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Escaping the danger zone

August 12, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s a frosty Saturday morning and I’m listening to Kim Hill’s programme on the radio. She’s interviewing an expert in levitated dipole reactors. She’s always struck me as someone with an arty bent, but she’s spent the entire (long) interview asking intelligent and insightful questions, as if she actually knows what she’s talking about. She’s a clever bugger, basically.

It’s nice to get out – away from Mum and Dad’s place which, while their extension work is in progress, is an accident waiting to happen. We’re falling over each other to grab knives or plates or tins of tomatoes. They have about a fifth of the plug points they need. The kettle? The toaster? Dad’s iPad? Choose one. Cooking here is one level above camping. Washing clothes is impossible. The builders are here every weekday, and they seem great (as they should be, given the vast sums involved). Mum and Dad tell me what will be where when the work is all done – the sliding doors will be here, the pantry here, the island here (did we always have islands?) and it will look great when it’s finished I’m sure, but the place will still be impractical, and increasingly so as my parents age. In two or three years they’ll probably move again.

We went into Timaru yesterday. We parked down on the bay, as we used to all those years ago, although then it was always summer; it was lovely to see the snowy mountains over Caroline Bay on a chilly but sunny day. I went to ASB to find my KiwiSaver balance and dealt with a helpful young woman who spoke the same language as me and wasn’t overwhelmed with other (angry) customers. We had a chat and she showed dollar projections on her screen for the various funds. I asked how those estimates were arrived at. Mean? Median? Half the time above, half below? She couldn’t answer that. I moved my money into the second most aggressive fund, with the intention of dialling it down a notch in a few years’ time, and hoped for the best. I was very happy that my parents popped into House of Travel – they’re serious about a trip to Europe next year. We visited my aunt – Mum’s older sister, who lost her husband in 2021 – and that was great. I’ve always got on well with her. She’s aged and the outer edges of her memory are becoming slightly fuzzy. She talked about her daughter in Wellington who is battling jaw cancer; reading between the lines, things don’t look good there. It was what she didn’t say. On the way back I was pleased to see that some unspectacular old cars, like the odd Ford Laser from the eighties, were still kicking around.

We did some shopping at Pak ‘n’ Save, or at least Mum did. She commented on the ballooning prices, but I was surprised how cheap things were. Most items were only a little more expensive than in Romania, but average earnings must be close to triple what people live on over there. Food products are massively more affordable here. (Housing is another matter.) We came back via Temuka, to visit the laundromat. A load took about half an hour to wash and cost $4.50. There was an enormous plume of choking black smoke from around the saleyards opposite. Entering both Timaru and Temuka, I noticed a weird trend for translating placenames from what I thought were Maori anyway into real Maori. Te Tihi-o-Maru. Te Umu Kaha.

Last night we watched the women’s World Cup quarter-final between Sweden and Japan. A very good game, which the much more physically imposing Sweden dominated for the most part but ended with the Swedes hanging on for dear life – during lashings of injury time – for a 2-1 win. Mum slept through most of it. There were ex-players in the studio; one of them was unable to answer a question without saying “absolutely”.

It’s election season again, which in New Zealand means you get all those crazy opinion poll figures with spurious decimal places: 37.8 to 32.1. I’d forgotten about those. C’mon, when your data is subject to so much sampling variation, you gotta ditch those decimals; 38 to 32 is the only way to handle it. You don’t get decimal degrees in weather forecasts, and including them in polls is worse than that would be.

A brand-new vape shop in Temuka with bollards to prevent ram raids. Crazy, really.

This flatiron-shaped building on the corner of the Loop Road housed Mascot Finance until it went under in (I think) 2009

The old backpackers’ lodge

Family - Other sports - Tennis

Her great nephew is, well, great

July 25, 2023 by 0 Comments

Just twelve days to go now. The plumber is back, slaving away in the heat, after a week chilling (literally) in the mountains. Our minimum temperatures are causing as much havoc as our maximums. Tonight we’re forecast to bottom out at 23. Yuck.

My aunt called me, surprisingly, on Saturday afternoon. My brother had just been over to see her with his wife and son. It was the first time she’d seen my nephew, and was instantly besotted with him. He’s so handsome. She has four grandchildren of her own whom she doesn’t see from one year to the next; I found it quite touching that she felt such warmth towards my brother’s son. It helps that my brother and sister-in-law are a breath of fresh air compared to the animosity and high-maintenance crap that she gets from her own family. My aunt and I had a longer chat than usual. Last night I called my brother who was back on the south coast after a weekend in St Ives.

