Buying property - Other sports - The UK

A new box, perhaps

April 28, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It looks like I might have bought a flat. On Tuesday I met up with the owner, a very bronzed lady in her forties, and asked her about the heating and why there are massive mirrors, covering entire walls, in what will hopefully be my teaching room. She said she used to run gym classes in there. I offered her €110,000, just €3k more than my previous offer, and later that afternoon the agent came back to me to say she’d accepted. (The original price was €120k, which she then lowered to €115k.) I now have about eight more questions I wish I’d asked her. With this property lark, there are monsters everywhere, as I know full well. The process shouldn’t take too long – this isn’t the UK, with such horrors as chains and gazumping – but what do I know about buying in Romania, really? I’m using a solicitor who has decided to take the whole week off after Orthodox Easter. Then there’s the question of getting the money across from New Zealand. Obviously the property stuff will be front and centre in my life for the next little while.

I’ve just read this long article about public phone boxes in the UK. The old red ones are a symbol of Britishness; I imagine one next to a parish council notice board or a village green, near a cylindrical post box of the same colour. I don’t know what it is about that shade of red, which was also the colour of the old Routemaster double-decker buses. When I was growing up, our front door was that colour too, and I remember my brother and I being disappointed when Dad decided to paint it green. Some of them have been converted to mini libraries, or now house defibrillators; many more have been removed. I remember them stinking of pee and cigarettes. I last used one as recently as 2016 when I washed up in the UK with no way of making a call on my mobile. I tried calling my aunt but each time I got her answer phone which was useless to me.

Snooker. I stayed up far too late last night to watch John Higgins edge over the line in a deciding 25th frame against Jack Lisowski. These evening sessions can run and run, and I’m two hours ahead of Sheffield where it all takes place. Today the semi-finals start. These are three-day matches, played over a gruelling best of 33 frames. Ronnie O’Sullivan will play John Higgins, while Mark Williams takes on the delightfully (!) named Judd Trump. It’s a heavyweight line-up, all right. O’Sullivan, Higgins, and Williams all turned professional way back in 1992 and have all won multiple titles. It seemed they’d been around for ages even when I stopped watching 19 years ago. Trump won in 2019 and is supremely talented too. O’Sullivan will surely be the crowd favourite. I’ll watch a frame or two – but no more than that – tonight.

It’s a drizzly, grey old day today, reminiscent of the Land of Red Boxes.

Life :) - Other sports

An Easter big break

April 26, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve had my latest Skype lesson with the eight-year-old girl in Germany. I needed a glass of wine after that. Next time I might have it before.

It’s the end of the long Orthodox Easter weekend here. I worked all of the four days, though less than usual. It’s been nice not being hassled by estate agents.

Yesterday (Easter Sunday) I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român. I thought nothing would be open but there was a bar which served barbecue food. I sat on a bench and read the first chapters of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. If the beginning is anything to go by, it’ll be the best book I’ve read in a long time. I had to give up when some inconsiderate twat decided to pump out music on his boombox. I then went to the bar and waited a very Romanian length of time for my barbecued pork and wedges. It’s frustrating when you’re on your own, as I so often am.

Saturday night was the Easter vigil, a huge event here. People turned out in their hordes shortly before midnight for a service that carried on into the small hours. They seemed desperate to partake in it again, after two years when Covid put paid to the whole thing. I ventured over from outside the cathedral (there was no hope of getting inside) to the church at Iosefin, across the river, but the scenes were even more chaotic there. At that point I figured I’d rather watch the snooker instead, then later when the crowds had thinned out I entered the cathedral (with my requisite candle) to see what the fuss was all about. I now know that the reply to “Hristos a înviat!” (Christ is risen!) is “Adevărat a înviat!” (Indeed, He is risen!). Many Orthodox Christians use these greetings in place of “hello” at Easter time.

