Month: September 2026

Family - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Scrabble - Tennis

Statins

September 27, 2026 by 0 Comments

So I saw my doctor on Tuesday. He went through my blood test results. Everything was fine until he came to the dreaded cholesterol. “This isn’t your fault,” he said to me, in English, as if he really wanted to get the point across. It’s simple genetics, he said. He told me to eat less dairy (I do eat too much of the stuff, I know), no more than three eggs a week (I’ve been averaging close to one a day), and pork no more than once a week. But at the end of the day, he said, I could eat a perfect diet and my cholesterol would still be too high. So as I rather suspected, there was only one thing for it. Statins. These can have knock-on effects on your liver function, so I’ve also started taking something for my liver too. That’s likely to be my future: taking some drug, then another drug to counteract the effect of that drug, and so on, to the point where I’ll no longer know what’s what. I’ll get my cholesterol tested again in six months’ time, to see if the statins are doing what they should.

I’ve just been catching up with the family. I had a good chat with my cousin in Wellington – we hadn’t been in touch for a while – then called Mum and Dad. They had Mum’s younger brother (who lives in Palmerston North) staying. He was down for my older uncle’s 85th birthday party. It was the first proper family get-together for several years. Everyone seemed to have a really nice time. They’ve had an unusually late dumping of snow there; the skiers will be making the most of it.

I had another new student (or pupil I suppose) yesterday, a nine-year-old girl who goes to the British school. She was born in Thailand. Though she speaks good English, she’s two or three years behind with her reading and writing. She also finds it hard to follow instructions. She does know the alphabet which is a help, but on the evidence of yesterday I’ll have my work cut out.

I’ve watched two more old Wimbledon matches, both involving Pete Sampras. And both involving Pete Sampras losing, which he did very little of at Wimbledon. I was never a fan of his. He was extraordinarily effective, to the point of monotony. In fact, some of the big matches involving Sampras bordered on sleep-inducing, especially if his opponent was another big server like Goran Ivanisevic. Their final in 1994 was almost unwatchable. Sampras’s match with Federer in 2001 though was an absolute classic grass-court battle that was in the balance right until the end. It wasn’t a massive shock that Federer won – by this stage everyone knew that he was the real deal. It brought back happy memories for me, because Mum and I went to see the men’s semi-finals a few days later. The other match was from the following year: Sampras’s five-set loss to George Bastl, whom nobody had heard of. This was a shock. It was played on the old Court Two, which was traditionally a graveyard of the top seeds. Sampras sat in his chair for several minutes afterwards, perhaps realising that he’d never play at Wimbledon again. And he didn’t. But wouldn’t you know it, a couple of months later he went and won the US Open, beating Andre Agassi in the final. I think that was his last competitive match.

These days, the top end of English football is disgusting and I can’t bring myself to follow it. But Man City. Damn. Throw the book at them. No pointless fine (well, you can do that too if you want), but relegate the bastards several divisions and take their trophies off them. Harsh on their fans from decades back, when they were a real club rather than the fake Abu Dhabi-owned pile of plastic they’ve become, but that’s life.

Last night I watched an episode of Black Mirror entitled Demon 79. It was set in northern England in (as the title suggests) 1979. For the first half of the episode I thought, this is a bit silly but not quite bad enough to stop watching, especially as I got to listen to all that great music from ’79 and see all the old cars and so on. But then it really picked up and I couldn’t tell which way the ending would go. Well worth watching.

I realise I haven’t mentioned Scrabble for a while. I gave up the league play over a month ago. The league, and the damn chat that you couldn’t turn off, were dominated by strong regular tournament players. Even though I generally gave a good account of myself, there was little to encourage outsiders like me. I felt I didn’t belong. I might jump back in soon for one round and see how it goes. I’ve still been playing on ISC, the much older site. Last night I played six games, winning four. In one game I exchanged tiles on both my first two moves, and once again later in the game. Suffice to say I didn’t win that one. In my other loss, my final rack was RRAEIU plus a blank. There was an open L on the board. A bingo would have won me the game. Unusually for me, I had plenty of time on my clock. I was mostly looking at the -IER ending as that looked the most promising, but I just couldn’t see anything. It turned out I had five valid winning plays: RURALIsE, RURALIzE, RURALItE, REbURIAL and gLAURIER. So there was an -IER word after all, but I didn’t know it. I’m still battling with the short words. Learning the fours – there are 5662 of them – is a monumental task for me. I’m a lot better now than when I started my assault on the fours in early June, but despite my best efforts (I test myself every day) a lot of them are still a giant mush in my brain. The problem is that they are so similar to each other and also very similar to thousands of plausible non-words.

