Cat - Family - Films - Life :)

Tough to take

March 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

So when I spoke to Mum on Wednesday night I said that I’d fly over to New Zealand if they couldn’t make it over to Europe. She replied, “Are you sure? What about your work?” Well, you know, if I come it’ll be in the height of my summer when I’ll want to escape the heat and will have less work anyway. Plus I can still give online lessons if I want. It was only yesterday that it dawned on me. She couldn’t give a damn whether she sees me or not. Or my brother. Perhaps she’d even prefer not to see us. It took so long for me to figure it out because it didn’t seem possible. How can somebody not care about seeing her own children? Yesterday I sent her a message: “I really hope you can get your tummy troubles sorted and start making regular trips to the loo. Right now Kitty is sunning herself on the window ledge and she says she can’t wait to see you.” In her reply she just blanked the whole issue. As for Dad, he’s certainly better than Mum in this regard, but even he isn’t exactly champing at the bit to see his kids. Or grandchildren. This is tough to take. Last night I woke up at 2:18, checked in on Kitty, then spent the next three hours chewing all of this over in my head. I’m now putting the chances of Mum and Dad coming at 70% – down a bit, but still decent. But even if they come, it won’t be with any real enthusiasm.

On Wednesday morning I went to the bank to pay some money in. It’s a horrible branch, but it’s near the supermarket and I wouldn’t need to talk to anybody anyway. Just deposit the cash via the machine, then leave. The place stank and the machine’s screen seemed to be covered in a hazy brownish black muck. It was only when I tried to wipe it off that I realised the “muck” was on the inside. As usual, the machine rejected some of my notes and I had to repeat the process six or seven times. Finally I was done. Not the exact amount I’d planned to put in, but close enough. But then it swallowed my card. Um, did I just imagine that? I looked around just in case. No card. Jeez, what now? If you wanted to see anybody, there was a long queue. I spoke up. The machine has taken my card. The teller, a woman of 40-odd, told me to join the queue like everyone else. At this point I made a scene. This isn’t normal! Join the queue. The woman didn’t even look at me, or anybody else. I was braced for an hour in the queue followed by who knew what. A few minutes later I heard a young woman say, in English, “Is this your card?” The machine had spat my card out while she was using it. Amazing security they have there. I was relieved, but won’t dare visit that branch again for at least a year. Half an hour later, at the queue for the supermarket checkout, an older man was having difficulty with his Kaufland app. The cashier (a woman of 50 or so) really laid into him. You have to do this, then this, don’t you get it?! The man simply accepted this appalling treatment in a way I never would have. I love Romania, but the customer service here continues to be dire.

I’ve started watching a 2021 film called Nomadland. I’ve only seen the first 20 minutes, but I can tell it will be fascinating. It’s about Americans who have lost their jobs and survive by travelling around the country in RVs, getting odd jobs here and there. I was going to write more about America and its decline, but I don’t feel like writing much more today. I’ve teed up a video call with my cousin who lives in New York state.

My latest maths student is proving hard to teach. She can calculate, up to a point, but hasn’t yet learnt how to think. Teaching that isn’t an easy task at all.

Driving - Family - Language learning - Life :)

If we come over

March 19, 2025 by 0 Comments

Mum’s scan was all clear. A relief: it isn’t colon cancer. But what now? She’s already seen the doctor since then (great that it was so quick) and she’ll now have a colonoscopy. Dad has been more insistent of late – it won’t just magically go away if you ignore it – without bugging her to the point where she gets angry. On Monday Dad said “If we come over…”. If. Yikes. It’s seven weeks until they’re due to arrive. I told my brother that they’ll still probably make the trip – I said an 80% chance – but he thinks I’m being optimistic. If they do cancel, the first thing I’ll do is book a trip to New Zealand. For my brother, who can’t simply do that, it would be pretty devastating. (My parents know this, you would hope, which is why I’m saying 80%. Also, Mum’s pain hasn’t got any worse.)

