Month: December 2023

Family - Other sports - Photos

Avoiding stress in the last week of the year (with some photos)

December 29, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

After giving an online lesson between eight and nine this morning, I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român where I grabbed a coffee and Skyped my parents. They were amazed to see the cloudless blue sky in the background, a far cry from what they’ve been experiencing of late. They didn’t have much news and nor did I. They’ve been cracking on with painting, taking advantage of the poor weather. Then I pedalled back home.

Yesterday afternoon was also sunny, so I went for a walk beyond the lock at the end of the canalised Bega to the wilder non-man-made part that for some reason I hadn’t visited before. I’ll go back there again in the next few days. It’s nice to have a break from lessons and to have very little risk of needing to interact with people.

The darts. The post-Christmas phase started yesterday with a match between Scott Williams of England and Martin Schindler of Germany. Schindler looked like he would win with something to spare, but his finishing let him down badly towards the end, and Williams squeaked it out on a deciding tie-break. In his post-match interview, Williams said “two World Wars and one World Cup” which suggests that he may be lacking something between the ears. I mean, yeesh, I thought we were past that. The female presenter then apologised for any offence caused. I often find myself supporting the non-English players.

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching

A Christmas mishmash

December 27, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s 5:20 on Boxing Day evening; the sun set half an hour ago. Once I’m done with this blog post I’ll dip into the ample leftovers from yesterday.

On Saturday the 23rd I had my full complement of four lessons. After an online English lesson, I had to get to Dumbrăvița by bike – a struggle on such a blustery morning. I was glad that Matei was finally learning probability. We went through various exercises. One of them asked him to imagine picking two letters, one at a time without replacement, from the word SCIENCE. What’s the probability that the first letter you pick is S? One in seven, he happily answered. What’s the probability that the second letter is S? Now he wasn’t so sure. Doesn’t it depend on what the first letter was? Well yes, but at this stage we have no idea about that. I did my best to convince him that the probability was also one in seven, asking him to consider a lottery draw (the second ball is just as likely to be 17 as the first, isn’t it?) and resorting at one point to tree diagrams. Probability messes with people’s heads.

On Christmas Eve I made salată de boeuf, which despite its name is a chicken-based salad, with potatoes, celeriac, carrots, parsnips and gherkins added to the mix, bound together by mayonnaise. I put a sliced egg, some olives and slices of red pepper on the top. Then I made salam de biscuiți: a pound of simple biscuits broken by hand, to which I mixed in milk, melted butter, cocoa, raisins and rum essence. I rolled the mixture into two salami-like cylinders and put them in the fridge overnight.

Then in the evening I did something I hadn’t done for five years: attend a church service. Dorothy, a regular churchgoer, had invited me. To be polite I accepted, not knowing what I might be letting myself into. I cycled there and got my shoes all muddy as I found something to attach my bike to. I found the church, which didn’t look at all churchy, without too much trouble. Sfânta Treime – Holy Trinity. A Baptist church. I felt out of my comfort zone. Since Covid, I’ve found that any place where there are dozens of people, some of which I may have to interact with, will give me that feeling. It didn’t help that my muddy shoes came close to causing a scene. Mass kicked off at seven; I was amazed how young the congregation was. Many of them could speak English, and quite a few had good jobs in the IT field. At the front of the church, if it had a front, were a guitar, drums, and a viola. We sang several carols, many of which were the same tune as the English but with Romanian words. I must admit that the wordy Romanian version of Silent Night did little for me, though Away in a Manger was fine. (The Romanian for “manger” is iesle.) Some of the language was new to me; religious Romanian tends to be older and more Slavic-based than what you encounter day-to-day. In the middle of the service, the children acted out a short nativity play. There was a sermon in which the priest, dressed in civilian clothes, lost his thread on more than one occasion. The service took 1¾ hours. Afterwards there was lots of chitchat – I ended up talking to an Australian woman among others. Dorothy, who had gone to the church since 2001, was in charge of food and drink duties, as out came cozonac (a traditional Romanian cake which I’ve tried to make in the past) and non-alcoholic mulled wine. It was an interesting experience, but I was glad to finally get home at 10:15.

