June 2025 – plutoman.com

Books - Films - Politics - Travel: Europe

As I go away, Mad Max is upon us

June 24, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’ll be off very early in the morning – I’ll call a taxi to the airport at four. From Luton I’ll take a coach to Cambridge, then a local bus to St Ives which will only cost £2. I should get to Mum and Dad’s flat around midday. As well as St Ives, I’ve got my brother and his family to look forward down in Poole, then a day trip to Birmingham. After the debacle of last August, I decided I couldn’t face another night at Luton airport, so I’m flying from Stansted to Budapest instead. My long-distance bus to Timișoara is due to get in at 1:30 in the morning. Not ideal, but anything beats a sleepless night at Luton.

I’d hoped to avoid family discussion of politics because it’s always so negative. (I yearn for the days when politics just “did its thing” in the background and we didn’t have the toxicity of social media.) But after the Iran strikes, it’ll be hard to dodge entirely. Dad and I had discussed the prospect just hours before it happened. No, Trump wouldn’t do that. He’s too cowardly and joining a war is altogether too much like hard work for him. But then he damn well did it, using bombs called MOP which could hardly sound more innocuous. His motivation is pretty thin and probably doesn’t run much deeper than, no-one’s given me a goddamn Nobel peace prize yet so fuck it, I’m gonna bomb the shit out of Iran. He just craves the attention, the fame, never being out of the news for one moment. The actual threat posed by Iran (or lack of one – who really knows) doesn’t come into it. I’d be shocked if any good comes out of this. What I do know is that international law is basically dead, the UN might as well be dead, American law is meaningless for someone like Trump, and democracy is teetering on the edge everywhere. I recently watched the 1979 Aussie cult film Mad Max for the first time to see what all the fuss was about; we really are rapidly descending into a Mad Max world. It’s all so scary. I just dearly hope that at least the UK and Keir Starmer stay well out of the war in the Middle East. Memories of the Iraq war are still fresh, even after 22 years.

Last night I saw a film with Dorothy at Studio cinema, one of the old theatres that has recently been reopened. We saw Kontinental ’25, a Romanian film set in Cluj very recently as the title suggests. The smart city, the city of the future, the city with a certain animosity between Romanians and Hungarians, they couldn’t have chosen a better place in the country for this sort of film. It was a damn good film, hilarious in parts, dark in others, and very thought-provoking. Unusually, the camera would often focus on somewhere in the city, perhaps an apartment block, for ten seconds or more. This was quite striking. Afterwards we went to Berăria 700 where we both had bulz. They’ve now opened three of Timișoara’s old cinemas, with two more on the way. One of those two is Dacia – see below for what it looked like last Friday.

I finished Wessex Tales on Saturday. It’s all set close to where my brother lives. The biggest town, Casterbridge, is in fact Dorchester where my niece was born. The name Dorchester sounds quite posh, doesn’t it? (My nephew was born in Poole.) I used to think Wessex itself was a made-up name. Come to think of it, I thought the name Transylvania was made up, too. Many people think Timbuktu and Kalamazoo are invented, but they’re real as well. (Timbuktu is in Mali; Kalamazoo is in Michigan.)

I’ve shown Elena what to do with Kitty. My biggest concern is remembering not to enter auto-pilot and lock my front door at the bottom. Locking it at the bottom would lead to an enormous mess that doesn’t bear thinking about.

This week, 15-year-old Romanians have their evaluare națională, a pair of pressure-packed exams (in Romanian and maths) that will determine where they spend their final years of school.

I hadn’t been to the communist-block-heavy Dacia area for ages. Shots like this featured heavily in that film last night. There are three “jocuri de noroc” (basically pokie machine) places in this picture.

China shop. Maybe you’ll find a bull in there.

Lugoj yesterday. The guy on the left was the steadier player and I imagine he won in the end.

