I’m tired. Tons of lessons. Not enough sleep. The end of the world as we know it, fast approaching. Just six days now. At least I’ve been amassing a healthy brick of lei, even though I don’t get as many cash payments as I did in pre-Covid days.
I felt shattered when I got up on Sunday. I still decided to make the trip to Szeged, a city just over the border which like Timișoara is replete with beautiful architecture. Our clocks had gone back an hour the night before, and then Hungary is a further hour behind Romania. So I had four different times in my head all at once: Romanian summer, Romanian winter, Hungarian summer, and Hungarian winter, the middle two of those four being equivalent. (Szeged’s buildings featured many clocks, some of which hadn’t yet been put back to winter time.) Szeged sits on the Tisa which is a major river. I parked by the river and mooched around the city for a couple of hours. Then, because it was still quite early, I decided to go to Kecskemét, the city we visited in early September on the way back from Vienna. On the way I met more pheasants than I’d ever seen before. The autumn colours were stunning. Szeged is a clean, modern-looking European city, while Kecskemét has a very different vibe with its communist blocks crowding out the lovely empire-era architecture that it still has. At the car park a woman tried to communicate with me. Do we have to pay? It’s Sunday. I could tell that was her question, but I had the same question and I couldn’t speak her language. She asked somebody else, then relayed the reply of “nem” (no) to me. I had a tortilla there – this was a bit of a disappointment – and then went back home. In total I did 425 km. Luckily I only had short queues at the border. I noted that they no longer bother to stamp my passport. That’s a shame; all those stamps were a useful memory jogger.
SzegedI really liked the design of this phone box. Surprisingly, the phone still worked.Kecskemét
This was on the table of the fast food place I ate at. Hungarian names are always surname first. In Romanian they can go either way, which can be horribly confusing when the surname happens to be a possible first name too.
Just outside Szeged
Back in Romania, at a small lake in Sânnicolau Mare, popular with fishermen. Next to the lake, a couple were roasting a chicken in their back garden.
Seven lessons yesterday. It’s rare to have that many. All that talking gets quite tiring, especially when it’s online. I’m hoping to keep Sunday free (unlike last weekend) and hop over the border to Szeged in Hungary. I’ve heard good things about the city. I may even make a detour on the way there or back to take in the beautiful autumn colours.
When I spoke to Dad this morning, I mentioned the difficulty I have in connecting with young women aged between 15 and 25 or thereabouts in my lessons. Dad said that’s to be expected on account of the age gap between us, but I disagreed. There’s a certain vacancy there. The lights are on, but nobody’s home. Eight hours a day on Instagram, with its laser focus on image, will do that to you. When my university friend came to stay we talked about this. He reckoned that 10% of young women will suffer long-term damage – they’ll be confined to a (permanent?) zombie state – as a result of their social media use. Yes, boys and young men have their own issues, mostly around gaming. They’re up half the night and can’t stay awake in class. But I get the feeling that it’s something they’ll grow out of. They also do normal stuff like go out on their bikes or play football. One teenage boy had just been to football practice before our lesson. I got him to do an exercise where he had to choose between two verb tenses. Sometimes he wanted to use a different one. “Sorry mate,” I said, “You’re offside!” I raised my arm as if I was a linesman. He thought that was funny. With most girls, that sort of interaction just isn’t possible.
Talking of sport, Mum was pleased that Team New Zealand had won the America’s Cup. I think of it as an obscene waste of money. In other sporting news (from probably two weeks ago now), Rafael Nadal announced his retirement. The extraordinary two-decade-long rivalry between three titans of the game is now over; only Djokovic still remains. I also saw that Wimbledon is doing away with line judges in favour of automated line calling. I’m surprised they didn’t do this back in 2021 for the first tournament after the Covid cancellation; the tech certainly existed then. I read an article by an ex-line judge at Wimbledon. It’s something I wouldn’t have minded doing. As for being a ballboy though, bugger that. I’d have been terrible anyway. As a kid, trying to coordinate myself with other kids just wasn’t going to happen.
