Driving - Music - Photos

A quick trip

March 21, 2024 by 0 Comments

Earlier starts are good for me. This morning I had a one-hour lesson from eight, then cycled to the local produce market where I bought a sack of potatoes, cheese (cow’s this time), some spinach and some spring onions. I heard a stallholder say “crumpir”, a regional word for “potato”: it comes from the Serbian “krompir”. As usual at this time of year there were bags of stinging nettles for sale; I should probably try cooking with them at some stage.

After I got back from the market I took my car for a spin because I was free of lessons until 2:30. What’s great about Timișoara (among many other things) is that when you’re out of the city, you’re properly out of it, so I drove to Recaș, 25 minutes down the road. Famous for its winery, it’s easy to get to from my side of the city. When I arrived at eleven, I found a town brimming with life and bathed in sunshine. It was lovely just to sit for a few minutes on a bench in the small central park where the trees were in pink blossom and the birds were chirruping away. There was a small indoor market and a popular outdoor stall selling mici and chips. Most of the folk were older; a fair few of them were gypsies. I’d only been to Recaș once before, back in 2017, to pick up wine with one of my students. After a quick look round the place I went to the winery outlet (in a more modern building now) and got five litres of medium dry white wine from the tap for NZ$18 or just under £9, then came home. On the way back I saw a Wizz Air plane come in to land – probably the one I’ll be coming in on two weeks tomorrow. Though it was a chilly start to the day and the temperature barely made it into the teens, there’s hardly been a cloud in the sky.

In recent weeks I’ve felt a lot of anxiety. I’m not sure why. It’s probably a combination of pessimism about the modern world as a whole (I keep wanting to escape it by putting on 50-year-old records) and recognising that I’m getting older and need to change aspects of my life but don’t know what or how. It’s also the being on my own thing. It’s been so long that I hardly remember anything else, but it’s not supposed to be like this, is it? You’re supposed to have a rock, a safety net, someone to share your experiences and problems and foreign-language life admin with. Without that, life can get precarious, overwhelming, and expensive. (Single people are screwed over financially all round. Politically, we are second-class citizens, not in the same league as hard-working families that David Cameron and his ilk liked to woo.) During my chat with Dad, he wondered how on earth he would manage his banking should anything happen to Mum. He doesn’t even have an operational cell phone.

My records. I’ve now got 18 albums. What are my favourites so far? My top three would probably be Leonard Cohen’s 1975 greatest hits album (one of the first batch of records I bought), Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram, and Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn. All brilliant. Ram showcases Paul in his raw state, shortly after the Beatles broke up and before he got all sugary. Some honourable mentions too, such as ELO’s double album Out of the Blue, and Paul Simon’s Graceland which doesn’t really count because I’d played it hundreds of times on CD so its brilliance wasn’t exactly a shock. I mean, the first track Boy in the Bubble, good God. And if you’re talking individual tracks, Ramble Tamble – track one of Cosmo’s Factory by CCR – that’s mindblowingly cool.

I’ll be off to the UK next Thursday, coming back the following Thursday. After staying in St Ives, my brother will kindly pick me up from the airport and take me to Poole; I’ll probably stay there until Easter Sunday. Then I plan to get the bus to Cambridge and stay in St Ives. On the Monday I’ll try and see my aunt in the home – that will likely involve a long bike ride, then the next day I might see my friend in Birmingham. On Wednesday I’ll have to make my way to Luton and stay there overnight. I think I’ll just stay the night in the airport, as tiring as that might be.

I was apprehensive about getting a car but after today’s excursion I’m glad I’ve done it. It will open up all kinds of possibilities to see this beautiful country. And rather than being a cause of stress, it might have the opposite effect on me – outside the city, at least – just like it did in New Zealand.

Driving - Other sports - Tennis

Four wheels good, and a rare chat with Dad

March 20, 2024 by 0 Comments

My neighbour has just given me a chunk of sheep’s cheese. I’ve got very used to sheep’s cheese, with its rich farmy flavour, in my years of living here. I’ve also just had a message from a student who mixed up Tuesday and Thursday. Hmm, are you sure you mean Thursday? I’d better check. I even get people who hedge their bets with the delightful Thuesday. So far two students have actually shown up on the wrong day as a result of this misunderstanding, which isn’t that bad considering how widespread the confusion is.