On Christmas morning I spoke to my parents who’d been over to my aunt and uncle’s place in Woodbury for dinner. I then called my aunt in England. I was happy to get through to her, but what do you say, exactly, when she’s stuck in a nursing home for what will almost certainly be her last Christmas? Have a good Christmas, I said. I think I’ll have had better, she replied. She got calls from Dad and my brother, and thankfully a visit from her son. I worried that she might spend the whole day alone.

I had a 45-minute walk to Dorothy’s place. The food and bottles of drink and (admittedly basic) presents were too much to carry on my bike. When I arrived, I was greeted by Dorothy and a 65-year-old man called Ionică who lives in the same apartment block and has recently retired from 44 years of working as a baker. A real job. He left school at 14, he said, and did military service which was compulsory back then. He had made enough apple tart for a dozen people or more, explaining that he either bakes in proper quantities or not at all. Ionică and I were tasked with decorating Dorothy’s (real) Christmas tree. When that was done, Gabriela (a woman who attends the same Baptist church as Dorothy) arrived. Although she has an 18-year-old son, she said she wasn’t yet born when Ionică moved into his flat in 1982. Her son didn’t come, apparently because he’d injured himself playing football. The food came out. I was slightly bemused by how gingerly Gabriela approached my salată de boeuf. What? A man cooking? A British man cooking? Romanian food? Despite being quite young and (you’d think) more open, that didn’t quite compute in her mind. In the end, she seemed to quite like it. Then came Dorothy’s roast dinner – chicken, stuffing, potatoes, parsnips, and so on. The British stuff, in other words. Finally we had dessert – the apple tart, my salam de biscuiți, and some Christmas pudding and mince pies that Dorothy had made. We had plenty of food left over. Ionică’s fact-free musings on mental health were interesting, shall we say. “I don’t take any pills,” he said with an inordinate level of pride. Lucky you. “Depression isn’t real. You shouldn’t have time to be depressed.” It’s all a lot more complicated than that, I’m afraid, I said. I’m glad I went no further. I found Ionică to be a very pleasant chap, but on that issue he was badly misinformed. Hardly surprising, because he comes from a time and place where things were simpler. Not easier certainly, but simpler. Probably the best thing about Christmas Day was how much Romanian I spoke. Pretty much all conversation was conducted in Romanian; a few more days like that and I might get reasonably good at it.

When I got home I spoke to my brother who showed me his son, dressed up in a Father Christmas costume. He has an outfit for every occasion, it seems. He’s just started walking and is a happy chappy whenever I see him. I’ve made up my mind to visit the UK for Easter, so it won’t be too long before I see him in the flesh.

Today I’ve finally got round to finishing George Borrow’s Wild Wales, including the interesting bit at the end on the Welsh language. We’re getting warm weather for the time of year, and tomorrow I’ll take advantage of that by going for a bike ride.

Language learning - Life :) - Other sports

Strange games

December 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night I met Mark at the Christmas market. It wasn’t as busy as we expected. Whether it was the prices or the too-loud music or something else, we couldn’t tell. Mark wanted to buy his girlfriend a present, so we visited one of the souvenir shops. An ie – a traditional tunic, embroidered in red and black – caught his eye. It was 550 lei (nearly £100 or NZ$200), so not cheap. Unlike other cheaper versions made in India, this one was handmade in Romania. A ton of work. He got me to ask the sales assistant about washing and the like, and when he was satisfied he made the purchase. We had langoși (deep-fried flatbread) and mulled wine, and talked about how lucky we are to be living in a city as nice as Timișoara. You really can’t beat the three beautiful squares in the city centre, and while it isn’t quite as developed as somewhere like Cluj, that actually adds to the experience. I don’t think I could be me in a city that was all perfect and pristine.

