Family - The UK

Proper Christmas! Part 2 of 4

January 5, 2019 by 0 Comments

Saturday 22nd December

My last two lessons of 2018 were thankfully at home, and with students at vastly different levels. When they were over with, I took the bus to the airport. My plane was delayed by an hour, and it was quite pleasant to hang around in the terminal with the machines selling inexpensive coffee, snacks and even books. The click-clack of the big split-flap display board is pleasing, although the some of the letters get stuck and they’ll probably replace the board with some insipid screen in the not too distant future, if not the entire terminal. The trick with Timișoara airport, as elsewhere, is not to go through security until you have to. On the other side you’re no longer in Romania but in Airportworld, with all those bottles of scented water going for dozens of euros. In Airportworld, they don’t even use Romanian money. The flight to Luton was uneventful, and my parents met me at 10pm. It was lovely to see them, as it always is. The three of us stayed in a relatively cheap hotel near the airport. I heard on the news that Paddy Ashdown, leader of the Lib Dems throughout the nineties, had died. I reckon he would have made a good prime minister.


Sunday 23rd

Dad and I both had colds. For me it was my fourth in a couple of months, but Dad’s was worse. How would he cope with the drive down to Poole? Breakfast at the hotel was excellent, though the dining room was jam-packed with people. My parents had planned to drop in on some friends on the way to Poole, but they were suffering from colds too, so we gave them a miss. As we drove through Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Hampshire, I thought, shit, I couldn’t come back here to live. Get off the M something at junction whatever for yet another soulless dormitory town. Milton Keynes with its endless roundabouts, coded H for horizontal and V for vertical. Too many bloody people. I could see why 17.4 million of them voted to escape this crap (even if their votes will probably just serve to make things even crappier). We wanted a hot drink so pulled into one of the services. At any service station in the UK, you either get Costa or (in this case) Starbucks. We went for the cheaper option, filter coffee, and it was pure poison. It didn’t help that they only had two young staff, who were rushed off their feet. Starbucks: never again. We reached my brother’s place in late afternoon. Their two-storey terraced house is modest, I suppose, but still beyond my wildest dreams. A lot of time and effort had gone into the interior, and it was all looking very Christmassy. They have a cat, named Major Tom but usually just Tom, and four hens that give them more eggs than they know what to do with.


Monday 24th

On Christmas Eve we visited Wimborne, a picturesque town nearby. It was bigger than I imagined, and full of lovely old buildings. We went to Primark after that, so my parents could buy me some clothes. I wish they wouldn’t. We watched the Snowman on TV – it never stops being a wonderful animation – and then it was time for church. Midnight mass was an option, but we attended the 5:30 pm service instead. It lasted 80 minutes, which would be very brisk by Romanian Orthodox standards, but Catholic services are usually shorter, even at Christmas, and people were getting decidedly antsy. We had an unusual reading where 42 generations – who begat whom, ending up at Jesus – were itemised. After church (I wonder when I’ll do that again next) it was time for more TV. Gogglebox. A TV programme about people’s reactions to watching TV. I’d forgotten the cultural importance of TV in Britain, especially around Christmas. And I’d totally forgotten how celeb-obsessed Britain is. One celebrity game show after another, where many of the categories used in the quizzes are celebrity-based themselves. Later that evening we chatted about the sister of an old friend of mine, who has become a semi-famous live artist, comedian, call her what you will. She defies categorisation. We watched her “Fanny Song” on YouTube and my sister-in-law in particular was in stitches.

Family - The UK

Proper Christmas! Part 1 of 4

January 5, 2019 by 0 Comments

My site got hacked (again!), and I’ve just this minute got it unhacked. This is the first part of what happened after that.


