September 2023 – plutoman.com

International travel - Language learning

Travel and language — part 2 of 3

September 30, 2023

by plutoman 0 Comments

I was already going to talk about this topic – Why is it that most people can’t write anymore? – but ten minutes ago I got this automated out-of-office email from a Barclays employee:

I am now out of the office untill 2/10/23 and your email may not be responded to.

I will endevour to response to your email upon my return

Bugger me. Even “your email may not be responded to”, while correct if you allow “may not” to include probabilities of 0%, sounds pretty terrible. I’ve had a few emails from this lady now. She’s one of the more helpful members of Barclays’ staff, but she doesn’t have the faintest scooby when it comes to the English language. Even activating spellcheck, which she does sometimes, doesn’t come close to hiding that fact. You see this crap every day and everywhere, even from – especially from – people who handle really important matters, such as your money. For instance, the woman who runs Dad’s gallery in Geraldine – bringing in a tidy 48% commission – sends him emails that are beyond abysmal. Being utterly shite at using your own language used to be at least some kind of barrier to attaining money, status and power. Not any more. Social media must be partly to blame, as it is for most things. Barf out a couple of lines that you don’t even look at, then press “send”. Voilà.

Many of the people I worked with at the insurance company in Wellington were dreadful writers. They had all the fancy phrases down pat – furthermore, in the interim, core deliverables – but they could never get the basics right and couldn’t properly express themselves. Then I moved to the council and the water company and something extraordinary happened. People there could write. I could logically see why. The sort of person who works with drainage systems, and maybe even enjoys going down the odd manhole occasionally, might also be the sort of person who reads Terry Pratchett. Or, for that matter, reads at all. A career-obsessed, KPI-focused middle manager at an insurance firm, maybe not so much.

I’m still watching those MIT linguistics lectures. Such bright minds, and such good humour too. If the students are any barometer of America’s future, the country should be in safe hands for the next couple of generations. If only that were the case. (Also, it’s Boston. I was lucky enough to spend over a week in that amazing city in 2015. When the professor makes references to the T – the city’s subway system – or other Bostonia, he brings back happy memories for me.)

I wasn’t going to mention Māori again, but I stumbled upon this photo I must have taken at Tekapo. The quality isn’t what it could be.

If you look closely you can see some Māori words. Glass is karāhe, recycle is hakurua, and rubbish is rāpihi. What’s going on here? Well, two of the three words (karāhe and rāpihi) have been taken from English and then transmogrified into something acceptable in Māori. By acceptable, I mean adhering to the rules of how Māori words are formed. Māori has only ten consonant sounds (h, k, m, n, ng, p, r, t, w and wh) and five vowel sounds (a, e, i, o and u), while English has way more than that (about 12 pure vowels, 7 or 8 diphthongs, and 24 or so consonants). Then there’s the question of phonotactics, which means what sounds can go where in a syllable or a word. For example, swift is a word in English. Twift and slift and swipt aren’t words, but they could be, because they follow the rules of how English sounds fit together. But srift and swifk can’t possibly be words, because even though you could pronounce them without too much difficulty, you just can’t have sr or fk together, except in compound words like classroom. Swifl can’t be a word either, because although the fl combination is fine in lots of places, is isn’t OK at the end of a word. English therefore has various restrictions, like all languages do, and that’s phonotactics. Māori has much stricter phonotactics than English – all clusters of two or more consonants are banned, and all words must end in a vowel – as well as a much more conservative inventory of sounds in the first place, and that all means that if you want to Māorify an English word, you’ll have to do a lot of messing around with it.

