September 2025 – plutoman.com

Catching up

September 25, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’m struggling a bit this morning with a cold. It’s possible I even have Covid. (Remember that?) There’s a lot of it flying around.

I’m in the middle of a catching-up-with-people period. On Sunday I had a Teams call with my cousin in New York state. His wife briefly came on the line too. We talked about our parents. His father (whose 84th birthday it is tomorrow) recently lost his driver’s licence after badly flunking a memory test. I’ll have a chat with him and my aunt tomorrow. On Sunday I plan to catch up with my Wellington-based cousin who seems to have recovered from her jaw cancer. I was very pessimistic about that, but I was just speculating; she didn’t tell anybody, not even her immediate family, what was happening, so I feared the worst. Last night I spoke to the lady who lives above me (she’s in Canada and will be until January) on WhatsApp. Then yesterday morning I got a very quick call from my parents who are in Moeraki. They said they’d been sleeping a lot, which is fantastic. Something about that place allows them to relax.

And that’s not all. Yesterday I went to the local produce market (which runs twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays) and bumped into Domnul Sfâra who I used to play tennis with. He’s now 90; he told me about all his birthday celebrations with friends. Though frail and diminutive, he’s still as sharp as a tack. I mentioned that I passed the halfway point to his impressive milestone earlier in the year.

I’ve had some interesting lessons this week. On Monday I had my fourth lesson with a 16-year-old boy. What different worlds we inhabit. The idea of visiting a local produce market wouldn’t even cross his mind. In fact I showed him some pictures of people eating in different places (this was part of a Cambridge speaking test) and he said he’d never had a picnic in his life and never intends to do so, opting for restaurants instead. I figured he’d been to more restaurants than I have, despite me being nearly three times older. (At that age even the word restaurant sounded so damn fancy to me.) We then talked about social media. I think he was surprised when I said that social media (an indispensible part of life for him – no, let’s rephrase that, it is his life) was the worst invention in the last 80 years. Or maybe he just thought, here we go, another old man yelling at clouds. He was also amused when I said I manage to avoid it pretty much entirely and have never even been on Instagram. But I’m utterly convinced of its toxicity. I’d love to nuke it out of existence. He said that any news he gets (which isn’t much) is via social media. How do you know it’s true? I just assume it is true, and even if it isn’t, I don’t care. And besides, what goes on in the world doesn’t affect me and I’m too young to vote anyway. That’s why you’re too young to vote. There’s been a push in some countries to lower the voting age to 16. (In Austria, for example, it is now 16.) Sometimes I think it should go up rather than down. Maybe it should work like driver’s licences and you get tested at both ends of the age range.

Kitty is now asleep on the sofa, on top of an open file which I’ll have to pick up before my next lesson starts. I often get envious of her life’s simplicity. She’s become a real positive in my life – a calming influence – as well as just part of the furniture. She’s a boon to my face-to-face lessons at home with kids; the majority of them like her being around. It’s all a contrast to the early days of Kitty when she was fearful of me, prone to biting at any moment, hyperactive, and a general pain in the arse.

Scrabble. I played two games last night. In the first I began with a blank but complete junk alongside it. I exchanged all but the blank and drew six vowels, giving me no sensible options other than to exchange again. Meanwhile my opponent hit bingos on his opening two turns, putting me 158-0 down. In the end I was able to score well, losing a high-scoring battle 505-441. Despite the loss I was happy with how I played. Then came the second game which was ridiculous. I obliterated my personal best score with a 650-253 win, slapping down five bingos. My play certainly wasn’t perfect in that game – at my level of experience, it’s never going to be – but hitting a mammoth total like that was encouraging all the same, even if it was the definition of a massive outlier.

Update: I’ve just taken a test for Covid and the flu. I’m negative for both. I still haven’t knowingly had Covid. Summer is properly over now; a run of unseasonably high temperatures (30 or above) came to a welcome end today.

Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Weddings: pressing all the wrong buttons

September 21, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. No real news there. A vicious storm had been forecast for their local area, but it didn’t fully bare its teeth. On Friday I spoke to my brother who was nonplussed after Mum and Dad failed to make a call or send a message for their grandson’s birthday. (He turned three last Monday.) And it’s not like they forgot; Mum, who has a good memory for such things, chucked some birthday money in his direction, but they consciously decided not to make contact. What gives, my brother wondered. They spent all that time with their grandchildren over the summer but now they simply don’t care? He speculated that maybe both Mum and Dad had been hardened at a young age by attending boarding school. Just throw money at him, that’ll do.

