Family - Life :) - Other sports - Romania

Roll on September

July 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

Last week I was having a discussion with the 11-year-old girl in Germany when she asked me what my favourite month was. When I said September, she thought I was crazy. End of holidays. Back to school. Homework. Tests. Getting up far too early. That’s what September means to her. But for me it means no more infernal heat for nine months. And yes, back to (hopefully) a full suite of lessons, without which life can feel purposeless.

Last summer messed me up mentally. The heat was relentless. So far (touch wood) this summer has been more manageable. Yes, we’ll be well into the 30s every day until Saturday, but then we’ll get a break. That’s just as well, because I’ve been feeling a bit down ever since my parents came over. Lots of talk about their properties and plans, lots too about my brother (his kids, his house, his career plans, his master’s degree), and then there’s me, stuck out here on my own, my life rather meaningless in comparison. Then there’s the sudden realisation that Mum and Dad are properly old and I’ll have to play a more active role in their lives. Having Kitty is certainly a positive amid all of this.

On Monday I saw a survey in which the majority of Romanians thought that Ceaușescu was a good president and would prefer to return to communism. Anybody under 40 has no memory of that time so wouldn’t know first-hand how awful things got, especially in the final years. He’s become something of a cult figure on social media. A cartoon character. I was shocked to see Ceaușescu fridge magnets for sale when I visited those monasteries four years ago. Older people fondly recall being young and pretty, with lives largely free of hard decisions. It’s still striking to see a poll like that though. People have frighteningly short memories. And we got pretty damn close to going back there in May’s presidential election.

Ozzy Osbourne has died at the age of 76. A legend. And like so many other icons of heavy metal, a Brummie. He held a farewell concert at Villa Park just two and a half weeks before his death. He had a horrific quad bike accident in 2003 that almost did for him. (Those things are bloody lethal. The following year I came off a quad bike on my cousin’s farm on the Coromandel. Not far from Thames. I got my leg trapped underneath it. I wasn’t hurt but it was certainly scary.)

Last week Felix Baumgartner died in a paragliding accident; he probably had a heart attack while he was still in the air. He’s the daredevil who jumped from the edge of space in 2012. I remember that well. There was Chuck Yeager with his “Attaboy” just before Baumgartner leapt into the void. Obama was about to be re-elected. We’d just had the London Olympics. The Queen’s diamond jubilee. Gangnam Style. I felt pretty crap about my own life, but at least the world still made some kind of sense. But within a year, social media had swallowed the lot and spat it out, and here we are. Because of his Romanian girlfriend, Baumgartner’s death has received a lot of attention where I am.

The golf. Scottie Scheffler, easily the best player right now, won the Open easily too. There was just the one slight bunker-based brain fart which resulted in a double bogey, but he soon put that behind him. But for that mishap, he didn’t have any single bogeys in the entire weekend. Best name of the tournament went to Chris Gotterup (‘e’s got ‘er up onto the green); he finished third. Runner-up was Harris English. I kept thinking his first name was Johnny. There were so many vying for second place that if it hadn’t been for Scheffler it would have been an absorbing afternoon and evening. Never mind.

Mum and Dad are off in just 48 hours. I still haven’t worked out where (or even if) I’m going between now and September.

Books - Cat - Family - Language learning - Other sports - Politics

The too-hard basket

July 20, 2025 by 0 Comments

I just took Kitty out for a drive. She spent one hour in a large cardboard box, 70 by 50 by 30 cm, with holes cut out of it (obviously) and an absorbent blanket at the bottom. (Lately I’ve put her food in the box to get her used to it.) She clearly didn’t love the experience, but she wasn’t traumatised by it either, so I’ll try it again in a few days. When I was little, our cat would be let loose in the Allegro or the Mazda on our five-hour-plus trips to and from Wales. With Kitty, that would be beyond dangerous.

Three weeks since I left my brother’s place, I’ve still got the cold I picked up from (probably) my nephew. He picks up a bug from nursery, infects his mum and dad and anyone else he comes into contact within, then three days later he’s as happy as Larry while everyone else is suffering for weeks. Mum and Dad have still got it too. Mum didn’t look great at all when I saw her on WhatsApp yesterday. They leave in only five days. I hope their trip back goes smoothly, or as smoothly as something like that ever can. At least this time they’ll break up their journey with a stopover in Singapore. I never want them to go direct again. Despite none of us being 100%, we had a really nice chat which made me feel good. Mum had been to meet up a few of the teachers from her school in St Ives, for the first time in about a decade. She was struck by how hard they had found the Covid period. We were pretty lucky in NZ, weren’t we? No Matt Hancock, who really should be behind bars. I was lucky too. Romania was at times riddled with virus, but my personal circumstances allowed me to dodge the worst of it.

