Family - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

9/3/99

March 10, 2019 by 0 Comments

Last week was an exhausting one. I’m not sure why – my 30 hours of lessons were pretty standard – but after yesterday’s final lesson I didn’t feel like doing a whole lot. It might have been the late finishes (on five consecutive days) and all the extra to-ing and fro-ing that happens when I teach kids. With the exception of one boy, a 14-year-old, all my lessons with kids involve a trip.

When I turned up nine days ago for my lesson with seven-year-old Albert (I’d seen a Victoria earlier in the day), my heart sank. He stood almost pinned to the back of the sofa, cowering, wondering why this strange man had entered his lair. I felt sorry for him. Look, I said, it’ll be fine, knowing of course that I had an hour and a half with him, and it was likely to be anything but fine. But to my surprise, I was able to put him at ease. Being able to communicate with him in Romanian was a huge help. Unlike some kids who expect me to be fluent in their mother tongue, Albert seemed quite impressed with my Romanian skills. He had a pretty good knowledge of the basics: numbers, colours, animals, simple food items. We played a simple board game I’d created involving frogs, and before I knew it our time was up. On Friday I had my second lesson with him, and he ran up to me when I arrived. It was quite incredible to see that. He spent half the lesson wanting to run: he was a bundle of boundless energy. Simon says for god’s sake stop running! It truth it’s much easier to teach someone like him than a kid who looks perpetually bored and whose favourite words are “no” and “I don’t know”.

Yesterday I had a pair of new students – an ambitious 20-year-old couple – who want to do the Cambridge exam and perhaps move to the UK. They were both at a good level, around a 7½ on my 0-to-10 scale. They specifically mentioned Birmingham as a city they’d like to live in. The bloke marvelled at what I see as my extremely standard British accent. I get that from time to time from people who have been brought up on a diet of American movies and games. With this couple, I’ve now had 76 students (but no trombones) since I started back in November 2016.

My grandfather (Dad’s dad) passed away twenty years ago yesterday. It was a Tuesday, I was in my first year of university, my brother was in his first year in Army uniform, and my parents had been in London to try and fix up a teaching exchange for Mum in New Zealand. As it happened, New Zealand was booked out, so my parents decided to spend 2000 in Cairns (Australia) instead. My grandfather, who had been a physically strong and debonair gentleman, with quite a sense of humour to boot, spent the last decade of his life in the ever-tightening grip of Alzheimer’s. It was all very sad, and extremely hard for my grandmother. His problems came to the fore when they visited New Zealand in the summer of 1989-90 (we were living there at the time). He, who had always been a lover of the outdoors, became dizzy and disoriented when exposed to the sun. From then on it was a downward spiral. My grandmother tried to keep things as normal as possible, even going on holiday in Barbados with him and my father as late as 1996, but it was very hard work. I remember the speech my dad gave at his funeral – a very good one, especially for someone who doesn’t normally speak in public.

Last weekend S and I watched an unusual film about Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president. It wasn’t an easy watch – it brought back some ugly memories of the early 2000s: that awful election, 9/11, and the Iraq War which Britain, and of course my brother, got dragged into. I learnt plenty about Dick Cheney and the machinations of American politics at that time, but it was hard not to watch it and feel angry. It was all just a bit too close to home. S disagreed with me, but it showed to me that elections can and do matter. Had Al Gore been the victor in 2000, which he perhaps would have been if the Florida recount hadn’t been stopped by the Supreme Court, the world would be a different place now. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people’s votes in elections matter, but that wasn’t my point.

Scrabble. Five games yesterday, and just one win, despite averaging 402. At the level I play, that kind of average is likely to give you four wins rather than four losses, but it wasn’t my lucky day. I lost one game by five points when my opponent played an out-bingo, and in another game I was a long way behind, but found a bingo and some other high-scoring plays, only to fall short by three points. Even in my final game I was made to sweat a bit when my opponent played a 97-point bingo to the triple, making several overlaps, but I managed to edge over the line. My rating has dipped into the low 1300s, which is probably an accurate reflection of where I am right now.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Normal rules don’t apply