A video popped up on Youtube last week which is an absolute must-watch for anyone with a friend or family member on the autistic spectrum. It’s about how weddings are sheer hell on about a dozen levels if you’re autistic. (Honestly, they often aren’t much fun even if you’re not because of the eye-watering cost. And these modern “destination weddings” are the epitome of wastage and selfishness. I’m worth you all spending thousands each to fly to my wedding in sodding Tahiti. Sorry, you’re not. You’re really really not. And because you’re so selfish, it’s fifty-fifty that it’ll be all over within five years.) The guy who made this video (and is married!) has a great sense of humour, as you can see at the beginning when he struggles even to utter the word “wedding”. And oh god, the expectation to dance. Someone asked me once to name my three greatest fears and I said dancing, weddings, and dancing at weddings. He did make one big omission, however, and that’s just how triggering weddings are. All the time you’re thinking, this is something normal people do but I’ll never do – certainly not like this, anyway – because I’m not normal. I should mention here that my brother’s one on the army base in Plymouth was fine, but that’s because it was my actual brother and I was very happy for him. Even then, I wasn’t too disappointed to get back to the hotel room at around midnight.

After my lessons yesterday I played six games of Scrabble – three wins, three losses. I’m finding 50-point bonuses at a decent clip but am hampered by my lack of knowledge of shorter words.

Today I’ll take the bike to Padurea Verde (the Green Forest) where I haven’t been for ages. We’re getting incredibly warm weather still – we’re forecast to hit 31 this afternoon. When I get back I’ve got a video call lined up with my cousin in America.

Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

The land of no nod

September 15, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’ve got five English lessons today (two down, three to go). My next session is with a new student who wants to do the Cambridge exam. Having more work is usually beneficial to my sleep and mental health, but it doesn’t always pan out that way. I was pretty busy on Saturday with all my maths lessons, then after work I had dinner at the beer factory with Mark. (I just had a chicken salad, but he wolfed down a meat-heavy local dish in no time.) I thought I’d sleep well after that, but I was up most of the night. There was a lot of dark matter floating around my head. At one point I got up and read a Wikipedia article on suicide rates in people with autism. The next day – yesterday – was pretty much a write-off. I’d planned a bike ride but had to flag it. Last night I slept rather better, and that’s keeping my head above water today. Tomorrow I’ll see the doctor. It’s unusual for me to go through a rough patch at this time of year – September is normally a good month for me.

In this morning’s Romanian session, after running through a bunch of verbs beginning with D, we talked about some subjects pertinent to our time: how advertising sucks people in, and whether you can trust anything you read online. In our previous session we discussed travel. When asked to name the most wonderful place I’d ever visited, I quickly said Bali. It really was magical for a nine-year-old boy. If I asked my brother, he’d probably give the same answer.

I played three games of Scrabble yesterday. In one game I was accused of cheating. I was definately using an annagramer, my opponent said. He (or she, but it’s always he, isn’t it?) could do with using a spell check. I won that game (in fact I won all three, one of them by just two points), but it left a sour taste in my mouth all the same. There’s no incentive for me to cheat. My motivation is to become better at Scrabble in the long term, not to win random games against people I don’t know from Adam.

They’re about to work on the bottom of this handsome building near me. It’s been stripped back to reveal what used to be a tailor’s (croitorie). That hand-painted signage is very Romanian; 30 years ago it would have all been like that.

The blade sharpener at the market near me. The man in his fifties who runs this stall is usually pumping out Depeche Mode and other similar music from his era.

Update: I’ve just had that lesson with the new guy. Only 16, he’s the tallest student I’ve had so far; he’s got to be at least six-four. (Come to think of it the guy who lives in London might well be taller, but I only see ever him sitting down so it’s hard to tell.) His English wasn’t too shabby either. In fact he hardly put a foot wrong. Will I be able to teach you anything? He said that he’s been speaking English since he learnt to walk and he intermingles English with Romanian when he’s with his friends. Ah, you’re one of those. Cool and sophisticated young Romanians like to show off their coolness and sophistication by using a cooler and more sophisticated language, as they see it. We just talked for the first half of the session. Then we did some Cambridge “use of English” exercises and he met his match when he hit the challenging part 4. (Some of the reading exercises are challenging even for me as a native speaker because they’re gamified; I’m not used to playing the game.) According to my records, which could easily be wrong, he’s my 200th student so far. I don’t get new students at the rate I used to; my existing ones tend to stick around longer. I still remember my 100th which was in January 2020, just before Covid and long before I got a car. I took tram number 4 to the end of the line, then trudged all the way to this young girl’s house in Urseni for our first and only one-hour session.

