Politics

Life :) - Politics - Tennis

Total tennis

September 29, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today I watched a 15-minute YouTube video of largely abandoned small-town Mississippi – deep Trump country, surely – by TheDailyWoo. The commentator is amusing and has such attention to detail. So much of his video was sad but strangely beautiful. It’s one of a series – I also saw the Alabama one.

The New York Times dropped a bombshell by revealing that Trump had only paid $750 a year in taxes. I’m doubt this will shift many votes at all, but it keeps Trump in the news for all the wrong reasons, eating up the clock. There’s still time, of course, but unless the polls are systematically wrong, stagnating is no good for him.

Tennis. On Saturday we a storm in the afternoon, and even though it had passed by the time we were due to play, the courts were unplayable. Yesterday’s action went off without a hitch, though. I played men’s doubles, with the 85-year-old man on the other side of the net. He was incredibly lithe in the set we played. (I do alter my play to take account of his age, but not too much.) We led 5-3 and had three non-consecutive set points on my partner’s serve, but couldn’t close it out. At 5-5 we played a tie-break, because someone was waiting, and got taken apart 7-0 in the shoot-out. The senior among us shuffled off the court a winner, and was replaced by someone a bit younger. I kept the same partner. Again we led 5-3, and having lost my two previous service games easily, this time it was my turn to serve for the set. After numerous long rallies, as long as I’ve seen on TV the last two days, plus a double fault on set point, we got there on at least our fifth opportunity as the light was fading.

How weird it is to see the French Open being played in autumn with a bemasked skeleton crowd, but what I’ve seen so far has been utterly absorbing. Pure attritional, cat-and-mouse, clay-court tennis. Best of all, there are still no final-set tie-breaks at Roland Garros, and we’ve already seen some gargantuan, logic-defying matches, with scores into the teens in the fifth set despite many service breaks. Last night I saw the end of a match between two Argentines – Londero and Delbonis, which finished 14-12 in Londero’s favour in the final set. Londero served for the match five times and saved a match point. I thought it wouldn’t get nuttier than that, but tonight we had Colentin Moutet, a left-handed Frenchman, against Lorenzo Giustino of Italy. I thought Moutet would win – he looked the fitter and more composed of the two – and he served for the match three times, once getting to 30-0. But somehow the match refused to end. It was both gripping and draining to watch, and heaven knows what it must have been like for the players. Giustino really swung at everything on the return games and was the winner in the end, by the ludicrous score of 18-16 in the fifth, after six hours and five minutes over two days, despite being dominated for large chunks of the match. Giustino came through qualifying, so even if he totally crashes in the next round, this will be a useful payday for him.

At the weekend we had the Hungarian festival, which is always fun. It was smaller than usual, for obvious reasons. I got myself a bottle of Csiki Sör (pronounced “cheeky sherr”), the rather fruity Hungarian beer. It’s cool as hell honestly to live in a place where you see all these weird and wonderful languages.

Timișoara has a new mayor. Nicolae Robu, the distinctive-looking mayor of the last eight years is out, and Dominic Fritz (who sounds like a tennis player; he’s of German origin) is in. My students had told me that Robu was an overwhelming favourite to be re-elected, but it wasn’t even close. Robu got 30% of the vote, Fritz 53%.

Maybe it was that song Omaha by Counting Crows that told my brain I should be playing some form of Omaha poker.

Family - Life :) - Politics

Really hope I don’t get hooked again

September 28, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Work is certainly picking up. Last week I had six early starts. The switch to mainly online teaching means I’ve now got students from around the country – Bucharest, Maramureș, Brașov – and beyond (one in Austria, one in Spain). One of the week’s highlights was when a boy showed me his flight simulator during our online lesson. It replicated the real-time weather conditions wherever in the world you happened to be. I asked him to go to Queenstown in New Zealand – he took off from there in the middle of the night, when I hoped instead he would try and land there (not the easiest of tasks). In another lesson I taught the time. When I asked him to tell me the current time, he told me his watch wasn’t working. You’re not getting away with that one, mate. And anyway, the cathedral clock is in full view.