Take rubbish (rāpihi). It’s interesting they had to resort to an English loan word. Doesn’t Māori have a way of expressing “unwanted thing”? Whatever, that’s what they did. There are no voiced consonants in Māori (except the nasals and w), so b is replaced by p, its unvoiced counterpart. Sh is a sibilant – none of them in Māori – so that gets replaced by h. The short u vowel in English is converted to a, which isn’t far off, and made long probably because it’s stressed in English. Then the vowel i is added so as not to break the no-final-consonants rule. For glass (karāhe) the change is even more dramatic. Two extra vowels need to be added. The puzzling thing for me is why karāhe gets a final e while rāpihi gets a final i. Does the difference come from the fact that the h in karāhe originates from an English s, while the h in rāpihi comes from an English sh? (If they’d gone for the American English trash instead of the British rubbish, what would the Māori version have been? Tarāhi?) Then there are names. Rōpata (the Māori version of Robert) gets an a at the end. Wiremu (William) gets a u. Who decides this stuff? Finally there’s hakurua. Recycle. It looks like a real Māori word, unloaned from anywhere. But what does it actually mean? I’ve googled it and keep coming up blank. A mystery.

That was supposed to be the end of me talking about language, but it definitely isn’t I’m afraid.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Why am I so damn tired all the damn time?

September 25, 2023

by plutoman 0 Comments

It was amazing in New Zealand. I’d wake up after a good night’s sleep (or even after a less than stellar night’s sleep) and feel refreshed. Now I’m back in Romania and I’m constantly tired. Yesterday I had to apologise for yawning in a lesson. I’ve mentioned this and two people have given the polluted city air as a reason. Could it also be the warm weather here? (Yesterday we broke 30.) What about the screen time? Or maybe it’s all the talking I have to do in my job? But back in 2018, say, I had busy work weeks one after another – often having to yap away for hours on end – and didn’t feel nearly as tired as I do now. Perhaps I was still energised by the relative newness and excitement of my lifestyle change. This fatigue seems to have coincided with my move to this apartment 16 months ago, so maybe it’s something about being here. Though my sinus problem doesn’t help, I can’t really blame that because it didn’t exactly go away in NZ where I felt much less tired.

On Friday I took a look at a car – a 19-year-old Dacia – just off Piața Bălcescu. It was just after lunchtime and the square was chocka. That made up my mind for me. There’s no way I could handle the stress of a car right now. For getting around the city, a car would be more of a burden than anything – and just think of all the added bureaucracy – so I’m going to wait until March before looking again. I should be pursuing two wheels rather than four; my latest old city bike has just about had it. The uneven roads and paths in Timișoara require something more robust, and it is slightly ludicrous that my main mode of transport – the thing I rely heavily on – dates from when I was in primary school.

Tennis. I was back on the court this weekend for two sessions of singles against my usual opponent. When you’re fatigued, singles will make you feel horribly exposed. Yesterday, something wasn’t right with the guy at the other end, and I led 6-0 6-2 2-2 when our time ran out, tiredness and all. Tonight though was an entirely different matter. I won two close games to start, then I lost seven games out of eight as he hit a deep purple patch that left me floundering despite not even playing that badly. From 3-6 0-1 he went off the boil just enough, and I came back to win the second set 6-2, at which point the heavens opened.

Lessons have been interesting. Many of my students have looked at my photos from NZ and expressed disappointment at the lack of pythons and crocodiles and spiders as big as your hand. A parrot? Telling them it can rip your wiper blades off does little to impress them. There’s also been a general sense of bafflement at the whole snow thing. Most Romanians simply don’t get that there’s another side of the world where seasons are reversed. One student asked, “Are they aware that we have Christmas in winter?” Oh yes, and most of their Christmas cards even depict winter scenes. That made him even more confused. “What about daylight savings?” Yep. I resisted the temptation to talk about Australia’s time zones that include half-hour offsets and some-do-some-don’t daylight savings.