Last week I got a reminder to renew my car insurance. Seriously? It’s been a year? I clearly remember the day I picked up the car. All that gubbins at the town hall in Sânandrei, then actually having to drive the thing. It was fine to begin with, but then I hit the city traffic and am I even going to survive?! It’s been seven years. When I finally parked it after a hair-raising 20-odd minutes, I was distinctly clammy. I remember my drive to Recaș the following week – on a sunny day – and how exciting it was to visit another town at the drop of a hat like that. Then there were those trips to the mall to get all the paperwork done. These state-controlled offices are always so forbidding, and the vehicle registration office was no exception. I did end up with a comedy number plate, so there was that, and it was worth paying for a broker to sort me out. Without her, I’d have been sent from pillar to post without having a clue what was happening. I’ve been really happy with the car and the added freedom it’s given me, but at times on my various trips last summer I thought, you know what, it would be quite nice now chugging along on a train and looking out the window or reading a book. As for driving in Romania itself, well that all seems pretty normal now, though roundabouts (there are so many of them) still feel kind of weird here, and I’m not the world’s best parallel parker. I suppose I very rarely park in the city, parallel or otherwise, so I don’t get much practice.

Last weekend there was a fire at a nightclub in North Macedonia which killed at least 59 people. It happened at a club called Pulse in the town of Kočani, which only has around 25,000 people. The fire was caused by a pyrotechnic display, but a raft of safety violations contributed to the terrible death toll. It’s all very reminiscent of the Colectiv fire in Bucharest, not long before I came to Romania, which killed 64. Just like the one in North Macedonia, Colectiv only had one exit. Of those 64 deaths, most of them didn’t occur at the club but later, in hospital. The hospitals had diluted disinfectant which was a dreadful scandal in itself. (When I was a student in Birmingham, there was a popular club called Pulse. I only went there once. That was enough for me.)

I had my weekly Romanian session on Monday morning. The truth is I’m not learning anything anymore. If anything I’m going backwards, and I’m at a loss to know what to do about that. (One-on-one sessions, which I had for a short time in the autumn, would certainly help. Dorothy is at a higher level than me, and her involvement doesn’t help.)

Books - Cat - Language teaching - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Other sports

Back on the (smaller) court

March 17, 2025 by 0 Comments

This morning I played squash with Mark and his wife. It was my first time on the squash court since I left New Zealand. We took turns; I got more than my share of court time. It made a nice change to get some intense exercise. That dried up for me when the tennis did last summer. His wife asked me about Kitty. (Since this morning, she’s taken to biting me again.) When we left the sports centre, there was a black and white tom cat prowling around the entrance to the sports centre. It didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Mark’s wife seriously suggested I take it home to give Kitty a friend. Um, no thanks, one is plenty.

Last week I hit 30 hours of lessons for the first time this year. Bugs have been going around, my more well-to-do students have been on ski trips, and so on and so forth, all reducing my hours somewhat. I always think of 30 teaching hours as being a full week (there’s preparation on top of that), with 25 as an absolute minimum. Yesterday I started with Matei. He turns 17 next month; I’ve been teaching him for almost half his life. In my other maths lesson with the younger girl, I explained the importance of division in everyday life. Say you need to split a restaurant bill, for instance. “Won’t you just have a calculator?” I then told her that Romania’s new president is likely to ban calculators following the upcoming election. Even phones with calculator functions, like this one, will be outlawed. It’ll be chaos – utter mayhem – as people resort to the black market to obtain these devices. So you’d better learn to divide! The funny thing is, she believed me. I suppose this is a country where the president banned Scrabble just 40 years ago, so banning calculators might seem vaguely plausible. After my three lessons in Dumbrăvița, I got soaked to the skin coming back on my bike. I still had another lesson when I got home.

Recently I had one of the nicest comments yet from a ten-year-old boy. I’ve been teaching him English for six months. “English at school is boring. I’ve learnt more in a month with you than in three years at school.” I told him that I have a much easier job than his teacher at school.

A couple of weeks ago I weighed myself. I was 78 kilos. That’s more than I want to be. I’m targeting somewhere around 72 or 73; in other words, I’d like to lose two Kitties. (Yes, she’s little.) I’ve cut back massively on carbs and have reduced my portion sizes substantially. It’s already making a difference. A benefit of living by myself and having a limited social life is that it’s easier to make these sorts of lifestyle changes. On Friday I got my hair cut. The woman who did it was very nice. She commented that I had “hair for two people”. Well yes. It felt good to have a more manageable barnet once she’d finished with it, even if my big floppy mop is part of who I am.

