by 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.
