Family - Films - Life :)

Being alone at Christmas is actually OK

December 27, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

The worst thing about being alone at Christmas isn’t being alone. That bit’s fine. No, the worst part is people telling you if you’re alone at Christmas, then something must have gone wrong in your life. I could have gone over to England, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. (It’s chaos there at this time of year normally, even without everyone going on strike.) It was nice having three days to myself, not having to talk to students or to the builder, and certainly not to a dozen people all at the same time. On Friday (the 23rd) I went over to the English couple in Dumbrăvița, where we ate the sarmale and salată de boeuf I’d made earlier that day. They gave me a present: a book of Romanian recipes, in English. The book has a very pleasant rustic feel to it. Whether I’ll actually cook many of the recipes is another matter though. Here are the ingredients for “toba”, for example: 2 pig’s trotters, 2 pig’s ears, 2 kidneys, 1 tongue, 1 heart, half a pig’s head, 1 pig’s bladder or a thick cow’s intestine, … The list almost entirely lacks anything that doesn’t gross me out. I’m now reading Homo Deus, the sequel to Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, and every page I read makes me think about becoming a vegetarian. More and more people I know are making the conversion. There’s one snag right now though: I live in Romania which is just about powered by pork. In summer I get by with very little meat, but in winter I’d be struggling.

Those three days gave me the chance to reflect on a few things. Like, wouldn’t it be nice to have a cat? When I go out for lessons I’m often surrounded by cats and other furry friends; the companionship is clearly beneficial. Pets haven’t been a big part of my life until now. When I was little, though, we had a tortoiseshell cat. She was mute and had virtually no interest in chasing mice or anything else. A zen cat. My parents adopted her as a kitten – there had been a plague of kittens near their old house. When I was nine, and the cat was two years older, we spent six months in New Zealand, so Mum gave her to one of the teachers at her school. A few weeks later a letter arrived at our Twizel house in Temuka. I’m sorry but we seem to have mislaid your cat. The big negative of getting a feline friend is what I’d do if went away. I’m planning to spent three or four weeks in New Zealand during our summer, so perhaps I’ll wait until after then. Four wheels first, four paws later.

I didn’t get up to much over the three days. I went for a bike ride, read my book, watched Doctor Zhivago for the first time (great film), and did a really good job of busting out of poker tournaments just before the money. Of course I caught up with family. My sister-in-law sent me photos of my nephew at his first Christingle service. Christingle. Such a funny word, isn’t it? These oranges with candles poked in them weren’t a thing when I was a kid. Then it was his first Christmas. I suspect I’ll receive lots of pictures of firsts over the coming months and years.

Dan the builder is back now. He’s a nice guy. We just had a chat about the mildness of our current winter. It’s a far cry from what I experienced six years ago when I learnt all that winter vocabulary such as țurțuri (icicles) and chiciură (hoar frost). He said that during the Ceaușescu period they used army trucks to clear the chest-deep snow. This year it seems all the snow has been dumped on the US. It’s like a war zone in New York State. My cousin and his wife, who live near Albany, are now in New Zealand, but they had a heck of a time getting a plane out of America. Dan should be finished tomorrow, when Bogdan the plumber will also come back. Soon I’ll have a new fully-functioning bathroom (I hope), then I’ll need to give this place a damn good clean.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

A low ebb

December 19, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

At about the time I wrote my last post, my nephew was in hospital. He was having trouble breathing and his oxygen saturation was down, so he spent the night there. He now appears to be fine, but it was a scary day or two. At that age, things can go so wrong so fast. This incident made me wonder if having kids is even worth it. From day one to day 10,000 or 15,000 or if you’re really (un)lucky 20,000, they’re a source of constant worry. How do you sleep at night? There’s gotta be some, I dunno, benefits to counteract the neverending stress.