Snooker. I’m watching the World Championship, after 19 years of not following the game. I used to be glued to the screen all through late April, then I moved to New Zealand where there was no TV coverage, and that was that. If the last few days are anything to go by, I’ve missed a lot. It’s such a deep game. An innocuous cannon on a brown can have unexpected ramifications down the line. One frame can easily last forty minutes or more, then the next can be over in ten. The match between Mark Selby and Yan Bingtao, which Yan won 13-10, featured a monumental 85-minute frame, the longest ever in 46 years of the tournament and the likes of which I’d never seen before. Selby, the clear favourite, had come from 11-7 behind to close to within one, which heightened the tension even more in the 22nd frame. After Yan eked it out, he then coolly knocked in a break of 112 in the following frame to wrap up an utterly absorbing match. It’s been great to see all these new players, especially those from outside the Anglosphere like Noppon Saengkham this afternoon, whose handshake after his defeat by John Higgins was quite wonderful.
Update: Neil Robertson has just compiled a maximum 147 break in his match with Jack Lisowski. I remember Jimmy White’s one (1992 I think), then Stephen Hendry’s, then Ronnie O’Sullivan’s iconic whirlwind one, but I only ever saw those after the event. They were extremely rare back then. This one I saw live, and Robertson made it look easy. He was in a deep hole half an hour ago, but from 10-7 down and looking decidedly scratchy, he’s now level at 10-10 in a race to 13.
Update 2: Lisowski has won in a nervy deciding frame, after Robertson had almost won in the frame before. What drama.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker - Romania

Happy Easter

April 22, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My birthday – another one – was on Wednesday. It was just a normal day for me; I didn’t even see anybody face-to-face except when I looked at yet another apartment. (That decision isn’t getting any easier. I’m glad it’s now the long Orthodox Easter weekend, so agents are unlikely to hassle me for a few days.)

Yesterday I had my last lesson with a 16-year-old girl. Her mother had contacted me the day before to say that it would be the last one. We’d had some good and productive sessions in the last few months, so seeing the clock tick down on our final meeting was rather sad.

The weekend before last, I went to Lake Surduc with Mark (the teacher) and his dog (or really his girlfriend’s dog). It’s funny how I see him quite often but haven’t seen his girlfriend since around Christmas. She probably doesn’t like me. I can imagine their conversations. “I suppose you’ll be seeing your mate this weekend, then.” “I might do.” “God, he’s so boring!” “He isn’t really. And you don’t exactly like trudging through mud, do you?” Maybe she’s just very conscientious and spends her Sundays making lesson plans for the following week like my mother used to do. Anyway, Surduc is about an hour’s drive away. I’d been there once before, when my friends from St Ives came over in 2017, but we didn’t stop apart from to ask locals if there was any nearby accommodation. This time they’d clearly had a deluge of rain overnight – it was extremely muddy. There was no path around the lake, so you had to clamber through the adjoining wood. There were plenty of ups and downs. We passed shepherds on their small farms, and at one point we were met by six menacing dogs that had come from the farm below. On the shore of the lake we saw dozens of four-pointed (tetrahedral) seed pods that looked like medieval weapons. These came from water chestnut trees. We also saw some rather large shells. I had to cycle to his place in Dumbrăvița and back, and I later played two sets of tennis, so I managed to burn off some calories that day.

Some of those spiky seed pods
A shell and a muddy Doc Marten

Today is Orthodox Good Friday, or as they call it here, Vinerea Mare (“Big Friday”). I’ve just had a lesson with a lady in Bucharest, and I’m about to try and make a Romanian-style marble cake, following a video on Youtube (in Romanian) that has had ten million views. Easter is a much bigger deal here than in most of the English-speaking world, and it seems relatively free of commercialisation. It’s a family occasion, with a lot of traditional food. It’s the only time of year that Romanians normally eat lamb – as well as roasting the meat, they use the innards to make drob, a kind of loaf that also has an egg inside. There’s the usual sarmale and salată de boeuf, then for dessert they have various cakes including pască, which is made with sweet cheese.

After a nice run of final tables (but no wins, dammit) I withdrew $1375 from my PokerStars account. Of course I didn’t quite get all of that because they hit you with a withdrawal fee and an exchange rate margin that adds up to nearly 5% (or at least it did in my case). I’ve now got $719 sitting in my account. Maybe I should have withdrawn the whole lot and ended this unproductive distraction for good, but the SCOOP tournament series is coming up soon, so I thought I’d at least try my hand at that.

This was the scene outside my window last night, following a screech of tyres and metal. I don’t think anyone was badly hurt.