I called my parents on Sunday night. Five minutes later she was off to Mayfield to play golf, meaning I got the chance (which I get two or three times a year on average) to talk to just Dad. As always on these rare occasions, he talked about Mum’s manufactured stress that profoundly impacts both of their lives without her even being aware of it. When I was over there I didn’t want to be in the same room as her a third of the time. She’d be fine one minute, then the next I’d hear that deep sigh, and that was the only cue I needed. A storm was brewing and I’d have to strap myself in for a bumpy ride. Dad told me about her wish to sell the place in Moeraki – it’s more than doubled in value since they bought it nine years ago. We agreed that selling it would be crazy because she invariably feels calmer when they go there, but then she has close to zero awareness of mental health, including her own. We talked about how sad it is that Mum – one of life’s great winners – can never be content. We discussed other topics like the unstoppable and terrifying freight train that is AI, and what sort of future their grandson will have. When I talk to him I realise how lucky I am to have him; above all he’s a great friend. I’m lucky to have Mum too of course, but I can’t help but be upset at how big a dent she puts in her and Dad’s enjoyment of their later years.

In more Dad news, he should soon get the confirmed results of his heart check-up. In 2005 he had a replacement aortic valve fitted in the UK – the procedure damn near killed him – and was supposed to have regular check-ups in New Zealand but somehow slipped through a bureaucratic net all this time. The initial check looked fine, but it’ll be good to get the final confirmation.

The car. So far I like it. Yes, it was terrifying last Wednesday when I picked it up and had to negotiate a busy city when my brain hadn’t dealt with anything like that for years, but I’ve taken it out for a couple more short trips and slowly but surely I’m getting used to driving again. It’s a 1.6 – right at the top end of what I wanted engine-wise, though smaller than any of the four cars I had in New Zealand. When I tell my female students that I’ve bought a car, the first thing they want to know is what colour it is. I must say I like the blue – anything to get away from the insipid greyness I see everywhere. The registration process is quite a rigmarole here and I went to the mall this morning to kick all that off. Romanians pronounce Peugeot as /peˈʒo/, as if it were written with an é instead of eu.

Tennis is back, much pricier than before. I had two hour-long sessions with Florin over the weekend. The first time we just rallied – I’m a fan of that – but the second time we played a game. I came from 3-1, 30-0 down to win the first set 6-3, then I struggled in the remainder – I missed a shocking number of returns and had trouble with my ball toss – but got to 4-4 when our time ran out. After Saturday’s first session we went to the bar by the river where we met some others for some drinks and mici. That was nice to begin with, but soon I was starving and desperate to get home and eat something more substantial than bloody mici. At least that meant I missed Blues’ football match – despite playing much better this time at home to Watford, they lost 1-0 for the third straight match. It’s a miracle they’re still outside the relegation zone, albeit only barely on goal difference. Today I’ve heard that Tony Mowbray isn’t in a good way at all, poor chap, and they’re bringing in Gary Rowett (he’s managed Blues before) to maybe shore things up for the final eight games.

Recently some students have told me that I’m funny. Comedy funny, not strange funny, though I’m sure I’m that too. I’m taking that as a complement. Last night I had a lesson with the 16-year-old who wants to become a pilot. His head is very firmly screwed on, and he’d rather not spend (waste?) four years at university, as his dad would like him to do, before starting his pilot training.

Under nine days till I fly to the UK. I still haven’t properly thought about it.

Driving - Other sports

Wheely scary

March 14, 2024 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I had a look at the bright blue 2006 Peugeot 307. A diesel, which I’ve never had before. Diesels get a terrible press from all the ghastly shite they pump into the atmosphere. The guy I met outside the cash-and-carry was young. It was registered in his mum’s name – she was born in 1973. It only had 133,000 km on the clock – I hope that’s genuine – and both the car and its vendor were the least dodgy I’ve come across so far. It had air con, an absolute must here, plus a load of fancy computery stuff that looked beyond me even though I’m sure it’s already old hat – every car I’ve ever owned before was built last century. Its warrant (or ITP as they call it here) runs out in July. So today I bit the bullet. It was going for €2250, I offered €2000, he bumped that up by €100 and we had a deal.

This morning I met him back at the cash-and-carry, armed with the 21 green euro notes I’d just withdrawn from the bank. (He said he’d accept either euros or lei; I had €2800 in my euro account – that I rarely use – after buying this flat and receiving the odd payment for lessons with the German girl.) On the way I met the mother of the 12-year-old boy I’d be seeing this afternoon. I was early and nervous as anything. I popped into the store to use the loo. Near the entrance were a variety of football tables for sale. I think my parents still have the one I had as a kid. I wondered why table football always uses a 2-5-3 formation. Then he turned up and we drove to the village hall in Sânandrei where I met his mother – they made copies of my residence permit and I had paperwork to sign – and blow me down (as my mother would say) I saw the mother of my 12-year-old student again. What on earth are you doing here? The business at the village hall was only the start of all the bewildering bureaucracy I’ll have to contend with now that I’ve bought a car. This took nearly an hour, then I was free to go.