Last week was probably my worst, from a mental health perspective, since I washed up in Romania way back when. Loads of lessons despite some last-minute cancellations, and those I coped with even if I sometimes got drenched on the way to them. But I’ve also had the builder here to help sort out my bathroom and at the same time throw everything out of balance, and I’ve just been, well, low. Those books, what’s the point exactly if (as is very likely) they never get published and hardly anyone reads them? Yet another exercise in futility, as if I haven’t had enough of those already. And of course I’m stuck here on my own, getting older, seeing my parents get older, wondering if and when I’ll need to go back to New Zealand and how on earth I’ll afford to live in a place where the average house costs a million dollars.

Yes, the bathroom. Last week the builder, a heavy smoker in his late forties, spent four days here gutting everything and making a start on the tiles. The builder’s name is Dan, and he’s back again today. The plumber, who should be coming on Wednesday, is Bogdan. So just like Dan, but he has to deal with the bog. Nominative determinism in action. It would have been easy if I could have just left Dan to his own devices but at times I’ve had to make decisions. Friday was a bit fraught. In a gap between lessons I went with him in his van, first to the tip, then to Dedeman where we spent well over an hour. That place, where everything is orange and blue, reminding me of Uncle Ben’s sauce, is disorienting at the best of times. In places like that I freeze, or even worse I concentrate on all the wrong things, like why it is that Romanians call the middle traffic light galben, or yellow, when they’re clearly orange. Is it because portocaliu, the Romanian word for orange, has too many syllables? (Officially in the UK, the middle light is amber, but nobody actually calls it that unless they’re trying especially hard to be an annoying twat. In the New Zealand road code – I’ve just had a look – it’s officially yellow even though everyone in NZ surely calls it orange. I see that Toby Manhire, writing about the Covid traffic light system, is no fan of the yellow designation.)

Back to Dedeman. I first had to choose some floor and ceiling tiles without pissing Dan off too much. Which browny grey or bluey grey or whitey grey do I choose? Shiny or semi-shiny or non-shiny? I almost thought, sod it, I’ll get the one with the bright pink fish. Then I chose a loo and a sink and a cupboard and so on and so forth. We made several stops as Dan got his quarter-tonne of cement and gypsum board and many other bits and pieces. I got so lost in there. “Get the trolley and bring it back to me,” he said. But, but, that’s like eight aisles away and I wasn’t paying attention. Back home, we had to haul the vast bags of cement up the stairs to my flat. I managed, but struggled to keep up with the smoker half-a-dozen years older than me.

I spoke to my brother last night. His wife’s family really go to town with Christmas activities, and he seemed almost envious of the non-Christmas I’ll end up having. He was grateful for the lockdown two years ago. We talked about our aunt who seemed pretty good on the phone when I spoke to her last week. But physically she’s a mess; my brother doesn’t think she’ll be around much longer. We discussed, of all things, the new notes and coins with King Charles’s portrait. He said that monarchs alternate the direction they look in, so Elizabeth faces right while Charles will face left (I knew that), and that queens wear crowns but kings don’t (I didn’t know that). Soon this will all be moot – cash is rapidly disappearing from Britain.

The deadliest and stupidest football World Cup ever is over. The football – none of which I watched – was a roaring success, as it was always going to be. Yesterday’s final surely ranks as one of the greatest games of all time, but why can’t they damn well decide it properly? (Five of the knockout matches, or about a third, went to penalties at this World Cup.) “Nobody has come up with a better way” is such a lazy argument. There are no end of better options. My favourite is to gradually remove players from each side after 120 minutes until someone scores. With all that space, someone is bound to. I’m aware here that I’m over 40 and younger people think shoot-outs are “sick” or whatever, so they’re unlikely to go away any time soon. By the way, I only maintained a vague interest in the World Cup (go Morocco!) because of the boys I teach, many of whom had never seen a normal World Cup before. For them, this is normal.

Life :) - Tennis

Thirty days hath December

December 12, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I miss my old place. This morning is a good example of why. Until I started my lesson at eight, I didn’t even notice it was snowing. Last December I was surrounded by parks and trees and the clatter of trams and Christmas lights and strange blokes dressed up as goats, but now the outside is sadly much more ignorable. As I type this I can see a tree.