Yesterday I worked with the top-2%-ers in Dumbrăvița. First I had two hours of maths with Matei who spent time with a Spanish family in Toledo over the summer, just like I did in France at a similar age. His family now have a conservatory which they’ve filled with exotic plants. Matei has got himself a record player and he played a few bars of Kanye West for me. I’d like a record player too (they call it a pick-up here), though certainly not to play even one bar of Kanye West. After Matei, I had two hours with Octavian who spent seven weeks combined in the UK and America (his pronunciation hadn’t improved as much as I’d hoped), then my first one-hour session with his six-year-old sister who knew more than I bargained for.

Language learning - New Zealand

Travel and language — part 1 of 3

September 23, 2023

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’ve been watching – with a tinge of sadness – a series of lectures from an MIT linguistics course, which are available on YouTube. I say a tinge of sadness because 25 years ago it could have been me attending those lectures, if not at MIT then somewhere, but alas that’s not the path I went down. Now I know enough bits and bobs about linguistics to sound semi-knowledgeable in my lessons, but there’s so much I don’t know, having never formally studied it. At one point the impressively bearded professor apologises for being old: “You can tell I was born last century.” He taught the course last year, so I suppose all his students, or almost all of them, really were born this century. Yeesh. You can tell he’s in love with the subject in all its guises, and he can actually speak several relatively obscure languages. He interacts very well with the students, who are clearly much smarter than our bunch in Birmingham a quarter-century ago.

Long-haul travel, and spending a whole month in another country, gives you an almighty hit of linguistic phenomena. Ten years ago on my old blog, I wrote quite extensively about Kiwi pronunciation. I’m happy to report that all the traits I mentioned are still present, some of them in an even more exaggerated form. John Key’s “shtrong and stable” is now quite common; for people with this tendency, it affects words containing either of the strings /str/ or /stj/, for instance shtreet, shtupid, shtew, Aushtralia, or ashtute. If you quit smoking but then relapse, you might say that you’ve gone ashtray. I also noticed that a divide – young versus old, city versus country, sophisticated versus somewhat less cultivated – has opened up in the way Kiwis pronounce certain words, mostly those ending in the /ri/ combination.

How many syllables do these words have for you?

battery
broccoli
mandatory
necessary
pottery

For me they have 2, 3, 3, 4 and 3, respectively. But I betcha a hyper-online (and perhaps slightly woke, though I hate that term) 22-year-old student might want to replace his or her (or their?!) laptop bad-der-y, where I’d replace my batch-ree.

But the biggest linguistic phenomenon by far affecting New Zealand is the rise of Māori. If I went back there to live, I’d need to enrol on a Māori course toot-sweet, because my pronunciation would be hopelessly dated. (Dated is a word my parents love to use when browsing House & Garden.) Māori seems simple – it has a small inventory of only five vowel and ten consonant sounds – but what’s going on with combinations like ea or oa, as in Aotearoa? What do they morph into exactly, and why? (Those particular digraphs are a distinctive feature of Romanian, by the way.) Then what about au? Why is it Lake Toe-paw all of a sudden? I wonder if some of these “new” sounds are the result of phonetic changes – a vowel shift, if you will – just like what has happened with the consonant wh. The wh, as far as I can tell, is spelt that way because it was actually pronounced like the wh in wheat when it was first transcribed, but since then it has turned into an f sound. (Interestingly, the English wh has, at the same time, turned into a simple w sound for most speakers, though in some places like Scotland the old sound still proliferates. Mum’s mother used the old wh in words like white, but Mum uses the simple w.)

The increased use of the Māori language rubs a lot of people – especially older people like my parents – up the wrong way. They do have a bit of a point. At times it can actually impede communication. Writing Keep Left in Māori is downright dangerous for foreign tourists. (That raises an interesting question. Did the Māori have the concept of left and right? Not all cultures and languages do. Some don’t have the concept of relative direction at all, and you’d have to say Keep East if east happened to be on the left in that instance.) Sometimes it’s just older people not liking change, and I perfectly understand that, but often it’s part of a more general anti-Māori sentiment, which again I understand, and is starting to create a very unhelpful us-versus-them in New Zealand society.

