Month: December 2025

Family - Life :) - Music

A quiet Christmas

December 26, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s been a very uneventful Christmas Day which I don’t mind at all. The living room looks halfway decent now so I attacked the bathroom. Then I made a salam de biscuiți – well two of them, actually – and a salată de boeuf to take to Dorothy’s tomorrow. I’ve had a lot of Merry Christmas messages with a couple of Marry Christmas ones thrown in. No Mary Christmas ones yet, but there’s still time. A bit earlier I had a chat with my neighbour Elena who is still in Canada bit will arrive back in Timișoara on 9th January.

I haven’t spoken to my brother today, though we had a chat last night. I imagine it’s pretty full-on for him, with his son now three and a quarter and amped all of a sudden by Christmas. Mum and Dad had a stress-free Christmas Day which I’m very happy about. They had dinner at Mum’s older sister’s place in Timaru; my cousin, her husband, daughter and son were also there. My cousin is simply a nice person with a great family, so that would have made everything way easier. My parents had been invited to go out somewhere on Christmas Eve, but Mum did something out-of-character (and utterly brilliant): she said no. She had stuff to do for the church and desserts to make for Christmas Day and all the rest of it, so hats off to her for uttering that very handy two-letter word.

Another of my twenty cousins, the one who lives in New York state, is over in New Zealand with his wife. Just before Christmas they went to Stewart Island with my cousin’s parents. My uncle is 84 and is suffering from memory loss, so I’m not sure what the trip would have been like. My cousin is a keen golfer and recently got a super-rare two on a par-five, known as an albatross. Holes-in-one are ten a penny when compared to an albatross. I’m impressed he was even able to drive the ball far enough to reach the green in two. Yes, I have exactly twenty cousins, just two of whom are on my father’s side.

Yesterday I ended up watching a YouTube video about the 1996 Ethopian Airlines flight that was hijacked. Not long after the plane took off from Ethiopia, three men stormed the cockpit (as you could do in pre-9/11 days) and attacked the pilots with an axe and a fire extinguisher. They beat up the co-pilot, then ordered the pilot to fly to Australia, which was impossible – the plane didn’t have nearly enough fuel for that. Eventually the plane ran out of fuel and ditched off Comoros Islands, near a beach resort. The ditching was spectactularly caught on amateur video – whoever shot the video initially thought it was some kind of air show. Fifty of the 175 people on board survived, including both pilots. I had no recollection of this incident, even though I could remember two other crashes from the same year.

On Monday when I was at Mark’s, they had some music playing. I can’t remember who, but I commented that it sounded rather like Tracy Chapman. Mark’s wife then put on all of her first album, which I much appreciated. I never imagined she’d be a fan. Today I’ve been listening to a few Christmas songs including Chuck Berry’s Run Rudolph Run which I don’t remember hearing before.

I’m still a bit hazy about Dad’s health. Mum’s too, to be honest. Dad told me he was disoriented when he flew his model plane last Sunday. When the plane is flying away from you instead of towards you, left becomes right on the controls and vice-versa. He said he was momentarily confused with that, even though he’s been flying these planes since the late nineties. I can see worries about my parents’ health dominating large chunks of 2026.

Family - Life :) - Music - Scrabble

The game is rigged (and a health update)

December 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

Firstly, Dad sent me a video entitled How to Get Rich. It’s a must-watch. The game of accumulating wealth is increasingly rigged against young people (and even not-so-young people) unless they happen to have rich parents. And upsettingly (and “coincidentally”), people’s self-worth became synonymous with wealth in the eighties, just when the rigging clicked into overdrive. My solution to the rigged game was to walk off the pitch entirely, and I say that as as someone who does have well-off parents, if not exactly rich ones. Honestly I gave up chasing wealth in my late twenties, well before I even thought about living anywhere near Romania.

I spoke to Dad on Sunday night (Monday morning over there). Mum happened to be at the supermarket. Dad looked terrible. He felt dizzy and spoke of an attack of some sort, less than an hour before we spoke and just before Mum went out. His symptoms sounded akin to a mini stroke. While we were talking, Mum came home looking as happy as Larry. She asked me why I looked so worried. Dad later emailed me to say that he and Mum had managed to go for a walk, which was good to hear, and other than that he’d spent the rest of the day working on a painting in the studio. Mum, for her part, hasn’t been great either.

