plutoman.com – Page 26 – a romanian adventure

Family contact

February 12, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

Good news – my brother and his family are going to New Zealand in August for three-and-a-bit weeks. They’ll come back just before my nephew turns two and the fare whops up. I spoke to my sister-in-law about it on Friday, just after they’d booked the trip. (She’d had to get the green light from her boss.) She was apprehensive about flying so far with her son, a placid little chappy though he is. Will the trauma of it all mess him up? I was roughly the same age as him when Mum took me – and my tiny brother – to New Zealand in 1982. The mind boggles. My parents are paying for the trip (“well I hope so,” my brother said, “because we can’t afford it”). That’s what living in the UK in 2024 with a sodding great mortgage does to you. Mum made the trip in ’82 (a similar cost in real terms) without batting a financial eyelid. They were living – pretty much – on just the unpredictable income of my father. Crazy, isn’t it?

They should have a nice time. The house will – I hope! – be finished, so Mum won’t be worn out and highly strung and miserable (let’s be honest) like she was when I was there. At any rate, even if she was under stress, she’d take great pains not to show it, unlike with me. I get the real deal. They’ll see a lot of Mum and Dad – if my parents had come to the UK, that might not have been the case – and there will be happy times as the little one is passed around various aunts and uncles.

A fairly standard week of lessons for me. On Saturday I had eight hours, including four of maths. With both my maths students it was the same story. Determine what the problem is and how to solve it, then do your calculations, not the other way round! There needs to be a maths equivalent of “aviate, navigate, communicate”. And jeez, when you’re 15 years old, dividing 35 by 7 doesn’t require a calculator. I wish someone would invent the shockulator, a calculator that administers electric shocks that increase in voltage the easier it gets to do the problem in your head.

On Wednesday I saw the ENT specialist again. We did the whole thing in Romanian this time. He put that probe up my nostrils. Stop flinching! Stop tensing up! Well I’m trying, but it bloody hurts! After then sucking the wax out from my ears (plenty of it), he gave me a prescription for some nasal spray that will last me two months, if that. I’ll probably wait until the long hot summer when I’ll need it the most.

Yesterday I went a different way on my bike. The wind made it slow going. I rode past the factories, some still in operation, others not, to Moșnița Nouă. When I went there six years ago for a lesson it was a village. Not any more. I wouldn’t want to live there.

Muzicorama – the nightly music programme on local radio – sadly finished last September, not that I got many chances to listen to it. The host, Bogdan Puriș, still does his show on a Sunday morning, and yesterday there was certainly an eclectic line-up. Four consecutive songs (saved on my Shazam) were Hey Matthew by Karel Fialka (1987), Bats by the Scary Bitches (2009) (because the lyrics mention Transylvania?), Come Down Jesus by José Feliciano (1971), and This Wheel’s On Fire by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity (1968).

Lately I’ve been listening – a lot – to David Bowie’s 2002 album Heathen.

I’ve just read that Kelvin Kiptum, marathon world record holder (2:00:35) died in a car crash yesterday. The Kenyan was only 24. At such a young age for a marathon runner, he would have had many chances to go under two hours. Tragic news.

Spumotim, which I *think* is still up and running. They make polyurethane foam products. (*Spumă* is Romanian for foam.)

As much of this colossal abandoned factory as I could get in the camera lens

Family - Photos - Travel: Romania

Trip to Buziaș

February 5, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

My student has cancelled her pointless lesson with me two-and-a-bit minutes before we were due to start, giving me the chance to write this.

Yesterday I went with Mark to visit Buziaș, a town of 7000 people, less than half an hour away. I was just about to head out on a 10 km bike ride to his place when he offered to pick me up (Calea Buziașului – the road to Buziaș – is quite close to me). A little while later I got a message from him – “Drop us a pin.” Sorry, what? Was that meant for me at all? Oh, you want me to share my location. I rarely get messages from native English speakers, so “drop us a pin” (with us meaning me) really threw me.