Books - Cat - Family - Life :) - Music

Rubbing along and a simpler UK plan

June 21, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

Tomorrow is the longest day. Then it’s all downhill from there. Right now it’s a beautiful evening – I’ve just been down to the river. Only three full days till I go away. I’ve chosen a good time for it: a pair of ghastly 37s have popped up on the long-range forecast.

I’m grateful to Elena, the lady above me, for agreeing to feed Kitty. For a while I was cursing my lack of friends. After nearly six months, Kitty has become part of the scenery. Our start was somewhat rocky. She’d bite or scratch me, or cower in the naughty corner. She just wasn’t comfortable here. Combine that unease with her pent-up energy and she’d drive me to despair. Now she’ll sit beside me or on my lap, sometimes nuzzling up to me. She sleeps a lot more now than in the early days. As my grandmother would have said, we rub along pretty well together. I just wish she had a proper name. For some reason the Genevieve film came into my head this week – wouldn’t that be a nice name? – but she got saddled with Kitty, a non-name really, and that was that.

My UK itinerary has changed once again. My brother thought that going to London wouldn’t give us enough time to properly see him – he’s probably right there – so Mum (who is masterminding this) has deleted London from the schedule. Thinking about it, I’m glad. Meeting up in London but getting lost, phones not working, staying in shitty accommodation (they might not even have had fucking slippers), going to a show that may or may not have been any good, it was all a recipe for stress and falling out. Not worth it. It now looks like I’ll spend two nights in St Ives, then we’ll go down to Poole next Thursday. We’ll spend four nights there before returning to St Ives. A week on Tuesday I’ll catch an early train from Cambridge to Birmingham and spend the day there, which should be fun.

What other news? Well, the roof on the block opposite me has been replaced, and now looks pretty smart. We might get ours done too if all the owners can agree. The Praid salt mine, similar to the one I went to in Turda last summer, flooded last month, with disastrous effects both economically and ecologically. When I met Dorothy last Monday, I saw she had five copies of The Picture of Dorian Gray on her bookshelf. She happily lent me one to read while I’m away. (I’ve almost finished Wessex Tales.) And my colour printer is back in working order.

To give you some idea of how crazy simple things can be in Romania, I tried to get a copy of my front door key to give to Elena. Three useless keys and five trips to the key cutter later, plus waiting around for her to show up, I still haven’t got a spare key that works. Eventually she gave me my money back. (Luckily my front door has two locks, and I do have a spare key for the other lock which normally I don’t use.)

This week I took delivery of Tracy Chapman’s first (1988) album on vinyl. It’s one of my favourite albums, so that was cool.

Books - Life :) - Photos - Travel: Romania

Jimbolia and how tech is wrecking us

June 17, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

This time next week I’ll be meeting Mum and Dad somewhere in London, hoping that my phone works over there. You can never be 100% sure. Blame Brexit for that.

My hours are now dropping like a stone. The end of the school year has that effect when kids make up a higher proportion of my students than ever before. As always, this time of year means more trips to the market. The strawberries will be done in a few days. Stone fruit is now in abundance. Before I go away I’ll buy a few kilos of sour cherries to preserve in jars for the winter. (In Romanian, sweet and sour cherries are completely different words: cireșe and vișine, respectively.) Yesterday I met up for lunch with Dorothy at one of those basic but good Romanian places in her neck of the woods. I had quite a substantial meal: bean soup with bread, chicken schnitzel, rice, and mashed potato mixed in with spinach. The temperature had climbed to 30 by then. As always, she was unfazed by the heat while I was constantly looking around for shade.