I saw that Blues drew 1-1 at Northampton Town yesterday. Northampton are known as the Cobblers. The town has a proud history of shoemaking. All three of my pairs of Doc Martens were made there, I think. (I’ve just checked. They would have been made in Wollaston, five miles down the road from Northampton. Production moved to China and Thailand in 2003, but mine are all older than that.) The Cobblers are one of several trade-based nicknames of English football teams. There are also the Blades (Sheffield United), the Potters (Stoke City), the Railwaymen (Crewe Alexandra), the Hatters (Luton Town), the Saddlers (Walsall), just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are others. Ipswich Town are affectionately known as the Tractor Boys, which sort of counts too.

Today I read something about Sweden and Norway trying to encourage the use of cash for civil defence purposes as the world becomes a more volatile place. Scandinavia has become virtually cashless. For me, a private tutor in Romania, the story is rather different. Last night I realised I had around 50 (mostly low-value) banknotes in my wallet, with another 50-odd in an envelope ready to take to the bank tomorrow.

I’ve just started reading Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. It’s good, but it won’t be a quick read, unlike Shute’s fantastic page-turner On the Beach which I read over Christmas. Whenever I see lots of past perfect – had travelled, had seen, had had – I know I’m in for something more challenging.

No news from Mum yet about her scan. My parents called me this morning, but I couldn’t talk for long because of my squash appointment. They talked about monarch butterflies hatching from chrysalises in their garden. The joys of actually having a garden. These very pretty butterflies are common in NZ but the species originated in North America. Dad described them as “much cleverer than your cabbage white”. The cabbage white was the one we always got in the UK.

No news at all regarding the book. I’m on the verge of giving up.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Photos - Politics - Travel: Romania

Spring, Mum, and Arad pictures

March 13, 2025 by 0 Comments

No more news from the publishers. I can’t even get through to them. I don’t think they’re malicious in any way (though I might be wrong); I just think they’re hopelessly disorganised, even by Romanian standards.

Mum and Dad just Skyped me from the hotspot in Hampden. (There will be no more Skyping after 5th May when Microsoft are pulling the plug on what has been an extremely handy – and simple – communication tool.) They seemed mostly fine, though Mum had low-level stomach pain. She had her colonography scan on Tuesday. It involved her taking a barium meal and being inflated via a tube stuck up her bum. She should get the results soon after they get home on Saturday. (They’re in Moeraki at the moment. They’re always more relaxed down there.)

On Tuesday I helped Dorothy take a bunch of old electronic bits and pieces to the tip. Her husband was something of a hoarder. One of the contraptions emitted UV rays, she said. The man at the tip was very helpful, as these sorts of people usually are. After visiting the tip, she came back to my place for a coffee and to meet Kitty. We talked about spring. I miss being in my old flat and seeing everything come alive outside my window at this time of year. The green and then the blossom. I could take in three parks and the river on a short walk. A slightly longer walk would take me over to Iosefin – where Dorothy lives – with its beautiful old buildings (albeit unrenovated) and tree-lined streets. I think back to the early days of Covid, this time five years ago. Weirdly it improved my mental health. The quiet, the total lack of expectations, the simplicity of it all. The Monday morning shopping. Mask, gloves, job done as fast as possible. No queues, unlike in the UK. I felt strangely calm then. Mum still talks positively of that time. Nobody cared what I looked like. I could just hide behind my mask.

When I talk to my parents now, 60% of our conversation is about politics and world events. How did we get here? One thing I don’t understand is why we haven’t heard a peep from the Obamas or the Clintons about this utterly destructive shitshow. Is their silence on the matter part of some grand scheme? It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a rather different story north of the border. The Canadians have decided it’s gloves off, and rightly so. I’ve become quite a fan of Canada in the last few weeks. In fact I’ve always liked Canada, ever since I was lucky enough to visit in 1998. Yesterday I read this comment about Trump’s economic “strategy”, which sounded pretty accurate. It takes some talent to even write this:
I don’t see Trump as having even the remotest concept of economic and/or foreign policies. He rules by diktat tweeting out his edicts while taking a dump on his gold toilet with all the forethought, consistency and strategising of a squirrel cranked up on crystal meth. That’s what happens when big money buys the seat of power when it should be left to sober administrators who have a genuine sense of duty for the public good.
This week I’ve realised how little I know about tanks and fighter planes and aircraft carriers and warships and Britain’s (or anyone else’s) defence capabilities. They just aren’t things I think about on a daily (or even yearly) basis. Luckily I have a brother whose job is to know about this stuff, so I can always ask him.