I should also mention football for the second time in this post. Earlier this year I wrote regular updates on Birmingham City’s eventual tumble through the trap door into the third tier of English football. A lot had to go wrong for that team to be relegated. A lot did go wrong. In their first season in such a low league since 1995, Birmingham have so far played eleven games, losing one, drawing one, and winning all the rest. They spent big over the summer and getting sell-out crowds to watch some pretty exciting football. There’s a sense of optimism around the club not seen in more than a decade. It’s funny how things turn out.
Just eleven days until the US election, and I have a strong sense of impending doom. (I wonder if anything else but doom can be impending. I never hear anyone talk of an impending root canal, as frightening as it must be.) This morning I saw two polls, one showing a tie nationally, and another showing Harris with only a three-point lead in New Hampshire, a state outside the “swing zone” which Biden won by more than seven points in 2020. Just two polls, but there have been several now that depict a race inching slowly but surely in Trump’s direction. My gut feeling, and that’s all it is, is that Trump will win the seven swing states 6-1 or even 7-0, perhaps even taking a “non-swing” state in the process. He may even win the popular vote or at least come very close. In that case (or any other of the many scenarios that see Trump elected again) I’ll want to log off from global news for my own sanity, keeping just my Romanian news app. I don’t think I could bear to see that grotesque excuse for a man day after day. Dad said that Harris hasn’t been charismatic enough, and charisma is all that matters over there, but what would “acceptable charisma” in a woman even look like in the US? A very “charismatic” woman would be perceived as too boisterous or not feminine enough. No matter what she does, she’s facing an uphill battle in those swing states simply because she’s a woman.
Last Sunday an important pair of votes took place in Moldova, Romania’s baby sister, which I would like to visit one day. (My first introduction to Moldova came from reading Tony Hawks’ Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, a funny but thought-provoking read.) The first round of the presidential election saw pro-European incumbent Maia Sandu come top with 42%, but she now faces a second round in nine days’ time against Alexandr Stoianoglo who is pro-Russia. There’s no guarantee that Sandu will win. There was also a referendum on amending Moldova’s constitution to include a path towards EU membership. The vote passed, just: 50.4% voted in favour. If Sandu doesn’t remain president, I expect that will be knocked on the head.
Any way you look at it, we’re living in fragile, unpredictable times.
It’s been a tiring last few days. My students’ constant chopping and changing of lesson times, and all the associated messages, have been exhausting for me. More than the lessons themselves.
I had a funny lesson this morning with an 18-year-old guy whom I last saw in August 2023. He came armed with textbooks on something called “consumer math” from an American publication called Christian Light. There were maths problems, mostly of a practical nature, interspersed with readings from the Bible. He told me he’d so far done them with the help of ChatGPT. That became pretty clear when I asked him to work out a percentage. He’s homeschooled (that’s highly unusual in Romania) and wants to study in America. His English is excellent.
I spoke to Mum just before that lesson. She still hasn’t fully got over her cold, which she thinks might have been another bout of Covid. She was annoyed that she’d accidentally deleted a recording of a netball match. I said that all wasn’t lost – it’s 2004 and online stuff exists – and sure enough she found it on YouTube. My parents still think of TV (and they watch a lot of TV) as something that comes on at a specific time, and that’s it. A little while ago I told Dad an “old person” joke I’d seen – “What time does that programme start on Netflix?” – and he didn’t get it.
Our clocks go back this coming weekend. These are the dying embers of not-winter, in other words. It especially feels that way with the US election only two weeks away. I remember very clearly the lead-up to the 2020 election. We were in the midst of a horrendous second Covid wave. Ambulances sped past every couple of minutes. I was still in my old flat then – it was on the route to the hospital. The city was shrouded in thick fog that didn’t lift for days. And then the election. Surely he can’t win again. Just look at the polls. But just imagine if he does.
The polls were way off in several swing states, but he still lost. I actually enjoyed the drawn-out vote-tallying process, especially when it became clear Biden would get over the line. But now there’s a full-scale war practically on my doorstep and the guy who just said that Arnold Palmer was a real man because he had a ten-inch dick (or whatever), and is now arguably a favourite to become the most powerful man in the world, supports the guy who invaded a completely independent country. How can 75 million-odd Americans vote for this heap of shit, just because they’re angry that gas isn’t under $2 a gallon? It’s beyond fucked up.