In English, two-letter words are almost entirely restricted to function words: prepositions (at, by, in, of, on, to), conjunctions (as, if), pronouns (me, he, it, we, us), and forms of very common verbs (do, go, am, is). Two-letter content words are very thin on the ground: there’s only really ox and (if you’re American) ax. In Romanian, that isn’t the case at all. Of the top of my head, as well as ie (plural ii), there’s iz (a whiff), ac (needle), șa (saddle), as (ace), in (linen), os (bone), om (person), ud (wet) and uz (use, noun), in addition to a whole bunch of function words. You could imagine a simple Romanian conversation in a shop consisting of only two-letter words.

Having a lighter work week has given me a chance to brush up my Romanian a bit. I’ve added hundreds of words to my Anki deck (a spaced repetition tool), and several cards that aren’t words as such but instructions: conjugate this or that verb, think of all the ways to say this or that, find four words that begin with zg-, and so on. On Monday in our Romanian lesson, the teacher gave us a story to read entitled Puiul, or the chick. It’s a sad story. Although I got the meaning, there were a number of new words for me, and they all went in the Anki deck. I need to start reading properly in Romanian again.

Today at the darts there was a match that went all the way to a sudden-death leg, but the big story so far has been 16-year-old Luke Littler who was out of this world in his first-round victory and won again in round two. He looks considerably older than 16 and has already developed a good paunch; he’s got “darts champion” written all over him. Watching not-so-young members of the crowd swaying and braying to a version of annoying nineties hit There’s No Limit made me think, some of these people must have kids. Imagine if I’d been “blessed” with a dad like that. Just imagine. Watching that, and visiting the mall today to grab some simple presents, made me consider the idea of some super-intelligent species watching humans in intrigue or perhaps horror at their behaviour, and making documentaries on them. “Once a year, they practically fall over each other to buy so-called knick-knacks made in China, without ever wondering why. Look at how this female extends her arm. You can see she is practised in the art.”

Update: Sheer madness in the darts tonight. Florian Hempel, the big German ex-handball goalkeeper, came back from the dead to beat seeded Dimitri van den Bergh. He hit a massive 151 checkout to keep himself alive, then he went ballistic. Two ten-dart legs back to back. Madman mode. It was quite something to witness it. And such great sportsmanship from his much smaller opponent after the match.

I had a strange dream last night about a fictitious sport played in Britain. I visited a centre where this traditional rough-and-tumble sport was played, and talked to a player. The name of the sport began with B and had another B in the middle. Something like burbank but not that. From there I went to a place nearby, where a version of cross-country lacrosse, that also seemed to have elements of golf, was played. I talked to a woman about the game.

Four lessons tomorrow, then a very barren patch until the second week of January. I won’t mind that.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

A room with a view of sorts

December 21, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments
Outside the window of my office this morning


I regularly posted pictures taken out of the window of my old flat, with the view of the park and the square. Not so much this place, though the sky – just before my 8am lesson on perhaps the second-shortest day of the year – made for an interesting shot.

Yesterday wasn’t such a great day. Way back in October 2022 I had a problem with the loo in the small bathroom which I hardly ever use. I went to the UK for a few days, and in that time the cistern ran non-stop. I shut off the valve when I got back, but in that time many thousands of gallons of water had gone through the system. I sent the block administrator my meter readings as I do every month. She misread the reading – 337, when it was actually 377 (an understandable error – how could I have possibly used that much water?) and charged me accordingly, “promising” to correct the mistake the following month. I got a plumber to fix the loo, but the fix lasted about two days. I thought my water bill did get rectified, but obviously not because yesterday the administrator sent me a message, finally asking for the extra money. What’s more, she’s billing me at the current rate (which has gone up in the last 14 months), not the old rate. I’ll pay the bill of course, but only if it’s calculated at the old rate. We’re talking a couple of hundred quid here, which is a massive pain but nothing I have (or had) any control over.

