Month: January 2026

Family - Music

Priority C

January 28, 2026 by 0 Comments

Dad got a message back from the agents yesterday. The current tenants are still keen to buy. That’s a huge relief. Mum and Dad were down in the dumps, to put it mildly, after they hadn’t heard back.

With everything going on with my parents, and also my brother bringing up a family, anything I do here now feels of tertiary importance.

Just now I’ve been looking at flights from Budapest to Christchurch and back. It looks likely I’ll be going in the first half of August and coming back in the first half of September, but I haven’t booked anything yet.

While I was coming back from Lipova on Sunday, they had local (Banat) music programme on the radio. They played a doină, a traditional wistful song that at the time (as I was passing traditional villages) I felt was so beautiful that I pulled off the road to Shazam it. It’s called Omu-n Lume-și Știe Neamu by Traian Jurchela. It’s still very good now, but not quite what it was when I was bowling along and hearing it for the first time.

Family - Films - Photos - Romania - Scrabble

A profound sadness and some pictures of Lipova

January 27, 2026 by 0 Comments

So yesterday I spoke to my brother – only for five minutes, because he had to put his daughter to bed. Before that he gave his son a mug of something greenish-yellow to drink; my nephew asked if it was wee-wee. My brother had been talking to Dad: a rare conversation with only Dad – a rare encounter with the truth, in other words. “It’s depressing over there, isn’t it?” my brother said. Dad is worried about the sale of the flat. Worried about Mum’s health. Worried that his later years have been irreparably wrecked. My brother and I both expressed quite a profound sadness at it all. In the next week or two I’ll hopefully book some flights to New Zealand. It’s highly unlikely that Mum and Dad will make it to Europe in 2026 – perhaps they never will – and I know Dad would like to see me over there, even if Mum is probably indifferent to the idea. At least I can make the trip. For my brother it’s much harder. And he’s going through a tough time himself because my sister-in-law is struggling to cope with the kids and may (reading between the lines) be suffering from depression.

Yesterday I took the car to Lipova which is about 70 minutes away. I hadn’t had a decent drive for a while, but the snow and ice had pretty much melted, and even though it was an overcast day I thought, why not? It’s a pleasant, typical provincial Romanian town that sits on the substantial River Mureș. Not a lot was going on there on a Sunday morning. The architecture was nice, even if (as it so often the case) it was in need of some TLC. Because it’s provincial and time moves more slowly there, a lot of the eighties signage has still survived. I think you can eat there quite cheaply.

Today I achieved something quite remarkable: I managed to track down some NBT (normal bloody tea). Earl Grey in fact. Lidl only had three boxes of the stuff and I bought them all. Sixty tea bags, or a fortnight’s worth. A couple of weeks ago I saw Profi had just one box of NBT left. I didn’t buy it – it didn’t seem right to take the last box. A few days later that same box was still there – I could tell it was the same box because it had a dent in it – and I bought it. Early last week, with my supplies running low, I went back there to find an “out of stock” sign. On Friday I ran out completely. I even tried in Lipova, but no luck. I had the same problem when I arrived in Romania – after a month I finally found a packet of NBT which had a picture of Big Ben on the front.

I finished watching The Queen’s Gambit. The ending was a bit predictable, and in the end I found Beth Harmon a little hard to root for, but the series as a whole was a good watch all the same. I noticed that Harmon’s name appeared as XAPMOH in Cyrillic during her Moscow tournament. Hmm, that looks familiar. Oh yes, it’s an anagram of that Poxham name I came up with in my dream.

Talking of anagramming, yesterday I got accused of cheating in a game on the old site. Really that amounted to abuse; I may give up playing on there entirely and play exclusively on Woogles, the new site where the leagues are.

The Mureș at Lipova, with a handsome building looking out onto it

Surviving eighties signage

Umbrellas like in Timișoara, only they don’t take them down in winter, and patriotic park benches

Orthodox Church on the left (service in full swing), Catholic on the right, and an ex-market in the middle

I liked the hand-painted road signs. I remember when New Zealand used to have them.