I’ve often wondered why someone hasn’t invented a nice efficient Māori syllabary, a bit like hiragana in Japanese, in which each symbol represents a syllable. (Maybe somebody has.) You’d need 55 symbols: one for each of the 50 consonant+vowel combinations, plus one for each of the five vowels on their own. That’s just over twice what the English alphabet has, and a handful more than hiragana itself has, so it should be doable. I also think it would be quite cool. You could still use macrons (horizontal bars) to show long vowels, as you (increasingly) see in the standard Roman-alphabet version of Māori. Here’s my attempt at a start:

My choice of more angular shapes for ri and especially ki is deliberate. The i sound is a close vowel, and feels more angular than a, an open vowel.

Next time I’ll talk about some of the language phenomena I saw on the way to and from New Zealand, rather than when I was there.

Family - Life :) - New Zealand

More from my aunt, and a rocky time in Geraldine

September 20, 2023

by plutoman 0 Comments

A beautiful autumn day here, though the forecast 28 degrees is in fact a degree less than Mum and Dad’s unseasonably warm Wednesday. This afternoon I’ve got my appointment with the ENT specialist. Maybe he can crack the problem of my sinuses – so far nobody else has. I must remember to bring all my scans and reports and what have you. I’m over my cold now, so that’s something. Last night I saw the doctor who told me who to see to get the cyst removed from my back.

A pretty hefty earthquake shook Geraldine this morning (NZ time). It was a long, rolling shake that measured 6.0. My parents didn’t feel a thing because they were in a car. It was funny to see Geraldine plastered all over the front page of Stuff.

My aunt is going to get a course of chemo that (in my cousin’s words) won’t be too invasive and might give her another few months. In hospital she’s been on morphine and antibiotics for her crippling pain caused by an infection. She’s also gone cold turkey on booze and cigarettes – that can’t have been much fun. So Dad has booked a trip over there, leaving on 9th October and coming back five weeks later. I might even make a visit. Thankfully his itinerary won’t be as onerous as mine – no clapped-out trains, and instead a 16-hour leg (!) on an Emirates A380. My fun and games in the mysterious depths of Hungary would just about kill him. My cousin has been very good to my aunt while she’s been in hospital, but she’s never had much time for him – her interest ended when he was shipped off to boarding school at the age of eight (!?).

Here’s an interesting YouTube video by a bloke called Noel Philips, who quit his IT job to travel and make videos about travelling, mostly on unusual routes and older planes. He even has a private pilot’s licence. In this video, he was daring enough to fly on an Indonesian airline with a one-star safety rating, out of a maximum of seven. Fascinating to watch – the airports reminded me of travelling through Indonesia as a kid.

I still don’t really know what’s happening with my central heating.

Update: I saw the ENT guy. When I entered his clinic, I saw my name hand-written in his big book, with the number 969 alongside it. He was happy to do everything in English. Normally I hate that, but when it’s my health I’m fine with it. His English was very good, apart from the time he pushed probes up both my nostrils and told me it wasn’t painy. Sorry, but it bloody is painy. He said that surgery won’t do me any good, then asked me to take an allergy test (the last time I got tested for allergies was in 2017) before taking a spray twice a day and a pill only in the evening. I’ll have to take these drugs for two months, then after seeing him again I might end up taking them for life. So that’s where I am with that.

Family

Sad news about my aunt

September 17, 2023

by plutoman 0 Comments

Dad’s sister had been in hospital for over a week, undergoing tests. There had been no news, mainly because her family is so dysfunctional. But last night my brother got in touch with our cousin, and he told me that they’d taken a bone marrow sample and the results had come back: she has leukaemia. Blood cancer. She’s in extreme pain and distress. They tried to move her to another (bigger) hospital, but she refused. A basic search tells me that the prognosis of somebody of her age with leukaemia is terrible. After a steady decline over the last few years, in which time she’s become a recluse, this looks like being the end of the line. She’ll be 76 at the end of October. It’s all so very sad. I spoke to Dad this morning; he can’t even face the prospect of making a trip over.