Wednesday 19th December

Timișoara was beautiful following the weekend’s snowfall, but the snow had frozen and the roads and pavements were treacherous. I only had a pair of two-hour lessons but getting to both of them was a mission. In the morning I slipped and fell on the ice during the 40-minute trudge to my appointment in the Soarelui area. The lesson wasn’t the easiest either, as my devoutly religious student tried to sniff out my beliefs. “But what does Christmas really mean to you?” In the early afternoon the plumber came over and fixed my hot water – snow had somehow got into the boiler from a duct. He fixed it impressively quickly but I still had no chance of catching the bus to Dumbrăvița for my 92nd lesson with Matei. Or so I thought. Traffic was gridlocked to the point where I managed to catch the bus up just by walking, and I clambered on two stops later. I called Matei’s grandmother to say I’d be pretty late, and that seemed to be fine. I gave him the full two hours. After the lesson I walked 2 km over the border into Timișoara, to the nearest bus stop where buses were still going to and from. I caught up with S in the café where we first met in September, and she wasn’t too bothered that I was seriously late. I gave her a box of biscuits as a Christmas present; she’d earlier given me the Romanian translation of The Little Prince.


Thursday 20th

A much easier day. My only lesson was at the university, a stone’s throw from my flat. My student teaches Romanian and linguistics there. Her surname is Pop, and we went on a whistle-stop tour of English phrasal verbs that feature her name. I’m just popping out to get some milk. A message just popped up on my screen. Pop round whenever you like. My grandmother even used to say, “when I pop off”. Pop is just such a fun word. It probably helped Kellogg’s sell many thousands of extra boxes of Rice Krispies. Just snapping and crackling would never have been enough. (When I think about it, there’s a lot going on there. A trio as in “snap, crackle and pop” is often deadly effective. Spelling “krispies” with a K, which of course is emblematic of Kellogg’s itself, also plays a pretty big role.) In future we’ll hopefully have two-hour sessions, half in English and half in Romanian. A Romanian teacher would be enormously helpful for me.


Friday 21st

After the monthly tram trip to pay my rent in non-Romanian cash, I had two lessons. One was with David, my 11-year-old student. He’s a nice kid, extremely polite, but he has a habit of responding to my questions with “I don’t know”, killing the conversation stone dead. In his room he has a collection of Harry Potter books, and even a photo of him holding one. “So, do you like Harry Potter?” I don’t know. David is an only child (one of many) and there is certainly pressure on him to achieve at school. He’s in the A-stream. Extra maths. Extra Romanian grammar. Lots of questions that have a definite, right and wrong answer. In our previous lesson I asked him what he’d be doing afterwards. “Santa,” I thought he said. What will Santa be doing? No, not Santa. Centre. Centre of excellence. In the Romanian language. All this means that when faced with open-ended questions, he seems afraid to give the wrong answer. He likes games though, and I ensure that those take up almost half of each session. I was getting a bit stressed at the prospect of flying out the next day, and trying to find last-minute Christmas presents in a god-awful shopping mall. That evening I went to the cafeteria in Auchan but when the woman behind the counter insisted on speaking to me in English even after I told her not to, I stormed off.

Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Cold hard facts

December 18, 2018 by 0 Comments

It’s been a bit of a crappy day. At the weekend It was possible I’d have up to five lessons today, but everybody has cancelled. Literally everybody. The weather might have something to do with that. I also have no hot water. The plumber (or handyman) was here for two hours and after speaking to someone on the phone, he fixed it temporarily. Very temporarily.

My parents landed in the UK five days ago, and in another five days I’ll be there. They aren’t enjoying the cold and darkness, least of all Mum. Here in Timișoara we’ve had quite dramatic weather. Snow fell almost constantly for about 36 hours at the weekend, and the city is blanketed. Today I slipped and fell, appropriately outside the skating rink that’s been put up in Piața Libertății.

Outside my window on Saturday night

Some good news is that last week I picked up a bunch of new students and had a busy week: 29½ hours of lessons. It bodes well for 2019. Some of my recent discussions have made me very glad not to have office Christmas parties anymore. One woman of about thirty sought advice from me after getting drunk and stoned at her work do, and finding out that a man of about fifty had supposedly kissed her. She couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t think of much in the way of advice. Um, how about next time try not to get totally off your face at a work function.

Last weekend my body corporate in Wellington had their meeting. At 11pm on Friday I tried and failed to join the discussion on Skype. For some reason the plug-in didn’t work for me. The least bad option appears to be selling the whole block. With the deadline for objections rapidly approaching, last night I sent off my form to QV, contesting the latest hike to the rateable value of my apartment. I included the independent valuation report that we got six months ago, only to find an email this morning telling us NOT (bold and caps) to include it. Whoops.

