Family - The UK

Too much tech

November 9, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’m enjoying the cooler weather. Even in the first half of October the heat sapped me of energy, but now it’s like being in New Zealand again. I’m sleeping much better. Also, getting over those two hurdles has helped me to relax more. Not as many stress-inducing WhatsApp messages about things I don’t fully understand.

Dad only has a few days left until he goes back to New Zealand. He’s looking forward to it. This trip has provoked considerable anxiety in him; it’s been sad to see. Years ago, when his mother was still alive, he’d make the trip to the UK and not think anything of it. In fact he still felt more at home there than in New Zealand. I asked him what had changed. The UK being a country in decline? Just a case of getting old? No, he said that undoubtedly it was technology. The modern requirement to be connected all the time has made his time in the UK a misery. One minute Skype wasn’t working, then Outlook, then something else on his phone. It was like he was discussing a debilitating medical condition that could compromise his vital functions at any moment. He longed for the simplicity of physical maps and people at desks selling train tickets. I sympathise with Dad because I’ve found tech to be increasingly invasive. I want to use it when I need it, then forget about it. Yesterday I had to visit the bank; my query that was supposed to be about transferring money degenerated into talk of passwords and PIN codes and apps. I simply didn’t want to know.

Dad’s trip hasn’t been all bad. When I spoke to him last night he’d just been over to see some friends. On his near-daily visits to his sister, he’s had quite long chats with her that have often brought up memories of happier times. He said his last visit will be a tough one – it might well be the last time he sees her.

As for Mum, she’s doing pretty well. We can now make WhatsApp calls, and last time she gave me a quick video tour of the renovation. It’s all taking shape and looking increasingly housey and kitcheny. Mum has been winning golf competitions and even won a Melbourne Cup sweepstake at the golf club earlier this week. I told her that she and Dad should use her winnings to go out for a proper slap-up meal when he gets back. One day last week she was annoyed with Dad for going on about his technological woes when she’d been painting walls all day and hadn’t spoken to anyone else. She’s been exasperated at Dad’s lack of technological dexterity, when in reality she’s at the same level.

My parents have never been into tech, and when they did buy a gadget it was usually cheap and crappy. My classmates at school were constantly talking about the films they’d seen on video (a VCR that might have set their parents back a month’s salary – these things were expensive) but we didn’t get a video recorder until Dad bought one from a car boot sale when I was 16.

I’m about to have a two-hour online lesson with the boy I made cry back in January. Her mother just told me. Shoot me now.

Life :) - The UK

Terrifyingly shit

November 6, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching a YouTube video from the Royal Institution about ultra-processed foods. The subject of obesity comes up a lot, especially when you talk to non-overweight older people. The younger generations (which include anyone under 60!) are too stupid and lazy and immoral to eat proper food and they don’t know when to stop and blah blah blah. A few years ago a photo of Brighton Beach in the 1970s (it was probably during the heatwave of 1976) did the rounds. Look how slim everyone was back then! The implication was that we’ve all got stupider and lazier since then. The real story is the increased availability of all that ultra-processed junk (and in some cases non-junk, or at least marketed as non-junk), not a massive loss of willpower that began in the late seventies and occurred in both men and women and across all ages and ethnicities. Willpower is a thing, and some of us are blessed with more of it than others, but the idea that humans lost it en masse a few decades ago is ludicrous. What the video didn’t quite go into (but Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens books did) was how incompatible modern food availability and consumption are to the caveman instincts that we still have. I live in Timișoara where I have a substantial market within walking distance and half a dozen more markets a reasonable bike ride away, so most of what I eat doesn’t even have an ingredients list. Most people aren’t so lucky.

Last week some lurid language came out of the UK Covid inquiry, but the expression that stuck in my mind was Dominic Cummings’ (who else) description of Cabinet Office in March 2020 as terrifyingly shit. I can’t stand Cummings, but it was a pretty accurate description. The handling of the pandemic at that point was dangerously, frighteningly, life-threateningly, bad. From my last few conversations with Dad, he has a similar view of the UK as a whole. A country unravelling, with few prospects for improvement. If Labour win the next election, they’ll hopefully drive out the sheer toxicity of the Tories, but there’s little sense that they’ll make any meaningful positive change. It’s all very different from the feeling before the 1997 election. Indeed I remember a conversation I had with Dad in 1993 – he was my current age then – in which we talked driving across the vastness of Russia and the former Soviet Union, not long after it had all opened up. Now there’s no optimism, no sense of hope at all on a scale beyond one’s own immediate family and friends. That’s terrifying.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - The UK

