by 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.