Mum and Dad only made a short stop in their showerless pit in Geraldine, and Skyped me from Hampden this morning. They’re still some way off fully recovered from their bout of Covid. Mum said she’d been sleeping most of the day. No harm in that. Dad used a word – pantechnicon – that I’d never heard before. It’s a British word for a big truck or van used for transporting furniture. I feel I should have known the word, being British and all, but the Pantechnicon company, which the name comes from, ceased trading in the seventies. More often than not these days I’m too old to know a word, not too young, so that made a change. In a previous chat with Dad, we got talking about Auckland for some reason. A city with so much wasted potential. What a disappointment the centre is (or was – maybe it’s magically improved since either of us visited). But there are nice parts, Dad said. I replied by saying, yes, but the nice parts are inhabited only by people who can afford stupidly expensive houses, making for a funny kind of nice that I wouldn’t want anything to do with even if I had that kind of money.

At this time of year I give my students a sheet of paper asking them to write down five new year’s resolutions, then to pick one to focus on. How will you go about achieving it? This afternoon my able 11-year-old student wrote “Make my parents feel proud of me” for one of his resolutions. “Don’t they feel proud of you?” I asked. He replied with a definite no, and that made me feel sad. He also wrote “Be nice”, which surprised me because he’s always seemed perfectly nice around me. He probably feels comfortable around me: a harmless hairy man wearing (today) an orange jumper with a multicoloured llama on it, rather than his classmates. He says all the bullying makes him morose when he gets home.

Earlier today I watched a YouTube video from a guy who goes around decaying British high streets. Once thriving, they’re now struggling up and down the country. Today he went to Slough, which rhymes with now. Not far from Slough are Eton and Windsor, England’s two most famous public schools, and many affluent towns, some of which even (much to their disgust) have an SL (for Slough) postcode. He opens his video by reading a few lines of John Betjeman’s poem that asks for “friendly bombs” to be dropped on the town. Betjeman wrote the poem in 1937, so the bombs didn’t have long to wait. I went through the poem a few years ago in a lesson with a woman who once spent a few months in Milton Keynes, whose reputation is no better than Slough’s.

More drama at the Darts. Matt Campbell, from Hamilton, Ontario, pulled off an upset by beating James Wade 3-2 – he was clearly the better player – and has made it to the post-Christmas stages. Prior to this tournament, he’d never won a match in four attempts. He’s flying back to Canada to spend Christmas with his family. Yesterday afternoon saw a whole host of upsets and wins for players outside the UK – all good for the game. Steve Beaton, someone I remember from my bigger darts-watching days in the nineties, got through his first match. Age is no barrier in this game.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Music - Other sports - Romania

The start of my collection, with nothing to play it on (yet)

December 19, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum and Dad called me again from Hampden yesterday. It was a relief to see a smile back on Mum’s dial. She’s always more relaxed down there, away from what is now (let’s not mince words) a shithole. Mum seems strangely magnetised to that dreadful place which they should stay away from as far as humanly possible until the building work is completed.

Yesterday Dorothy messaged me to say there was a vinyl and book sale on at Scârț. Sounded good. Sale wasn’t quite the right word though – some of the LPs were really quite pricey. I picked up five second-hand records for a total of 300 lei (just over NZ$100 or £50): Selling England By the Pound by Genesis, Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel, 18 by Chicago, Oxygène by Jean-Michel Jarre, and Leonard Cohen’s greatest hits album. That’s a start; I just need an actual record player now. Oh, and I bought one book for 5 lei: H. W. Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, in Romanian.

Four English lessons today. I started at 8am with my Bucharest-based online student – I found out today that he’s only two months older than me – who wanted help with adverbs of manner and uncountable nouns, among other things. I was in contact with the east of Romania again for my second session, this time with a 35-year-old woman. She said that if her six-year-old son (her only child) doesn’t get what he wants for Christmas, he’ll make his disappointment very obvious. He’s still very little, I said, but by twelve he’ll have learnt to hide it. You can’t always get what you want. She said, no, he won’t do that when he’s twelve because I’ll have told him to fight for what he wants. If he doesn’t like something, even a glass of juice, I want him to make his feelings clear. I still remember at seven or eight telling a family friend that I didn’t like some juice – probably something Ribena-like – and wouldn’t drink it. My grandmother told me I was already too big to act in that way, and I think she was right. Little Vlad (I don’t think that’s his name) has the pleasure of going to intensive after-school classes, which include nine hours of English lessons a week. Right Vlad, I’m going to make you work stupidly hard, and in return you get to be total dick. That’s the modern way, it seems. She earns well by working extremely hard at an investment bank, doing something that I would find utterly pointless.

