Politics

Headaches - Life :) - Politics - The UK

Struck down

June 26, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve had a bit of a crappy time of it the last few days. On Wednesday night I had a piercing sinus headache on my right side – one of those “screwdriver rammed up my nose” ones – and although it eased at around four in the morning, it destroyed my sleep and my energy for the next day. Yesterday was an improvement, but the pain returned last night and I’ve reverted to go-slow mode today. I was grateful for the storm that put paid to this evening’s tennis.

The first half of the week wasn’t too bad. I got good feedback from the two teenage boys about my new skyscraper-building board game. The first one said something like “isn’t it amazing that you’ve actually made this?” which was nice to hear. I was on solid ground with them; after a combined 400-odd lessons, they probably weren’t going to say they hated my stupid game and didn’t want to see me again. (Someone basically did tell me that once, though it wasn’t a game I’d created.) The timing was good because they’d just had their high-pressure exams in Romanian and maths that will determine where they go for their final four years of school, so there was a good chance they’d be receptive to some kind of game.

Lots of politics this week. The US Supreme Court have made abortion illegal in something like half the states. Even if you are anti-abortion, actually banning it is monumentally stupid and evil. Thousands of women will die because of this ruling that has been handed down by half a dozen ultra-extreme religious loons whose concern about a child’s life seems to evaporate once it is born, if their attitude to guns is anything to go by. And where will they stop? Will abortion soon be outlawed nationwide? Homosexuality too? Who was it who said that America shouldn’t fear Islam, but fundamental so-called Christianity instead? They’ve been proven right. This latest ruling will have repercussions that go beyond America’s borders; I could see abortion laws being tightened in religious countries like Romania. The whole political system in the US so utterly messed up. It would be good it could burn to the ground.

In happier news across the pond, the Conservatives lost both the by-elections they were contesting on Thursday, the sixth anniversary of the Brexit referendum. In the next general election, voters absolutely all-capital-letters MUST vote tactically for whatever party is most likely to beat the Tories. Labour, Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, it doesn’t matter. If Labour don’t win a majority, that doesn’t matter either. In fact it’s better if nobody wins a majority. The more chance there would then be of the terrible electoral system (albeit not nearly as egregious as the American one) changing.

I called my sister-in-law last night. I knew she and my brother had gone up to St Ives, but was very surprised to see her in the church by the river. She said she was at a “Booze in the Pews” event. After the news from the US yesterday, I was glad to hear that so few people in the UK now use churches for their original purpose that they hold drinking sessions there. My sister-in-law, six months pregnant, wasn’t partaking.

I plan to travel to the UK in a month’s time, but I’ve been unable to book a flight because I still haven’t got a replacement debit card after I nearly got scammed two weeks ago. I’m getting just enough cash payments to tide me over from week to week. What a pain.

Life :) - Politics - Tennis - The UK

A mix of old and new (including pictures)

June 7, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a phone call. It was a woman from the mattress company. She spoke so damn fast at the beginning that I almost blacked out. After all this time, Romanian on the phone can still be a real challenge for me.

Right now I’m living in a near-permanent state of fatigue. I don’t know if it’s the heat, the stress related to the move, the regular bike rides, or some combination. I don’t feel refreshed even after a full night’s sleep. Maybe I really need this new mattress.

I had a chat with my brother on Sunday. They still had the bunting out for the jubilee. It’s obvious that he’s had enough of life in the army. All the early starts and pointless trips are getting to him. Amazingly he’s started a correspondence university course in – I think – business management. He says he’ll finish it in 18 months. My sister-in-law, who is expanding, was more upbeat. Mum keeps referring to her future grandson as Herbie, which was the name of a guinea pig we used to have. (We don’t even know what it’ll be yet. It’s still an it.)

After being booed at the jubilee, Boris Johnson survived his confidence vote last night, but a whopping 41% of his Tory colleagues voted against him. His supporters – a bunch of overgrown schoolboys – banged their desks in unison on learning the result. A good result for the country, Boris said. In the medium and long term, I hope he’s right. A divided party with a lame-duck leader that staggers on to the next election, then gets well and truly stuffed. The UK ends up with a coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems, and the SNP. They introduce proportional representation. That would be good for the country.