This banister was amazing

The church at Zăbrani on the way back. Surprisingly, the clock was working.


Family - New Zealand - Romania - Scrabble

It may all fall through

January 23, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. There’s now the very real possibility that the St Ives flat sale will fall through. The prospective buyers haven’t been answering their phone. The system in England (but not Scotland) allows a buyer to pull out of a purchase right up until the moment you have the keys in your hand, and it doesn’t cost them a penny. In 2026 that’s simply nuts. This has caused my parents months of stress already, and who knows how many more months (or years) they will face. If the sale doesn’t happen, they’ll probably rent it out again. I can see them being stuck with the place until they’re 85.

Mum got her eye done on Tuesday. It’s clearly made a big difference, but she might never have 100% sight in that eye. There’s a buy-one-get-one-free offer over there, but under that scheme she’d need to wait till May to have the second eye done. She’s decided (to my surprise) to pony up the extra $5000 and get the other eye done next month. That now means there’s some chance that they’ll make a trip to Europe in spring or summer. I’d put it at 30%. Whether they do or don’t, I’m going to book a trip to New Zealand during my long, oppressive summer. Hopefully I can find a less roundabout route this time.

They’re had terrible weather in NZ, especially up north. I’ve seen the pictures of a landslide above a campsite; two people were killed and several more are missing.

Much closer to (my current) home, a murder took place on Monday in the village of Cenei, right next door to Bobda which is where I went on New Year’s Eve. A 15-year-old boy was killed by two other teenagers who then buried him in a garden. He may have been stabbed to death; the details are still murky. This murder has come up a lot in my lessons this week; the locals are understandably shocked by it.

Scrabble. I finished my latest round of matches with eight wins and six losses, yet again. I’m assuming here that my opponent in my last game logs in sometime before tomorrow afternoon (when his time bank is due to run out) to finish me off. This player is an International Master. I’m far from au fait with these accolades, but that clearly means he’s played at a very high level for several years. I thought I would beat him actually, but his final rack was much more flexible than mine and he was able to set himself up to play a sneaky word that I didn’t even know. This should mean that I’ll play in the same (sixth) division for a fifth straight round.

There have been some developments with the book which I’ll talk about next time.

Cat - Family - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Scrabble

The attraction of a cat

January 19, 2026 by 0 Comments

In family news, today is my niece’s first birthday. It’s also the eve of Mum’s cataract operation on her first eye. She’ll get the other one done next month. I think the bill for both eyes is around NZ$10,000, a staggering amount. In Romania it would cost a fifth of that. Mum is pretty dire need of this surgery (which only takes ten minutes per eye, though there’s considerable faff when you get to the clinic). Her eyesight was pretty terrible when I saw her last May and June, and has deteriorated further since then.

Yesterday was a reasonably busy day for a Sunday. The twins, whom I normally see at their place on Wednesdays, came to my place yesterday morning instead. They seemed to enjoy the lesson because they got to see (and play with) the cat. Kitty has been a boon to my face-to-face lessons at home. Later I met Mark for lunch at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. He tried a few words of Romanian with the waitress but she didn’t understand him. You can see why I hardly bother. It can be like that sometimes. It’s rare for a non-native to speak Romanian, so Romanians aren’t “tuned in” to imperfect, non-native versions of their language. That’s in sharp contrast to us native English speakers who hear imperfect second-language English all the time to the point where we don’t think anything of it, and it creates a barrier for anyone trying to learn Romanian. You have to reach a certain level before you can even cross the start line. The barrier has even been raised somewhat in my time here; Timișoara is fairly cosmopolitan by Romanian standards and as a result more and more people are gaining a command of English, so if you’re not careful you can find yourself dealing almost exclusively in English even after living here for years. That’s especially true of someone like Mark who works at a British school and lives a far more “expat” lifestyle than me. Our lunch was done and dusted in a very swift 50 minutes; quite often it’ll take you that long just to get served.

