Month: December 2024

Family - Language teaching - Other sports - Photos - Politics

Darts and car parks

December 30, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just got back from my lesson with ten-year-old Filip. (They don’t mess around with ph in Romanian, let alone poncy French spellings like Philippe.) We had our session in his little sister’s room, which was full of shelves piled high with books that obviously weren’t for her immediate benefit. There were novels that would have been bought in the seventies, travel books, and medical books including a fat tome all about excretion.

Yesterday my brother called me on WhatsApp. The little one was still up and about. I had my first-ever verbal interaction with him. I picked up the word Christmas and a whole load of babababa-sounding words which my brother translated for me; he was talking about family members.

Because I had a cold (and still do), I drove to Dumbrăvița on Saturday for my pair of two-hour lessons, instead of cycling there as I normally do. It’s my only work destination where driving is a significant time-saver. I came back via the mall, because my doctor’s clinic is now attached to the mall and I knew he’d be there. (I wanted to pick up my monthly allocation of pills.) But being a Saturday between Christmas and New Year, the multi-storey car park was a nightmare. I entered through the barrier, drove up and down and around in circles for ten minutes, then decided the whole thing wasn’t worth it and headed through the exit. They give you an hour’s free parking. My doctor’s next stint is New Year’s Eve so I’ll see him then instead. I got flashbacks of the Park Street multi-storey car park in Cambridge, which was even worse. When I was little, Mum went shopping in Cambridge on a Saturday (she often brought me along) and parked in that horrible car park which was built in the sixties, as so many architectural monstrosities were. Its levels were called “decks” which were denoted by letters going up to L, if memory serves. She mostly parked on Deck F. Then we walked down the staircase which stank of pee. I don’t remember Mum being all that stressed by it; she must have got used to it. I’m happy to report that a wrecking ball was taken to that hellhole a few years ago. (I once read a book that was partly set in a different Cambridge car park, sometime in the nineties. This was the Lion Yard car park, which no longer exists either.)

Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. I was born towards the end of his only term, so obviously I have no memory of him as president. But it’s clear to me that he had more compassion and integrity in his little finger than the thought-free, morality-free president-elect has in his entire body. Carter was a victim of circumstance and America’s celebrity culture. America boomed under Reagan, and later Clinton, but you have to wonder at what long-term cost.

The darts. On Friday I saw Damon Heta hit a nine-darter, the second of this year’s tournament. (Christian Kist earlier got one.) Unlike a 147 in snooker, a perfect leg of darts happens in the blink of an eye. Heta got £60,000 for that, Prostate Cancer UK benefited to the same tune, and someone in the crowd also took home sixty grand. Unfortunately for Heta (just like Kist before him), he didn’t win. When I started my maths lesson, he was 3-1 up against Luke Woodhouse in a race to four, but he proceeded to lose the final nine legs of the match. One match that stood out for me was Ricardo Pietreczko, a German who appears rather awkward in interviews, against Scott Williams, who looks for all the world like someone who I’d have avoided like the plague at school. Maybe I’ve got him completely wrong and he was the shy and retiring type, but I doubt it. No wonder I wanted the awkward guy to win. Which he did, 4-1, after a very solid performance. Another match I had my eye on involved Ricky Evans. A cartoonish figure, his face is a picture every time he throws, which he does at lightning speed. He was beaten yesterday by Robert Owen of Wales, 4-2. I was glad to see Chris Dobey get through, but the real story must be last year’s champion Luke Humphries who lost 4-1 to Peter Wright.
Update: I’ve just watched a dramatic match between Dobey and Dutchman Kevin Doets. Dobey was looking good but it almost slipped away from him. He scraped through in a deciding set to make the last eight. Both players missed a plethora of doubles, adding to the drama.

The book. Lots of monkeying around with fonts and formats, but it’s coming together.