Kitty. She’s changed in the last ten days or so. She’s become more comfortable with me around. I honestly think she was fearful of me. She’s now sleeping noticeably more too. The best thing is that she’s stopped biting me, unless I rub her tummy when biting is a reflex action for her. Due to the warmer weather (I presume), she’s now shedding a lot more hair than she did at the beginning.

Here are some pictures of Arad, where I went on Sunday. In some ways I like Arad more than Timișoara. It sits on a proper river, the Mureș, unlike the piddly Bega we have. Although they have a boat club, I didn’t see a single boat out on the river. Just imagine a river of this size in the UK on a lazy Sunday morning. Boats just aren’t part of the culture here, with the exception of canoes and rowing boats that are used for serious sport.

A plaque on the wall of the boat club showing where the River Mureș got to in 1970

The mishmash of languages in these places is always fascinating. Romanian became the dominant language in these parts pretty recently in the scheme of things. This inscription in Hungarian, from the gospel of Matthew, is hard to read. So the double letters in the first word are zeds, right? No, they can’t be, because that must be a double zed in the second word and these look different. So what are they? Gees? Jays? Does double J exist in Hungarian? Sure enough it does. This says Jöjjetek énhozzám which means “Come to me”. Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be learning Hungarian anytime soon.

Sunset over the Bega on Sunday

Kitty sleeping next to the giant mirror in my teaching room

Cat - Family - Life :) - Other sports - Writing a book

B is for bombshell

March 9, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a WhatsApp video chat with my brother. He called me. His son, not so little anymore, was still up and about. My brother is very proud of him, and why shouldn’t he be? He’s been teaching him letters of the alphabet using wooden blocks. D is for daddy, O is for orange, X is for … he struggled a bit there. I showed him Kitty and asked him what he thought of his little sister. My brother and I got onto the weird subject of how many stillbirths Mum’s parents had in addition to the seven live births. We think that, from talking to other family members over the years, it’s between three and six inclusive, including a set of twins. Mum has never broached the subject.

Late last night Dorothy dropped a major bombshell on me. She said, you realise you’ll probably have to pay for the book publication? What? They’ve been talking about distribution and EU funds and all sorts. If Dorothy’s right, then I’m just about out. Get them to run off two dozen copies or so, pay them whatever that costs (not much, hopefully), pick them up in a box, and give them to my students. Then try and find another publisher who’s actually serious and draws up proper contracts and stuff. Self-publishing, or vanity publishing, does not interest me in the slightest, especially if the self-publishers are then going to sell on the copies that I’ve previously paid for! If she’s right, this “publisher” is even shittier than I thought. She also thinks this is somehow normal. She’s been in Romania too long.

That potential crappiness and subsequent lack of sleep made for a strange Saturday of work. Matei’s mother didn’t have enough cash to pay me after our maths lesson. Look, pay me next week, it’s fine. She insisted on going to the cash machine that obviously wasn’t just round the corner. This almost made me late for my next lesson and deprived me of the bite to eat that I would normally have. (I ended up eating during the lesson. My student didn’t seem to mind.) While I was waiting, I saw Matei’s mum had flowcharts from her job sitting on her desk, all full of pompous language that just about killed me. Their huge TV was tuned to an American version of the Living Channel. They were redesigning the interior of a house that looked perfectly fine to me as it was. Just before the lesson I’d given Matei’s mother a bouquet of nine roses. Even numbers are unlucky, for some reason. March 8th is International Women’s Day, which has really become a thing.

When I got home, the Six Nations rugby match between Ireland and France (being played in Dublin) was on TV. The last time I watched that, it still would have been the Five Nations. France led 8-6 at the interval. I saw the second half – a veritable barrage of tries, mostly by France who were (using a word that commentators like) rampant. They won 42-27. I thought, hmmm, this is actually pretty watchable. I found the TMO (video replay) confabs quite amusing – the Aussie referee said maaate a lot. When that was over, I saw what was left of Blues against Lincoln, with the commentary almost a minute behind the picture. On 70-odd minutes, with the score at 0-0, Blues were awarded a penalty. Up stepped Kieran Dowell (not Jay Stansfield who normally takes spot-kicks). Straight into the top-right corner. I half-expected the commentator a minute later to say that he’d missed, with all the nonsensical stuff about the book still going around my head. That was the only goal of the game. The football was a lot less interesting to watch than the rugby.