In the evening I went to Dorothy’s for our monthly English Conversation Club meeting. She managed to start it up again in November. There were ten of us, of whom eight were women. (Language learning – and teaching – can skew pretty heavily in that direction.) I had to cycle home, and by that stage the temperature had plummeted to −6. First thing this morning we were at −10.

On Saturday I had my first lesson with a seven-year-old boy called Noah. I don’t really like teaching kids that young, but he was very nice and our session went well. Unusually, he was happy to see me. (Most small children have a look of either puzzlement or fear on their face the first time I see them.) The name Noah is very un-Romanian; the Biblical Noah is called Noe in Romanian, while a final h is pronounced here with a guttural sound like the ch inloch.

In a recent conversation with Dad, he mentioned his decision in the late seventies to quit his job as an illustrator for the Ministry of Defence and go his own way as a painter. It takes a lot of courage to step away. As you also did, he said. It would have been so easy to have stayed where I was, he then said, rather than take that leap. Ah, I said, this is where we differ. The idea that insurance was any sort of comfort zone for me is laughable. I simply couldn’t have stayed there; it would have been dangerous to have done so. Staying there might literally have killed me; I had to leave. Moving to the water company was a useful stopgap – it got me away from a lot of that corporate toxicity – before I decided what I really wanted to do. (I was also several years older than Dad was when he made the move.) Talking of the corporate world, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comics, died of cancer last week. Those comics were extremely popular and funny; they did a great job of satirising office life and the practices that came to the fore in the nineties. Sadly in later life he became a Trump-supporting attention-seeking twat. (It’s quite possible he was always a twat, but only with the advent of social media did he gain an avenue for his twattishness.)

Scrabble. I’ve had three wins and five losses so far in my latest round of league matches, but my six outstanding games aren’t looking too bad. I’ve also got a decent tie-breaker this time if I happen to finish on the same number of wins as another player. There has been some controversy this time around as one player in our division has been kicked out, presumably for cheating. Before his expulsion he managed to beat me. Six of his matches were still outstanding, so I’m guessing his opponents in those games will be given walkover wins, but I don’t know if his earlier victims (including me) will be compensated in any way. Last week I had a crazy game on ISC, the other site. I put down a bingo only for my opponent to respond with the huge 158-point triple-triple TIDYTIpS, a word I didn’t know. (It’s a very pretty yellow flower found in America.) But a couple of turns later I put down BURTHEN (an old form of burden that I’d seen in books) for 97. A very close finish ensued, and eventually I won by a single point, 428-427.

I’ve just got one episode of The Queen’s Gambit still to watch. It’s been great so far. Obsession with something like chess can certainly drive one to madness. In addition to the story I’ve been enjoying the sixties music as well as the cars and decor of that time.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Taking a tumble

January 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve just finished my lesson with Matei. Not that Matei, the one who will have maths lessons with me for another few months until he goes to Germany, but another Matei, who wears gallons of after shave and will be doing a Cambridge C1 exam at some point. Kitty scratched me seconds before our lesson, so I had to get a plaster as soon as we started. We did reading exercises. One of them was about Olympic medallists who give motivational speeches at companies, after which the employees think, yeah, that was kind of fun to listen to but how will it help me in the slightest to do my job better?

Yesterday afternoon, when we reached our top temperature of minus 5, I went for a walk. Having got to the river (which was partly iced over) and turned for home, I took a pretty big tumble on the ice. I fell on my back and must have hit my head, though I don’t remember. I got up OK, but I was dizzy and felt absolutely terrible. I was winded and stood up against a window ledge for five minutes before feeling able to carry on. I walked the kilometre or so home very gingerly.

On Friday Elena (the 82-year-old lady who lives above me) got back from Canada. Yesterday she invited me up for coffee. She seemed to be coping extremely well with jet lag. I brought Kitty along; for whatever reason she wasn’t a happy camper.