Books - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A surprise visit

September 22, 2026 by 0 Comments

On Friday I got a surprise message from my university friend. He said his girlfriend’s parents, who stayed with me two years ago, were coming vaguely my way; they were in the middle of yet another epic trek across Europe. He had no more details than that. This threw me a bit. What if they want to stay with me? This place is an absolute pigsty. On Saturday evening I managed to get in touch with them. They said they wanted to meet up somewhere convenient in town the following lunchtime, specifically so they could eat papanași, that (usually) fried traditional Romanian doughnut-like dessert. Yesterday was a scorcher for the time of year; we must have got close to 30. After picking a few kilos of fully ripe plums in Mehala, I met them at Berăria 700, which I’ve now been to countless times. They were a little late; they didn’t realise that we were an hour ahead of Serbia where they’d just come from. Unlike last time when they travelled in a campervan, this time they were going by a single 1200 cc motorbike and camping. We mostly spoke English, though sometimes I switched to French, their native language. I wasn’t that bad considering how rusty I was (and also my experience of speaking a different Romance language gets in the way). They said how much they liked Timișoara and had been keen to visit again. Having visitors who compliment the city makes me less blasé about living here. We were at the restaurant a long time; the good weather meant it was fairly busy and service is rarely swift at the best of times. Eventually we parted company – they hadn’t actually planned where they were going next, apart from to Decathlon (the sports shop) to buy a new airbed.

Decathlon is where I’ve just been myself. To get swimming trunks. On Friday I got pulled up by (I guess) one of the staff who said I was wearing inadequate swimming attire. My boardshorts, which were all I had, apparently fell foul of some regulation or other. Whether it was hygiene (I could have worn the shorts elsewhere beforehand I suppose) or just aesthetics I have no idea. What I’ve just bought aren’t quite Speedos, though they head in that direction. I went four times again last week. After all of that I was pretty knackered.

My work volumes are still relatively low considering that the kids are now back at school. That’s mainly down to the difficulty in scheduling everyone. The schools are so unprepared that people don’t know what they’re doing when, and that has a knock-on effect on me. It looks like my hours will go up this week, and probably again next week, so I should be fine. The most pleasing thing is that I’m actively trying to increase my hours – a few weeks ago I felt so crappy that I wondered if I’d ever do a full week of teaching again. Tomorrow I’ve got a maths lesson with the A-star girl. These lessons now take place in the back office of a petrol station. Her parents own either that station or a whole chain, quite possibly the latter. We were supposed to meet last Thursday but she was off to see Céline Dion in Paris. As you do when you’ve got loads of money.

I recently finished Flesh, which I found extremely readable if short of amazing. The fact that the protagonist was Hungarian was a plus for me; it felt literally pretty close to home. I’ve just started First Among Equals. It’s my first attempt at reading a Jeffrey Archer novel. This one came out in 1984 and Dorothy lent it to me. Will I be able to get through this? That was my initial thought. It’s all about political ambition. I find certain aspects of politics interesting, certainly. The way elections work for one, but also the psychology of how people vote and the way political outcomes can shape our lives. But the inner workings of the political machine rather leaves me cold. I saw Dorothy today – she’s leaving for the UK very early on Wednesday morning – and she very kindly (!) lent me another political novel, this one written by Douglas Hurd in the seventies. I remember Hurd as a senior Conservative politician when I was a kid. He ran for the Tory leadership in 1990 after Margaret Thatcher resigned. Our local MP John Major beat out Hurd as well as Michael Heseltine to become prime minister. Both Hurd (96) and Heseltine (93) are still alive. I’m sure the Hurd book is very good, but can I really face more politics?

Last week I found myself watching a Wimbledon semi-final match from 1975. The last three sets of Arthur Ashe’s close five-set victory over Tony Roche were on YouTube. What a breath of fresh air it was to watch. They rattled off the points incredibly quickly, taking less time between rallies than I would. Though you could see the players tiring, particularly Roche, the tennis had little of the physicality – bordering on brutality – that you see in the modern game. Instead it was all about net play (which has become virtually suicidal in modern singles) and crafting points. The fourth set was decided on a tie-break, but this was played at 8-8 rather than 6-6. (They did that at Wimbledon from 1971 to 1978.) Roche played a superb tie-break to extend the match, but dropped his serve in the opening game of the fifth set. Still, Ashe played a tight game as he served out the match and could easily have let Roche back in. What impressed me the most was Ashe’s interview after the match. So few clichés. This is a highly intelligent man talking here. He talked about Jimmy Connors trying to sue him for $5 million. Ashe went on to beat Connors in the final and become champion. Sadly he suffered from various health problems. He had a heart attack and underwent major heart surgery. Some years later he contracted Aids. He died in 1993 aged just 49.