March 1, 2019 by 0 Comments

Last Wednesday was a terrible day. I had to go to the doctor, then I faffed around with paperwork for ages, then I managed to lose some pretty important paperwork that might still mean I have to go to Bucharest. Or not. The next day, when I’d just about come to terms with my situation, I ended up in an argument with Mum on the phone, my first for a while. Mum, you should try living in Romania. In hindsight I shouldn’t have told her; it would have made both our lives easier. My difficulties stem from the fact that I’m not a Romanian citizen and I don’t have the national ID card that everybody else has. Anything admin-related becomes so much harder because normal rules don’t apply to me. I shouldn’t complain; being off the grid is otherwise quite nice, really. As I said, normal rules don’t apply to me.

S told me that if I do need to go to Bucharest, we can make a proper trip of it. That could be good. I now have major doubts as to whether anything will happen between S and me. Heck, it’s already been over five months. It’s odd that she (temporarily) lives with her parents, but I’m still yet to meet them.

Yesterday I celebrated my 100th lesson with Matei; Zoli (my first-ever student) is just two behind. Tomorrow I’ve got four hours with the Cîrciumaru family – two hours with the mother followed by two with the son. It won’t be easy with either of them. She’s fixated on grammar to the point where I wonder exactly what her aim is (tomorrow I’ll ask her), and he’s Mr I Don’t Know. I say it isn’t easy, but when I think back to some of the bullshit I faced in my previous jobs, it’s an absolute breeze. After that I’ve got my first lesson with a boy of just seven. Ninety minutes. For a boy that young, that’s an absolute age. In the evening I’ve got a Skype session, not with the young man who lives in England, but (for a change) with his mother, who lives in Focșani in the east of Romania.

This morning I attended a performance of Puss in Boots, in English, at Waldorf School. The cast were aged around fourteen. I didn’t know what to expect but it was actually rather good, with plenty of comedy moments. An incredible amount of work must have gone into it. Learning lines in a foreign language is no mean feat.

Today is the last day of winter, according to one definition (and the one I tend to use). It’s been quite a tough three months, probably the most challenging spell since I arrived. My main goal for the spring and summer is simply to be well. I’m taking a new nasal spray, and eventually (when my paperwork is sorted) I’ll be having a CT scan. That’s a positive development. The weather is improving and that always helps too.

Scrabble. Three tough games tonight. I was starved of high-point tiles, eleven out of twelve falling on my opponents’ racks. In the first game I out-bingoed my opponent 3-1 but still fell to a 41-point loss. In game two I couldn’t get anything going at all, and was thrashed by 159. The final game had an attritional feel about it, but finding DAIKERS gave me a second bingo to my opponent’s one, and a 42-point victory. I’m getting better at the game. Learning a bunch of bingo stems has helped me memorise and find words like DAIKERS (which is RAISED + K). That’s still a sticking point, however. There are many thousands of highly playable words, many of them fours and fives but lots of sevens and eights too, that I have no knowledge of whatsoever. Compared to some regulars, I’m playing with one hand behind my back. I’ll keep persevering though; I enjoy the challenge.

Life :) - Scrabble

Slowing me down and tiring me out

February 19, 2019 by 0 Comments

My mood is certainly better than when I last wrote. The spring-like weather, the snowdrops coming out, and the people filling the squares, might have something to do with that. Yesterday Piața Unirii was heaving. This permanent state of being a bit ill is one thing I really could do without, however. It’s slowing me down and tiring me out.

Last week I had 31 hours of lessons. Right now, that’s about my limit. They included two hours with my eleven-year-old Mr I Don’t Know, preceded by (for the first time) an hour with his mum. I could see where he gets it from. She was terrified to actually speak English, preferring to focus on grammar instead. I kept telling her that gaining the confidence to speak is more important (at the beginning, at least) than learning grammar rules. Her son had to contend with a day of school, followed by two hours of me, followed by three hours of Romanian. This was a Friday. Poor chap. I made sure we just played games during the second hour.

I now have a bookcase. On Saturday S an I went back to one of the hardware stores, and surprisingly the two-metre-long flat pack fitted in her rather small car. I put it together yesterday. My level of practical nous just about stretches to that.