I’ve been on a go-slow today. I just felt so tired. Yesterday I only had a single two-hour lesson and then had a Christmas dinner of sorts in Dumbrăvița with Mark and his wife. Our last one – they’re moving back to the UK, probably in June. Mark, who (unlike his wife) enjoys cooking, made a risotto, while I brought over both my leftover cottage pie and a salată de boeuf I’d made earlier in the day. We had some interesting conversation, a lot of it (inevitably) about teaching because we all do so much of it. Mark’s wife at one point commented that eating out in Romania has got so much more expensive, saying she’d recently been out for sushi with one of the other teachers; it cost the equivalent of £80 each. What?! I said that I’d never spent eighty quid on a meal out in my life, which was certainly no lie. Unexpectedly, the three of us ended up playing Texas Hold ’em poker. Mark busted out early, then his wife won heads-up against me. Really I just wanted to get home by that point.

Scrabble. I’m back playing the Romanian guy again. He says he wants me to play real-life Scrabble. There’s a tournament in Cluj (which is where he lives) in February. Just weeks away. Playing serious Scrabble over the board would be a pretty nerve-wracking experience for me. Top players don’t just put down words, they also do admin stuff like tile-tracking so they can later figure out the endgame, which is something I’ve never done because when you play online that’s all done for you. Plus I might just be too busy for something like that. I’ll have to think about it. Overall I haven’t done badly in the league this time around. I had two surprise narrow victories (by ten and five points) which have certainly helped me.

I never mentioned the Bondi Beach shooting that happened last week, killing at least 15 people including a ten-year-old girl. I stayed at Bondi Beach in 2000, a few weeks before the Olympics, while my parents were living in Cairns. I think of Australia as being a safe haven of sorts, but it’s just as vulnerable to terror attacks as anywhere else; there have been a number in the last decade or so.

I heard that Chris Rea has died. He’s most famous for Driving Home for Christmas which is an excellent Christmas song, though I really like his Road to Hell and especially Auberge.

We’re losing pop and rock stars at a rate of knots now. It’s hard to believe that nearly ten years have passed since David Bowie died. Lately my go-to song has been his Sound and Vision.

Tomorrow will be my cleaning-up day.

Cat - Films - Life :)

The absence of people

December 22, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’m absolutely desperate right now to not see anybody. Gagging for the total absence of people, and as such, to recharge my batteries. From the 27th to the 31st I might have one or two online lessons, but apart from that I will not see anyone over that period.

I get about 95% of my recommended daily human contact from work alone. I hardly need anything else. Dorothy invited me to church today. Not just the service, but also lunch afterwards. That meant I had to make something. There would be people of all nationalities, so people had to bring something from their home country. I made something British – a cottage pie. As I was making it last night, I felt exhausted. Making sure I have all the ingredients, buying those few ingredients I didn’t have, then making the pie which nobody was going to bloody eat (let’s face it), then going to the service and the lunch and getting there and back – all in all it was nearly six hours. Six hours that I’ll never get back. During the service itself, I felt pretty out of place. And very tired. I ended up next to a large man who told me his first two names were Cristian and Emanuel. Very Christmassy, I said. “If there’s anything in Romanian you don’t understand, let me know.” “I’m sure I’ll manage.” Eventually we came to the sermon which of course was in Romanian. (At 80-something minutes, the service was shorter than I expected.) The moment the sermon ended, Cristian Emanuel asked me in English, “So what were the three truths?” Oh god, you’re literally testing me?! Don’t you realise that I’m simply going through the motions here? The food bit wasn’t so bad, but I was still dying to get away. The Australian woman was there. She’s virtually my age and incredibly now has a three-month-old son. We talked about Antipodean expressions. She brought a pavlova which was very good. It reminded me of all my Kiwi Christmases. (Well, Mum made a lot of pavlovas even when we were still all in the UK.) A young woman from Ethiopia showed me how to type in Amharic on her phone. They have an alphabet (or really a syllabary) that works rather like Japanese hiragana but with far more symbols (over 200), presumably because the language has a larger inventory of sounds than Japanese.

I got away. Earlier this evening there was the English conversation club which meant yet more talking. Yesterday the 17-year-old girl wanted her third maths lesson of the week with me. I was seeing Matei at ten, then I had lunch with the tennis people at one, so I agreed to meet her at four. I got back home with a few minutes to spare and the bell went immediately while I was having a pee. Oh jeez, give time to have a pee will you, and preferably make a cup of tea and feed Kitty too.