Yesterday wasn’t particularly enjoyable. The English Conversation Club met up at Porto Arte, which was (and still is) a lovely spot on the bank of the Bega. There was a bigger crowd than I expected and we spread out over two tables. I chose the wrong table. Two people had a long and heated debate, talking across me. One of them asked if he was speaking correct English and I had to admit that I hadn’t been listening. I’d drifted into my own world. The prices at Porto have ballooned since the pandemic, and that’s really taken the pleasure out of being there. When that was over, it was time for tennis. I played with one of the Florins, with Gabriela and the better Florin on the other side. Gabriela shouted “Yes!” every time my partner or I committed an unforced error. You don’t do that unless you’re ten years old or a complete arse, or both. If I did this in a singles match, I might expect my opponent to deck me. After 90 minutes of this (!), I eventually confronted her. “Cheering every time we miss isn’t OK at all. For God’s sake, stop it!” But her partner thought it was fine, and suddenly I was the problem. Perhaps it is fine in Romania. Buggered if I know. Not getting vaccinated was very fine here. Yesterday was a good example of why I like to avoid people.

Before I went out yesterday, I saw that the Open golf championship was entering its final round. The diminutive and unheralded Brian Harman was leading by five, and the weather was terrible. When I was younger I often used to watch the Open on TV, and the yesterday’s conditions had all the makings of a dramatic finish in the wind and rain. I wish I could stay home and watch it. When I got home I was glad to find out that Harman had won by six shots and I hadn’t missed anything. I read a report that contrasted his serene passage to victory with Greg Norman’s collapse at the 1996 Masters and Jean van de Velde’s final-hole explosion at the Open in ’99. Heck, these happened last century and people haven’t even begun to forget. Collapses in golf are more brutal than in any other sport. They’re slow burners, where the heartbreak slowly unravels, and there’s no defence – if you lose a big lead in snooker, it could be down to your opponent’s brilliance as much as anything, but when in golf you shoot 78 or triple-bogey the last hole, that’s all on you. I found footage of van de Velde’s escapades on YouTube, with commentary by the late great Peter Alliss. The Frenchman up to his knees in mud at one point. Apart from some extraordinary bad luck, part of the problem was that both he and his caddy were so underprepared, as if they’d gone hiking the Himalayas in jandals. (Some Kiwis actually did this a few years ago.)

Dad sent me this video about Romania, which went out in 2001. Since then the cities have changed beyond belief, especially Cluj which was showcased in the video, while the countryside has remained much the same. Tourism hasn’t really materialised – yet.

Environment - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Time to stop the willy waving

July 18, 2023 by 0 Comments

I read this morning that the Australian state of Victoria has pulled out of hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games. My reaction to that was Good. How sensible. The earlier cost estimate of Au$2.6 billion – already ridiculous – had blown out to $7 billion. Sanity has prevailed for once. If memory serves – it might not – the 1990 Auckland games came in at NZ$14 million (under budget and ahead of schedule). That’s $30m in today’s dollars using CPI inflation. That might not be the best measure when considering the cost of building materials, so let’s call it $50m. So why on earth are these events now costing billions? Is it all just ego? A dick-waving competition? Last year’s Birmingham games, which I attended and thoroughly enjoyed, cost about £780m, or Au$1.5 billion. I suggest they save some cash by going back to Birmingham in 2026. (Some view the Commonwealth Games, and the commonwealth itself, as an anachronism. It’s possible that last year’s games were the last.)

Yesterday was a steamy, smelly day. My main objective was getting out of the heat and not losing my mind. That’s hard to do when you have lessons in other parts of the city and you haven’t slept well. I probably had my last lesson with the single pair of twins until the autumn. It was productive: two vocubulary exercises, then some exercises where they had to match phrasal verbs (written on cards) with their definitions, then a “correct or incorrect” sentences game, then (because it was our last activity for a while) the Formula 1 racing car game.

There are now endless apps and sites for exploring the weather in great detail. As the climate has got increasingly crazy – Sardinia and Sicily are heading for the mid-40s today – the demand for this information has also shot up. A good site I found is ventusky.com. It has historical, zoomable weather maps going back to 1979. Mum often talked about 1st October 1985. (We had the paddling pool out! In October!) Here’s the section of the map for our neck of the woods on that day. You can see the wind coming from the Mediterranean:

Back then, we normally topped out at that kind of temperature in summer. TV weather maps showed temperatures in orange (instead of the usual yellow) at 25 and above. Orange, at any time of year, was rare.