Standing on the new footbridge over the Bega, with the old one just in front of me.
Books - Family - Life :) - Writing a book

My un-Christmas

December 27, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s Boxing Day here. The day after my un-Christmas and the 20th anniversary of the tsunami that killed nearly 230,000 people.

Last Thursday, the 19th, I had a video call with my friend who came to visit in September. He was about to travel to Normandy to spend Christmas with his girlfriend’s family. I told him that seeing him in Timișoara was a real highlight of my year, which was the truth. He surprised me slightly when he said that it was a major highlight for him too. I suppose I’m just not used to people saying that seeing me is a highlight.

On Sunday, straight after I wrote my last post, I went to Dorothy’s church. Unlike a lot of churches, this one seems harmless. The service lasted 1¾ hours and included a few carols, including one with a verse in French. I quite enjoyed the mini-detour into French. But gosh, that sermon. When will this thing ever end? He was tireless, not even taking a sip of water. Mercifully, at last he said (in Romanian), “As I come to the end…”. He spoke for 45 minutes. I was subjected to some pretty bad sermons as a kid – the priest mumbled so much that you couldn’t make out what he was saying – but at least none of them lasted 45 minutes. Afterwards there was food – good food and plenty of it – and chat, which I wasn’t really in the mood for, though I did talk for a while with the Aussie lady. Before I left, Dorothy gave me an old map of Timișoara, printed in 1983, as a sort of Christmas present. The cathedral, which was completed during the Second World War, was conspicuous in its absence. The government thought it could deny the existence of a major religious landmark by simply leaving it off maps. How bizarre.

The following day I had three lessons, all of them with boys, then later I had dinner with Mark and his wife in Dumbrăvița. It had started to rain just before I got on my bike, and I very nearly wimped out and took the car instead. I took my salată de boeuf and other bits and pieces. Whenever I go to their place at the far end of Dumbrăvița I think that I could not live there. No little bars, no market stalls, no ornate cast-iron doorways, in fact nothing at all more than a few years old. It would do my head in. When I got there, I was immediately greeted by the less placid of their two big dogs. (The one nice thing about where they live is the wood nearby, which is great for the dogs.) We sat down and shared a meal. Ambient music, the sort that I never choose to listen to in any circumstances, emanated from their smart TV. They were mostly very good songs, but annoyingly “ambientised”. We talked a lot about teaching, which makes sense – we all have that in common. We also talked about religion. It isn’t taught at all at their school, when really it should be. We all wondered how a very high IQ doesn’t stop a person having very staunch – and sometimes dangerous – religious beliefs. I only drank one glass of wine, because I knew I’d need to be alert the next day. After we ate, they taught me how to play the card game Shithead. I do remember playing it in France in 2000, but couldn’t remember a thing about it. Mark’s wife gave me a whole load of information without ever telling me that suits didn’t matter. Finally I twigged. So suits don’t matter?! That was the first thing you needed to say! I mastered the rules eventually, but as the game relies pretty heavily on short-term memory and mine is pretty bad, I can’t imagine I’d ever be any good at it. The rain had stopped by the time I left, though I still got pretty muddy. When I got home the darts was still on – this was the last session before Christmas, and the best of the tournament so far, but I couldn’t watch much of it because I needed to be up the next morning. I did however see Florian Hempel lose out in a close match; I’d really wanted him to get through.

The next day was Christmas Eve. A work day. Ten hours on the book, in five two-hour chunks. No interruptions. At one point my doorbell went. Almost certainly carol singers who had tailgated through the front entrance. I ignored it. This reminded me of when I studied for my final university exams. I spent the day writing explanations for the 25 pictures that Dad drew. Some were simple, others much more complicated. There’s probably still some tweaking to do, and then there’s the business of getting the layout right. Neither the pictures nor the explanations are a uniform size.