Last night I had a 55-minute chat with Mum and Dad. They were about to make another trip down to Moeraki, and then on to Wanaka, to retrieve a painting that didn’t sell at an exhibition. I’m not sure any other paintings sold there either. I came away from the call feeling quite worried about Mum, whose digestive issues are still very unsorted, and coupled with all of that she’s now practically blind in one eye. She’s also been full of cold the last few days. She hasn’t been to golf for a while and yesterday she didn’t even go to church. From 11,000 miles away where I can do absolutely nothing, it’s all a bit of a concern.

Dreams - Family - Films - Music - Photos - Scrabble

Deep freeze

January 11, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s been bitterly cold. On Friday morning it was minus 16 degrees. As I write this at 9:30 on Sunday morning, it’s −9; the top temperature today is forecast to be −5. Yesterday, when we soared to the dizzy heights of zero, I had to drive to my two maths lessons in Dumbrăvița. The main roads had been ploughed of snow, so they weren’t too bad, but the side roads bordered on treacherous. It was also foggy on my journey out there. (I got all-weather tyres put on my car. A lot of people make a twice-yearly switch between summer and winter tyres, but it’s a real palaver that can take up an entire weekend.) I was very glad to get home. It’s all very reminiscent of my first winter here, nine years ago, when the river froze and there were icicles hanging from the building I’d just moved into. Kids under about 13 have no recollection of a proper winter, but winters like this – and even more extreme – used to be an annual occurrence here. The snow has got the young ones all excited, and we’ve got more coming in the next few days. Apart from driving which required serious concentration yesterday, I have no problem coping with these rather nippy conditions. There’s always something you can do to keep warm. Summer is a totally different ball game though.

On my trip to Dumbrăvița yesterday they played Crowded House’s Weather With You on the radio. A nice touch, assuming it was deliberate. The song immediately before that was Der Kommissar by Falco, which came out at the end of 1981. I still remember when their bigger hit Rock Me Amadeus came out in ’85. The night before I had a dream where I was hiking somewhere in Romania and met a younger British woman. For some reason she showed me an ID photo with her face on it. Her surname was Smith. She then told me she’d changed her surname to Poxam. I attempted to spell it, putting an h after the x, but she said it was H-less. Then she asked me if I’d like to come and see her in the UK, at which point I woke up. I wonder where I got that name from. Poxham is a plausible name for a British village. There is a Poxham out there, and in fact it’s a picturesque hamlet in Austria. The closest name I’ve ever had anything to do with is Moxham Avenue, the main street in the Wellington suburb of Hataitai. I once put in an offer on a flat in a Disney-style block there, but it wasn’t accepted.

Lately I’ve been tuning out of politics and international news. That’s just as well; what’s coming out of America would drive me to insanity if I paid close attention to it. However, the shooting – cold-blooded murder – by an ICE officer of an innocent mother driving her car in Minneapolis was too awful to ignore. America right now seems a lost cause. I sometimes laugh when I hear people intellectualising the president, using adjectives like transactional, when really it’s far, far simpler. He’s a piece of shit who cares for nothing but his own power and ego and has no respect for human life. He enjoys hurting other people. Most of the people around him are pieces of shit too. And 77 million people voted for that, with their eyes wide open. None of what is happening is a surprise.

Scrabble. The latest round of league matches is over, and just like last time I won eight and lost six. That vastly surpassed my early expectations – I had a pretty rough start. So that should mean I’ll stay in the same division for the fourth round in succession. Yesterday I played six games on ISC. I lost the first of them, then won four straight before being hammered 508-306 in my last game. In that game I drew terribly to the point where it was probably unwinnable no matter what I did, but I was still disappointed with my decision making. More generally, my word knowledge keeps letting me down. I’m still totally ignorant of a lot of very useful fours and fives, and even if I do know them, I’m likely to miss them because I haven’t played enough for my brain to properly “zone in”. Missing – or simply not knowing – these words has all kinds of knock-on effects. It makes it harder to sort out a bad rack, leading to lower scores (and fewer bingos) down the line. The tournament in Cluj is six weeks away, on 21st and 22nd February. I don’t know if I could realistically make that. It’s a four-hour drive so I’d have to go up the day before and miss some work. I was hoping there would be a sleeper train but there doesn’t seem to be. So far I’ve watched the first three episodes of The Queen’s Gambit which Mark recommended to me. I didn’t like the ending of the third episode – Beth’s stepmother really needed to tell Beth to “pull her head in” – but hey. So far it’s clear that however scary a Scrabble tournament would be, at least it wouldn’t be as bad as chess.