On Sunday I went to Jimbolia (a fun name to say), a town of 10,000 people which sits close to the Serbian border. It was a typically Romanian town, mostly unmodernised, its wide main street lined with trees painted (as always here) white on the bottom. They do that, as far as I know, to stop the trunks from absorbing too much heat when the temperature quickly rises in the spring. The main street ends in the railway station, a border crossing between the EU and the wild exterior. The station was practically deserted, but to my pleasant surprise there was a toilet inside. In Romania this is a big deal. Those in Loo Zealand don’t know how good they’ve got it. (That’s just reminded me that there was a Lew Zealand in the Muppets.) Mostly I sat in the shade and read Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories by Thomas Hardy that Dad gave me. It took me a while to “dial in” to the late-Victorian English and obsession with marriage, which was the norm back then. (In Romania, it’s still kind of the norm now. I’ve got used to brushing off the “Why aren’t you married?” question.) The tales take place in towns and villages near where my brother lives, though the names are changed in the book. I’d hoped the stories would be more focused on the places themselves, akin to Wild Wales, but they’ve been worth reading all the same.

My lower workload will give me a chance to work on my other book, the one based on the bloke I played tennis with in Auckland. I hope to make some serious headway with that over the summer.

Last week I read this comment on AI:

AI is the latest con in a long line of charlatanism from the IT industry. Almost every promise made for how it would improve our lives has been a sham. The speed increase of communication has imposed insane pressures on people in the workplace. Social media has mentally damaged a whole generation. Society has become pornografied and every deranged whack job who previously would have had to stand shouting on a street corner has been given a seemingly respectable platform for their nonsensical hate filled tosh. No-one can read a map anymore – or spell – or write music – without pushing a button.

And now we have vast amounts of money being poured into a concept which is going to steal people’s jobs and just make us even more gullible and stupid. The worst part is being told that AI will solve climate change when in reality it is contributing massively to it! We don’t need a billion dollar computer to point out that we are consuming too much – we are just hoping that it will tell us how we can carry on doing it!

Think I’ll put my foot through the telly and go live up a mountain somewhere (if I can find one not swarming with bloody “influencers”).

I don’t think pornografied is really a word, but this commenter manages to be very funny and absolutely right (as I see it) at the same time. Social media has been profoundly damaging for people’s mental wellbeing. It has also catastrophically accelerated the hyperconsumption and each-man-for-himself “un-society” that started in about 1980. And as my student Matei (a big user of AI) said recently, we’ve now got AI on top of all of this, making us super dumb. (As for me, it’s instant messaging that’s the real killer. I turned off all alerts more than a year ago; it was the only way I could handle it. I couldn’t cope with being part of active WhatsApp groups.)

Here are some pictures of Jimbolia:

The railway station

I was met by goats outside the station

A compulsory charge of zero lei to use the loo doesn’t sound too bad. (It was once 2000 old lei.) But the loo had disappeared. Luckily there was one inside the station.

The main street, with the Catholic church on the left

The very centre. The statue on the left is of St Florian, who was venerated in Austro-Hungary, of which Jimbolia was a part at that time. (Jimbolia didn’t become Romanian until 1924.)

A monument marking 150 years since the 1848 revolution, also known as the Hungarian War of Independence, in which tens of thousands died. The plaque on the right uses the word “Pașoptiști”. That comes from the Romanian for forty-eight: patruzeci și opt, or patrușopt in quick speech. The suffix -ist (plural -iști) is used a lot in Romanian: IT workers are known as ITiști, for instance.

A WW2 memorial. The defaced plaque at the bottom is in German.

The Catholic church

Quite a handsome council building, I thought, even if it needs some TLC.

Family - Films - Language teaching

Getting on and a great film

June 14, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

Today is Mum’s 76th birthday. I’ll be down at my brother’s place for Dad’s 75th in two weeks. (Yes, my brother has managed to get a week off work so I’ll see him and his family after all. That’s great news.) I still can’t get over my parents being this old. They’re in great physical health for their age. I mean, Dad almost died 20 years ago when his aortic valve replacement surgery got complicated, then in 2019 he had bowel cancer. Mum is in excellent health too, even with her digestive problem which needs to be looked at when she gets back to New Zealand. They’ve been walking up hillsides in Romania and going for bike rides in the area around St Ives. They just seem much younger. But then I hear Mum calling the computer you have on the end of your arm a “telephone” and Dad calling a conflict that ended 80 years ago “the last war” and yeah, they’re getting on a bit. It’s a crying shame they can’t just enjoy this period of their life, being better off than about 95% of couples of their age both financially and health-wise, but after Dad gave his “resignation” speech at the pub round the corner from me, it’s clear there’s little hope of that. This affects my parents a lot more than me, but since I’m literally the only person on the planet other than Dad who sees how bad Mum can get, I sort of have a special relationship with him.