But my god, It had been seven years since I last properly drove, and I was in a completely new car. The Sânandrei bit wasn’t too bad – take it nice and slowly, no rush – then I hit the city. Roundabouts and lane changes and bugger me, can I even do this again? I got hooted at just once. I wish I had an L-plate on the back (here it’s an exclamation mark) or a great big neon poo to tell everyone just how out of practice and shit-scared I was. For some of the way I was behind a car whose number plate was TM 13 DIE. When I finally parked just round the corner from my block, I breathed one hell of a sigh of relief.

In theory this will be good, and I’ve always been a fan of French cars after living in France in 2000-01 and seeing all manner of shapely jalopies on the roads, but driving again will take some getting used to and I’ve just injected another layer of life admin which I could do without. I won’t get the chance to drive again until Sunday because I’ve got a packed schedule of lessons until then. And no I won’t drive to lessons in the city. Not yet anyway, that’s for sure.

Last night I watched bits of Blues’ home game against Middlesbrough. In a far cry from their win over Sunderland last month in front of a full house, the crowd – sparser this time – sounded nervous. Panic had set in; the spectre of relegation with a capital R was hanging over the place. Middlesbrough scored the only goal – a very good one – in the 16th minute, while Blues were dire from what I saw. Since Tony Mowbray’s serious illness forced him to step down, the stuffing has been knocked out of the team. Keep playing like they did last night, or the two games before that, and they will be relegated.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Music - Other sports - Tennis

Panic stations

March 12, 2024 by 0 Comments

I didn’t sleep well last night and got up at 7:30, half an hour after I meant to. After breakfast I reviewed some Romanian words – there’s a few I can never bloody remember – before our lesson that started at nine. It was an enjoyable lesson – probably the highlight of the day. Then I called Mum and Dad. During the pandemic (it’s now four years since everything went mad) we became closer, but now our lives and experiences have drifted apart again. I have to feign interest in their building project, while the novelty of their son teaching English in Romania has long since worn off. During our chat, they said they might come to Europe in 2025. Might. Jeez.

After the chat with my parents I felt on edge. Can I face another online lesson with that damn woman? Following a surprisingly normal chat, she read screeds of corporate shite from Harvard Business Review. Doubling down on robust penetration capability to achieve superior resilience in a crowded landscape. The more I stare at that sentence the more lewd it gets. She read at 100 miles an hour – her typical Romanian monotone (and the subject matter) made it seem even faster. Slow the eff down. Please. Then it was the 17-year-old girl. We talked about music festivals. I’ve never been to one; she’s already been to three. Have I missed out? Yes, she said. I’m not convinced.

Then it was off to the twins. A quick turnaround. They wanted to talk about their diarrhoea travel experiences and Adolf Hitler. Then a third of the way through our 90-minute session it happened. A panic attack, just like I had regularly in 2001. Or at least that’s what I think it was. A sudden jolt, my heart seemingly skipping a beat, and I felt as if my lower body was giving way from under me. The twins wondered what was happening. Shaken, I recovered and made it through to the end, then did some breathing exercises on my bike trip back. My final lesson of the day was with the extremely pleasant guy in his late forties. He read from Michelle Obama’s autobiography – a fascinating window into her early life, with no end of words and expressions to challenge even an accomplished English speaker such as my student. At one point she mentioned the Muppets. I asked him if they got the Muppets here in Romania. Yes, he said, but only right here because being close to the border meant they could access Serbian TV. He was lucky to live in Muppetland, he said.

Last week I felt terribly demotivated. Heck, I’ve got to do something. Two things. Sort out a car for myself and write that damn book. I had 32 hours of lessons despite a number of cancellations. I doubt I’ll ever get the money from Marco, the bugger. Two and a half hours, then I don’t hear from him. The smoking in bed and his unwavering religious devotion rang alarm bells, though this is Romania, a country of many false alarms. On Saturday I had the most incredible lesson with the girl who has just turned seven. Two hours. How will I cope? Or more to the point, how will she cope? She managed phenomenally well. Several worksheets and colouring exercises on clothes, then a bingo game (she knows her numbers up to 60 upside down and backwards), then I read her a few tactile books before we played a 20-minute game of Kiwi-style Last Card which incredibly we didn’t even finish. She sat there the whole time in rapt attention.

Yesterday I met Mark at Scârț, the place where they have the museum of communism. It was packed there because there was a vinyl sale that I wasn’t even aware of. Then I found both Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Cosmo’s Factory and David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, both of which I’d been looking at online just an hour earlier. At 220 lei between them, they weren’t cheap, but I snapped them up. As Mark said, you’ve got to have a hobby. I’ve now got 18 records, most of them older than me. The texture of the sleeves, the artwork, the smells, it’s all pure happiness and that’s before I even start playing them. Mark and I had a good chat as always, though 14 lei for a lukewarm coffee was a rip-off. I love that area of town so I then hung around in the park on Romulus and Remus Streets with all the blossom out and hardly anyone else around. My next trick was carrying the records home on my bike (I was unprepared, obviously) without falling off it again. Then in the evening I met Dorothy in Piața Unirii. She’d just got back from a trip to the UK where she slept in six different beds and then got bumped off her flight home but got put up in Luton and received $400 in compensation.

Football. Following any kind of sport can be a heck of a time sink. After work on Saturday I watched Birmingham’s game at Millwall, direct rivals in the battle to avoid relegation. It wasn’t easy on the eye. Blues were shocking in the first half but improved somewhat in the second. The game was petering out to a goalless draw, but then Millwall scored from a corner in the 90th minute – a real sucker punch – and that was that. With ten games to go Blues are teetering, there’s no doubt about it. Since their manager was forced to take a back seat, they’ve taken just one point in four games and sit a single point above the drop zone. The good news is that five of Blues’ next seven matches are at home, including tomorrow night’s catch-up game with Middlesbrough. Straight after that run, they travel to Rotherham who were long ago cut adrift at the bottom of the table. If they can garner four wins in those eight matches, they’ll very likely stay up. Even three with the odd draw would give them a good chance. Less than that though and they’re in deep doo-doo.

Dorothy and I even talked briefly about football last night. Mostly we discussed the evocative names of the clubs. Um, OK, not Birmingham City, but rather those named after a girl or a weekday or the Far East or three successive letters of the alphabet. We didn’t talk about the names of the grounds, but those can be quite lovely too. I used to love Burnden Park and Upton Park and Roker Park and the Baseball Ground, none of which exist today. I remember a game from the 1995-96 season in which West Bromwich Albion drew 4-4 with Watford having been way out in front. West Brom’s ground was, and still is, called the Hawthorns. As Watford equalised, a reporter said “it’s four-four at the Hawthorns!” and I remember thinking how poetic that sounded.

In tennis news, Simona Halep’s doping ban has been greatly reduced and she’ll be back on the court later this month. Great news. It’ll be interesting to see how well she does after such a long time away. And this morning on TV they showed the most extraordinary rally between 37-year-old Gaël Monfils and eighth-ranked Hubert Hurkacz. Monfils won the point, and eventually the match. As for my tennis, our season is about to resume but the cost has risen from 40 lei an hour to 70 – why such a huge increase I don’t know – so my court time is bound to come down. That’s a real shame.

Tomorrow morning I’ll have a look at a blue Peugeot 307. I’ve got to get this sorted, as scary as driving again might be.

That was a very long one, I’m sorry.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

The warmest everything ever, everywhere

March 8, 2024 by 0 Comments

After a six-week winter we had the warmest February on record (warmest X on record is something we’ve been hearing a lot lately, right?), and now spring has well and truly sprung. Saying that, it’s tipped it down all day today.

A funny week of lessons, and it’s far from over. On Monday I had the 17-year-old mall rat again, though this time she seemed actually human. We had something approaching a chat, mostly about the Ukraine war. After two years, people here have become dangerously blasé about it all, but she was rightly concerned. One oddity was that she’d never heard of the September 11th attacks. I say oddity – for me it’s the where-were-you moment when the world changed at a stroke – but in Romania it had a much smaller impact on the collective psyche than in the English-speaking world or western Europe. And of course she wasn’t even born then. On the same day I had an online session with the senior manager (a 35-year-old woman) who lives somewhere near Bucharest. Saying these sessions are like talking to a brick wall would do a disservice to the responsiveness of masonry. Just an utter waste of time. The good news is that pointless work makes up just 20% of my hours; 15 years ago it was up near 90%.

A student from 18 months ago has also rejoined the fray. He goes by Italian-sounding name of Marco. I don’t know how you get that out of Dumitru, his real name. I’ve had three online “lessons” with him already this week. One of them he spent lying in bed; during another he smoked the whole time. (I recently had a guy vape during a face-to-face session at home; things suddenly got very strawberry-ish.) The sessions with Marco aren’t pointless exactly, but he’s on a different frequency to me somehow, and I struggle to pick up a signal.

It was 10pm when I finished with Marco on Tuesday. With no lessons the next morning, I put on the game between Hull and Birmingham. Hull, predictably, took the lead just after I tuned in – a goal that should have been disallowed for handball. Hull were dominant and it had all the makings of a stonking win for them, but Blues clung on and in the 82nd minute conjured up an equaliser as Lukas Jutkiewicz who had just come on as a substitute headed the ball home. A good point for Blues but they’re still very much in a relegation scrap. (Today I saw a simulation model that gave Blues a 15% chance of being relegated. Having seen a few of their performances, that feels low, even if they do still have a game in hand. They go to Millwall on Saturday, a huge game for them.) When the Blues game was over, I switched over to Ipswich – the Tractor Boys, as they’re affectionately known – at home to Bristol City. It was 2-2 with ten minutes left and the place was rocking. Ipswich were awarded a penalty, and a shocking kick was easily saved, but not to matter. They scored the winner a couple of minutes later, and it’s a wonder they didn’t add to their tally in stoppage time. That was fun to watch.

Not much other news. In my next post I’ll give a run-down of all the vinyl I bought recently. In the meantime, here’s a video from CityNerd on the world’s top ten music cities (by the metric he uses). Very interesting.

I’m extremely proud of my brother for getting his first-class degree. His graduation takes place on 18th April, a couple of weeks after I go to the UK. It’s a shame he won’t have family there for it. My graduation ceremony in 2002, which my parents and grandmother attended, was quite lovely really.

Books - Language learning - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports

Beating the drop

March 4, 2024 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I spent some time in the park near the cathedral, reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. Someone once recommended it to me. Whenever I go there I get a twinge of sadness as the trams and trolleybuses clatter by and the cathedral bells chime four times an hour. Now I just feel the occasional mini-earthquake when a large truck goes past. As for the book, my initial reaction was, I don’t think I can stick this, but now I’ve reached chapter four I think I’ll persevere. I went back via Parcul Regina Maria and sat in the gazebo there. A girl of about 14 was with her parents. Her mother kept quizzing her, presumably for an upcoming history test as school. What happened in Philadelphia in 1774? Poor girl. I found this distracting and went home.

Kaufland has become my go-to supermarket of late. As the name suggests, it’s German-owned, so I get to pick up odd snippets of German there, like erbsen for peas. The signage in the shop (and outside it) is sensibly all in Romanian though.

On the sign above you can see both plural forms of monedă, which means coin. (It’s quite obviously related to the English money.) Should the plural be monede or monezi? From what I gather (and the Romanian academy would agree) the plural should be monede, but people often plump for monezi because most Romanian nouns ending in -dă form plurals in -zi (oglindă – mirror – becomes oglinzi; ladă – crate – becomes lăzi; livadă – orchard – becomes livezi, and so on). Debates about plurals of nouns abound in Romanian. I’ve found an excellent YouTube channel on languages, hosted by somebody called K Klein. Imagine being as clever as him.

On the way back from Kaufland I passed a small market where people (often gypsies) sell old jewellery and other mostly low-value bits and bobs. Two of the stallholders (men) were having a fight. One threw something at the other and hit him in the face. Great.

Saturday was my usual busy day. My final lesson was a two-hour maths session with the 15-year-old girl. After a calculation involving a flight from Bangkok to Melbourne, she told me how much she loved travelling and that she goes on a family holiday to Dubai every year. Dubai. Please make it stop. After our session I checked the football scores. Birmingham were 3-2 down, and a man down, against Southampton. The situation sounded hopeless. But then Blues equalised. A miracle. With ten minutes of normal time left I found a stream for the match. There was wave upon wave of pressure from Southampton. Blues hardly saw the ball. Could they hold out? Nine minutes of added time. Oh lord. After five additional minutes Southampton fired in the winner, and Blues are now in relegation peril. This is what the table looks like from 12th place down:

Rotherham are done. Two of the twelve other teams on the list will join them in the league below, unless something very weird happens to one of the teams above this truncated table. (Blues could well be one of them; they have an extra game to play relative to the teams around them, but their manager being out of commission is a massive blow.) Calling this a relegation dogfight doesn’t do justice to how tight it is. And that’s why the system of promotion and relegation is the best thing about club football. (Much of the rest of it leaves me cold.) Ten years ago Blues avoided the drop by scoring with just moments remaining; a 2-2 draw at Bolton kept them up on goal difference over Doncaster. Most dramatically of all, in 1999 Carlisle (sponsored by Eddie Stobart, a haulage company who had a cult following) were seconds from dropping out of the football league entirely when their goalkeeper scored the winning goal deep into injury time, relegating Scarborough instead. Part of the drama on the last day comes from following scores of other games. In the pre-smartphone age this was quite something: news of goals would filter through the crowd Chinese-whispers-like and you’d see players crowding around radios, agonisingly in some cases, at the end of the game.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching

That’s a first

March 1, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been to get my 15 litres of drinking water, as I do every fifth day or so. The wells – about 90 of them dotted around the city – are a microcosm of Romanian society. There’s often a queue, there are usually old ladies (babe, the plural of babă) sitting on the benches nearby, and this time there was a young guy on a quad bike pumping out manele, a controversial genre of Romanian music.

My brother. He’s now officially first-class. Last night he got confirmation of his top-drawer BA degree in business management. I must say I’m impressed with his discipline and application throughout the whole process, and what’s more, how much he enjoyed it. This from someone who had zero interest (if I’m being kind) in his schoolwork. He may even decide to do a master’s. It helped that he had completed a number of leadership courses in the military, so he could skip through the early stages, and his degree was all paid for by the army. (Not to pour any cold water on what my brother has achieved, but in my day roughly one student in a dozen across the UK got a first. Now it’s one in three. There’s some grade inflation for you.)

That lesson on Monday with the 17-year-old girl. I’m still thinking about it. I spent most of my time wondering, what am I dealing with here? Not who, but what, for she hardly seemed human. It’s been the same every time with her, except during the could snap in January which briefly humanised her. She’s the latest in an increasingly long line of students I’ve had from so-called Gen Z – young women, mostly – who live curated lives on Instagram. They aren’t living, they’re performing. How exhausting must that be?

It’s a mild, if grey, Leap Day. I still clearly remember the dread I felt eight years ago today when I came through Wellington Airport after flying from Timaru, knowing that I’d soon have to face my flatmate. Last night I got thinking: wouldn’t it be nice to reform the calendar? Just tweak it ever so slightly. The 28/29 business in February, when all other months are 30 or 31, doesn’t make much sense and messes up a lot of statistical comparisons. If it was up to me I’d make the months 31 30 30, 31 30 30, 31 30 30, 31 30 31. Nice and easy to remember. (Yes, that adds up to 365.) I’d add the Leap Day, which would be a worldwide holiday, to the end of June. And that’s all. Oh, apart from fixing Easter to the first Sunday in April. Even my modest changes would cause major tech headaches, dwarfing what we saw with Y2K, and social media would be dripping with anger, mostly from those with birthdays such as 31st March. Saying that, if the orange blob is re-elected I wouldn’t entirely discount him from introducing a reformed calendar, right around 1st Trump 2027.

Here is a great video from City Nerd, an urbanist YouTube channel. I really like this guy’s sense of humour. In the first five minutes of this video – a must-watch, I’d say – he explains the Gini coefficient of income inequality. (Integral calculus, yay! Not that I was ever fantastic at that.) In the rest of the video he looks at the North American cities with the highest and lowest Gini coefficients. Interestingly, he says that 190 million Americans – nearly 60% of the country – live in urban areas with over a million people. For comparison, that figure in Romania is a little over 10%.

Before yesterday’s maths lesson with 14-year-old, six-foot-one Vladimir, I had a 20-minute phone chat with his mother. I couldn’t get her off the line. Neither could I convince her that her son is actually pretty good at maths. Her expectations are stratospheric.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Writing a book

Putting a jetpack up my back-end

February 27, 2024 by 0 Comments

A miracle has just occurred. This site had locked me out of making new posts. A critical error has occurred. At work I remember getting both fatal and catastrophic errors. Though this sounded like a notch down from them, it didn’t exactly fill me with optimism. I had visions of being stuck on a help chatline for hours, not getting anywhere, and maybe being locked out for good. Then I read something about a Jetpack, whatever that is exactly. I hit the update button next to Jetpack on my back-end (this might sound like I have an inkling of what I’m doing; believe me, I don’t) and hey presto, it worked.

There’s very little to report since I last wrote. The greatest excitement came on Saturday when I fell off my bike. I’d just bought some speakers for my record player and tried to carry them on the handlebars. Bad idea. The rain didn’t help matters either. There was a fair bit of traffic on the road, so I was lucky to escape with only a few bruises.

This morning I had the Romanian lesson which cleared up one or two things. Most interestingly for me, our teacher said that -iă isn’t an allowable combination in Romanian, after I tried to create a word with that ending. It’s amazing what you miss. After that I had (just) three English lessons, the first of which was with an extremely shallow young woman of 17. We’re talking puddle-deep here. I still think she’s less superficial than the girl of the same age who started with me last autumn and – thank God – didn’t get back to me after visiting Bali over Christmas. It was a relief to get my session with the hyper-competitive mall rat over with, and see the twins before coming home for an online lesson with Alin who is currently reading Michelle Obama’s autobiography. The twins worked through a textbook before I played a game with them called Bedlam which I’d picked up from a car boot sale near my brother’s place. The name of the game tells you all you need to know.

Talking of my brother, his degree results are imminent. I don’t quite get how he’s completed a degree in a little over a year while also holding down a job (will the qualification carry the same weight as a standard three- or four-year degree?) but the way he’s applied himself is very impressive indeed. This is my brother, who could hardly have been less academic as a kid. He made a concerted effort not to learn anything. Lately he’s been going on about assignments and dissertations and bibliographies – is this him I’m talking to? I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets a first-class degree. I got an upper second, by the way, and was delighted with it. In my day, firsts were hard to come by, the preserve of the real high-flyer which I certainly wasn’t. I thought I was destined for a lower second, or 2:2, sometimes known as a Desmond (ha ha), but I was very focused towards the end of my final year and scraped into the level above by a couple of percentage points.

Football. Birmingham lost 3-1 at Ipswich. I’ve always liked Ipswich – they’re fairly local to where I grew up. They’ve got a good shot at automatic promotion now. As for Birmingham, that loss to a better side puts them back in the relegation picture again after other struggling teams surprisingly won. I also watched a few frames of snooker – it’s getting to that time of year again.

Tomorrow I’ll get back to the book once more. I really need to put a jetpack up my back-end as far as that is concerned.

Books - Dreams - Family - Life :) - Other sports

It could have been curtains

February 20, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had an online lesson with a young woman in the final year of university. She’s also working part-time in IT as a tester. She shared her screen and described some bugs to me, saying that she’ll need to ask her colleagues before attempting to fix them. I asked her if her colleagues are approachable. Oh yes. I thought back to the early days of my insurance job in Auckland and how unapproachable they were. Day in day out, I felt unable to ask anybody and had no choice but to guess. For more than two years, until I got shunted off to a different department, I felt terminally stupid. My first real job, dealing with flood maps in Peterborough, wasn’t like that at all. People were happy to help, and guess what, I learnt stuff.

So I spoke to my parents after breathing that sigh of relief. Damn well tell us next time, I said. I was lucky enough to get five minutes of just Dad, as Mum dealt with a delivery man. Dad wasn’t too happy either. He said that Mum had had the lump for bloody ages before seeing a doctor, and if it had been melanoma she’d have been toast. Mum came back on the line to say she’d been back on the golf course, playing in some competition or other, going round in exactly 100. Nice to know she’s got her priorities straight.

On Sunday I had dinner with Mark at the Timișoreana beer factory which is a five-minute walk for me. We both had bulz bănățean – a substantial, very Romanian dish consisting of mămăligă (polenta) with cheese, a fried egg, sausages, mici, pork, gogonele (pickled green tomatoes) and pickled cucumbers. We had two beers apiece. It was busy there, though you’d never guess it from the outside, and as is typical for Romania it took us 40-odd minutes to get served. He told me about his girlfriend’s family, which made any issues I might have with my mother pale into insignificance. She grew up in a poor part of Yorkshire as the middle of three sisters; they suffered constant mental abuse at the hands of their father who committed suicide soon after they left home. Understandably this has left her badly scarred. (If you ask me though, she’s done remarkably well. She’s carved out a successful teaching career for herself.) Now 37, she is unable to have children; he said she will have IVF treatment. Next month (I think) they will get married in a registry office in Scotland. That’s because England requires you to be resident in the country to get married, but Scotland doesn’t.

I’ve almost finished reading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Dad gave me it – an 1896 edition – when I was over there six months ago. Defoe himself was only five when the bubonic plague struck London in 1665, so I wonder where all his facts and (extensive) figures came from. There are clear parallels with Covid, and the good and bad of humanity have changed remarkably little since that time. Just like with Covid, the plague’s long incubation period meant that people transmitted the disease asymptomatically, killing many others in the process. The lack of anything approaching modern medicine made the whole thing harrowing beyond belief. Doctors, such that they were, tried to break the swellings – or buboes – by burning them. Pure torture. In the autumn as the figures improved, people got blasé, thinking they were out of the woods. That brought about a second wave. Sounds familiar. The plague was followed by the Great Fire of London in the following year.