If there’s one day I’d happily scratch from the calendar, it would be New Year’s Eve. It’s just far too social for someone as asocial as me. In Romania it’s particularly bad because people don’t call it a day (or a year) soon after midnight. Oh no, they power right through till four or something ridiculous, so the whole monstrous thing might last eight hours. Imagine being stuck at an airport for eight hours. It happens. In fact it happened a lot in Europe this past summer. But picture this: at regular intervals during your ordeal at Gate 29, to avoid being bumped off the flight, you’re required to talk to one of your fellow passengers. Someone you don’t know from Adam. What’s more, every third time you say something, you must make that other person laugh. After first grabbing an alcoholic drink, obviously. You must also laugh every third time the other person says something, no matter whether you think it’s funny, because you know he or she will be kicked off the flight if you fail to do so. There’s a mutual understanding. Then, at the five-hour point, you’re suddenly obliged to dance with your fellow travellers. Imagine that! Fail to tango with these complete strangers and you might as well be carrying explosives. At New Year, millions of people choose to do something pretty similar to what I’ve described. They’re obviously barking mad. Off their rockers, the lot of them. Recently someone from tennis invited me to a New Year thing at a restaurant not far from where I live. Oh god. It costs 300 lei. (Pay extra for the privilege of being stuck at an airport for eight hours and having to make jokes with other passengers. Utter insanity.) I ummed and ahhed for a few days and then said yes because I didn’t want people to hate me. There will be food, that’s something. And maybe they’ll let me off if I duck out at around two. He’s not from here, he does things differently. I can always play that card, the joker up my sleeve.

I’m tired all the bloody time. I look back at early 2018 when I had a two-month spell without a single day off. Nearly five years on it’s all much more of a struggle. Getting to lessons from my new place takes longer, but it’s the regular headaches that really wear me out. I also changed my antidepressant recently – I was forced to – and who knows what that might have done. It’s hard to know what’s what. Last week I visited my doctor who gave me some pills for my high liver enzyme levels. Why they’re high I have no idea; I drink copious water, I hardly ever have fizzy drink, and as for alcohol I average something like two drinks a week – I work late every evening from Monday to Friday, and the last thing I want at 10pm is a beer. These pills contain silymarin, which is a flowering plant, and cynarin, which is extracted from artichokes. I’m also taking vitamin D again.

Tennis is over for at least another three months. I didn’t particularly enjoy my last session of the season. The woman on the other side shouted “yes!” every time we made a mistake (cut that shit out, seriously) and her partner was an explosive player who had all the right gear (an expensive Babolat racket, obviously) and seemed ever so slightly dickish.

This is shaping up to be a really busy week. I hope I can stay awake for it.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Winter is upon us once more

December 2, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

… but right now it’s pretty benign. I’ve just been to watch the parade for Romania’s national day. This time it was outside the cathedral, and from where I stood I looked directly up at the windows of my old apartment. In the past the parade took place outside the Timiș council building, and last year we all congregated in Central Park as the tanks, police cars and fire engines went by in the middle distance. They played the national anthem – one of only a handful in a minor key – and then there was a lot of hanging around as mostly inaudible sermon-like speeches were delivered before all the military vehicles and people in uniform drifted by, and two choppers flew overhead.

I’m now on day two of escitalopram after my vanilla citalopram ran out and all shipments had been halted. No side effects yet, touch wood. I got the results of the tests I had on Monday. My cholesterol is high as it’s always been, and some of my liver enzymes seem to be elevated – hopefully when I see my doctor next Tuesday he’ll tell me what that all means. I’ll also ask him to refer me to a specialist. I continue to be pleasantly surprised by my level of medical care in this country. I could see a doctor at the drop of a hat if I needed to, not like in the UK where I’d be waiting days. I’m baffled by how accepting the Brits are of their increasingly shitty reality. Maybe the easy availability of consumer goods makes them lose sight of the big picture.