Scrabble. I’m not playing all that much, concentrating on learning words (sevens and eights) instead. When I have been playing, I’ve mostly been winning, and my rating on ISC has hit the low 1400s once more. Come the middle of this year, the lexicon will have expanded to include three extra two-letter words (EW, OK and ZE, with OK being the most controversial), half a dozen additional three-letter words, and many more longer ones.

Tomorrow I’ll try and get an appointment with one of the ENT specialists. This has been going on for too long. I’m even looking into surgery, but I don’t like the idea of going under the knife unless it’s absolutely necessary. (I’ve just spoken to my brother about this, and typically, he says I should just get on with it.)

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A bump in the road

February 14, 2019 by 0 Comments

I’ve hit the skids in recent days and weeks. All this being sick all the time, the sinus pain, the serial colds, the lack of energy, has caught up with me. I guess I’ve been experiencing low-level depression. I’ve had an extremely good depression-free run since my move to Romania; it was bound to rear its ugly head again at some stage.

Last weekend was a low point. Some cancellations meant I had no work at all on Saturday. Lack of work is rarely a good thing. In the morning a shelf loaded with books and files collapsed. This was my stupid fault; I knew the shelf was far too flimsy for everything I had sitting on it. Luckily nothing was damaged. In the afternoon I decided to walk to Shopping City and try to find a bookcase. This took forever; just putting one foot in front of the other was a serious effort. I was also completely unable to relax.

This anxiety continued into Sunday, when S picked me up to take me to some of the various hardware hypermarkets in the southern part of the city. I wasn’t in the mood for any of this. She thought I just wanted a shelf, not something far bigger. We found something suitable but it didn’t fit into her car. She suggested getting her brother (who has a bigger car) to pick it up for me, but I hardly know her brother. During our trip, she tried to execute a U-turn that I’m amazed was even legal (this is Romania, though) and could easily have caused an accident. As it was, her manoeuvre led to a queue of cars and honking horns left, right and centre (again, this is Romania). We got back into the centre of town, but many of the bars near the river were inexplicably closed. We ended up in a café in the square, where they were showing the Fed Cup match between the Czech Republic and Romania, on Czech turf. S knew almost nothing about tennis (she said she’d never played it), and I tried my best to give her a run-down of the rules in Romanian. Simona Halep beat Karolina Pliskova in a tight three-setter. When I got home, I saw Mihaela Buzărnescu lose in straight sets to Katerina Siniakova. That left the encounter tied at two matches apiece, and the doubles match would decide it. This was one of the best doubles matches I’d ever seen. Drama and quality from start to finish, and a great atmosphere. When the Romanian pair dropped the first set on a tie-break, I expected the Czechs to rattle through the second, but no. Romania won the last two sets 6-4 6-4 to record something of an upset. A great result for Romanian tennis. (This reminds me, it would be good if I could start playing tennis again soon.)

I’ve had a solid amount of work so far this week. That seems to be a good remedy. Yesterday’s early-morning lesson started in amusing fashion: he’d been driving the car immediately behind S’s when she attempted that U-turn. He said he recognised me in the passenger seat, and thought my face was a picture. One of those funny coincidences. Last night I had a new student, and I should have another one – my 70th – this evening. The sun is shining, there’s a busker outside singing Vinovații fără vină, and I’m reasonably confident that this latest episode will be no more than a bump in the road.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Making a difference

February 4, 2019 by 0 Comments

The last few days have been a struggle. I’ve picked up my fifth or sixth cold (I’ve lost count) this winter, and I feel feeble. All the colds have pretty much merged into one, and with all the sinus pain that never totally goes away, it’s a long time since I felt anywhere near 100%. Maybe I contracted this latest bout at the doctor’s surgery on Thursday night. As I do every four weeks, I went to the after-hours doctor to pick up my prescription, but that might not have been all I picked up. There had been a flu outbreak and the woman behind the desk was wearing a mask.