Water, a two-year-old cat and a laptop really don’t mix, as I found out on Friday morning, ten minutes before I was due to start a lesson. Kitty jumped up and knocked a glass of water, mostly over me and the sofa, but a small amount went over the laptop keyboard. I wiped the keyboard – surely it’ll be fine – and quickly got changed, then bugger. This keyboard really isn’t working. For a while the digits were stuck, then M gave me H and G gave me V and the space bar wasn’t working properly. It still isn’t quite right now. The forward and down arrows aren’t working, and neither are some of the keys on the numerical keypad, but at least all the normal keys (if you like) are fine. Maybe those other keys will come right after I next shut down. I have no idea how any of the circuitry, or what have you, works. What a pain though, and for a while on Friday I was worried I’d have a keyboard that was completely out of action – a huge problem when my work relies so heavily on it.

Scrabble. The latest round of the league started on Thursday. It’s tough. My opponents are just too good. They’ve played proper tournaments – nationals and even world championships in some cases. The top divisions feature a world-class line-up. Last time I was fortunate to eke out enough games to escape the bottom five, but this time I don’t think I’ll be so lucky. As well as the Romanian again, there’s a New Zealander in my division this time – she’s from Palmerston North – as well as some Australians.

On Friday I went with Dorothy to Cinema Timiș to see The Yellow Tie, a film all about the Romanian conductor Silviu Celibidache. A brilliant film, and I realised how lucky we now are to have these proper cinemas in the city that don’t necessitate going to the mall. The acoustics were great, which for that sort of film you absolutely need. And at just 25 lei, it’s frankly a steal.

This flat is a complete mess. Christmas Eve will probably be my tidying-up day. I’ve got nothing planned for Christmas Day. On Boxing Day there’s something going on at Dorothy’s place. Then after that all I’ve got planned is a whole load of not seeing people.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Music - Photos - Scrabble

Loads of lessons — time for a break

December 15, 2025 by 0 Comments

I took Kitty to the vet on Friday for her latest round of flea treatments and a general warrant of fitness. As I suspected after changing her food, she’d put on a smidgen of weight: according to their scales (which have 50-gram precision) she was exactly three kilos. She’ll always be a little kitty.

Last week was a very busy one with 35 hours of lessons. That’s a lot of contact time. A lot of talking. When you add in all the preparation, it was a pretty draining week. I’m now staring at my diary for tomorrow; after my early-morning lesson with the Romanian teacher I’ve got six sessions, finishing at 9:30 pm. I’m seriously looking forward to the Christmas break, in particular the days between Christmas and New Year when not a lot happens. This morning I bought an artificial Christmas tree from the supermarket. In some ways I’d have preferred a real one – I like their smell – but I had a look at them at the market and decided they weren’t really cost-effective for a single person. I’m glad I got to the mall this morning at nine, before it became impossibly busy for me. (Only the supermarket is open at that time; the other shops don’t open till ten.) I wondered what the heck was going on with the decorations you could buy in beige and other pastel shades. “Billy, I’ll put the oatmeal candy cane on this side just above the pale lilac Santa hat, and you can put the taupe reindeer over there. There’s a good boy.” Is it because it looks better on Instagram?

Mum and Dad went to Moeraki last week. They called me from outside the fish and chip shop in Hampden, which is the only place they can get a signal. They enjoyed themselves down there, as they usually do. Mum slept a lot. They plan to spend a few days there straight after Christmas.

My first round of the Scrabble league finished last Tuesday. To my surprise, I narrowly avoided relegation with a record of six wins and eight losses. That might not sound great, but I was delighted with the result. It all came down to my final game – with four of the five relegation spots already taken, it was a straight shoot-out, with the winner avoiding the drop. The correspondence format, where you often have to wait hours between moves, made for some nerve-wracking moments. I’d built up a handy lead in that last game but, partly thanks to my total lack of experience in these sorts of situations, did my best to blow it. My last two tiles were Q and J, and I could only play one of them. I decided to play the Q, but that allowed my opponent to play MEOW which a J play would have blocked. (I really should have seen that word.) He then played one tile at a time to maximise his score while I was stuck with the J. I just had enough of a buffer though, and I won in the end by 19. It’s possible they’ll rejig the divisions and I’ll be relegated anyway, and if that happens I’ll be pretty peeved – eking out those six wins took a real effort. The next round starts this Thursday.

On Friday I met up with Dorothy and another friend in town for coffee. And three-way Romanian Scrabble. The café has an upstairs bit, so we took the Scrabble up there. Our friend hadn’t played before, so despite playing in her native language, she wasn’t tuned into triple word scores and the like. In the end I won, finishing just seven points ahead of Dorothy. At one point I had a bunch of vowels and I queried whether AIOLI was valid in Romanian. Our friend asked the waitress about the validity of AIOLI. Unsurprisingly, this was met by a Huh?

A song I’ve been playing a lot in the last few days is John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels, one of his last songs before he was murdered.

It really does feel like time for a break.