The night before last I slept terribly. Yesterday I just had one lesson – maths in Dumbrăvița in the morning – and when I came back I lay on the sofa, washed out, where I finished Ella Minnow Pea (a fun read) and watched round three of the Open golf. My yearly golf watching. I like the Open visually: the dunes, the crags, the ever-changing skies, the squalls that come out of nowhere. I enjoy seeing top golfers battle near-horizontal rain and brutal rough. I particularly enjoy it when there’s a packed leaderboard on the final day and half a dozen potential winners as they turn for home, and a previously unheralded player keeps it together through all the mayhem to win – to make history – with a score of maybe three under par. This year’s tournament is taking place at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. Barring the heavy shower I saw on day two which added to the drama, the conditions have mostly been benign. Scottie Scheffler – number one in the world and a brilliant player – has taken a four-shot lead going into the last round, which might be a procession. A shame if so. World number ones haven’t won many Opens in recent times. Tiger Woods was the last to do it, I think. Rory McIlroy is six shots off the lead. He’s from Northern Ireland and a huge star in the game, so it’s no surprise that the crowd went nuts throughout his round of 66 yesterday.

Since the bit I wrote last time about council tax, I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to get these kinds of things right. Coming up with a fair and workable system is oh so complicated. Countries like New Zealand benefit here from being small, with relatively few working parts. What you don’t do though is hold your hands up and say it’s too hard. That’s exactly what the UK government is doing. We know this is unfair and absurd, but we’ll keep it the same (which in reality means making it worse: it will only become more unfair and absurd over time) because it’s too politically hard to change anything. And that’s just one aspect of tax policy. It’s the same thing with immigration, healthcare, housing, energy, infrastructure, the lot. Education isn’t too bad in the UK and they’ve made some progress on the environment. But everything else is going backwards because of a lack of political will to do anything. It’s the same all over the western world. The only people who do have the balls to change anything are those who aren’t interested in a fairer world and just want to make their mark. So they make things more shit. As I keep saying, how did we get here? When I was over in the UK recently, I watched an episode of Newsnight. They had ex-policitians (with opposing views) on the programme to discuss Labour’s climbdown on benefits. Adults, talking about a serious topic in a civil manner. This would no longer happen in America, I kept thinking. For the UK at least, there is still hope.

Next week’s challenge: for seven days, everything I read or listen to must be in Romanian where at all possible. I will also write something in Romanian every day. My Romanian has stalled and I can’t not do anything about it because it’s too hard.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Taxing times

July 18, 2025 by 0 Comments

Kitty keeps changing her happy place. Right now she has two. One is my bed. The other is the well of the printer that I got fixed recently. Yes, it’s got a Kitty-sized pit. This weekend I’ll take her for a test drive – an hour in a box to see how she copes. My guess is not very well, but you never know.

It’s hosing it down right now. Much rather that than 35-plus. So I’ll be probably driving to my upcoming lesson. It’s nice to have that option I suppose, although I did manage perfectly well for over seven years without it. This morning I had a two-hour lesson with the girl who once wrote that she was bored. Two hours. An aeon. I resorted to giving her a 100-question test that took up most of the session. She got 77%, a commendable effort considering she was visibly tired by the end of it. (I rarely give tests, but when I do, they’re nearly always harder than what the kids get at school. Often these kids are used to perfect or near-perfect scores, so I can have a job convincing them that they haven’t failed calamitously.)

On Monday I had my weekly Romanian lesson. I’m not sure how much it’s really helping. My Romanian has stalled, at best. This time I asked the teacher about a sign I’d seen at a market stall: Avem mațe. Hmm, mațe means intestines, doesn’t it? The sort you make sausage skins out of. We have intestines. Nice. I guessed that because the stall sells mainly booze and tobacco, it must mean something else. Cigarette papers or something. But no, my teacher assured me that it really does mean intestines for making sausage skins, and those visiting would know the stallholder personally. Stuff like this, or the clatter of the backgammon pieces if I visit the market on a Saturday, makes me feel more alive.

It’s hard to see, but Avem mațe is in the red circle. Avem tutun means “We have tobacco”. I wonder where the name Bampoa comes from.

It’s melon time. Marius Oltean, the melon man from Dăbuleni, even has a TikTok account.

My brother and I have been in contact with our aunt. Partly we’ve talked about her and our uncle’s recent house move, but the hot topic has been our parents. That’s great because we all agree on our parents’ urgent need to downsize and simplify the heck out of their lives. It’s also great because Mum respects our aunt a lot. I’ve been telling our aunt to badger Mum about the seeing the doctor when my parents get back ten days from now. There’s also the matter of Mum’s cataracts when she’ll need to get removed. Right now she’s as blind as a bat. You can point out a bird on a branch a few feet away and she won’t see it. Though both our parents are remarkably fit physically for their age still, a lot of things have come to a head quite suddenly, and my brother and I will have get far more involved.

Mum said something recently which made it clear that our attitudes to money are poles apart. She was talking about the verges – berms, as Kiwis might call them – in and around St Ives which the council had left unmown. Example 574 of how Britain has gone to the dogs. Fine. But then she specified. It was the verges beside the most expensive houses that bothered her. Their owners pay massive rates (or council tax) bills, she said, so they should be the ones that the council prioritises. The verges near the cheaper houses can basically go hang. Her idea might be a really common one for all I know, but it’s not one that’s ever crossed my mind. Owners pay rates based on the value of their property, then all that money gets pooled together and spent on libraries and playgrounds and rubbish collection and mowing (or not mowing) verges. Across the board throughout the area in which the council operates, irrespective of the proximity of a particular service to high-value properties. Isn’t that how it works, or am I being hopelessly naive? I wonder if Mum thinks that access to treatment for, I dunno, stage 3 cancer, should be based on one’s earnings to that point.

Council tax (i.e. rates) in the UK is weird. And unfair. Even though I’ve never owned a UK property, I know about council tax in some detail because my student, that one who’s getting a divorce, tried to get his bill lowered. It went to court, he didn’t win, and it set him back £10,000 in court costs. Not great for their marriage, I imagine. The weirdness and unfairness are twofold. One, the big one, is that council tax in England is based on the value of your property in 1991. Unless some government decides to change the law, that 1991 date is set in stone. In perpetuity. For anything built after that date, they estimate what it hypothetically would have been worth then. As for extensions and so on, don’t ask. Of course prices haven’t gone up uniformly throughout the country since ’91. They’ve skyrocketed in London and the south-east but have risen more slowly in the north. So if you’ve got a house worth £700k in some fashionable suburb in London, you’ll be paying a lot less tax than someone with a £700k house in a less swanky part of Yorkshire, because of its much lower ’91 value. Absurd, isn’t it? The second problem is that council tax has eight bands, A to H, with A being the lowest. Once you’re in H, you can’t go any higher, so someone owning a house worth many millions in London doesn’t pay any more than that owner in Yorkshire. (Some very expensive houses aren’t even in H anyway.) There really should be bands stretching into the middle of the alphabet at the very least. Oh, and for rental properties, it’s the tenants that have to pay council tax, not the landlords. The whole system needs a huge overhaul. Maybe it shouldn’t even be based on property value at all. They should probably hammer AirBnBs and second properties left vacant. Someone far cleverer than me could dream up a fair and workable system. What they have now clearly isn’t it. (New Zealand’s, with its rateable values updated every three years, is certainly better.) By the way, this all came about after the ill-conceived poll tax (a uniform tax per adult, brought in at the end of Thatcher’s time) which resulted in riots. Anything is better than that, which I could tell was appalling even though I was ten years old.

I hadn’t meant to write so much about bloody council tax! Mum and Dad often talk about the UK going to the dogs. Dad is worse than Mum in that regard. It’s not great, but I wouldn’t say it’s quite as bad as they make out. (Dad would feel better about his homeland if he stopped reading the Daily Mail.) Part of it is just a general negativity about the present. We’re all guilty of that, especially as we get older. I know I am. This week I saw a news presenter (a bit older than me) interviewing an aviation expert about last month’s Air India crash. He said, it seems there are more crashes now than there were in the past. I was practically shouting at the screen, even before the expert replied. Flying is far safer now than say 40 years ago.

Books - Family - Life :) - Tennis

Windfall and new (and old) balls

July 15, 2025 by 0 Comments

Recently Dad found out that his mother had an account in a bank (or was it a building society?) that no longer exists. So he could reclaim the money, which might have been a fiver for all he knew, I ordered my grandmother’s death certificate online, then Dad got photocopies and other bits and pieces. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a few hundred. Even a thousand. Late last week he got a cheque in the mail (cheque – it’s still 1995 in the UK apparently) for about £11,500. A pleasant surprise. Dad will give my two UK-based cousins, now orphans after their mother died last year, a quarter each. My brother wanted Dad to keep the whole thing secret and not give his cousins a penny. He’s not a fan of his cousins – “they’re not nice people and they’ve had enough handouts already” was how he put it – but Dad couldn’t do that.

I was on the phone to my parents for an hour today. Most of that was taken up with money stuff. Not just that surprise windfall, but preparing to sell their third and fourth properties and seeing lawyers and accountants. From my vantage point, it’s all so bizarre. As I’ve said before on this blog, it’s like watching the All Blacks play Romania, 75-0 up in the last minute, desperate for one last push over the line before the final hooter. (OK, it’s more like 75-7 now. They switched off momentarily at the back when they bought the mad house.)