Recently I’ve been watching YouTube videos on maths. There are a couple of popular channels I like: Stand-up Maths (run by Matt Parker) and Numberphile. A regular guest on Numberphile is Neil Sloane (now 85 years old) who was born in Wales and emigrated to Australia but has lived most of his life in the US. I particularly like his videos on sequences and their often crazy patterns. His voice and manner are quite soothing.
It’s been a slow day today. In mid-morning I got an attack of sinus pain which I staved off with an Advil and several paracetamol. So I didn’t get the excruciating pain I suffer on rare occasions, but I became sensitive to light and sound, and energy drained from me. I lay on the sofa and dozed until 20 minutes before my first lesson (of four scheduled) started. This was an online session with an eight-year-old boy. He’s a nice boy. But because I was more sensitive to sounds than usual, the monotony of his reading voice got to me. What Does Jack Want To Do He Wants To Play With His Dog What Does Sam Like To Eat… All at one note – Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba – without any pauses between sentences, like a helium-fuelled robot. Native-speaker children are like this too when they learn to read, but Romanians take it to another level because their native language stays at a more constant pitch than English does.
Annoyingly I only got two of my four lessons. One of the two “real millennial” girls completely forgot, while the Bucharest-based guy in his forties cancelled with 50 minutes to go. (I told that young lady she’d need to pay me, then changed my mind because she’s still pretty new and it was her first “offence”.)
Tomorrow I’ve got seven sessions in my diary – that’s a lot – but the odds are against me actually having that many. One of them is with Alex, a boy of nearly 14. In a recent session he told me how his grandfather had just bought three of the latest Samsung phones (for himself, Alex’s mum and Alex) for €1100 apiece. (Well-off people talk in euros; poorer people talk in lei.) He wanted to know if it was true that black Air Forces had been banned in British schools. Black Air Forces? Are these shoes, or what? And how the hell would I bloody know?
Yesterday I got my hair cut. I went to a place at the other end of the (long) street where I lived for two months in a guest house. I was the only customer. The hairdresser was a lady of sixty or so. She went on about how bad things were in Romania compared to the “old days”, then she talked about all the people she knew who had become ill from the Covid vaccines. I asked her how she knew it was the vaccines. By this time she was in full flow, so much that she’d stopped actually cutting my hair. Mercifully she got off the subject and resumed my haircut.
Song of the week – Demons by the Welsh band Super Furry Animals. The song, which came out in 1997, makes an inauspicious start (I’d say), but then gets much better. The video is fantastic throughout. It features the Colombian capital Bogotá. It makes me really want to visit South America. Another Super Furry Animals song I like (in fact there are a few) is Y Gwyneb Iau, sung in Welsh.
Two posts ago I mentioned tetrahedral numbers. I neglected to mention that they came in handy for me in my online poker days. How many different seven badugis are there? That’ll be 20, the fourth tetrahedral number. What about eight badugis? That’s 35, the fifth tetrahedral number. And so on. If GG Poker ever get round to adding draw games and the like, I’ll probably give it a whirl, but otherwise I’m not going back there.
Kamala Harris is going on Fox News in a few hours. Great move, I reckon. More eyeballs on her, wherever they come from, are what she needs. And it makes her appear unfazed. It is risky of course, because she could completely bomb, but the upside outweighs the downside. No matter what, I still have a nasty feeling about 5th November.
I saw Threads on Saturday night. The last 60% of the film, from the attack onwards, was extremely chilling. I nearly didn’t see it through to the end. It was broadcast on the BBC in September 1984, three weeks after I started school. There were reminders of my early childhood everywhere: football scores, typewriters, cars similar to what we had, and most poignantly an educational TV programme called Words and Pictures. Educational TV was a big thing in the UK in the eighties. Us tiny kids would file into the TV room, then the teacher would wheel out the great big telly on a trolley, just in time for the ten-minute programme to start. Sometimes this was Words and Pictures. Seeing a garbled post-nuclear version of this – which made reference to skeletons and skulls – was haunting. Threads, in its way, was brilliantly done. It was also informative. My only gripe was that those born after the attack spoke a greatly simplified pidgin English; this was unrealistic to me. Tragically, the girl who played Jane died in a car crash in 1990.