Autism - Life :)

The elephant in the room

April 13, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Now for a monster post (sorry it’s so long) about something I haven’t written about before. I’m probably autistic.

I’ve never had a diagnosis. I’ve been label-free my whole life. When I started school on 4th September 1984, at the ridiculously young and typically British age of 4 years and 4½ months, I had little interest in what the other kids were doing – I just sat in the corner on my own – and changing in and out of clothes for PE lessons was a problem. I could do it, but it took me ages. My teacher – who was very pleasant, I thought – called my parents to ask what was wrong with me. Mum didn’t take kindly to this, so she asked her to get me to read something. I could read quite a lot. Um, yes, your son has a reading age of nine.

This was still pre-Rain Man, so autism wasn’t really “a thing” yet, and anyway my parents didn’t want me branded for life, as they saw it. My early childhood was a happy one, but in my teenage years and beyond I became an expert in tamely going through the motions. I did the remainder of school, then I did university (my first year was a nightmare because I couldn’t hide, but things improved after that), then in 2003 I moved from the UK to New Zealand where I did a job in the financial sector. I rarely knew why I was doing what I was doing, and my level of emotional attachment hovered close to zero. The only exception was a spell of about a year when I calculated insurance quotes; I almost enjoyed that. It was a process that made sense to me. Then it was back to the other stuff. In 2007 I rented a flat on my own, and with a couple of short exceptions (taking on flatmates to help pay a mortgage – not a great idea for me) I’ve lived by myself ever since.

I stuck with my job because I wasn’t badly paid. Sometimes I wondered how I got paid at all given how little I achieved. But all the time I was building some monstrous edifice without any foundation (friends, a home, a semblance of identity) to underpin it. By 2008 it occurred to me that I was supposed to have moved on by now. My similar-aged colleagues were discussing house prices and stag dos and non-rust-bucket cars. Some of them were even having kids. I fitted in less and less at work, and before long I’d mentally checked out of there. I suffered regular bouts of depression. In early ’09 I started a blog called Fixed and Floating (named after the types of mortgages that my colleagues spent hours yapping about, but also because that described my situation rather well), and later that year I started attending meet-ups for autistic adults, initially because it was a field I could see myself working in. I remember the first session, and what an uplifting experience that was.

Moving on is something people almost take for granted. A car, a house, a job, a better car, a bigger house, promotion, and of course children who you’ll help to get bigger and better cars, jobs and houses. The route is all nicely mapped and sat-navved, even if it may be bumpy and potholey. At school I learnt about the seven (or was it eight) stages of man, as if they were a given. I don’t remember there being Ts & Cs. One thing I noticed about the (often wonderful) people I met at the autism group, even the most high-functioning of them, is that they didn’t move on. How could they? Imagine a traditional wedding for an autistic person. How are a hundred-odd guests going to magically materialise? A minority of those who attended the group, like me, could drive a car (an extremely useful skill to have if you want to avoid people), some had jobs, a few were in relationships, but the sense of progression was universally absent. Bad stuff, on the other hand, happened just as easily to them as to anyone else, if not more so. If you’re autistic, it seems the road isn’t bumpy so much as you’re driving an 1100 cc Austin Allegro – you struggle to climb the gentlest of hills, but you’re very capable of dropping off a cliff. (I’ve had literal nightmares about school reunions, which are all about moving on and making comparisons. Luckily, I don’t expect I’ll ever have to attend one.)

Mercifully I got out of my job at the end of 2009, and I spent the next few months either at the beach or playing online poker or creating word puzzles. In the middle of 2010 I visited the UK and Europe, seeing my grandmother for the last time. That’s all still on my old blog. I worked for a while on insurance claims from the major earthquakes that had hit New Zealand – a temp job, which was great, because it meant I cut out all the stressful social crap – but then for some inexplicable reason (my mother?) I relocated to another city to take a permanent job that I didn’t even want, and that was an utterly predictable disaster. I was useless at the job, and when I was depressed, which was most of the time, I became worse than useless. I couldn’t keep my job, so I took on a different role at the same company that paid barely half as much, just after taking out a mortgage on an apartment. The flat itself was condemned because it was an earthquake risk. Barrels of fun all round, I must say. I escaped the financial world in 2014 to enter the realm of pipes and manholes instead, and that was a useful stopgap while I figured out what I actually wanted to do.

In 2015 I managed to visit the US – my first overseas trip since 2010 – and I came back from there on a major high. That’s when I started this blog. Then I figured it out. I wanted to teach English in Romania. That’s mostly because I became besotted with the beautiful Romanian language, but also because I felt the country itself would make me happy. Britain was a member of the EU at the time, so it was feasible. I was able to rent out my crappy apartment. So towards the end of 2016, after more bouts of depression and a certain high-profile referendum, I made the move. I flew from New Zealand to the UK, then took the train to Timișoara, which is where I’ve lived for the last 5½ years.

I tried knocking on the door of just about every language school in Timișoara but had no luck getting work, so I put up posters all over the city and started getting phone calls. Although I’d spent some time studying Romanian it wasn’t easy to understand what my prospective students were saying on the phone. Slowly but surely, though, I got snippets of work here and there, and when I wasn’t working I could explore my beautiful new city. The parks, the markets, the squares, the clattering old trams. A few of my ads showed a picture of the newly elected Donald Trump. One young woman who replied to the Trump ad and started lessons with me worked for an estate agency. At this point I was in need of somewhere permanent to live. She found me a flat slap-bang in the middle of town with wonderful views, and at Christmas time I moved in. It was in an ugly communist-style concrete block, but it felt like heaven. I enjoyed my work a lot – I had my own systems and processes – but it wasn’t until the autumn of 2017, when the kids went back to school, that I really got my hours up. Suddenly I was pretty busy. I wasn’t making tons of money, but I could certainly get by, and my job suited me down to the ground. An open-plan office and everything that entails was hell for me, but a one-on-one lesson was actually quite enjoyable. Plus I was helping somebody. Amazingly, I was depression-free.

That’s been me ever since. In the last two years we’ve had Covid to deal with. It has taken a heavy toll here in Romania where about half the population are unvaccinated. Covid caused a few problems for me workwise initially, but they were solved once people got used to the idea of online lessons. In fact I quite liked the initial lockdown because it was so peaceful and quiet and people’s expectations went way down. The way to dodge the virus was to avoid people as much as possible! Coming out of the pandemic is proving more of a challenge for me, however. Every time another piece of melamine or MDF falls off the inside of this messy tired-looking flat, it reminds me that I need to move on, somehow, but I’m seriously lacking in motivation. My plan is to buy a place where I can run a proper teaching business, and then get a car so I can travel around the country more easily, but it’s hard to know where to start. I’m on my own, in Romania, flying blind. Donald Rumsfeld-style question marks hang over every apartment I look at. Things I don’t know about, and more that I don’t know I don’t know about. There’s also my parents and my brother whom I haven’t seen in absolutely bloody ages. Should I sort out a flat before seeing them?

I’ll be 42 next week. I remember on my 21st birthday that my mother said I’d get a girlfriend soon. I replied, “You’ll be saying that on my 42nd birthday too.” And here I am. I’ve missed out on so much – relationships, careers, a sense of home and belonging, being part of something bigger – because of who I am. My undiagnosed condition. All I can do is keep battling away.

Buying property - Life :) - Photos

Sunshine today, and boy do we need it

April 7, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

The news from Ukraine has become almost too horrifying to watch. This evening my student said he’s thinking of moving to Portugal – as far away as possible from the terror while remaining in Europe.

I had a look at another flat today. It was close to the centre, in a building with a courtyard, constructed in 1900. It’s the first time I’ve looked at a properly old place. It was great, but in a higher price bracket than anything I’d seen before. Would it be worth the money? I really haven’t a clue.

This flat search isn’t getting any easier. I can’t help but be intimidated by estate agents, even if they’re nowhere near as predatory as the ones I remember from New Zealand. Then if the current occupants are also there when I look around, I generally lose interest and want to leave. I plan to look at one more flat this weekend, and if that doesn’t quite work out, I’ll go back to the place I made the offer on three weeks ago.

I read that Ashley Bloomfield, who masterminded New Zealand’s response to coronavirus for two years, has resigned. I can’t say I blame him.

After I wrote my last post, I went for a bike ride after being stuck inside all day, and promptly got stuck in a hailstorm. The weather has improved markedly since then; today was a glorious spring day.