Christmas Day. I felt a cold coming on. In the morning I spoke to my brother who was up early sorting out his son and about to sort out the turkey too. Then I called Mum and Dad who were already done with Christmas dinner which they had at their place. Mum’s brother and sister-in-law had been, along with Mum’s niece with her (I think) third husband. We talked about a potential name for my little niece. My nephew has a five-letter, one-syllable first name, which follows all the rules of the English language, right down to a magic E to prevent it from being the plural of something sticky. My brother chose that, as far as I’m aware. But we have a feeling that my sister-in-law is less conservative than him (or me, for that matter) when it comes to names of humans, and it’s probably her turn this time. We’ll see what they come up with.

After the video calls, I read the whole of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach yesterday, with the exception of the first chunky chapter which I’d already read. Imagine if that could be a regular thing. No work, no having to see anybody or deal with any ghastly instant messages, just sitting down and reading almost a whole novel. On the Beach, written in 1957 and set in Melbourne following a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere, really was a compelling read. I read it with a map of eastern Australia open; at times he would refer to places as they were gradually “taken out” by radiation as it spread southward. I read the final chapter in bed, still not knowing what would happen. As always with an older book, there were a lot of interesting language aspects. One, he uses ‘ld as the contraction for would, instead of the now standard ‘d. Two, he uses directly as an adverb of time, to mean “as soon as”, as in “I went home directly I finished work”. That threw me the first time I saw it. Three, he calls a fridge a frig, which means something very different to me. Frig is also one of the two Romanian words for cold, the other being rece. I suppose fridges were still pretty new in 1957, and the spelling hadn’t been standardised. I’m glad we settled on fridge rather than frig. On the same theme, I remember when mike was used as the short form of microphone. Then mic took over, which is nowhere near as good in my book. Mic goes against English spelling rules, and the c ending makes the verb forms mic’d and mic’ing clumsy; miked and miking worked just perfectly. Imagine if we called a bike a bic. Ugh. Four, he uses the ligatures æ and œ in words like anæsthetic and manœuvre, which you rarely see these days. As for manoeuvre, that’s such a messy word. Yes I know it’s from French. The Americans spell it maneuver, which I prefer, but ideally I wish we’d all just go with manoover and have done with it. And five, he calls babies it. Yes, we still do that sometimes today, but not usually when we know the gender, which is the case when he says it.

Wow, this has been a long one. I went for a brisk walk this sunny morning after taking a Lemsip. Here are some pictures:

Big Ceaușescu-era apartment blocks on the other side of a large vacant section

This bar was once open from 8am to 11pm, but has been closed a while. The patio area next door now looks to be a car wash. This is on Strada Mătăsarilor, or Silk Merchants Street. The Mătăsarilor cemetery is nearby.

I don’t know what the story is of this writer who is seemingly still alive (yes, they erect gravestones in advance here).

A rather nice gravestone and poem; this young woman died during WW2.

I must have been past this large building several times without really noticing the designs on the top.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Something on the horizon

December 23, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m feeling reasonably good at the moment, maybe because I have two things to look forward to. One, the books getting published, fingers crossed. And two, Mum and Dad coming over in May. When you live by yourself without a family, it’s quite easy to be staring at miles and miles of barrenness. An endless desert, with not even a tree in sight. This is especially true when it seems that everything in the wider world is going to the dogs; you can be totally bereft of anything on the horizon to latch onto, whether personal or collective. So I’m grateful for these two things.

Recently Dad sent my brother and I a pair of tape recordings of us when we were little. They were dated 1984 and 1985. The ’85 one was mostly me, making up a story as I went along. I was surprisingly eloquent for just five years old. I had a habit of repeating myself, but some of that was because I was big into rhyme, which is to an extent repetitious. Dad would read me Edward Lear or something in that line, which I really enjoyed. In fact, by five I was perfectly able to read it myself. Sometimes I think I peaked then, and my life since has been four decades of managed decline.

Yesterday I only had one lesson – maths with Matei – and since then I’ve been cooking. Salată de boeuf, salam de biscuiți, and a crumble which I made with quince and four enormous apples, a variety of cooking apple I’ve never seen before. (On the market they were just called mere acre, or sour apples; in fact they’re not that sour.)

