Life :) - Other sports

At a Romanian barber shop

April 29, 2026 by 0 Comments

Last night I didn’t bother with the snooker. Earlier to bed. A bit easier to get up in the morning. I spoke to Mum and Dad on Teams before they had dinner, or what we would have called tea.

Yesterday I finally got my hair cut. It had got pretty long and for the previous few weeks I’d had it tied back in a ponytail. The hairdresser, a woman of around sixty, asked me why I hadn’t been for a while. I told her about the headaches. How many doses of the Covid vaccine did you take? Um, three. Well that explains everything. I remarked that there were no other customers. Nobody has any money anymore. We’ve given it all to Ukraine. She then went on about how Romania has gone to the dogs in the last 35 years. So what was it like here in the eighties, I asked. Just wonderful. People had jobs. Look at all the factories we had! Food was so much better, not full of all those E-numbers like it is today. And we all went to the disco. It was fun. I decided to mostly let her talk; she had a weapon in her hand that I preferred her to use only for cutting my hair. Afterwards she showed me some jarred preserves she’d made. In particular, he was keen to show me a jar of bright green stuff. It cures haemorrhoids. I haven’t got haemorrhoids! We both laughed at this point, and she ensured me that it sorted out plenty of other ailments too. It felt pretty good to have rid myself of all that hair.

Yesterday I also went to ask about my car – the place is on the the way to the hairdresser’s – because the “anti-pollution fault” light has been showing on the dashboard for a while and I haven’t a clue what to do about it. I’ll take it in on Monday. I also put a new chain on my bike. That would have been so much easier if I’d had someone else to hold it. In so many ways, the world isn’t made for one.

Snooker. Since Mark Williams’ exit I’ve been sort of zoning in and out. There was a crazy (very long) frame yesterday between John Higgins and Neil Robertson where everything happened – off the table. First Robertson’s chair broke. Then there was a suspiciously loud ah-choo as one of the players was about to play his shot. Then there was a mystery beep. Not a phone. Where is it coming from? The female referee was perplexed. It was in fact someone in a wheelchair with breathing apparatus which beeped when he (she?) got low on oxygen. It couldn’t be turned off. The referee asked the players. Can you cope with the beep or shall we make them leave? The players were hardly going to agree to the latter. There were several protracted ball replacements after fouls. During one of them, the players used the opportunity to visit the loo.

My maths student had the first of her two exams today. She’s given me mixed messages about her performance. Fingers crossed she did OK.

Update: I managed to traumatise my eleven-year-old maths student today by giving her a so-called lightning quiz. Twenty quick mental arithmetic questions to do in five minutes. Her mother got involved and I think I was pretty close to being fired, so to speak. I will come back next week, but there’ll be no lightning quizzes for a while. I felt bad about the whole thing

Last year’s champion Zhao Xintong is out of the snooker, beaten 13-10 by Shaun Murphy in a bit of an upset. The Crucible curse, by which a first-time champion has never defended his title, is still alive and well. Zhao potted three reds in one shot (um, what just happened there?) during his loss to Murphy. Wu Yize is still going strong though. Tomorrow is the start of the semis, played over three days on a single table.

Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports - Scrabble

The big cancel

April 28, 2026 by 0 Comments

Right now I’m shot to shit, mentally and physically. Life has slowed to a crawl. I have just about all the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome or ME. Or long Covid, for that matter, not that I’ve ever knowingly had even short Covid. Terrible sleep, energy levels through the floor, and feeling generally discombobulated (great word) when faced with, well, just about anything. I have found pages online linking migraine attacks and chronic fatigue, but you’ll find pages linking anything to anything if you look hard enough. My hope is that given time I’ll get back to normal, as I did for ten days or so in the early part of this month.

So I’ve been cancelling lessons left, right and centre. I stumbled through my two-hour maths lesson this morning, then had a Zoom call with my uni friend (my brain fog meant that even arranging that meeting felt like a big deal). And that was it for the day. I’d let the three Ms (Matei, Mihaela and Martin) know that I wouldn’t be seeing them. Tomorrow I’m cancelling three sessions out of five. Even doing that is hard, because I can’t immediately think of their names to cancel them, and I feel embarrassed doing it. Paying bills online and shit – jeez. It’s all a massive effort, which is exactly why I’m cancelling all lessons beyond the few I need to give me some human contact and a sense of purpose. I’ve been thinking of those films where someone (usually on their own, but with a cat) ends up living in squalor with piles of unopened red bills and how easy it would be to get like that.

So I watched the snooker this afternoon. John Higgins beat Ronnie O’Sullivan 13-12. A fantastic match and all so improbable: Ronnie made all the early running and led 9-4 and had chances in subsequent frames. At the same time Wu Yize (who was my pick for the tournament before it started) edged past Mark Selby 13-11. My man Mark Williams bowed out. He lost 13-9 to Barry Hawkins. A shame, but Barry is a thoroughly likeable chap, just like most Barrys I’ve met. And gosh, there were some crazy frames in that match, like the one where they spent 15 minutes on just the green, then Williams fluked the pink to win it. They’re just about to start the last session of the second round. Tomorrow the quarter-finals (played over just two days) begin.

Last month O’Sullivan made a 153 break – the highest ever. Bigger than the “maximum” 147. A super-max. Of course it would be him to do it. It takes some very unlikely circumstances to make such a feat even possible. You need a free ball before any reds have been potted – that means being snookered on all 15 reds after your opponent has fouled themselves, which is pretty damn rare.

Talking of records, someone – in fact two people – did a sub-two-hour marathon in London yesterday. That milestone was always the big one to go. And now it’s gone.

Scrabble. This time around the league has been a pain in the arse. I feel like I can’t be bothered with it, like everything else. Saying that, I managed to post a 606-295 win in a game just finished, going out with my fifth bingo. It’s only the second time I’ve scored 600 or more. The problem is I’m losing the close games. One of them was against a very experienced Aussie lady who beat me in a high-scoring encounter, 472-454. I haven’t studied any words for a while now, but I will need to get back to that if I have any intention of playing real-life games.

The maths girl came in Louis Vuitton shoes this morning. Yikes. Maybe they’re fake; I wouldn’t be able to tell. Last week it was Hermès, which I said was pronounced air-mess but is actually air-mez. Those ès-ending French words and names are unpredictable in how (or if) the final s is pronounced. Many have a silent s, like après and succès, but others have the s pronounced as either s or z.

Edit: The evening session at the snooker is about to start. You get some crappy walk-on music sometimes, but some great stuff too like the Automatic’s Monster which Chris Wakelin just came on to. In gaps between frames on Romanian TV there’s an ad for Magnum ice cream which (surprisingly) uses Courtney Barnett’s Pedestrian at Best. I’ve always liked her; she’s a unique artist. Some other interesting songs I’ve heard lately are Pic Pic by Romanian band Voltaj and REM’s Supernatural Superserious.

Update: Getting out of bed has become like inching into cold sea water. Once out of bed this morning, I watched bits of the news and struggled to take it in. I didn’t quite get why there was such shock that the shooting suspect at the Trump event was a mechanical engineer with a master’s degree. An intelligent guy would want to do that?

Oh, and the other Trump lost to Iran last night. Hossein Vafaei beat Judd Trump in a deciding 25th frame. I had to switch it off at 11-all. That was a bit of a shock.

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

What a drag

April 24, 2026 by 0 Comments

Since Saturday I’ve been dragging myself out of bed, or around the supermarket, or off to lessons. It’s all felt like a huge effort. Just like in March, even fairly light physical activity has made me deeply exhale, as if I’m letting off steam. Monday was horrifically bad. Because it was my birthday, more people than usual wanted to communicate with me. I’m not talking a whole lot here, because I just don’t have that many contacts, but it was still far more than I could handle. I was not in a good place mentally that day, or the day after when all the new road works in two different parts of the city totally threw me. I don’t feel I should be driving at all right now. This feels dangerous. And the lessons of course. I’ve kept up a full week of teaching, including maths every day with the girl who has her IGCSE exams next week and the week after. I’m confident that she’ll get at least an A. Maybe even an A-star. She’s bright enough, and her determination is admirable, but it shows you what money can do. On Monday she brought me a box of biscuits for my birthday which was nice. That day, or was it the day after, she was wearing a pair of trainers. Normally she takes off her shoes when she comes in but this time she didn’t. I caught the brand: Hermès. Just imagine. I had half a mind to ask her if she knew how to pronounce it. It’s air-mess, by the way.

Seeing Mark for lunch on Wednesday gave me a slight boost, but it’s still a big struggle. I’m constantly fatigued. To make matters worse, I’ve just about lost my voice. Next week I’m going to cancel a bunch of lessons because that’s the only way I feel I can recover. I’ve never done that before, and when you work for yourself you feel a certain pressure to work whenever you can, but the way I am at the moment that’s a false economy.

Snooker. The second-round matches started yesterday and go through to Monday. The first round was slightly disappointing, though it had its moments. It looked for a while that the second round might be utterly (and depressingly) devoid of qualifiers, but Hossein Vafaei of Iran dismantled Si Jiahui 10-3 in the penultimate first-round match to finish. Just as he did in his last qualifying match, he won the last nine frames. So Iran versus Trump is still on. Vafaei is a colourful character and it certainly makes things more interesting that he’s still there in a sea of British and Chinese players. The most dramatic match I saw was Stan Moody against 2024 champion Kyren Wilson. Moody (born 14/9/06) was playing brilliantly and stood on the verge of an 8-3 lead, but lost seven straight frames, some of them in highly improbable fashion. Mark Williams (born 21/3/75) got through his first match comfortably, 10-4, and his next match starts 90 minutes from now. He plays Barry Hawkins (23/4/79) over the best of 25 frames – three sessions. That’s what’s so great about the snooker. These long, engrossing matches practically warp time and allow you to forget about everything else.

Scrabble. I did avoid relegation, just barely, in the last round. The latest suite of games started yesterday. There are so many Aussies in my division this time. In fact all the divisions have their fair share – I had no idea competitive Scrabble was so big there.

Update: My brother, having been offered that job, has since had to go through various security clearances. The process has been pretty onerous. Mum has even been involved because she has various info relating to his New Zealand citizenship. When I last spoke to Mum, she was really worried. What if the job falls through for him now? Mum looked like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, her already small frame all shrunken up. It would have been really upsetting for us all if he’d missed out after all of this. But I’ve just spoken to her again and it seems everything will be fine.

It’s a bright sunny day here. I’ve just been to get a new watch strap and a block of sheep’s cheese – even doing that is an effort. That stallholder near the dairy market was blasting out Depeche Mode as usual. And now I’m about to sit down and watch Mark Williams until my first lesson starts.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

Just when I thought I was over it…

April 19, 2026 by 0 Comments

I only had one lesson yesterday (from 9 till 10:30 in the morning, with the 25-year-old woman) as the British School kids are still on holiday. And that was just as well: within half an hour of my lesson finishing I had a horrific headache. Pacing, eye shades, lying on the bed, the sofa, ice from the freezer, anything I could do to ease the pain. It didn’t go quickly. At 3pm it eased just a fraction and I tried to eat a bowl of cereal but could only finish half of it. I finally re-entered the world of the living just after four. Conveniently, Mark Williams’ first-round match with Antoni Kowalski started at 4:30. It wasn’t on TV – they had cycling on instead – but I could watch it online. I kept the cycling on (with the sound down) in the background because of the picturesque views of Pontevedra in north-west Spain. The snooker was good. Williams was fortunate to win a protacted second frame and his 6-3 lead at the end of the session flattered him somewhat. They finish their match tonight.

Since then I’ve just been trying to recover and to build up some strength again. This morning – my last morning of being 45 – I sat in the nearby park and read my book. So many dogs. And pigeons. Just two cats. After that I had a Teams call with my aunt and uncle in Geraldine. My uncle, now 84, didn’t talk much, though I had a good chat with my aunt.

Other sports - Politics - Scrabble

Up in the air

April 18, 2026 by 0 Comments

So the Strait of Hormuz is open, maybe, for an indeterminate time, and my parents are coming to Europe next month, maybe, by an indeterminate route. I spoke to them this morning. We discussed the possibility that they get stranded in Europe. Perhaps aviation fuel in Europe will have all run out within a month and the only way I’ll get to see them is if I drive to the UK. A three-day trip.They booked their flights a week or two before war in Iran broke out; there’s no way they’d have booked after.

“I think it’s very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” So says JD Vance, referring to the very first American pope. On one level that’s bloody hilarious. On another level, WTF? I must say I find the way Trump and his gang invoke God to justify thousands of innocent people to be utterly disgusting.

I did get to see a fair bit of those final eight snooker qualifiers on Wednesday. In some ways they were disappointing; six of the matches failed to stretch beyond the 15th frame. Five of them featured Chinese players. Four of them made it, but what drama there was in the match between the fifth Chinese – Xu Si – and Gary Wilson from the north-east of England. Wilson was miles in front at 7-2 and 8-4, but went behind 9-8. At that point he’d basically had it. But he scraped himself up off the floor to win a very tense 50-minute penultimate frame that hinged on an absorbing safety battle on the blue, and then rattled in a century in the decider. The tournament proper starts tomorrow. In the first round, my favourite Mark Williams (who gave me so much excitement last year on his run to the final) plays Antoni Kowalski who I just couldn’t warm to in his interview after he’d qualified.

Scrabble. I’ve finished all my 14 league games, winning half of them but with a negative points differential. Other players are still to finish, and it’s still on a knife-edge as to whether I survive in the division.

We’re having beautiful weather right now. I should be able to make the most of it this weekend, with only one lesson tomorrow. Yesterday I had a super full-on day of lessons, but other than that it’s been pretty light as people are still coming back from Easter.

Life :) - Other sports - Scrabble

Brightening up (and it’s snooker time again)

April 15, 2026 by 0 Comments

I’ve got a cold so I’m sluggish today, though still positively lithe compared to basically the whole of March. On Monday I went over to Sanda’s place where we had some traditional Easter food including painted eggs and cold meats. Her parents, whom I hadn’t met since Christmas 2018, were there. It was great to meet them. Her mother is the same age as my mum, while her father is in his mid-eighties. Sanda’s uncle, with whom I went to Vienna in 2024, was also there. They’re planning a trip to Belgrade in early June. If we go, it will be the same four of us (Dorothy, Sanda, Sanda’s uncle, and me). But it’s likely to coincide with my parents’ stay in Romania, assuming they make it. Sanda has no flexibility around the date, so it makes things awkward. The other three could go without me, but I’m the only one with a car.

Yesterday I benefited from my relative lack of work by watching a few hours of the last qualifying round of the snooker. There were eight first-to-ten-frame matches, played simultaneously, with the winners making it to the Crucible. There’s something soothing about watching snooker even when the stakes are high, as they certainly were yesterday. Some highlights were Hossein Vafaei of Iran who rattled off nine straight frames from 4-1 down to book his place (there may be some jokes if he draws Judd Trump in the first round) and 19-year-old Yorkshireman Stan Moody who beat one of the many Chinese players in a deciding frame. In that final frame, his opponent spent an age over a yellow which he missed, then slammed the table in frustration. That gave Moody all the encouragement he needed as he cleared up with a very impressive century. Matthew Stevens (who missed out dramatically last year) beat Stuart Bingham 10-7. Shame they couldn’t both make it. Another close match was 22-year-old Antoni Kowalski’s 10-8 win over Jamie Jones to become the first-ever Polish player to make it through. But when Kowalski was interviewed by the brilliant Rob Walker after his win, I couldn’t warm to him at all. He struck me as Very Online and very Gen Z (which I’m sure he’d pronounce as zee). Spare a thought for Martin O’Donnell who led 8-2, then 9-4 and 69-0 in the penultimate round of qualifying, only to lose 10-9 to Anthony McGill. There are eight more final qualifiers today, including the one involving comeback king McGill, but I don’t know how much I’ll watch of them. I think I’d rather read, and anyway I’ve got some lessons later.

In some excellent news, a long-term deal has been struck which will keep the World Championships at Sheffield’s Crucible until 2045. The venue will be revamped and 500 seats added. I imagined that in a few years it would be off to China or (even worse) Saudi Arabia, so I was very glad to hear that snooker didn’t decide to sell its soul after all. I’ve wondered whether it might be worth getting tickets one year, to either the qualifiers (which this year are just twelve quid; amazing value) or the main event.

Scrabble. This time I’m battling relegation. It doesn’t feel like I should be, seeing as I’ll most likely finish with seven wins and seven losses, but the promotion and relegation zones are enormous and my relatively poor spread (which acts as a tie-breaker) might sink me. It’ll be close.

The sun is shining, the temperature is perfect for me, there’s less traffic than usual (so I can hear the birds for a change) and most of my flat is no longer a pigsty. And Viktor Orbán got booted out. So there are reasons to be positive.

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Don’t need to cook much this Easter

April 13, 2026 by 0 Comments

It hasn’t been a bad Orthodox Easter weekend. The best part has been only one lesson over the four days. That was with Matei yesterday, on his 18th birthday. I’ve now been teaching him for over half his life, though those days will soon be over – his maths exam is just a few weeks away, and then he’ll almost certainly be off to Germany for uni. I thought about how well adjusted he is at that age compared to how I was.

This morning I went to the park near the cathedral with all the tulips to read my book. I got there on the dot of ten – the cathedral bells were going full-bore – and the place was practically deserted. People would have been up all night for the Easter vigil. I brought a flask of coffee. I hadn’t read for weeks and it was nice to get back into the swing of it.

Piața Operei this morning

Last night Elena (the lady who lives above me) gave me a huge platter of sarmale, drob (very similar to haggis), and various cakes and biscuits. It was like hitting the culinary jackpot. “It’s a pleasure,” she said. Then, in seriousness, “Don’t throw it away”. Why on earth did she think I might throw all that food away? Sanda (someone I met a few years ago but is usually out of the city) has invited me over to her place tomorrow, so I may take some of that food.

Drob

Last week I had two sessions with the 25-year-old woman who has just started a new job. I was lucky to have two evening slots for her. Her job involves hot-desking – having to book a desk via an app every workday – which for me would be the seventh circle of hell. Not that I’d get to work in a place like that at my stage of the game; she said there’s nobody over 35 there. When you get to 35 you age out of those kinds of jobs, and then what? In one of our sessions we discussed AI. I said that for people of her generation, the first thing they do when they have a question is ask AI. She said, no, for me that’s the second thing I do. The first is to ask TikTok. I bet TikTok is largely AI-based anyway. I keep my lessons entirely AI-free to the best of my knowledge. I’m proud of that fact that my teaching materials are produced manually and guess what, I actually enjoy that side of it.

Polls have just closed in Hungary where maybe, just maybe, Viktor Orbán will be ousted after 16 years. The opinion polls point that way, but in a country where the media is basically state-controlled and the elections may not exactly be free and fair, we really have no idea until actual results start coming in.

Some music. Our Mutual Friend by the Divine Comedy. It came out in 2004. What a powerful song. The band’s name comes from Dante’s poem (which is all about circles of hell as I mentioned two paragraphs ago).

Update: With 85% of the votes counted, it’s all over for Orbán. Hooray! He conceded impressively early in the night. Crucially, Péter Magyar’s party will win at least two-thirds of the seats, meaning they will be able to reverse Orbán’s constitutional changes. Magyar’s party has similar policies to Orbán, but he ran on an anti-corruption and pro-EU platform. This is great news for Europe. The fact that JD Vance was trying to get Orbán re-elected shows you that that’s really good news.

I’ve just been reading about Hungary’s joke political party, called the Two-Tailed Dog Party.

Family

10/4/76

April 10, 2026 by 0 Comments

Today is Mum and Dad’s golden wedding anniversary. It’s one thing that they’ve both survived this long, but to have stuck it out together for 50 years is some achievement. When I spoke to them a bit earlier, they’d just been out for a meal in Temuka with my aunt and uncle (the ones who came to Timișoara; today is also my aunt’s birthday) and another aunt of mine who lives on her own – my uncle (another of Mum’s older brothers) died some years ago. Today I’ve been thinking of my grandparents; both sets made it past 50 years of marriage. Mum’s parents had a huge event, such was their enormous extended family. It took place when we were living over there in 1989. Dad’s parents’ golden wedding was in Rhayader in Wales during the 1995 rugby World Cup. My grandad by that point had fairly advanced Alzheimer’s.

Today is Orthodox Good Friday. It’s nice to have a short break from work. This morning I went to Utvin on my bike. It’s great to even be able to do something like that again. There weren’t many people out and about. Plenty of sheep (and lambs) though, and there was the pleasant ribbit of frogs in the river.

The market on Wednesday

I now need to (finally) tackle the living room which is hopelessly untidy.

Family - Maths teaching - Politics - Scrabble

Chickening out but feeling better at last

April 9, 2026 by 0 Comments

Finally! After five weeks, I now feel close to normal. I’m no longer ravaged by headaches and mentally and physically exhausted. What a relief. But let’s see how long I stay like this.

Speaking of relief, I went to bed last night not knowing if World War Three might have broken out by the morning. Last night I wondered, are you able to wager on such an outcome? Sure enough, I found a site called simply ww3.bet that allows you to bet on whether or not WW3 will start by the end of April. The site looks legit, but there are a couple of practical problems with a bet like that. Last night the implied chances of armageddon were around one in six. Crazy, but hardly orders of magnitude from reality. This morning, following the ceasefire, they were one in twenty.

Trump’s TACO Tuesday makes it more likely that I’ll see Mum and Dad in the early summer. Had the US followed through on “wiping out a whole civilisation”, the Gulf states would have likely been obliterated too, and no commercial planes would have gone anywhere in the region for some time. I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. Dad thought that the alliance between Europe and the US was still worth holding onto, while Mum didn’t. I agreed with Mum. While the orange turd is in charge (and quite possibly for some years afterwards), America is enemy territory as far as I’m concerned. The other news I saw this morning (reinforcing my view) showed JD Vance just over the border from me in Hungary, cosying up to Viktor Orbán, trying to sway this weekend’s parliamentary election. Orbán is currently down in the polls. Whether that will translate to the election I have no idea, but let’s hope he gets a shellacking.

Mum and Dad will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary on Friday. A few months ago my brother suggested that we all meet up in the UK and have a big celebration there. When I told him that yeah, that’s a nice idea, but it just wouldn’t fly for several reasons (the biggest of which is that there just aren’t the people in the UK anymore to celebrate with), he thought I was being overly negative. Just this morning, Dad joked that they’ll struggle to handle the sheer number of people at their party. (They did think of taking the TranzAlpine train to the West Coast and back, but found it was ludicrously expensive.)

On Monday my brother called me. He was very upbeat about his new job, as well he might be. He said there were six positions available, and he probably just barely snagged the last of them. His very good degree gave him a shot. (His wife didn’t think the degree would be worth it. Hmmm.) He’ll be working for BAE, which I called “British Aerospace” in my last post. It hasn’t been called that since 2000, so that shows how out of touch I am. His job should pay well and provide excellent job security, which is a rare commodity these days. This is a real boom period for the defence industry. I’m really happy for him.

My bike is now fixed, for the moment at least. This afternoon I had a maths lesson in Aradului with an eleven-year-old girl. I’m facing the same battle with her as with almost all my maths students. I’m coming up against an education system that so emphasises methods and procedures – can you remember how to do this trick which will be almost useless in real life? – when their real problems are (1) an inability to do basic calculations quickly and accurately, and (2) a general inability to problem solve.

The next round of the Scrabble league starts tomorrow. The common word “coating” already has a valid anagram: “cotinga”, which is a bird found in Central and South America. Maybe “tacoing” will have made it in by the next update.

Family - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

Energy desert

April 6, 2026 by 0 Comments

I feel a bit better now, but it’s like I’m travelling through an energy desert, both mentally and physically. Friday, for instance, was close to being a write-off. At one stage I was trying to gee myself up for a lesson when my student messaged me with 18 minutes to go. I’m really tired. Can we have the session on Sunday? What about me? And I prefer to keep Sundays free. But as I’d already scheduled a Sunday afternoon maths session with someone else, I agreed to see him at 9am.

On Saturday I had nine hours of lessons (six sessions: three English and three maths). I dragged myself out of bed for an 8:30 start in Dumbrăvița, wondering how I might cope. I stayed almost headache-free, and I survived, even if began to flag during my final maths lesson. I’ve done a lot of teaching by now, and even when I’m below my best I have my own systems and processes (and experience) to fall back on. The highlight of the day was a maths lesson with a girl who had taken a test on volumes and surface areas the day before. Formulas were still clearly visible on her arm. Did they help you in the test? No, it turns out they were wrong.

Sunday. Not Easter Sunday under the Orthodox calendar, but Palm Sunday. My 9am student failed to show up. Ugh. Dorothy had invited me to church (a 10:30 start) and although I’ve become increasingly anti-religion, I reluctantly accepted. Her church is mostly harmless and even benefits people in the community, especially recent arrivals from African countries. There was a huge congregation including a lot of children. The sermon went on, as expected. After the service a young woman of 18 or so was baptised, which at this church meant getting fully (and dramatically) dunked in a swimming pool. Then there was food. Tons of it. Dorothy is heavily involved and was in her element. I wasn’t. We all had to queue up and I found myself in that dreadful situation where someone in front of you talks to someone behind you and you’re stuck. In general there were too many people and I desperately wanted out. At one point someone sang Happy Birthday for one of the kids. “Wow, it’s someone’s birthday,” I heard someone say. With so many people it would have pretty weird if it hadn’t been anyone’s birthday. I’d mentally budgeted to be home by 1:30. I got home ten minutes after that, relieved that I’d be church free for another eight months. Then Mum and Dad called. I kept it very brief. My maths session was coming up and I couldn’t handle conversation with anybody. I had a nap before my lesson which went fine.

Some news from my brother. It looks like he’s got a job at British Aerospace in Portsmouth. Doing what exactly, I don’t know. Getting that degree must have made a huge difference. (These days you’ve got to have the piece of paper.) I expect I’ll talk to him this week and find out more.

I watched the Artemis II launch on Wednesday night. I happened to be awake at 1am, so I got out my laptop and watched it in bed on YouTube. At that point it was still in doubt. It had an eerie feel about it because all I had was the audio from mission control and I kept looking at that rocket, with four astronauts inside, and thinking, this is horrendously complicated. There are many ways that this could go horribly wrong. So far it’s been a success though, and last night they entered the moon’s gravitational sphere of influence, if I’ve got that right. It’s just a real shame that the four occupants of the spacecraft couldn’t have been Trump, Vance, Hegseth and Rubio, on a one-way trip.

I did speak to Mum and Dad properly this morning. We still have no idea whether they’ll make it to Europe. After “Open the fuckin’ strait”, all bets are off. I reminded Dad of a conversation we had immediately after 9/11. Dad talked about how terrible Bush was. No diplomacy, he said. “Smoke ’em out”? How did he ever become president with language like that. Now when they’re bombing a girl’s school to pieces with God on their side, that all seems so tame. There was no social media back then.

Scrabble. Amazingly I didn’t just get promoted in the latest round of the league, I actually won the division. I had ten wins and three losses; the four players behind me all had nine wins. I drew pretty well, it must be said. That result will put me in division three, starting Thursday. To say I’ve exceeded my expectations would be a massive understatement. I’m now going to be facing even more world-class players who know words that I couldn’t even dream of. I’ll have my hands full for sure.