I’ve been thinking of how to “play” the time I spend with my parents in the future. My UK trip coming up should be fine. We’ll be on somewhat neutral territory. I can let Mum make most of the decisions and when we’re on a bus or a train I can keep quiet, maybe with my nose in a book. Then when we’re down at my brother’s, Mum – fake Mum – will be fawning over her grandchildren and everything will be sweetness and light. Next year will be a challenge, though. I plan to make a trip to NZ. Part of the trick will be minimising the amount of time spent in their house, which is where most of the stress and life admin lies. I hope they let me borrow their (non-electric) car. Then they might come to Romania, in which case I’ll want to simplify everything. Mum and I get on fine when we’re on our video calls, but when we see each other there’s always the potential for things to get really shitty.

Conclave. I watched it this week over two nights. What a film. Brilliant acting throughout. Thought-provoking at about a dozen separate moments. I loved Cardinal Lawrence’s (Ralph Fiennes’) sermon. There is indeed far too much evidence-free certainty and too little doubt in our world. But then the ending. Controversial and a big negative for a lot of people. Dad saw the film on the plane coming over last month, then spoilt the ending for me, not realising I hadn’t seen it. No big deal really – it was thoroughly enjoyable all the same. Then, showing his age, Dad had forgotten that he’d spoilt the ending when I told him I’d seen it. The film got a massive boost from the real conclave that took place just a few months after it was released. Some cardinals even watched the film to glean some tips before attending the real thing.

I’ve just finished my lesson with the boy who wants to be a farmer. He’s been getting 3 out of 10 for English at school. I can see why. (Normally in Romania they give you 4 just for showing up.) His lack of knowledge and interest makes an online lesson with him like wading through treacle. Towards the end, he went to the loo. He was gone for something like eight minutes, coming back with only a couple of minutes left. He lives in a village with clearly a healthy bird population.

I had a funny experience yesterday. Near where I had my lesson in Dumbrăvița (two hours with an eight-year-old girl), I stopped off at a big supermarket for a pee. Getting back on my bike, I ripped the front of my shorts, almost from top to bottom. Great. I tried to tie a knot in them to make it look less bad, but no luck. When I saw the girl’s mum before the lesson, I had my bag strategically placed in front of me. I was sat down the whole time during the lesson and the girl didn’t say anything.

That printer repair was on the verge of taking over my life before the courier came to take it off my hands yesterday. It’s become maddeningly hard to talk a real person. Let’s hope it actually gets fixed.

Good weather right now, by which I mean not too hot. I’ll go to the local produce market now, then I’ll give Mum a birthday call.

Family - Language learning - Tennis

Cuscri and tennis

June 10, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

Words for family relations vary wildly between languages. Sometimes there are different words for older and younger brother or sister, or maternal and paternal grandparents, and so on. Some languages have a an impressively vast array of family words compared with, say, English.

Romanian, like Italian, doesn’t distinguish between grandson/granddaughter and nephew/niece. Nepot can mean either grandson or nephew; nepoată can be either a granddaughter or a niece. That’s something I always have to point out in my lessons on families, which happen quite regularly.

On the other hand, the words for in-laws are more varied in Romanian than in English – there’s no equivalent of just sticking -in-law on the end. Here are the Romanian words:

socru – father-in-law
soacră – mother-in-law
ginere – son-in-law
noră – daughter-in-law
cumnat – brother-in-law
cumnată – sister-in-law

As you can see, there are two pairs here, but son-in-law and daughter-in-law are completely different from each other. By the way, all six words are totally different from the “-in-law-less” versions; brother (for instance) is frate, which is nothing at all like the word for brother-in-law.