Family - Language teaching - Music - Photos - Romania - Scrabble

December in Timișoara and being out of my league

December 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

A lot of stuff happens in Romania in December. The first of the month is the national day with all the parades of military and emergency vehicles. I wasn’t able to see the parade this time, but in the early evening I saw the bit where they march through the city carrying torches and stop every few minutes to sing the national anthem. A few days later there’s St Nicholas’ Day where all the kids get goody bags which always include a stick. Then on the 16th and for a few days afterwards there are commemorations of those who died in the 1989 revolution – that gets particular attention in Timișoara because it all kicked off here. Not long after that it’s Christmas, which is huge, though thankfully still not quite at the level of the UK. After a few blissful days it’s New Year’s Eve which is massive. As the clock ticks towards midnight, it’s practically impossible to move in town for people, as I found out nine years ago. (That was only my second night in my old flat.) Through it all and into January there’s the Christmas market which was very exciting to be among that first time with all the lights and smells. Though it seems far less exciting now – it all just feels normal – it’s actually got bigger.

On Saturday I met Mark in town, in the thick of Christmas market action. There were jazz Christmas songs booming from the stage. Things had all been rejigged to accommodate the extra stuff. We decided to get away from the chaos and go to Piața Unirii where the Museum of Banat was looking quite spectacular with all its Christmas lights. We tried a new restaurant. Predictably, it wasn’t worth it. It rarely is. One young waiter seemed to understand neither Romanian nor English. We sat there for over two hours and all I had was a burger and chips and two beers. Mark also had a dessert – some sort of pancake topped with a meringue which was supposedly some Banat speciality, though I’d never seen it before. I didn’t order a dessert and hoped Mark wouldn’t either because I knew it would mean sitting there for almost another hour.

I went to Ciacova yesterday – one of my favourite small towns around here – but the weather was pretty atrocious and I quickly came home. Other than that there’s not much news. Mum and Dad are currently in Moeraki. I’m glad about that because they manage to relax down there in a way they can’t at home.

Last week I had a session with a 25-year-old woman who said that making a lot of money is important to her. I told her that I gave up on that some time ago, and in fact I earned more at her age than I do now, 20 years later. She wants to move on from her job, not just in the pursuit of wealth but because she currently does shift work and the schedule is horrendous.

I had a difficult moment last week with a 17-year-old girl who in her last session with me made it clear that she didn’t believe in evolution. I find that hard, because to me evolution isn’t something you believe in any more than the result of two plus two is something you believe in. Anyway, on Wednesday night at close to eleven when I was halfway into bed, she sent me a message needing urgent help with an online test. At that time of night. Ugh. Reluctantly I agreed to help her. It was a 15-minute reading comprehension test that was part of the application process for an exchange programme in America. The problem is, her English level is well below what they require. She read the text and the possible answers to me but I struggled to understand what she was saying. If I’d had the text in front of me it would have been easy. In the end we ran out of time. I felt bad for her, but what could I do?

I recently joined an online Scrabble league. They split the participants up into eight divisions of 15 players each. I was put in the sixth division. It has a correspondence format in which you have to play the other 14 players in your division in 14 days. You get ten hours per move. Exceed that and you dip into a three-day time bank. If that runs out too, you lose the game. So there isn’t much time pressure. There is however significant pressure from my opponents who are mostly better than me, even in my lower division. You click on their profiles and they’ve played national and world championships, often with great success. So it’s a real uphill struggle for me. I’m currently on three wins and six losses, with five games still outstanding. Because this league is pretty new, they have an aggressive promotion and relegation system – five up, five down – so that people sort themselves quickly into the right divisions. It’s possible I can still sneak into tenth place and avoid the drop, but I may well end up being relegated. Though my play is sound strategically (I think), my word knowledge is my biggest handicap. As luck would have it, a Romanian player – one of the top-ranked English-language players in the country and a participant of two world championships – is in my division. We chatted in Romanian during our game. At one point he played cAEOmAS. Yes, using both blanks, as if he needed that advantage on top of all his others. I have no idea what that word means or how to pronounce it. I ended up getting stuck with the Q and he beat me by “just” 46. One of my other losses was by five points. My last play was MAN, and then my opponent went out with yet another word I didn’t know. I then remembered that NAM was also a word, and I could have played that instead. That would have given me four extra points, so fortunately it didn’t cost me the game.

On Saturday, the Beatles’ I’ll Follow the Sun came on the radio. Such a beautiful song, and all in a minute and 48 seconds. When I hear something like that (this song is from 1964), I always wonder how older people possibly manage in the modern world.

