Family - Maths teaching

A talking time machine and the great divide

November 17, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

When Mum was on the way to Christchurch to pick up Dad on Tuesday, she dropped in on her mother’s cousin Pat who now lives in a care home in Ashburton. Pat is 106 (!) years old – she was born during the First World War – and remarkably still has all her marbles. In this meeting Pat told Mum about her car journey from Christchurch to Dunedin at the age of four. A car journey of that distance would have been a mission back then, and something quite astonishing for a four-year-old; I can see how she still has a clear memory of it more than a century later. What was the car? Her family wasn’t wealthy as far as I know, so how did she end up in that car in the first place? What were the roads like? How long did it take? I’ll ask Mum the next time I speak to her; our conversation quickly moved on to the building work. Last year the local radio station had a phone-in where anyone who remembered Elizabeth’s coronation (in 1953) could call in and regale the listeners of their memories of the day. Pat called in. “I remember when she was born?” Um, sorry, what, you’d have to be at least a hundred. “Yes. Do you have a problem with that?” That might not have been exactly how it went down, but I know there was disbelief on the part of the host.

Yesterday I had a late finish – a face-to-face maths lesson between 7 and 9pm, followed by an online English session. In our maths lesson, among many other topics (her schoolteacher switches between topics at a maddening rate) I helped my 15-year-old student divide by decimal numbers smaller than one, without using a calculator. We think of division as sharing – that word was used at school, I remember – and sharing money or sweets or bottles of orange juice between two or three or ten people all feels natural. But sharing between half or a tenth or 0.08 of a person – what on earth could that even mean? When you divide by something less than one, you end up with more than what you started with, and that messes with people’s heads. It goes against what people intuitively feel that division does. By chance, earlier in the week I stumbled upon a blog post that used bottles of juice as an intuitive basis for dividing by small decimals. When I explained how to divide 24 by 0.08, I asked her first to imagine 24 litres of orange juice and (big!) 8-litre bottles. How many bottles would all that juice go into? She correctly said three. Now imagine the bottles are 0.08 of a litre. You know, tiny, the size that you could take through airport security. You’d need loads of ’em, right? Turns out it’s 300. Move the decimal point two digits to the right, or in this case add two zeros. I told my English student about my maths lesson – she’s an accountant and has a strong mathematical background – and she couldn’t understand how my student didn’t just know to do these division problems. She’s fifteen, for crying out loud. Can’t she just think of that decimal as a fraction and go from there? No. So much of being a good maths teacher is empathy. Just because you got it at a young age and it all seems obvious to you, that doesn’t mean they will. And I certainly wouldn’t want to introduce fractions into the problem – fractions seem to frighten the living bajeezus out of Romanian teenagers.

Earlier today I watched this video of somebody multiplying and squaring numbers showmanlike, faster than a calculator. His party piece came at the end: working out 37,691 squared in his head. I actually paused the video and tried to do this. It’s not the worst five-digit number to have to square. It’s 9 away from 37,700. The repeated 7 helps. All (!) you have to do is square 377 and tack on four zeros, then find 18 lots of 37,700 then take that away, then add on 81. Hey presto, Bob’s your uncle. But there’s a catch. You end up with a ten-digit number, and my brain is nowhere near capable of storing that many digits while also carrying out calculations. I gave up. He can also calculate the day of the week that a particular date falls on, which is something I saw people do at the autism groups I used to attend. I recently had a go at this 21-question hard mental arithmetic test. I tried to do the questions as fast as possible, and got 17 correct.

The weather is wet and nasty. I had to go out in it this morning, for a lesson with a 12-year-old boy who lives on the fifth and top floor of a block of flats with no lift. He’s a nice kid. We mostly did the simple past tense in all its glory.

Family - Language teaching - Politics - Tennis

He’s back, and so is Mum’s stress

November 17, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to Mum last night, not long after she’d picked up Dad from the airport. After seeming pretty calm while Dad was away, she suddenly looked stressed again. She was frustrated with the building work progressing too slowly and having to cook for two people with facilities that are even more limited than when I was there. Dad’s journey, which included a 16-hour Dubai-to-Sydney leg, was tiring but he managed. It wasn’t as arduous as my trip, which could have gone horribly wrong in a number of ways. (Of course I’m a lot younger and should be able to cope with the more taxing route.)