Coronavirus had plateaued (what a weird-looking word) in Romania, but it’s heading back up again. Several European countries, such as Spain and France, and increasingly the UK, are having a tough time of it. Another particularly bad place is Israel. I was talking to my Wellington-based cousin this morning, and she said that many Orthodox Jews simply don’t believe in the pandemic. We had a good chat. Her eldest boy will be 18 next month – he’s two days too young to vote in the upcoming election, unless (and let’s hope not) Covid postpones it again. He plans to study at Canterbury, which is where his parents met. (They both have PhDs from there.) It’s amazing how time flies. I continue to be envious of New Zealanders and their near-total lack of virus. Flu and other respiratory illnesses were almost nonexistent over the winter. Strangely there has also been a huge downturn in premature births.

I went to the doctor on Friday to stock up on antidepressants. He had a very obese assistant who I’d never seen before. This bloke tested my oxygen saturation, which once again was fine. I asked about flu jabs, and I should be able to get one next month relatively cheaply and painlessly. This afternoon my aunt called me. She’d just been put on a new antidepressant that I’d never heard of, and it seems to be working.

I don’t know what prompted me to fire up Poker Stars again, but last week I decided to install the latest software and play a bit of no-limit Omaha hi-lo, just for play money. Back in the day I never quite mastered it. Just for fun I did two laps around a play-money badugi table. God, I could see why that game was so addictive for me. That feeling when you hit your draw, and the adrenalin rush of running a pat bluff. You really couldn’t beat it. (It helped that I was a winning player.) These days the player pool is much smaller, and I doubt it would be worth depositing and playing for real money again, when there are better things to do with my time. Part of the fun right now is that the interface is all in Romanian, so you get all the weird and wonderful translations of poker terms. A flush is simply a “colour”. A straight is a chintă, which I’m pretty sure comes from the French quinte. A king isn’t called a king (that would be rege), but popă. There are even strange names for the numbered cards. Romanian for seven is șapte, but in cards it’s called șeptar. Ten isn’t the usual zece, it’s decar. And so on.

The US election. Just over five weeks to go. Biden could crash in the debates. He could get Covid. All the economic figures between now and 3rd November could be bloody marvellous. The polls could be polling all the wrong people. The chips could just happen to fall in all the right places, so that Trump loses by five million votes and still claims an Electoral College victory, perhaps via the Supreme Court. But right now, Trump is losing.

Politics - Tennis

Social surprise

September 21, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve played tennis twice this weekend. To be honest, I do get slightly bored with playing exclusively doubles – I enjoy the physical challenge of singles and I’m better at it – but it’s certainly preferable to the alternative, which is no tennis at all. Last night they asked if I wanted to go to the pub with them after our games. I don’t like social surprises, and my first instinct, as it often is, was “no”. Where even is this pub? I went home, got a bite to eat, and joined them at the place beside the river where I sometimes go with Bogdan. I wasn’t allowed to squeeze onto their table – Covid makes squeezing a no-no – so we had to sit on two tables. I enjoyed the chat, especially with the wife of perhaps the best player among us. She described me as “nonconformist”. I usually find talking with older people – they were all older than me – more interesting than talking with younger people who can be rather superficial. Big generalisation, but people who lived under a different regime seem to have more interesting things to say.

Last weekend our game became almost secondary as people were following the final of the WTA tournament in Istanbul between Patricia Țig and Eugenie Bouchard, which was on a knife-edge. Țig saw three match points come and go at 5-3 in the final set, then three more at 6-5. She got there in the tie-break, on her eighth match point, for her first WTA title. This afternoon Simona Halep was a bit fortunate to get over the line in her semi-final with Garbiñe Muguruza; Halep led 6-3 4-6 5-1, then Muguruza came back to within one game, only to play an error-strewn service game (including double faults on the last two points) to hand Halep a close win.

This morning I spoke to my brother and my parents. Mum and Dad talked about the cannabis referendum in New Zealand. Mum will be voting against legalisation. (No surprise there. It’s a drug. Drugs are bad. If you legalise the drug, more people will take it. That’s just obvious. And it’s bad. And it will lead people on to other, even worse drugs. And that’s really bad.) I was surprised that Dad might vote against too, though he was undecided. For me, legalisation is a complete no-brainer. Loads of Kiwis smoke weed, and will smoke weed, legal or not. And it’s uncontrolled. (The fact that it’s illegal and uncontrolled is part of the attraction for young people.) Legalise it, and suddenly it’s regulated and taxed and boring. The strength will be limited. Police time and money will be diverted into things that actually matter, like violent crime, which marijuana almost never causes (unlike alcohol, of course). The proposed change is hardly a free-for-all – the legal age will be 20, higher than for alcohol which is far more dangerous. You’ll be allowed to possess half an ounce or grow a couple of plants. That’s it. And it will still most definitely be illegal to drive or operate machinery under the influence of weed. (That side of things needs to be beefed up a bit, I’d say.) I expect the bill will fail narrowly – the polls are close, but older people, who are mostly against it, are more likely to vote.

Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice, died on Friday night aged 87. Because this very old lady didn’t survive a few more weeks, the Republicans now have the chance to fill the vacancy with somebody who is likely to kill the Affordable Care Act. And kill people. Trump might now benefit from people’s attention being off coronavirus. The Republican party, and the whole American political system, really need to burn to the ground.

Family - Language teaching - New Zealand - Politics

Missing NZ (and more US election talk)

September 9, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

The guy in Austria just cancelled his lesson 45 minutes before we were due to start. No sorry or anything. He’s a nice bloke and we have productive lessons, but when it comes to reliability he’s becoming a pain in the butt. The lessons with the woman in the north of Romania – we have two a week – are going well. My Romanian has improved to a point where I can handle beginner students, even online.

I spoke to Mum and Dad yesterday. They were about to head off to Moeraki for three days. I miss them a lot. I even miss the journey down there from Geraldine, through Oamaru and perhaps a stop at Kakanui, seeing penguins and seals, going to the pub there, and maybe getting fish and chips in Hampden or on the way back. It would be great to visit Central Otago again. I went there with my parents in 2014 – it’s quite a magical part of the country. Mum says we’re unlikely to meet before 2022, no matter what side of the world that happens to be.

Yesterday Dad said that America could enter a civil war if Trump is re-elected. Crunch time is approaching. Every poll of the country or a swing state is being met with delight or despair from the sorts of people who follow these things. And then there’s the geeky (but important) analysis. Is it a partisan poll? What is the margin of error? Does the pollster weight for education? (This was a big problem in 2016. Educated people are more likely to respond to polls. They are also more likely to vote Democratic. Four years ago, most pollsters didn’t take this into account, so their samples were skewed a couple of points to the left of the nation.) Yesterday a Florida poll showing Trump and Biden tied 48-48 got a lot of attention. Florida is a huge state. It has bucketloads of electoral votes (29) and tends to march to the beat of its own weird drum. The large Cuban population tend to lean Republican. It’ll be one of the first states to report on election night, so we’ll get a good idea of how the election will pan out (perhaps days or weeks later) by watching the Florida returns. Pennsylvania (20 votes) is also of massive importance.

It’s totally crazy that states allocate all their electoral votes to the winner, no matter how close the vote is. (See Florida – again – in 2000.) Or, at least, 48 states do. The two exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, where two votes are given to the statewide winner, and one to the winner of each congressional district, of which Maine has two and Nebraska three. This could be crucial in one of Nebraska’s congressional districts, centred on Omaha, the biggest city. It’s much more Democratic than the state as a whole, and there are non-crazy scenarios where that single electoral vote could put the Dems over the top, 270-268. (Although if it’s that close, prepare for court cases and frankly dangerous behaviour from Trump.) As for Omaha, there’s a lovely song by Counting Crows called Omaha. Released in the mid-nineties, it evokes a simpler time.

There’s plenty of Brexit news again. The government are just being extremely irresponsible now. There’s not much else to say, except for I didn’t vote for this.

We’re having beautiful, and quite hot, weather. There’s a string of temperatures in the low 30s stretching out as far as the forecast goes.

Politics

Ten percent?! (Some thoughts on the US election)

September 5, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I arrived in Romania just before the last US election – I watched the results come through while I was staying in that hotel room on the other side of the river – and we’re now in the last two months before the next election. Jeez, have I really been in Romania all that time? Almost ten percent of my life? That’s nuts.

So who’s going to win? Most people are saying Trump, either because they are part of his cult and according to them he’s the best!!! – a winner!!!, or because 2016 is still etched firmly in their minds and they fear the worst. They’re going with their gut, and maybe their gut will be right. Those who are more dispassionate, and look at the numbers, are making Biden the favourite. He’s in better shape in the polls than Hillary Clinton, who (and people forget this) only just lost.

There’s not that long to go now – early voting has already started in some states – and Biden’s national polling is good. A ton of polls were reported on Wednesday and they were mostly favourable for him. He’s up by a smidgen over seven points, and the race has been stable. That’s because it’s largely a referendum on Trump, and people’s opinions on Trump are just about set in stone. If it were a referendum, decided by the popular vote, Biden would be an enormous favourite. But of course it ain’t, and the state polling is about three points closer. Biden could easily win the popular vote by more than the 3.9% margin Obama had in 2012 – which isn’t even that close – and still lose the election. What a ridiculous system.

The thing about Trump is that he’s stooped to such depths so many times that nobody bats an eyelid anymore. Encourage people to vote twice? Call soldiers who died in WW1 “losers” and “suckers”? With a normal, half-way human president, those comments would be scandalous – let’s face it, they’re both obscene – but with Trump you just add them to the pile.

The debates are still to come. The economic situation could well improve a bit. Coronavirus might not be as bad by early November, or perhaps more likely, people will have got used to it being bad. Perhaps Trump will announce a vaccine or miracle cure on 1st November. There might even be a James Comey–style bombshell in the final days. All of these things could change the race, or not. (It’s crazy that we’re even talking in these terms about someone who has been worse than useless in dealing with a pandemic that has killed about 190,000 Americans, but here we are.)

The Democrats have raised boatloads of money, and they seem to be spending it more wisely in the swing states than four years ago. They’re leaving nothing to chance. But still, Trump could be re-elected. For all the talk of the election being rigged, if Trump does get back in I’m guessing the deciding factor will be the Democrats’ inability to find someone younger and more dynamic, while still being perfectly “electable”. Literally nobody in that mould – out of about two dozen candidates – ran for the nomination. Biden is probably their best shot.

That pigeon laid a second egg in that cubby hole in the wall of my apartment. If I get really hungry…

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

No going back

August 30, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Right at the end of August, we’re hitting the mid-30s. Hot, soporific weather. At the same time, people in the UK are firing up their central heating.

This summer I’ve been eating a healthy diet. Tons of fruit and vege, mostly from the local produce market – the best market – and very little processed food. And I’ve been exercising more. Those 26 km round trips on my bike to Sânmihaiu Român – where I can read a book in the park and listen to the birds – are helping me shift some of my burtă (tummy). I’d like to get below 75 kilos. I’ve also ordered some second-hand clothes from Ebay – smarter stuff but stuff that’s still me.