Shortly before the jubilee celebrations, the British government announced that pounds and ounces and other imperial measurements could be making a comeback, not that they’ve totally gone away. I’ve always quite liked imperial measurements because they’re batshit mad and much more fun to say than the metric versions. I recently got one of my students to read a simplified version of Alice in Wonderland in which Alice’s heights had been converted into metres and centimetres, and it felt like we’d been transported to a lab. I still remember Dad (“you can’t even see those silly millimetres”) ordering sheets of glass for his paintings in inches, one by one, over the phone. “Twenty-four and five-eighths by seventeen and three-quarters.” The person on the other end would repeat the dimensions back to him, and the whole thing took on a poetic quality, a bit like the BBC shipping forecast. But, after being taught in metric and living all those years in New Zealand, and now Romania where non-metric is almost unheard of, it’s obvious that metric is far superior for doing actual calculations and when you’ve got to, you know, do business internationally. Going back to imperial would quite clearly be crazy.

The shipping forecast, read four times a day on Radio 4, has a place in British culture. It follows a strict format that hasn’t changed in decades, running through the evocative names of the shipping areas – 31 in all – always going round the British Isles clockwise in the same order: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, and so on. I liked listening to it as a kid, and I still remember the warnings of “hurricane force 12” in the storm of October 1987. It’s still popular today, even if it’s far less in demand, thanks to the internet. It reminds you that you’re part of something far bigger, that there are people out there exposed to the high seas, not in air-conditioned offices. Regular listeners get to know the announcers. I tuned in over the weekend and listened to a forecast read by Neil Nunes, who has quite a wonderful deep voice. He comes from Jamaica and started at the BBC in 2006. Apparently some rather bigoted listeners complained at the time that his voice wasn’t British enough. The late-night forecast is preceded by Sailing By, a beautiful song. (YouTube comments are nearly always awful, but the ones for Sailing By are delightful.) Other maritime countries, like New Zealand, have shipping forecasts too, but they don’t have the cultural signficance of the British one. The shipping areas are rattled off in a great 1994 song by Blur called This is a Low. Damon Albarn, whom I’ve seen live, likes referencing the sea in his songs.

After Saturday’s washout, I played tennis on Sunday. It was a hot one, and I was relieved to be playing doubles and not singles. They had some kind of party on the beach volleyball courts next door, with music that I found almost unbearable. I partnered a 14-year-old girl against two men, and we played a heck of a set lasting roughly an hour. Following numerous deuce games, we got to 6-6 but then fell 6-1 behind in the tie-break. We saved four set points but my error on the fifth was the last shot of the set. We had to call it a day at 2-2 in the second set. After that we picked sour cherries from the laden tree next to the courts. It’s a great time for fruit right now.

As promised last time, here are some pictures.

I took this picture on Saturday night. Magda, on her 58th birthday, with Domnul Sfâra, 87.
A last picture of Piața Victoriei on the day I left for good.
A game of backgammon at Piața Lipovei. You can also see the egg and coffee machines.
A law firm. The two names are identical, just that one (Kovacs) is written in the original Hungarian way while the other (Covaci) has been Romanianised.
An old, and small, Pegas bicycle at the supermarket yesterday. This dates from communist times when these were virtually the only bikes around. In the last few years, modern Pegas bikes have come on the market, though they’re no longer made in Romania.
Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker - Politics - Tennis

How exciting!

September 26, 2021 by 0 Comments

My uncle – another one – is celebrating his 80th birthday today. He and my aunt visited Timișoara after coming to the UK for my brother’s wedding. A retired (or semi-retired) farmer, he still does a ton of physical work. The idea of slowing down is alien to him. I guess he’s been lucky – he’s lived ten years longer than either his older or younger brother, who both died of cancer. Ten years ago I went to his previous big birthday bash – in the middle of the rugby World Cup, and we watched the All Blacks’ first match against France. Israel Dagg (what a name) was probably man of the match. The world has spun off in an altogether darker direction since then.

Mum and Dad are now in their new place. It was weird seeing them on FaceTime with the new backdrop. So much wood everywhere, including on the ceilings. Dad described parts of the new house as “horrendous” and in dire need of renovation, but his horrendous is my kind of meh. I would just about kill to have their new place, as long as I could transport it out of Geraldine. Just before the definitive move, they had a horrendous day where their lawnmower broke down and my uncle’s (birthday boy’s) trailer, which Dad had borrowed, also needed expensive repairs.