Last Wednesday night, just after I wrote my previous post, I found a live YouTube stream of Hurricane Milton. Or rather, it was a stream of the tornadoes that preceded Milton’s landfall in Florida. There was a host – a qualified meteorologist – transmitting a barrage of tornado warnings, accompanied by a younger meteorologist in another room and three storm chasers on the ground. There were brightly coloured maps showing the path of the tornadoes in precise detail. A locality that got disproportionate attention was the village of Yeehaw Junction (what a name) with a population of just over 200. I’ve become skeptical of some modern technology, but they were using fantastic, life-saving tech.
Yesterday I cycled to Utvin in the morning. The village is larger than I imagined, with around 3000 people. Then in the afternoon I went for a drive. I ended up in the north of Timiș, not far from where Dorothy has her place. At one point, two kestrels flew overhead. Another time six or seven piglets ran out alongside me. There’s something quite wonderful about just being in rural Romania. I was a little too early to fully catch the full array of autumn colours.
Just three weeks until the US election. I’ve got a horrible feeling about it.
Utvin. Can you spot the cat?The church at Remetea Mică
I’ve just had a no-show from one of those real millennials I once talked about on here. One of the ones who’s been to Dubai. That’s after reminding her less than two hours before she started. Yes, she said. Or rather, da. Then nothing. When she messaged me last month to say she wanted to resume lessons with me, I let out a deep groan to myself. Uughhh. I thought I’d got rid of her.
Yesterday I caught up with my cousin on Zoom. The one who lives in Wellington and has had cancer. For all I know, she may still have cancer. In an hour she didn’t mention her health once. Her siblings and even her mother have virtually no idea what’s going on either. All very bizarre. There was still the visibly drooped jaw but her speech wasn’t affected. We discussed my parents’ house, both agreeing that it was madness, then we talked about working from home. On that matter we disagreed entirely. Her number one son has almost finished at Canterbury and is going to Sydney do a master’s in robotics. Number two boy has just started working for Wellington Free Ambulance. The little chap, now all of 16 (time whizzes by), looks set to join either the police or the military. I thought my cousin might push all her boys into academia, so I’m glad the younger two haven’t gone in that direction.
Yeah. Working from home. A bloody great invention if you ask me. Obviously some very important jobs can’t be done from home. Even mine doesn’t always work online. Getting an eight-year-old kid to sit still and look at me can be quite the battle. Teaching maths online is rather inconvenient. I can never seem to find the pi key. But yeesh, there are millions of people in white-collar jobs (both good and mind-numbingly crap) where face-to-face contact is a near-total irrelevance when it comes to actually doing the job. Sure, there’s the socialising if you’re into that, but even that can be unbearably fake. The modern office itself is unbearable to a lot of people. If I went back to a large open-plan office I’d last five minutes. Two minutes if hot desking was also involved. Just fuck no. And if you live in a dormitory town (what a horrible phrase) in the UK, you’re probably looking at two to three hours a day just getting from your soulless housing estate to some equally soulless business park and back. Who wouldn’t want rid of that and have the chance to exercise more (the amount of exercise the average Brit gets is shockingly low) and spend more time with their kids? (Yes, I know, there are plenty of TGIM fathers – thank God it’s Monday – who like all that commuting and office fakeness precisely so they can escape from their families.)
My cousin is 55 and owns a business. To put it mildly, she wasn’t a fan of working from home. She talked about fostering team environments which may have been a thing 30 years ago but isn’t really now. When I spoke to Dad, he expressed a dislike of the whole WFH concept which I found very weird coming from him, but then again he is 74 and you can’t cure 74. It’s great, he said, that civil servants in Wellington are finally going back to work. Back to work! This amused me greatly. If Dad’s definition of work involves travelling to an office, he has done zero hours of work in the last 45 years.
Here’s the British comedian Michael Spicer’s take on the WFH phenomenon. My favourite comment to the video is the one that mentions commercial real estate investors and surrounding businesses like coffee shops. Sorry, but $7 cups of coffee aren’t a good enough reason to bring people back.