I’m going to beat last year’s number of teaching hours by a small margin. According to my records, I’ve so far done half an hour more this year than in all of 2023, and I’ve still got some sessions tomorrow and a few between Christmas and New Year. I’m glad I’m coming to the end of my Christmas-themed worksheets and spot-the-difference pictures. I’m reindeered out now, I’m telling you.

A few days ago somebody sent me this video of Michael McIntyre’s “Silent Letter Day” skit which he performed at the London Palladium. I know I’m biased because I’m a word-obsessed English teacher, but I thoroughly recommend it for McIntyre’s extraordinary timing and delivery. I’ve had all kinds of fun and games with silent letters in my lessons. A student will read psychology and say “p-see-hhho-lo-jee”, with a pronounced p and a guttural h, just like how the equivalent word (psihologie) is pronounced in Romanian. I then ask my student to have another go, interrupting him or her as soon as I hear the p-s. “P-see…” No. “P-sigh…” No. “P-s…” No. Then I tell them that the p isn’t pronounced at all, much to their surprise.

The darts. It’s been a mixed bag so far. Often I’ve seen either both players performing well together, or both struggling (by their standards, of course). Darts is a funny game in that it has an objective measure of one’s performance (your average score per throw) but it’s perfectly possible to have a better average than your opponent and still lose the game. The best example of this was Jim Williams, the Welshman who was visibly better than Paolo Nebrida, his Filipino opponent. He averaged 7½ points better than Nebrida – that’s a lot – but missed five darts for the match, losing in a deciding leg. He also spurned a bunch of chances earlier on, otherwise the match wouldn’t have been so close in the first place. Another match I thought might go the same way was Matt Campbell’s against Mensur Suljovic. They’re both likeable characters and I didn’t mind who won. Campbell was clearly the better player, and eventually he did win, 3-2 in sets. Last night I saw Luke Littler’s first match. It took him a while to kick into gear but when he did so he produced a record-breaking 32-dart fourth set, coming millimetres from a nine-darter. Such ridiculous talent. Ryan Meikle, whom he beat 3-1, played very well too but couldn’t do anything at the end there. Yesterday’s final match saw Aussie madman Damon Heta win. Heta was lethal on the doubles and also came very close to a nine-darter.

Dorothy has invited me to church; I’ll be leaving any minute. Tomorrow she goes to England for Christmas. After the church service there will be food. I’ll be taking some of my salată de boeuf along.

Life :) - Music - Photos

Sad news, and wondering what came before

December 19, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Monday I found out that Petrică, one of the guys I used to play tennis with, had died at the age of just 57. He died a month ago of a heart attack. When I first played with him he leapt around the court. I remember partnering him in a set of doubles which we lost 6-1. If you’d just let me take my shot occasionally, maybe we wouldn’t have got thrashed. The next thing I knew, he’d developed kidney problems and was on dialysis. He still played tennis, but was limited to half an hour at a time. I’ve been in touch with a female friend of his; she said she’s in no mood for anything Christmassy. Petrică is the second of the tennis group to pass away: Domnul Ionescu, who was 70 or so, died of cancer at the beginning of 2022.

In other sad news, yesterday I had a lesson with my London-based student. I asked him if he had any news. Looks like I’m getting a divorce. He’s 35, with two boys aged five and two. I get the impression they got married nine years ago (in Romania, before moving to the UK) because it was just what you did, and now they’re facing a divorce which is just about always stressful and traumatic. With divorce rates hovering close to 50%, I often wonder whether getting married is ever really worth it. I mean, getting married is pretty damn stressful in itself, not to mention expensive.

This morning I opened a letter from my family friend in St Ives whom I spent considerable time with in August when I visited. Getting a letter these days is really quite something.