The main focal point of Buziaș is the park, substantial for a town of its size. It features a large covered walkway – wooden and quite ornate – that goes all the way around. That and all the trees, and the fact that it’s well maintained, make it a pleasant place to take a stroll in. But apart from that, there was endless abandonment like you see in so many Romanian towns. The ștrand – a swimming pool with sunbeds and a bar and a general beach vibe, but in this case abandoned decades ago – was an extraordinary sight. It’s now a decaying shell, overgrown with reeds. You could still see the slide, the changing rooms, and where they would have put the mici on the barbecue. Mark said that a Romanian of his age (he’s 53) would surely find the whole thing upsetting, for 40 years ago it would have been a fully functioning hive of activity.

Just before we left, we saw a painting of the brightly painted bandstand with the locals prancing around in traditional dress. The bandstand is still there, but the bright colours have gone. It’s been left to go like so much else. As we started our walk around the park, I pointed out something that looked like the tail fin of a plane. We didn’t pay that much attention, because obviously there wouldn’t be any aircraft there. After we’d nearly done a lap of the park, the tail fin came back into view, together with the rest of the plane. And a few other planes too. All old Soviet aircraft – Antonov, probably. It was part restaurant, part theme park. It’s functional, but only in the summer. Even though it was “closed”, we could still roam around and hop inside one of the planes, where it was all decked out for kids.

In the park was a large shiny white touch-screen device that looked only months old – and completely out of place. It had clearly been bought with EU funds. The big front screen was all in English. I pressed Start. Up popped the Buziaș council webpage, all in Romanian, with links labelled “Rubbish collection” or “Pay your rates” that didn’t even work. Great. If I go back in a couple of years the machine itself will likely be just a sculpture.

Party Land. Buziaș, where your heart is always healthy. Great use of Jokerman font.

The water from this well can cure just about anything, apparently

No entry, and not much room on the sign either

I sent Dad the Luton video, which he watched. He said, well it’s all the immigrants, isn’t it? Luton does have a very high immigrant population, but there are also post-industrial towns all over the country which have very few immigrants and are just as crap. The picture is complicated, and grim all round.

On Saturday I called my brother and had a good chat with my sister-in-law. They were watching Gladiators – the very popular nineties series that has been brought back. Thirty-odd years ago, that was Mum’s Saturday night. Gladiators followed by Blind Date – two hours of trash TV. Fair enough after such a tiring week. My sister-in-law talked about the potential difficulty of getting three weeks off work to go to New Zealand and completing the trip before my nephew’s second birthday in mid-September when the cost would shoot up. We also touched on Mum’s trip with us two tiny boys in 1982, and the state of the house that she left Dad to deal with over that dreadful winter. Their penchant for buying completely inappropriate houses didn’t exactly end there.

Family - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports

Not this year, maybe not ever

February 4, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

Not a terrible week, if a fair few cancellations. Two or three times this week I’ve had to check myself. This will be nice for Mum and Dad when they come over. Ah. I’d been looking forward to it for months. But they won’t be coming this year, maybe not next year either, maybe not ever. I avoid the subject with them on the phone now. When we last spoke, they’d just been to Washdyke to do something housey. Mum talked about the importance of flow. Heck, they had all the flow in the world back at the other place.

Three sessions today, including a marathon 2½-hour maths lesson this afternoon. When I saw Matei this morning for our usual two-hour stint, his parents – they both have senior positions at a big supermarket chain – showed me photos of their recent team building. His father was up on the dance floor. An extrovert’s dream. When we were upstairs in his room, Matei – less extroverted than his father – said he dearly hoped he’d never have to do that. We spent most of the session on quadratic equations, which he can just about do in his sleep. He has an enormous world map on his wall. It’s fun to stare at. Spratly Islands popped out at me today. Sometimes I can even use it to explain concepts, like when we were doing bearings and I happened to have watched a video of a 1989 flight between the Brazilian cities of Marabá and Belém which went horribly wrong, partly because someone had keyed in the wrong bearing. On the way to Matei’s place I stopped at Kaufland to get a coffee from the machine. A homeless man who must have been there all night asked me for the time.