No Scrabble during the week but I got in seven games over the weekend, winning six. My rating has hit 1400, which I think is hugely flattering. (Average is around 1000, while 1800 is expert level.) In short games I’d be eaten alive. Likewise in games where you lose a turn if you play an invalid word. While my strategy is pretty sound, I still don’t know nearly enough words. Heck, I’ve played fewer than 300 games. One of my opponents at the weekend, also rated 1400-odd, had played 18,000. He was the only player to beat me, although we played a second game which I won.

Four lessons in my diary for tomorrow.

This is from last night’s carol singing in the cathedral


Life :) - Scrabble

Seeing some light

December 9, 2018 by 0 Comments

Last night I had a blissful nine hours of sleep, and finally I can see light at the end of the tunnel. It’s almost like I just have a cold now. This is one of the (few?) downsides of being self-employed: sometimes you get sick. Last year I was “lucky” enough for my illness to coincide perfectly with Christmas (I’d forgotten what that was like until I re-read my blog posts) so it had virtually no impact on my bottom line. This week I’ve got lessons scheduled with four new students, so I really hope I can re-enter the world of the living.

S is staying with her grandparents this weekend. They’re in their mid-to-late nineties, so S clearly has good genes. She said she’d just attended a traditional Christmas pig-cutting, er, event? Ceremony? Exercise? I think I prefer exercise. You can watch several of these exercises on Youtube, such as here. (Look at all the downvotes.) Since S is a vegetarian, I wonder what she thinks of it. My body corporate Skype meeting is on Friday night, so we might push off to Sibiu on Saturday and spend just one night there.

My illness has been terrible for getting out and entering the festive spirit, but good for Scrabble. In addition to the odd occasions I’ve used it as a stress-free educational tool with my students, I’ve played a fair few games online, and mostly I’ve been winning. Learning some high-probability sevens has been a huge help already, but I feel the biggest progress I’ve made has been in scrapping, finding ways to offload awkward tiles, finding less-obvious moves, and making better decisions about what to play and what to keep. I’ve certainly become better at endgames. Yesterday I won eight games out of nine, including three come-from-behind wins in a row. In the last game of the day I stormed out to a 163-point lead thanks to two natural bingos, but my opponent drew both blanks and found two impressive bingos of his own. On multiple occasions I had bingos on my rack with nowhere to play them that I could see, and I became more and more indecisive. I clung on for just a 14-point win. My favourite game was a remarkable one: despite being out-bingoed 3-0, I won 444 to 416, thanks in part to NOVELLA for 52, a double-double that hooked other words. It’s that kind of play that keeps me coming back.

Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Under the weather

December 8, 2018 by 0 Comments

I’ve had eight pretty awful days since I last posted. I should be in Sibiu right now, but when I met S yesterday at a café in her work complex she said, that cough doesn’t sound good, so how about we don’t do this. At least not this weekend. That’s a shame, but it was the only sensible decision. Although I was a bit apprehensive about going there with S, I was quite excited too. It’s a beautiful city after all.

I’ve cancelled only three lessons; my bar for doing that is quite high, probably too high. Last Thursday night, right after my last blog post, was the worst. I hardly slept a wink and by morning I felt extremely feeble. I’d have to bike to my 9am lesson, the temperature outside was well below freezing, and it just wasn’t going to happen. Early this week I started to feel better, but by Wednesday I was running a mild temperature and hacking up all kinds of lurid slime that looked rather the stuff some of my younger students play with. That day I went to the doctor’s surgery, a completely baffling place, especially when you’re sick. You have to see someone to make an appointment, someone else to pay, someone else to do something else… There’s no “Pay here” sign or handy arrows pointing to Dr Smith or Dr Jones. The onus is on me to figure out, or rather guess, where I’m supposed to be. It didn’t help that the lady at the desk kept telling me it was Tuesday, with enough certainly that I believed her, when it was actually Wednesday. Eventually I saw somebody, and that part of the process is nearly always fantastic. I got some drugs, although no antibiotics, and with a bit of luck I’ll be back in business before long.