On Sunday I met both Mark and Dorothy in town, one after another with a longish break in between. I met them both at Berăria 700 which has reasonably priced food and drinks. Mark is almost ten years older than me, and I like to ask him about his memories of the seventies, growing up as he did in Tamworth, which isn’t far from Birmingham. This time he talked about people driving bubble cars. Being born right at the start of the Thatcher–Reagan era and growing up in Cambridgeshire rather than say the north of England, I sadly have no memories of a time before money was everything, except perhaps when I was really little and rampant capitalism hadn’t fully kicked in. I’m thinking of the funny little shops that still existed in St Ives back then, or the local auction in which Dad would scout around for antique furniture. (There’s still an auction in St Ives now, but the bottom has really dropped out of the antique market in the last 40 years.) Being born in 1980 means I can remember nothing that came before, but everything that came after.

I could really see the stark difference between the beginning and the end of the eighties when I read two of Garrison Keillor’s books, one published in 1981, the other in 1988. In the space of a few years, money had morphed from being a tool for buying useful goods and services and providing security, to being a thing in itself that fairly ordinary people wanted to acquire. Share prices were suddenly read out on radio bulletins as if they were things that mums and dads ought to know about, rather than being hidden away in tiny font in some obscure section of the paper.

Music. Lately I’ve been listening to Joan Armatrading. She was born in St Kitts and Nevis, as it is now called, but moved to Birmingham at a young age. She came out with a number of hits in the seventies and eighties. Love and Affection (1976) is wonderful; Drop the Pilot (1983) isn’t bad either.

Here are some pictures of town on Sunday evening:

Then and now. We might be going back to “then”.

The third old-style cinema to have opened in the city

Dreams - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports - Politics

Dodging a bullet and getting up my nose

December 15, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night I had two strange dreams. In the first, I was piloting a small plane and was in trouble (though I was surprisingly calm) until my brother got me out of it. I communicated with him via text or something. Soon after I had another near accident, which made me nervous about flying in small planes again. (In that dream, flying in small planes was a normal part of everyday life.) In the second dream I was in trouble at work for playing some kind of ball game (that I’d invented) during office hours. My boss seemed to quite like the game though, and thought I should market it. In fact he talked enthusiastically about a business opportunity. I was embarrassed about the whole thing and began to skulk around the office.

The “invented game” dream might have come from the board game I played with some of my students last week. This is the one Dad came up with back in 1993 or ’94 – racing cars around a three-lane track, where the fast lane gets you round faster, obviously, but requires more fuel. I refined his idea and a quarter of a century later started using it in my lessons. My 13-year-old student wanted a copy of the game that he could print out and play at home, so I sent him soft copies of the game board, the dashboards (showing fuel and completed laps), and the cards that you have to draw if you land on certain spaces.

On Monday night I started getting pain in my sinuses that continued through Tuesday and Wednesday. I also seemed to pick up a bug of sorts. I was devoid of energy for two days. On Thursday I was back to some sort of normal which was just as well – I had seven lessons that day. The pain hasn’t entirely gone away and I’ve had no choice but to take painkillers. Fatigue has been a major issue for a while; it isn’t helped by my waking up multiple times virtually every night.

On Monday morning I had my weekly Romanian lesson. Inevitably we talked about the election, or un-election. I suggested that Georgescu was similar to Viktor Orbán. Oh no, my teacher replied. Far worse. Cancelling the election so close to the final round was very clumsy and looks antidemocratic on the face of it. Oh shit, it looks like we might elect an anti-establishment figure that we don’t like, let’s cancel the election. But the truth is the election had been manipulated in a big way on social media. Georgescu’s assertion that he spent “zero lei” on his campaign was quite clearly a lie. And his credentials that I mentioned before – that’s he’s a scientist with a PhD – are probably made up too. Invalidating the election may have been cack-handed, but in the short term at least, Romania has dodged a major bullet here. Since I arrived here, the country has been moving, albeit slowly and unevenly, in the right direction. It is less poor than it was eight years ago. It came very close to throwing that progress away. By the way, Romania and Bulgaria have now been fully admitted to the Schengen area. That will mean that I won’t have to queue at the border to get into Hungary, whether in a car or on a bus or train, and more importantly, trucks won’t be held up for hours. There might still be checks until June; I saw contradictory information on that.

