Month: October 2025

Family - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Scrabble - Writing a book

AI: soon there’ll be nothing left

October 30, 2025 by 0 Comments

This will be a quick post. There just isn’t a lot of news. At this time of year, work tends to dominate. This morning I met up with Dorothy and another friend for coffee. Among other things we discussed the books. What happens how, if anything? Someone Dorothy knows said that AI might render books like mine obsolete. If that’s the case, maybe all books with an educational purpose are becoming obsolete. Or possibly even all books, full stop. And films and music and visual arts and the list goes on. Teachers too. Why am I even writing this now? It’s not like anyone ever read it even prior to ChatGPT. (Even before the AI boom, I endeavoured to make my teaching as manual as possible, with handwritten cards and pieces of paper glued together. People seem to like that. They appreciate the effort that goes into making it all. Obviously online sessions are a different story.)

Dad currently has an exhibition running in Geraldine. He sent me a wonderful photo of him and Mum in the gallery, with a number of his paintings in the background. Mum in particular looks great. I’ll have to print it out and put it in a frame along with the others in the living room. Last time I heard, nothing had sold. It’s partly sign of the times, and partly that the woman who runs the gallery has jacked up the prices to beyond what anyone apart from wealthy farmers can afford. And maybe that paintings are being made obsolete by AI.

Mum was telling me about the horrendous weather they’ve been having up and down the length of New Zealand. From what Mum said, the damage it’s done has been close to Jamaica levels. Here we’ve been doing much better; we sat outside for coffee this morning and were baked in sunshine. When I spoke to Mum this morning, she was about to watch New Zealand play Australia at netball.

I’m in a break between two maths lessons. The first was with that 17-year-old girl who has now got a pretty good handle on her maths. I fear though that in 10 or 15 years’ time she’ll be such an awful boss that many members of staff will quit as a result. That’s if jobs as we know them haven’t completely been replaced by AI by then.

Scrabble. I’m currently on a winning streak of ten games. I’m trying to keep abreast of the three-letter words while simultaneously learning sevens and eights as well as a few fives that contain high-value letters. Not an easy task for me.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Spelling it out

October 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s a dark, dank, windy Friday here. Tomorrow night the clocks will go back, meaning any final summery vestiges will be officially gone. I got up later than usual this morning; I woke up in the middle of the night and went into the living room where Kitty was being particularly affectionate. In fact, she’s chosen to clamber and walk over me, blocking the screen, as I attempt to write this. She’s purring loudly. This is all a far cry from when I first got her. Back then, she was unfriendly at best and positively evil at worst.

On Tuesday night I talked to my brother about his ambitious golden wedding plans for Mum and Dad, even including a blessing at the church. When I told him what I thought, he said I was being overly negative. “I’m not annoyed with you, but I just won’t talk about it anymore.” Actually, you are annoyed with me. I wouldn’t want to fall out with him over something like this. (Normally if he and our parents disagree on something, I end up siding with him, but not this time.) Thankfully we moved on from the subject and reminisced about our childhood Guy Fawkes nights. Yesterday I talked to Mum and Dad. It was pretty clear what they thought of the golden wedding business. Nice in theory, but wholly impractical. And I said to my brother, what even is negative about a simple meal with just the immediate family? Dad even said that after travelling halfway around the world, it would be another bloody thing that we could do without. That’s assuming they come at all.

Dad has been renewing his passport. He got an email back from the British authorities with a name change form attached. Huh? He’d misspelt his middle name on the application form. He’s also been trying to get a new gravestone made up for his mother’s grave in Wales. When the stonemason was about to get to work, Dad realised (or more likely Mum did) that he’d misspelt his mum’s name. He’s almost certainly dyslexic, though kids weren’t diagnosed back in his day. Thirty years later, my brother was diagnosed as having dyslexia, but wasn’t given much in the way of help. Yep, you’re dyslexic, now deal with it. Things have moved on since then.