I had my latest lesson with the four twins yesterday. They live in the west of the city, a half-hour bike ride away, beyond the road that’s being churned up to lay new tram tracks, and almost right next to the 1000-seater rugby stadium. Yes, rugby is played in Romania; the national side will play in next year’s World Cup. Romanians tend to pronounce “rugby” somewhere between ruby and ribby with no hint of a g, and I try to point them in a more native-sounding direction. The lesson went fine, although the younger boy sat out one of the games, saying he was bored. In the lesson with the single twins on Monday, we discussed what things are supposed to bring good luck in certain cultures, such as a horseshoe, a four-leaf clover, or a rabbit’s foot. We then went on to lucky colours and numbers. What numbers are lucky? The boy said, in all seriousness, 69, without seeming to realise what it meant. Where did you get that from?! “Toma from my class said so.” Tell Toma he’s wrong!

Mum and Dad are back home. Dad said he’d been looking forward to getting back, but felt flat the moment he actually did so. It’s funny how that can work. For him, it might have just been all the chores that they were suddenly confronted with. They told me about the woman they sat next to on the plane. She was Indian, in her fifties, and was clearly far out of her comfort zone. She squatted rather than sat, as if being on a chair was alien to her (perhaps it was in the town or village she came from) and spent the whole journey with a blanket over her head, never eating anything or even taking a sip of water. For ten hours. She had the aisle seat and couldn’t get that she had to move out of the way to let my parents sit down. She didn’t know a word of English. And for some reason she was flying to New Zealand. I found my parents’ account of her fascinating; there’s the basis for a whole novel right there.

The Glass Hotel is great. I’m coming to the end of it. She’s done her research, that’s for sure. I like all the references to shipping, They make me think I’m back in Devonport in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis (which is a major theme of the book). Late at night I’d watch the dockers, lit up like fireflies, from the window of my flat. I became a container spotter: P&O Nedlloyd, Maersk, Hamburg Süd, the occasional Matson. Each colossal container ship carried thousands of these huge boxes, many weighing 30-odd tons, and that made me feel pleasantly small.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

An agonising day

November 30, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’d just about got over my latest kidney stone business when Sunday happened. I woke up at about 5:30 with sinus pain, the sort that eats into the quality of my life without completely wrecking it. I got up just before eight. The pain in my left sinuses was still there, and getting more intense. By nine it had become unbearable. Sheer agony. I didn’t go to bed, because pacing up and down helps relieve the pain at least somewhat. Normally the excruciating pain lasts two hours, but what if it doesn’t this time? What if the torture lasts hours or days on end, what then? It did start to subside at eleven, and I went to bed until half-two. I couldn’t eat anything – it wouldn’t have stayed down. The rest of the day I was on a go-slow, and even two days later I feel devoid of energy. Yesterday I felt a strange calmness come over me, as if nothing in the outside world really mattered. No TV please, and no internet if I can help it. Do my lessons and don’t do much else.

Yesterday I had an early-morning lesson, then went to the doctor’s surgery for blood and urine tests. When I got back I made myself a late breakfast (because I had to fast before the tests), and in the middle of eating it, the phone rang. You haven’t paid. The lady used the posh Romanian word for paid, achitat, instead of the common word, plătit. You’re right. How embarrassing. In the afternoon I had the face-to-face lesson with the single pair of twins, and I passed by the doctor’s on the way. All the tests came to 356 lei (£63; NZ$120), so it wasn’t especially cheap. I’ll post my results next time. I seriously need to consider surgery on my sinuses. My normal doctor, who is generally very good, prescribes me pills or sprays that are of very little benefit. As Mum said, spray and walk away.

I’ve been quickly getting through (and thoroughly enjoying) The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel. It’s the second book of hers I’ve read, the first being Station Eleven which is all about a fictional pandemic and its aftermath (I reread bits of it at the start of the Covid outbreak).

Mum and Dad are now on their way from Singapore to Christchurch. They Skyped me from the airport this lunchtime (my time). All around I could see Airportland. Flashing (and surprisingly fast) buggies, travelators that seemed to stretch miles, and a sign saying Changi Terminal One. Changi consists of four vast terminals. They were too tired to enjoy their stay in Singapore much this time, although they’d had a very good beef dish from a street market, or bar, the night before. On the London-to-Singapore leg, they had to contend with a screaming baby for the entire 13½ hours. When I spoke to them today, they dearly wanted to get home.