I had six maths lessons last week. In one of them I estimated pi using a round bowl, a tape measure and a piece of string. I got a value of 3.129, which was a lot closer than I expected.

The darts World Championship starts in London tonight. There’s a lot to like about the format, the colourful characters, and the fact that it takes place over the festive season. Last year I got fairly into it. This year I expect I’ll watch rather less: I really have to get the picture book finalised.

Autism - Films - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

Gradually, then suddenly (plus more pics)

December 9, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today I made another trip to Peciu Nou and Ciacova. (Pictures below.) The biggest benefit of having a car, after seven-plus years of not having one, is being able to easily see these beautifully rustic towns and villages. I rarely use my car to get around the city; when I’m in a rush (to get to a lesson, for instance) I find that massively stressful, and my bike is just as fast anyway.

In recent months I’ve been reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s famous quote, when he said that he went bankrupt “two ways: gradually, then suddenly”. I’ve felt a gradual societal decline over the last decade or so, but lately the process has kicked into an entirely different gear. Perhaps I’m in a better place to feel it than most, because unlike most people, I’m not busy playing the game. I walked off the pitch a long time ago, and now I can sort of sit back and observe. From my vantage point, things now look very ugly indeed.

On a similar theme, a couple of months ago I discussed childlessness with Dorothy, who never had children herself. It was a hot topic in the US presidential campaign: vice president-elect JD Vance basically said that if you don’t have children, you don’t have a stake in the future of the country, or I suppose the world. I imagine that’s quite a popular viewpoint: if you have kids, you care more about future generations. But if you think about it for five seconds, you’ll realise that it’s actually bollocks. Most parents aren’t really that bothered about the success of future generations; rather, they’re extremely bothered about the success of their own specimens of future generations, which isn’t the same thing at all. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that; it’s simple human nature to want your own kids to succeed. But maybe that means that if you don’t have kids, you’re able to invest in future success in a more dispassionate way.

This weekend I watched a two-part BBC documentary on autism. Presented by the British naturalist Chris Packham (who revealed his autism diagnosis a few years back), Inside Our Autistic Minds showcases four autistic people, all under 30, though all very different. One of them is the son of Ken Bruce, the radio DJ, who is highly intelligent but non-verbal. Chris Packham teams up with animators and other creative people to produce short films to help illustrate their autistic lives better. Very well done (Britain tends to be really good at this stuff), though I’d have liked one or two of the participants to have been older. Naturally I compare myself to these people. On more than one occasion I thought, I’m more extreme than you. When it comes to avoiding social situations and generally keeping out of people’s way, I’m pretty damn extreme.

Yesterday many parts of the UK were buffeted by storms. When I got back from my lessons in Dumbrăvița I tuned into the match between Barnsley and Birmingham, thinking it might have succumbed to the elements. But no, it was on. At times the corner flags were near-horizontal, such was the wind. The first half was mostly uneventful. Barnsley dominated the early stages of the second half and took a deserved lead, only for Blues to hit back immediately with a screamer from Jay Stansfield. Later Barnsley had a player sent off for a second yellow card, and then Stansfield scored what proved to be the winner for the away side. Barnsley were a bit unlucky not to at least get a draw. Thanks to the copious added time, the game was still going on when my online lesson started. I make it the fifth time already this season that Blues have come from behind to win a league game. That’s a lot.

Two weeks ago, or was it three, I decided to self-block YouTube, thinking all those videos are a huge time-waster. I only applied the block to weekdays, but I’m finding I have no desire to watch it at weekends either.

I hope that in the coming days I’ll take delivery of the batch of books I’ve ordered. I’ve missed having a good book to read.