Loosely on that theme, I had some annoying cancellations yesterday, though they allowed me to play Scrabble last night. It was a good session for me: five wins out of six. The first game was the tightest. I’d built up a healthy lead, but with the bag empty my opponent had great tiles including a blank. He (or she) would clearly find a bingo to end the game. I made a low-scoring play to offload as many of my tiles as possible – not a bad idea sometimes, but here there was higher-scoring play I should have made, even though it kept more tiles. It was easy to spot and I had plenty of time, so there were no mitigating factors. After my opponent went out with a 77-point bingo, I scraped home by five points. I noticed he could have scored 82 with a common word, leading to a draw, so I was lucky to still win after my blunder. In the second game I lurched from one crappy rack to the next and unsurprisingly lost, but then I won the next four games. One play of note from my side was the opening move of UMIAK. I’d learnt a few useful Q words including UMIAQ which is a boat used by Eskimos. It has an anagram of MAQUI which is a kind of shrub (with edible berries) found in Argentina and Chile. I was happy to remember that UMIAQ could also be (and is more commonly) spelt with a final K instead of the Q. (The dictionary tells me that there are seven valid spellings: OOMIAC, OOMIACK, OOMIAK, UMIAC, UMIACK, UMIAK and UMIAQ. How you’re ever supposed to remember this stuff, I have no idea.)

On Monday there was a huge outage that knocked out a whole load of Amazon services. Whenever I hear about such things, my initial thought is great. (I don’t use Amazon. Not intentionally, anyway.) I’d love to see the whole rotting tech edifice, dominated by five or six behemoths, come crashing down. The only sad thing about the episode, and it is a big one, is that it took out the payment system for Amazon staff at the same time.

It’s a light day today with just three lessons. Tomorrow I hope to catch up with Dorothy who has just got back from a trip to Greece, and also Mark. Maybe I’ll play squash with him on Sunday.

Family - Life :) - Photos

Golden no-go

October 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

At the weekend my brother messaged me about Mum and Dad’s upcoming golden wedding. It’s under six months away, on April 10th. He thought we should make a big thing of it in St Ives. But there are all kinds of reasons why that just ain’t gonna happen. For one, it’s unlikely they’ll be over in April. Heck, they might not be over at all. Then there just aren’t the people anymore. Most of the guests at Mum and Dad’s wedding are no longer even alive. It’s been half a century! There’s practically no family even. Simply put, it wouldn’t fly. Literally: Mum’s aging relatives in New Zealand are hardly going to make the trip for it. I think my brother still has fond memories of Mum’s parents’ golden wedding in 1989 when we just happened to be in New Zealand. And why not? It was quite the family occasion. All seven children and 18 grandchildren were present; there were uncles, aunts, cousins, you name it. Temuka was pretty much taken over by it. Stuff happened in the church, at St Joseph’s Hall, and best of all at the Tea Pot Inn (three words) where the fifty-odd (maybe more) of us had a celebratory meal.

On Saturday I had my usual maths session with Matei. He told me he’d been offered a university place at Bremen in Germany, assuming he gets the grades. Exciting for him. When he’s flown the nest, his parents will move Bucharest where they lived until 2016 when they moved to Timișoara for work. So after nine years, it looks like my time with Matei (and his family) will be at an end.

My cousin took part in the “No Kings” anti-Trump protests in New York state over the weekend. He’s not massively politically motivated, but that shows you the critical mass that has (at last) built up.

On Friday there was a huge gas explosion in a Ceaușescu-era tower block near Bucharest that killed three people including a pregnant woman. The disaster has since dominated the news.

Yesterday I took the car to Lake Surduc, and hour and a bit from here. Hardly a soul was there. The weather was just about perfect and it the autumn colours made for some nice scenery. Unfortunately there’s no way of walking around the lake unless you’re prepared to trudge through forest, which I actually did with Mark (and his dog) 3½ years ago. The lake is pretty close to that beautiful spot where I stayed with my friends from St Ives even further back. I came back via the town of Făget.

Topolovățu Mare, on the way to the lake

Lake Surduc

Făget
Dreams - Language teaching - Music - Politics

14/10/15

October 14, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s ten years since I started this blog. If I hadn’t decided to radically change my life at that point, I might not even have made it this far.

Last night I had another strange dream. Mum had to see a lawyer – a rich and powerful woman – in connection with one of the flats in St Ives. The only snag: this lawyer didn’t speak a word of English, only Irish. Her son Sam did the job of interpreting. After the meeting Mum described the lawyer as “the most horrible woman I’ve ever met”.

Dreams are so often a summary of the previous day. I’d had a late online session with a new guy who knew very little English so the whole lesson was conducted in Romanian. In an earlier session we discussed phrasal verbs and I gave an example of someone collecting their son from school. Sam was his name, of course. I explained that you can pick Sam up or you can pick up Sam, but when you use a pronoun instead of the name, things change. You can pick him up but you can’t pick up him.