In between my first two English sessions was the Romanian lesson, which was mostly spent discussing the downfall of Ceaușescu during an unseasonably warm few days in the lead-up to Christmas 1989. Our teacher was 20 at the time; I would have guessed several years younger. Yesterday the song Timișoara, produced by Pro-Musica in the wake of the Revolution, came on the local radio. It starts with a few bars from the Romanian national anthem and turns into something spine-tinglingly powerful. I recommend that you watch the video. My third English lesson was with a 17-year-old girl who came to my place. We went through some B2 Cambridge papers. I struggled to get her to write anything. In the end she wrote about her “happy place”, the mall, but didn’t even say much about that. My final lesson was the twins who live near Piața Verde. Because it was our last meeting of the year we had an extended Bananagrams session, which is always fun.

The World Championship darts. It’s back on again. Though the game is skin-deep compared to the multi-layered wonders of snooker, this tournament can be worth a watch because it’s the pinnacle of the sport. If you can get past the tedious football-style chants, you find an event filled with personality and drama. I’m a big fan of the format which, like in snooker, is a straight knockout and calls for matches of increasing length as the rounds progress. In the pre-Christmas phase, matches are best of five sets. The top players only need one win, and anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, to book their place in the post-turkey stages. Yesterday I saw a great game involving the Canadian player Matt Campbell. He was two sets up and had multiple opportunities to win the match in three. His Filipino opponent Lourence Ilagan took advantage of his reprieve to tie the match at 2-2, only for Campbell to storm through the fifth in some style. After Christmas the matches are best of seven, and in the new year they get longer still, culminating in a best-of-13-set final.
Update: I’ve just seen Man-Lok Leung of Hong Kong (he goes by Hugo) win an absolute belter of a game against Dutchman Gian van Veen, coming from two sets down – and missing no end of chances – to win 3-2 in a joyous finale. He fired a whopping eleven 180s and was a very popular winner. A Kiwi by the name of Haupai Puha – he lives in Wellington – is on next, but it’s bedtime for me.

Coronavirus - Family - Photos

The stress of it all

December 17, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents Skyped me this morning from the hotspot in Hampden. It was blowing a gale there; a purple and white flap-in-the-wind “Takeaways” sign was about to be unmoored until a member of staff came out to save it. Mum looked pissed off and washed out, and still far from fully recovered. Dad, who didn’t get Covid as badly as Mum, wore a more stoic expression. The line was much better than it normally is from there, and we spoke for 18 minutes. (Skype keeps a record.) On a call of that length there would normally be at least something to interrupt Mum’s gloom – a moment of levity – but this time there wasn’t the faintest ghost of a smile. I hate seeing them under so much stress, especially when so much of it (OK, maybe not the Covid bit) was avoidable. On the plus side they were away from home, that godforsaken place where building work is taking place at a glacial pace and right now they can’t even have a shower. They’d arrived in Moeraki a short time before, and I hope they spend a good few days down there. It would be great if they didn’t have to go back.

Dad and I talked about British Christmas. I’m so glad I decided not to make a trip to the UK for the festive season. For travelling and just being in the UK, it’s the most horrible time of the year, as Andy Williams might have sung 60 Christmases ago. If I had the prospect of a 6am flight and a bus trip from Luton and charades with my brother’s in-laws, my stomach would be churning right about now.