A majestic tree at dusk. You can see the cathedral at bottom right.
The Bega flanked by magnolias this lunchtime, from the Traian Bridge
The building containing the flat I looked at today
The view from a flat I looked at on a gloomy Saturday, with the river and the new church. I’d be happy with that.
The Salamon Brück building — or palace — in Piața Unirii
A rhyming message at the bike stand at Kaufland. Romanians love things to rhyme.
Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching

How times — and words — change

April 4, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

We had beautiful weather at the start of last week with temperatures in the 20s, but we’ve been plunged right back into winter on 3rd April. We even had a light flurry of snow earlier today. Tennis has been impossible this weekend. What a turnaround.

I’ve got my new Samsung phone. I’m enjoying the extra real estate of a 6.5-inch screen, the battery lasts what feels like ages after my recent iPhone experience, and the camera does its job. The bad news is that I’m constantly monkeying around with settings to stop it from doing really maddening things, and failing almost every time, but at least I have a working phone. On Monday or Tuesday or whatever day it was, I FaceTimed my parents for the last time on my old phone; when I hung up, the battery percentage was way down into single figures, and no book no matter how heavy would keep the cable in place for it to charge. Damn. What about my contacts? My students and stuff? I’d tried importing them before with no success, so now there was only one thing for it: I scribbled down all the names and numbers as fast as I could before the battery went dead, which it did 15 minutes afterwards, and then tapped them all into my new phone manually.

Some people are easy to teach. Others aren’t. The eight-year-old girl I see on Skype each week is firmly in the latter category. Seriously, what am I supposed to do with her for an hour? What can I even give her that she can’t already get from YouTube? (I know she watches a lot of YouTube videos.) You’re bored, she told me on Friday, in the second half of the session when her father was (annoyingly) present. You’re telling me I’m boring, aren’t you? No, she doesn’t mean that, her father assured me. Of course not. Yeah, right. None of this is her fault, and I can only imagine what primary school teachers went through when they taught online during the pandemic.

Yesterday morning I had my maths lesson with Matei. We’re going through past “checkpoint” papers, which are exams they give you in the UK at age 14 but don’t immediately count for anything. (He’s going through the British system.) At the start of the session his mother gave me icre – fish-egg paste on pieces of bread, and doboș, a Hungarian layered cake. At ten in the morning, I had to work my way up to the icre, like edging into sea water that I know is too cold, but I finally took the plunge and it was fine. The doboș was delicious. After the session, his parents told me about an online influencer who knew all kinds of magic tricks to get people to view your content, and I was made to watch a video about him on their smart TV. Mercifully, it was only a few minutes long. What makes you think I should see this?

I looked at another property yesterday, and will get to see one more tomorrow. The owner of the place – a lady in her seventies and no more than five foot tall – was lovely. She seemed a typical older Romanian woman, with all her preserves jarred and labelled in the pantry. Talking to older Romanians gives me a fascinating window on their lives, and makes a nice change from hearing about ambitious career plans and trips to Greek islands.

I’ve been watching a weird series on Netflix, with a weirdly long title to match: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. Some exercises I did last week on car parts made me think of some other weirdly long titles from the recently (and sadly) departed Meat Loaf: I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That), and Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are. Both those songs were on the hugely successful Bat Out of Hell II album, which came out when I was a teenager.

This was my attempt at yesterday’s Wordle:

I was lucky to get so close with my second guess, but as for the actual solution, I thought, when did people start using this word? Luckily, there’s something called Google Ngrams which shows you how word frequencies have changed over time in printed material. You can even compare words, such as trope and tripe. Trope has indeed exploded in my lifetime:

Below is how the spelling of the country I live in has changed in English over two centuries. I certainly prefer the current spelling, which only took over in the 1970s. Note how mentions of Romania (spelt in any way) peaked during the Ceaușescu era, and dropped off a bit in the 1990s.