Lock them up

November 3, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve been following the UK Covid inquiry, and all I can say is lock the bastards up. The mishandling of the early stages of the pandemic went well beyond incompetence; these people were actively toxic. They were egomaniacs who behaved like playground bullies and were only in their positions because they supported Brexit. (The pandemic coming right after the brain drain of the December 2019 election was such unfortunate timing.) As senior civil servant Helen MacNamara (who wasn’t blameless herself) said in her hearing yesterday, there was an absence of humanity among the people in charge. For Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock, old people, poor people, and frankly all people who lacked their privileges, were expendable. Dominic Cummings, who gave his evidence on Tuesday, was just as bad. The insults that came from this special – unelected – advisor, mostly in WhatsApp messages, were shocking in their language. Making the right decisions didn’t matter to these c***s (as Mr Cummings would say); they only cared about whether the decisions made them look good. And what were they doing governing by WhatsApp anyway? They cost tens of thousands of lives. They should all go to prison for several years, and be banned from public office or indeed earning more than the national average income when they come out.

On Sunday I met Mark in town. We had lunch at Berăria 700, both opting for bulz – a bowl of cheese, bacon and mămăligă with an egg on top. Not the healthiest meal, but delicious. The funny bit was ordering the beer. Large or small? “Large, I suppose.” We thought that “large” meant a halbă which is just under a pint, but no, we got these great big steins that must have been a litre each. With the food and the sunny weather, getting through them wasn’t a problem. I showed him around the nearby market which for some reason he’d never been to before. He was amazed by the flowers, which are the most sense-engaging part of the whole thing. Just before we parted company, we discussed our good fortune at living in Timișoara – beautiful, lively, genuine, and (touch wood) safe. I played just one hour of tennis after that. Since then, the week has been a bit of a disappointment with so many cancellations caused by the Romanian equivalent of half-term, which only started to be a thing last year. All in all I can’t complain – I’m feeling much more relaxed than a couple of weeks ago. Last night I had a long chat with my friend in Birmingham, which was nice. Like Mum in Geraldine, he’s busy painting walls. I also spoke to Dad yesterday. Seeing his sister every day is leaving him exhausted. Britain is now being gripped by a storm. He’ll be flying back home in eleven days; he wishes it were sooner.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

A bad ad for rugby

October 29, 2023 by 0 Comments

Ugh. What a disappointment that was. Not just because the All Blacks were unfortunate enough to lose by a single point having played most of the match with 14 men, but because the game itself was almost unwatchable. Every other minute it was up to the TMO – a slightly creepy surveillance-style booth with about two dozen screens – destroying any semblance of flow to the game. If it was your first taste of rugby, as doubtless it was for some people, you wouldn’t be coming back for more.

I had a nice chat with Mum this morning – she seemed glad to have missed most of the game. She was part of a church congregation that was even tinier than usual, and got back in time to see the last four minutes. Mum was fine, but a little tired after spending many hours painting walls. While I was talking to her, there was a pungent whiff of peppers being roasted in one of the other flats.

I stumbled across this xkcd strip from 2017:

Look at Wellington in the top-left, um, blob. I talked about this just before I left the city in 2016. Complaining about Wellington’s weather was practically a national sport, but I found the lack of temperature extremes to be a big plus, even with all the wind and rain. Timișoara would be somewhere close to Boston and New York – it probably just misses out on being in the bottom-right blob because although we get scorching summers, it’s normally a dry heat.

Update: I’ve just spoken to my aunt on her birthday. She’s currently in a care home in Cottenham, a few miles from Cambridge. When I wished her a happy birthday, she said “Well, it’s not a happy one, is it?” although she appreciated my call. After that it I said it was a shock to learn of her diagnosis (though, in truth, it wasn’t) and we talked about her regular meetings with Dad. I then said I might manage a trip over for Christmas, and after six minutes that was it.

Books - Family - Language learning - Music - Other sports

Out of the dimness (and into the light?) as we enter winter time

October 29, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s the last day before the clocks go back, and the last vestiges of not-winter.