I had two more phone chats with Dad before he left, and they helped clear the air after the argument I had with him earlier. I felt upset that my parents attach such a shockingly low financial value to seeing their own family, but also bad that I ended up in an argument with a mild-mannered man like my father. In our last chat he said he’d spoken to my brother who expressed similar views to mine. He’s getting it from both of us. His last meeting with his sister went fine; he’d been an enormous help to her over that month. I wonder what will happen next. Will her children bother to visit?

I see that David Cameron, who isn’t even an MP, is back in cabinet as foreign secretary. Appointing someone to the Lords and then giving him a cabinet position is a new one on me. I thought you had to be, like, elected or something. Shows you what I know.

Tennis finished for the season on Sunday. It was just me and Florin, and this time common sense prevailed – the surface was slippery after the previous day’s deluge, so we just hit balls for an hour without keeping score.

Plenty of work. I had that boy for two hours again this morning, just like last week. It’s a real test of stamina. I’m trying to gently persuade one of my students to stop having lessons with me – she’s extremely spoilt and unmotivated, and she’s taking up a slot I could give to someone else.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching

Play time

November 13, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had an argument with Dad on his last full day in the UK. We talked about him and Mum possibly making the trip in six months’ time. “We have to consider the cost.” No, Dad, you really don’t. I’m fully sympathetic to all the factors that make the trip difficult for you, but the cost isn’t one of them. It isn’t even close to being one of them. Dad will visit his sister later today – it might be the last time they meet.

Last night I saw a comedy play at the theatre with Dorothy and Sanda. I got wet on my bike ride to Scârț, a place that houses a bar, a museum of communism, and an amateur theatre company called Auăleu. (Auăleu is a Romanian exclamation, used similarly to “Oh my god”.) The theatre sat 50 people; I was on the front row (of two) next to Sanda, but wished I was on a hypothetical tenth row. Being that close to the stage was rather intimidating. The play was called Grand Hostel Timișoara. Guests of various nationalities booked in, and the comedy came from all the national stereotypes as well as local jokes about Timișoara in 2023 (supposedly it’s the European Capital of Culture, though you wouldn’t know it) and other in-jokes, only some of which I got. After the interval the guests came back to the hostel having visited the city and suffered all kinds of mishaps. Some of the actors could clearly actually speak the native languages of the guests – German, French, Hungarian, and so on. The play was partly improvised and was very clever and well done, though it wasn’t quite my thing. Being in Timișoara for “only” seven years didn’t help, and political jokes about Schengen or neighbouring countries’ accession to the EU left me cold. I’ll happily go back though and see something else if the opportunity arises.

Plenty of interesting lessons last week. One was with a woman who is always ever so busy in her work as a middle manager at a large bank, to the point where she often has to cut short her meetings with me. I still haven’t figured out the purpose of our sessions. Business English? Well, she’s got that down to a tee already. A simple chat? Maybe, but our discussions rarely stray from the corporate world. Last Tuesday she talked about how good it felt in her previous job to be given so much power; in that job she was the sole determiner of who got what access to vital IT systems at a company she didn’t even work for. With no sense of irony, she said “I felt like a rock star.” That responsibility would terrify me. I could, like, accidentally press something that shut down everyone’s access at a stroke. Then on Friday I helped a woman prepare for a job interview in English, which she has tomorrow. The first thing I did was browse her CV. She, like many Romanians, uses an automated CV system which produces personality-free walls of text in a tiny font. Her first inscrutable wall of text related to her current job. “So, what do you actually do?” Robots. Directing robots. Fixing robots. Ordering new robots. “Why, then, are there over a hundred words in this paragraph and not one mention of robots?” Robot is a fun, eye-catching word, even if it’s a bit scary. (Incidentally it comes from a Czech word meaning “forced labour”.) But I couldn’t persuade her to move away from that dreadful vagueness. I then saw that at the bottom of the CV she said she was at a C1 level in English listening, but B1 in all the other disciplines (reading, writing and speaking). Why the big gap, I wondered. (C1 is miles better than B1.) I can understand anything anyone says. That’s why I’m C1. I suggested that she visited a British pub and tried to follow a conversation – jokes, regional accents, people arguing and talking over each other. It became apparent during our interview practice that she didn’t really know what she’d be doing if she got the job. Not her fault – the job description was hopelessly vague. I’m so glad I’ve left the corporate world behind.