A terrifying storm, which goes by the less-than-terrifying name of Milton, is making landfall in Florida. There are several tornadoes. Joe Biden has just called it the Storm of the Century. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Milton. The name makes me think of the character from the Office Space (ha!) documentary comedy film. Another Milton I’m aware of is the nephew of the mathematician who wanted a name for 1 followed by 100 zeros. Milton came up with googol. This was then extended to the googolplex, which is 1 followed by a googol zeros. The name “googol” was the inspiration for the name Google.
On the subject of maths, it’s taken me till October to realise that the year 2024 is a tetrahedral number. In 2016 we were living in a triangular year: if you have 2016 balls, you can arrange them into an equilateral triangle with 63 balls on each side. Well, tetrahedral numbers take this to another level. (Or several other levels, to be precise.) You can arrange 2024 balls into a tetrahedron (or triangular-based pyramid) in which each face is an equilateral triangle. Specifically, 2024 is the 22nd tetrahedral number; there are 22 balls on each edge. It’s equivalent to the sum of the first 22 triangular numbers. This means that tetrahedral numbers (or years) are even rarer than triangular ones. The previous one was 1771; the next one won’t be until 2300.
Earlier today my student read an article about Threads, a 1984 docu-drama about a nuclear apocalypse. Frightening as it must have been then, during the Cold War, I’d like to find and watch it now.
Music. A new favourite song of mine is called Help Me See the Trees by Particle Kid. The lead singer of the band is Willie Nelson’s son. Here’s the song being performed at the Tomboy Sessions in Santa Cruz, California. There’s loads of other good stuff – mostly country music – from the Tomboy Sessions.
As my work hours are getting longer again, my posts are getting shorter.
This morning I had a Skype chat with my aunt and uncle in Woodbury (the ones who visited me in Timișoara). She had a lot to say; he didn’t. She said they’ll be putting their property on the market. Time to pull the plug. Though with my uncle starting to lose his memory, I wonder how much a totally alien home might mess him up.
Today marks the eighth anniversary of my arrival in Romania. I’ve spent 18% of my life here. Yesterday I met Mark in town. We talked about a lot of teaching, mostly. But also his three children. And how much we both still like Timișoara. If only it wasn’t so hot in summer, this place would be just about perfect for me.
This was from Saturday. I still haven’t been invited to a Romanian wedding. The more I hear about them (400 guests? Lasting three days?) the more grateful I am.
A statue of Adi Bărar, guitarist for Timișoara band Cargo. It was put up just three weeks ago. Bărar died in 2021 after getting Covid.
Glory to God. Read the Bible every day. In Recaș yesterday.
This dog just wouldn’t budge, no matter what. I even took a video of cars swerving around it. At Bazoșu Nou yesterday.
I suppose the big news from me is that the roof of this apartment block is leaking and needs a repair pretty urgently. We’ve had a quote for 65,000 lei, which (assuming it’s split evenly between the ten owners) means we each have to pay the equivalent of £1100 or NZ$2300. Now that I’ve left the world of money far behind me, that feels like a lot. It’s a lot of lessons, certainly. A lot of trying to explain to a ten-year-old boy the rule for adding an S to verb forms while a parrot is screeching his head off in the room next door. That actually happened yesterday.
I’m now teaching more kids than ever before. Fitting them all in is a major headache. At some point I may have to switch to group sessions. Tomorrow I’ve got four sessions scheduled, running from 7:45 till 4:30. One adult – the priest – followed by a trip to Dumbrăvița for the three kids.
There’s just a month until the terrifying US election. So consequential, but nothing any of us can do about it. I suppose I should at least be grateful that Harris has a fighting chance. Biden was heading for a drubbing (by recent standards) until mercifully he pulled out. I heard that John Key, former prime minister of New Zealand, has come out in support of Trump. Remarkable, isn’t it? He was leader of one of the most peaceful and least corrupt countries on the planet for eight years, and now he’s backing that way-too-old hate-filled criminal. He’ll be better for the economy, Key said. Even if that’s true (and it’s a big if), that tells you all you need to know about Key. As prime minister he emphasised economy at the expense of society, and now he’s even prepared to dispense with global stability. (And yeah, his fingers are in a lot of pies, and it might well be better for his personal economy if Trump were to win.)
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