Tomorrow I’ll probably take the car to Arad. The last time I went there was in January 2024, which already feels a world away.

I now realise that when I feel shitty, it’s rather nice having Kitty.

Books - Life :) - Other sports - Writing a book

Book stuff and the end of the old world

March 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

Today was a searing hot day for early March as we hit 24 degrees. When the calendar flicked over to March, I immediately thought, oh shit, just three months till summer. Last summer practically messed me up. I hung around a bit in Piața Victoriei and Piața 700 before my 1pm meeting at the publisher’s. These were my old stomping grounds back in the old days. The kiosk that sells pleșkavițe in Piața 700 is still there. I remember when they bumped the price of a pleșkaviță up from 5 lei to 6. It’s now 17. Taverna lui Romică, which didn’t exist back then, was doing a roaring lunchtime trade, selling mici and other traditional Romanian food.

The book meeting. Four of us were there: both ladies from the publishing house plus Dorothy and me. As always, the older lady didn’t stop talking. She started by asking Dorothy and me if we’d be keen to do a 1050-page (!) translation from Romanian to English on something to do with sociology. We both said no. When we got on to the book, they said they’d probably only do 100 copies in the initial run. That’s a tiny number, and it’s laughably few considering how it could be distributed to schools all over the country if they had the wherewithal to do that, but at least it seems something will happen. The younger woman clearly liked the book; you could see she was suitably amused by some of Dad’s pictures. They brought up the book on their screen. It looked all wrong. They’d set it to a crazy big page size and one of the fonts wasn’t right either. The old lady played with the settings, flailing around, hopelessly guessing. I insisted on coming back the office myself on another day, armed with my own laptop, so we can properly sort it out. At one point Dorothy and I were served strong coffee with some kind of pink ice cream on the top. It was my third coffee of the day. The kid I taught at his home after the meeting usually makes me a coffee, but this time I asked him not to.

Yesterday I had a 57-minute Skype chat with Mum and Dad. It was mostly talk of the imminent apocalypse. We all fed off each other because we all feel that way. If it wasn’t already apparent, what went down last Friday in the Oval Office made it crystal clear that it’s over. The world as we knew it, the shape of it, it’s over, and what happens next could be terminal. Change is happening so damn fast. It reminds me in some ways of this time five years ago, a week into March, where people were milling around Timișoara in denial as to the tsunami that would hit us within a few days. That time it was awful but temporary. This time it could be permanent. I hear parents of 14-year-old kids talking about this or that university and I’m thinking, do you realise that there’s a decent chance (20%? How do you estimate such a thing?) that all that talk will be meaningless?

Before our chat I went to the office adjoining the dreaded immigration centre, to apply for a cazier judiciar, whatever exactly that is. It turned out that I needed one to renew my resident’s permit for another five years. The expiry date is over a year away – 22/4/26 – but I really want to renew it before the rerun of the election which takes place in May. If Georgescu or someone of a similar ilk gets in, there may no longer be a renew. Plus my current permit still has the wrong address on it, so it would be good to rectify that.

Mercifully, I’ve just finished American Psycho. I was a bit harsh last time when I said there were very few funny bits. There are a few sprinkled through the novel, but not enough to compensate for the unremitting gore and torture. The scene with the rat for instance, it was almost too much to keep ploughing on with. And I was well and truly over the designer labels and pretentious restaurant food, even though I know they were necessary to get the vacuity of eighties yuppiedom across properly. All the Trump stuff though, my gosh. The sick protagonist of the novel idolises someone who we now know is sick beyond belief. My copy of the book has an afterword by the author Bret Easton Ellis who mentions the abuse, including death threats, he received by women he describes as feminists. That’s obviously horrifying, but when he says that “I wasn’t a misogynist when I wrote the book but the unearned feminist hysteria briefly turned me into one” I’m thinking, yeah right. I don’t get the feeling that Ellis is a particularly nice man.

On Tuesday night I watched Birmingham fall to a rare defeat at Bolton. They were well beaten, too. After Blues took the lead, Bolton were totally dominant in the second half and ran out comfortable 3-1 winners. The home crowd were on good form. Blues looked lethargic, as if their busy schedule had finally caught up with them. Blues still have a nine-point lead at the top of the league with a game in hand. Surely – surely! – they can’t mess it up from here.