Yesterday I watched this YouTube video on Luton. Yikes, that hotel. A reminder that I’ll have to stay a night in Luton in two months’ time. The one positive from that video is the local football team: yes, Luton Town play in the Premier League. At a ground with entrances inside a row of Victorian terraced housing. Last season they went up through the play-offs in dramatic fashion. Their final against Coventry stood at 1-1 with moments left in extra time when they scored. Delirium. Only for the goal to be chalked off for handball following a video replay. Then they somehow kept their nerve to win on penalties. This afternoon Luton had a ridiculous 4-4 draw at Newcastle; they sit one point above the relegation zone.

On Tuesday I had my first haircut for ages. The place opposite me closed a few months back, and it’s now a trek to get it done. A middle-aged woman did it. I apologised for my dodgy Romanian. It doesn’t matter. I was hoping she might say it wasn’t actually that bad, but hey.

I’ve now ordered eleven records, the latest being Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue, and a few books. I’m getting them sent to a single location near Paris, and from there I’d get them delivered as a job lot rather than in dribs and drabs.

Tomorrow I’m going over to Mark’s place, and from there we’ll go to Buziaș, a town 30 km from here.

Family - Films - Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

Kill the lot

January 30, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

It’s been a long day. Five lessons, including one with a 35-year-old woman who works for a big investment bank. The purpose of my lessons with her remains a mystery; whenever I point out anything language-related, she pays zero attention. Today’s other sessions were rather less pointless. Before all that, I had the weekly Romanian lesson, and before that I went to the supermarket. Nobody on the checkouts at all. Self-service only. Everybody had a problem, including the one woman tasked with dealing with customers’ problems, though she’d clearly become institutionalised and thought that the shitty checkouts were fine and the customers were the problem. Shit is becoming the new OK everywhere. That all slowed me down and I was in a mad dash to get back for Romanian, carrying a backpack and a large carrier bag over the handlebars.

In our recent Romanian classes, the teacher has been asking us what we would do in various hypothetical situations, as a way of teaching the conditional. Last week she asked me what three things I’d change about the world, top of my list was killing social media. “Facebook, Instagram, the lot?” She was surprised how far I wanted to go. And Whatsapp. The bloody lot. (I nearly included YouTube.) Case in point, I WhatsApped Mark on Saturday morning to ask if he wanted to meet up the day after. Maybe, I’ll get back to you. Not a problem. The evening came and went and I was off to bed. Nothing from Mark. Right, in that case I’ll go for a walk in the morning and then watch the Australian Open men’s final. I get up in the morning and at about nine I look at my phone. There’s a message about meeting up in the morning. Sent at 12:20 am. Crap. Just why? Sorry mate, you’re a really nice guy and someone I enjoy spending time with, but I’ve made my plans now. Not Mark’s fault; it’s just the new normal.

Last night I saw Oppenheimer at the cinema. After missing the chance to see it in Geraldine, I thought it would pass me by for good, but Dorothy saw that Cinema Timiș were having an Oscars night, so I joined her. This was the cinema that I used to live above; I saw a film there in its dying days seven years ago. It was sad to see it go. Recently it underwent a revamp, and together with its sister Cinema Victoria, there are now places to see a film without setting foot in a mall. Fantastic, and bucking the trend of everything turning to custard. Timiș seats 500-odd; we sat in row T, one from the back. (I noticed there was no Q – a deeply foreign letter to Romanians.) Oppenheimer is a three-hour epic, but it didn’t seem that long. The stakes were so heart-stoppingly high, and all interwoven with a tale of an extraordinary man. I must have changed what I thought of him about eleven times during the course of the film. Cillian Murphy (apparently he’s famous or something) played the part of Oppenheimer so well. I’m glad I saw it, and all for just 20 lei (NZ$7 or £3.50). Such good value. Dorothy (nearly 70) filled me in at the end on what the cryptic “fellow traveller” meant; I had no idea that it meant a sympathiser and enabler of communism.

On Saturday I helped my sister-in-law’s friend with some maths, then after sending my scanned pages of working I gave them a call. They showed me my nephew who was half in the bath, then called me back post-bath. Two months now till I see them all – something to look forward to. My brother was unimpressed with our parents. He reckons they might never come to Europe again. I pointed out that Dad did visit his sister; my brother said that’s about where the bar is – you have to be dying for them to bother. Lately I’ve heard a lot about politicians “reading the room” – or not. It’s a phrase that’s in vogue. Mum and Dad have misread the room here in spectacular fashion.

The Australian Open. On Friday morning I switched on the TV, not even realising that Djokovic’s semi with Jannik Sinner was taking place, and saw the score: 6-1, 6-2 for Sinner. I did a double-take. I sat through set three which Djokovic eked out on a tie-break after saving a match point, and thought, you’ll bloody go on and win it now, you bugger. At that point I had to leave for a lesson. I was surprised and relieved to see that Sinner won in four sets. Yesterday was the final between Sinner and marathon man Medvedev. The Russian, playing flagless, was impeccable at the start and led 6-3, 5-1. Sinner was flat; maybe it was simply nerves in his first grand slam final. But the tide turned. More than a whole day on court in the tournament caught up with Medvedev. He did go two sets up but rather hobbled over the line in the second, and from there the far fresher man took over.

I also watched two full matches in the FA Cup fourth round. The first was hard to believe. Ipswich huffed and puffed but couldn’t blow Maidstone’s house down. Maidstone United, in the sixth tier of English football, only had two attempts on goal in the match, both of which went in. (One of them would have been chalked off for a foul had video replay been available.) Ipswich had 38 shots, a number that hardly seems possible, but thanks to heroics by Maidstone’s keeper and huge dollops of bad luck, scored just the once. Maidstone are the first team at that level to get this far in the Cup in my lifetime; the last was Blyth Spartans in 1978. Then I watched Leicester play Birmingham. The visitors dominated the first half but didn’t score; Leicester then ran out 3-0 winners. Blues’ defending for the third goal was terrible but by that stage it hardly mattered.

Not so many lessons tomorrow, so back to the book.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music

Stubborn refusal and songs about trains

January 26, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

I felt sad after talking to my parents yesterday. Seeing them was something to look forward to. They can justify it all they like, but refusing to come after the dozens of times my brother must have asked them – I mean yeesh. We’re talking some serious stubbornness here. Steely determination. OK, they’ve got their self-inflicted house shite to deal with, but the trip would still be very doable. Hopefully my brother will make the journey in our late summer and the rellies (do people still say that in NZ?) will get to see and hold the little man.

This morning, after the lesson with the priest, I had back-to-back lessons with a woman in her late forties and her 13-year-old son who’s a piece of work. I feel sorry for her. Before that I watched a spot of Romanian breakfast TV and they talked about digitising the post office here. Not before time, because right now it’s a clunking wreck. But there are bound to be teething problems (to put it mildly) when the new system doesn’t function properly and the system grinds to an even screechier halt than it does at the moment. And in 2024, talk of computerised post office systems will frighten anyone with even half an eye on the UK: the post office scandal there, which took a four-part docu-drama for people to sit up and take notice, has been appalling. Here’s what an A merican who lives in th e UK, and now has British citizenship, has to say on the matter.

Music. I’ve been listening to a lot of R.E.M. lately. Their song Driver 8, which I mentioned in a previous post, made me think of other great train-based songs. Here’s a few I can think of:
Marrakesh Express by Crosby, Stills & Nash
City of New Orleans by Arlo Guthrie (I’ve actually been on that train)
Downbound Train by Bruce Springsteen
Last Train to Clarksville by the Monkees (yeah I know)
5:15 The Angels Have Gone by David Bowie
Long Train Running by the Doobie Brothers
Midnight Special by Creedence Clearwater Revival
I thought Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show was about a train (it does say “southbound train” in the lyrics) but it turns out I was wrong.

