Books - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching

Life probably WAS simpler then

June 25, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother on Tuesday night. He’d just been down to St Ives. He said they’d taken their inflatable motor boat for a trip down the Ouse from St Ives to Earith. Around Earith there’s a complex network of tributaries and drains – you’re on the edge of the Fens there. I remember all that from the flood mapping job I had before moving to New Zealand. Earith is where my aunt lives, and they wanted to drop in on her, but she told them to stay away. Among older people there’s still understandable fear. We talked about the photos that Dad had sent us. Was life really so much simpler back then, or did it just seem it because we were kids? We settled on the former.

I told my brother that I’d just had a lesson on verb tenses, and he said, with a tinge of pride, that he didn’t know what a verb was. He doesn’t need to know what a verb is. (I don’t think he’ll be learning Romanian or Serbian or any other foreign language any time soon.) And at least he knows there are things called verbs that he doesn’t know about – his work day is filled with tanks and other machinery that I don’t even know I don’t know about. But his remark showed how different the British and Romanian education systems are. The Romanian system has serious issues, but at least practically everyone leaves school knowing that you can’t make a sentence without a goddamn verb. (My students are often amazed when I tell them that I’ve had to teach English grammar myself, long after leaving school, by a mix of trial-and-error and studying foreign languages.)

I’ve just finished Border by Kapka Kassabova, a tale of life, death and travel in the harsh, wild border regions of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. Three languages, three alphabets, dozens of irregular verbs. So much upheaval, so much history that I couldn’t keep track of, and so much violence. The author was born in Bulgaria in 1974, and moved to New Zealand with her parents in around 1993 after the iron curtain fell. She got sick of all the rugby and beer and what she probably saw as a general shallowness, and ended up in Scotland. She’s extremely clever and at times used language that lay at the borders of my vocabulary. I liked that she explained the meaning of both people’s names and placenames; that added to the mystique.

In a lesson yesterday I translated the word “porch” as prispă, before adding “does anyone still use this word?”. My student told me that young people probably don’t even know the word: the typical Romanian image – quite lovely to me – of an old lady on her prispă is becoming history. People now use the more boring terasă – the same word that they use for outside areas of cafés and bars – instead. They then translate terasă as “terrace” in English, but that doesn’t feel right. After all that time in NZ, I would say “deck”. When I was growing up we used “patio”. There’s also “veranda(h)” and probably a bunch of others.

As I said last time, Biden is leading Trump by 9 or 10 points in the poll averages. (Update: And crucially, he has big leads in swing-state polls, too.) If the election was held now, he’d be an overwhelming favourite, but of course it isn’t. One way this could play out is a bit like last year’s women’s Wimbledon final. Simona built a lead, but surely Serena would come back. She’s Serena! But she never came back. She was sluggish, there was nothing there. Simona hardly put a foot wrong and it was all done and dusted in 56 minutes. This is a terrible analogy I know, but it’s one of many ways the campaign and election could go. Heaps of time for it to change, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it did, but right now Biden is up by about 25 points among women and least 35 among college-educated white women. That’s massive. But Trump can at least console himself that among white men who don’t know what a verb is, he has a commanding 70-point advantage.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Politics

Will I be able to stay?

June 24, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

This virus is still wreaking havoc. I’ve just heard that Novak Djoković has tested positive, along with three other players who took part in some exhibition event that Djoković himself organised. They even went clubbing after the tennis because, you know, they’re all young, super-fit, super-rich, and basically immune. You set a pretty crappy example there, Novak. Thousands have picked up the virus at an abattoir in Germany, sending the country’s R-rate skyrocketing. Several hundred of those infected are Romanians – their living and working conditions must basically be a petri dish. There have been similar outbreaks at American plants.

I started with a new student on Sunday – a 53-year-old man who lives in eastern Austria, having left Romania in 1989, making his way illegally over the border, risking jail (at least). The revolution came at the end of that year, but he didn’t come back. He got married and had two children; he still sees his parents in Arad. He had a beer and smoked two cigarettes during our lesson.

I haven’t been sleeping that well and by mid-afternoon I’m often struggling to stay awake. Maybe it’s the headaches I’m getting. Maybe it’s the grey, wet, soporific weather. Maybe I’m just getting old.

Yes, after a bone-dry spring that we spent mostly under lockdown, we’ve had the most unsettled spell of weather in all my time here. Timiș has been hit particularly badly – some villages have been flooded.

“All my time”! On Friday I popped in to the immigration office to ask what was happening with Brexit. There was no queue, obviously. Will I be safe after 31st December when the transition period ends? (It’s crazy that in these circumstances they aren’t extending it. The UK government are using Covid – and tens of thousands of deaths – to their advantage, so they can ram through a hard Brexit when people’s attention is elsewhere. The bastards.) The guy said I just have to go back in December and they’ll replace my certificate with a new one. But did he really know? I speak Romanian whenever I can, but it’s especially important to speak the language in those sorts of situations, to show that I’m serious. I really would like get residency here, and maybe one day have a place with a garden, or even just a deck or a balcony, and most importantly rope off part of my home for work. Oh, and a car. So many beautiful places in Romania are out of bounds to me because I don’t have one.

I’ve had a good few days with the language. When I spoke to my new student on the phone in Romanian, he told me I had a “slightly unusual accent”. That’s quite the compliment! And on Saturday I had that beer by the river with Bogdan.

Joe Biden has, on average, a nine-point lead over Trump in the polls. He’s getting on for eighty, dammit, way too old to even think about becoming president, and not exactly the spark that America and the world badly needs right now. But still, he must beat Trump. He has to. He still might not of course, because there are over four months until election day, the wacko electoral college works against him, and who’s to say the election will be free or fair? But he simply has to win. (It’s clear to me that people have underestimated Biden, as an election candidate, and probably as a person too. He’s got more humanity in his little finger than Trump has in his entire body.)

Coronavirus - Family - Life :)

The calm before the next storm

June 20, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Bogdan, the guy on the second floor, just phoned me to ask if I wanted to join him at a bar on the riverbank. He said there was live music. I would have joined him but I have a Skype lesson soon. Hopefully we can meet tomorrow.

The coronavirus case numbers aren’t looking great in Romania – more than 300 new cases on each of the last three days – but people I talk to seem to be living in a parallel universe. “Social distancing is nonsense,” the father of one of my younger students told me yesterday. We still have very few cases here in Timiș, but the return of all those ambulance sirens I heard in April feels inevitable, sadly. But this time with the lid off.

My parents have a friend of sorts who has just flown from Christchurch to Arizona, where he grew up. Imagine voluntarily going to Arizona at the moment – they’ve got terrifying Covid numbers. What’s more, he’s over 70, he’s overweight and he’s got type II diabetes. His wife has stayed home; she might never see him again.

In my list of Timișoara smells in my last post, I didn’t mention mici. In the summer, the smell of those pieces of pork sizzling on a barbecue (grătar) permeates the city, and probably the whole of Romania. From time to time (not where I live, thankfully, but on other arterial roads in the city), you also get the dreadful pong of what will become mici. Pig crates. Even when they’ve rattled by and are well in the distance, the stench from the pigs, or rather their ordure, still lingers.

Family has seemed more important than ever, now that we can’t see each other, and Dad has been sending me family pictures from when I was a kid. My favourite so far is from the time we lived in Temuka in 1989-90 and Dad’s parents came out to see us. All four of my grandparents are in the picture, along with Mum, my brother, me and our cousin (she’s between me and my brother in age). My brother had Grandad’s hat on – he liked to wear it. Other highlights are my brother sitting on a tractor on my uncle’s farm on the West Coast, and one from even further back (December 1986) when we stopped off in New Caledonia on the way from the UK to New Zealand – my brother and I looked unbelievably tired.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

When will I see you again?

June 17, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a lesson with a guy who admitted that he was addicted to fishing, to the point where he regularly dreams about it. It sounded like quite a good addiction to have. This was our first lesson since early March, before the lockdown.

I had a long chat with my parents this morning. I won’t be seeing them for absolutely ages. Not until we get a vaccine, which is probably a year away. For me, this has been the saddest part. I don’t know when I’ll next see my brother in the UK either. At least this is 2020 and not 1990, when hour-long video calls to the other side of the world would have practically been science fiction. Mum was disappointed that two new Covid cases had been imported into New Zealand from the UK.

Romania has seen 250 more cases and 10 deaths in the last 24 hours. Still way too many. I don’t know where we might head from here. There’s a lot of good simple stuff here – for instance, whenever I buy anything from the pharmacy (wearing a mask, of course) they give me another mask – but just about everything has now reopened, including malls. I was supposed to have a face-to-face lesson with a boy yesterday, but his mum changed her mind and we ended up still doing it remotely. I mentioned to him that malls had just reopened, and he said he wouldn’t be going anywhere near one because it’s too dangerous. But the fact is that after three months of being stuck, people have had enough. We’re seeing this all over the world. I don’t even talk to my brother about the virus anymore.