Autism - Life :) - Writing a book

Feeling better, but the end of the line for the books

September 13, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

After a few days of feeling close to gone, I’m almost back to normal. That’s a huge relief. I still have to catch up a bit from being so exhausted and clumsy and disorganised – this living room is a mess, for instance – but at least everything isn’t totally unmanageable as it was two days ago. Tomorrow (Saturday) I have lessons from 8:30 till 7 with very few breaks; I was worried that would be impossible for me.

I spoke to the woman at the “publishers” today (the inverted commas are there for a reason), three and a half months after we sent off the proposal or whatever it is they call it. It wasn’t accepted, or rather it was ignored. Lack of funds, or lack of interest, or both. I don’t really care what the reason is, and anyway I’d have been surprised if the outcome had been anything else. I told her what I wanted to do next, which is not waste any more time. I might end up having a coffee with her and Dorothy, just to be polite and to put the final full stop to the whole thing.

I told Dad about this. After all, he’d done 25 brilliant illustrations for the smaller of the two books. Don’t worry, I enjoyed doing them, he said. And you’ve still got all the text and artwork. You might bump into a publisher. Seriously, bump into a publisher! That’s not how it happens at all, Dad. If there’s anything that living with (probable) autism for 45 years has told me, it’s that you don’t bump into anything. Not anything good, I mean; you’re more than capable of bumping into piles of shite. You might have bumped into a publisher, Dad, and in no time at all had royalty cheques zooming in from America, all ready to be cashed at the wonderful rate of a dollar ten to the pound, as it was in 1985. But that isn’t how things work for me. I think I may have mentioned that at an autism group. If you’re autistic, connections are hard to make. Chance meetings are rare. If you really want to change your life, you have to actively make the change, hard as it is, because nothing will fall into your lap. Changing my lifestyle involved moving halfway around the world to a country where I didn’t know anybody and spoke little of the language: the very opposite of bumping into it. Anyway, I will need to actively pursue publishers here; there’s no way around that. For one thing, the vast majority of Romanian publishers are located in Bucharest.

Cat - Life :) - Scrabble

Not too smart right now

September 10, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

I put on the TV this morning. A normal day in Romania. Another fire in an apartment block – this time nobody injured. A report stating that 30% of adult Romanians have no bank account. Then they dropped in on a factory that processes 20 tonnes of pickled cabbages a day. (Cabbage season has just started.) But nothing feels normal to me. Since Saturday night I’ve been stuck in the crawler lane. I’ve been sleeping poorly and constantly fatigued.

Yesterday was a case in point. My Romanian lesson started at eight and I knew I’d be buggered for that. I set my alarm for seven. As soon as it went off I killed it, intending to get up. I hadn’t slept well. Next thing I knew it was almost eight. No time for breakfast or even a cup of tea. The lesson, which overran a bit, was really a waste of time. Luckily I had no lessons until later. After a belated breakfast I knew I needed to pick up my bike which I’d taken in to be repaired last Thursday. The bike shop was five kilometres away. Walk or drive? I decided to walk, thinking the exercise could do me good, and there were a few things I wanted to pick up from the mall on the way back. The walk to the bike shop took me just over an hour. It took me past, among other things, the shaorma kiosk I frequented when I lived in town. Back then, a shaorma cost 11 lei. Now it’s 28. Yes, I’m putting my prices up for lessons again – I have no real choice. The repair – a new chain and a whole new set of gears – set me back 240 lei (£40 or NZ$95).