Another oddity, from a native English speaker’s perspective, is that Romanian has a specific word for your son-in-law’s (or daughter-in-law’s) parents. That word is cuscri. I mention this because my parents just got a message from their cuscri inviting them to go on a Mediterranean cruise with them next year. Mum and Dad said it was the last thing they wanted to do, even assuming they come out this way again in 2026. They really wouldn’t want to go on that sort of cruise. I wouldn’t want to go on that kind of cruise. I wouldn’t want them to go on that kind of cruise. They’d hate it. When Covid hit, I hoped the cruise ship industry would be killed off for good – it does considerable harm to the environment and to people who live in places where they dock – but alas it’s come back with a vengeance. The ships are bigger than ever. If it was up to me, I’d simply ban cruise ships with more than 500 passengers, along with ambient music and ranges of paint with more than ten shades.

I thought I wouldn’t see much of yesterday’s tennis final because of my lesson. But not to worry – there was loads of it left once my lesson had finished. When I turned it back on, Alcaraz was about to break Sinner for the third set to trail just 2-1, but really the match (which lasted 5½ hours) was just getting started. The fourth set was where things got really mental. Alcaraz stood on the precipice, serving at 3-5, 0-40. He was almost gone. And Sinner certainly had his chance on at least one of the match points. Having missed his opportunity, he then dropped his serve easily and it was 5-5. After Alcaraz had Houdinied his way out of that huge hole, he dominated Sinner physically. He won the set on a tie-break and then grabbed an early break in the fifth. He started drop-shotting to good effect. Still there was another twist – Alcaraz was broken when serving for the match and Sinner came close to breaking again and avoiding the deciding tie-break. Sadly for him he failed to do that, and a few minutes later he was 7-0 down in the first-to-ten shoot-out which turned into a procession. The extremely popular Alcaraz won it 10-2.

The match had pretty much everything. Shotmaking, athleticism, determination on both sides, and sheer drama including an incredible comeback. It also made it pretty clear who the current big two in the game are; their rivalry at the very top of tennis could last another decade or more. In terms of all-time great matches, it’s got to be right up there. Maybe not quite at the level of Borg v McEnroe in 1980 or Nadal v Federer in 2008 because (1) the rivalry between the two players was less established than between those two pairs and (2) that final tie-break was a bit of a damp squib after a match of such brilliance. (Why did they have to tinker with the fifth-set rule?) I’d put it on a par with Djokovic v Nadal in the 2012 Australian Open, and that’s some pretty esteemed company.

Jannik Sinner was oh so gracious in defeat. I mean look, you were up two sets, three match points, you let them slip, you serve for the match, you get broken, suddenly all looks lost, then to top it off you come back right at the end in spectacular fashion but still fall short. How he handled the loss bodes well for the rest of his career. It’s interesting how many big comebacks in finals there have been at Roland-Garros compared to the other three grand slams. It could just be random chance, but playing on clay makes fatigue a greater factor. You can’t just rely on your serve on clay, so if you start to flag physically just a little, your opponent can really capitalise, even from two sets down. Plus, because serve is less dominant, any particular lead you may have within a set (a single break, say) is less safe.

There was some fallout from the women’s final following Aryna Sabalenka’s interview. Though it wasn’t as bad as some made out, she should have been more complimentary towards Coco Gauff who actually played pretty damn well.

After our Romanian lesson this morning, I met up with Dorothy for coffee in Piața Victoriei. I gave her half a pizza I made yesterday. It’s been cooler today, with a high of “just” 24. There has been a pleasant breeze all day. Dorothy said that she wishes it were windier in Timișoara. I feel the same.