It really smelt of June today, with the sweet aroma of lime trees just about permeating the whole city. There’s no doubt about it, Timișoara has smells. When I moved in to this flat, the waft from the patisseries really got me, although that disappeared over the lockdown. The markets can be quite pungent, especially at this time of year, although the cheese section pongs all year round. Then the river has its own distinctive smell too. And then there’s the pigeon poo. And crow poo. I still remember visiting the UK in April 2018 and how good it felt, on my arrival in the middle of the night, to smell Timișoara again.

In March I asked Mum what her secret was for making such good pizza, and she gave me her recipe. Things got ugly with the virus almost immediately, and baking products became hard to come by, especially yeast. But yesterday yeast was back on the shelves, and I’ve currently got a pizza in the oven. I’m sure it won’t be anything like as good as Mum’s.

We’re having a run of wet, stormy weather. Here are some pictures I took this afternoon:

A busker about to start up
The Opera House getting an extreme makeover
So many pigeons
Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :)

Feeling fruity

June 16, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Fewer new coronavirus cases today but I think that’s just a result of less testing and reporting; there were still 17 deaths.

Last night I didn’t sleep well – lots going on in my head and the humidity didn’t help either – and this morning I broke my routine of getting to the supermarket when it opens at eight (I was 45 minutes late). A reasonably productive day though.

I’ve recently been attempting alphabetic sentences with my younger students. We take it in turns – he’ll start with an A-word, I’ll add a B-word, he’ll say a C-word (though hopefully not that C-word), and so on. Or sometimes I’ll start, as in this sentence Octavian and I made: All bears can dig extremely far getting hotter in Japan killing ladies, men, near old police quickly running straight to uncle’s van with Xeroxes yelling “Zoo”. When I couldn’t sleep I realised that Octavian’s name is an anagram of vacation, which isn’t a word I ever use (being British and all that) but my students pretty much all do.

Here’s the glorious fruit at the market yesterday:

Coronavirus - Family - Life :)

Should have stayed in Peterborough

June 15, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I gave up painstakingly updating my Covid graph on 21st May, but it hasn’t gone away. Far from it. Today we reported 320 new cases in Romania, the most on one day since 8th May, and 16 more deaths. Active cases are edging back up. In this corner of the country we’ve got near–New Zealand levels, but it’s spreading like wildfire in Bucharest, Suceava and Brașov, and will surely be back here with a vengeance.

Today is Mum’s birthday (and Steffi Graf’s and Donald Trump’s). When I called her, my aunt and uncle (who visited Timișoara two years ago) were over for dinner. It was great to see them on FaceTime. They were shocked to see I now have a ponytail. I’m shocked to have one too.

Yesterday I had a bad day with my sinuses, or migraine (whichever it was), so today it was nice to sit on the riverbank and read my book, and get all the wonderful strawberries and cherries and apricots and tomatoes from the market (while I still can, before the second wave hits).

On Friday I had my lesson with the guy who lives on the outskirts of London with his wife and son whose first birthday it was. They’re looking at buying a house; he said they’d been to see a ghastly place costing £500,000. He showed me an online property evaluator with an intriguing feature called a happiness rating. You tap in a postcode and this needle waggles into position, telling you how happy everyone in the area is. It’s based on crime, deprivation, health, levels of education, and so on. I asked him to tap in the postcode of the flat I rented in central Peterborough in 2003, and the needle hardly budged. So sad. But I was reasonably happy there. My job didn’t pay a lot but I had interesting flatmates, played tennis, went bowling, went to the pub, and ate out from time to time. I often saw my grandmother. I made two trips to France, including beautiful Montpellier. I only had a six-month work contract which they happily extended, and they would have given me a permanent role. But my boss said he was unconvinced that flood mapping and forecasting was the best career path for me, and when my parents decided to shift to NZ, I convinced myself that I’d be better off over there.

Anyway, we read an article containing the word cusp, and I explained that the word is sometimes used in relation to star signs (which some Romanians take as gospel). Like me, he is on the cusp: he was born on 21/9/89. He has a family, a career, pretty soon he’ll have a house, and he has almost an extra decade to play with compared to me. Maybe I should have stayed in Peterborough.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :)