Another highlight was an 11-year-old boy’s piece of creative writing, in which he said there were “cloudy clouds” in the sky. Then yesterday I had maths with Matei. Fractions reared their ugly head again. He can add, subtract, multiply and divide them, but conceptually he hasn’t the foggiest, and that’s starting to cause a problem.

I’ll soon be playing tennis for the last time in 2023.

Family - The UK

Too much tech

November 9, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m enjoying the cooler weather. Even in the first half of October the heat sapped me of energy, but now it’s like being in New Zealand again. I’m sleeping much better. Also, getting over those two hurdles has helped me to relax more. Not as many stress-inducing WhatsApp messages about things I don’t fully understand.

Dad only has a few days left until he goes back to New Zealand. He’s looking forward to it. This trip has provoked considerable anxiety in him; it’s been sad to see. Years ago, when his mother was still alive, he’d make the trip to the UK and not think anything of it. In fact he still felt more at home there than in New Zealand. I asked him what had changed. The UK being a country in decline? Just a case of getting old? No, he said that undoubtedly it was technology. The modern requirement to be connected all the time has made his time in the UK a misery. One minute Skype wasn’t working, then Outlook, then something else on his phone. It was like he was discussing a debilitating medical condition that could compromise his vital functions at any moment. He longed for the simplicity of physical maps and people at desks selling train tickets. I sympathise with Dad because I’ve found tech to be increasingly invasive. I want to use it when I need it, then forget about it. Yesterday I had to visit the bank; my query that was supposed to be about transferring money degenerated into talk of passwords and PIN codes and apps. I simply didn’t want to know.

Dad’s trip hasn’t been all bad. When I spoke to him last night he’d just been over to see some friends. On his near-daily visits to his sister, he’s had quite long chats with her that have often brought up memories of happier times. He said his last visit will be a tough one – it might well be the last time he sees her.

As for Mum, she’s doing pretty well. We can now make WhatsApp calls, and last time she gave me a quick video tour of the renovation. It’s all taking shape and looking increasingly housey and kitcheny. Mum has been winning golf competitions and even won a Melbourne Cup sweepstake at the golf club earlier this week. I told her that she and Dad should use her winnings to go out for a proper slap-up meal when he gets back. One day last week she was annoyed with Dad for going on about his technological woes when she’d been painting walls all day and hadn’t spoken to anyone else. She’s been exasperated at Dad’s lack of technological dexterity, when in reality she’s at the same level.

My parents have never been into tech, and when they did buy a gadget it was usually cheap and crappy. My classmates at school were constantly talking about the films they’d seen on video (a VCR that might have set their parents back a month’s salary – these things were expensive) but we didn’t get a video recorder until Dad bought one from a car boot sale when I was 16.

I’m about to have a two-hour online lesson with the boy I made cry back in January. Her mother just told me. Shoot me now.