It’s six months since the Covid freak-out started – did people even call it Covid then? – and two-thirds of the year is now in the rear-view mirror. It’s therefore just four months until the Brexit transition period expires. I really really hope all my pre-Brexit papers can be converted and I can stay here. Timișoara has been life-changing for me. Timișoara is my life now. Then if the Wellington sale goes through I can maybe look at buying a place here with a dedicated space for teaching, setting up an actual business, getting myself a car, and really building something. Perhaps – who knows? – even a relationship.

I had a busy first half of last week, and it’s amazing what that did to my mood. On Monday I started online lessons with a 41-year-old woman who lives in a place called Negrești Oaș near Baia Mare (which I visited in 2017). She’s at a fairly low level – no more than 3 on my 0-to-10 scale – and WhatsApp lessons with her were no easy task. Tomorrow we’ll be switching to Zoom. Without an easy way of sharing documents, we’re both pretty much hamstrung.

At the market on Wednesday I was still thinking about the world I used to live in. The ego-driven meetings, the desk moves, the restructures, the pretending to care, the slinking into the background to cope, the barrenness of each day, the futility of it all. How could I go back to that? For any sum of money? (And in 2011, I did go back after a much shorter time away, and the money was good, but I was like a fish out of water.) Now I get the sights and smells and sounds of the markets and the grandmothers and Simon Says and the Formula 1 game and the handmade cards and it’s all more real, more raw, more colourful, more mad. If I went back I doubt I’d even survive.

So much is going on in America, and very little of it is good. Fires in California, a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast, a man shot seven times in the back and the dreadful aftermath of all that. And of course Covid-19, which is still killing about 1000 a day. The official death toll will likely hit 200,000 in the middle of next month. With all of this, and Trump’s failure to even acknowledge most of that, the vile man still has a shot at re-election. I found an free-to-enter online prediction game, open to anyone with a Twitter account (I have one, even though I hate social media), where the organiser has stumped up prizes for the top three predictors. I picked a very narrow electoral college victory for Trump combined with roughly a three-point popular vote win for Biden. I very much hope I’m wrong.

Coronavirus - Politics

Can’t see a way out for the UK

August 13, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

They said it was a case of when, not if, and New Zealand now has community transmission of Covid for the first time in over 100 days. Auckland is back under a fairly strict lockdown. If the last five months are any indication, they’ll stamp out this latest outbreak pretty sharpish. Heaven forbid Auckland ends up like Melbourne, or Romania for that matter. Heck, if we took the same attitude to Covid that NZ has, we’d be bolted down right now. Hermetically sealed. On Tuesday night one of my students decided to turn up sick to his lesson. We shook hands when he arrived, then he immediately said he wasn’t feeling well and could we cancel? My first feeling was one of sympathy for him being ill – he’s a nice guy – but then, shit, what if he’s got the virus? Why didn’t he just stay at home?

Joe Biden has picked his running mate, Kamala Harris. The sensible pick, I’d say. I’m not sure how I should pronounce her first name. I’ve heard Americans say it’s comma + la, but I don’t pronounce comma anything like how Americans do. My best option I think is to say the beginning of the name like how I say calm, so I end up with /ˈkɑːmələ/. It’s an interesting name, with those three consecutive consonants alphabetically (albeit out of order) alternating with three identical vowels. It reminds me a bit of the common Hungarian surname Kelemen – four consonants in alphabetical order, with the same vowel three times in between. Relatedly, someone once created the word kelemenopy from KLMNOP, the six letters in the middle of the alphabet, defining it as a period in the middle of something when not a lot happens. There’s also the New Zealand band Elemeno P.

Fivethirtyeight came out with their election forecast yesterday. They made Biden a 71% favourite. Only 71%, after the practically flawless way Biden has campaigned so far and Trump’s utter eff-up on coronavirus and just about everything else. They’re saying that Trump’s chances are the same as the probability that a random date on the calendar is in the weekend, or the chance that a random point on the earth’s surface is on land. Or that Biden is marginally less likely to win than my dad was to see out the next year after his cancer diagnosis. In other words, because we live in such uncertain times and there still nearly three months until election day, this thing is far from over. And the odds don’t even take possible cheating into account.

But, in the US you can see a path. A long and treacherous one, but a path nonetheless. There’s the sense that the Democrats are building something that people can get behind. It’s possible that they take the senate, that Harris or some other Democrat wins in 2024, that the country enters a long period of positive leadership, of inclusion, of reduced partisanship. It’s possible. Even if Trump wins, which would be a huge setback, the path wouldn’t necessarily disappear. This is different to the UK, where I can’t see the path at all. It might be there, but it isn’t on any map. I see hatred, bile, polarisation caused mainly by the botched Brexit process, and people getting angry at all the wrong things. Reading an article in the Express yesterday and the comments that went with it, I thought, holy hell, even if 20% of British people think like you, the country is in an omnifuck of staggering proportions.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Writing a book

Steady progress with the book

August 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my aunt this morning. We both had an almost total lack of news. It was hot in Earith where she lives, just like here, so at least this time she couldn’t contradict me on the weather front.

My work volumes are relatively low so I’ve been working on the book. I’m now up to letter I of the dictionary part. My Romanian teacher is now tackling the first (most important) part which contains all the big-ticket items, in other words the mistakes that even good speakers make over and over. She’s made a good start at correcting my Romanian, which as I’ve said before, isn’t up to this kind of task.

I only had one lesson today, with the eleven-year-old boy who lives with his grandmother. I beat him in the Formula One game for the fourth time running. He’s a mild-mannered kid but I think he was ever so slightly pissed off today. In the first couple of games he didn’t exactly apply optimal strategy, but now it’s pretty much dumb luck. Today he drew a card that sent him into the pit stop on the last lap, and I was able to overtake him.

Last week we had that awful explosion in Beirut. At first I thought it was a terrorist attack, but it was a terrible accident. The warehouse was on the waterfront, right next to a grain silo, so the blast took out much of the city’s food supply. As well as the hundreds who have died, about 300,000 people have been displaced. Lebanon was in a deep enough crisis already, exacerbated by Covid-19, so this is an utter tragedy. It was impressive to see Emmanuel Macron make a hasty visit to Beirut, appearing in a packed crowd and risking getting Covid-19; I could hardly imagine Boris Johnson doing something similar. I’ve just read that the Lebanese government have quit.

Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump shows signs of narrowing. His average lead looks to be seven points, or perhaps half a point more. There are under three months to go, and early voting starts soon in some states. I see this election as a giant IQ test, but even if the country passes it (i.e. significantly more people vote for Biden than for Trump), will their sham of an electoral system hold up enough to be rid of the bastard?

Coronavirus. Romania is in what looks like a plateau, but it has spread to just about all parts of the country. My panic level has dropped just a tad, but I don’t know how justified that is.

Mum and Dad got their birthday cards from me yesterday. Their birthdays were six and eight weeks ago.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Tennis

Back on the court

July 6, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m back on the court, and it feels good. I’ve played tennis twice this weekend at the courts in Parcul Rozelor – seven sets of doubles with older people including the couple who live on my floor. Socially it’s incredibly stress-free. One of the blokes is 85 (!) and still hits a pretty mean ball. He can’t move much, but heck, I can’t imagine being anywhere near a tennis court in 45 years’ time. Will there even be tennis courts then? There were six of us this evening – at one stage I sat out with a guy who has worked for the railways for 33 years, and he told me about practically every railway line in the region, past and present, in great detail. He even told me about the declivitate of the lines. I figured out what that meant when he said things like “2.1 per 1000”: he was talking about the gradient. He surprised me by saying that what is now a handful of courts of varying quality was once a big tennis stadium with a running track around it. Back in 1981, Romania played host to Argentina in the Davis Cup right were we were playing tonight and yesterday.

With new tennis partners come a new set of “house rules”. So far I’ve picked up three. First, don’t change ends. Ever. Second, you don’t have to receive serve on the same side throughout a set (though you can’t swap during a game!). In fact, changing sides seems to be compulsory and I’m supposed to magically know when to do it. Third, and this is the weirdest, double faults don’t count in your first service game of the playing session. That’s nice, but it has the potential to become embarrassing if you really can’t get the damn thing over the net and into the box. In my first service game yesterday I strung together five straight faults on a single point.

I’m hitting the ball better than I expected to, and the benefits, fitness-wise, socially, and with the language, should be significant. This could be quite a boon for me, as it was in New Zealand at times.

We’re going to be stuck with Covid for the foreseeable future. We’re averaging about 400 cases a day in Romania, just like during the first peak in April. Although we’re now testing a bit more, the trend is clearly upwards. The situation in Timiș isn’t clear: in the last three days we’ve had zero cases, then seven, then zero again. I figure if I’m going to get a haircut I should do so soon before it becomes too dangerous again.

On a worldwide scale there’s little to be optimistic about. The crisis has been politicised to a ridiculous extent in the US, the UK and elsewhere. “Masks are taking away my freedoms!” How bloody stupid can you get? People are getting extremely angry about things they shouldn’t be angry about, and are almost silent on things that really matter. I feel that everybody is complaining about the guttering on their house while it’s on fire. (I don’t put the Black Lives Matter movement in America in that category, by the way. Racism in the police and in many other walks of life is a massive problem there. It’s literally killing people.)

I saw Octavian on Thursday after a two-week hiatus; he’d been on an intensive Zoom-based advanced maths course. Seven hours of maths a day. And he wanted more maths with me. I gave him a maths-only version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He impressed me by knowing instantly that the square root of 18 was three times the square root of 2 (he’s nearly 13; I don’t think I knew that then), but he was flummoxed when I asked him which of 11, 12, 13 and 14 was the most likely total with three dice. I would have known at his age that 11 (along with 10) was the most likely. All in all, I think he’s marginally better than I was at the same age.

Another week will soon be kicking off. Only two lessons scheduled for tomorrow.

Family - Life :) - Politics

Unfathomable

July 2, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m having a better work week. Today I had four lessons – seven hours in total – and the boost that gives to my mental health makes everything else much more manageable, like, for instance, this flat going back on the market. I found out about that yesterday.

What an utterly mad first half of the year it has been. (My hair is now madder than ever, by the way.) I should be glued to Wimbledon right now, but a world in which people thwacked furry objects with bats, and other people queued to watch them do it, feels unfathomably far away. When will I next see any of my family?

Talking of unfathomable, what the heck is going on in the UK? How did we end up here? People throwing bottles and spreading Covid throughout Liverpool just because their team won the league. People shitting on beaches. People generally not giving a fuck. People handed a licence not to give a fuck because the people in power don’t either, beyond their own careers. A leader ripping whole hunks out of Trump’s book who is still remarkably popular (his fans include my own brother). I think how much better Britain would have handled the crisis back in 1995, when the country was led by John Major, who was very unpopular but objectively light years ahead of the charlatan currently in charge.

Last week I had something close to an argument with Mum. (That’s rare these days. Ever since my move to Romania, we’ve got on well.) She was blaming young people again. By young people, Mum means anybody under about 50. “They don’t have any money and for a lot of them it’s their own fault.” Um, OK. “They’ve got to have everything now.” Well yes, but whose fault actually is that? Are you really suggesting that they’re stupider than your generation? Seriously? Or maybe, just maybe, they’re essentially the same people, with at least 99.9% of the same DNA, but born into a very different world, with completely different decision paths available to them. Mum didn’t max out her credit card because there were no credit cards to max out. If Mum had been born in 1999 instead of 1949, I bet she’d be clambering over people to buy whatever the hell the latest number iPhone is. Honestly, this whole generation shaming, and it’s people of all generations who do it, is bloody ridiculous.