You can wait

June 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spent half of yesterday doing something I didn’t want to do (trying to find a courier) so I could do something else I didn’t want to do (send my signed sale agreement and associated documents to my lawyer in Wellington). At one office a lady quoted me 330 lei (about NZ$120) for an estimated delivery time of two weeks. Sorry, what? Did I hear that Romanian number correctly? Trei sute treizeci? Doamne. After biking here, there and everywhere, and finding offices had been relocated to other parts of the city, I found a place that could get it to NZ in two days for $100. It was 5:05 by then, and too late for them to send it. I’d have to wait till the morning. But then I thought, that’s still bloody ridiculous. Bugger the body corporate committee and their fake urgency. Who knows when they’ll even invoke the agreement. I popped it in the normal post today. That cost $10. They said it would be there in nine working days. I know we’re talking about property and six-figure sums—hopefully I’ll still get a six-figure sum if and when the place sells! I paid $354,000 for it 8½ years ago—but I couldn’t handle the principle of blowing a hundred bucks (for probably no reason) on sending a sodding envelope.

Yesterday I also had a genuinely urgent situation to deal with. This laptop was making a racket. I was sure it was the fan. (It has a solid-state hard drive.) If my laptop dies, I’m pretty seriously compromised, especially in the world of online lessons. I told four of my students that our lessons probably wouldn’t be happening. I backed up my data and in the morning I took it in to the repair shop down the road (just before Piața Bălcescu). In no time they had the back off. The thermal paste (which I’d only just learned about) had turned to dust, and two blades had detached from the fan. This will be expensive. And slow. Blow me down, at 3pm I got a phone call to say it had been repaired. It cost me 150 lei ($55). I’ll still need to source a fan from Ebay – it’s hard to get a replacement in Romania – and they’ll be able to fit it for me.

On Saturday I went on my first decent bike ride since we locked down in March. I did my usual trip to Sânmihaiu Român. I’d forgotten how noisy the Bega gets with all the frogs. Yeah, I do need to get myself a new bike.

On Friday morning I had coffee on the sunny balcony of one of my students. We spoke Romanian for an hour in a low-stress situation, and I felt a certain sense of pride at being able to communicate reasonably well in someone else’s language. It’s such a rewarding feeling, especially because Romanian is both beautiful and an unusual language for people to learn.

Mum was telling me that she’d been to the funeral of a woman I knew in Temuka. She would have been about 85. She was from an enormous Catholic family – ten children I think – but never had a family of her own. She was a very kind person, but quite shy. I went to see Whale Rider with her in Geraldine in March 2004, days before I moved up to Auckland to take that job. Apparently she had a habit of arriving at church late and leaving early – perhaps she didn’t want the conversation – and the priest joked that she was on time for once. Mum also recently went to her 95-year-old aunt’s funeral in Mosgiel – this was her mother’s younger sister.

New Zealand is at Level 1. They seem to have crushed Covid. Apart from the fact that it’s now hermetically sealed, everything is back to normal there. On the phone, my parents and I joke about NZ’s “smug level” (that’s after my aunt described NZ as being unduly smug about their low case numbers). Both my parents would prefer to be back at Level 4, I think. Dad’s migraines are an ongoing problem and he quite liked being unable to see anybody. As for Romania, we’re doing pretty well in Timiș with very few new cases, but in the rest of the country this thing sure isn’t going away. Around ten Romanians are dying every day on average.

Life :) - Politics - Writing a book

I can’t breathe

June 3, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

There was a whole load of Spandau Ballet on Radio Timișoara’s Musicorama show this evening. I’m not a big fan, but my brother is, and it all reminded me of his Spandau Ballet-tinged wedding, two years ago now.

When I spoke to Mum on Sunday, she said she wished New Zealand was still under lockdown. She cherished the peace and quiet. So did I. Here it’s back to queues of traffic and honking horns. I miss being able to hear birds in the park, and trains clattering by in the distance.

If things weren’t bad enough, America has taken yet another upsetting turn in the last week. The brutal crushing to death of George Floyd, captured in a harrowing nine-minute video – how many more George Floyds were never caught on camera? – has led to mass protests and riots, all in the middle of a pandemic. There are endless video clips of police violence. The disease will have spread in these protests and people will die. This strong backlash to police brutality feels like a tipping point, something that transcends America’s dreadful partisanship. Trump has been appallingly inactive and silent, outside of Twitter. If the election were held tomorrow, I would be confident in predicting the end of that vile creature, but it’s five months away, which in these extraordinary times is an eternity. Thanks to the vagaries of the electoral college, he could easily still win.

Britain can’t quite compete with the US, but they’re giving it a jolly good go. For the UK it’s been a perfect storm. After the immature 3½-year faff with Brexit, anyone with an ounce of common sense and humility got elbowed out of power in December’s election if they hadn’t been already, and now you’ve got a government who’d be out of their depth even under normal circumstances. Then coronavirus came along. Now they’ve ditched the remote parliament – the only good political thing to come out of this crisis – and today there were farcical scenes of a ridiculously long queue to vote.