Then the mall. A bad idea when I’m so tired and I can’t face noise or bright lights. What I felt wasn’t far off what I experienced in a supermarket in 2001 when I’d just started taking medication for panic attacks. It struck me that most of what you find in a large mall like that is pure unadulterated shite. And these days a lot of it has an added sinister edge to it. A crypto ATM, for instance, with flashing surrounds. I’ve never even liked the Americanism ATM. The Samsung shop, if it was even a shop and not just a display, was even more frightening. SmartThings. AllOneWord. Start your SmartThings journey. In English, of course. The display included a smart washing machine and a smart fridge and a smart TV showing Aardman-like claymation figures watching their smart TV. Presumably there are people out there who want this stuff. There must be; I recently had a lesson in Dumbrăvița with an eight-year-old girl in their smart kitchen and she explained her mother’s smart electric cooker to not-very-smart me. Her mum was in the middle of baking something smart. I think I’d rather have one of those ubiquitous seventies gas cookers you saw all the time in New Zealand, the ones with the digital-dial clock. Similar cookers were made on a vast scale in Romania, all in a single factory in Cugir, 200 km east of Timișoara, not far from Deva. That factory also produced arms.

I walked past all of that crap – all I wanted was some bits and pieces from the Auchan supermarket. I found the tablecloth I needed, eventually. Next stop electric toothbrush heads. These aren’t cheap and I couldn’t find the price anywhere. They used to have barcode scanners dotted around the place but now people have become too affluent to even care… Look, this is too hard. Getting everything on my list will take me hours. I came out with only the tablecloth. At least its price will mean I’ll have change for the coffee machine once I negotiate the smart bloody self-checkout. A woman had to help me with the initial screen. The shops around the coffee machine were in a quieter area and not sinister at all. A dry cleaners’. A shop selling detergent. A place that does printing and medals and trophies. Then I went home.

This really isn’t great. What’s causing it I don’t know. It’s still pretty damn warm; today we’re forecast to reach 32. I hope I’ll be better when the temperature drops, but who knows, I might be low in magnesium or something. I’ll ask my doctor the next time I see him. At the moment I’d struggle enormously to hold down a normal job. (I have had spells like this while in a normal job. That was horrible.)

On Sunday I met Dorothy in town. We had a simple lunch, eventually – it took an age to get served. Nothing new there. But I was very happy to be eating inside especially on such a sunny day – I couldn’t face the brightness.

Some sad news from Dorothy. Her five-month-old kitten has died. She had a virus that she couldn’t recover from and on Friday she was put down. I hope that day she spent with Kitty (14th August) didn’t permanently traumatise her. You just never know. As for Kitty, she’s still going strong. You really notice your fatigue when you have such a bundle of energy around the place as Kitty.

I managed three games of Scrabble yesterday, winning two. In one of them I scored 527 – my highest since I got back into it.

Dreams - Photos - Travel: Europe

Czech and Poland trip — Part 3 of 3 (photos, and is it really worth it anymore?)

September 3, 2025

by plutoman 0 Comments

The night before last I had a weird dream in which I was forced to leave Timișoara and move to Cluj. I don’t know why the prospect was so frightening given some of the other moves I’ve made in my life. Cluj is a fine city; maybe I’ll go there with Mum and Dad if they come this way again.

It’s officially the end of summer. I don’t mind that one bit. (It got to 33 today all the same; I had to have a cold shower in the middle of the day after a bike ride.) This summer wasn’t in the same league as the infernal three months we had last year that just about did for me. A combination of the heat and the news made me feel that we were heading for hell in a handcart. A year later I’ve just about checked out of the news entirely; it’s got too much for me.

Moving to New Zealand in 2003 meant I missed out on a lot of potential travel opportunities in Europe. Now, with ever more globalisation and saminess and theme-park-isation, I wonder if it’s even worth it. It’s the differences that make travel interesting. Why not just look at the pictures while staying here? Here is more interesting to me than many popular destinations anyway, with all the funny little shops and bars and cafés. I’m reminded of an episode of Miranda where everyone thinks she’s gone on some exotic trip when in fact she’s booked into the motel down the road to avoid all the hassle. Then there’s the expense. On Sunday I played squash with Mark in Dumbrăvița, then we had pizza and beer at a place around the corner. He’d just got back from a seven-week trip (with his wife and their two dogs) around western Europe, all at unavoidably high cost.

I forgot to mention that I got a speeding ticket coming back from Slovakia. I was still in Slovakia when I was pulled over for doing 132 km/h when the limit was 110. (This was in the middle a short section when the limit dropped from 130. For the police it was like shooting fish in a barrel.) I expected the worst. When I got a fine of only €20, which I paid in cash on the spot, I was immensely relieved. I also think I might have got flashed by a camera in the Czech Republic at the start of my trip.

Here’s a selection of the pictures I took on my trip:

Firstly, Olomouc (which was lovely really) in the Czech Republic: