On Monday morning I got an email from Dad. He’d been round someone’s place for dinner, with Mum, despite having a migraine. At the dinner table he was on the verge of passing out, and excused himself so he could lie on the sofa. For the next day and a half, he felt really shitty. He never should have gone, obviously, but for Mum there’s always this bizarre loss of face. There’s massive shame in admitting that her husband suffers from migraines. That’s assuming she believes Dad is suffering in the first place and isn’t just being awkward. I really don’t know what she thinks. All I do know is that over the years, her attitude toward Dad’s obvious extreme pain has been unforgivable. It’s making me angry just thinking about it. Dad emailed me because he has nobody else he can talk to. I was careful to send him a very short separate email, without replying to his original message, because Mum often reads the emails he receives but never looks in his sent items as far as I know.
This morning I called my parents, and as luck would have it Mum was out playing tennis, so I was able to have a good chat with Dad. He said that Mum was very good when it came to his bowel cancer last year, I guess because it had the potential to kill him, but she has a blind spot when it comes to his (very frequent) migraines. When Mum got back from tennis I chatted with her for a bit. We get on very well these days. Mum really just wants the best for me, and she can see I’m much happier now. I just wish she wouldn’t make Dad’s condition even worse thanks to her lack of sympathy.
If you even half-believe the polls, the US election right now isn’t close. With under two weeks to go, Biden is up by about ten points on average and has biggish leads in the swing states. It’s not over just yet – there’s still time for Biden to get Covid or some other huge bombshell to shift the numbers enough to push Trump over the line, especially if there’s also a sizeable polling miss. If Trump loses by three points, he’s about 50-50 to win the Electoral College. But please please please no.
This morning I got hold of some zinc to go with my vitamin D. The wintriest-ever winter is on its way, and if I can boost my immune system inexpensively and harmlessly, I should absolutely be doing so.
Last week was quite a big one on the work front. Three new students. One of them is a friend of another student of mine – a Romanian who has lived just outside Birmingham (which is where I studied) for the last three years. I spoke first with her husband whose English was mindblowingly good – practically fluent, with a Brummie accent to boot. Then I had my two sessions with her on Skype – she’s one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. The other new people are Lucian, a bloke of about my age who works for a courier firm, and an 18-year-old guy (I had a rare in-person lesson with him) who wants to study in Amsterdam and needs an IELTS certificate. I’m trying to discourage face-to-face meetings. I had my work cut out with the ten-year-old boy in Bucharest – with no games or fun physical activities at my disposal, 90 minutes is an aeon.
Talking of Birmingham, I’ve been in touch with my university friend who lives in the centre of the city. I mentioned that tri-generational families are quite common in Romania, and there’s generally a fair bit of mixing between different age groups, to the point where the elderly are in danger of catching Covid from their children or grandchildren. He said that (of course) that isn’t the case in the UK outside Asian communities, and when I saw a heat-map chart that showed just how age-sorted Britain now is, I thought, isn’t that sad? (I talk to my parents two or three times a week, and I’m in regular contact with people aged between 10 and 85.) And it’s not just age groups where people are increasingly sorting themselves. Race, income, level of education, how they voted in the EU referendum, you name it. When I saw that chart, I thought it’s no wonder that UK is so fractured right now.
What a contrast between Britain and New Zealand. The UK’s response to Covid has been shambolic, and I can hardly blame Scotland and Wales and Manchester and maybe one or two others for giving central government the middle finger. I couldn’t follow the NZ election because I was working, but shock horror, you properly handle the biggest crisis facing your country in 75 years, you bring in the best scientists, your messaging is clear, you show compassion, and guess what, you’re rewarded in the polls. It’s not that complicated. Labour won the first majority under proportional representation, in the ninth election to be held under that system. Although it was a decisive result, there was a nice balance, with the Greens (climate crisis, hello?) and a resurgent ACT picking up ten seats apiece. It’s great they have a system that allows such balance unlike the US or UK.
I did catch up with my brother. He’d just got back from northern Scotland. He likes long drives, which is just as well. His phone has just about had it, so we struggled to communicate. What? Wh-what? I couldn’t hear a damn thing on the other end. He doesn’t want to spend the money on a replacement phone. His attitude to money has taken a complete one-eighty in recent years; in his twenties he got through more phones than I did hot dinners. Now he’s all into mortgage interest rates and stamp duty and whatnot. I found out that he had a dramatic time up in Scotland – he helped rescue an American destroyer, however the hell you do that.
I had an email reply from my friend from St Ives. She and her husband came to visit me in Romania in 2017. We hired a car and had a wonderful time. She was relieved that I’d finally been in touch for the first time in months, thinking perhaps I’d entered (Covid-induced?) depression. But no, it was a combination of forgetting and lack of news. In truth I haven’t had depression in Romania. Sometimes I’ve felt a bit down, but that pointlessness, that neverending desert, weeks, months, years of it, seems to be in the past.
After work yesterday I went for a longish walk through the parts of town I frequented when I moved here. It was quite nostalgic, which might seem a silly word but I’ve now spent 10% of my life in Timișoara.