Two new students tomorrow – a twelve-year-old boy and his mother, separately. Tomorrow will be St Andrew’s Day, the first of two public holidays. Thursday (1st December) is Romania’s national day. Many Romanians have decided to take Friday off as well, giving them a five-day weekend.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music

Feeling cabbagey

November 25, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

The walls of my Ceaușescu-era apartment are thick, solid concrete, so sound from other flats rarely travels into mine. Smells often do, however, and there’s a distinct meaty cabbagey whiff right now. Romanian cuisine is often meaty and cabbagey, especially at this time of year.

To get to the nitty-gritty, it’s been a pretty shitty week. I had stomach pain on Monday night, just after I wrote my blog post, and I hardly slept at all. It’s my kidney stones again, isn’t it? Luckily Tuesday is when my usual after-hours doctor is on duty, so I saw him after muddling through four lessons. It was hosing it down and I was sapped of energy but I had to make the trip. I was like a drowned rat when I got there. After waiting for a whole family to be seen to, he did all the usual checks like blood pressure, then I lay down on the table for an abdominal ultrasound. He checked my organs in turn – at one point he examined my liver for Covid-related damage of which there was none – finishing with my kidneys. I now just have one stone – not three like in February – which is in my right kidney. It’s 5 mm wide which is only borderline passable. I also had some tiny stony stuff in my left kidney, which he called “sand”. He seemed surprisingly unfazed by all this, and gave me some pills to relieve the pain caused by the build-up of gas. The pain was nowhere near as severe and persistent as nine months ago, coinciding with the start of the war in Ukraine, and it’s basically gone away now, but I feel whacked. Yesterday I even managed to fall off my bike on the way home from a lesson. I was in a rush, it was wet, my handlebar grip flew off, and I ended up with just a grazed knee and hand. It could have been something far messier. I’m now going to get the cheapest hairspray I can find, which hopefully will glue the grip to the handlebar.

I had a quick chat with Mum and Dad yesterday. They were in the library next to a shelf with Andy McNab books, and had to keep the volume down. They’re always worried about me, what with me being stuck here on my own. Their train from Poole to Cambridge on Monday was at a standstill for two hours, meaning they hit Cambridge in rush hour and a relatively simple journey turned into a stressful messful ordeal. Nothing has been simple about their trip. They fly back home tomorrow night and frankly they can’t wait.

I’ve had a good amount of work this week, though less than it feels like I’ve had. The lesson with the four twins went decently – I now have a handle on the girls’ unusual names; I’m no longer drowning in a sea of A’s and E’s and I’s. One incredible thing keeps happening with teenagers (though sometimes younger children too) and old rock bands. On Monday the single twins both wrote a paragraph about their favourite band: Metallica. Their favourite song, they said, was Nothing Else Matters. It is an amazing song, and according to Wikipedia it was released on my 12th birthday, which is bloody ages ago now. On Tuesday my 16-year-old female student came in a Guns ‘n’ Roses top with pictures of magazine cuttings dated 1988. On Wednesday I had an online lesson (finishing at 10:15 pm – ugh) with a 15-year-old boy who popped up on my screen in an AC/DC T-shirt. The eight-year-old girl in Germany – I’ll see her online later today – said her favourite band was Depeche Mode. It keeps coming. Admittedly I’m dealing with a tiny sample size here, but if it’s even partly replicated elsewhere, it’s nothing short of a phenomenon. And why? I asked Guns ‘n’ Roses Girl why, because I was so intrigued by that point. Modern music is really bad, she said. If she means mainstream modern music, I agree 100%.

Another interesting lesson was with a 32-year-old bloke who likes his football and parties. He’s close to an absolute beginner. We did some food vocab, and I asked him to pick out the foods in the pictures that he’d eaten in the past week. Chicken, burgers, pizza, chips, cakes, and hardly a fruit or vegetable to be seen. Good god man, you’re a human dustbin. I sometimes have a go at Mum on this blog, and immediately feel terrible about it, but she made sure us two boys got a proper healthy diet, which we’ve largely maintained in adulthood. Lack of McDonald’s and the like in our home town (there’s one now) certainly helped.