This morning I saw my nephew, bright as ever, on a WhatsApp call with my brother, his age no longer a nothing but a something. He’s got more and bigger and shinier toys than anything we ever had. His latest is an all-singing, all-dancing, garage-and-car-wash set.

Family - Life :)

Landed with a bump

September 16, 2023

by plutoman 0 Comments

On Tuesday, at about the time I met the English lady Dorothy in town, I realised I’d picked up something on the plane. Over 300 people crammed in a tube – it’s not that big a surprise. For the last three days I’ve had a mild fever, a sore throat, and very little energy. And it had all started so well, too. Early-morning visits to the market, meeting my neighbours upstairs, and resuming lessons with the twins who were bronzed after their beach holiday in Greece. It was all rather nice. (That’s the single pair of twins. I might not see the four twins again – their mother said she wants them to concentrate on Romanian and maths.)

This illness wouldn’t be so bad if (a) I didn’t have the constant sinus business too, and (b) I didn’t have life admin chucked at me. More Barclays stuff for a start. I’d given them my New Zealand account to pay the funds into, but the lady on the phone said that living in Romania (not NZ) had caused their system to spit the dummy and send me a cheque instead. I never received this cheque, and at any rate it’s five years since you could cash foreign cheques in Romania. On Wednesday I opened an account denominated in pounds at my Romanian bank so I could receive the funds here without getting hit for who knows what fees, then sent Barclays my latest payment instructions. With the way I was feeling, this was a major effort. Now I’ve got the central heating to deal with. First thing this morning, Viorica (who lives on the top floor) went with me to the energy provider, to help me set up a contract with them. She must sense my cluelessness (and lack of desire to get a clue) about Romania’s bureaucratic systems; she’s been very helpful. I told her I was operating on an even slower mode than usual. At least I figured out how to make the 8am appointment on their automated system. The office had red furniture and red notices everywhere, there were red digits to tell us our position in the queue (at the front, thankfully), and the young woman at the desk wore a red top and had her nails painted red. I got the contract set up, but there are several more hoops to jump through. The next step might be getting the meters or ceasuri (literally ‘clocks’) installed, but it could easily be something else.

Today is my nephew’s first birthday. Now that has gone by quickly. They’re putting on a party for him tomorrow. Let’s hope they give him a celebration he’ll never forget. I’ll call my brother tonight. As for my aunt, her one-night stay in hospital has turned into six or seven and nobody knows what’s going on.

International travel

The trip back — part 2 of 2

September 10, 2023

by plutoman 0 Comments

I Skyped Mum and Dad from Singapore, still less than half-way to my destination. Then my mind turned to food. I was peckish and had seven more hours to kill at the airport, plus I wanted something for when I got to Budapest because it was anyone’s guess how long it would take to get home from there. Luckily Singapore has food courts on the upper level. These consist of about a dozen stalls, mostly serving Asian food. To order your chosen dish, you select a stall and meal on a central machine and wave some plastic. The machine then spits out a ticket with a number. When your number pops up on a screen, you go to the stall to collect your meal. I had a beef brisket soup which I greatly enjoyed. At $12 in the local currency (NZ$15 or £7) it was far from the rip-off I’m used to at airports. Next to the stalls was a 7-Eleven supermarket, and a $10 note – the only local cash I had – was enough to pay for some sandwiches and cakes and a bottle of ice coffee. Just around the corner was the butterfly garden, a welcome change from duty-free stores and pulsating video screens. At 32 degrees, it was hot out there, and I was glad I didn’t think of venturing into the city. Besides, I was hopelessly tired. My flight to Istanbul was still far in the future – beyond the reach of the departure boards – but I figured out that Terminal 1 was where I needed to be. I took the Skytrain from the vastness of Terminal 3, and lay out on several chairs in the surprisingly quiet Terminal 1 until it was time to board. If you have a long wait between flights, Singapore is easily preferable to the heaving nightmare that, say, Heathrow would be.