My mother still sometimes refers to the sort of computer you hold in your hand, like the one I’ve just bought, as a telephone:

It used to be unprintable, didn’t it? It’s now six times as printable as it was at the turn of the century.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Social struggles

March 28, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today I had lunch with the tennis crew and some of their friends. The wife of one of the guys I play with sings in a choir at the church in Piața 700, and some of them were from there. All in all, there were 14 of us, including Domnul Sfâra, the 87-year-old man who still (somehow) plays tennis from time to time. Most of them hadn’t caught up with each other since the pandemic started. At one point there was a go-round-the-table thing, where everyone was expected to speak in turn, and amid the jokes that mostly zoomed over my head, there was much discussion of everyone’s medical trials and tribulations, Covid-related and not. Romanians are far more open than Brits when it comes to discussing this stuff, though the woman who sat next to me – white as a sheet and no more than seven stone – didn’t say what she’d been through. It wasn’t until it was my turn that I realised the round-the-table thing was actually happening. “So I have to speak now?” Yes. How did you end up in Romania? Always this question, which never gets any easier to answer. When I told people what I did for a living, there was then a short discussion of the English language. And and end are pronounced the same, somebody said. No no no! Just no! Two different vowels. Miles apart. On a daily basis I deal with people who think that send is something you find on a beach, or that a bet hangs upside down, because for some historical reason Romanians and speakers of other central and eastern European languages use their e vowel to represent our short a vowel, when it would serve them better to use their a instead. We stayed from twelve till about three. It was great that everybody got to see each other after such a long time, and they all seemed such nice people, but that sort of thing is never easy for me, even in my own language.

Romania has now suffered 65,000 Covid deaths. Because some of them would have died anyway, it’s hard to gauge the impact of vaccine refusal on that number. However, we know that two-thirds of the deaths occurred after the vaccines became readily available in spring of 2021, and the vast majority of those who died once the vaccines were available hadn’t taken them, so we’re looking at a very large number of preventable deaths, orders of magnitude greater than other tragedies like the Colectiv nightclub fire which killed 65 people on the night and in the weeks afterwards. It’s utterly appalling.

I’d planned to play poker this morning, but once I knew this lunch was happening and I wouldn’t be finished in time, I decided to play last night instead. I was pretty tired this morning after that, and putting our clocks going forward didn’t exactly help. I haven’t played a lot since I had the stones, though last week I did make $76 in a tournament for finishing second and snagging plenty of bounties. My bankroll is $2005.

Yesterday I lamented the end of extended final sets in tennis. It’s not an earth-shattering change; just look at the 2012 men’s Australian Open final. It was a titanic battle – no match has been quite that gladiatorial before or since – and it didn’t even get to 6-6 in the fifth set. (Djokovic beat Nadal 7-5 in the decider.) But it’s a symptom of what’s been happening in sport in general. Everything now has to be neatly packaged and shiny and pristine. Remove the kinks and imperfections and mud, and play it all in soulless air-conditioned stadiums in sodding Qatar. I find myself losing interest.

Here are some pictures of Timișoara in early spring:

The old Banca de Scont (Discount Bank), now done up nicely
The map stone in Piața Unirii, showing where the fortress used to be. This isn’t old; it was laid in 1987.
The Bega boats are back in business
Pink magnolias in bloom
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis

No more marathons, and more’s the pity

March 27, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got my TV tuned to BBC news, with the war now centred on Lviv in the west after the Kremlin said they’d concentrate on the Donbas region having been pushed back by the Ukrainians. Since the first morning of the war, none of this has made any sense at all. Joe Biden has just made a speech, saying at the end that “for God’s sake this man cannot remain in power”. Whenever I see Biden speak about the Ukraine war, I wonder what the orange turd might have come out with.

Today I had my maths lesson in Dumbrăvița – he did well on a practice exam paper – and then when I got home I had a last-minute cancellation, meaning I just one had English lesson before stepping on the tennis court. I played two sets, both with the woman who struggles a bit with her footwork, so I had to run a bit, which was no bad thing. It was a lovely early evening for tennis, and it’s been a great week of weather all round. Blue skies every day.

Yesterday I called my aunt, and this time she answered. I remembered to add “Auntie” before her name. She was much better than she can be. In the past she’s seemed unaware of anything beyond her four walls. She’ll say the weather is bad, I’ll then mention that it’s fine and sunny where I am, and then she’ll almost seem put out by my mentioning other weather. Incorrect weather, as she sees it. I got none of that yesterday. We spent most of the ten minutes or so discussing the war. She still did her usual trick of ending the “conversation” when I still had things I wanted to say.