I need to move away from this flat but I don’t want to. That’s the situation I’m in. Again, I’m having flashbacks to 2011, although then I didn’t actually need to move. It’s just that society had told me that someone of my age should buy a property – you’re a failure if you don’t – and my job, which gave me the licence to buy, was a ticking time bomb. And yeah, I thought it might actually make financial sense. But there was no excitement then, and neither is there now. The phrase “How exciting!”, as it relates to buying property, drives me mad. My biggest worry with this move is that it could kill my mental health, which has been so much better ever since I moved to Romania.

Last Monday I did have a look at a place in the Bucovina area, near where I once had lessons. The agent led me up to the fourth – and top – floor of a Ceaușescu-era block. Pinned to the walls of the staircase, bizarrely, were pictures of islands and beach resorts with golden sand and deep blue sea. It was something you might have seen in a prison cell. At the flat I was greeted by an elderly couple who had lived there for 35 years, and a very yappy dog. Everything in the flat had a seventies or eighties feel about it. There was even an old typewriter. The flat was easily big enough, but it would have needed serious work. I mean, it would have been OK for me, but potential students would have found it a turn-off. No lift either (again, I would have coped), and perhaps the biggest minus was a lack of any sort of view.

Then on Thursday I tried to visit some agents. This isn’t like New Zealand or the UK; they’re not really interested in dealing with the public. The first place had an intercom system which nobody answered. They didn’t answer their phone either. Fantastic. Just round the corner was another agency, located in a modern fourth-floor office. It was the same company that I rented this place from when I arrived. A woman took down my details and we had a chat. She told me that the young employee who had just two lessons from me in 2016, but honestly changed my life by tipping me off about the flat I’m in now, had left the company to train as a psychologist. I told her about some of the areas I liked, then inevitably she started peddling brand new apartments in the south of the city. I’ve been to that area, and nothing is more than five years old. I’d worry that living there, even if it might be good for business, would leave me depressed. Maybe not, but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

What else? There’s a Hungarian festival on in the city, perhaps the last thing that’ll be “on” before the plug is pulled. Last night we had country music at Piața Operei and there was even a re-enactment of a battle. They’re selling various bits and bobs, Csiki Sör beer, and overpriced food.

I played singles tennis last night, again with that super-fit near-60-year-old. We only booked the court for an hour, and at the end I was up 6-4, 4-2. I lost the first three games. The first game went 16 points but was almost devoid of rallies. In the third game I had a break point, and hit a shot I thought he might struggle to return, but he ripped a cross-court forehand that was out of the top drawer, and the next two points slipped from my grasp too. It was all happening too damn fast. I made sure I had a good sit-down before coming up to serve. The games had been close, and there was no reason why I couldn’t come back. It was overall a good game with plenty of winners from both of us, although he lost concentration in the middle.

Poker. Back-to-back second places, and big comebacks, on Friday, though I made such bad starts to both tournaments that I couldn’t get many of those damn bounties. After blanking all three of last night’s attempts, my bankroll is $979.

Work. It’s OK but I could do with more of it. (Someone called me wanting only face-to-face lessons. Um, there’s like this thing on the news that you might have seen.) Thursday was a good day, however. One boy in particular has come on so far in his English since I started with him that it blows me away. He’s gone from a kid who knew a few words and didn’t say boo to a goose to an intelligent teenager who has a bloody good command of English. It’s so pleasing to see.

Justin Trudeau has been re-elected prime minister of Canada despite his party losing the popular vote. Their system isn’t nearly as awful as the US one (stupid amounts of money, stupidly long campaign, stupid everything basically) but it still ain’t great. The Germans are going to the polls right now.

Boris Johnson resorted to his schoolboy Franglais shtick again last week. “Prenez un grip”, “donnez-moi un break”. Mildly amusing to an Englishman for whom mumbling pointless French phrases for five years was an iconic part of his upbringing, but it would have fallen flat elsewhere.

It might just be me, but I can’t see how we’ll ever escape from the environmental mess we’re in. Humans are just terrible at dealing with problems that happen incrementally over periods of time greater than a lifetime. We still think we can consume our way out of this. We can’t.

Sorry for making this post so long.

Coronavirus - Poker - Politics - Tennis

Back in lockdown

March 8, 2021 by 0 Comments

I was about to do my weekly shop, but then I checked the rules and realised I couldn’t until after lunch. Timișoara entered lockdown last night at midnight, and supermarkets are reserved for over-65s between 10am and 1pm. Good decision all round. The sunny early-spring weather had brought crowds of people to the centre, especially in narrow streets like Strada Alba Iulia where you’re all hemmed in. Hospitals are just about bursting at the seams when the new variants are starting to proliferate, so this increase in activity is at exactly the wrong time. There’s been too much “can we get away with it?” and general pussyfooting around, so I’m glad they’ve put the hammer down. I wonder if that would have happened under Nicolae Robu, our old mayor.