And that’s my lot.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Writing a book

Food for thought

January 24, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

So I’ve just had a long chat with Mum and Dad. It would now be a massive shock if they came to Europe in 2024. Their vanity project is more important than seeing their family; that much is clear. They even talked about what a hassle their late-2022 trip was because it was spring in New Zealand and, you know, plants grew while they were away. So inconsiderate of them. They did see their family in that time including their tiny grandson, but whatever. A minor detail. These conversations get progressively more bizarre. The bright spot is that my brother and his family are likely to make the trip to NZ in August or September; Mum said they’d help them out financially. Help. I’d say a fair level of help would be 100%.

I had a fascinating chat with my brother at the weekend. He was in St Ives, dodging the storms that are battering the country, and had just seen our aunt. He said that for the first time in his life he’d had a proper conversation with her. Her responses were dependent on what he had just said. She went cold turkey on booze and fags when she got to the home; half a lifetime of brain-addling drinking gone at a stroke. Her muscles have atrophied to the point where she doesn’t get out of bed, but he said she was strangely content.

I saw the doctor last night, as I do once a month, to stock up on pills. He told me that he’d divorced from his wife last summer; she’d been cheating on him for two years. They have a ten-year-old son. It’s still all extremely raw. Then he said that their surgery would be moving to one of those horrible new glass buildings next to the mall. Ugh. That will mean more of a trek, and having to enter a depressing building to get my antidepressants. Some people even work there. Just imagine. The building is called UBC 0. United Business Center zero. It’s number 0 presumably for the same reason that King’s Cross built a platform 0 in 2010, leaving me momentarily baffled when I needed to catch a train from there. I could transfer to another surgery but that would be a pain too.

Five lessons yesterday. At least three of them are making no discernible progress; that’s the harsh reality. One of them is a university student who seems quite content with not improving. Not much I can do about that. One is a kid who’s got way behind at school and doesn’t quite realise it. And one needs to up his level of focus in my lessons by at least 300% to have any hope. I need to change tack entirely with him.

My high school didn’t do much for me (I was glad to leave at 16) except in one important respect. In a country where school food had a terrible reputation, my place provided substantial, nutritious cooked meals every day. Then I’d have another cooked dinner when I got home. On a Friday I’d get fish twice. At that age, both my brother and I packed it away. We had a proper breakfast too – porridge and toast, usually; going without breakfast would have been unthinkable. Importantly, we practically never ate between meals, apart from pieces of fruit which were in plentiful supply. Mum was in control of 90% of this – no surprise there – and the values that she’d gained from growing up on a farm, thousands of acres and a couple of decades from any fast food outlets, helped us boys considerably. Yesterday I was talking to a kid who skips breakfast, practically inhales a rudimentary sandwich and a few wine gums at school, then finally has something meaningful – schnitzel or the like – when he comes home. The boy who is falling behind at school only has a single meal per day as far as I can tell. And it’s not like the parents of kids I see can’t afford it. So what’s going on? It’s probably a number of things. Blame modern society, blame TikTok, blame the messed-up Romanian education system that forces kids to spend hours cramming pointless facts about lakes in China in order to get the coveted 10 grade.

Writing the book. It’s hard. I finally planned out the chapters, 19 of them, something I should have done years ago. I’m still learning, right. It’s tough because you can spend hours plugging away, moving words and paragraphs around, and it just doesn’t work. I should think of it as the new online poker.

I’ve bought seven new records and will grab a few more. I’m getting them delivered to a single location in France to be forwarded on to me. Ups the cost slightly, but it’s worth it for the huge increase in convenience.

Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

The kings of clay (or not)

January 21, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

She’s back. Elena, the lady who lives above me, after a long stay in Canada. The walls and floors of this Ceaușescu-era apartment block are so thick that no sound permeates them. Except her voice. I’ll pop up and see her later today.