Life :) - The UK

Terrifyingly shit

November 6, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching a YouTube video from the Royal Institution about ultra-processed foods. The subject of obesity comes up a lot, especially when you talk to non-overweight older people. The younger generations (which include anyone under 60!) are too stupid and lazy and immoral to eat proper food and they don’t know when to stop and blah blah blah. A few years ago a photo of Brighton Beach in the 1970s (it was probably during the heatwave of 1976) did the rounds. Look how slim everyone was back then! The implication was that we’ve all got stupider and lazier since then. The real story is the increased availability of all that ultra-processed junk (and in some cases non-junk, or at least marketed as non-junk), not a massive loss of willpower that began in the late seventies and occurred in both men and women and across all ages and ethnicities. Willpower is a thing, and some of us are blessed with more of it than others, but the idea that humans lost it en masse a few decades ago is ludicrous. What the video didn’t quite go into (but Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens books did) was how incompatible modern food availability and consumption are to the caveman instincts that we still have. I live in Timișoara where I have a substantial market within walking distance and half a dozen more markets a reasonable bike ride away, so most of what I eat doesn’t even have an ingredients list. Most people aren’t so lucky.

Last week some lurid language came out of the UK Covid inquiry, but the expression that stuck in my mind was Dominic Cummings’ (who else) description of Cabinet Office in March 2020 as terrifyingly shit. I can’t stand Cummings, but it was a pretty accurate description. The handling of the pandemic at that point was dangerously, frighteningly, life-threateningly, bad. From my last few conversations with Dad, he has a similar view of the UK as a whole. A country unravelling, with few prospects for improvement. If Labour win the next election, they’ll hopefully drive out the sheer toxicity of the Tories, but there’s little sense that they’ll make any meaningful positive change. It’s all very different from the feeling before the 1997 election. Indeed I remember a conversation I had with Dad in 1993 – he was my current age then – in which we talked driving across the vastness of Russia and the former Soviet Union, not long after it had all opened up. Now there’s no optimism, no sense of hope at all on a scale beyond one’s own immediate family and friends. That’s terrifying.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - The UK

Lock them up

November 3, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been following the UK Covid inquiry, and all I can say is lock the bastards up. The mishandling of the early stages of the pandemic went well beyond incompetence; these people were actively toxic. They were egomaniacs who behaved like playground bullies and were only in their positions because they supported Brexit. (The pandemic coming right after the brain drain of the December 2019 election was such unfortunate timing.) As senior civil servant Helen MacNamara (who wasn’t blameless herself) said in her hearing yesterday, there was an absence of humanity among the people in charge. For Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock, old people, poor people, and frankly all people who lacked their privileges, were expendable. Dominic Cummings, who gave his evidence on Tuesday, was just as bad. The insults that came from this special – unelected – advisor, mostly in WhatsApp messages, were shocking in their language. Making the right decisions didn’t matter to these c***s (as Mr Cummings would say); they only cared about whether the decisions made them look good. And what were they doing governing by WhatsApp anyway? They cost tens of thousands of lives. They should all go to prison for several years, and be banned from public office or indeed earning more than the national average income when they come out.

On Sunday I met Mark in town. We had lunch at Berăria 700, both opting for bulz – a bowl of cheese, bacon and mămăligă with an egg on top. Not the healthiest meal, but delicious. The funny bit was ordering the beer. Large or small? “Large, I suppose.” We thought that “large” meant a halbă which is just under a pint, but no, we got these great big steins that must have been a litre each. With the food and the sunny weather, getting through them wasn’t a problem. I showed him around the nearby market which for some reason he’d never been to before. He was amazed by the flowers, which are the most sense-engaging part of the whole thing. Just before we parted company, we discussed our good fortune at living in Timișoara – beautiful, lively, genuine, and (touch wood) safe. I played just one hour of tennis after that. Since then, the week has been a bit of a disappointment with so many cancellations caused by the Romanian equivalent of half-term, which only started to be a thing last year. All in all I can’t complain – I’m feeling much more relaxed than a couple of weeks ago. Last night I had a long chat with my friend in Birmingham, which was nice. Like Mum in Geraldine, he’s busy painting walls. I also spoke to Dad yesterday. Seeing his sister every day is leaving him exhausted. Britain is now being gripped by a storm. He’ll be flying back home in eleven days; he wishes it were sooner.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

A bad ad for rugby

October 29, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Ugh. What a disappointment that was. Not just because the All Blacks were unfortunate enough to lose by a single point having played most of the match with 14 men, but because the game itself was almost unwatchable. Every other minute it was up to the TMO – a slightly creepy surveillance-style booth with about two dozen screens – destroying any semblance of flow to the game. If it was your first taste of rugby, as doubtless it was for some people, you wouldn’t be coming back for more.