Talking of Aids, I mentioned to my brother the alarming cholesterol reading I’d got from my blood test. It could have been worse, he said. He knew someone who had a routine blood test and it came back with him being HIV positive. This was a married bloke with kids. Um, what?!? Just imagine. He found out six weeks later that there had been some stuff-up and something that was supposed to be reset before the test hadn’t been. Mistakes happen, but this sort of thing can cause people to take their own lives. My brother is right; it could have been a lot worse. Tomorrow I’ll see my doctor and will ask him what I should do.

Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Clogging up as I write…

September 14, 2026 by 0 Comments

On Thursday I got my blood test results back, and apparently I’ve got cholesterol out the wazoo. My LDL level in particular is scarily high. It should ideally be under 100. According to the piece of paper, levels above that are divided into gradations of badness – up to 130, then 160, then 190. Anything above that is deemed very high risk. My LDL is 202. My total cholesterol is 275. In New Zealand and the UK they use a different scale, and my reading is equivalent to 7.1. When I worked in life insurance, we got blood tests thrown in. Cholesterol was what got everyone’s attention. In 2005 my figure of 5.5 (I still remember it) was the second-highest in the office and raised some eyebrows. The only person with a higher reading was the guy I sat next to – he was roughly the age I am now – who farted all the time. My latest figure blows that number out of the water. So what do I do now? It’s tough, because I eat a pretty healthy diet. Plenty of fruit and vegetables. Extremely little of what they now call ultra-processed foods. Not a lot of sugar. I do however eat a fair bit of dairy, so should I cut that out entirely? Naturally I’ve been searching for information and watching YouTube videos, such as this one that explains that not all LDL is created equal and I really need a more comprehensive test which I may or may not be able to get in Romania. I also played around with a UK site where you plug in your personal data and your risk of heart disease pops out. It said that because I’m not overweight, I don’t smoke and my blood pressure is normal, my risk is only just above the national average.

I got the blood test if there was something causing all the fatigue, and instead I found something else. A big something else. I’ve actually been feeling better of late. There’s still the weird back pain, but things have been normal apart from that. Having enough energy to go swimming four times last week means I can’t be that bad. Because it’s a properly laned competition-style pool, I’m forced to do lengths, when it would be nice to just sort of paddle around. On Friday the guy in the lane next to me was probably going at twice my speed. He used the stopwatch on his smart watch and even keyed numbers into the calculator on his phone which he left at the side of the pool. I’m not much better than the dog I saw swimming in the Bega today as I sat by the river and read my book. It’s very pleasant all of a sudden to do that, now that the temperature has dropped. It feels great to want to be in the sun.

I still have the odd night of badly interrupted sleep. Thursday night was pretty dreadful. I made it to the pool the next morning, but things were a struggle. I was glad to have a long break between lessons. A big gap until 5:30. But then a message appeared on my phone. You’re coming at 4:30, right? Oh god, it’s the mother of that new boy I’d agreed to teach. I’d completely forgotten, probably because when I said yes I was feeling terrible. Damn damn damn. The lesson would take one hour, but I wouldn’t be able to get to my other lessons (with the brother and sister) on time. I contacted their mother and was apologetic. She said it would be OK to start a bit later. The new boy’s place was practically impossible to find. His mum had said number 5 of such-and-such street, and I’d envisaged a detached house. Instead there were endless modern tower blocks with either no numbers or multiple numbers and names. I didn’t have a clue. I called the mother. Where are you? How do I even explain? I’m next to a cream-and-red block and just opposite a brown-and-white one, on the corner of a bigger road and a smaller one. There’s also something called “The Ring”. In English. There’s no other information. “Imagine actually living here,” I then blurted out. I wasn’t joking. Even though I live in a block myself, living something like that would be a mental-health disaster for me. Luckily, because she lived on the eighth (top) floor, she spotted me even though I was nowhere near her block. She said the whole area – estate I suppose – was completed in 2018. So when I moved to Timișoara it didn’t exist, or maybe it was a building site. (I read recently that the first wave of communist blocks in Russia each took just twelve days to build.) It was clinically modern inside the flat, with the obligatory Nespresso machine. (My book has just mentioned Nespresso machines. I remember when I lived in Wellington, there was a Nespresso store on my drive home from work. One time we got stuck in traffic outside it. We could see all the coloured pods or capsules or whatever inside. My carpool mate and I agreed that it was vile.) The lesson was fine. The boy seemed really nice, as did his mother. He was a big football fan. I gave him an “About Me” sheet where he had to write about (or draw) the things he liked and give very basic information about himself. In the “age” box, he wrote 8:30. Half-past eight. It had a certain logic to it, I suppose.