I played singles tennis tonight with the “good” Florin. After this morning’s rain the court was slippery – dangerously so – and I didn’t enjoy it one bit. The wet patches made it worse than if it was fully wet. I started out at the greasier end. Florin made a fair few unforced errors and I led for large parts of the set, but we landed in a tie-break which I lost 7-3. When that was over I told Florin what I thought – that playing singles on a slippery court and risking a broken ankle is bloody stupid – but he didn’t seem bothered. After the changeover (we only switch sides after each set) I moved to the less horrible end, but still slid in the tramlines and almost fell twice. I won the second set 6-2 and led 2-1 in the third when our time ran out, but amazingly Florin moved around the court at the (to me) lethal end as if nothing was amiss, at one stage even retrieving a deep lob. I was handicapped down there. I asked him how he managed it (was it the shoes?), and he said the secret was being brought up in north-eastern Romania, close to the border with Ukraine. Harsh winters back then, so he soon learnt how to move in the snow and ice. I can see that two years ago I had the same problem.

I’ve been reading Wild Wales, George Borrow’s account of his trek on foot through Wales in the middle of the 19th century. Back then, Wales really was wild and outsiders rarely ventured there. Unusually, Borrow could speak Welsh at a decent level. He liked to show off his intellect (this grates after a while) in his conversations with the locals he met along the way, which were surely embellished. My grandmother had a cottage in mid-Wales which we often stayed in when I was a kid, and necessitated a long car journey which I’ve talked about previously on this blog. In my teens I viewed that part of the country as dull and grey and remote, but really it was beautiful. I haven’t been there since 2001, and I’d like to go back.

I’ve picked up a few words of Welsh while reading Borrow’s book. My grandmother’s cottage was in the small town of Rhayader, a semi-Anglicised version of rhaiadr, meaning waterfall, though in fact there hasn’t been a waterfall there for centuries. The word for “not” or “without” is dim, which has a certain logic to it. People in Borrow’s book are always saying “Dim Saesneg”, meaning “no English (language)”, the word Saesneg literally meaning Saxon. For a while I was dim dŵr poeth (without hot water) and dim arian (without money – arian is literally silver) from Barclays, but those dim days are hopefully over now. Last week I called the complaints team to accept the £200 compensation they offered me, derisory though it was. Getting it all over with has a value.

Dad’s sister has bounced back better than he or anyone else (including her) imagined. He’s been seeing her almost every day. Her children, realising she’ll hang on a while longer, have stopped bothering to see her. Of course, her prognosis is still poor. Tomorrow is her 76th birthday and I will make the effort to give her a call, difficult though that will be.

Yesterday Dad caught up with his friends (and mine too – they visited me in Romania six years ago). The couple are in their mid-70s, similar to my parents, and although he was at death’s door in early 2022 before staging a recovery, they’ve managed to cut out most of the stress from their lives while still travelling and pursuing interests. I wish my parents could do likewise.

The Rugby World Cup final is about to get under way between the All Blacks and South Africa, the historical heavyweights of the competition with three wins apiece. (Two wins for Australia and one for England, so the Southern Hemisphere is going to make it 90% whatever happens tonight.) I vividly remember the 1995 final between the two nations – one of the most famous rugby matches ever because of what the occasion meant. There have been some good matches in the knockout stages but I haven’t watched any of them. My mind has been elsewhere. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the Irish fans’ use of the immensely powerful Cranberries song Zombie as an unofficial anthem. Not long till kick-off, and I guess I might actually watch it.

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis - The UK

Maths, newness, and unwanted grub

October 23, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I went to tennis but nobody showed up. As I was waiting in vain, Dad called me. He’d just come back from my brother’s place in Poole, and was tired after a seven-hour bus journey full of traffic jams. He said he wouldn’t want to live in the UK again. New Zealand is on a human scale, he said. I see what he means. I remember seeing a road sign around Wanaka: “Christchurch 424 km”. In Romania you see signs showing similar distances. But travelling through southern and central England, you rarely see much above 60 or 70 miles, or 100-odd kilometres. Everything is on top of each other – there are no gaps that allow you to breathe. Dad enjoyed seeing the family – he had nothing but positive words for his grandson – but his (and my brother’s) mental energy was taken up with sorting out his email and phone; he’s always got some tech issue. As soon as he got back, he saw his sister who was surprisingly chatty.