The last time I spoke to my brother, things weren’t easy for him. He said he’d like to take the kids camping at some point, but there’s no way his wife would ever go. She prefers cruises or Center Parcs (the name makes me shudder), neither of which are my brother’s cup of tea, and they wouldn’t be mine either. We had great camping trips as kids, and I’m sure my nephew would love camping. With my brother’s line of work, it would be right up his street too. And what’s more, they live in a great part of the country for it. Practically right on the coast, with the New Forest on their doorstep, and a quick hop over to France if they ever felt like camping over there. I hope my sister-in-law can be convinced.

Films - Other sports - Photos

The year has started all white

January 5, 2026 by 0 Comments

I had a tough start to the day with some pretty bad sinus pain. I’m fine now, but on the odd occasions when I get that (thankfully less often than I used to), I’m tired for many hours after the pain has subsided.

We’ve got proper winter here now. It’s snowed all day, pretty much, and all around is blanketed in white. Great for the kids who have bemoaned the lack of snow in recent years. The temperatures are forecast to plummet into the double-figure negatives late in the coming week.

Yesterday I called Mum and Dad, but I got a lot more than just them. My aunt and uncle (the ones who live close to my parents) were there, and so was my Wellington-based cousin – who has come through a gruelling two years of treatment for cancer in her jaw – and her mother. It was good to catch up with them all. Apart from lack of snow, their weather hasn’t been much better than mine. I did mention that I hope to get over to see them in August.

I watched the darts final last light. Luke Littler, still a teenager but the undisputed king of darts, basically thrashed Gian van Veen, the rather more cerebral Dutchman who at 23 is still very young. The match started out with great excitement. There were big out shots from both players at the beginning, then a tense and nervy deciding leg of the first set which van Veen won. Then Dutchman then went 2-0 up in the second set. Game on, as they say. But from there it was one-way traffic. Van Veen averaged 100, which is pretty damn impressive, but Littler averaged a whopping 106 and was always a step or two ahead. The highlight for me was probably the appearance of a wasp (not for the first time) that took some of the sting out of Littler just momentarily. The end came quickly, before I’d even finished grinding all the coffee beans; Littler’s 147 finish was the final flourish in a 7-1 win. By the way, the G in Gian van Veen’s first name is that guttural sound similar to a Spanish J. I knew a Gerrit and a Margriet – Dutch students from my time in France – and their Gs were pronounced the same.

Since my last post, Kitty has been great. She’s calmly sat on my lap without wanting to wriggle away at any opportunity. Let’s hope she carries on like this.

I can’t even begin to know what to think of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and capture of Maduro. It’s all beyond me.

My break from all those students is coming to an end. I’ll have lessons in dribs and drabs for the next two or three days, then bam!, it’ll be back to normal again.

Update: I’ve just spoken to my brother. It’s hard work looking after the kids. My niece has had a virus; my nephew is full-on whenever he’s not asleep. I think Christmas was probably tough for my brother – he spent a week with the in-laws, whom he gets on well with, but it’s just hard not being in your own home and having to look after the kids. Talking to him puts any issues I have with Kitty into perspective.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - New Zealand - Other sports - Photos - Scrabble

The Year of the Cat

January 1, 2026 by 0 Comments

It’s properly cold now. We’ve had flurries of snow both yesterday and today. When I went off to my lesson with an eleven-year-old boy – my 862nd and final lesson of the year if my records are correct – it was minus six. I drove, when normally I’d cycle. I took a detour after the session, and stopped for sandwiches at Bobda, a place I went to four years ago to the day, that time on my bike. It had just gone 1pm – midnight in New Zealand – so I called Mum on WhatsApp, thinking she may have already gone to bed in which case she just wouldn’t answer, but no, my parents were still up and about. They’d just seen the Sky Tower fireworks on TV. Sometimes they’d go down to Caroline Bay, but not this time.