I had a nice chat with Mum this morning – she seemed glad to have missed most of the game. She was part of a church congregation that was even tinier than usual, and got back in time to see the last four minutes. Mum was fine, but a little tired after spending many hours painting walls. While I was talking to her, there was a pungent whiff of peppers being roasted in one of the other flats.

I stumbled across this xkcd strip from 2017:

Look at Wellington in the top-left, um, blob. I talked about this just before I left the city in 2016. Complaining about Wellington’s weather was practically a national sport, but I found the lack of temperature extremes to be a big plus, even with all the wind and rain. Timișoara would be somewhere close to Boston and New York – it probably just misses out on being in the bottom-right blob because although we get scorching summers, it’s normally a dry heat.

Update: I’ve just spoken to my aunt on her birthday. She’s currently in a care home in Cottenham, a few miles from Cambridge. When I wished her a happy birthday, she said “Well, it’s not a happy one, is it?” although she appreciated my call. After that it I said it was a shock to learn of her diagnosis (though, in truth, it wasn’t) and we talked about her regular meetings with Dad. I then said I might manage a trip over for Christmas, and after six minutes that was it.

Books - Family - Language learning - Music - Other sports

Out of the dimness (and into the light?) as we enter winter time

October 29, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s the last day before the clocks go back, and the last vestiges of not-winter.

I played singles tennis tonight with the “good” Florin. After this morning’s rain the court was slippery – dangerously so – and I didn’t enjoy it one bit. The wet patches made it worse than if it was fully wet. I started out at the greasier end. Florin made a fair few unforced errors and I led for large parts of the set, but we landed in a tie-break which I lost 7-3. When that was over I told Florin what I thought – that playing singles on a slippery court and risking a broken ankle is bloody stupid – but he didn’t seem bothered. After the changeover (we only switch sides after each set) I moved to the less horrible end, but still slid in the tramlines and almost fell twice. I won the second set 6-2 and led 2-1 in the third when our time ran out, but amazingly Florin moved around the court at the (to me) lethal end as if nothing was amiss, at one stage even retrieving a deep lob. I was handicapped down there. I asked him how he managed it (was it the shoes?), and he said the secret was being brought up in north-eastern Romania, close to the border with Ukraine. Harsh winters back then, so he soon learnt how to move in the snow and ice. I can see that two years ago I had the same problem.

I’ve been reading Wild Wales, George Borrow’s account of his trek on foot through Wales in the middle of the 19th century. Back then, Wales really was wild and outsiders rarely ventured there. Unusually, Borrow could speak Welsh at a decent level. He liked to show off his intellect (this grates after a while) in his conversations with the locals he met along the way, which were surely embellished. My grandmother had a cottage in mid-Wales which we often stayed in when I was a kid, and necessitated a long car journey which I’ve talked about previously on this blog. In my teens I viewed that part of the country as dull and grey and remote, but really it was beautiful. I haven’t been there since 2001, and I’d like to go back.

I’ve picked up a few words of Welsh while reading Borrow’s book. My grandmother’s cottage was in the small town of Rhayader, a semi-Anglicised version of rhaiadr, meaning waterfall, though in fact there hasn’t been a waterfall there for centuries. The word for “not” or “without” is dim, which has a certain logic to it. People in Borrow’s book are always saying “Dim Saesneg”, meaning “no English (language)”, the word Saesneg literally meaning Saxon. For a while I was dim dŵr poeth (without hot water) and dim arian (without money – arian is literally silver) from Barclays, but those dim days are hopefully over now. Last week I called the complaints team to accept the £200 compensation they offered me, derisory though it was. Getting it all over with has a value.

Dad’s sister has bounced back better than he or anyone else (including her) imagined. He’s been seeing her almost every day. Her children, realising she’ll hang on a while longer, have stopped bothering to see her. Of course, her prognosis is still poor. Tomorrow is her 76th birthday and I will make the effort to give her a call, difficult though that will be.