My lessons got cancelled this morning. Annoying for a bunch of reasons including lack of a bike ride, so I went for a walk. This place is big enough that I can still ramble down random streets and see things I haven’t clapped my eyes on before, such as this rustic-looking restaurant:

Coronavirus - Family - Films - Language teaching - Writing a book

Saying no

December 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I went over pronouns and possessive adjectives with my extroverted beginner student this evening (see below). When I asked him what should replace the question marks, he said “shim”, which I thought was funny because (a) it has a certain logic to it, and (b) who knows, maybe “shim” is actually a pronoun now. Edit: “shim” is already a word: it’s a thin sliver of material (wood, usually) that you wedge into a gap to ensure a nice tight fit.

In my previous session with him we talked about his extroversion. He has to be around people all the time, and the more the merrier. At 33 he’s never spent a whole day alone; the very idea filled him with dread. We’re at opposites ends of the spectrum, I said, and be thankful you’re at your end – life will treat you better.

I called up my tennis friend yesterday and told him that no, I wouldn’t be going to the New Year’s do because I had “other plans”. I said I felt bad for not going (which was true – they’re all lovely people) and I’d like to meet up for a drink at the usual place by the river (also true) in the near future. Saying no was really hard, but after doing it I realised it was still eight times easier than going to the bloody party would have been.

Next week things will start to wind down a bit. I’m going over to Dorothy’s for Christmas; there should be four of us there. Other than that, I’m looking forward to the time to myself – reading, watching the darts (I know), and working on the book I started a year ago but soon put to one side. I’ve got to finish it.

Last night I watched a film called The Whale, which Dad had recommended to me. The title is a reference to the main character, a morbidly obese online university professor, as well as to the novel Moby-Dick. I found the story gripping, even if it was harrowing a lot of the time. I certainly recommend it.

I’m about to call my parents. Last time we spoke, there was a chink of light at the end of the Covid tunnel, so let’s hope it wasn’t a false dawn. If I really wanted to wind Dad up, I could ask him what “shim” means.
Update: I gave them a call. They’re on the mend, but it’s been a really rough time for them. With all their ridiculous building work which will continue into the new year, their living quarters would be dangerously impractical even if they were in rude health.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching

Looking positive in Geraldine

December 12, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Now Dad’s got Covid too. He didn’t look too clever when I spoke to him this morning (my time). Mum had already gone to bed by then. He told me that Mum had forced herself to do painting and other ridiculous DIY that day, despite being sick as a dog herself, and had been angry with Dad for not doing the same. It beats me how Dad has lived with Mum for half a century without ever (as far as I know) telling her to eff off.

Last week I got an email from one of the other ex-owners in our Wellington apartment block. Ex. Thank our lucky stars that we’re ex. Still being embroiled in that misery (which about 650 owners in Wellington are) hardly bears thinking about. The email contained the words disproportionate, unfair and inequitable, which the whole situation absolutely is. (I spelt that out to letters I sent to Grant Robertson, my local MP, but they got passed on to the housing minister who was bloody hopeless.) The ball is starting to roll now, but up a depressingly steep hill.

Last week it was Boris Johnson’s turn in the hot seat at the Covid inquiry. He had aged, and at times he looked quite ill. The interesting bit came right at the beginning as some protesters were asked to leave during Johnson’s initial apology, and then Hugo Keith (the KC) pointed out that the UK had the second-worst mortality rate in Western Europe, behind Italy who were extraordinarily unlucky in the early stages and have a very high elderly population. “Look at the table!” the ex-PM protested. “Why are you excluding countries like Bulgaria [top of the European Covid death league overall] or Romania [fourth, I think]? When you include these vastly poorer countries full of anti-vax nutters, we’re slap-bang in the middle!” What a joke. After he’d got that apology out of the way, he spent two days justifying and normalising everything, including missing those five emergency Cobra meetings prior to mid-March. No, the toxicity in government at the time was not normal nor in any way desirable, and I seriously doubt it would have been like that had Theresa May or Gordon Brown or any of a number of former prime ministers had been in charge. This week the current PM Rishi Sunak, of Eat Out to Help Out fame, is stepping up to the plate.