I’ve spent most of the last two days working on a dictionary for problematic words for the book. I’m still near the beginning of the Cs – almost the whole alphabet still to do.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Writing a book

Possessions

June 1, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning’s service at the cathedral took place outside, but tomorrow will see another easing of the lockdown. Although other parts of Romania are still suffering, we now have very few active cases in Timiș, after being hit quite hard early on because of our proximity to the border. Let’s hope it stays that way. Yesterday I visited a bike shop – masks were mandatory, my temperature was checked on the way in, and at the checkout we all stood on blue circles two metres apart from each other. These measures will remain in force.

Last week the Romanian teacher gave me the encouragement to press on with my book, of which I’ve now written about 90 pages. After all the angst with the flat in Wellington, that put a much-needed spring in my step.

I’ve confirmed that I will sign the sale agreement, but I let the committee know that I wasn’t a massive fan of the way they’ve handled the process. They’ve been deliberately opaque about the number of signatures they’ve received, making each non-signer feel like they’re the only one, then putting a gun to their head by imposing a tight, and totally bogus, deadline. What tipped me into signing is that I just wanted out of the whole thing. I never want to hear of body corporates again. If I was still living there and had been exposed all this time to three-hour meetings and endless officialese and the chair’s oh-so-rounded vowels, I’d have gone round the bend.

Mum and Dad talked this morning about how materialistic the world has become. Dad said it’s horrifying how obsessed with stuff we’ve become since the sixties and seventies. Although I wasn’t around then, I really despise materialism, and living in Romania has allowed me to live an unashamedly simple life with few material possessions. And it’s not like I have the money to splash around anyway. This isn’t 2007.

The bike shop and back was a 9 km walk. All I needed was a new inner tube. But then I thought, I really could do with a new bike. The cheapest ones were 500 lei, but the one I really liked was 1200, or about NZ$440. It was a Dutch-style bike, with baskets on the front and back, and white tyres. Just what I would need to get to my lessons and the markets. I saw it was made in Portugal rather than Asia. That isn’t a ton of money to spend on a bike, though it feels like it. I should probably just damn well buy it.

Family - Life :)

Run out of road

May 29, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

If the world hadn’t been turned upside down, Mum and Dad would have been making their way here about now. It seems a lifetime ago that long-haul travel was even thinkable.

My grandmother (Dad’s mum) would have been 98 today. Ten years ago she was still around, thanks to the marvels of modern medicine, and I was staying with her in the UK. I took her to a pub in Houghton for a birthday lunch – it was deathly quiet. I wrote about my time with my grandmother – my last time, sadly, before she passed away in January 2012 – in my old blog, which I called Fixed and Floating.

Ah yes, Fixed and Floating. I called it that because (a) I supposedly had a life and a career but in reality I was directionless, and (b) I was living in New Zealand, a country obsessed with the housing market. At the time I was even living in Auckland, where the feeding frenzy was quite ludicrous. “Do you fix or float your mortgage?” was a common topic around the water cooler.

When I did buy my first property, I fixed part of my mortgage but had a revolving-credit facility for the rest, so I wouldn’t risk losing my flat if the house of cards (a.k.a. my job) caved in, which of course it did almost the moment I moved in. And now, eight years on, I’ve decided to sell my flat at a gigantic loss. A horrible decision, but I (and the other owners who didn’t want to sell originally) have finally run out of road. Every morning lately I’ve woken up to emails where people have written screeds, and I’ve been forced to take an interest in something I’m nowhere near thinking about caring about. I think the body corporate committee, especially the chair, secretly enjoy all the expansive language and officiousness. I’ve now had three Zoom meetings, including one on Monday that lasted an hour and 50 minutes. I won’t make Sunday’s deadline to sign, because of all the legal requirements, but the body corporate have said I’ll be OK if get all the wheels in motion. This morning I saw a notary public (in Romania this is simply called a notar) to certify my ID documents. Surprisingly she didn’t make me take off my mask – none of the pictures on my passports and driver’s licence look much like the current version of me, even maskless. It might take ages for us to sell (the pandemic won’t help), but in the meantime I’ll still receive rental income, and I’ll be able to concentrate on things I care about, like teaching, writing this book, learning a language or two, and maybe even travelling when that becomes an option again. It’s absolutely bloody awful but I just have to make the best of it.

On Tuesday I finally dared to visit the market, so I could buy some strawberries. They were very good.