Yesterday I made a cottage pie (something British!) and quince crumble to give to Viorica and Petrică, the couple in their late sixties who live on the top floor. Viorica has been so helpful to me. Without her, I’d be having cold showers all through winter. This is too much, she told me, and spooned half of the food onto some plates, leaving me with the other half. A few minutes later my doorbell rang, and she handed me back almost all of the half that she’d originally taken. “I appreciate the gesture,” she said. But not the food, obviously. When I gave her the pie she asked me where the beef had come from. Kaufland, I said. Maybe she sees supermarket meat as poor quality or something. Older Romanians have these ideas, I’ve noticed. Oh well.

On Saturday I only had one lesson – two hours of maths with Matei. He’d just got an A grade in a test, which will allow him to take the extended GCSE maths paper. He only needed a C for that, so in other words he smashed it. That’s obviously great. I still think he can improve though. He’s good at following processes – move this over to the other side of the equation, now square both sides – but still lacks a good understanding of how numbers fit together. When I say numbers, I mean fractions, decimals, percentages, roots, powers, the lot. He reaches for the calculator at the first opportunity. Funnily enough, one thing that helped me with this when I was growing up was a crappy calculator with an eight-digit display, which my maths teacher called a “Noddy calculator”. Tap in 1 + 2 x 3 =, and it would tell you 9, not 7. So I’d learn about the order of operations, which at the time we called BODMAS. My Noddy calculator preferred SAMDOB. Divide 2 by 3 on that same calculator, and you’d get 0.6666666. Multiply that by 3 and it spat out 1.9999998. As the real answer is clearly exactly 2, that taught me something about the perils of rounding. A handy feature was being able to quickly repeat an operation over and over again by mashing the equals button. If you started at 1 and repeatedly multiplied by 2, you’d see that (a) the final digits cycle through 2, 4, 8 and 6, and (b) the numbers get very big very fast – just like the grains of rice on a chessboard – until they got too big for the screen. Dividing by zero was an immediate no-can-do. Why was that, I wondered? On fancier Noddy calculators with a square root button, you’d see that repeating square-rooting brought you closer and closer to 1. Now kids have better calculators – even the ones on their phones are way superior to Noddies – but the old Noddies gave you a better idea of how numbers fitted together. Plus you could tap in 5318008, turn your screen upside down, and have a giggle – this doesn’t work on your phone. After maths on Saturday, I really did play tennis. This was singles again with the other Florin. I lost two games out of the 23 we played.

I’ve now been in Romania for just over seven years. In my head, I split that time into four phases. Phase one was from the moment I arrived (October 2016) until the summer of 2018, when everything was new and exciting. The sights, the sounds, the smells. The regular trips back in time. That proper first winter. Living in the centre of such a beautiful city and trying to build my teaching business (all those phone calls, when I could hardly speak the language!) was like nothing I’d experienced before. I look back at that time with great fondness. Then came phase two. Timișoara and English teaching had become normal. Routine. The newness had gone. That lasted until the outbreak of Covid. Terribly scary, and horrific for many people, but (and this probably sounds awful) at least it was something new. I enjoyed the quiet of the lockdown. The parks in the springtime with the birds and the flowers. The focus on the simple things. That third phase lasted two years until we clambered out of all the lockdowns and restrictions into a world of having to achieve again, and in my case a move and feeling unable to cope. I’d really love phase four to be over. New Zealand – that feeling of newness, of something different – was wonderful, but it was just a temporary respite.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Another marvel

October 20, 2023 by 0 Comments

After the Barclays wonder of last Wednesday, this morning saw another miracle. My central heating and hot water got turned on. It’ll take some trial and error to figure out how the thermostat actually works, but I can say with some confidence that tonight I’ll have my first hot shower of October. (I certainly won’t need central heating for a few days. We’ve got 29 forecast today, and 28 tomorrow.) Over the weekend I’ll bake something to give to the couple upstairs, without whose help I’d have been even further up the creek than I’ve felt these last few months. I hope that getting over these hurdles will put a spring in my step because right now everything is an effort – I’m leaden-footed even on a short walk. (I’ve just been for a short walk. A lady in her sixties asked me if there were any pokie machines nearby.) I also hope I can now stem the flow of money from my pocket. Yesterday I got the stitches removed from my back following the cyst removal, and even that cost me what felt like an arm and a leg.