Before my maths lesson yesterday, I met up with Mark at the beer factory. I had a pasta dish while he had a very Romanian combination: a slab of pork, some sausages, some mici, and mămăligă. I’ll go for that next time. Just one beer each; I’d soon be explaining algebraic fractions. We discussed various ongoings in his job which are making the experience rather less fun, and the possibility of my one day getting Romanian citizenship. Becoming actually Romanian and having triple nationality would be totally mad, wouldn’t it?

Talking of mad, someone else to put in the mad-but-good category is Luke Thompson, an English teacher based in Paris who has a long-running YouTube channel with over 850 episodes. I use his channel as a teaching tool for my more advanced students.

Five English lessons for me today after my initial Romanian one. Plenty of work, and with a welcome drop in my life admin, I’m not complaining.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Photos

Mum’s Covid and a spot of music

December 10, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Almost four years after everything went nuts, Mum’s got Covid. She’s been ill for five days – fever, sore throat, aching joints, the works, and different to anything she’s had before – but she only tested positive this morning. A bright second line in under a minute, she said. I’m glad it’s Covid – she looked wiped out when saw her on Friday on our Skype call, but now the mystery (as it was then) has been solved. Let’s hope she’s back to normal ASAP and Dad doesn’t now come down with something five times worse.

“Shine your light,” big bright yellow posters proclaimed at the beginning of the year, as Timișoara became European capital of culture. The slogan alluded to Timișoara being the first city in mainland Europe to get electric street lights, back in 1884. Since then we’ve mostly been kept in the dark. The whos and whats and whens and wheres of the events have been badly publicised, and visitor numbers have been well down on expectations. It’s done about as well as the Festival of Brexit. This weekend has been something of an exception though, with a well-signposted (by Romanian standards) closing ceremony in town. On Friday night I was lucky to finish lessons at 6:30, and I managed to drag Dorothy along to the free concert in Piața Unirii. I’m very glad I did. It kicked off at eight with Delia, a celebrity in Romania and an exponent of bubblegum pop. It was visually impressive – dry ice and streamers and fireworks – but the music did nothing for me and even less for Dorothy. Fifteen-odd songs that blurred into one another. We didn’t have much of a vantage point; the square was rammed with young people who then filed away the moment Delia’s hour-long set ended, allowing us to get much closer to the stage. On came Katie Melua who is very, very good. British but born in Georgia (the country, not the American state) she hit the scene in oh-five with Nine Million Bicycles, the inspiration for which was a guided tour of Beijing. Because why not? Her other main successes were The Closest Thing to Crazy, which is partly in 7/4 time, and The Flood, a track with regular changes of tempo and a total shift half-way through. She treated us to all three of these and several other songs – all dripping with emotion and creativity – that I hadn’t heard before. I felt so lucky to see her in Timișoara, at a cost of zero lei. Dorothy seemed to like her too. When she’d done her bit, I was keen to get home – my hands and feet were like ice, and I had an early start in the morning.

During Delia’s set

Katie Melua during The Flood and I Cried For You

I’ve had a busy week of teaching. I was supposed to have a two-hour maths lesson at nine this morning (Sunday – not my preferred day), taking me to 33 hours, but my student messaged me 35 minutes before we were due to start. Any chance we can move it? Hmm. Where I come from, you’re committed at that point. At the very least, the word sorry needs to appear somewhere in your message. But this is Romania. She’ll now be coming at 4pm instead. Yesterday I had my first online lesson with a guy in Bucharest whose wife I used to teach, then it was off to Dumbrăvița to see the kids. The heating in Octavian’s place is always jacked up to something crazy and I’m unable to stifle my yawns.