I’ve tried to simplify my lessons this week. Not too much complex grammar. I’ve certainly played the odd game of Scrabble, using the set I bought in Oxfam in Cambridge which has four of the requisite 100 tiles missing (they spell out LOVE; weird I know). In one game we made DICK and SEX.

After my only lesson today I met up with S again. She told me, no, you really don’t need to get your hair cut. It’s been ten months.

So that’s me. I spoke to my parents this morning on FaceTime. While I chatted to Dad, I could see Mum in the corner of the screen looking far from her best. She’s picked up a cold. “Really I’m fine.” Don’t lie. They’re flying to the UK, with a two-night stopover in Singapore, in little over 24 hours. The “I’m fine” thing, especially on the eve of a flight half-way around the world, is always a bit of a worry.

If we go to Sibiu next weekend, the last chance before I go away for Christmas, it’ll coincide with a fairly important body corporate meeting, or workshop as they’re calling it, in Wellington. They told me I could Skype in. It takes place between 11pm and 1am my time. There’s about as much certainty as to what we’ll end up doing with our apartment block as there is with Brexit.

Life :) - Romania - Scrabble

Centenary celebrations

November 30, 2018 by 0 Comments

One of my students is a chemistry teacher at a very good school called Waldorf (I can’t help but think of the Muppets when I see or hear that word) and she invited me to the school’s celebration of Romania’s centenary, which took place this morning. She gave me precise details about the two buses I needed to take, and stupidly I never looked on a map to see exactly where the place was. If I had, I’d have known it was almost right next to the apartment block of one of my students, and I would have walked or biked there. As it was, I went too far on the first bus (I didn’t realise it was only a five-minute ride) and had to call her. Um, what do I do now? I walked back to the stop I should have got off at, then took the second bus, and I got there just in time, or la țanc (an expression I picked up two weeks ago, meaning “in the nick of time”).

Inside the school, a drummer, one of the older pupils, gave everybody a rousing welcome. My English student led me upstairs into a hall, and a couple of hundred kids, most of them dressed in traditional Romanian attire, formed a spiral. (I didn’t have any clothing along those lines, and was concerned that I’d stand out in jeans and a plain white shirt, but I was fine.) The national anthem was sung. It was a good job the words were projected on a screen: “Deșteaptă-te, române!” is about as far as I get otherwise. The singing, sometimes accompanied by guitars, was lovely. After a video explaining the unification in 1918, some more songs and some readings, we joined hands for a hora, a traditional Romanian dance. I said “Am două picioare stângi” (“I’ve got two left feet”) but I managed, just about. (If you’re uncoordinated, or “unco” as some Kiwis say, you can say in Romanian that you have two left hands.) The kids filed out, to the beat of the drum once more, and I met some of my student’s colleagues, including Bogdan, the history teacher. He was the only man amongst them, although supposedly two other male teachers weren’t in attendance. Downstairs we ate bread covered in pork fat and red onions (some of the traditional food can be interesting) and that was that. In a funny way I felt quite privileged to be there. I could quickly tell that it was a good school; the kids behaved extremely well.

Otherwise things haven’t been so great: I’ve picked up a cold once again. Let’s hope it passes reasonably quickly. I spoke to Dad last night; he’s been having a terrible time with migraines. He said the only saving grace was the interminable spell of rain, which would have put the kibosh on a lot of activities, migraine or not.

The 100th anniversary of the unification is on 1st December, the day after tomorrow. The market stalls are all up in the square; they’ve been painted white unlike the last two years. Tomorrow they’ll be up and running, with the pleasant waft of chimney cakes and mulled wine. Outside my window is a sea of blue, yellow and red. I doubt I’ll see the parade because I’ll be working on Saturday, but I should get to see the lights being switched on and the fireworks, which last year weren’t until 11pm.

On Tuesday morning S and I had a text conversation while I was at Piața Badea Cârțan, the big market. She said, isn’t it wonderful that your job allows you to start the day in a marketplace among the vegetables and cheeses, and I said, yes it absolutely is. I’m certain that the fundamental change in lifestyle has been hugely beneficial to my wellbeing. I’m a different man. (Heck, I sure look like a different man. It’s nine months since I had a haircut.) It would take a helluva lot for me to go back.