On Wednesday I had a bad lesson. They happen occasionally and that’s OK. This was an online session with the woman who lives near Birmingham. I had the electrician over and you can imagine what happened. As well as the switching on and off, meaning I had to use my phone instead of my laptop, the electrician asked me questions which further disrupted the lesson. My student was unhappy, but what could I have done other than cancel or postpone? I offered to give her the lesson for free, but that didn’t help matters much. Maybe she’ll be silly enough to give up on me completely. I say silly because a UK-based private tutor would cost her something like quadruple.

On Tuesday I had a lesson with the woman in Bucharest. She said that language death is a good thing as it enables people to communicate better. Taking this to its logical conclusion, I asked her if it would be good for the whole world to speak just one language. “Of course,” she said. Learners of English often use “of course” in that way, not realising that it verges on being rude. Her opinion, which she’s perfectly entitled to, is just that; by using “of course” she’s intimating that it’s a universal truth. Part of the problem is that learners want an alternative to “yes”, and “of course” is the alternative they know. I’ve written about this in my book that I would love one day to be published. (Crossing those hurdles might help me focus on things like that.)

Amid the unspeakable horrors in the Middle East, some good news came out of Poland last weekend. The ominous-sounding Law and Justice Party lost power to a much more moderate grouping led by Donald Tusk, whom I thought handled Brexit admirably when he was president of the European Council. In one simple vote, Poland have pulled themselves (and maybe Europe as a whole) back from the abyss. I also see that UK Labour won two by-elections overnight, overturning huge Tory majorities in both seats.

I spoke to Mum this morning. She suggested that only she, not Dad, might come to Europe in the spring. That’s probably because Dad had to make an extra trip and they want to save money. Gah. As I see it, they’ve got three options. One, they both come over. Two, they pay for my brother and his wife and son to fly to New Zealand. Or three, they can be selfish buggers. It’s up to them.

Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Politics - Tennis - The UK

We should leave it at that

October 16, 2023 by 0 Comments

The rain is lashing down and I’m grateful for it – I’d have really struggled on the tennis court. I played two hours of singles with Florin yesterday; when time ran out I was up 6-1 6-2 4-6 5-0. That second set score was deceptive – the set was a real battle of attrition, full of long rallies and close games that I somehow won. My efforts left me bereft of energy for the third set, in contrast to the Energizer bunny almost two decades my senior down the other end. I then got a second wind from somewhere. Before tennis I had three lessons – one maths and two English. My 16-year-old English student reiterated what he’d said before, that if Russian forces hypothetically attacked Romania in a couple of years’ time, he’d do all he could to flee the country rather than defend it. He said, “What is there to defend?” Yeesh, where do I start?

So New Zealand has voted in a new National-led government. It was on the cards. I felt sorry for Chris Hipkins, who seemed to me a thoroughly good chap and a very hard worker, leading a dysfunctional party and in the end flailing around trying to make something happen to turn the tide that was rapidly going out on Labour. Because that’s really what that election was – a resounding vote against the incumbents rather than a positive endorsement of National. Indeed, National got a smaller share of the vote than they did in 2017 when they lost power to Jacinda Ardern’s Labour. Crucially this time though, they had some partners to (comfortably) get them over the line. What an opportunity Labour squandered. They won a rare majority in 2020, a mandate for real change, and then they pissed around on fringe issues that didn’t help to make people’s lives better, instead of say, let me see, building homes that people can actually afford. This all serves as a warning to the UK Labour Party. The next UK election is a year or so away, and with the Tories being frankly disgusting right now, Labour should win. But if they don’t use that power to bring about positive change (and boy does the country need it), it won’t mean a thing, and the Tories will likely be back in charge next time around.

On Monday I met a lady from New Zealand (an Aucklander) who lived in Timișoara from 2006 to 2010 and was back visiting the city as part of a round-the-world trip. She was staying with Dorothy. She was pleasant enough, but we just didn’t have that much in common. In the evening I had a new maths student – a 15-year-old girl – who came here for a two-hour session. The following day – the day Dad arrived in London – was a shocker for me. I didn’t quite plumb the depths of 31st January, but at times I got close as I felt overwhelmed. The “emergency” online maths lesson with Matei, which finished at 9:45 that evening, helped to calm me down. Work was going OK; it was just everything else that was a mess. Wednesday was the miraculous day of the Barclays money. Thursday was a weird one. I rode to the north of the city for my lesson with the spoilt teenage girl, but she wasn’t there. I rang the doorbell and called her on the phone. Nothing. I hung around for 20 minutes and went home. Oh dear. Did I offend her so badly that she wanted nothing more to do with me? Did she tell her father and they decided to get back at me? Just after I got home, she sent me a message to say that her phone had died, and we had an online lesson in the evening. On Friday the electrician was supposed to come but he didn’t. Later that day I had an allergy test – 24 pricks on my arms – which confirmed what I thought, that my sinus problems aren’t allergy-related at all. When the receptionist gave me the bill for the test (525 lei, equivalent to NZ$190 or £90), my jaw literally dropped. Now that allergies are out, I’m free to get my prescription for various pills and sprays, which I’ll take until Christmas.