When I was discusing “intrusive r” with my young student on Saturday, I gave the same example I always do: Pamela Anderson, because it’s slightly amusing. (Non-rhotic speakers – people who don’t normally produce an audible r in words like hair – often introduce a rogue r sound between Pamela and Anderson. That’s an intrusive r.) Of course because he was so young he didn’t have the foggiest idea who Pamela Anderson was, so my example didn’t exactly pack the punch it does with older folk. I then gave him law and order (“Laura Norder”) instead.

One of the great things about this blog is that it stops me from forgetting things. I’d totally forgotten the unhappy feeling of cabin fever I had in June 2021, before I made the trip to Iași and into the mountains the following month.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

A video to watch, some non-competitive word games, and some traditional pics

July 12, 2023 by 0 Comments

Here’s a 15-minute video of Timișoara that an intrepid American couple recently put up on YouTube. It showcases my picturesque city (I think of it as my city) pretty well. I wouldn’t recommend you come right now because of the searing heat, but in autumn or spring, or even early summer, an enjoyable and relaxing time in this beautiful place is just about guaranteed.

This is what my whiteboard looked like at the end of Saturday morning’s lesson.

I explained that we sometimes use so-called delexical verbs such as get, give and take, where the meaning is taken out of the verb and put into the noun, for example “give the house a clean” as an alternative to “clean the house”. I notice that I mistakenly wrote “give my house a clean” rather than “…the house…”. We love possessives in English, but we wouldn’t normally use one there.

Today I played Bananagrams with a boy of (I think) eleven. This was how it panned out (his effort on the left, mine with excessive wind on the right):

Kids seem to like the game. There’s no scoring, it doesn’t feel competitive, and they I know I’m always there to help them (and say no every time they ask me if AI or PC or any other ridiculous abbreviation is a word). In this game I also had to say no to MICES. Why can’t you have that? C’mon, think about it! By the way, if you ever play Bananagrams, try and make some longish words off the bat – I started with FLOODING and FARMER – to improve your chances of being able to join on later.

Another non-competitive word game I play sometimes with kids is Hangman. I recently watched a surprisingly interesting video about some of the oddities of the game. Yes, you literally draw a decapitation as an education tool for little kids. When I was six, I had a Milton Bradley boxed version of Hangman which was competitive. Both you and your opponent (seated opposite each other) chose a word of up to eight letters; the first to guess the opponent’s word was the winner. At the start of the game you put the letter tiles into slots, facing yourself. You turned them around as your opponent guessed them; this meant you had to insert the letters in reverse. Every time your opponent guessed a letter that wasn’t in your word, you turned a dial that showed an additional limb on a stick figure. When I played with Dad, he’d often forget to reverse the letters, leaving a six-year-old boy hopelessly struggling with complete gibberish.

I’ve watched almost none of this year’s Wimbledon so far. I saw half an hour of an Alcaraz match (not a bad player, that guy) with Serbian commentary, and that’s been it. Last weekend I found myself more interested in the Ashes cricket, for some reason. I listened to two of the players being interviewed after the match. They both invariably appended a –y onto the ends of their teammates’ names. Brooky and Broady and the rhyming trio of Stokesy and Woakesy and Foakesy. No first names at all. What are the rules for this stuff? What if you have a multi-syllable surname? What if your surname already has a –y stuck on the end, like Batty or Hardy? It’s something that smacks of British public schools to me, but maybe I’m overthinking it. (Aussies stick an -o on the end instead: Johnno and Thommo and Deano and Wayno.)

Here are some pictures from the open-air concert on Friday night:

A local group

Remembering the founder who had passed away

A Turkish group

People getting mici or maybe a frigărui

Tomorrow morning I have to go to some depot with the plumber to select pipes and what have you. He’ll start putting my central heating in on 25th July.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - The UK

One man’s obsession, and travel hassle

May 5, 2023 by 0 Comments

After I heard what had happened to my friend in Auckland, I wanted to find out more. He was bipolar and had a horrific time with that before I met him, though he seemed to have it under control. Sometimes during our Skype chats he’d come out with “I don’t know if I can be bothered with life”, but in a surprisingly upbeat way; I didn’t for one minute think he’d actually do it. I emailed the author of that blog, and he quickly got back to me. This guy mentioned my friend’s obsession with the two Malaysian incidents, and his delusions about the book he was writing on the subject. This book, jam-packed with conspiracy theories, was going to be a bombshell to rock the world of civil aviation. He said he had video conferences around the world and around the clock with the real movers and shakers. The reality was that only a handful of other conspiracists might have wanted anything to do with his book which he’d spent years on, and maybe the realisation of that sent him over the edge.