Things have kicked off in Los Angeles. Who knows where this will lead. Possibly to civil war.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Bro no-go

June 8, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

This morning I played squash with Mark in Dumbrăvița. We just rallied rather than playing a game and it was good fun. Though we worked up a sweat we were in the indoor cool, which is a real bonus at the moment.

On Friday I had a chat to Mum about my trip to the UK. Mum’s idea was that she’d book a hotel in London for two nights and I’d catch a train from Luton Airport to meet her and Dad. On one of the nights we’d see a show. Great idea, I thought. The theatre is something they rarely do and I practically never do. Then we’d all go down to my brother’s in Poole for three days, taking us up to the 29th – Dad’s 75th birthday is on the 28th – before heading up to St Ives where I’d stay until 3rd July when I fly back from Stansted. Very well sussed out by Mum I thought, and I was keen to tell her that. But then Mum called me last night to say that my brother has to go to Portsmouth for work during that time, making it pretty much pointless to go down to Poole. So it looks like I’ll miss him and his family. I’ll probably book another trip to the UK in August after Mum and Dad have gone.

Before this morning’s squash session I watched a YouTube video by the wonderfully deadpan Patrick Boyle on American consumerism. He started by saying that in the last 40 years the average American has gone from buying 12 items of clothing a year to 68, an unimaginable number for me. But in the same time the average American’s expenditure on clothes in real terms has halved. People have this idea that being able to buy new jeans for ten bucks a pair is a good thing, when really if they’re that cheap something must have gone wrong. Consumer spending in the US is crazy though. I read that Americans buy 40% of all the world’s toys despite only being 4% of the world’s population. I find it sad that many Romanians see America as the holy grail – what they should aspire to.

I managed to see most of yesterday’s women’s final at Roland-Garros. Coco Gauff was mentally stronger than her opponent Aryna Sabalenka, and that was a big part of why she won a close match. Sabalenka dominated the early running and did eventually win a marathon first set in 77 minutes, but her unforced errors – a whopping 70 of them – caught up with her in the end. The men’s final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz is later today. I don’t know how much of it I’ll see because I have an online lesson scheduled.

Grand slam tennis isn’t immune from the saminess that permeates modern life. When I watched the French Open on TV in the nineties, I felt it was being played in a faraway land even though it was only a few hundred miles away. People were still smoking their Gauloises in the stands; it just looked and sounded wild compared to the lawns of Wimbledon. Now Court Philippe-Chatrier looks tame in comparison; it could be anywhere. There are also signs of dumbing down. The scoreboards now flash up “Ace” or “Balle de set”, when I’d have thought sophisticated Parisians wouldn’t need to be informed like that. That sort of thing is fine in New York, accompanied by the waft of hot dogs, but it’s out of place in Paris.

I noticed on the official Roland-Garros website something called “excitement rate”, a percentage which goes up and down during a match. Near the conclusion of yesterday’s final it reached 97% with a burning flame alongside the figure. I mentioned this to Dad who thought it was silly because it depends on who’s watching: the average Serbian will get more excited during a Djokovic match than the average Spaniard, for instance. But it clearly isn’t measuring that: it’s a measure of how crucial the upcoming point (or maybe few points) are based on the current situation in the match. At 8-8 in a deciding tie-break there’s way more riding on the next point than at 6-3, 6-2, 4-2, 40-15, and hence far more “excitement”. I still think it’s silly though for a whole raft of reasons. One, “rate” is the wrong word: it should be “index” or “level”. Two, “Get excited now!” doesn’t add anything. Three, I never saw it drop below 60-70% when it should be able to drop to practically zero; the “marketers” are never going to say their “product” is boring. Four, it’s really just a crappy way of promoting a data company, in this case InfoSys – I’ve seen these pointless promotional stats and indices in tennis for ages.