I’m slowly getting over this cold, but I’m still low on energy. Outside my lessons but inside my life, not a lot is happening. I meant to say that the Moldovan parliamentary elections took place at the end of September. Maia Sandu’s pro-EU party won handily. That was a relief. In other news, Jane Goodall, the eminent primatologist and a thoroughly good person, died two weeks ago at the age of 91. Her love for primates was sparked a young age when she was given a stuffed toy chimpanzee.

Dad recently sent me this video of a Tiny Desk concert featuring the band Big Thief. It dates back to the early days of this blog, when Obama was still president. It’s excellent. My favourite Big Thief song (that I’ve heard so far) is Double Infinity, although Grandmother gives it a good run for its money.

Life :)

Only the basics

October 12, 2025 by 0 Comments

Six days ago I picked up a cold and I’ve been on go-slow mode ever since. I’ve managed another 31-hour teaching week but that’s all I’ve managed. Wash, cook, feed Kitty, give my lessons, but everything else has gone by the board. Today I’m taking things as easy as possible before my five lessons tomorrow. (Kitty makes my lack of energy seem even more acute.)

Because I haven’t been feeling well, there’s not a lot to report. Trump didn’t win the Nobel peace prize. I’ve been reading about butterflies losing their bright colours to better blend in with their environment which is doing the same (ugh) and how the internet is becoming crappier by the minute thanks to enshittification and AI slop. This morning I watched a YouTube video from the brilliant RobWords about the (badly named) NATO phonetic alphabet. The familiar Alfa Bravo alphabet is extremely well designed. My brother must have used it extensively; I remember he once he described someone with undesirable olfactory qualities as having a Bravo Oscar problem. Another time I remember trying to use the NATO alphabet when ordering flowers after my uncle Mick had died. I wanted to include a message. “Sorry, is that Mick or Nick?” Mick, I said, with an M as in Mike. Adding a third name didn’t exactly clarify matters.

My parents are generally good, though when I last spoke to them they were reeling from a strong nor’wester. The forecast here is set fair for the next few days. Plenty of sun, with highs in the mid teens. Pretty much ideal.

Cat - Dreams - Family - Scrabble

What dreams are made of

October 6, 2025 by 0 Comments

Last night I woke up three or four times during the night. Each time I went back to sleep, I resumed a weird and unpleasant dream. This dream started off with me running late for a meeting – I first had to walk to collect my bike – and then when I got there I found it wasn’t a meeting but a game in which everyone was in teams except me who was on my own. The game consisted of a number of physical puzzles to solve. While the others were busily solving these puzzles in their teams, I was getting absolutely nowhere and wanted to escape. The game morphed into some kind of meal. I was on my own again at a table which I knocked over. I then lost my bike. My mother appeared out of the blue, then disappeared. The meal turned into a party in what seemed like student accommodation. Plenty of food was involved. I enjoyed the food but otherwise hated the experience. A power cut allowed me to escape the packed room with food in my pockets. I found an empty room and ate alone until the others located me, to my embarrassment.

There has been a huge shift in the weather in the space of a few days. It’s like September and October have been ripped from the calendar and we’ve lurched from August straight to November. At the weekend Dorothy went to Păltiniș, a mountain resort not too far from Sibiu. She sent me pictures of the (rare) early October snow. In Timișoara we had major downpours last Friday and Saturday. The sun has hardly shown itself.

Last week was an exhausting one. My 31 hours of teaching were nothing too unusual, but the scheduling became a real pain with messages batting backwards and forwards constantly (I felt my batteries being further depleted with each one) and one 17-year-old girl in particular being annoyed that I couldn’t see her at a time that perfectly suited her. Saturday started off in inauspicious fashion when Matei’s father invited me to “take off my clothes”. Matei’s dad doesn’t lack confidence when it comes to speaking English, even if he makes plenty of errors. (The cause of that rather amusing error is that the singular Romanian noun haină means a coat, while the plural haine means clothing in general.)

I worry enormously about my parents. So often they look drained when I talk to them. Dad hasn’t slept. Mum has the weight of the world on her shoulders. On Tuesday they both looked so bad that I guessed something really terrible must have happened to them or to a friend or family member. But no, it was the usual stuff – the tangled web of tech problems and their flats in St Ives. Dad mentioned that the property manager for one of their places had just changed, leading to no end of issues. He later emailed me to apologise for mentioning that. God no, Dad, there’s no need to apologise – your problems are my (and my brother’s) problems too – but I’m much more concerned about the effects they’re having on you and Mum than on the problems themselves.