The third leg of my journey took eleven hours. I don’t remember much of it – that’s a good sign. I grabbed occasional 15-minute naps and watched (and enjoyed) Walk the Line, the documentary about Johnny Cash. At Istanbul I had a tightish turnaround, and unlike on my outward journey, I had to go through security. (There’s no rhyme or reason to whether or how security screening takes place, or whether you have to remove your shoes or dispose of your empty drink bottles.) Once again my departure gate was at the end of the terminal and my flight was flashing red on the board by the time I got there. I shouldn’t have panicked; with my baggage in the hold, they won’t simply take off without me.

My boarding pass for my fourth and final leg showed 5B – B for bugger. With letters later in the alphabet you’re never quite sure where you’ll be sitting – it depends on the seat configuration of the aircraft – but when you see B, you’re pretty much certain to be sitting between two other people. Not that it mattered on this flight, a short hop, or so I thought. Seats 5A and 5C – just behind the small business class compartment – were occupied by two Romanian women of about 30 who were having a good old chinwag. I plonked myself in between them and they continued to chat. “Do you know each other?” I asked in Romanian. Yes. “Would you like to sit together?” No. We’re happy like this. Er, but maybe I’m not!? They carried on chatting and even held hands across me. Much to my relief, I saw that the man in 5F had two empty seats next to him, so I sat in 5D, and before long we landed in Budapest. No next flight for me anymore. Phew!

There was just the small matter of getting home. I’d arranged what I thought was a bus a few days earlier. I was able to communicate with the driver using the airport wi-fi, and he picked me up shortly after I’d got my suitcase off the carousel. It turned out to be a car, and at this point I was the only passenger. He sped off along the motorway. At Cenad, just over the border in Romania, he picked up a young Italian guy. The Romanian part of the drive was picturesque. The driver wasn’t a great observer of the two-second rule and please don’t overtake here, but at least that meant I got home quickly. He dropped the Italian guy off in the middle of Timișoara, at a cost of 100 lei, then dropped me off at my door – the trip set me back 200. It was quarter to two in the afternoon when I got home – a 3½-hour trip. If I’d taken the train – a slightly cheaper option – it would have been four or five o’clock, and I’d have needed a taxi or a tram at this end. Avoiding all that hassle was well worth it.

So now I’m back. I’ve had a letter from Barclays – a real human wrote it – saying that they sent me a cheque back in June that I’ve never received. I haven’t properly digested the letter; I’ll need to call them tomorrow. I’ve slept quite well, but I expect I’ll have a hard time not drifting off early this evening. I’ve made two trips to the supermarket and this morning I walked to the market, passing the small bars – birturi, the man on the yellow tricycle, and the graffiti spelling out Panda and (in English) Don’t grow up – it’s a trap. It’s about 30 degrees and it’s forecast to be like this for another three days. My first lessons are tomorrow.

International travel - Tennis

The trip back — part 1 of 2

September 10, 2023

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’m back, groggy but just about in one piece.

On Friday we were almost out the door when the man who owned my parents’ property in the nineties decided to drop in. It was the first time they’d met this British-born chap who liked to talk, mainly about the work he’d done on the house. He was happy somebody had bought it – its fate otherwise would probably have been demolition and three townhouses plonked on the section. Despite the delay – over half an hour – we set off to the airport in plenty of time. The fish and chip shop at Rakaia had closed down, but crisis was averted when I saw “CHIPS” through the window of a café-type place in Dunsandel. We had very good fish and chips – my last for some time – for just $9 each. We then got lost on the way to my Jucy Snooze place near the airport. I half-hoped we’d never find it and I could somehow stay in New Zealand, but no such luck. Jucy Snooze ($43 a night) consists of “pods” of eight enclosed bunk beds. After checking in on a touch screen, I walked past a pod full of teenagers – Aussies probably – swigging beer from cans. Please don’t let there be seven of them in my pod. When I found my pod – this was 8pm – it was empty. I heaved my heavy suitcase into an upper locker and did the horrible bit – saying goodbye to Mum and Dad. The bed was comfortable. In fact the whole set-up worked very well. There’s a common room with a kitchen and a pool table which was still in use at 3:30 am, after I’d managed to get some kip.