I had a good chat last night with Dad. I usually do have good chats with him. His days are dominated by bus trips to see his sister at a private hospital in Cambridge. He’s able to take advantage of the £2 bus fares that the government introduced earlier in the year, and which I also benefited from in June. My aunt has ups and downs but the trend is clear. She isn’t going to bother with chemo now. In fact she told him that she’d like to pop off in her sleep, sooner rather than later. I spoke to my brother on Friday, and we both sort of agreed that it might be better not to see her. In July he brought the little one over to her place, and it was the highlight of her year. She called me immediately afterwards, and the way she spoke about meeting her great-nephew was quite touching. Perhaps it’s best to leave it at that.

Language learning

Travel and language — part 3 of 3

October 13, 2023 by 0 Comments

Travelling was fun while it lasted, but I’ve now been back for as long as I was away.

In a recent lesson with a man in his late forties, I discussed the phenomenon of shifting stress patterns as suffixes are added to certain English words. By stress here, I mean accent, or emphasis. For instance, photograph has stress on the first syllable, photographer on the second, and photographic on the third. The trio of politics/political/politician behaves in the same way. I then mentioned that there are sets of Romanian words that do the same thing, citing barbă (beard), bărbat (man), and bărbăție (manliness). He then said, hang on, barbă and bărbat have nothing to do with each other. He was wrong – even though he’d never made the connection in over 45 years of speaking Romanian, they absolutely are related. The interesting thing though is that as a native speaker he had no need to ever make the connection, whereas the link was handy for me as a learner: barbă is beard, bărbat is a bearded person, in other words a man. It’s just like how native French speakers don’t think “earth apple” when they hear pomme de terre (potato), or “small lunch” for petit déjeuner (breakfast), or “sixty-thirteen” for soixante-treize (seventy-three). (As an aside, the name Barbados means “bearded ones”, although people are unsure whether that refers to actual people or a species of bearded fig tree.)

One thing I love about long-haul travel (on the rare occasions I do it) is that I get to see other languages. I dealt with Māori in the first two posts in this series. Indonesian (at Singapore Airport) was a fun one. Air minuman, which sounds like an airline for Hobbits, just means drinking water. But two languages that became friends of sorts were Hungarian and Turkish.

Hungarian is a deceptive beast. It’s part of the Uralic language family that includes Finnish and Estonian, but it went off at a pretty steep tangent many centuries ago, and now bears little resemblance to anything else. It’s written in the familiar Roman alphabet but no matter how hard I stare at it, I can’t get a reading. Even words that you expect to be almost the same everywhere, like restaurant, are completely different. The spelling is phonetic but it has some unusual traits. The letter s on its own represents the English sh sound, while sz denotes the s in silly. Weird, right? (Hungarian zs represents the final sound of massage, while cs denotes the ch in chips.)

Hungarian has a feature called vowel harmony whereby front vowels (vowel sounds created with your tongue near the front of your mouth) go together in the same word, and likewise back vowels. You can’t mix them. (More or less. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.) Hungarian has no grammatical gender, just like English, but it seems to have pretty much everything else, such as a whole bunch of case endings. Plurals work in an interesting way. Both singular and plural nouns exist, but when you mention a number you always use the singular: “look at the horses” but “five horse”. In a way, this makes sense: as soon as you say five you know it’s plural, so you don’t repeat that fact. On that arduous journey to Budapest I had rather too much opportunity to try and pronounce the names of stations my train pulled in at: Tápiószentmárton. Sülysáp. That last one – s is pronounced sh, remember – is something like shooey-shap.