I’m trying to decide whether I can be bothered to get a Christmas tree. Here are some pictures of Timișoara in December:

The torch parade on 1st December

The Banat museum on Saturday night

Between the two market squares

Family - Music - Scrabble

Keeping the temperature down

December 1, 2025 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow it’ll officially be winter – my tenth in Romania. Winter has a nice cosy feel about it here, all the more so now that I have a cat. Yesterday it tipped it down all day – in my pre-car days I’d have got soaking wet getting to my lessons. We’ve had several days lately with highs of 3 or 4 degrees.

I had an hour-long chat to Mum and Dad this morning. It was all very civil, as if last Sunday’s awful call with Mum had never happened. In the meantime a number of emails bounced around between Dad and me. He talked of Mum’s thin skin, among other things. He said that I can be quite strong in my opinions, particularly when Mum is involved. I don’t think of myself as being opinionated or combative, and I don’t like getting into arguments – if I did, I’d probably lose students quickly – but I appreciate that he said that. In future I will do my best not to react, and to count to ten, even if I think she’s said something totally out of line. (The exception is when she asks me to lie to my brother about her or Dad’s health. I draw the line there. But even then I’ll try to react as calmly as possible. Easier said than done.) That was our fifth verbal bust-up since my parents came here in May, which is far too many. Dad said that over the years he’s learnt not to raise the temperature, as he put it. I totally get that – so often with Mum it’s already baking before you start – but wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a deep, meaningful discussion where you agree and disagree like grown adults? That literally never happens.

Some very good news on the Mum front. She’s been to see the doctor. Properly. The doctor was amazed at Mum’s lack of medical records. They didn’t even know if she’d had children. She was practically a blank slate. On Wednesday she’ll get a full blood test done. This morning she showed me her new vitamin D tablets that she’ll only take once a month. I didn’t know that was possible, but each tablet is 25 times the strength of the ones I take daily. I think Dad’s latest episode was a warning shot across the bow for Mum. They’ve both reached a kind of breaking point. If the apartment sale goes through (and because it’s England, you can never be 100% sure), I really hope that will take the edge off things.

My work week was busy enough, but it wasn’t quite at the level I feared. There were a few cancellations including one really annoying last-minute one. Tomorrow is Romania’s national day – a public holiday – but I’ve got four English lessons anyway, plus the Romanian one.

In the summer I bought a Romanian Scrabble set, and after my lessons yesterday I finally managed to play a game with Dorothy. I won by quite a lot, 392-215, but that was mostly because I drew a lot of high-value tiles which enabled me to score well. I also think my recent games of English Scrabble helped me to see moves over the board. Dorothy got both blanks which are normally a big help, but they came out late and the board was pretty blocked by then. It’s quite a different game in Romanian. The letter values and distributions are different: B is worth five points, G six, C only one. K, Q, W and Y aren’t there at all. There’s no equivalent of a super-powerful S tile: most words can take either an A, E or I on the end, and in some cases all three. Before I even came to Romania, I tried making Romanian words using an English set, ignoring the points, but yesterday’s experience was very different to that. Perhaps the hardest thing was the colour scheme for the premium squares which really messed with my head.

I also managed ten games of Scrabble in English this weekend, winning seven. I’ve just joined a league with a correspondence format – you need to play 14 games simultaneously in 14 days, so you get plenty of freedom as to when you play. It’s split into divisions; the top divisions have some very strong players, so I expect (hope!) I’ll be put in the bottom division. The league starts this Thursday, I think.

Lately I’ve been playing the same song over and over. It’s called Marz, by John Grant. I really liked the ethereal nature of the song and was intrigued by the lyrics. It’s all about a sweet shop called Marz that the singer frequented as a kid, so it touches on childhood nostalgia and that sense of wonder that you have at a young age. Marz is a great name for a sweet shop. I mean, Mars itself is the name of one of the world’s most successful chocolate bars, but then if you really want to attract kids, stick a Z in there. Z means fun and excitement. K has the same effect. Skool looks a lot more kool than school.

The Hong Kong apartment block fire has been all over the news in the last few days. It’s like seven Grenfells in one, with deaths in the hundreds. Utterly horrific. I was shocked to see bamboo scaffolding still being used. I’ve just had a look at other terrible fires that linger in my memory, such as one in a Honduras prison in 2012 (361 deaths) and one in a Bangladesh clothing factory in the same year (117 deaths). The following year a staggering 1134 people died in Bangladesh when a building housing several clothing factories collapsed. I’ve tried to avoid “made in Bangladesh” ever since.

On Friday I had a chat with Elena, the lady who lives above me. Yesterday was her 82nd birthday. She’s still in Canada and will be back her on 10th January.