I’m still trying to lose weight. Since I started my effort, I’ve dropped three kilos, which isn’t nothing, but I’ve still got a paunch I’d like to get rid of and a couple of pairs of jeans I’d like to get into. Losing weight isn’t easy. Although I try not to write too much about it here, I still go days or weeks on end of struggling to enjoy a whole lot. Except food. When I’m in one of those spells, resisting the temptation to totally pig out on some big cheesy sausagey pasta-y thing takes some doing.

Yesterday I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român for the exercise. I was just finishing a coffee there when my brother rang. I moved out of the bar, in which some old geezers were playing a particularly loud game of cards, and sat in a gazebo, out of the sun. We discussed the windfall – those bloody cousins – and our parents’ need to offload those properties toot-sweet.

Wimbledon. It’s over for another year. The men’s final was a damn good match, with Sinner the winner and I suppose the grinner. He was the better man on the day. Still, it could have got hairy for him when he faced 15-40 on his serve at 4-2 in the fourth set, especially after what he endured at Roland Garros last month. His serve was brilliant throughout. Alcaraz and Sinner keep producing great matches and right now they’re a league apart from the rest. (I should mention that Sinner got away with one against Grigov Dimitrov in the fourth round. Dimitrov of Bulgaria was two sets up when he was forced to retire with a crippling injury to his right pec.) As for the women, I said last time that Amanda Anisimova’s winning shot in her semi-final – against the world number one – was “sublime”. Well, it went from the sublime to the ridiculous in double-quick time on Saturday. Iga Świątek whitewashed her. It was just the second 6-0 6-0 Wimbledon final; the only other was in 1911. (There was one rather more recent whitewash in a grand slam final, when Steffi Graf beat Natasha Zvereva in the 1988 French Open. Steffi was untouchable that year – she won the calendar slam and Olympic gold.) You had to feel for Anisimova. She had 40-15 in an early service game, I think four chances to win it, then it all just unravelled against an opponent who wouldn’t let up for a second. Please, just win one game…

Mum watched a lot more Wimbledon than me. That’s great. It’s helped to relax her. It’s also given us something nice to talk about. Mum and I often used to watch matches together. (We played a lot together, too.) Steffi and Novotna in ’93. Steffi and Hingis in ’99 at the French Open. I’ve thought today about that first time we were lucky enough to go to Wimbledon, for the first time, in ’98. We were members of a small tennis club that was allocated ten pairs of tickets. We went into a draw and our names came out of the hat. (Because the club was so small, our odds were decent.) Our tickets were for No. 1 court on the first Saturday. We took the train there. Before taking our seats, we watched a pair of clay-courters thrash it out on an outside court. It was jaw-dropping stuff. TV gives you no real appreciation for how hard those guys are larruping the ball. The only match we saw in its entirety on No. 1 court was Petr Korda – champion at Melbourne earlier that year – against Jérôme Golmard of France. Korda won in four close sets. (Golmard, I just found out, died of motor neuron disease at only 43.) Midway through the next match the rain came, as it so often does. There were conga lines and people in ponchos, but that was that. No roof back then. That No. 1 court had only just been built and the atmosphere in the stadium was surprisingly sleepy. Mum actually did fall asleep in the fourth set of the men’s match. I also remember smoke drifting across the court from a fire in a nearby apartment.

I’ve just started reading a book called Ella Minnow Pea. If that sounds like the middle of the alphabet, it is. It’s about a fictitious world in which letters of the alphabet are progressively outlawed. It reminds me that I need to write my series of posts about the alphabet that I’ve had planned for ages.

Still no news from the publisher about the fate of my book(s).

Books - Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis

Perfect storm

July 12, 2025 by 0 Comments

We had severe storms here on both Monday and Tuesday. The alert system worked a treat, unlike eight years ago when nobody saw those 15 minutes of mayhem coming, and people lost their lives. I watched the roof opposite like a hawk – it was still gleaming having been replaced just last month – and the tiles held. Further east the storm was much more devastating – buildings and cars were destroyed and people were badly injured. I was grateful for the much cooler weather that the turmoil brought. The few days I’ve been able to sleep, to actually live. Isn’t that great? (OK, I’m suffering a bit from a cold, coughing up thick gunk.)

My brother called me yesterday while I was half-watching the semi-final between Alcaraz and Fritz. (Alcaraz won in four sets following a dramatic tie-break. He’ll play Sinner in the final, a repeat of that match at the French Open last month.) We’d spoken a couple of days before. Oh god, what’s happened? It was to do with our parents’ UK properties which they plan – desperately need, in fact – to offload. Because they don’t live in the UK, solicitors won’t touch them with a barge pole. Increased risk of fraud, apparently. I’m sure they can find someone who’ll deal with their situation, at the right price. It’s hardly rare, after all. My god, my parents’ lives have got pretty damn complicated all of a sudden, haven’t they? This property crap is going to dominate their lives for god knows how long and, as my brother said, it’ll take over a fair chunk of our lives too. They should also get rid of their mad house in Geraldine sooner rather than later. Mum seems hell-bent on selling the Moeraki place even though it’s the only place they have that isn’t either shit or causing shit. And Mum still isn’t well – she goes to the loo every fifth day or something – and is determined not to see the doctor. All their problems are surmountable if they could just be businesslike about things, but Mum stopped being businesslike about anything ages ago. It makes me question the purpose of accumulating all this vast wealth (by my standards, it’s certainly vast) if all it does is cause constant stress in your old age. When I last spoke to Dad, he said he’d lost sleep because of it, and that was before the latest business with the solicitors.