Last night I played tennis with one of my students – Lucian, who’s almost certainly gay. He’s had 146 lessons with me so far. We played on an indoor clay court. It wasn’t cheap, but for a one-off I can handle it. (He’s got one of those proper job thingies, and plays there all the time. He even gets coaching.) I come from a land of virtual claylessness, so the dusty orange stuff feels quite exotic to me. Like me, he’s left-handed; that always adds an extra dynamic. (Presumably he also writes with his left hand. I don’t. In that respect (only), I’m just like Rafael Nadal.) We knocked up, then started a game. I won the first game, then led 0-40 on his serve thanks to some double faults, but he came back in that game and was soon all over me. Yeah, he’s too good, isn’t he? He could accelerate through the ball like I could only dream of, and sometimes he imparted sidespin – his coach had probably taught him the technique – that left me floundering. He led 3-1 and had a point for 4-1. But I somehow found a way back. Early on I struggled with my range, often hitting long. When I located my radar I was suddenly in business. I led 5-3, then dropped serve, but from 30-0 down in the tenth game I won the next four points for the set. The second set was bizarre: I won it 6-0, but it was a close 6-0 if such a thing exists. The majority of games went to multiple deuces. In truth I fed off his mistakes, of which there were many. We started another set – I won the first two games, then he reeled off the next three before the clock ran out on us. After the game he said that he focuses on producing “nice shots” and found my shots unusual and hard to read. Though I’m not a very competitive person, I’m not big on aesthetics; I select strokes that give me the best chance of winning points and games. We spoke mostly in Romanian; that’s always a bonus for me.

On Friday I had a new student. I got him through word-of-mouth, which is my most common method these days. His mother had contacted me; he was a 16-year-old named Peter who goes to the British school. Hmmm. In Romania you’re called Petru or Petrică, not Peter, so what’s the story here? At 7pm a message flashed up on my screen, asking me to let Zhong Mao (or something similar) into the meeting. Peter and his mother had come over from Nanjing, a city of nine million, a few months ago. I’m still not sure of the full story of how they ended up in Timișoara. He’s a nice guy. Fairly serious, I suppose – the unremitting Chinese education system practically forces you to be like that. Suddenly having the odd break from intense study was a revelation to him. When I asked him what he likes best about Timișoara he said the food. Kebabs in particular. Ha! He said he knew just one Romanian word – ciao – which doesn’t exactly count. (Ciao, sometimes Romanianised into ceau, is the go-to word in Banat where I am. In the east of the country you hardly every hear it.) I was impressed with his English. Tomorrow it looks like we’re having a face-to-face lesson.

Yesterday I had my usual suite of lessons, minus the one at 8am. The most interesting one came at the end. My student (a 15-year-old girl, or is she 16?) had to write a 500-word article about anything. No pointers at all. We homed in on a subject pretty quickly though. She’s travelled a fair bit in Romania, and decided to write about the Danube Delta which she visited when she was ten. I’d love to visit that area of natural beauty, preferably with my parents if and when they ever come this way. We nearly finished the article in the time she was with me. This brainstorm was pretty handy; I think she was able to decipher my writing.

When I finished that lesson I saw that Stoke had just scored, reducing Birmingham’s lead to 2-1 in their away game. But Blues clung on to the win, and Tony Mowbray’s revolution continues.

Dad sent me this 14-minute YouTube video from Neil Oliver, a Scottish ex-presenter on matters historical and archeological. It started off fine. The idea of personal money having restrictions and an expiry date isn’t that far-fetched; in China it might already be happening. (Only I wish he hadn’t said it was a fact. It’s just a prediction.) Then he went down the rabbit hole by talking about the Kennedy assassination, and just as I thought he might avoid Covid entirely, there it was. Lockdowns. Bloody masks. Please make it stop! My biggest issue with all these people – and there are no shortage of them – is that they bang on about being silenced. No you’re bloody not! Social media gives you an audience for your stinking fact-free horseshit like never before. At least Dad agreed with me.

