. My left nostril is “always on” and causes me considerable discomfort. The pressure builds up and builds up – and so does the pain – until eventually I’m able to blow the thick clear, colourless gunk out. Sometimes it shoots out with such force that I don’t know where it’s gone. Occasionally I can’t blow it out, and then I’m in a whole world of hurt – the pain can then become excruciating. I normally wake up in the middle of the night and have to give my nose a good blow – I’ve yet to devise a way of doing this in my sleep. I told the neurologist all of this, and he said that unfortunately most of the ENT specialists in Timișoara are lacking. He gave me the number of one who might be reasonable, but said that ultimately I might need to see one in Bucharest, and that wouldn’t be cheap. He quoted something like £2000, which I’d happily pay to get rid of this once and for all.

On Thursday I decided to give up on online poker, having lost the desire to play. I played one final session, finishing with a fourth and a third in my last two tournaments, then cashed out. Annoyingly they creamed something like 10% off the top – it was never anything like that high when I lived in New Zealand – but the remainder (around £1100 or NZ£2200) will be useful. So will the extra time. I’ll have a bit more time over the summer to work on these books which I haven’t forgotten about.

This afternoon, to my great surprise, I got through to my aunt on the phone. She rarely picks it up. She sounded fine, but admitted that physically she was a mess. I plan to cycle over to her place on Saturday, just like I did last summer. When I told her about the Barclays business, she said I needed to make an appointment at the branch, so I did as she suggested. I’ll visit Barclays in Cambridge on Friday (the day I arrive), then I’ll still have an appointment up my sleeve on Monday if that doesn’t work out, although that will mean making a special trip to Cambridge. Tomorrow I’ll need to get my electricity bill translated, once again. The whole thing slipped into the realms of farce ages ago.

Teachers have been on strike for the last two weeks. They’ve chosen the end of the school year, when all the big exams are held, for maximum disruption. I sympathise with them; teachers’ salaries in Romania are derisory. But giving teachers more money will hardly begin to repair Romania’s creaking education system. This is the subject of a whole separate post. (I need to make a series of posts on how stuff works, or doesn’t, in Romania.)

I played a strange set of tennis last night. I partnered Ionuț, a man of around my age, against his daughter and Gabriela, a competitive woman also in her forties. So yes, it was boys against girls. The girls won the first eleven points; in the end we won the set 7-5 despite (if I calculated correctly) winning two fewer points than them overall.

Nearly 300 people died in a horrific train crash in India on Friday. To see the grieving families was extremely distressing. The Wikipedia page on Indian railway incidents shows a litany of disaster over decades, although (this awful incident notwithstanding) they have reduced in frequency.

I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. Workers in New Zealand had the day off for King’s birthday. Doesn’t that sound weird?

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Romania - Tennis

Back to nature

June 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Lots of biking this weekend. This morning I met Mark at his place in Dumbrăvița and we cycled to the (relatively) nearby village of Covaci, then into the countryside, through fields of wheat and barley and rapeseed (though that had been harvested). As I realised we were at the highest point of a câmpie, a plain basically, I was reminded of Haddenham, a large village in Cambridgeshire and perhaps the highest point in that very flat county. (The Blossoms and Bygones open day held every May in Haddenham was really quite wonderful. The vintage cars, the traction engines, seeing horses being shod, trips on horse-drawn carts, going up the church tower and water tower, and best of all, cheap cakes and biscuits. This event seemed to run out of steam around the turn of the century, and Wikipedia tells me that it finished for good in 2013.) We saw two foxes and a hare (hares can run at around twice the speed us pathetic humans can) as well as several storks, and the puddles (of which there were many) were teeming with froglets. And, as always in Romania, so many insects. My old city bike, as opposed to Mark’s newish hybrid bike, coped OK with the narrow dirt tracks. Even on the paved roads there was gloriously little traffic; it was great to be away from the noise of people and their machines. We came back via another pleasant village named Cerneteaz (pronounced “chair-net-yazz“, or close to that; click for a late-eighties flashback) where we had a packed lunch. Traditional Romanian music was playing; we both agreed that we quite liked it.

Made from mud and glass bottles, it’s supposed to be like this

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei, who had just got a D grade in a test at school. That disappointing result was little to do with him and a lot to do with his teacher who hadn’t really done her job properly. Her explanations had clearly been superficial, so no wonder when she dumped a demanding test on her pupils, they were mostly at sea. Matei showed me the unprofessional-looking test which had been cobbled together from at least four different past papers. The worst part was the marking scheme. Not every mark on every past paper is worth the same. One two-hour paper might carry 100 marks; another two-hour paper which has just as much stuff in it might only have 60 marks. If you’re going to just smoosh different papers together, you have to adjust the marks up and down accordingly. You’d think a maths teacher might have figured that out. After seeing Matei I met Mark at a restaurant called Astur, just off the main street of Dumbrăvița. Unusually there was a large, nicely mown beer-garden-style outdoor area. I was hungry so I had a carbonara and a beer as we sat in the full glare of the sun. (The tops of my legs certainly caught it.) As we were about to leave, my brother surprisingly called me and showed me my nephew, now closing in on nine months old and a different person from the previous time I’d seen him. He’d just uttered his first word: cat. He and the cat are best mates; they spend many hours in close proximity. It was a bit awkward to talk, so I called my brother back in the evening after tennis.

Mark and I soon parted ways, and I cycled to Giarmata Vii to look at yet another Dacia, this time a bright blue one from 2005. It was going for 1500 euros. It had one or two small spots of rust, and only had two weeks left on its ITP (MOT in the UK, or WOF in New Zealand). The owner took me for a ride around the village, and it seemed fine. I don’t know what to do. On Tuesday I looked at another car that seemed fine on the surface, but I found out that it had been in a crash that damaged both the right doors and the pillar and cost a lot to repair. At this rate, buying a car is looking as hard as buying a flat was. (I still have awful flashbacks to that meeting in the lawyer’s office on 5/5/22. My stress levels were off the scale.)

On Friday night I had my lesson with the guy who lives in London. He’d recently been to Alton Towers. I went there twice, in 1999 and 2003. The more famous rides, such as Nemesis, and Oblivion which was brand new in ’99, are still running. He’d also been back to Romania with his family to attend a wedding. They stayed in a hotel which he’d booked on booking.com. The hotel was dire and he duly left a one-star review. The hotel owners then tracked him down, found where he works in the UK, and gave his company a one-star review. What bastards. After he read articles about Boris Johnson and Philip Schofield, he said he’d read The Noonday Demon, a 2001 book about depression that I’d been meaning to get hold of. He said his wife suffers from depression but is denial of it. We had a very interesting conversation about the subject, in particular the number of people who are affected indirectly.

Tennis. I played last night for the first time in two weeks. I played with the teenage girl; her father and 88-year-old Domnul Sfâra were on the other side. We won 6-1, 7-6 (7-5). The local tradition of swapping the side you receive from with your partner every second game is weird and against the rules of tennis, and gets very confusing during a tie-break. Our first set point at 6-3 in the tie-break was the most incredible rally I’ve been involved in for some time; the fact that a near-nonagenarian was also involved made in even more remarkable.

Only four full days until I go away.