Yesterday Dad caught up with his friends (and mine too – they visited me in Romania six years ago). The couple are in their mid-70s, similar to my parents, and although he was at death’s door in early 2022 before staging a recovery, they’ve managed to cut out most of the stress from their lives while still travelling and pursuing interests. I wish my parents could do likewise.

The Rugby World Cup final is about to get under way between the All Blacks and South Africa, the historical heavyweights of the competition with three wins apiece. (Two wins for Australia and one for England, so the Southern Hemisphere is going to make it 90% whatever happens tonight.) I vividly remember the 1995 final between the two nations – one of the most famous rugby matches ever because of what the occasion meant. There have been some good matches in the knockout stages but I haven’t watched any of them. My mind has been elsewhere. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the Irish fans’ use of the immensely powerful Cranberries song Zombie as an unofficial anthem. Not long till kick-off, and I guess I might actually watch it.

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis - The UK

Maths, newness, and unwanted grub

October 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I went to tennis but nobody showed up. As I was waiting in vain, Dad called me. He’d just come back from my brother’s place in Poole, and was tired after a seven-hour bus journey full of traffic jams. He said he wouldn’t want to live in the UK again. New Zealand is on a human scale, he said. I see what he means. I remember seeing a road sign around Wanaka: “Christchurch 424 km”. In Romania you see signs showing similar distances. But travelling through southern and central England, you rarely see much above 60 or 70 miles, or 100-odd kilometres. Everything is on top of each other – there are no gaps that allow you to breathe. Dad enjoyed seeing the family – he had nothing but positive words for his grandson – but his (and my brother’s) mental energy was taken up with sorting out his email and phone; he’s always got some tech issue. As soon as he got back, he saw his sister who was surprisingly chatty.

Yesterday I made a cottage pie (something British!) and quince crumble to give to Viorica and Petrică, the couple in their late sixties who live on the top floor. Viorica has been so helpful to me. Without her, I’d be having cold showers all through winter. This is too much, she told me, and spooned half of the food onto some plates, leaving me with the other half. A few minutes later my doorbell rang, and she handed me back almost all of the half that she’d originally taken. “I appreciate the gesture,” she said. But not the food, obviously. When I gave her the pie she asked me where the beef had come from. Kaufland, I said. Maybe she sees supermarket meat as poor quality or something. Older Romanians have these ideas, I’ve noticed. Oh well.

On Saturday I only had one lesson – two hours of maths with Matei. He’d just got an A grade in a test, which will allow him to take the extended GCSE maths paper. He only needed a C for that, so in other words he smashed it. That’s obviously great. I still think he can improve though. He’s good at following processes – move this over to the other side of the equation, now square both sides – but still lacks a good understanding of how numbers fit together. When I say numbers, I mean fractions, decimals, percentages, roots, powers, the lot. He reaches for the calculator at the first opportunity. Funnily enough, one thing that helped me with this when I was growing up was a crappy calculator with an eight-digit display, which my maths teacher called a “Noddy calculator”. Tap in 1 + 2 x 3 =, and it would tell you 9, not 7. So I’d learn about the order of operations, which at the time we called BODMAS. My Noddy calculator preferred SAMDOB. Divide 2 by 3 on that same calculator, and you’d get 0.6666666. Multiply that by 3 and it spat out 1.9999998. As the real answer is clearly exactly 2, that taught me something about the perils of rounding. A handy feature was being able to quickly repeat an operation over and over again by mashing the equals button. If you started at 1 and repeatedly multiplied by 2, you’d see that (a) the final digits cycle through 2, 4, 8 and 6, and (b) the numbers get very big very fast – just like the grains of rice on a chessboard – until they got too big for the screen. Dividing by zero was an immediate no-can-do. Why was that, I wondered? On fancier Noddy calculators with a square root button, you’d see that repeating square-rooting brought you closer and closer to 1. Now kids have better calculators – even the ones on their phones are way superior to Noddies – but the old Noddies gave you a better idea of how numbers fitted together. Plus you could tap in 5318008, turn your screen upside down, and have a giggle – this doesn’t work on your phone. After maths on Saturday, I really did play tennis. This was singles again with the other Florin. I lost two games out of the 23 we played.