Books - Cat

Can’t wait for the last page

March 4, 2025 by 0 Comments

For a while there Kitty seemed positively hostile and I’d got to the point where I’d make jokes with her. I’d get back from lessons and say to her, “I’m back! You must be so glad to see me. I can just tell how happy you are!” But things have improved. Less biting, for a start. Three nights ago I got up at 4:30, went for a pee, then checked up on Kitty. As always at that time she was wide awake. She nuzzled up to me and licked my face and that was rather nice. At the weekend my brother said to me, “Cats don’t care about people. Get that into your head.” He was tired and prone to making sweeping statements. That just isn’t true though, is it? Some cats are clingy to the point of being annoying. On Sunday I met Mark who told me more about Kitty’s start to life. She was born on the street and went nine months before having anything to do with humans. So I’ve got a semi-feral cat who was never going to become my best friend overnight. I must say though that she’s very comfortable here in my flat. In the first few days she’d try and get out but it seems she’s forgotten there even is an out.

It was Mark’s idea to play squash on Sunday, but he cancelled at short notice – he thought his ankle wouldn’t be up to it. Squash is not a common sport in Romania, but it looks like there’s a court somewhere in Dumbrăvița. We were going to rock up there and see. Maybe you had to book or be a member or who knows what. He sent me a message saying that we could go “down the river” instead. I didn’t twig that he meant ride along the bike track to Livada in Sânmihaiu Român, a fair old trek. I had a cheesy pizza, he had bulz. He said that I’d made a good decision to turn down that potential job offer at his school. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it would have been terrible for me. I made it back just in time to see Dorothy at Scârț.

I’m two-thirds of the way through American Psycho. The book, not the film. The film, which I haven’t seen, is a source of endless jokes and memes among people half my age. The book though – jeez. It’s well written, but it’s so appallingly horrific that I can’t wait to get to the end of it so I can read something else. It was written in 1991 and set in late-eighties New York, at the height of the Wall Street boom. It’s supposed to be a dark comedy, I think, but moments of levity are thin on the ground. I can only really think of one so far – when he brings a woman home (whom he then mutilates and murders) and she notices he’d hung his oh-so-expensive piece of modern art upside down. On every page Patrick Bateman (the protagonist; it’s written in first person) goes into mind-numbing detail about designer clothes – who each item is by. The very idea of clothes being by somebody is preposterous to me. The book has only got gorier as it’s progressed, and I can’t wait for it to be over. Notably, the story is peppered with numerous mentions of Donald Trump whom Bateman idolises. Half a lifetime later he’s leading the most powerful country in the world. Again. It’s made me think that so many aspects of American capitalism like credit ratings and platinum cards (I don’t even have a credit card; why would I need one?) are really shitty.

Last Wednesday I had a bad morning of severe sinus pain. I was just glad I didn’t have any lessons until the afternoon.

Cat - Maths teaching - Other sports - Photos - Politics

Can’t ignore Kitty and terrifying developments

March 1, 2025 by 0 Comments

If Kitty was an antidepressant, I’d probably ask my doctor if I could taper off her. She’s not doing me any harm as such (apart from the biting, though she doesn’t draw blood or anything), but after living by myself for so long I was really hoping for a loving companion and she hasn’t exactly been that. From the start I could see she was very curious, and she’s a cat after all, so I never thought I’d be her top priority all the time, but I kind of thought I might occasionally make her top twenty. The ignore experiment didn’t quite work, because it’s hard to ignore her and I don’t want to anyway. Young Kitty is an incredible athlete (that’s been mindblowing, honestly) and I want to play and engage with her. On Wednesday when she bit me over and over, I gave her gentle (I hope) slaps around the head every time. I was hesitant to do that. I mean, imagine as a human a 50-foot monster slaps you on the head and you don’t know why. Will Kitty understand why? Will she even remember the next day? Yesterday she only bit me once. I gave her the customary slap and she was bite-free from then on, so maybe it’s working. I’m amazed by how little sleep she gets. I read that the average cat gets 13 to 16 hours sleep. If she could get half of that, it would be bloody amazing. I hope that over time she’ll warm to me. I’ve just got to be patient.