The good news is that I met S for coffee this morning, and we spoke for two hours in Romanian. Being able to speak someone else’s language is one of the most awesome things ever. I haven’t seen a lot of S lately. She got sick, I got sick, she went skiing in Austria, she got sick again, I got sick again, and so on. Before we met it was just lovely being out in Timișoara on a Sunday morning. It’s always so quiet and peaceful then. Then it was equally lovely having somebody to talk to. On the way back from the café I filled a pair of six-litre water bottles from the well, as I do every few days, but this time the bottles in my backpack felt unusually heavy. My life here is primitive in a lot of ways, and I don’t mind that too much. The water trips, the tram trips to pay my rent in cold hard cash, and of course work. My work is deliberately manual. The world we live in is automate, automate, automate, but manual is often way more interesting and fun.

I had a bunch of cancellations again last week, but the lessons I did have went pretty well. One of my latest exercises for kids is asking them to come up with 26 foods, or animals, or games, one for each letter of the alphabet. Last week one of my eleven-year-old students thought of Tasmanian devil, or diavol tasmanian in Romanian. He wanted to put that under D, but he already had “duck” there. Of course it needed to go under T instead, and that letter was free. It’s cool when kids come up with stuff that I hadn’t even thought of. I asked another eleven-year-old boy to write about his favourite time of day, expecting about four lines. Instead he wrote almost a whole page about why he liked evenings. I was bowled over, not just by the amount he wrote but also by how much his English had improved since I started with him in October 2017. Man, this is fantastic. All my work is making a difference, hopefully.

The men’s Australian Open final sure didn’t take six hours. It barely lasted two. Djokovic was brilliant and Nadal was very passive and indecisive, perhaps simply because Djokovic was playing so well as to leave him flummoxed. That’s the 52nd grand slam won by either Federer, Nadal or Djokovic. Thirteen years’ worth of majors. Extraordinary stuff. I’ve sat in Rod Laver Arena once, back in 2005 (I did also visit the Open in ’08, but didn’t have tickets for the biggest court). In ’05 the experience felt “big” but not too big. Not like today, with obnoxious electronic advertising boards pulsating in between games. Wimbledon seems to be getting too big as well. They’ve purchased the adjoining golf club, so more land, more courts, bigger, bolder, better. Bleuugh.

Scrabble. I’ve had a fairly iffy start to 2019, but I won all seven of the games I played yesterday. Although my results haven’t been fantastic so far this year, I’ve made some interesting plays: my first-ever triple-triple (ACTIONeD for 149 – he left the C in the triple lane, not particularly dangerous in second position, but I just happened to have a play that fitted perfectly); TOUZLED for 120; SqUARELY (the first time I’d ever used the blank as a Q); and two nine-letter bingos in ASPERsION and OVERDOINg (that last one in the final game I played yesterday; OVERDOg was also playable but I didn’t see it; I only saw its anagram gROOVED which didn’t play).

Brexit. Oh dear. Last Tuesday was a quieter than average day on the work front, so I watched a stream of the debates and series of votes, open-mouthed. One of the amendments was to extend Article 50 in the event that no agreement is reached by a certain day. A chance to sit down, have a cuppa tea, and think about what you actually want to do. It was voted down. So hang on, there are barely 50 days until the scheduled exit day, you’ve got no bloody clue what you’re doing, you’re fast running out of options, and you’ve just voted to deny yourselves the option of a bit more time in the event that no solution magically presents itself in the next few weeks. Are you insane?

Five lessons planned for tomorrow.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Politics - Tennis

Don’t panic!

January 27, 2019 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I had my first “half-and-half” lesson with the teacher at Universitatea de Vest. In the Romanian half of the session, she kept complimenting me on my knowledge of the language, but said I need to relax a lot more when speaking it. I shouldn’t beat myself up when I can’t find the right word. Nor should I panic when I’m at the front of a long queue and I’m told to “Speak!”. That’s solid advice. She also helped me with those pesky pronouns. “She sent it to me.” Mi l-a trimis or Mi-a trimis-o, depending on whether the thing she gave me is masculine or feminine. You might add a mie at the end if you want to emphasise that she gave it to me and no-one else. It gets way harder than this, and after more than two years I still struggle.

I had a couple of Skype chats with New Zealand relatives, yesterday and today. They were shocked when I turned the screen around and everything was white; we’ve had another fairly major dumping of snow, including mega-snowflakes the likes of which I’d never seen before. My cousin and family might be coming over next January. Let’s hope so. I really miss the ten-minute drive to their place on a Sunday, seeing the three boys grow up, the roast dinners, the chats. Just as we were about to hang up, my cousin dropped a bombshell of sorts: her husband had just resigned from his job.

The watched the women’s Australian Open final this morning, and a bloody good match it was too. It lacked those long, scrambling, edge-of-your-seat rallies (the only point that fell into that category came at 5-5 in the first set and featured three net-cords), but apart from that, it was gripping stuff. The lefty-versus-righty match-up and the fact that they’d never played before added to the unpredictability. The drama dial got turned up to 9 when Kvitova saved those three match points. From 5-3 in the second set to 0-1 in the third, Osaka went through a stretch where she lost 11 points out of 12, then another where she lost 12 of 12. The stuffing had been knocked out of her. But she showed impressive fortitude in putting all of that behind her. At 2-4 in the third, Kvitova even fended off triple break point with a barrage of big serves, and at 4-3 Osaka might have cracked, but her own serve was brilliant throughout. Either player would have been a worthy champion (and don’t forget that Kvitova was stabbed two years ago) but Osaka has now won the last two grand slams and is the new number one.

Tomorrow we’ve got the men’s final. Djokovic against Nadal, yet again, in a repeat of the final from seven years ago, which might as well have been played on another planet. I’ll stick my neck out and say that this match won’t last almost six hours, because there’s now a super tie-break (boo!) if they get that far, and a proper shot clock. I can’t pick a winner though: they’ve both been in supreme form the last two weeks. The 2012 final was a bright spot in what was otherwise a shitty period for me. I moved house, something I wasn’t particularly interested in doing, everything went pear-shaped at my job, and my grandmother died. I still miss her. At times I wonder what she’d have made of my move to Romania. I think she’d have loved it here, actually. The late summer evenings, sitting out in the bars in the square, the buildings, the similarities between the Romanian language and Italian (she spent some time in southern Italy).

I’ve been watching the Brexit shambles, and it seems Britain of 2019 bears little resemblance to the country I was brought up in. A country of compromise, of pragmatism, of tolerance for others’ views. The actions of senior politicians in the last few months have been totally irresponsible. That includes Jeremy Corbyn, whose non-Brexit policies I have a lot of time for. Regarding Brexit, however, he just seems to want maximum chaos. As for Theresa May, I had sympathy for her in the early days of her tenure, but not any more. In 2017 she called an unnecessary election, thinking she could lead the Tories to a thumping majority without even showing up. That didn’t exactly happen, but she acted as if nothing had happened. Ten days ago her deal got annihilated in parliament. Still it was as if nothing had happened. In between, she has kowtowed to the extremists on the back benches of her party, while the country has become more and more polarised. The saga has become a game, where leavers want the gold medal they “earned” in 2016, they want it now, and sod the consequences. The tragic thing is that 2½ years have gone by since the referendum, and the multitude of reasons why so many people decided to give the middle finger in 2016 haven’t been addressed at all.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Tick-tock

January 18, 2019 by 0 Comments

Occasionally one of my students does something extraordinary. That happened this afternoon. I gave her an IELTS writing exercise, where she had to write a letter about sub-standard student accommodation. Twenty minutes, a minimum of 150 words. As always, I had a go at the task at the same time. Hmm, too much noise? Problems with the heating? Too far away? What should I write about? These questions posed no such problems for my student. With barely half the time gone, she gleefully said “Done!” and presented me with a letter easily good enough to get the grade she’ll need when she does the exam. If she’d actually used the last ten minutes it might have been just about perfect.

Dad recently acquired a 9-carat gold pocket watch that his great-grandfather (or to be specific, his dad’s dad’s dad) had received as a present from work. He showed it to me over Christmas. For some reason he was happy to throw it away, or get some money for the gold. It’s a double hunter, meaning it has a lid on both the front and back. The case (monogrammed on the back) has been battered a bit, and the glass is missing, as is the second hand. We couldn’t get it to work. I told Dad I would take it in to one of the watchmakers here in Timișoara; he might be able to do something. The shop, on Piața Libertății, was a delight to visit. Every type of clock and watch, and piece of clock and watch, and tool for mending clocks and watches, was on display. Old cuckoo clocks were going off, left right and centre. It was like visiting a clock museum. Fitting the theme perfectly, the pocket-sized man who dealt with my great-great-grandad’s watch was about seventy. Two hours after handing it to him, I went back to find he’d got the mechanism going. Tick-tock, tick-tock. It might have been the first time it had tick-tocked for half a century, perhaps more. Unfortunately he didn’t have a glass that fitted, nor a second hand, but that’s a start.