Scrabble. I’ve played four games in the last 24 hours. Last night I started with a shocker. I couldn’t get anything going at all. Just one of those games, and I went down in a heap, 283 to 418. My opponent played extremely well; she seemed to actually know words. Perhaps that’s what happens when you’ve played 9000 games. The next game went considerably better: I found an early bingo, my opponent hit back with two of his own but I made RITZ for 69 and that was enough for an 83-point win. I had TOASTER on my (toast) rack towards the end, but I couldn’t find anywhere for it. After the game I realised that of course it has an anagram, ROTATES, that would have gone down. Everything seemed to go right for me in game three. Four bingos and a 536-332 win, just four points off my record game score, which happened way back last New Year’s Eve. I’ve played one more game (so far) today, a 390-all draw. After an early bingo I held a three-figure lead, but my opponent slapped down a trio of bonuses. I continued to score well, without seeming anywhere near another bingo, and I still had my nose in front as we entered the endgame, but my opponent put down EXEC (which I hadn’t seen) for 45 and I was perhaps fortunate to have an out-play that allowed me to escape with a draw.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Unashamed

November 26, 2018 by 0 Comments

When I met up with S on Friday I felt pissed off: my work day had been just about wiped out by last-minute cancellations. I asked her if she could help me write a short contract to give my students, starting in the new year. I knew what to say; she just needed to ensure that the Romanian was right. “Pay for lessons in advance, in blocks of five. If you cancel within 24 hours or don’t show up at all, that counts as a lesson. End of.” But a bit more politely. S surprised me by saying that a contract might not be such a good idea. Romanians are unashamedly late and unreliable; perhaps I just need to get used to that. Hmmm. It’s hard, because where I come from, cancelling an appointment half an hour before the start because you’re “not in the mood” (yes, I’ve had that) is laughably bad form. This weekend I took stock of what S said, and realised that my cancellations are running at the same 15% or so that they always have – it’s just felt as though I’ve had more recently because they’ve come in flurries. And heck, when I came here I didn’t know whether me teaching idea would even be viable. It certainly has been. I’ll finish 2018 with more contact hours than a schoolteacher would get in a year.

On a not totally dissimilar theme, today there was a blessing at the yet-to-be-completed monster cathedral in Bucharest. I saw the half-finished monstrosity when I visited two years ago. The final bill will be something like £100 million. In such a poor country it’s an enormous, and very sad, waste of public money.

More positively, buildings are being renovated all the time in Timișoara. There are a lot of them, and limited funds, so it will take a while. Today I saw this beautifully restored building near Piața Unirii. The picture doesn’t quite do justice to it. It’s on quite a narrow street; this was as much of it as I could get in the frame without doing anything fancy.

Today I sold my bike. That was my first bike, which I bought in March. I put it on OLX (Romania’s equivalent of TradeMe) this morning and within 2½ hours it was off my hands. I got the same 200 lei I paid for it, although I had to cough up a 20 lei fee. That’s a pretty good outcome.

Scrabble. I’m trying to learn some seven-letter words, which are extremely important for bingos. Eights are equally useful, and very occasionally you’ll even play a longer bingo. One of those occasions for me was yesterday – the nine-letter MENTIONER, through TI, as a 94-point double-double. That’s one of my best plays to date. Anyway, the sevens. Some people prefer to study alphagrams – seven-letter strings in alphabetical order, which they can map onto the correct word, such as ABEITUX for BAUXITE. This seems a terrible way for me to study. My brain doesn’t work like that. So instead I’ve been studying six-letter “stems” made up of common letters, such as ORNATE, and then coming up with mnemonics for the letters that combine with the stem to produce valid words. For instance, the mnemonic I use for ORNATE is “I’d pinch curving bums”. Any of the letters in that phrase can be added to ORNATE to give a valid seven. The first letter (alphabetically) is B, and that combines to make BARONET and the rather obscure REBOANT. Add C and you get ENACTOR. Adding D will give you TORNADE, which is another word for tornado. (Ashburton had a pretty impressive tornade last week.) The next is G, which makes NEGATOR. And so on, up to V, which gives VENATOR. I had to find a method that was an least vaguely interesting, or else I’d give up.