Leadership matters more than people think. Would New Zealand have done so well had the 2017 election turned out differently (or should I say, as expected)? We’ll never know, but it’s just a hunch that National would have been all “we’ve got a goddamn rock star economy and we ain’t gonna shut it down”. Team of five million? Maybe. Be kind? I doubt it. NZ’s messaging has been inclusive, not divisive, and that’s gone a long way towards their resounding success up until now. To be clear, I still think National would have handled it miles better than the US or most of Europe.

The British people’s reaction to their disastrous response to Covid is increasingly maddening. The death toll is around 120,000, and tens of millions of Brits aren’t only OK with that, they like what they see. Now they’ve got their vaccines and all is forgiven, if they ever thought there was anything to forgive in the first place. It seems that if you supported Brexit and voted Tory in December 2019, you’ll support the government come what may. And now they’ve got their vaccines that the EU don’t have, so hahahaha in your face! Take that remainers, we’re winning! Who cares about all that death now.

I played tennis twice at the weekend, and it’ll be at least three weeks before I’m back on the court again. In both sessions – four hours – I played with Domnul Ionescu, a man in his late sixties with a smoker’s cough who spat on his hand every second point or so. On the other side was a woman of 30-odd and the bloke I had that singles match with just before Christmas. Petrică, one of the other regulars who must be in his early fifties, couldn’t make it. He’s suffered from a kidney problem for some time, he managed to pick up Covid, and now he needs dialysis.

Four poker tournaments yesterday. All frustrating in their various ways. I cashed in two of them but barely broke even. In the Omaha hi-lo I amassed a nice stack but couldn’t build it up into something imposing. I treaded water for a long time, then when we got down to three tables I min-raised my high-only hand in the cut-off. I was unlucky enough for both the blinds to wake up with A2 and good side cards. I correctly got all in pre-flop three ways because I had plenty of equity (one third, as it happened) but the board ran out horribly for me and I was out in 15th for a small cash. In the single draw I hung around but a big stack on my left kept going all in over my raises and I never felt I had enough to call. Being out of position is horrible in that game at the best of time. I had another good run in the pot-limit badugi, knocking three people out early, but the bounties dried up and at the final table my stack did too. I got a small payout for coming seventh out of 100. Then in the fixed badugi I started OK but couldn’t win the big pots when it mattered, and was out well before the money. My bankroll is $337.

Update: The Romanian authorities have come to their senses and approved the Astra Zeneca vaccine for over-55s. The notion that it was unsafe or ineffective for older people has been roundly disproven, but sadly too many people might already have been spooked by all that bollocks.

This morning Adi Bărar, who founded the highly successful Timișoara band Cargo, died after spending two weeks in hospital with coronavirus.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Politics

Hard to stay optimistic

January 11, 2021 by 0 Comments

It’s hard to stay optimistic at the moment. A month ago I felt that the end just might be in sight. Help was on the way, in the form of vaccines that had been developed at lightning speed. But the virus has morphed into this mutant monster, the vaccines are being rolled out mind-bogglingly slowly, and all that optimism was just a mirage. The UK is nothing short of a disaster zone. Once it was divided into three tiers, then a fourth was added, but the whole country is now officially in Tier Fucked. Leadership is been lamentable since the beginning, when Boris Johnson missed five straight emergency meetings. Daily death tolls – a lagging indicator – are already in four figures. My sister-in-law might not be a podiatrist for much longer. She could soon be a nurse. The south coast got off lightly during the first wave, but now it’s mayhem there, just like everywhere. Here in Romania it’s bad, but nowhere near that bad. However, we’re still dealing with old, non-mutant Covid, as far as I know. If the new variant takes hold (or should I say when?), all hell will break loose. In some ways I’m very lucky. My little job is extremely doable from home, and avoiding people is almost the norm for me.

Then there’s Trump and the riots in Washington where four people were killed. My god, where do you even start with these people? What will happen to Trump now? Could he be removed before the inauguration in ten days’ time? Could he end up in the slammer? Let’s hope so. And Covid is a massive shitshow in the US too, let’s not forget. It already feels a lifetime ago, but Trump’s phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, horrendous as it was, probably helped the Democrats pick up those two seats in the runoffs, giving them control of the Senate (with Kamala Harris’s casting vote). That’s good news.

I need to stop it with all the disaster (and dystopia) porn on Netflix. Black Mirror, The Social Dilemma, David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet (brilliant though it is), and this morning a documentary about the Challenger accident in 1986. I remember that happening when I was in Mrs Stokes’s class in primary school. I liked Mrs Stokes. She died of cancer only three or four years later.

I finished 11th in a badugi tournament tonight, making eight bucks. There were 110 entries, including those who busted out and rebought. On a few occasions I was just one pot away from having a real shot at the final table and the bigger prizes, but it wasn’t to be. (I could easily have missed out entirely, too.) My bankroll is now $162.

Weather update: it’s snowing!

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Why didn’t he tell me?

December 9, 2020 by 0 Comments

The busker outside has just been playing La Fereastra Ta (“At Your Window”), an early-eighties hit by Cluj band Semnal M. I remember hearing it when I listened to Romanian radio online in the months before coming here, and trying to make sense of the lyrics. In my letterbox I’ve just had a note telling me I have to pick up a small package from the post office. I was hoping it would be the books Mum ordered for me, but I think that because it’s “small” it’ll be the CD I ordered off Ebay: Mwng from Welsh band Super Furry Animals. The whole album is in Welsh. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. (I also bought one or two items of clothing on Ebay, but they seem to have vanished into thin air.) Talking of music, the Kinks song Apeman came on the radio a few days ago. A great song which expresses how I feel about 21st-century life, even though it came out fifty years ago. Leave modern life behind and massively simplify everything. In some ways, that’s what I’ve done. A funny thing though – they bleeped out the first word of “fogging up my eyes”. It does sound suspiciously like “fucking”, but in reality it isn’t, and at any rate I’ve heard expletive-laden songs in English on the radio here which have been left uncensored.

Romania’s parliamentary elections have produced a split decision. The PSD (clear winners last time) are the biggest party again, but with a far smaller vote share this time, and it looks like they’ll be locked out of a coalition. The forward-thinking USR-plus (who were in third place, and may form part of government along with PNL who finished second) came top in Timișoara. There’s also a new party on the scene called AUR (which means “gold”); they’re anti-lockdown, anti-mask, and anti even thinking Covid is real. AUR got 9%, nearly twice the threshold for entering parliament, in a shock result. My student last night said they only did so well because of their shiny name. Turnout was abysmal, even considering the pandemic: only about a third showed up. And we’re currently rudderless. Ludovic Orban, the latest prime minister in a long line of them since I washed up in Romania, has quit. We still have a president, though.

After my two tricky lessons last night, finishing at 10:15, it was a great pleasure to talk to the woman who lives near Barcelona this morning. The woman I saw last night at seven is always so vacant. The lights are on but nobody’s home. What am I doing wrong? Help me! When I gave up on grammar exercises and asked her about her Christmas plans, she mercifully turned her dimmer switch up a notch or two. Then it was the poker guy with a big-stack ego. He’s so bloody good and knowledgeable about everything and loves saying so. I had 90 nauseating minutes of that. (Apart from those two students, everybody else I have is great, so I can’t complain.) The woman in Spain told me she didn’t like weddings. Join the club, I said. (Except my brother’s.) I bet loads of people don’t like weddings but don’t dare admit it.

I’ve been scouring statistics about verb tenses. (That’s the present perfect continuous.) There are twelve tenses in English, and I’ve been teaching them, concentrating on what I think are the most important ones. In speaking, more than half our verbs are in the simple present. (Not the present continuous, which some Romanians use continuously. That’s far less common.) About 20% of what we say is in the past simple. When we write a story, we’re generally writing about the past, so the percentages tend to flip. In my last blog post, which included an account of a tennis match, roughly 60% of what I wrote was in the past simple. All the stats I saw online confirmed what I thought. Five tenses are important enough to warrant serious study, including the problematic present perfect. Another three are useful once you’re at a pretty decent level. As for the remaining four (like the past perfect continuous – “I had been waiting at the station all day”), you can get by perfectly fine without them.

I spoke to my brother last night. They were in the middle of laying their parquet flooring. Eleven hundred strips of wood, each requiring two screws. It looked like painstaking work. My sister-in-law should get a shot of Pfizer any minute. I recently had a strange dream about my brother, although he wasn’t actually there. No, he’d gone to the moon (!) and Mum was naturally worried about him. Why didn’t he tell me?!