I saw these six kitties in Recaș on Wednesday (my latest trip there)

Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with Trump and Vance at the Oval Office was sickening. And terrifying. How the hell did we get here? I spent a half-hour talking about it with my parents last night, just after it had happened. Zelensky was at a disadvantage from the start: it was two against one and not in his native language, but he couldn’t have expected Trump to be quite that appalling and for Vance to be just as bad. “You’re gambling with World War Three,” Trump said. Well, sorry mate, you’ll be the one starting WW3 at this rate. As for Putin, he would have cheered on Trump’s win in November, but even he couldn’t have imagined things would go so well for him (and so quickly) in the few weeks since Trump took over. More than a dozen European nations have come out in support of Ukraine since last night’s horror show, but Viktor Orbán inevitably did the opposite, and I haven’t heard a peep out of Romania yet. I was worried that Mum’s health might mean I won’t see her and Dad in May. That is still a concern. But that might not be the only reason.

I had several maths lessons last week. I’m always fighting the same battle. Getting them to actually think what they’re doing and not just blindly applying procedures. Crank the handle, out it comes at the other end. Yesterday I had one fairly bright girl add a half and a quarter to get six-eighths. Well, technically it is 6/8, but if you get that answer you clearly don’t have a clue what a fraction even is. “You see, I timesed the top and bottom of the first fraction by four, then I timesed the top and bottom of the second fraction by two, then I added the top numbers to get six over eight.” Maddening stuff, and of course not her fault, but the fault of the education system. (Cue my pizza diagrams.) In another of yesterday’s sessions, the kid was faced with this problem: “The first term in an arithmetic sequence is 30. The first 16 terms add up to 960. What is the difference between each pair of successive terms?” An arithmetic sequence, by the way, is simply an ordered list of numbers that go up by the same amount each time. He got out his formula booklet and busily cranked the handle. The formula had letters like S and u and subscripts. I took him a while. It would have taken me a while too. I told him my method. Think of the numbers in pairs. First and last, second and second-last, and so on. Each of these pairs must add up to the same thing. There are 16 numbers, so 8 pairs. If all the numbers add up to 960, then each pair must add up to 960 divided by 8, which is 120. If the first number is 30, then the last number (which pairs up with the first) must be 90, which is 60 more. Since there are 16 numbers, there are 15 jumps, and since all the jumps add up to 60, each jump must be 4. That’s your answer. He said, “That’s cheating.” He was joking, but in fact that’s exactly how people need to be thinking about problems like this instead of applying some magic formula.

Edit 24/3/25. There’s an easier way of solving the problem above. If you’ve got 16 numbers and they add up to 960, their average is 960 divided by 16, which is 60. Since the first number is 30 and they increase by the same amount every time, the last number has to be 90. To get from 30 to 90, you go up 60, and because there are 15 jumps, each jump has to be 60 divided by 15, which is 4.

Football. Blues beat Leyton Orient 2-0 on Tuesday. It was a match spoilt by an Orient player receiving an undeserved red card in just the 12th minute. Blues are now on course for promotion as league champions and with a massive points total. The other match that piqued my interest was Hollywood-backed Wrexham at home to Peterborough in the semi-finals of the EFL Trophy. Blues would play the winner in the final at Wembley. Wrexham were 2-0 up late in the game, but Peterborough (who go by the rather cool nickname Posh) clawed back those two goals and then won on penalties. Blues against Posh will be a fun match-up in the final. The two sets of fans actually like each other, from what I can tell. They have a connection through Barry Fry who managed Blues in the mid-nineties and, after getting the sack, took over at Posh. Barry Fry was a crazy guy and something of a cult hero. I remember when he suffered multiple heart attacks. But three decades on, he’s still chugging along. In fact he’s now Director of Football at Posh. He’ll turn 80 a week before the final.

Some better news on the book front. It looks like we might be meeting next week.

Politics - Writing a book

Latest book news and a spot of politics

February 25, 2025 by 0 Comments

This morning I thought, jeez, everything is turning to shit, isn’t it? I’ve got a cat that might never like me, two books that might never get off my hard drive, and parents who might never make it out of New Zealand. I plucked up the courage to call the woman from the publishers-in-name-only on WhatsApp. She was in a car, on the way to Peciu Nou she said, as if her destination was of vital importance. (I’ve been there. It’s a half-hour drive from here.) Call back this afternoon, she said. She couldn’t hear me at all. At half-four, between lessons, I called her back. Our seven-minute call, which she ended rather impolitely, was at least somewhat encouraging. I was more insistent this time. Yes, we’ll meet up again at some time yet to be determined. Yes, your book will actually happen. Now bugger off. She didn’t say the last bit but she implied it.