Here are today’s pictures from Ciacova. I’m not sure how that Cadillac ended up there. The guineafowl (bibilică in Romanian, plural bibilici) were all tightly bunched in a corner before I disturbed them.

Family - Photos - Politics - Romania - Writing a book

Good news about the books, an un-election, and some pictures

December 8, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I see I somehow neglected to mention my meeting with the publishers, so here goes. It was a weird meeting with the mother and daughter that lasted all of two hours. The mother likes to talk. She’s a French teacher, and sometimes she even switched from Romanian to French. Like I said, weird. At the beginning I was presented with a print-out of both the picture book and the A-B section of the dictionary. I started to comment on the picture book – for the love of God, don’t stretch or squoosh Dad’s illustrations as you’ve done here – before zooming out to the big picture. Before we start talking fonts and formats and stuff, can you assure me that this book, I mean these books, are actually going to see the light of day? The answer was yes, which was by far the most encouraging thing in the whole meeting. I was worried that everything Dad and I had done to this point might be in vain. It seemed EU funding will pay for a large chunk of it. (Of course, this is Romania, so until I actually see the books in print I can’t be 100% sure of anything.) Sometimes I struggled to articulate – in Romanian – what I wanted to say, but we managed to flesh out some important details. Surprisingly, I’m in charge of the layout, not them, and I agreed to a deadline of 15th January to get the small book sorted. This won’t be an easy task because the pictures won’t all be the same size, they’ll need varying amounts of explanatory text, and so on. We agreed that both books would be in B5 format, roughly 7 inches by 10, though the picture book will be landscape and the dictionary portrait. I have no plans for Christmas, which means I’ll have time to spend on the books.

Yes, Romania, where you can’t guarantee anything. Even whether elections actually happen. On Friday they (Romania’s supreme court, I think) invalidated the first round of the presidential election, less than two days before the second round was due to take place. (In fact, overseas voting for the second round had already begun.) This was a major shock. A couple of days earlier, documents were made available that showed that Putin supporter Călin Georgescu had been hugely promoted, probably by Russia, through algorithms (and money) on TikTok, which is Chinese-owned. The re-run of the election probably won’t happen until March, and it’s unclear if Georgescu will be allowed to run again. Last weekend’s parliamentary elections are still valid as far as I know, so presumably Klaus Iohannis (the current president) will stay in place, with the new parliament, until March. But really, all bets are off.

I spoke to my parents this morning. Mum had her shiny new crown. She described the space-age process of X-rays followed by scans from every angle that enabled the crown to be 3D-printed. None of this business of having to bite into a mould; it’s all cutting-edge stuff. The price is cutting-edge too. I could see a lovely painting of Dad’s which they’d hung in the kitchen; it was of the fruit and vegetable market in Cambridge. We discussed my brother, who has been pulling out every imaginable stop to complete his latest assignment for his master’s. Master’s. Where on earth has this motivation come from? He called me during the week for help with a spreadsheet. Luckily I spent quite a few years dealing with spreadsheets in a previous life. Only six weeks until I’ll be getting a niece.

I had four lessons yesterday – two English, two maths. Matei wanted to talk about the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a gargantuan American health insurer. Delay, deny, defend: that’s apparently what was written on the shell casings. Matei said that his death was being celebrated all over TikTok. I suggested that celebrating the brutal killing of someone with a wife and family who was just doing his job isn’t really OK, even if the company is as parasitic as the one he headed. But at least this has shed a light on the unforgivable state of US healthcare and insurance. Unfortunately I suspect it will all just blow over like everything else in America. It’s headline news for a week or two, but ultimately nothing happens. Just think of George Floyd. Or the numerous school shootings. Or the 2008 financial crisis where the big banks got bailed out as people lost their homes, and people shrugged their shoulders. They just put Trump back in, after all.