In other news, my London-based student of seven years told me his divorce that was on, then was off, is now back on. He was amazingly matter-of-fact about the whole thing. How will your boys cope? They just will. He said it’s a shame I guess after being married for six years. Six years? I said. But you started having lessons with me seven years ago and weren’t you married then? Hmm, let me see, oh yes, it’s nine years. Time flies I suppose. My wife has a good job, he said, so she’ll be fine. What does she do exactly? I asked. Don’t really know, he said.

I finished The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde’s only novel) earlier this week. I kept flitting between liking it a lot and barely tolerating it, getting it and not getting it. The chapter with all the gemstones and spices slowed me down, as it was meant to, even though I enjoyed all the vivid vocabulary – words like bezoar. Then I rattled through the next few chapters. A wild ride. It must have been highly controversial in its day.

I felt pretty down after saying goodbye to Mum and Dad. Especially Mum. On Friday night I hardly slept. I’ve also had a cold. On the other hand I’ve had a good week of lessons considering it’s summer – I’m just about to have one on square roots. Work is always a pretty useful antidote.

The women’s Wimbledon final between Świątek and Anisimova takes place this evening. There was a great finish to Anisimova’s win over Sabalenka in the semi. That winner to end it, when it could easily have slipped from her grasp if she hadn’t nailed it, was sublime.

Family - Photos - The UK - Travel: Europe

Family trip report — Part 2 of 2 (plus photos)

July 8, 2025 by 0 Comments

Saturday the 28th was when Dad brought up three-quarters of a century. In the morning us four men, including the little man, went to the car boot sale. (The previous time I was down there it didn’t run because the field was flooded.) Then it was off on a steam train as a birthday treat of sorts for Dad, though it was really more of a treat for my nephew. He was clearly enjoying himself. The train ran from Norden to Swanage, which is by the sea, and made three other stops along the way. They run old diesel trains on that line too, but you know in advance when you book which type of train you’ll get. Our steam train didn’t have open carriages like the narrow-gauge mocăniță I took in Maramureș in 2021, and though it topped out at just 25 mph, that was very speedy compared to the one in Romania which also had a much longer line.

We got off at Swanage and headed to the beach where my nephew built sandcastles (tap it!) and we ate chips. A typical British seaside town, not down at heel like so many these days, not full of ghastly posh shops either, but simple and really quite lovely. It was a cloudy day, so it wasn’t busy. It brought back memories of the wonderful simplicity of the seaside when I was little. I can see the sea! Rock pools, shells, sea anemones, the cycle of tides, so much time. When my brother and I were small we sometimes camped at Sheringham in Norfolk. My brother would like to take his kids back there, or anywhere by the sea really, when they get a bit bigger, but his wife never went camping as a child so it might be a hard sell. On the train back we stopped at Corfe Castle for cream teas. Jam and cream oozing out of our scones. A delight. There were some wonderful family photos from that day: the ones on the train and of all seven of us at the beach. (I had actually been to Swanage once before, at the time of the Easter floods in 1998.)

Sunday was another “hot” day. My nephew had a meltdown and got stung by a bee. We had coffee at Wetherspoons. I had a depressing discussion of the Ukraine situation with my brother who understands it all much better than me. Then on Monday, after a fifth night on an airbed in the study, another episode of Nick Cope’s Popcast and my nephew’s latest tantrum (my brother is a brillant dad really, dealing with it all), I went back to St Ives with Mum and Dad. This was a tiring trip that involved being stuck at Cambridge North station for half an hour (one of the doors broke) and being in rush-hour traffic in Cambridge on the bus.

The next day I had my day trip to Birmingham. I left at 6:30 am and got back at nearly 10:30 pm. Given the extra time I spent at my brother’s, it was really one trip too many, no matter how much I like Brum and wanted to see my uni friend. What were the highlights? Well, one was having coffee on the top floor of the Cube building and the view from up there. Edgbaston, the Old Joe clock tower. So much green around where I went to uni, but the centre suffers from a lack of it. Another highlight was lunch my friend’s girlfriend had made for us and all her positive words about her recovery from cancer. I suppose the Jewellery Quarter was a highlight too, though I’d seen it before. Judging by the cars, there’s an awful lot of money in jewellery.

I was in St Ives for my last day. No obligations. I had coffee and a muffin with Mum and Dad at a newish place called the Ivo Lounge, then I met up with some family friends (the ones who came to Romania in 2017) and that was very enjoyable as always. We even talked about meeting up in Budapest which would be wonderful if it could ever happen. Later we ate at Wetherspoons (yes, Wetherspoons featured extensively) and watched bits of Wimbledon. The match between Taylor Fritz and Gabriel Diallo was of high quality and a pleasure to watch. Fritz won in five sets and barely three hours, reminding me of the good old days when games and sets flew by at Wimbledon.

I was up early the next morning for what would be a long day. I’d picked up a cold, ultimately from my nephew I think. As I just about had one foot out the door, I had another quite major run-in with Mum. It was all because of how horrible and unreasonable she was being to Dad who had only asked her a simple question. I just couldn’t let it go. She talked about wanting to die. Why does she do that? She had stomach pain which didn’t help, but bloody hell. See you whenever, she said. Whenever is likely a year away, maybe more. Dad walked with me to the bus stop.

I took the bus to Cambridge, then a train to Bishop’s Stortford because a broken rail had put paid to the one to Stansted, then I got a replacement bus (I was lucky to get that) to Stansted. A good job I’d given myself some time. After my flight to Budapest I took a bus and then the underground to the main bus station called Népliget. I had loads of time, and because it was so hot and I had a cold, I was glad to just mooch around the underground part of the station which was full of funny places to eat and drink, all designed for locals. A seven-finger signal from the barlady meant that a beer cost 700 forint. I didn’t really want a beer, but I did want the loo which would otherwise be a minimum of 300. The bus to the Normandia bus station (a 15-minute walk from my flat) took 4½ hours. I got back at nearly two in the morning. Kitty was happy to see me.

It’s good to be back, or at least it will be once I’ve stopped coughing up green gunge. I’ve talked to Mum. It’s as if the business just before I left never happened. We get on fine at a safe distance. I’m having to seriously think about what to do next year though, because things can become very unpleasant whenever I get within a mile of her.

They’re into the fourth round at Wimbledon. I haven’t seen much of it, though I did see the end of Cam Norrie’s admirable five-set win yesterday over Nicolas Jarry. Norrie had had a match point in the third-set tie-break and faced a barrage of huge serves from the other end. His own wide lefty serve was extremely effective though – it got him out of trouble in the final set.

We’ve had very hot weather. No surprises there. But we’ve just had one of those ear-splitting mass alerts informing us of a storm about to rip through, and one of my students has postponed a lesson to tomorrow.

Here are some non-family photos:

The river and meadow in St Ives, plus the, um, world peashooting competition

My brother’s cat

A stag beetle in my brother’s garden

Happy Bottom

The car boot sale

The Swanage steam train

The beach at Swanage

Where we stopped for our cream teas

Family - The UK

Family trip report — Part 1 of 2

July 6, 2025 by 0 Comments

It was supposed to be about my brother’s family but it ended up being all about Mum. As it so often is.

I got to my parents’ flat in St Ives at 11:45 on Tuesday morning (24th June). It was almost a ten-hour trip door-to-door, and within ten minutes of arriving I’d already had a low-level run-in with Mum. The problem was that I asked her a simple question. Don’t ask her questions. I should have known. Bloody hell, this could go really badly. The good news was that we’d be spending five nights (one more than originally planned) down at my brother’s, and Mum would of course be sweetness and light during that time.

Mum, Dad and I took the train down to Poole the next morning. Three trains, actually. From Cambridge to King’s Cross, then the underground to Waterloo, then down to Poole. My brother met us at the station. Soon I had my niece in my arms. She seemed positively lovely. But heck, the demands on my brother and his wife have ramped up beyond belief since I was last down there, now that they’ve had a second child and their first has become much more testing, as my brother put it. There’s no way I could do this, was what I kept thinking. Not with the expectations placed on parents these days and the sheer cost of attempting to meet them (which I know to me would be in vain). My nephew is already a very sharp cookie, but he has regular tantrums (pretty normal at his age I suppose – he’ll be three in September) and is jealous of his baby sister. He still thinks she might just disappear one day in a puff of smoke, but alas. He plays rough with her – I saw him pull her ear and press down hard on her chest and much more besides.

My brother’s place is on the edge of the New Forest; swallows fly over their garden which is teeming with insects. This is of great benefit to my nephew and niece. Insect populations have dropped off a cliff in Britain and kids aren’t spending nearly enough time in nature. Dad pointed out a butterfly called a fritillary, which I thought was to do with its scalloped wings but instead referred to the spotted pattern on them. On Thursday we went for a longish walk through a wood called Happy Bottom (of all things) and along part of a Roman road.