No tennis this weekend. Some of the group have been unwell, and I might have given it a miss anyway after what happened with my knee last weekend. One of the guys brings his small dog along; here are some pictures from the tennis court, which isn’t in perfect nick as you can see, as well as a bunch of snaps from yesterday’s walk.
The old abattoir
Opposite the old abattoir, just along by the guest house I stayed in, is a park. It’s pretty rough, as is the area as a whole, but I still remember being in this park on my second evening in Timișoara and seeing it packed with all the ping-pong tables being used.
This was a building site four years ago. There are 108 flats in this block, plus Guban, a locally-produced brand of shoes.
This is where I lived for two months
Above was once a bakery. You can just about make out the pre-1993 spelling pîine (bread, now spelt pâine).
The slogan above says “A Romania without theft”. We recently had the local elections, and we’ll soon be having parliamentary elections too. This new party, USR (literally the Save Romania Union), is on the rise.
This stone commemorates those who died during the 1989 Revolution.
The beer factoryTailorA poem
Above is the Millennium Catholic church, completed in 1901.
Last week I had a stuffy nose and a bit of a cough and I wondered what was causing it. Then I figured it out. I’d replaced my bike tyre with a new white-rimmed one, and the fumes from the glue on the tyre were getting into my respiratory system. This has happened to me before. When I moved into my Wellington flat, the previous tenants had left an old umbrella which had a glue lining the spokes. And once I bought a glue-drenched pair of shoes that I had no choice but to chuck out. I’ve now tied my bike up in the lobby rather than keeping it in my flat.
This morning I had a Skype chat with my aunt and uncle who visited me in Timișoara after my brother’s wedding. That all feels like a lifetime ago now. My aunt is about to have a hip replacement. (My uncle has so far had hip, knee and ankle replacements, so now it’s her turn.) They’re also trying to get a refund of the $20,000 they spent on this year’s holiday that never happened. Apart for that, they seemed good, and busy as ever. It was a great pleasure for me to see them here, and I wonder if and when I’ll see them again.
Covid. With rapid increases in cases and hospitalisations, and winter around the corner, the situation is in danger of spiralling out of control. (It’s worse than it was when we locked down, and now we aren’t anything close to being locked down.) Maskless in-person lessons are now a no-go for me. They’re marginal even with masks. The markets, while they’re in the open, are jam-packed with elderly people, and I’ve decided to give them a miss too. One trip to the supermarket each week, in and out as fast as possible, and that’s my lot for the foreseeable future.
I was surprised how many people thought that Trump’s Covid diagnosis was fake. I mean, it’s possible, but given how breathtakingly irresponsible he’s been, it’s almost a wonder he’s stayed Covid-free for so long. I hope he survives and is humiliated in next month’s election. (Following his diagnosis, he gave a four-minute speech – edited I’m sure – in which he briefly seemed like a human being who vaguely cared about other human beings.) When I heard that Trump was positive, I emailed my university friend who in March placed a bet on Mike Pence to be the next president.
The Romanian teacher has found time in her busy schedule to work on translating my book, and it looks like this thing might actually happen. Still lots to do. Some exercises and quizzes. A slimmed down version of the dictionary. Dad’s illustrations, if he’s on board with that. But it would be quite something to have my work – a useful, practical work – in print. Crucially, the teacher has experience of publishing in Romania, and her own mother is semi-famous in her home of Alba Iulia for the books she has written.
I had my first Zoom lesson with a ten-year-old boy who lives in Bucharest. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also my last. It was like pulling teeth. Not his fault; Zoom with kids of that age is hard. The “highlight” was when I asked him to guess my age, and he said 55. It reminded me of the boy who wanted to know how much I weighed. Um, I actually don’t know. Then out came the scales. Thirty-odd kilos. Now it’s your turn. Oh, alright then. Seventy-eight! That’s even more than my dad! My English teacher’s a fatty! Ha ha!
Roland-Garros. I’ve just watched Simona Halep be overwhelmed 6-1 6-2 in the fourth round by Iga Świątek (pronounced something like “shfyon-tek”), a 19-year-old from Poland. Świątek was in the zone, rarely put a foot wrong, and Simona was out of ideas. Halep has always been vulnerable to zoning power-hitters. I also saw the final game of Martina Trevisan’s victory over fifth-seed Kiki Bertens, another big upset. Trevisan is a diminutive left-hander from Italy, and I earlier enjoyed her dramatic second-round win over Cori Gauff, which she eked out 7-5 in the third set. In round three she had match points against her. Ranked 159th in the world, she’s come all the way from qualifying to reach the quarter-finals. Seven matches in a row. Whatever happens, it’ll be like hitting Powerball for her.
We’re getting warm, windy, weird weather. Yesterday I sat in Central Park and read my book. The wind sprayed the water from the fountain onto me. Somebody put a piano in the nearby bandstand a few months ago, and this time there was someone who could actually play it, rather than a small kid hammering away at random. A woman was pushing a man with no legs in a wheelchair. They made three visits to my bench for money. I gave them 7 lei in total. I found a small yellow stylised wooden elephant, and realising it could land in six positions when you throw it, with vastly different probabilities (Pass the Pigs style), I took it home. It could feature in a kids’ game, when kids’ games become a feature again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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