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

Another dark day for Romania

November 16, 2020 by 0 Comments

Tragedy struck Romania last night. Ten people died in a fire in the Covid wing of a hospital in Piatra Neamț, in the north-east of the country. I’m looking at the gruesome pictures on TV now. They still don’t know what caused it. Perhaps the fire was fuelled by the supplementary oxygen, or maybe it was a short circuit. To Romanians it brings back dreadful memories of the Colectiv nightclub fire that took place five years ago, killing 64 people. Did we learn nothing, they are saying today.

In brighter news I’ve played a decent amount of tennis this weekend, every point of it partnering the same woman. Yesterday there was a new woman on the other side of the net – a good player whose kick serve made it clear that she’d been coached – and we went down 6-3 6-4 3-2, though we led 3-1 in the first set and were unlucky not to at least make it close. Then today I had my work cut out once again, with two men across the net. I had to run everything down. We played 3½ sets, and from our point of view we finished up at 6-3 6-2 3-6 1-4. I played well but it was taxing physically and mentally, and I tired towards the end. My partner brought along some homemade apple pie.

The highlight of my work week was pretty clear. Half-way through my Google Meet lesson with an eleven-year-old girl, the “share screen” function stopped working. What do I do now? I asked her about music. Do you play an instrument? Do you like any singers or bands? I don’t want to say it, but I’ll write it, she said. The words “Sex Pistols” suddenly appeared on my screen, followed by “God Save the Queen”. Wow. Why do you like the Sex Pistols? How do you even know about them? Do you know they were British? She said her parents often played their songs.

I haven’t mentioned my book much recently. With my higher teaching volumes, I haven’t done as much. I’m now on the P section of the dictionary, which is taking ages. Dad, however, is now helping out with illustrations. So far he’s come out with a nifty cartoonish style, and he’ll use the same cartoon character in each picture, adding “extras” when necessary. The tricky bit (well, to me it’s all tricky, but the tricky bit even for a talented artist like my father) is to convey the relevant language point in each picture. That’s absolutely crucial. I have three lessons tomorrow – a light day – so I hope I can make more progress with the dictionary.

Covid. There are tentative signs that it’s getting better in Timișoara. The numbers of new cases have dropped off slightly. I still hear far more ambulance sirens than normal, but fewer than two or three weeks ago when they seemed incessant. Tentative signs, as I said, and with winter almost upon us. I’ve been trying to get a flu jab, with no luck. The pharmacies don’t have any available. To get me through the long, dark winter I’m now taking a cocktail of vitamin D, zinc and selenium. It would be nice to think that one of the vaccines – hopefully not the Russian Sputnik V vaccine – will be with us by the spring.

As soon as I got back from this afternoon’s exertions on the tennis court, I had a long chat with my cousin who lives in New York state. I spoke to both him and his Italian wife. The virus is tearing through the entire country now, making the first two waves seem like mere ripples. Of course we talked about the election. Just imagine if Trump had won re-election. Just. Imagine. And he wasn’t far off. People have been too quick to justify, or normalise, what we’ve seen from Trump since election day and the four years before. None of it is justifiable or normal.

My brother and his wife have moved into their new house. I’ll talk to them when they get their internet sorted. My brother quite likes fiddling with this or painting that, so I think he’ll enjoy having something extra to do over the winter while Covid otherwise restricts his options. As for my parents, they’ve put themselves on a list for a section of land in Geraldine, so they can build on it. It’s about 750 square metres, less than a tenth of what they currently have. Mum won’t want to be mowing that lawn much longer. I was hoping they’d abandon Geraldine, which has become rather geriatric, and buy something with a house already on it. If they don’t sell one of places in the meantime, they’ll – temporarily at least – own five properties. To me, owning five properties is about as realistic as owning three arms.

Politics

Biden! Harris! They did it!

November 9, 2020 by 0 Comments

Tuesday night. Oh man. I lay in bed at 2am glued to my laptop as the results from Florida came in. The big dump of ballots from Miami-Dade, where Biden massively underperformed relative to Clinton four years ago, was a bombshell. “I’ll be shocked if Biden wins Florida,” tweeted Matthew Isbell, a Florida expert. At that point it was clear we were in for a long night. More results trickled in and they too looked iffy for Biden. My 7:30 lesson had been cancelled (my most useful cancellation ever) and at around six I tried to get some shut-eye, to no avail. I got up at 7:30 expecting to see Trump on the verge of a second term, and allowed myself a smile when I saw that Wisconsin had been called for Biden and some networks had also projected Arizona in his favour. He was still in with a good shout.

Biden then gave a quick speech, in which he was predictably (but with justification) upbeat, and then came Trump who briefly took us into a very dark place by begging that millions of legitimate votes should be disallowed, wrongly saying that he’d won Pennsylvania. I spoke to Dad who said, that’s it then, Trump’s won. But unlike me, Dad isn’t exactly a numbers man. Those mail-in ballots, and there’s plenty of them, will be very friendly to Biden. Trump is trumping out of his arse, Dad. As for Mum, she was playing tennis, and very angry at Trump’s apparent win. She really can’t stick Trump.

Both Donald and Robu, the local mayor, are OUT

Wednesday and Thursday were grim days. The despair at how Trump, win or lose, received so many votes. The mounting Covid tallies as we sleepwalked into disaster. The sleep deprivation. The total lack of sun. I followed Twitter accounts of those in the know, such as the fantastic Jon Ralston in Nevada. There was great suspense every time a new batch of ballots was released. What do those numbers mean? Are they good or bad? I was madly googling names of obscure counties. By Thursday evening it was clear that Biden had done enough. I had a lesson with an 18-year-old guy, and we strayed into politics. Bad idea. Turned out he was a Trump fan. He even showed me his Trump book. He should be in prison, I said. He has no business being a free man.

Friday and Saturday went by in a holding pattern. To be honest I was enjoying the slow drip-feed of votes for Biden, particularly in Pennsylvania. There was much talk of lawsuits. Then at 6:30 on Saturday evening it happened. Pennsylvania was called for Biden, putting him on 273 electoral votes. There was a sudden outpouring of joy and celebration. People were dancing in the streets of Philadelphia, New York, and Washington DC. Power had been returned to the people. What a moment that was. Then last night came the speeches. Biden’s was perhaps his best yet. He could so easily have made occasional jibes at the now-lame-duck president, but he never did. And Kamala was wonderful. She has a great sense of humour. A stark contrast from the humourless egotism of the last four years. (I watched and listened, imagining with horror the pure hatred that would have emanated from Trump and Pence, had they been re-elected.)

It’ll be tough for Biden. It was a close election; the blue wave didn’t materialise. Trump, a bully, a liar and a cheat, has got 71 million votes and they’re still counting. The Senate (which has a huge Republican bias, more so than the Electoral College which is bad enough) will remain red unless the Democrats win both run-offs in Georgia (what a state that has been) on 5th January. The Democrats even lost seats in the House, though they keep control of it. And more immediately, Trump still has eleven weeks to do serious damage. The Dems are busily putting together their coronavirus taskforce, but they can’t do a damn thing until the orange monster vacates the scene.

It was amusing as hell to see the BBC cameras zooming in on Trump’s game of golf, minutes after the election had been called. He’ll soon have plenty more time for that. Until he’s banged up, that is.

Language teaching - Politics

Foreboding

November 3, 2020 by 0 Comments

A man by the name of Larry Sabato, who has followed US elections for six decades, said yesterday that he can never remember the sense of foreboding that there is now. I believe that. People are scared this time around. I’m scared. Will democracy itself even survive another Trump win? Could there be a civil war? How many lives will a Trump win cost? The stakes are enormous. (They’ve been enormous before, even if we didn’t know it at the time. For instance, my brother would probably never have ended up in Basra if Al Gore had won in 2000. But now the stakes are huge and we know it.) It’s no surprise that turnout is through the roof. In some states including Texas, more people have voted before election day than they did last time including election day.

Fivethirtyeight are still giving Trump a one-in-ten chance. But that doesn’t account for blatant cheating, or close races decided (probably in Trump’s favour) by the Supreme Court. There’s even a faint possibility of an electoral college tie, which (if I understand the rules correctly) would also likely go to Trump. Add in these unknowables and you might end up at something more like one in seven, which isn’t all that unlikely. Were you born on a Wednesday?

Pennsylvania looks like being the key. If Biden hangs on to the states Hillary Clinton won, and also wins Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (Trump won all three of these by less than one point in 2016), he wins the election. Biden is up big in the polls in Michigan and Wisconsin, but Pennsylvania is somewhat tighter. If he loses Pennsylvania, then he still has a shot (there’s Arizona and Georgia and so on), but if he’s doing worse than expected in one state, the same is probably true elsewhere, and the rest of the dominoes are likely to fall as well. It should be said that if Trump does win, he’ll probably have done so while losing the popular vote once again. Trump is really unlikely to actually get more votes than Biden. What a crap system.

Tonight’s lesson wasn’t going well at all for a while until we started to use a textbook and my student told me she’d studied in France on the Erasmus programme, just like I had done ages earlier. (She lived in Montpellier in 2015; I lived in Lyon in 2000-01.) Before that I saw the guy who until last week wanted to study in Amsterdam but has suddenly decided it would be way too expensive and wants instead to go to Aarhus in Denmark. (I always thought Aarhus was in the middle of our street.)

I’ve just heard a loud bang. A car has hit a bike. The cyclist is fine. Maybe that’s an omen for tomorrow.

Books - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Politics

Will the asteroid hit?

October 31, 2020 by 0 Comments

At the moment my days and weeks are passing in a fog of fatigue. Maybe I’m getting old, or more likely, I’m suffering from all the extra screen time. My lessons are now exclusively online. I preferred the face-to-face meetings and all the books and games and props. Now it’s a combination of Skype, Zoom and Google Meet. The latter two allow you to do all sorts of clever stuff; my younger students sometimes excitedly show me the various tricks which I promptly forget. Sometimes I feel like a schoolteacher in the eighties or nineties who struggled with the functions of a VCR. “Yes, miss, I know how to do it!”

My favourite lesson of last week was with a husband and wife whom I last saw nearly a year ago. I had my first lessons with them way back in September 2017. They’re really nice people, and it was a pleasure to see them (virtually, of course) in our three-way Skype meeting. They sat in separate rooms in their new house in Sânandrei, about ten kilometres from Timișoara. I’d always known the wife as Andreea, and was initially confused when she popped up on my screen as Eliza. Not that confused, because Romanians often have two first names which both get significant use. She explained that she’s Andreea to her friends but Eliza at work. She’s not a doolittle in the office, that’s for sure. Her whole day is taken up by answering emails of complaint, usually in English. She showed me a bunch of emails she’d sent that day, and I tried to help her iron out some kinks in her English and generally sound more human and less aggressive and robotic. “Photos unreceived,” she wrote at one point. Unreceived is in that grey area between a word and a non-word. In fact people in these multinational companies communicate all the time in this grey, lifeless, minimalist pseudo-English that would drive me mad. (This did drive me mad when I started working for an insurance company.)

The US election is almost upon us. It’s barely three days away. Biden is a pretty hefty favourite – in the “gold standard” Fivethirtyeight model, Trump has a one-in-ten chance of winning – not much, but it’s a 10% chance of something terrifying. It’s a bit like how I’d feel if there was a 1% chance of a giant asteroid impact in Timișoara. It’s also a bit like how some of us have felt about coronavirus, which Trump has so royally effed up on. I listened to a Fivethirtyeight podcast yesterday, and they said that if Trump wins, we’ve really got to question what any of this means anymore.

New Zealand voted against legalising cannabis in the referendum. The “yes” vote was around 46%, which will probably increase when the special votes come in, but it almost certainly won’t be enough. A missed opportunity, I’d say, and my guess is that if it wasn’t for the Covid-fuelled uncertainty, the result might have been different. I imagine they’ll revisit this in ten or twenty years. Interestingly, the assisted dying bill passed easily, and I would have voted for that too.

Mum has ordered me half a dozen books from Waterstones. Two of them are for my work. The rest are The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon (a book about depression – just what we all need right now), The Sixth Extinction (which we’re currently in the middle of), The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel (if it’s anything like the other book of hers I read, it’ll be amazing), and Word Perfect by Susie Dent (she first appeared on Countdown in 1992 and is now a minor celebrity). The books aren’t cheap – they come to just over £100, mainly because of the two work books. Study materials are so damn expensive. It’s always a pleasure to receive these gifts, but it would be nice if at our respective stages in the game I was buying stuff for Mum and not the other way round, and there was a time when I’d order my parents maybe a multifunctional printer or a case of wine. That time was about 2005.

On Thursday I called my aunt on her 73rd birthday. She didn’t want much of a chat. It’s always a bit frustrating talking to her. In our conversations (if you can call them that) you only get faint hints that she might care about what goes on in other people’s lives, and when you get that glimmer, it’s inevitably snuffed out in the very next sentence.

That’ll do for today (Saturday). About to have two lessons, with the bloke in Austria and the woman in Bucharest. And by the way, the mother who was messing me around with dates and times decided to give up on me. No great surprise.