I’m about to brave the outside. It’s minus four.

Family - New Zealand - Other sports

A degree in emotional detachment

January 18, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

The above is a quote from my brother. When I spoke to him on Monday, he said that’s what our parents have. Not a bad turn of phrase from someone who’s been doing a degree himself. (His results are imminent; I expect he’s done very well.) He was referring to their coming over to Europe. Or not. Yes, it’s a major undertaking, but you’d think there’d be some enthusiasm, some modicum of desire to want to see your own kids and your only grandson in their own world, that would trump all the reservations about the journey. The fact that this doesn’t exist has shocked both of us. We shouldn’t be too upset, we said to each other. Compared to a lot of families, we have it pretty good with all the Skyping and WhatsApping. My brother is now serious about making a trip to New Zealand, with his wife and son, during the southern winter. His aunts and uncles would love to see the little one, I’m sure.

Birmingham played their FA Cup replay against Hull last night. It wasn’t televised, so I listened to it on Radio WM, the local station. I thought it might have been geoblocked, but thankfully not. Listening to football on the radio was something I used to enjoy many moons ago, so this brought back good memories. The ground was three-quarters empty, it was bloody freezing, and the players came out to the rousing Feel It by The Tamperer, just like they did way back in ’99. Hull scored early and were the better side in the first half. Blues, still a goal down, made an extraordinary quintuple substitution after an hour. Changing basically half the team paid immediate dividends as Blues equalised straight away and bossed the rest of the game. They couldn’t find a second goal though, until right at the end – extra time was just moments away – when Blues found the winner via the Japanese player Koji Miyoshi. They now face Leicester away in the next round. A tough task. Tony Mowbray has injected a bumper dose of optimism into the club overnight; scoring last-minute goals in two straight games doesn’t do any harm either. When the game was over, the coverage switched to local rivals Wolves – they were in extra time. I was momentarily confused by the commentary – “Jensen passes to Mee”. That Abbott-and-Costello name reminded me of the Arthur Mee children’s encyclopedias.

I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. Yes, we talk pretty often. They’d been to Wanaka to collect a painting, then to Moeraki where they stayed the night, then back via Kurow and Waimate (I think). A long drive. They were telling me about a Green MP who had been caught shoplifting (high-end jewellery) on multiple occasions. We were all puzzled as to just why? She came into the country as a refugee and found herself with the world at her feet. Is the buzz you get from the act so great that you’re willing to risk your career, your reputation, your freedom, pretty much everything? It’s hard to fathom.

Life :) - Music - Other sports

Going back in time

January 16, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Elena, the 80-year-old lady who lives above me. On Friday she flies back here from Toronto. She told me that the man who lived on the ground floor and had a stroke just before Christmas had passed away at the age of 74. Very sad, though I never knew him.

I got new my record player up and running on Sunday. The 460 lei (£80 or NZ$160) I’d made the previous day barely paid for it. The first record I put on was Chicago’s 18. When I bought it I didn’t realise it was literally the band’s 18th album. So it was all very eighties. Even the brilliant – if cryptically titled – 25 or 6 to 4 had been brought kicking and screaming into the Reagan era. Slightly disappointing, but at least the damn thing worked. Then I put on Leonard Cohen’s greatest hits album from 1975 – before he came out with other hits that were just as great – and that was pure poetry from start to finish. Of the other three albums I bought, the wonderfully ethereal Oxygène by Jean-Michel Jarre is my favourite. I’m now eyeing up a dozen or so other LPs online, mostly from the seventies. I associate vinyl with older music; something like MGMT or Arcade Fire (already both 15-odd years old) on vinyl would feel weird to me.

In this morning’s Romanian lesson, our teacher asked me what time I’d like to go back to if I had the chance. I thought for some time about this. Maybe I could go back almost a millennium to witness the building of Ely Cathedral, just down the road from where I grew up. How and why did they build that? But I settled on something far more recent: the sixties and seventies. My teacher was surprised, but I’ve always thought of that era as an incredible time to be alive. The music, the energy, everything seemed limitless. Born in 1980, I missed out. Go back any further though and I think I’d be struck by the harshness of life, if Dad’s descriptions of the UK shortly after WW2 are anything to go by.