My aunt would get on well with the eight-year-old girl in Germany whom I teach on Skype. Yesterday’s lesson with her was especially hard because her father was with her the whole time. I made what I thought were fairly strong noises to say that I’d prefer it if he’d damn well go away, but he paid no notice. Half-way through the hour-long lesson her mind wandered. She must be tired, I said to her father. No, she’s just bored, he said. There might not be a whole lot I can do about that. Her English has got noticeably better in the time I’ve taught her. I think that’s down to YouTube more than me; her accent is very American.

Wednesday saw the return of Zoli, my first-ever student here, way back in November 2016. I hadn’t seen him since the very start of the pandemic in Romania, two years ago, when I joined him on a trip to the mountains. As we drove there, he told me that the hut had been closed because of the virus and we’d have to sneak in, and I got angry at him for not telling me before. Though it was beautiful up there in the snow, I was aware that a tsunami of disease and death was about to hit us. I thought I might never see him again, so it was a great pleasure to receive a text from him to say that he wanted to restart lessons. Wednesday’s meeting was hardly a lesson: it was a chat followed by a game of Bananagrams.

I’ve ordered a Samsung phone to replace my iPhone 5½ (as I call it) which I got as a present almost five years ago. My present phone doesn’t charge unless I place a heavy book on it, and then its battery runs down almost visibly (actually visibly if I’m making a video call, say), so I end up not using it much. It’s a low-end Samsung, called an A13 (it cost about NZ$300 or £150) but it seems to do everything I could ever want and much more. What it won’t do, however, is FaceTime, so I’ll have to switch to Skype or WhatsApp or something for keeping in touch with my parents. FaceTime has been so convenient.

Amid all the news of the war, they’ve been showing the PR disaster that is P&O, the once-proud British shipping company. P&O stood for (and presumably still does stand for) Peninsular and Oriental, a name that conjures up the world’s great trade routes and general intrepidness. Now it’s Dubai-owned (ugh), and the name makes me think of an outfit that lays off 800 of its staff on Zoom without giving any notice, and now has a ship that is deemed unseaworthy.

And finally, back to tennis. Ashleigh Barty has decided to retire from tennis at the age of just 25, at the pinnacle of the game. After winning Wimbledon and then her home grand slam in Melbourne, she probably thought, just what else can I achieve, and why not play cricket or golf or any of the other sports I’m ridiculously talented in. Tennis will miss her, though; I remember not long ago hearing some commentators suggesting that she might be too nice to ever be a champion. In other news, the no-tie-break final set, which has produced extraordinary drama over the last half-century, is no more. The movers and shakers of the tennis world thought we’d all be better off without that suspense, and now all four grand slams will be (quote) enhanced by a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-all in the final set, as the Australian Open has employed since 2019. I’m always wary of that marketing-speak word enhance. The new system has been billed as a one-year trial, but you don’t usually trial something in the biggest events on the calendar. It’s possible that, say, Wimbledon reverts to what they used before, but in all likelihood this will be a permanent change. Well, until someone else comes along and decides to shorten things even further.

Buying property - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Is it worth the risk?

March 21, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just come back from my second-most expensive grocery shop in Romania. The only time I spent more was in the headless-chicken initial days of the pandemic. Everything has shot up in price. This reminds me of 2008 in New Zealand, when a block of cheese hit $16 and they were practically giving gas-guzzling Ford Falcons away: petrol had smashed through $2 a litre, which seemed crazy at the time. This morning I met up with Mark, the teacher. We had a coffee; he also had waffles. We had a good chat, mostly about teaching, but he didn’t have much time because he was going to a barbecue soon after.

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei in Dumbrăvița, then two online English lessons when I got back, including one with a new guy who lives near Cluj. Most of my lessons are still online, but face-to-face is coming back gradually. After that I was on the tennis court for the first time this year. We’d planned to start back a couple of weeks ago, but we had a chilly first half of March. The tennis crew is depleted. Yesterday I partnered a teenage girl who is a national-level rower; we played against her father and the older guy I sometimes play singles with. We lost the first set 6-3, and in the second we’d fended off half a dozen match points to be at deuce for the umpteenth time in the tenth game, when time ran out on us. I wasn’t too bad. My serve needs some work; my only ace, which hit the sideline at 2-5 in the second set, came out of the blue.