Three lessons scheduled (!) for tomorrow.

Language learning - Life :) - Scrabble

Apprehension

November 23, 2018 by 0 Comments

I haven’t written for a while. I just haven’t had a whole heap of news. Last week somebody flicked the big black switch marked “WINTER”; it was going to happen eventually. Now the wooden sheds are being put up in the square in preparation for the Christmas market. Everything is now coming around for me for a third time. S and I decided to see Sibiu’s world-famous-in-Romania Christmas market the weekend after the centenary celebrations. We’ll head over there on Friday 7th December – two weeks tomorrow – and come back on the Sunday. I must admit I’m quite apprehensive about spending a whole weekend with S. Although come to think of it, I’d be apprehensive about spending a whole weekend with almost anyone.

Last weekend S and I wandered around the area just on the other side of the river from where I live. We stared at and talked about the beautiful buildings – she knew some of their history – and ended up in Scârț, the fantastically bohemian bar with all the communist memorabilia on the walls. As S said, Romania has got to stage where it feels it take the piss (just a little) out of its communist past. When I got back home my sinuses flared up, and I suffered two hours of horrific pain. Even when the pain had subsided I felt knocked for six, and the next day I wanted to do absolutely nothing. Unfortunately I’d sort of committed myself to seeing Fantastic Beasts 2, the ninth or tenth (or whatever) Harry Potter film. Not my cup of tea even if I was feeling 100%, but we saw it in 3D, and that made it kind of fun. The best part was getting to speak some Romanian on the way there and back.

I speak Romanian whenever I can, except with S, because her English is that ridiculously good (she hates me telling her that). I will insist that we speak Romanian for at least part of the trip. You might think I’d be almost fluent by now, but I’m an awful long way from that. My student at the university asked me how I’d say simple phrases like “She washed her car” and “The film we saw last week”, and I felt all at sea, because of the pronouns which are still a mess in my mind. “The big blue building was destroyed in the war” or “The weather will be foggy tomorrow” pose no such problems.

I’ve played four games of Scrabble this evening, winning three, despite being out-bingoed 5-4 over the four games. In the last game my opponent played strangely, seemingly fishing on every non-bingo turn. He played two bingos, but I might still have won without the solitary bingo I found late in the game. As well as playing, I’m trying to study seven-letter words. In my next post I might describe how I’m trying to learn them.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Heavy stuff

November 12, 2018 by 0 Comments

On Friday night I picked up a cold. Again. It’s not a lot of fun. Last night S invited me to see Luna Amară (Bitter Moon), a rock band from Cluj that have been around a while, at a venue called Capcana (The Trap), only a ten-minute walk from here. I didn’t expect her to have two female companions, and that totally threw me. They communicated in that way that some people do here, mixing English words into otherwise Romanian sentences, because they think it makes them sound so damn sophisticated. It gives them an air of superiority over those who don’t know enough English to be able to do it. For me, a native English speaker who takes words fairly seriously, this kind of speech is at best comical and at worst extremely jarring. We arrived at eight, but the band didn’t start playing till ten. The crowd, who weren’t that young, were restless by that stage. The band weren’t young either, but they certainly put their heart and soul into it. At times I thought the frontman might burst a blood vessel. About 20% of the music was beautiful; the rest was heavy, headbanging stuff. S, it turns out, is a headbanger. For me it was an experience, and what’s the point of living in Romania if I don’t experience things, but I breathed I sigh of relief at around 11:30 when it was all over and I could go home. I wonder what S thought of me.

Today I haven’t felt like doing much at all. Eight games of Scrabble – six wins, two losses – might have been the highlight. I won the first five games to extend my winning streak and reach my highest rating yet, which seemed slightly inflated. The run came to an end with a fantastic game in which my opponent got off to a flying start and played very well throughout as far as I could see. I did my best to claw my way back, and towards the end I was in position to slap down SHOREmAN for what would probably have been a game-winning bingo, but my opponent blocked it and in the end I fell 46 points short. The next game was one of those horror shows that I experience from time to time. Getting stuck with a Q and nowhere to play it, being sure I had 24 bingos on my rack (containing a blank) but being unable to find any of them, and at times seeing absolutely nowhere to play. My total was abysmal as I went down 260 to 394. In the final game I drew both blanks on my opening rack and immediately bingoed, and later drew all four S’s, but only scraped home by 15 points.