I had a funny online lesson yesterday with a boy who was keen to show me his farming simulator. He plays Roblox and Fortnite and Minecraft, but the farming simulator (which is in English) is his go-to game. He’s not the first boy I’ve taught who – refreshingly – wants to be a farmer when he grows up rather than a footballer or an online influencer. His grades in English are shocking, but this game is at least boosting his vocab in a specific area – combine harvester, enclosure, crops, slurry. It has given me ideas for future lessons.

Cat - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

A little rascal

June 7, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

Today I had a free morning, giving me the chance to cycle to Sânmihaiu Român before it got too hot. But really it was already too hot. I was sweating like a pig and jumped into a cold shower when I got back. The sweet smell of tei – or lime – has now taken hold. Not helping matters was another bout of sinus pain – though not as bad as the one before, it sapped me of energy as always.

Yesterday I didn’t start till ten – unusually – but it was a busy day. It started with a two-hour lesson with a lady in her late forties in which I partly took on the role of a shrink, then I had four more one-hour sessions with kids aged 10 to 13. One of them meant trekking across the city on my bike. In between I took Kitty to the vet to get her latest jab, then got my car back after getting the air con fixed. They put freon in it and also replace a switch that had been playing up. That was an absolute necessity and it only set me back 700 lei (£120 or NZ$260). I’ve also had the battery replaced on my laptop. It’s been a good week for that kind of thing. I’m still waiting for someone to pick up my colour printer which has packed in well within its guarantee. With only a black-and-white printer, my options with kids are limited.

It was interesting talking to Mum and Dad after their trip down to Poole. They really took to their granddaughter. Their grandson on the other hand is proving to be a real live wire. Super intelligent (my brother wonders how he could possibly be so good with numbers and the alphabet) but pretty conniving with it. My brother could be a pain in the neck at that age – I can remember – but there was never any malice in him. So watch this space, I suppose. My brother has been extremely good with his son when a lot of fathers would lose their rag. They were relieved to get back to St Ives and not have to do very much for really the first time since they left New Zealand. (I’d wanted their time in Romania to be a relaxing one, but it didn’t quite pan out that way.)

When my parents were with me, Dad sometimes said “I don’t know how you do it” in relation to my work. He thought it was surprising that I have a job that has a large social element when socialising has never been easy for me. To be honest, the sheer amount of talking I have to do can be exhausting. Sometimes I’m not even talking in my own language. But the social aspect isn’t too bad – it’s hardly going to some packed trendy bar where socialising is the primary goal, I rarely have to interact with more than one or two people at a time (I’ve always been terrible in large groups), and I’m safe in the knowledge that after 60 or 90 or 120 minutes it’ll be all over. And I’m actually helping someone in the process, which is something most humans derive satisfaction from. The social side of an open-plan office is far, far harder for me, even if it involves less actual talking. So much fakeness and playing the game. And don’t get me started on Christmas parties.

It looks like Elena, the lady who lives above me, will feed Kitty during my nine-day stay in the UK. Dorothy just happens to be acquiring a kitten in the next week or two, so that wasn’t an option. I was worried that I’d be forced to find a shelter for her. As for my planned road trip to Poland, I may well end up taking Kitty with me. That thought made me think of the song Me and You and a Dog Named Boo by Lobo. It was a number-one hit in New Zealand in 1971 and they’d sometimes play it on classic hits stations. It makes life in those days seem pretty simple.

Off-the-pitch football news. Birmingham City’s already ambitious plans are going gangbusters now. They plan to build a 62,000-seater stadium in the middle of a sports quarter with transport links to the city. Potentially this could be huge. Blues are already a big club in terms of support – it’s a big city after all – but on the pitch they’ve been very much in the shadow of Aston Villa. This massive investment could turn the tables. They’ve got one trump card up their sleeves that Villa lack – having Birmingham in their name. A successful Blues team could really put the city on the map, giving it a real shot in the arm, as well as revitalising a pretty impoverished part of it. I just they hope they don’t totally down the Manchester City route; I stumbled upon one of their home matches on TV recently and I switch it off – I couldn’t handle the sheer scale of all the advertising.