I watched Birmingham’s home game against Sunderland at the weekend. They came from a goal down at half-time to win 2-1 in front of a packed stadium. (The club had put on some kind of promotion.) Once young Jordan James bundled in the equaliser on the hour mark, the home side were galvanised and were clearly the better team. They were lucky though; Sunderland were really sluggish in defence in the second half. Now for the bad news. A serious medical issue has forced Tony Mowbray to step back from his managerial duties. Let’s hope he makes a full and speedy recovery, obviously. Mowbray strikes me as a thoroughly good bloke.

Finally, a totally mental dream I had last night. It took place at night in St Ives, the town where I grew up, except the streets were full of LED screens showing animated pictures of every colour imaginable. I met the young guy who ran the show, having learnt the trade from his father. He explained that the animation in St Ives was “three years out of date” compared to what other towns had. I said I preferred the older stuff. Then he invited me into the control room, where for some reason he was also broadcasting images to Mindanao in the Philippines. Where I got that from I have no idea. (This morning I found out that Mindanao is in fact an island, not a city.) I hope I have more dreams like that, not the ones where I trek around the city to do some life admin task, only find the place boarded up and overgrown by weeds.

Family - Maths teaching - Other sports

Kept in the dark (and an update!)

February 14, 2024 by 0 Comments

My friend in New Zealand said I’d been writing more often lately, and it’s true. Because nonsensical shit keeps happening.

After my lesson this morning, I had a longish chat with Mum and Dad. Well mostly Dad, about the geopolitical situation in my part of the world. The medium-term future terrifies me, truth be told. Yesterday I had a 13-year-old boy tell me that the rest of Europe (including us in Romania) should butt out of the Ukraine war and anyway Ukraine isn’t a real country, it’s just part of Russia. We’re on their doorstep, so that’s bloody great. After discussing all this with Dad, I asked Mum if she was playing tennis this week. No. Why? Well I had a lump removed from my back last Wednesday and I’m waiting to get the biopsy. I’m getting the seven stitches removed on Friday, so maybe I’ll know then. Yes, it is cancerous. Don’t you worry your poor little head about it, hahaha. I’d already spoken to her at the weekend, after the op, but she didn’t tell me anything then. If I hadn’t asked her about tennis I’d still be in the dark. I don’t know how long she’s had the lump. Dad said he’s encouraged by the fact that it came out in one piece, with no tentacles, as he put it.

When I got off the phone I messaged my brother. He had no idea (he’d also spoken to them at the weekend) and was incredulous. FFS! Why didn’t she say anything? I felt bad because he was probably mid-nappy change or something, but he needed to know. He said he wished our parents didn’t treat us like we were twelve, but he’s a few years out there. You’d even be open about this stuff with twelve-year-olds. Let’s hope she gets the all-clear from the biopsy and that’ll be the last we hear of it. In the meantime it’s obviously a worry.

In other news, I’ve got a new maths student (a 14-year-old boy called Vladimir – eew) starting on Thursday. He’s from the British school, where parents have money, so I can charge a bit more. His mum said he’s needed extra lessons for a while, which either means he really is struggling or his parents have high expectations. If I had to guess, I’d plump for the latter. It’s good to have another string to my bow – it gives me even more variety in my day as well as some extra income. It’s still fantastically mad that after all that unbearable corporate shite I’m now doing all this. Yesterday my student described her daily team meetings at work. How many people? In my experience, five worked well while eight became unwieldy. Beyond that and these meetings were pointless. Twenty-two, she said. That’s not a team, that’s a platoon.

A few posts ago I mentioned the optimism surrounding the new manager – Tony Mowbray – taking over at Birmingham after the Wayne Rooney debacle. Well they’ve just lost their last three games – all away from home – without scoring a goal, and that’s despite a boatload of chances. They’re now embroiled in a relegation scrap, just three points above the drop zone. Tonight they face Blackburn at home. Edit: Blues won 1-0 and they damn well deserved the win too. Blackburn very nearly snatched a draw right at the end though.

Update: Dad emailed me 20 minutes ago to say that they’d just got Mum’s results, sooner than expected. It’s a basal cell carcinoma – a type that doesn’t spread, so cutting it out should have got rid of it for good. I’ve passed that news on to my brother. A big relief all round. Dad also said they’ll need to get the boiler replaced in one of their flats in St Ives, at a cost of £2800, though that’s small beer in comparison to Mum’s health.

On a very different note, Steve Wright, a Radio 1 DJ who was hilarious to listen to at times, has died aged 69. His most famous show was Steve Wright in the Afternoon which ran during the late eighties and early nineties and included a very funny “Mr Angry”. He’ll be sorely missed.