Language teaching - Life :)

Bullying your way to victory

November 22, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

At 7:50 this morning, my student cancelled her lesson which was due to start ten minutes later. She said her husband had crashed his car, but he was OK, and she had to go and pick him up. What are the chances that she was lying? Five percent? Ten? I often try to put probabilities on these kinds of things, and that’s probably why at least the concept of gambling and odds appeals to me.

I read something yesterday by Nancy Friedman, an expert in brand names. Her piece was about Shein, a mega-successful Chinese online clothes store, and more specifically its name. When I see that name I want to pronounce it “shine”, which actually sounds nice, but no, it’s the butt-ugly “she-in” – the original name was SheInside. And what’s more, it sells men’s stuff too. The name is utter Sheit, in other words. The company’s huge success made Nancy question whether her decades in the naming business even mattered anymore: Shein are winning on the back of sheer marketing gigabucks, an execrable name be damned. Spending and bullying and brute-forcing your way to victory seems the norm these days.

I miss Muzicorama, the music show broadcast on local radio every weekday evening between six and seven. As far as I know it’s still running, and presented by Bogdan Puriș, but I’m always teaching at that time. Most of the music I listen to these days is on YouTube. Right now I’m binging British stuff from about 2006, especially the Kooks, Kaiser Chiefs and Razorlight. It reminds me of my trip to the UK in that year and the time I spent with my grandmother.

Time to get going – I’ve got my lesson with the single twins as opposed to the twin twins. After that I’ve got the eight-year-old girl; I’ve done “Would You Rather?” with her three times in a row and now I’m out of ideas.

Language teaching - Other sports - Poker - Tennis - Writing a book

Fuq the World Qup

November 21, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

One of the benefits of teaching kids is that they sometimes teach you stuff. It was a cliché in the 80s and 90s that teachers would often ask one of their ten-year-old pupils how to operate a VCR. Last week one of my 15-year-old students (who wants to be an airline pilot) told me about an upcoming Istanbul–Timișoara route run by Turkish Airlines, which could be handy in getting me to and from New Zealand. I asked Turkish Airlines for some idea of a date; they told me it was “up their sleeves”. On Friday a 13-year-old boy told me all about the groups and teams and players in the World Cup which is about to start. “You’ll be my go-to man, then,” I told him, “because I won’t be watching any of it.”

Qatar. Even the word looks ridiculous. If a U-less Q was a criterion for hosting the event, they should have held it in Greenland. No end of possibilities there. I’d have been all over the games in Qaqortoq, Uummannaq and Ittoqqortoormiit. They could have kept it in summer; no air-conditioned stadiums required. I’d say they’ve missed a triq. (I remember Chelsea’s Cup Winners’ Cup match in the blizzard of Tromsø in northern Norway, back in 1997. It was a thing of beauty.) Seriously though, this World Cup stinks. Everything about it is jarringly wrong, right down to an anatomical-looking stadium, one of eight soon-to-be white elephants they’ve built in an area not much bigger than Wellington, at a cost of probably thousands of lives.

Earlier today I spoke to my friend’s girlfriend in Birmingham. She gave me some pointers on getting my work translated; the dictionary might be a bridge too far because of the sheer cost. She also put me in touch with a woman in Romania who knows something on the matter. The translation business is much bigger than I ever imagined; there are vast numbers of people online touting their services, even in relatively uncommon languages like Romanian.

After our chat, I played some online poker. Specifically, it was a triple draw tournament. I don’t particularly like triple draw, but I gave it a whirl and ended up finishing fifth for a modest profit of around $9. Once that was over, I read an article about a woman who had developed a tennis gambling addiction during the pandemic. Poor her. Her wagers included betting on the winner of the next point, which is asinine, but if you need the rush… She lost £40,000. I count myself lucky that I don’t have an addictive personality, or at least I don’t think I do. Also, it helps that I’m not well blessed in the ego department. In poker, if I think my opponents are better than me or the stakes make me feel uncomfortable (mainly because my opponents are likely to be better at higher stakes), I simply won’t play.