Mum and Dad have just got back from Moeraki – it was their first trip down there since early May. I told them about my cholesterol. We also discussed my potential return to New Zealand. Last weekend my brother said I should consider going back to the UK instead. “It’s not all bad,” he said. I never said it was. I just don’t think I could handle the sheer volume of people anymore. With Google Maps you can home in on places pretty much at random, and a few days ago the little peg man happened to alight on Tobermory on the Isle of Mull. Looks idyllic. A kids’ TV programme was filmed there in the noughties, taking advantage of all the colourful buildings on the seafront. Hmmm, how much would a house be? I’d be pretty damn isolated somewhere like that, but if I ever did go back to the UK to live (extremely unlikely – I hardly know anyone there now) it would need to be well outside the M25.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

No longer out of my depth

September 9, 2026 by 0 Comments

Things are back to normal, for now at least, apart from that weird back pain that feels as if something is stuck there. I was supposed to have my blood test on Friday but I got turned away because I’d eaten in the previous ten hours. So I got it done yesterday instead and I’m now awaiting the results.

I’ve now been swimming three times. As I thought, it’s a 50-metre pool, roped off into eight lanes. There’s no shallow end or deep end; it’s a competition pool which has a constant depth of 1.5 metres. So there’s no diving board. And, oddly, no lifeguard either. Getting set up in the first place was a bit of a hassle. I remember how this membership stuff used to work. You’d give your name and address to the lady at the desk who would then write your name on a card for you to present whenever you wanted to swim. Now it’s all apps and passwords and links and options. Always so many options. And I’m not convinced they’ve improved our lives in any way. I’m hoping that regular trips to the pool, and just being in the water, will be beneficial to me.

Schools went back yesterday, so my hours are increasing again and I’ve got kids’ parents who won’t leave me alone. There’s one annoying mother in particular. In a short while I’ll be having a lesson on a subject I haven’t taught up until now. My student in her late thirties wants to learn how to swear in English. Yesterday I had my first lesson with the maths A-star girl since she did her exam. She’s now doing International Baccalaureate.

On Sunday I watched a football match for the first time in well over a year, if you don’t count a few minutes of that awful World Cup final. Birmingham City were playing Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Championship – the second tier. It was a damn good game that finished in a 2-2 draw. All the goals came in the first half including a comedy own goal that gave Blues their second equaliser. Blues had really been outplayed by Wolves in the first half and were lucky to be level, but unexpectedly they dominated the second half. Blues now have one win and four draws from their opening five games.

Also on Sunday I had a great chat with my brother. I was slightly cheesed off with him the previous time we spoke, but when I think about it I was feeling terrible and didn’t especially want to talk to anybody.

Family - Life :)

Where I’m at right now

September 4, 2026 by 0 Comments

Things are still pretty crappy. Burning sensation in the right side of my back. Numbness in my limbs. And tiredness. So much fatigue. I find myself exhaling deeply when I do even moderate exercise. And then there’s the brain fog. Everything becomes a huge effort. It goes in cycles though, from close to normal all the way down to getting by at only the most basic level, and back again.

I saw the after-hours doctor earlier this evening and told him my symptoms. He did the usual checks and everything was fine. I asked him, so what about some blood tests? He agreed that I should have some, and I’ve got an appointment tomorrow morning. Good that I was able to get one so soon. I said to him that I have no idea how I’ll cope with full weeks of lessons again – schools go back on Monday – and he said that of course I’ll cope. Well, I haven’t bloody been coping up until now, have I? My teaching hours this year will end up being way down on each of the previous three.

Yesterday I went to the 50-metre swimming pool a ten-minute bike ride from here. I was feeling a bit better then. A session would cost me 60 lei, or alternatively I could buy a month’s membership for 200, which would allow me to go any weekday before 4pm (and I think at some specific times at weekends too). I wasn’t allowed to swim there and then though, because I didn’t have a hat. I remember swimming at school when I was about eight and we were made to wear hats – I hated wearing one. I did buy a hat yesterday as well as stationery and a thick roll of duct (or is it duck?) tape so I can deal with Kitty’s fur a bit more easily.

The sale of my parents’ flat in St Ives is just about there. They’re now grappling with a load of online forms for capital gains tax. They haven’t made much on the property so I imagine they’ll pay negligible CGT, but it adds a layer of life admin that they could do without.