I’ve now been in Romania for just over seven years. In my head, I split that time into four phases. Phase one was from the moment I arrived (October 2016) until the summer of 2018, when everything was new and exciting. The sights, the sounds, the smells. The regular trips back in time. That proper first winter. Living in the centre of such a beautiful city and trying to build my teaching business (all those phone calls, when I could hardly speak the language!) was like nothing I’d experienced before. I look back at that time with great fondness. Then came phase two. Timișoara and English teaching had become normal. Routine. The newness had gone. That lasted until the outbreak of Covid. Terribly scary, and horrific for many people, but (and this probably sounds awful) at least it was something new. I enjoyed the quiet of the lockdown. The parks in the springtime with the birds and the flowers. The focus on the simple things. That third phase lasted two years until we clambered out of all the lockdowns and restrictions into a world of having to achieve again, and in my case a move and feeling unable to cope. I’d really love phase four to be over. New Zealand – that feeling of newness, of something different – was wonderful, but it was just a temporary respite.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Another marvel

October 20, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

After the Barclays wonder of last Wednesday, this morning saw another miracle. My central heating and hot water got turned on. It’ll take some trial and error to figure out how the thermostat actually works, but I can say with some confidence that tonight I’ll have my first hot shower of October. (I certainly won’t need central heating for a few days. We’ve got 29 forecast today, and 28 tomorrow.) Over the weekend I’ll bake something to give to the couple upstairs, without whose help I’d have been even further up the creek than I’ve felt these last few months. I hope that getting over these hurdles will put a spring in my step because right now everything is an effort – I’m leaden-footed even on a short walk. (I’ve just been for a short walk. A lady in her sixties asked me if there were any pokie machines nearby.) I also hope I can now stem the flow of money from my pocket. Yesterday I got the stitches removed from my back following the cyst removal, and even that cost me what felt like an arm and a leg.

On Wednesday I had a bad lesson. They happen occasionally and that’s OK. This was an online session with the woman who lives near Birmingham. I had the electrician over and you can imagine what happened. As well as the switching on and off, meaning I had to use my phone instead of my laptop, the electrician asked me questions which further disrupted the lesson. My student was unhappy, but what could I have done other than cancel or postpone? I offered to give her the lesson for free, but that didn’t help matters much. Maybe she’ll be silly enough to give up on me completely. I say silly because a UK-based private tutor would cost her something like quadruple.

On Tuesday I had a lesson with the woman in Bucharest. She said that language death is a good thing as it enables people to communicate better. Taking this to its logical conclusion, I asked her if it would be good for the whole world to speak just one language. “Of course,” she said. Learners of English often use “of course” in that way, not realising that it verges on being rude. Her opinion, which she’s perfectly entitled to, is just that; by using “of course” she’s intimating that it’s a universal truth. Part of the problem is that learners want an alternative to “yes”, and “of course” is the alternative they know. I’ve written about this in my book that I would love one day to be published. (Crossing those hurdles might help me focus on things like that.)

Amid the unspeakable horrors in the Middle East, some good news came out of Poland last weekend. The ominous-sounding Law and Justice Party lost power to a much more moderate grouping led by Donald Tusk, whom I thought handled Brexit admirably when he was president of the European Council. In one simple vote, Poland have pulled themselves (and maybe Europe as a whole) back from the abyss. I also see that UK Labour won two by-elections overnight, overturning huge Tory majorities in both seats.

I spoke to Mum this morning. She suggested that only she, not Dad, might come to Europe in the spring. That’s probably because Dad had to make an extra trip and they want to save money. Gah. As I see it, they’ve got three options. One, they both come over. Two, they pay for my brother and his wife and son to fly to New Zealand. Or three, they can be selfish buggers. It’s up to them.