Yesterday I called Mum and Dad from my car. I was in the village of Bucovăț, which is only a short drive from Timișoara. I’d parked next to a farmhouse which had a large gaggle of geese – dozens of them – outside. I got out of the car to show my parents the geese when a burly bloke asked me what the heck I was doing. Six dogs soon appeared. I told Dad that I was getting flashbacks to New Zealand when I was a kid. Dad was taking pictures of a farmhouse at Hanging Rock when suddenly the farmer levelled his gun at us all. At some point in our conversation, Dad said “shuffling tiles like in Scrabble” and I mentioned that I’d played two games the night before. I also said that I learnt that “hikoi” was a valid word. This was a bad idea: they both said that the inclusion of Maori words is ridiculous. I then countered that it isn’t so simple. “Kiwi” is obviously fine, so where do you draw the line? What about weta? Or weka? By the way, hikoi also functions as a verb, so the rather strange-looking hikoied and hikoiing are also valid Scrabble words.

I played seven games in all over the weekend, winning six. As is often the case, it was my loss that taught me the most. My opponent, who had a higher rating than me, simply knew more words. His (or her) opening play of ZAFTIG scored over 50 and though I competed well, I fell to a 474-423 loss. My losing score was in fact more than I managed in five of my six wins. In the last week I’ve been concentrating on committing the three-letter words to memory.

When I talked to Mum and Dad on Tuesday, I said half-seriously that they should get a cat. Though she was hard work at the start, having Kitty has helped calm me down.

Family - Music - New Zealand

Some ups and downs from NZ

October 1, 2025 by 0 Comments

When I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning, they both looked dreadful. Stress (or more like dispair) was etched on their faces. I wondered what had happened. Just the usual stuff. A mixture of tech going wrong (and getting beyond them) and all the business with their flats in St Ives. The toll this is taking on them is very heavy and I wish it didn’t have to be that way.

I spoke to my cousin in Wellington on Sunday. You could see from her face that she’d had a tough time of it, though she never discussed her cancer treatment. Mostly we talked about cats (they adopted a cat for a time; it got stuck and they had to dismantle the kitchen to extricate it), then moved on to her three sons. The eldest (23) is now in Sydney doing a PhD. The youngest (17) plans to become a policeman. And what about the middle one, aged 20? He’d been suffering badly with mental health problems – my cousin said he was almost admitted last year, having dropped out of university after one term – but now works as a paramedic for Wellington Free Ambulance. The new job has helped him immensely, as you might expect – that sort of job is high up the satisfaction scale. When I later spoke to my parents, they told me that they’d seen a picture of him with long pink hair and (according to my cousin’s younger sister who lives just outside Timaru) he may even transition to a woman. Mum said his mother wouldn’t let him do that. Mum, hello, he’s 20.

After that I spoke to my aunt and uncle who moved into their new place in Geraldine a few months ago. (Well, I mostly just spoke to my aunt. My uncle, who used to let his opinions be known on all manner of subjects, doesn’t say much these days.) The move has been a resounding success, even if it’s been disorienting at times for my uncle. We talked at length about my parents’ property mess and how they might ever escape from it.

I’m very glad to have the saga of my flat in Wellington behind me, but I feel sorry for other owners who are still caught up in the ludicrous earthquake-prone nightmare. Finally though some common sense has seen the light of day, and thousands of buildings are being removed from the list. I suspect that my place would have still been in the firing line: it was on six floors and in a prominent location, close to the war memorial. What will happen to those who have already spent a fortune on strengthening I have no idea. I don’t suppose they’ll get any compensation.

Another major fire on the news this morning. A hotel near Ploiești, about 40 km from the capital, was completely gutted. Two young female Nepalese workers were killed. Just two weeks ago the hotel had been closed by authorities for not having adequate fire protection, but reviews have appeared on booking.com since then. The hotel, which was six years old but looked much older to me, didn’t comply with any building regulations.

A couple of songs. First, Jet Airliner by Steve Miller Band. Everything about it is great, including the intro. (They also produced a radio-friendly version with no intro and “funky shit” replaced with “funky kicks”. Yeah, you’ll want to stick to the original.) It’s worth watching the video too, for all the pictures of Boeing 707s. Watching it make me think how confusing the modern world must be for someone like my father who grew up at the dawn of the jet age. All these exciting possibilities stretched out before us, and somehow we’ve ended up with this. The other song came on my car radio on Sunday. It’s Stand By Me by Oasis. I was never a huge fan of Oasis, but this one which came out in ’97 is rather nice.