The Australian Open is back, with its crazy hours. Last night a match didn’t finish until nearly quarter past three in the morning. We’ve also got a new tie-break rule. There are (sadly) no more advantage final sets; instead there’s a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-6 in the decider. Even if it feels gimmicky to me, there’s nothing wrong with the new rule as such; I just think the old one was better. We’re now robbed of the kinds of drama-filled long final sets we’ve seen at the Aussie Open in recent years, such as in both the Djokovic–Wawrinka matches (2013 and 2014) and both marathons Simona Halep was involved in last year. If they wanted to change it, I’d have preferred it if they’d gone down the route Wimbledon has done: a normal (less gimmicky) tie-break to seven points at 12-12. But that’s not what they did, and we’re now in the slightly mad situation where all four grand slams have different systems for determining the winner of close matches. The French Open is the only one to retain a no-limit deciding set, although I can’t imagine that will be for long. If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll eventually plump for the Aussie system.

Towards the end of last week I got hooked on the BDO world darts tournament. This isn’t the biggest and best tournament in terms of standard and prestige (that would be the PDC worlds) but it has that pleasant eighties feel about it. The story for me was really the women’s tournament, with Mikuru Suzuki of Japan steamrolling her British opponent in straight sets in the final, walking on (and off) to the strains of Baby Shark, doo doo doo doo.

Eighteen games of Scrabble in 2019 so far, and I have a 50% record. Last weekend I got utterly taken apart, 574-313, in my biggest loss ever. That took my record for 2019 to 4-9, but to my surprise I followed that up with five straight wins, including (in my final game) a 557-336 victory where I out-bingoed my opponent 4-0, two of my bingos scoring in the 90s.

I’ll leave discussion of the Brexit shambles until next time.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :)

Romanian commentary 12 – barriers

January 13, 2019 by 0 Comments

It’s ages since I last discussed my Romanian language skills, or lack of them. It’s an ongoing battle. People who don’t live in Romania might assume that after more than two years I’d be just about fluent by now. Total immersion, right? Well, no. Considering how many barriers there are to learning the language, I haven’t done too badly. What do I mean by barriers, exactly? Every time I go to a fast-food outlet or a bank or a pharmacy and I’m dealing with somebody under thirty or so, I get nervous. I’m going to get Englished again, aren’t I?! I always speak Romanian, but I might be the only non-native speaker who has attempted to speak the language that they’ve come across all week. Even if my Romanian is perfectly understandable, they’re likely to find my error-strewn version, with a funny accent, comical or worse. So then they reply in English, often with mistakes, and in a slightly funny accent: “Sorry. Are not dere.” But as a speaker (and teacher!) of a language that everybody wants to speak, I’m used to mistakes and funny accents. They don’t bother me. So Romanians can get away with their dodgy English whereas I can’t with my iffy Romanian. Usually I persist, speaking Romanian for the rest of the exchange, but still feeling that I’ve failed. Sometimes, if I’m not desperate, I simply walk away.

It doesn’t happen like this all the time, of course. Or even half the time. But it happens enough to frustrate me. Am I really this bad? Still? Often the person behind the counter will greet me with “Spuneți!” which means “Speak!”. Talk about putting the pressure on. Speak, boy, speak! Shit, what do I say now? The “Spuneți!” situation is just one of many where I become anxious and uncomfortable, and therefore less able to process the language. One of these times came up yesterday, when I got my hair cut in a place I hadn’t been to before, just on the other side of the bridge. People were talking loudly across me from opposite sides of the room, cracking jokes. I couldn’t see my watch from under the cape I was wearing, nor could I see the clock from where I was sitting, and I had a lesson to go to afterwards. That sort of stuff makes me tense in any language.