I always have to talk about football with my 14-year-old student. I don’t mind too much, but I’m far out of the loop these days. He’s recently taken a liking to Aston Villa, a side I saw play twice (if memory serves) when I was student. One of those games was a real belter: in the FA Cup against Leeds in January 2000, Villa won 3-2 with Benito Carbone scoring a hat-trick. I remember Paul Merson playing a big part in Villa’s win too. The place was rocking. Villa are now flying high, third in the Premier League. To be honest I preferred their rivals Birmingham City, known as Blues, and saw them more often. (Probably because they were cheaper.) Earlier this season Blues were sixth in the division below when their new American owners decided in their wisdom to sack their popular manager, a local lad, and bring in uber-famous Wayne Rooney. Turns out Rooney was rubbish. Once Blues were brushed aside on New Year’s Day at Leeds, Rooney got the boot after just 15 games (and only two wins) and the fans breathed a collective sigh of relief. In came ultra-pragmatic Tony Mowbray. When my lessons were over on Saturday, I saw that Birmingham were 2-1 down at home to Swansea in Mowbray’s first game in charge. Deep into added time, teenage Jordan James struck a pretty sweet equaliser, and Blues escaped with a point. Tomorrow Blues have another home game – an FA Cup replay against Hull. The cup is nothing like it was, sadly, and they’ll struggle to get much of a crowd.

Language teaching - Maths teaching - Photos - Travel: Romania

A busy winter’s day and a trip to Arad

January 14, 2024

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’ve had a busy Saturday, chock-full of lessons. Two maths sessions – two hours apiece – and three English ones. Everything from a creative writing piece about a murder and tactile Little Mermaid books to construction of perpendicular bisectors and probability tree diagrams. Marginally preferable to yesterday though, when I took five paracetamol for my sinus pain.

It’s been cold. Actual proper winter, like my first one in Timișoara, not the half-arsed stuff we’ve had of late. On Monday it snowed all day, making for a pretty sight, but getting around the city for lessons was quite a challenge. Today was the first time since then that the mercury – ever so briefly – touched freezing point. We’d been at (minus) sixes and sevens all week.

Last Sunday – just before the wintry blast hit us – I met Mark in Dumbrăvița and from there we went to Arad in his car. I hadn’t been there for six years. Arad is a fine city, with beautiful architecture much like we have in Timișoara. (Just like my home, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire for half a century until the First World War.) After a good wander, be both agreed that in some ways we preferred Arad to its bigger cousin. (Timișoara is roughly twice the size.) There were all kinds of photo opportunities. We managed to go inside the Palace of Culture, which reminded me of the larger one in Iași; the lobby and the concert hall were both superb. The Mureș, a much more substantial river than Timișoara’s Bega, runs through the city. The Christmas market was still running, but rather than grab overpriced food from there, we had a major feed at one of a clump of kebab shops at one end of the main drag. Kebab Alley, we called it. Unlike Timișoara with its three main squares, Arad has one long, broad main street where everything happens, though some of the side streets were impressive too. After our kebabs, we decided to go back home. Mark had parked in an area of town not far from the centre called Boul Roșu – the Red Ox – but despite seeing a sign depicting a red ox, it took us a while to find the car. Coming home from that very enjoyable trip felt like the absolute end of any kind of holiday-related downtime.

My record player – turntable, if you like – arrived yesterday. It’s still in its box. Getting that going will be tomorrow’s “thing”.

Here are some photos from Arad, and of the snow.

Above is one of those Roman numerals date word puzzle thingies that I mentioned on this blog some years ago. But did they have to make it so complicated? Someone must have really pissed off whoever made this in 1779 (if I haven’t gone wrong somewhere – I may well have).