Last Sunday I went out for a spin, visiting Peciu Nou, Cebza, Petroman (which isn’t far off my online name) and finally the decent-sized town of Ciacova which its cobbled streets and square. My brother called me while was in Ciacova, so I gave him a bit of a tour. I still hope one day he will visit me in Romania. After getting off the phone, a dog bit my leg, completely out of the blue. He or she (I didn’t pay attention to that) didn’t draw blood, otherwise I’d have seen the doctor.

On Sunday evening I went into town and saw the parade of army men with torches, for the national day celebration.

I sent this picture of Peciu Nou to Dad, who wants to turn it into a painting. He wanted to see the other side of the street, so it looks like I’ll be making another trip there.

Cebza

Petroman

Various pictures of Ciacova

40 kg piglets for sale

No trains have been down this track for a while

National day celebrations. Eight years ago, this was all so new and exciting, even though my feet froze.

Maths teaching - Politics - Romania

A manifest danger

December 1, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s 4:35 and daylight is fading on the last day before winter officially starts. I’ve only had a pair of two-hour lessons today: my 90-minute maths session with the 11-year-old girl got cancelled. I’ve still got one online session to come. Matei wanted to discuss the presidential election with me this morning. Regarding the ongoing recount, he said he thought they’d “put Marcel Ciolacu through” to the next round, overturning the original result in which he was pipped by Elena Lasconi for second place. This comment amused me. Put him through? Is this what Romanian elections are like? A kind of X-Factor, instead of, you know, checking the votes to see who has the most? If the process is above board (big if here I suppose), whoever was ahead originally should win after a recount more than 50% of the time. That’s just basic probability. Like most people, Matei doesn’t have a great handle on probability. His fancy new graphical calculator has random functions where you can toss coins, roll dice, or draw cards. But they aren’t random, he said, pointing to the clusters of heads or threes or spades or whatever. I tried to explain that clusters are exactly what randomness gives you. (His calculator functions in fact aren’t strictly random – it’s impossible to make such processes truly random – but they’re indistinguishable from being random.) A course on probability and statistics would be more practically useful than what we’re actually doing. Matei had been following the election pretty closely, but he said he’d never even heard of Georgescu beforehand. That gives you some idea of how a big a shock the result was. The subject has come up quite a bit this week. At my school we have to learn English, German and French! Soon you might be learning Russian too.

This recount is a logistical pain: there are 9.4 million votes including those from overseas. (Just 98 votes were cast in New Zealand.) The second round is supposed to happen a week tomorrow, and right now we don’t even know whose names will appear on the ballot paper. If the recount does put Ciolacu in second, I don’t know what would happen; he’s already said he won’t participate. Would Georgescu then win unopposed? That wouldn’t go down well. If Ciolacu decides to run in the second round after all, then Romanians have got (as I see it) two total disasters to pick from. Tomorrow we’ve got the parliamentary elections, so it’s all happening. I went through Piața Operei on Thursday night as I came back from a lesson. A protest was starting up. A small one, but who knows where it might lead.

Last time I said that enshittification had been named Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The Cambridge Dictionary gave the honour to the verb manifest. There’s nothing new about manifest as a verb: things can manifest themselves in all sorts of ways. What’s new though is that people are now using the verb transitively: you can now “manifest success”. In other words, achieve success by pure force of will. Maybe if I did that I wouldn’t be the irredeemable failure that my 23-year-old student said I was. This manifesting sounds like total woo-woo to me. Woo-woo is sadly on the rise; astrology is booming, for instance. It goes with all the social media-fuelled conspiract theories. None of this will end well.

Another thing I’ve noticed about the young women I teach: many of them have no discernible sense of humour. As I said last time, it’s like you’re communicating with an AI tool. My Romanian teacher said on Tuesday that Georgescu’s very limited sense of humour is a bad sign. I see what she means.

Tomorrow is Romania’s national day, which should mean a parade of military and emergency vehicles. How it will pan out on a Sunday morning, when so many people are at church, I’ll have to see.

A lovely piece on a Romanian news website today. How Europe is preparing for World War Three. From Poland’s Iron Dome to the awakening of an old military giant.