Without a doubt, my friend had a high IQ. He was eloquent, both in speech and in writing. He was also generous, often offering to pick me up or drop me off somewhere or other in his latest big swanky car. (His expensive cars riled the facilitator of the men’s mental health group. No job. Disability benefit. You’re gaming the system, mate.) The no-job thing was a biggie, as it is so often. Even a crappy job forces you to interact with people, it keeps you grounded, it keeps you in touch with the real world to some extent. I suggested that given his interest in aviation he should look for a job at the airport, but he never did. My aunt – Dad’s sister – married young and could afford not to have a real job, so she’s never had one. In fact she often childishly mocked people who had real jobs – “he does data, how boooring” – much to my annoyance. I’m sure her joblessness has come at a huge cost to her wellbeing. Anyway, I sometimes visited his house in a modern estate on the North Shore – not somewhere I’d like to live. His place was well looked after, but he’d put up weird signage everywhere, and he had about eight landline phones. In later years he bought a scooter, and I found a 2017 article about him patrolling the streets on his new vehicle. He was a nosy bugger, that’s for sure. He would come along to the mental health group tuned to police radio.

The author of that blog is a full-time conspiracist too – his posts are chock-full of anti-vax diatribes and lies about the 2020 US election being stolen – so I’ll give his little slice of the web a pass. Still, I appreciated him getting back to me so quickly.

I’d planned to visit the UK in July for my nephew’s christening, but the trip is becoming less doable by the day. I can’t find a flight back to Timișoara for much under £200. Before then I’ll have to get down south, somehow, probably taking a ludicrously expensive train. I’ll have to stay at least one night near the airport in Luton because the plane gets in so late. Then I wanted to get across to Birmingham and back to St Ives … it’s all just too bloody hard. I feel bad because I’d basically promised my sister-in-law that I’d be there, but what can I do? My best bet now is to stay two or three nights in Budapest when I come back from New Zealand in September, then go to the UK for my nephew’s first birthday.

On Wednesday I had my medical check-up for my driving licence. This included standing on one leg with my eyes closed and repeating whispered Romanian numbers with my hand over one ear. In all I had to visit six specialists in clinics on two floors. The whole process took 90 minutes including a fair bit of hanging around in a waiting room. I got the green light, so my next step is to go to Iulius Mall for the conversion. When I eventually get my hands on a Romanian licence I’ll buy a car, and that won’t be an easy task either. Registering a car is such a bureaucratic process, even for Romanians, that there are middlemen all over the city who you pay to do it for you.

The coronation is tomorrow. I’m not a monarchist, I’m not a republican, I have no strong feelings on the matter. For me, the royal family have always just been there. Still, I’m a little disappointed that I have to work and won’t be able to watch all the proceedings. From a pure visual perspective, it would have been great. I’d have enjoyed the talk of ampullas and sceptres and cherubs and tritons. Oh well. I’ll watch the highlights, or just wait until the next one.

The snooker. Yippee, it’s over! That was my first thought; it was enthralling, but such a time sink for me. What a final, though. Luca Brecel thoroughly deserved his victory, which almost nobody was expecting. Before arriving at the Crucible this year, he’d never won a single match in five attempts. Then he cleared up. A crucial moment of the final came in the last frame of Monday afternoon’s session. With the balls in extremely awkward spots, Brecel compiled one of the best breaks I’ve ever seen, and that put him 15-10 up going into the evening session. At that score, an awful lot needed to go right for Mark Selby and it nearly did. He won a tense scrappy frame to close to 16-12, then when he cracked open the reds in the following frame it was clear he meant business. Brecel hardly had a look in until the 32nd frame when Selby missed a black and then a brown, but finally the Belgian player was able to close out the match. I hope his win will help grow the game in continental Europe.

Letters of the alphabet sometimes rise to prominence in my lessons, Sesame Street style. Yesterday was brought to me by F and W. I’d like to do a series of posts on the alphabet because, unlike most normal people for which it’s incidental, letters and words have always been very meaningful to me.

Yesterday the mother of one of my students gave me ten eggs from the countryside, including a duck egg. In return I gave her two slices of pizza that I’d made. When I make pizza I follow Mum’s recipe – she’s always had a knack for making very tasty pizzas. I make the dough rather than buying the base – there’s something therapeutic about kneading it.