Continuing the football theme, I had a dream on Tuesday night about a Championship (second-tier) club that lacked decent support or even a decent song. As a joke a supporter composed a song: “Keep the cat flying along” (whatever the hell that was supposed to mean; I think it was a mishmash of other football songs) that ended up becoming not only the club song but a major hit.

I’m currently watching the Roland-Garros semi-final between Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic, though it’s uncomfortably hot in the kitchen where the TV is. Sinner took the first set 6-4 and Djokovic leads 3-2 (on serve) in the second. There was an extraordinary point early in the second set in which both players scrambled to reach near-impossible balls. The winner will play Carlos Alcaraz in the final.

On Sunday I’m playing squash with Mark, and maybe his wife too.

Family - Life :) - Photos

Here we go again… and some trip pictures

June 2, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

After spending a week at my brother’s, my parents have now made their way to St Ives.

It’s officially the first day of summer, meaning infernal temperatures are just around the corner. This coming Saturday we’re forecast to nudge the mid-30s. That’s still some time away so it could be several degrees out. In either direction. The air con on my car stopped working properly during the trip with Mum and Dad. No big deal at that point, but if I don’t get it sorted (maybe it just needs a top-up of freon) my car will rapidly become unusable.

Today we hit 28 degrees, the warmest day of the year so far. It was supposed to be my first relaxing day since my parents left, but I had sinus pain – not that absolutely crippling pain but bad enough all the same – that didn’t go away until five, after which I felt washed out and weary. I did manage to get through a lot of Brave New World, though.

Yesterday was the deadline for the book “project” submission. There were so many hoops to jump through, understandable in a way, but it made the whole thing (as Dad put it) a slog. I wish I could have gone through a conventional publisher. While I was having lunch in the park in Dumbrăvița between lessons, a 77-year-old man sat on the bench next to me. Unusually, it took him a while to determine that I wasn’t Romanian. He wanted to know what the British reaction to the Romanian election was. I said I bet it passed most Brits by entirely. (Not totally accurate, come to think of it. The re-run definitely garnered more attention than usual over there.) He said he was a retired Romanian and French teacher who had published 15 books. His “publishers” sounded rather like mine: glorified printers and not much more.

I had an earlier finish than usual yesterday so I met up with Dorothy at Berăria 700 for a light dinner. The weather was perfect for sitting outside. Among other things, we talked about Dot Cotton from EastEnders and forms of address for tennis players. She talked a bit about woke stuff, a subject that energises her much more than it does me. It’s funny – a couple of weeks ago I had a lesson with the 35-year-old guy who lives in London. He wanted to know why on earth all this trans rights (and related) stuff mattered so much. How is it even news, when so few people are affected? Yeah mate, you’re preaching to the choir here. I don’t get it either. It’s like deciding on what colour to paint the spare bedroom when your house is on fire. And that goes for both sides of the argument. Mark, who’s 54, said something similar last weekend, though he drew the line at calling individual known people “they”. So do I, honestly. The kind of singular they in “Always give the customer what they want” or “What did they say when you spoke to Barclays?” is perfectly normal to me because the person is unknown. “They wrote their first novel at 24” is something I can’t bring myself to say, however, and it takes me aback when I read it. That’s not for anti-woke reasons, but because the grammar of using “they” for an individual known person is just too jarring for me.

Another thing I forgot about our trip was the Romanian film Război în Bucătărie (War in the Kitchen) which we saw on TV in Sibiu. A really weird film, and one I wouldn’t mind seeing again.

Here are some pictures from the trip, as I promised last time. I’ve also included some of the unrenovated buildings near me. Mum said that give it ten years and they’ll all look pristine. That may well be true. But if that also means getting a KFC and bubble tea cafés and overpriced trendy ambient bars with everything in bloody English, I’d rather things stay as they are. Gentrification and saminess make everything deeply dull. I’m glad I arrived in Timișoara when I did, before all of that began to set in.