The German elections took place yesterday. It looks like they’ll have a Chancellor Merz. The extreme-right AfD did well. But at this point, all talk of left or right is by the by. There’s a dangerous piece of shit in the White House who is taking a sledgehammer to democracy in the US and elsewhere. It’s a real shame he wasn’t taken out last summer. If only the golf guy could have done it. The piece of orange crap, aided by the giga-turd who owns Tesla, will further empower Putin and tear Europe apart, unless we in Europe stand up to him. If Europe’s biggest economy elects someone who can do that, I couldn’t give a damn where on the political spectrum he comes from. European solidarity will be absolutely vital and we need to act fast. My fear is that Europeans won’t accept being materially poorer, which is probably what it will take. I certainly would, but I can be content with very little. (That’s one thing I loved about Covid, especially the early days of the pandemic. Consumption, and expectations, went way way down.) Oh, and of course, I’m pretty damn close to the front line where I am.

Everyone needs to stop theorising and philosophising about the orange turd. There’s nothing there. No master plan. No depth. Basically no thought. He’s just an egomaniac who enjoys hurting other people. That’s all there is. Sure, write books to your heart’s content about how modern society has enabled him to get to where he has, because that’s actually worth exploring, but don’t bother writing about him.

No more news from Mum. She’s got a scan on 11th March.

Cat - Other sports - Writing a book

Putting her on ignore

February 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ve just come back from having lunch with Dorothy at the brewery which is a five-minute walk for me. (When people ask where in town I live, I say “near the brewery”.) I had a large chicken salad; she had chicken and chips. We were talking (briefly, thankfully) about politics, when I said “She’d done her dash.” Dorothy said, she’d done what? Turns out I used an antipodean expression without even realising it. I’ve done that before with “spit the dummy” and I’m sure others besides.

After days of scratching and biting, and weeks of very limited affection, I’m trying out a new strategy with Kitty. Leave her alone. Let her do her thing – climbing and jumping and sticking her head down the loo and zooming around at 20-odd miles an hour – while I do mine. She’s got plenty of toys to keep her occupied. Just watching her is fascinating in a way; cats are incredible animals. So far this experiment is working out because I’m not getting scratched or bitten. After putting her on ignore for a week (which isn’t easy; her coat is so lovely and soft) I’ll go back to gentle stroking and tickling, and kicking a tennis ball around. No picking her up. If that doesn’t work, I’ll revert to ignore. On Friday I took Kitty up to meet Elena, the lady who lives above me. After a few minutes, Elena said, “I don’t think she likes me.” I wouldn’t worry about that, I said, I don’t think she likes me either. I should be glad that on a practical level, Kitty is fine. She seems happy enough in my flat. She isn’t wrecking my furniture and she’s peeing and pooing where she’s supposed to. She also provides entertainment value. Emotionally though, she’s not really there, I’m sorry to say. I suppose I just have to be patient.

Ice hockey isn’t a sport I follow closely. You can tell, because I call it ice hockey. But when Canada beat the US in overtime in Boston last week, that was bloody brilliant. In this new world order, America is enemy territory. I’ve generally been anti-American when it comes to team sports (apart from football, where the US team was more likeable because they were less successful), but that’s just because of their competitive brashness rather than any dislike of America itself. Suddenly my feelings are far more visceral, however, and I’m sure millions of people feel similarly. About ice hockey, I regret that I never persuaded my parents to take me to see the Peterborough Pirates when I was a kid. The game seemed a lot of fun, if you could get past the brawls. Seeing live sport, or live anything, wasn’t a thing we did though. Just like eating at restaurants. The idea of eating at an actual restaurant would have been laughable, but now kids grow up eating at restaurants every other week.

Birmingham drew 0-0 at Reading yesterday, on a crappy pitch against decent opposition. That’s Blues’ seventh draw in the league in 30 games this season. They’ve lost just two and won all the rest. Reading play at Select Car Leasing Stadium, in the middle of a retail park just off the M4. A bloody awful place to have to go (at least) 23 times a season to watch your team play.

An important day tomorrow. I’m going to call Ana, the woman from the publishing house. If she isn’t prepared to arrange a meeting, this could very well be the end of the line. That would be an enormous shame.