The old Rakaia post office, shortly before sunset

The airport was a ten-minute walk from Jucy Snooze. My flight plan was beyond the capabilities of the machines, so two experienced and very helpful humans executed the complicated check-in procedure using a black screen that reminded me of those old mainframes I used to make changes to insurance policies, back in a previous life. I had to prove that I lived in Romania and had the means to get there from Budapest. My suitcase was barely half the 30-kilo limit on the way out. Since then I’d added a painting Dad had done of Piața Traian in Timișoara, an old camera of my brother’s that must have been expensive, a pair of navy Doc Martens I bought in Birmingham in 2002, some more shoes, half a dozen books, and other assorted paperwork. Now I was over by 1.3 kg. They said they’d wave it through, but staff at other airports might not be so lenient, so I moved some books into my hand luggage and I was good to go. My flight was at 6am.

The flights to Melbourne and Singapore were uneventful. We flew over the centre of Melbourne – the brilliant Queen Victoria Market and so many places to play and watch sport. Not far from the centre was an enormous cemetery. On the second flight I started watching Everything Everywhere All at Once but gave up on it. To my surprise, I was able to watch live tennis. The end of Coco Gauff’s victory over Karolina Muchova was spectacular. After Gauff had already had five match points, the pair concocted a spellbinding 40-stroke rally which Gauff won to set up another match point. Both me and the guy next to me (he was watching on his screen) applauded. Gauff duly closed out the match on the next point. Then came the second semi-final between Madison Keys and Aryna Sabalenka. Keys led 6-0 5-3, but Sabalenka used her great power to produce the goods at just the right time and win by one of the weirdest scores you’ll ever see in tennis – 0-6, 7-6 (7-1), 7-6 (10-5). I felt sorry for Keys who even led 4-2 in the final set and didn’t do much wrong. Sabalenka, who will be a well-deserved world number one when the new rankings come out tomorrow, forgot that the final tie-break was first to ten and thought she’d won when she reached 7-3. Fancy that, you’re the world’s best player and you don’t know the rules. In a slight upset, Gauff came from a set down to beat Sabalenka in the final. I didn’t even think about watching that match – I was too busy sleeping.

Uncategorized

Just before I go…

September 7, 2023

by plutoman 0 Comments

On my last day in New Zealand, it’s currently 21 degrees. The perfect temperature, and not something I’d bargained for when I packed those winter woolies. I can hear the bellbirds in the garden. This morning I had a decent walk up the Downs with Dad. I’m very impressed by my parents’ fitness. They walk most days, and Mum also has her golf and occasionally her tennis. In Geraldine you’re not restricted to walking on the flat, and they take advantage of the undulations to get their heart rate up. On our way back we bumped it my cousin’s daughter, Kylie. I remember when she was born – probably in 1988, during the height of Kyliemania. She was a very good rugby player, and now she’s got four kids. I really am in the crawler lane, aren’t I?

Dad got an email this morning to say that his sister had been admitted to hospital. Just for one night I think, but the email was devoid of any hows and whys. Dad spoke to her at the weekend. She was depressed and hadn’t got out of bed or eaten proper food for ages. Dad tried to give her some advice to help her break the cycle, but he got “you don’t know what real depression is like” and there was nothing he could do.