I got to see plenty of kids’ TV which is now very good indeed. My nephew’s favourite show was Nick Cope’s Popcast and it quickly became mine too. The other thing I watched a fair bit of was Glastonbury. I was very impressed with Biffy Clyro, a Scottish band that has been around a while. On Saturday night Neil Young appeared. Isn’t this great, I thought. He’s still doing this at just about 80. But the next day I heard that his performance was terrible. There’s no pleasing some people. I suppose if you’ve forked out £400 for a ticket, you want bang for your buck.

I always say that my brother lives in Poole, but his nearest town is actually Wimborne, an upmarket sort of place whose main draw is the minster. Wimborne is a half-hour walk from where they live, and requires you to negotiate Julian’s Bridge which crosses the River Stour and is nearly 400 years old. The bridge is too narrow for both traffic (there’s a lot of that) and pedestrians, so crossing it can be treacherous. I made several traverses during my time there. One time Mum had a cold so I walked in to Wimborne with Dad. We went to a café, drunk our lattes outside, and mostly talked about Mum. Another time I went in with my brother, we drank at Wetherspoons, and we mostly talked about Mum. (I say we drank but in fact only I did – my brother has all of a sudden given up alcohol. He said it “isn’t a good look” around the children.)

Friday was a “hot” day. The inverted commas are there because it almost got to 30, which where I live is blissfully mild. In the morning my brother and sister-in-law saw a financial advisor. (I spell advisor with an O. I find that way more logical than the, admittedly more common, E way.) It was something about their mortgage, I think. When my brother mentioned to the advisor that his parents were staying and they had all those properties, he invited Mum and Dad in for a session that afternoon, free of charge. Mum and Dad were clearly Heavy Hitters. Mum does “weaponise” her wealth with me at times, making me feel inferior. The last night before I left the UK I didn’t sleep well. I thought, won’t it be nice to come back to Romania and leave the world of Big Money behind. I’ve got, let me see, 645 lei in my wallet. I’ll get 90 lei from this lesson and 120 from that one. I’ll need to spend 100-odd at the market tomorrow and 130 on Kitty’s flea treatment on Monday. Being back in that world will be liberating.

On Friday evening we went to a brewery in Wimborne called Eight Arch, named for that treacherous old bridge that has eight arches. We all had burgers and chips and I had a pint of cider. I drank quite a bit of cider when I was over there. That and bitter. Stuff I enjoy but don’t normally drink in Romania. (I don’t drink a lot here full stop.) Eating with my nephew was fun. He always thought someone was stealing his food.

Saturday was a lovely day, the best of the whole trip, and I’ll save that (and some photos) for Part 2.

Cat - Life :)

Trip report to come…

July 5, 2025 by 0 Comments

I got back last night at 2am, very tired and with a chesty cough that I’ve probably picked up from Mum. Luckily that’s all I’ve picked up from her. (She isn’t great at the moment.) The temperatures today have been horrendous – we hit 39 this afternoon. I don’t have the energy for much, though I will venture outside now that a breeze has sprung up. Lots to write about, but I can’t face doing that now. Dad thought I might come home to find a skeleton on the mat, but no, Kitty had been well looked after. She seemed to miss me, judging by all the meowing. I gave Elena two boxes of biscuits. Next Thursday I’ll take her to the airport for her very early flight.

Books - Films - Politics - Travel: Europe

As I go away, Mad Max is upon us

June 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ll be off very early in the morning – I’ll call a taxi to the airport at four. From Luton I’ll take a coach to Cambridge, then a local bus to St Ives which will only cost £2. I should get to Mum and Dad’s flat around midday. As well as St Ives, I’ve got my brother and his family to look forward down in Poole, then a day trip to Birmingham. After the debacle of last August, I decided I couldn’t face another night at Luton airport, so I’m flying from Stansted to Budapest instead. My long-distance bus to Timișoara is due to get in at 1:30 in the morning. Not ideal, but anything beats a sleepless night at Luton.

I’d hoped to avoid family discussion of politics because it’s always so negative. (I yearn for the days when politics just “did its thing” in the background and we didn’t have the toxicity of social media.) But after the Iran strikes, it’ll be hard to dodge entirely. Dad and I had discussed the prospect just hours before it happened. No, Trump wouldn’t do that. He’s too cowardly and joining a war is altogether too much like hard work for him. But then he damn well did it, using bombs called MOP which could hardly sound more innocuous. His motivation is pretty thin and probably doesn’t run much deeper than, no-one’s given me a goddamn Nobel peace prize yet so fuck it, I’m gonna bomb the shit out of Iran. He just craves the attention, the fame, never being out of the news for one moment. The actual threat posed by Iran (or lack of one – who really knows) doesn’t come into it. I’d be shocked if any good comes out of this. What I do know is that international law is basically dead, the UN might as well be dead, American law is meaningless for someone like Trump, and democracy is teetering on the edge everywhere. I recently watched the 1979 Aussie cult film Mad Max for the first time to see what all the fuss was about; we really are rapidly descending into a Mad Max world. It’s all so scary. I just dearly hope that at least the UK and Keir Starmer stay well out of the war in the Middle East. Memories of the Iraq war are still fresh, even after 22 years.