This extraordinary Catholic church in Bobda hasn’t been divinum or nobiscum for quite some time

I got Kitty at the start of the year. She hasn’t totally wrecked my life as my parents predicted. She’s certainly much more comfortable here than in those first couple of months – the biting-and-scratching-and-cowering phase. But last night I thought, there’s still something off about you, Kitty, isn’t there? Your body is so damn tense all the time. Why can’t you just relax? Sometimes she’ll sit on my lap or I’ll hold her in my arms, but never for more than a minute or two. As I said, her body isn’t relaxed and she wants to wriggle away all the time. That makes it hard to build up much of a rapport with her, which is a shame. I’m trying to play with her more and may even get a harness so she can go outside. I hope that she calms down a bit as she gets older. Here’s Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat.

Kitty on Christmas Day

There are still seven hours of 2025 left where I am. I don’t think I can face going into town for the New Year celebrations where it’ll be rammed as Brits say, and any sort of party is out of the question. Spending less time with people over the festive season has been wonderful, and I don’t want that to stop for another few days at least. As for 2026, it feels like a very hard to predict year. There are so many imponderables both on a worldwide level and for my family. The business with their flat in St Ives, their health (which is often hard to ascertain), whether they’ll make it to Europe, so much is up in the air. On Christmas Day I mentioned to Mum that I’ll need to get round to booking some flights. She asked where to. When I said New Zealand, she seemed surprised. It was almost as case of “Why would you want to do that?” Wouldn’t it be really cool if she said, “That would be absolutely lovely.”

I finished the latest Scrabble league with a record of eight wins and six losses. That means I’ll be back in the same division for the third time running. I was pleased with how I played overall. The lady from Palmerston North was one of two weaker players in the division; they will both be relegated. The next round starts tomorrow. I thought if I’m ever going to play a real-life Scrabble tournament (against the clock and with challenges) I should at the very least try an online version, so yesterday I tried my hand at one that was run by someone in Sri Lanka, scheduled for eight games each. It turned out to be a shitshow. It was due to start at 11:30 am my time (3pm for the organiser; India and Sri Lanka are on a half-hour time zone, just like the central third of Australia and a few other places). But most of the entrants didn’t even show up. Blame the ridiculous registration process for that; one click and you were committed, with no way of backing out. The organiser delayed the start for half an hour in a vain hope that more people might present themselves, but they never did. Eventually I played a game. A good game it was too. My opponent drew fantastically and I lost by 50-odd – no shame in that – even though I successfully challenged off his play of DOUG which as I suspected is just a bloke’s name. In the second game my opponent played ANECDOTA. I’d never seen that word before so I challenged, but it was valid. A little while later he said he had an emergency. Could I cancel the game? OK then. Five minutes later the game restarted from the beginning. Emergency over, he said. What the heck is this?! He wasn’t a good player, he was quite possibly cheating, and he definitely seemed to be a complete dick. Thankfully I was able to beat him. In game three I played someone better than me but was fortunate in my draws and ran up a big lead; despite my best efforts to blow it, I hung on to win. Then the organiser mercifully called a halt to proceedings. If real-life competitive Scrabble is anything like that, you can count me out.

Yesterday I watched some of the darts. I hadn’t watched any of this year’s tournament prior to that. One of the matches featured Krzyzstof Ratajski of Poland. I guess Polish Scrabble might be quite interesting. Another match involved a debutant called Justin Hood who remarkably hit all of his first eleven attempts at a double. His twelfth was match dart which he missed, but he completed a 4-0 whitewash over the much higher ranked Josh Rock all the same.