The incessant rain put paid to tennis today. Yesterday I got out there though, straight after finishing my three lessons. I enjoyed the session more than usual because we just rallied instead of playing a game.

Now I’ll do my usual Sunday night thing of rallying the troops (contacting my newer or less reliable students) before the week’s lessons start.

Family - The UK - Writing a book

The book, and a lack of pommy pride

November 19, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I made some progress today. First, I got my passport notarised and sent of a load of bumph to Barclays which might mean I can get my money back. Second, the chance that the plumber comes over to look at my bathroom went up. Third, I had a video call with my friend from Birmingham. At the end of a long chat, I mentioned my book idea and my need of a English–Romanian translator. His girlfriend works as a translator, and although she certainly can’t translate anything into or out of Romanian, she might know someone who can, so I’m going to have a video call with her on Sunday morning.

Yesterday I spoke to Dad who for various reasons was on his own at my brother’s place. “It’s bloody cold,” he said. Meaning inside. My brother and sister-in-law are very sparing with the heating because it’s got so expensive. Two people with decent incomes. And a baby. Crazy shit. My parents had gone down on the train. Return tickets were over £100 each. What are you even paying for? Dad used the word “grim”, just like Mum had done, to describe the current state of the UK. He said that if I were to leave Romania, moving back to New Zealand (rather than the UK) would be a no-brainer. I look back to my early days of working in NZ, around 2004-2006. I’d get all the jokes about “you poms”, but I could tell there was really a grudging respect for Brits and all our rich history and culture and music and comedy and pragmatism. I was proud to be a pom. But not now. It’s going to take a long time to turn the oil tanker around. Turfing out the current lot at the next election would be a good start.

I watched the Artemis I launch on Wednesday morning (weirdly, it took off in the middle of the night in Florida). The will-it-or-won’t-it-actually-go added to the drama. I missed out on the thrill of the space race that my parents lived through, so to see a new space age dawn in real time was an exciting moment. The first human moon landing since 1972 is planned for 2025.

Family - Life :)

Opt miliarde

November 16, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

That’s the current world population, more of less, written in Romanian. Pretty much the whole of continental Europe uses some version of “milliard” to mean what we (in the English-speaking world) call a billion, and honestly it makes more sense. A billion used to mean a million million, but then the Americans repurposed billion to mean a thousand million, because no-one would ever need to talk about a million million, and eventually Britain, Australia and New Zealand followed suit as they so often do. A million million (which, it turns out, we do need to talk about) is a trillion. This rescaling which means you get a new word every thousand (instead of every million) is kind of messy. A quintillion, for instance, isn’t the fifth power of a million, but it isn’t the fifth power of a thousand either. It’s the sixth power of a thousand, or 1 with 18 zeros after it, which under the old system would just be a trillion. By the way, in the “grains of rice on a chessboard” problem there are just over nine quintillion grains, under the rebased system, on the last square. And even further by the way, Indians don’t use millions and billions in their everyday lives at all as far as I know; they use the lakh (100,000) and crore (10 million), so they’d call the world population “800 crore”.

Whatever you call it, it’s too many bloody people. If you’re 48, the world’s population has doubled in your lifetime. If you’re 69 it has tripled. If you’re 95 it has quadrupled. Britain now has miserably many people; it’s an island coming apart at the seams. I spoke to Mum this morning – she Skyped me from the library so had to be quiet – and she called the UK grim. Dad said I have a better quality of life in Romania – a country doing its bit to combat the world population explosion – than I would in the UK and I agree. (They’re keen for me to go back to New Zealand at some point, though.)

I was already blogging when we hit seven billion. At six billion I was at university. I was seven when we crashed through the five billion barrier and a newborn boy was christened the five billionth baby. But, but, how do they know? What’s my number?