A silver lining to those awful kidney stones is that I’ve dropped a few pounds. On Friday I had my first haircut since last June; the barber’s comb turned my long thick hair into unappetising grey spaghetti before it fell to the ground. I didn’t really want that much taken off, but hairdressing vocabulary is something I struggle with even in English. I do prefer the slimmer, less caveman-like me, though. (I still have the beard.) On Tuesday I’ll go back to the doctor, and maybe I’ll find out if my stones are still there. I don’t think I’ve passed them, but the pain has gone. Now I “only” have my intermittent sinus pain to deal with, plus the cold that never goes away. (If I’m outside on a chilly day, I have to blow my nose all the bloody time. When I played tennis yesterday I had to wipe my nose after every second point. That’s just life for me.)

That’s more than enough about me. My dad passed out on Thursday night, just after I wrote my last post. He somehow fell into the bath at about two in the morning, and blacked out. He was lucky not to injure himself. He came round, then eventually clambered out of the bath. The next day was a write-off as he had such terrible leg pain, but yesterday he assured me he was coming right. As for Mum, a rogue contact lens had got stuck up her eye, and when she extricated that she was fine. I wish I wasn’t so far away from them. I expect they’ll want to come to Europe at or around Christmas – there will be a new addition by then – but I’d like to make a trip to New Zealand too.

I want to move on with my life, which means finding a new apartment and running a proper teaching business from it, but last week’s near miss has made me even more skittish than I was before. The appalling war in Ukraine has made the local economy very uncertain, then when you add in that I don’t really know what I’m doing, and I’ve had my fingers well and truly burnt before…

I forgot to mention a horrific accident – or pair of accidents – that occurred earlier this month near the Black Sea in eastern Romania. It was a quiet evening, and I got alerts on my phone in Romanian, one of which made me do a double take. Is that really what it says? A MiG fighter jet went down in a remote area, in terrible weather, killing the pilot. Then a Puma helicopter flew out in search of the plane, and it too crashed. All seven on board the helicopter died.

Buying property - Family - Life :)

Feels like we’re all running out of gas

March 18, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

When I spoke to my parents this morning, they were showing their age. Mum had just about gone blind in one eye overnight, while Dad had a sciatica-like jabbing pain in his right leg. I’m 11,000 miles away and I can’t do a damn thing. Last weekend I spoke to Dad, pre-leg pain. Mum had gone to church. They’d just had a “friend” to stay; Dad said that Mum was stressed to the max the whole time and could have erupted at any second. Since I left New Zealand, I’ve missed out on Mum’s volcanic (and irrational) side.

Yesterday I got pretty close to buying that flat I mentioned in my previous post, but after making an offer and receiving a counter-offer of €8000 more, I backed away. This is a minefield, isn’t it? I may still end up buying the place. The owner is in Mexico (why there?) and won’t be back in Timișoara for another three weeks, so there’s no way I can sign anything before then. I want to do this and start running a proper business, but right now I’m stumbling in the dark, at the mercy of a highly uncertain economy. My only saving grace is that this time I’m only putting half my eggs (or hopefully fewer) in one basket.

I got the new fridge-freezer delivered, but god, installing it was a performance. This flat has a funny V-shaped laundry “corner” which meant I couldn’t remove the old appliance without disconnecting the washing machine, and shitshitshit how do I turn off the cold tap? I’ll be knee-deep in water if I’m not careful. Then after sorting that out, I had to remove the doors of the new fridge-freezer because it wouldn’t fit otherwise. That’s about as close as I want to get to actual DIY, but in my new place (if I get that far) I might be forced into doing some. It was lucky that the fridge broke down in March and not August.

On Monday my sister-in-law sent me her latest scan. It looks amazingly human now. A human that will have the same last name as me. The due date is 20th September.

Tomorrow I’m getting my first haircut in nine months.

Here are some before-and-after petrol prices at the same forecourt. Unlike some stations which are in danger of running out of digits on their signs, this one can handle 10-lei-plus petrol.

22nd May 2020
12th March 2022