I’m more comfortable in open-air markets or funny unsophisticated dive bars, which are generally run by slightly older people who didn’t start learning English when they were at kindergarden. Those places also have a couple of side benefits: they’re more interesting and cheaper.

Since the start of the year (which isn’t very long, obviously), S and I have been alternating languages. We spoke Romanian the first time we meet up, English the second time, then switched back to Romanian again, and so on. This seems to be working. At one point, S suggested that my Romanian level is something like B2, but that can’t be right. Perhaps I’d just scrape B1, or about a 5 on my personal 0-to-10 scale.

It’s been brass monkeys here. We had heavy snowfall last weekend, and on Tuesday morning the temperature dipped into the double-figure negatives. One of my students then showed up on the wrong day: Tuesday instead of Thursday. Somebody else would be coming minutes later, so I had to turn him away. I felt sorry for him, having braved such bitterly cold weather to come here, and I also felt that it was partly my fault: I’ve been teaching in Romania long enough to know that everybody seems to struggle with the words Tuesday and Thursday. I’ve even had texts from people wanting lessons on Thuesday. In this case, a simple reply of Marți? or Joi? and this misunderstanding never would have happened. Luckily he was still able to come two days later.

It’s been a good work week, and the more work I get, the motivated I seem to be with everything else. Hopefully that will extend to the Romanian language.

Family - The UK

Proper Christmas! Part 4 of 4

January 5, 2019 by 0 Comments

Sunday 30th December

Over breakfast Mum read out an email she’d received from my aunt who stayed two nights in Timișoara after my brother’s wedding. Wow, some people have stressful Christmases. We went for coffee along by the river and met an old friend of my parents on the way; I think he thought I was weird for living in Romania. After coffee we had a very enjoyable walk down the thicket to Houghton and back. The track was busier than I ever remember it; people were making the most of the weather which was extraordinarily mild for the time of year. After a late lunch we messed around with my beard trimmer and I got packed for my evening flight. I was happy to be heading back, but it had been a real pleasure to spend some time with my family. I still marvel at how my brother found such a wonderful partner, and how they’re able to do all that housey stuff together that I could never imagine. Mum and Dad have their moments, but it helps a lot that I get on much better with Mum these days. I realise that she’s always wanted the best for me. She hasn’t always known what the best is, but that’s not really her fault.

I arrived at the airport with time to spare and got some “reduced to clear” sandwiches from Marks & Spencer. It was very busy at the check-in desk with several hundred Poles and Romanians jockeying for position in the queues. One bloke directed a barrage of F-bombs and other insults at the poor woman behind the desk, and after insulting her sister (!), he got chucked off the flight. By the time I reached the gate, I felt I was already in Romania. There weren’t a lot of Brits on the flight. I sat on the very back row, next to a younger chap from Petroșani, which is a three-hour drive from Timișoara. What an ordeal. We landed at 1:40 am, to a customary round of applause, and I was home in no time, although I didn’t get to sleep until nearly four.


Monday 31st

I got up at ten to ten. At lunchtime I met S at a café on Strada Mărășești. She asked me about New Year’s resolutions and I said I wanted to improve my Romanian. Could we speak Romanian from the start of 2019? She let out a huge groan. She doesn’t understand why communicating in the local language is so important to me. When I was in England she texted me to ask if I wanted to go a New Year’s Eve party. I said yes, hoping that she might forget. She hadn’t forgotten. She told me where it was, but I didn’t take it in, due to the anxiety that the mere mention of a party provokes in me. “Under something” and “on the corner of something and something” was all I remembered. Everything is closed here on 1st January, so I did a load of grocery shopping in the afternoon, making good use of my new backpack. Close to party time, I wandered around Libertății and Unirii, thinking I might figure it out, but to no avail. I had to call her. It was definitely under something. It was a small dungeon-like room, beneath one of the city’s many pharmacies, where you could see the brickwork and smell the mould. The music would have been fine if it had been at half the volume. I’m sure S (whom I hadn’t seen in party mode before) and her two friends could tell I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life there. Just before midnight we went out to see the fireworks, be couldn’t see much from our vantage point. S told me that her two goals for 2019 were to travel around the world and, um, to have a baby. Both?! I thought that might be it for the night, but no such luck. We bundled back into the vault, and by the time we left (phew!) it was 2019 in the UK too. It would be nice if parties or social events could one day be as much fun as, say, being stuck in Airportworld.