In a recent lesson I asked a very capable 14-year-old boy to write a short essay responding to this statement: Some people think women should be allowed to join the army, the navy and the air force just like men. Do you agree? His well-articulated response was a resounding no. His first sentence was: No, I don’t agree, because women have to take care of children, not take men’s occupations and manners. They shouldn’t steal men’s jobs, in other words. His mother, for what it’s worth, is vehemently anti-vax (though he himself was very careful during the pandemic, especially around masks). I asked him what he thought about women’s sport. Tennis and badminton were fine, but football?! God no. He’s a big football fan. Nobody actually watches women’s football, do they? Um, I hate to break it to you, but there was a World Cup recently and, yeah. His views are far from universal here – a 12-year-old boy I teach knows many of England’s top female players by name – but it’s interesting that they’re still so easy to come by in 2023. The pair of “position vacant” ads below are on the window of a popular second-hand clothes shop near me. I often cycle past it on a Saturday morning just before it opens at 9:30, and it’s heaving outside. Both the ads specify a woman (implicitly through feminine forms in the first ad, and explicitly in the second).

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Coronavirus - Language learning - Life :)

The good, the bad and the mad

December 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

So I watched the interview about Covid vaccines (an hour and a quarter long) that Dad sent me. It’s on John Campbell’s YouTube channel. Angus Dalgleish, the professor of oncology whom Campbell interviewed, started off by raising what sounded like some good points about T-cell activation and boosters, but then he said this: “Covid only killed old people who would have died three months later anyway.” Ye gods. He’s one of those people. Lockdowns were “lunacy”. Anthony Fauci was “not very bright”; Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance were “idiotic”. And so it went on. Supremely confident in his own views (never a “maybe” or an “I think”), but quick to criticise everyone else. I knew people like that back in my office days, and they were invariably nasty pieces of work whom I tried to have as little to do with as possible. I note that Dalgleish is an ardent Brexiter who stood as a UKIP candidate in the 2015 election. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it’s interesting how often anti-vax overlaps with that political outlook. Dalgleish did talk some sense about vitamin D at the end of the interview, even if he quoted an implausible statistic. Vitamin D is well known to boost your immunity against a lot more than just Covid, so in winter when we get little sun I take a tablet (2000 international units) every morning.

In the early days of the pandemic, when we were fumbling around in the dark, I watched Campbell’s channel religiously. While we were running around like headless chickens, his daily reports were a beacon of sanity. They were all the better for their lack of slickness. Then around the end of 2021 when the Covid situation had markedly improved, I stopped tuning in. Since then, his viewership has only grown, and his channel has become a haven for anti-vaxers judging by the comments. Campbell is doing rather nicely from his channel, and though he seems to be a principled man, he’s incentivised to feed his viewers red meat every other day rather than accurate information. On the BBC’s More or Less – a radio programme about statistics – they debunked a dangerously (and laughably) wrong statistic that Campbell gave about excess deaths caused by vaccines. Campbell took the video down, but the damage had been done by then. I often wish we could nuke YouTube and social media out of existence.

I’ve written before about people being criticised for being “mad” (Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, for example) when it’s not the madness that’s the problem. That’s always annoyed me; some of the most creative and most interesting people are a little bit mad, and it’s entirely possible to be mad without being a dangerous arsehole. Tom Crawford, the exceptional Oxford and Cambridge mathematician whose tattoos grow near-exponentially, is clearly a bit mad, but he’s a good guy with it. The world needs more people like him. Siouxsie Wiles, the UK-born, New Zealand-based microbiologist who was instrumental in handling the Covid pandemic, is another one. We need more people like her. Norvin Richards, the professor in the MIT linguistics lectures I watched, comes into that category too. You could even include Charlie Ottley, the guy who does the brilliant Flavours of Romania series on Netflix. Good mad people abound.

Last week I called up Elena, the lady who lives above me, on her 80th birthday. She’s still with her family in Canada – she’ll be back in mid-January. I can speak freely in Romanian with her; I wish I had more opportunities to do that. (Getting a car and visiting remote villages might help.) I’m still having Romanian lessons every Monday morning. In yesterday’s session we covered a ton of verbs, some of which are always used reflexively while others can be used either reflexively or non-reflexively with different meanings. The trick will be getting the chance to use them.