by I’ve just spoken to all the family. First I Skyped Mum and Dad. Mum had that pissed-off look. I didn’t entirely blame her. While she’d been painting the ceiling, Dad had been watching YouTube videos about Covid vaccines. The vaccines were useless according to the latest video he’d watched. “He’s a very creditable, highly qualified scientist.” Sure, he’s got a list of qualifications as long as your arm, but that doesn’t mean what he’s saying is true. At all. In fact you see people weaponising their qualifications all the damn time. YouTube is great if you want to find good music. Likewise if you want to know how to make sarmale or put up bookshelves or even solve quadratic equations. For “information” about Covid vaccines and treatments though, you should probably give it a pass. There’s a lot of nuance about the Covid vaccines. Maybe they were pushed out too soon. Some vaccines were clearly better than others. (Um, the Chinese one, anybody?) Side effects were real, to the point that maybe for a fit young person it was just about worth chancing their arm on getting the virus, from an entirely selfish perspective. The efficacy of booster jabs – fourth, fifth and beyond – is debatable. But to say that the vaccines were a waste of time is quite clearly ridiculous, when all the data points to vaccination massively reducing mortality. The more shocking a YouTube video is, the more eyeballs it gets, and that’s pretty much the story. Dad wants me to watch this latest (long) video, and I suppose I’ll have to, just to humour him.
After Mum and Dad, I spoke to my brother. He, his wife, and his son have been under the weather lately. The little chappy has had a bout of scarlet fever, which sounds like something from the Middle Ages. They’re almost recovered now though. My brother is going to St Ives in the next few days. It seems Mum and Dad have now considered paying for them all to come out to New Zealand (maybe after a comment I made, who knows) – that would be fantastic if it happened.
Yesterday I had four lessons – three in Dumbrăvița, then an online session with the chap in London. My first session was maths with Matei. He’d been learning some basic stats and had no problems that I could see. At the end of the session, as I’ve done the last few weeks, I gave him a few short multiple-choice questions on a variety of topics, mainly to get his mathematical brain working. They’re designed to be answered in under a minute. One of them was this:
He stared at it for a good five minutes, maybe more. He eliminated A (“it can’t be smaller than 36”) and D (“too big”), but was unable to choose between B and C. The question clearly says (perhaps unfairly) that you can’t use a calculator, though I don’t think it would have helped him. If I was tackling this question, I’d immediately see that 75% is three-quarters. If 36 is three-quarters of our number, then 12 is a quarter, so I’d just add on 12 (the remaining quarter we need) to get the answer. It would take me ten seconds or so, without any recourse to algebra. Just for a laugh, I gave Mum that question on our Skype call this morning, without the four options. She got the answer impressively quickly, using the exact same method that I did. As soon as I read out the question, Dad blurted out, “is it a hundred?”. Ha! But how do I teach the method that Mum and I use? Between us we’ve been fiddling with numbers for over a century, and in that time we’ve developed all kinds of hard-to-teach tricks and time-savers that we use without even thinking about them.
After Matei I had English with Octavian. We looked at yet more poems by Ted Hughes, such as The Thought-Fox, a poem about writing a poem. By the time he does his IGCSE in the summer, he’ll be beyond sick of Ted Hughes’ poems. I wish I could focus on his pronunciation, which could be greatly improved, rather than poetry which while interesting is of far less long-term benefit. Then came his little sister – after last week’s horse-heavy session, this time I gave her loads of sheets with dinosaurs. Next time she wants stuff on Christmas. When I got home I had my online session – we went through two articles, one on AI, the other on consumerism.
Friday was Romania’s national day, and a much warmer day than we’ve had of late. I met Dorothy in the centre of town – my old stomping ground – and we watched the parade of military and emergency vehicles. Unlike previous parades, this one was disappointingly short. When I sent my brother the pictures of the vast crowds, he likened it to Red Square victory parades. In truth there was little of that kind of vibe, but in Ceaușescu’s time they were just like what you saw in Moscow, or what you see now in North Korea. When the parade was over, I suggested to Dorothy that we walk through Central Park as I did countless times when I lived there. We walked by the busts of the great and the good of Timișoara – all men – and read some of the inscriptions. Some of them were ex-mayors. Many of them were writers. One was Béla Bartók, the famous Hungarian composer, who had links to Timișoara. When we reached Ioachim Miloia’s bust, I noted that he was my age now when he died. Look what he accomplished in that short time!
An art-history guru, a library founder, a writer on all matters related to local history, and painter who helped to restore numerous churches in Timișoara and its environs. And then look at me! Wouldn’t it be nice to say I’d accomplished something? Dorothy was taken aback by my comment, and I explained that I’d probably feel quite different if I had a family. My biggest accomplishment is, without a doubt, coming to Romania and making a life for myself here (and having a job where I help people, at least in a small way). In early 2015, a few months before I started this blog, I had the realisation that nothing would happen unless I did something drastic. Visiting the US that year – seeing the big wide world out there – gave me the impetus to actually do it.
Here are some pictures from the parade. The main square is being done up nicely.