Last night I saw a film with Dorothy at Studio cinema, one of the old theatres that has recently been reopened. We saw Kontinental ’25, a Romanian film set in Cluj very recently as the title suggests. The smart city, the city of the future, the city with a certain animosity between Romanians and Hungarians, they couldn’t have chosen a better place in the country for this sort of film. It was a damn good film, hilarious in parts, dark in others, and very thought-provoking. Unusually, the camera would often focus on somewhere in the city, perhaps an apartment block, for ten seconds or more. This was quite striking. Afterwards we went to Berăria 700 where we both had bulz. They’ve now opened three of Timișoara’s old cinemas, with two more on the way. One of those two is Dacia – see below for what it looked like last Friday.

I finished Wessex Tales on Saturday. It’s all set close to where my brother lives. The biggest town, Casterbridge, is in fact Dorchester where my niece was born. The name Dorchester sounds quite posh, doesn’t it? (My nephew was born in Poole.) I used to think Wessex itself was a made-up name. Come to think of it, I thought the name Transylvania was made up, too. Many people think Timbuktu and Kalamazoo are invented, but they’re real as well. (Timbuktu is in Mali; Kalamazoo is in Michigan.)

I’ve shown Elena what to do with Kitty. My biggest concern is remembering not to enter auto-pilot and lock my front door at the bottom. Locking it at the bottom would lead to an enormous mess that doesn’t bear thinking about.

This week, 15-year-old Romanians have their evaluare națională, a pair of pressure-packed exams (in Romanian and maths) that will determine where they spend their final years of school.

I hadn’t been to the communist-block-heavy Dacia area for ages. Shots like this featured heavily in that film last night. There are three “jocuri de noroc” (basically pokie machine) places in this picture.

China shop. Maybe you’ll find a bull in there.

Dacia market

Lugoj yesterday. The guy on the left was the steadier player and I imagine he won in the end.

A popular spot for swimming

Books - Cat - Family - Life :) - Music

Rubbing along and a simpler UK plan

June 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow is the longest day. Then it’s all downhill from there. Right now it’s a beautiful evening – I’ve just been down to the river. Only three full days till I go away. I’ve chosen a good time for it: a pair of ghastly 37s have popped up on the long-range forecast.

I’m grateful to Elena, the lady above me, for agreeing to feed Kitty. For a while I was cursing my lack of friends. After nearly six months, Kitty has become part of the scenery. Our start was somewhat rocky. She’d bite or scratch me, or cower in the naughty corner. She just wasn’t comfortable here. Combine that unease with her pent-up energy and she’d drive me to despair. Now she’ll sit beside me or on my lap, sometimes nuzzling up to me. She sleeps a lot more now than in the early days. As my grandmother would have said, we rub along pretty well together. I just wish she had a proper name. For some reason the Genevieve film came into my head this week – wouldn’t that be a nice name? – but she got saddled with Kitty, a non-name really, and that was that.

My UK itinerary has changed once again. My brother thought that going to London wouldn’t give us enough time to properly see him – he’s probably right there – so Mum (who is masterminding this) has deleted London from the schedule. Thinking about it, I’m glad. Meeting up in London but getting lost, phones not working, staying in shitty accommodation (they might not even have had fucking slippers), going to a show that may or may not have been any good, it was all a recipe for stress and falling out. Not worth it. It now looks like I’ll spend two nights in St Ives, then we’ll go down to Poole next Thursday. We’ll spend four nights there before returning to St Ives. A week on Tuesday I’ll catch an early train from Cambridge to Birmingham and spend the day there, which should be fun.

What other news? Well, the roof on the block opposite me has been replaced, and now looks pretty smart. We might get ours done too if all the owners can agree. The Praid salt mine, similar to the one I went to in Turda last summer, flooded last month, with disastrous effects both economically and ecologically. When I met Dorothy last Monday, I saw she had five copies of The Picture of Dorian Gray on her bookshelf. She happily lent me one to read while I’m away. (I’ve almost finished Wessex Tales.) And my colour printer is back in working order.

To give you some idea of how crazy simple things can be in Romania, I tried to get a copy of my front door key to give to Elena. Three useless keys and five trips to the key cutter later, plus waiting around for her to show up, I still haven’t got a spare key that works. Eventually she gave me my money back. (Luckily my front door has two locks, and I do have a spare key for the other lock which normally I don’t use.)

This week I took delivery of Tracy Chapman’s first (1988) album on vinyl. It’s one of my favourite albums, so that was cool.