Tuesday 1st January

After breakfast I had a bout of excruciating sinus pain, lasting an hour and a half. With the New Year bells going full-bore from the cathedral, I thought, hell must be something close to this. It was that painful, like a screwdriver being rammed up my nostril. The lack of sleep probably didn’t help, and neither did the alcohol, not that I drank that much. Lying in bed was no good; I paced up and down, up and down, until it gradually subsided. What a start to the new year.

Family - The UK

Proper Christmas! Part 3 of 4

January 5, 2019 by 0 Comments

Tuesday 25th December

This was my first Christmas Day in the UK for 16 years, and what an incredible day it was. My brother and sister-in-law had it all planned with military precision. It was the first time they’d done Christmas dinner, but they could have fooled me. We had Eggs Benedict (their own eggs, of course) with salmon for breakfast, an unexpected treat. My brother followed our late uncle’s method for cooking the turkey: two hours in the oven and as long again on the barbecue. It was melt-in-the-mouth stuff. Before long the Christmas pudding (which is always a highlight) was eaten and the dishes were washed, and it was back to TV watching. Michael McIntyre’s show was really funny (especially this cooking prank), as was Dad’s Army, which is now almost half a century old. As for presents, I got some kids’ books and the Bananagrams game (for my lessons), a backpack, some cash from Mum and Dad (it’s a bit ridiculous to be getting cash from my parents at my stage in the game, but there you go) and all kinds of stuff to help tame my beard. Christmas Day 2018 will live long in my memory.


Wednesday 26th

We walked off our Christmas dinner by doing a tour of Poole, which I quite liked. I discovered that gin bars had become a thing. Another trip to Primark, then it was TV time. We watched programmes about Ken Dodd and Torvill & Dean, although the highlight was the BFG which was beautifully done. We played a few games of Bananagrams.


Thursday 27th

A third trip to Primark to get a suitable suitcase for my flight back to Romania, and then it was time to say goodbye to Poole, and my very house-proud brother and sister-in-law. It was great to see them, but being in someone else’s territory for any length of time always makes me anxious. The journey to my parents’ flat in St Ives was a long one. Many people were driving home after Christmas, but many others were simply shopping. Consuming. Sometimes we barely moved. A journey of 180 miles took over six hours, including the two short stops we made. At least the road signs in the UK are good. It’s one of those things I took for granted when I lived there, but I now see that they’re brilliantly designed to be read at 70 mph. The little details like the hook on the lower-case ‘l’ that helps make for a friendly, readable font, the yellow route numbers on a green background for A-roads, the calming blue motorway signs, the airport icon that also functions as an arrow: these things all add up. They save lives.


Friday 28th

In the morning I called on some family friends, the couple who came to Romania in 2017 for the road trip we did, and we had a very enjoyable chat. They then came to my parents’ flat in the evening for so-called nibbles (in reality a proper meal). In the middle I went for a walk with Dad around the meadow and back through Hemingford.


Saturday 29th

At 10am we went to my aunt’s place in Earith. It’s been sad to see her world get progressively smaller over the years. She doesn’t have meaningful relationships with either of her children, who are now both in their late forties. She does, however, have a soft spot for both me and my brother, perhaps because we’re harmless. On this occasion she wasn’t too bad, and even in her worst periods she’s always had the knack of making people laugh. We didn’t stay too long. In the afternoon we called into Homebase where my parents spent ages not choosing some wallpaper, and then drove through some villages I hadn’t seen in a couple of decades, such as Abbots Ripton and Woodhurst. We stopped at Broughton and went for a walk there. My brother sent Mum links to properties in St Ives. He’s always felt bitter about my parents moving to New Zealand in 2003, and now that they make regular trips to back to the UK, he senses that they might want to move back permanently. I think that would be very unlikely and a bad move: the UK isn’t a great country to get old in.