Turkish was roughly as difficult as Hungarian to make head or tail of. Interestingly, although it is from a different family to Hungarian, both languages happen to share both vowel harmony and lack of grammatical gender. For over 600 years under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish was written using a form of Arabic. In 1928 under Atatürk – the great reformer – Arabic was replaced by a version of the Roman alphabet with a few extra dots and squiggles to accommodate Turkish phonology. This was a great success: literacy rates shot up and the economy grew. It’s hard to criticise a reform that paid such dividends, but after staring at a few Turkish signs I felt they could have done a better job.

In the last year or two there has been a push by the Turkish government for the country to be called Türkiye in English, not Turkey. No more birds. I’m not a fan, to put it mildly. Who are they to dictate what we call it in English? I don’t see the German government telling us to call Germany Deutschland. Then there’s the question of pronunciation. Turkey-yay? Turkey-yeah? Then there’s the spelling. Think Türkiye has just one awkward letter, the u with an umlaut? Think again. That innocuous-looking i causes all kinds of headaches. You see, Turkish has both a dotted and a dotless i (ı). The dotted one is the standard i sound you find everywhere, as in the Italian vino. The dotless one is a less common sound, similar to the vowel in Romanian în but with the tongue further back. So that the distinction is always maintained, the dotless i stays dotless in both upper and lower case, and the dotted one retains its dot even in upper case. I realised this when I saw a sign at Istanbul that read VISIT TÜRKİYE. (Istanbul, by the way, is İstanbul in Turkish.) This whole business of dotted and dotless i could have been avoided with one or two different choices a century ago. I for one will avoid all this hassle and keep calling Turkey Turkey.

Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Mess and a miracle

October 12, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’m now into year eight of my time in Romania. Who would have thought? Since I last wrote, I’ve felt tired and overwhelmed. I’ve coped OK with work, which I’ve had plenty of, but otherwise it’s all been a mess. Literally, in the case of this flat. The living room is a pigsty, to use Mum’s usual term for the bedroom I shared with my brother until I was 13. The central heating saga drags on and on, and I’ve now gone two weeks without hot water. We’re still getting unseasonably warm weather, but the temperature will soon plummet. On Tuesday I simply lost it as my six lessons were punctured by messages and phone calls about gas meters and plug points and contacting this or that person.

Then yesterday something miraculous happened. The Barclays money turned up in my Romanian account – the one I set up last month that’s denominated in pounds. I checked it at around 3pm; it had gone in at 11 that morning. It was all so highly unlikely – Barclays hadn’t even told me that they’d made the payment – but there it was. I’ll now have to decide whether to accept their derisory £200 “compensation” offer or try for more. Fight for something like I feel I deserve (at least one more zero), or just get on with my life. It isn’t an easy decision.

Dad landed in the UK two days ago. Mum emailed me last night to say that he’d seen his sister. She’s in a bad way – if not quite as bad as we thought last week – and won’t be having chemo. I might still decide to go over there before Dad goes back to New Zealand in early November.

The horrific terrorist attack by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent retaliation have unsurprisingly dominated the news. I’ve been watching YouTube videos, trying to understand the complex history of the region. The more I see, the notion that there are good guys in the conflict becomes more ridiculous.

New Zealand’s election is a day and a bit away. From the opinion polls and the general sentiment I got when I was over there, I expect National to win, although there are a few wrinkles involving this weird party run by a guy with more than a few wrinkles himself. They just can’t get rid of him. In the short term, a change of government is probably for the best, but in the medium term I can’t see it making much difference. I can’t see National doing much to alleviate the housing crisis, for instance. They might even worsen it. After a period of calm on the election front, I can look forward to several in succession. In Romania, the presidential, parliamentary and local elections are out of sync, but next year the stars will align and we’ll be treated to all three. Then of course next November will be the biggie – the one that puts the future of democracy fully on the line.

Last weekend I only had one tennis session. Just as well – I was so tired. After my lessons on Saturday, I spent most of the two-hour session playing with three members of the same family who were all at a good level. During the points I managed surprisingly well, but in between them I had to drag myself around the court. On Sunday I met Mark in Dumbrăvița, and then Dorothy at Scârț, a bar which has a museum of communism downstairs. I really just wanted to be alone, not just on that day but for several more. No instant messages. No risk of having to communicate. Then I had a Skype chat with my cousin in New York state. He said that Joe Biden is doing a better job than most people realise, and that was my feeling too. We talked about our parents – his father had slowed down noticeably when I saw him recently.

I’m now off to the other side of town for a lesson with that very shallow 16-year-old I mentioned last time. Should be fun.