A long, arduous journey awaits, including an eight-hour stay in Singapore – one of the better airports to spend eight hours in. I suffered very little from jet lag when I arrived in NZ – I doubt I’ll be so lucky when I get back to Romania.

My parents’ place today, with some building work in the background

Trees and plants were labelled on this narrow track

Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Photos

New Zealand: I like what I see

September 6, 2023

by plutoman 0 Comments

Sadly it’s all coming to an abrupt end. Dad’s got his Google gadget gizmo playing sixties music (they’ve turned the TV off – will wonders never cease?), and appropriately the deceptively complex Here Comes the Sun is playing as I write this. Spring has sprung; I’m seeing the daffodils coming out for the second time this year. Today it hit 19 degrees here, and at 1pm one of the famous nor’westers whipped through. Now we’ve got the Beach Boys – Surfin’ USA.

My brother called us this evening, just after we’d finished our chicken and vegetable pie. My nephew – nine days shy of his first birthday – was in a happy mood, as he is pretty much always. He’s a lovely little boy, it must be said. I’ve hardly ever seen him cry. He’s benefited hugely from all the time his parents have spent with him. My sister-in-law goes back to work soon – she’d rather not have to.

This afternoon Mum took me over to my aunt and uncle in Woodbury. It looks like they might pull the plug on their rhododendron nursery. I’m amazed they’ve kept it going for so long. We were there for two hours, most of which were taken up by gossip about various local no-hopers (quoting verbatim here) getting handouts they obviously don’t deserve. Before that, I got some life admin done involving phone calls to RaboBank (I had a high three-figure amount in an account that they’d closed) and the IRD, while Mum and Dad were getting haircuts and doing the laundry in Temuka, and sorting out a new kitchen in Washdyke. I also watched an incredible women’s doubles match at the US Open. At the end of a topsy-turvy third set, the American pairing of Taylor Townsend and Leylah Fernandez raced to a 7-2 lead in the first-to-ten tie-break before Gaby Dabrowski and Erin Routliffe won 10-8. I didn’t know at the time that Routliffe played for New Zealand. I also saw Sorana Cîrstea’s quarter-final with Karolina Muchova. The Czech had too much for the Romanian, who had done extremely well to get that far. There was one crazy game in the middle of the first set – it went ten deuces, and Cîrstea had nine break points – which could have sent the match on a different path had it gone the Romanian’s way.

Yesterday both Mum and I visited the IRD in Timaru. She’d been faffing around for many angst-ridden hours on the IRD site using her four-inch phone, and I also had a problem to resolve with non-resident tax, so I persuaded her to actually visit the office which is located just off the main street of Timaru and open 5½ hours a day, three days a week. Nowhere near enough. We arrived before it opened and were first in the queue. The two women we dealt with at the desk were very pleasant, although Mum was still effing and blinding because she had to pay provisional tax.

When we got back from Timaru I had a sudden urge to clear the cobwebs. Too much sitting around, either in a car, or worse, in my parents’ living room. So I took Dad’s rather good bike out and went all the way to the huts at Milford, 24 km away, and obviously all the way back. I’d packed a flask of tea. On those last few kilometres I was saddle-sore and ravenous. Mum was visibly concerned by the time I got back.

After a month in this neck of the woods, I like what I’ve seen. Could I move back here to live? Probably, yes, if I could somehow keep teaching and find a suitable place. It would need to be out of curtain-twitching range. As beautiful as Waikouaiti is, I’d find it hard to hide there. Dunedin would suit me I think, but could I afford it? These are things to consider in the medium term.

It’ll be a sad moment tomorrow as my parents drop me off at the Jucy Snooze place next to the airport where I’ll doss down for a few hours before my 6am flight – an early start to a long ordeal. Saying goodbye to Mum is the hardest. With Dad he’s still sort of there on the end of an email or a video chat. Without being able to hug Mum and smell her perfume – the same one she’s worn since I was a kid, at least – it’s really not the same.