I taught 28 hours last week. In some of my lessons with kids I saw both spoilt-brat syndrome and pushy-parent syndrome, simultaneously. A funny moment came with Matei, my ten-year-old student. I asked him to answer a series of “What if…?” questions, one of which was “What would you say if you could address the whole world?” Matei simply said, “Donald Trump sucks.” My lessons with adults were generally enjoyable.

Mum has been on a golfing weekend in Alexandra. That gave me the rare opportunity to talk to Dad. We talked for more than an hour. He told me how it really is. Mum gets wound up by certain people at the golf club, as she did at school in the UK, as she does pretty much wherever she goes. She’s unable to just let it all wash over her or take a back seat; she must get fully involved. Apparently the looming golf trip (and having to be with those people) dominated their recent trip to Moeraki and made the whole thing miserable. Then last week Dad received a final bill for the MG that he’s having restored. The figure was less than Dad expected and he thought Mum would be pleased when he showed it to her. Au contraire. Last week Geraldine had a decent fall of snow. In November. He showed me the mountains covered in the white stuff when we spoke on FaceTime. Timișoara has continued to be bathed in sunshine. Weather, like so much else in the second decade of the 21st century, has ceased to make sense.

Talking of bills, I did a double take last night when I saw the rateable value on my near-worthless Wellington apartment had risen by nearly 50%! You couldn’t make this shit up. I’ll have to appeal or do something.

Anybody reading this blog – and I know there are many thousands of you out there – please read this article from last weekend’s Mail on Sunday. Especially if you have any experience in dealing with autism. It’s horrific and will probably make you angry as it did me, but it gives you some idea of what a shitshow the treatment of mental health problems has become in the UK.

Films

Phew…

November 7, 2018 by 0 Comments

When I switched on Romanian TV this morning and saw that the Democrats had taken control of the House after all, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I was awake at 3am for some reason, and I had a look at Fivethirtyeight’s live blog. For the midterms, the site has been expressing probabilities using fractions rather than percentages, to stop people from freaking out over small changes of a percentage point or less. But on election night itself that didn’t work: the Democrats’ House probability plummeted from 11-in-12 to 2-in-5 in just 20 minutes. Full freak-out mode, in other words. Shit, Trump is going to carry on unchecked, and with the Republicans’ majority in the Senate boosted, they’ll probably get that health care bill through now, which will hurt and kill people. At that point, a tweet from Nate Silver was posted on the live blog, saying that the election night model was too sensative to early results, which were probably from rural areas that generally skew red. When I switched off my laptop I still feared the worst. In the end it isn’t the blue wave that some were predicting, and the American electoral system is so awful that all outcomes are somewhat depressing, but at least it’s a start. The most pleasing aspect was the turnout: the highest in the midterms for half a century, even if it’s still terrible by British or New Zealand (but not Romanian) standards.

Plenty of work again, in what it is yet another week of beautiful weather. Yesterday I had five lessons, including a slightly strange one last night: my student who is in his early forties and was born and bred in Timișoara said he hated the city. My views are quite the opposite. All the beautiful buildings, all the parks and green spaces, all the markets brimming with produce and life, all the trams clattering by. None of it is perfect, but I think I like that. Timișoara is a bit mad, a bit random, full of seams and fuzzy edges, at least once you get outside the god-awful central-Auckland-like angularity of Iulius Mall and its environs. And my job allows me to really be part of Timișoara. Right now I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else. (Of course if I’d been here all my life, I might feel different.)

Bohemian Rhapsody. Yes, the film was awesome. God, what an amazing band Queen were. Such talent across the board. What a fertile mind Freddie Mercury must have had. But after the film I couldn’t help but think how mainstream music has become such unbearably crap. It’s almost all meaningless pap. Last night I used Queen’s Bicycle Race in one of my lesson; he’s a keen biker and I’d spent a good deal of my day on a bike, so it seemed a good choice.