After two overcast days, it’s a beautiful day today.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

And now he’s gone

May 1, 2023 by 0 Comments

What a sad start to the day. This morning I thought, what ever happened to the guy in Auckland? We first met in 2009 at one of the mental health groups, and we kept in touch from time to time after I moved away. I last saw him in 2016, just before I left New Zealand. We had a longish Skype chat on 30th August last year, then I tried contacting him again and never got a reply. This happens to me quite often, so I didn’t think much of it. Then this morning I googled his name and found out he had died within ten days of our chat. The information I found was scant, and came from a single page discussing the two Malaysia Airlines crashes; he’d been trying to publish a book on the subject. He almost certainly committed suicide. It was hard to find information because he had changed his name twice, I didn’t know any of his other contacts, and I’m not on Facebook. I don’t know his exact age but he must have been in his late fifties, perhaps even sixty. For a time he presented a radio show in Auckland. We had all these weird Skype calls which were mostly monologues – I rarely got a word in – but at least we were in touch. And now he’s gone. I feel bad that I didn’t look him up much earlier than this.

Just before my Romanian lesson I saw an email from Dad. He and Mum had just got back from Christchurch where they attended the funeral of the 25-year-old teacher – Mum’s cousin’s son – who drowned in Wellington Harbour the week before last. As Dad said, what on earth do you say to his parents who are now living in a personal hell? There’s nothing you can say after a tragedy like this.

Dad also mentioned that they met my cousin – the one whom I spoke to three weeks ago – and one side of her face had dropped. She’d either had a stroke or was suffering from Bell’s palsy. She’s 53. There had been no mention of that from her mother – Mum’s elder sister – but then she never mentions anything.

I watched the snooker last night, but not the last three frames because I couldn’t stay up that late. When I hit the hay, Luca Brecel was playing great attacking snooker and had built a 9-5 lead. I missed a lot: Selby hit back to make it 9-8, and in the process compiled a maximum break, the first ever in a World Championship final. I don’t regret having an earlier night because I absolutely needed it. They play the two remaining sessions later today.

Next time I might write about my Romanian lessons.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

A desire to get moving

May 1, 2023 by 0 Comments

This morning I called my parents from the Mehala car market. I recently looked at the many hundreds of photos from my trip around Romania in 2016. Isn’t this country beautiful? So far I’ve only been able to scratch the surface of it, so wouldn’t it be great to have my own set of wheels? I’m apprehensive about the whole thing though; buying and owning a car in Romania seems bureaucratically onerous and could add further layers of life admin that send my whole wobbly edifice crashing to the ground. And I really don’t want to spend much. Plus, if you write a blog you can find out the exact date that you last did something. I last drove a car on 1/10/17, which is bloody ages ago. On Wednesday I’ve got my medical tests – all six of them! – which I need for a Romanian licence, then I’ve made an appointment for 15th May to actually get my licence converted over. Probably something or other won’t be in order and I’ll have to come back weeks later. I know the drill by now.

It’s the last day of April, when Timișoara is guaranteed to be beautiful. Cycling through tree-lined Mehala on a quiet Sunday is quite lovely. Not all of it was quiet this morning, though. At the huge Orthodox church there was the usual hubbub of people coming and going, and there were queues of people filling up big bottles from the well. According to the official list, there are 92 wells dotted around the city, but the one outside Mehala Church has the best water, or so they say. I tried to encourage Mum and Dad to come to Romania next spring. They must be thoroughly sick of my brother and I banging that drum, though I hope they’re happy that their kids want to see more of them.

The snooker. Yikes. Two gripping semi-finals and a very late night for me. In the first match, Luca Brecel (who had pulled off an extraordinary win over O’Sullivan) trailed Si Jiahui 14-5 with 17 being the target. In other words, Si was playing out of his skin and Brecel was gone. Until he wasn’t. Brecel went for broke, and got lucky when Si missed a green in the last frame of Friday’s brilliant session. Everything the Belgian player touched turned to gold, and he continued in the same vein when they returned yesterday. I didn’t see the end of the match because I was playing tennis, but he won eleven straight frames and ran out a 17-15 winner. Nobody had previously won a match at the Crucible from nine frames behind. I just hope the loss – on his debut – doesn’t permanently scar the Chinese player. If that match was free-flowing, the other semi between the two Marks – Selby and Allen – was the polar opposite; it was chess with balls. Selby’s shtick is to grind his opponent into the dust with tactical play. Allen just happens to be rather good at that type of snooker too, and the two of them tore hunks out of each other in a match spanning 13½ hours. The balls ran awkwardly and sizeable breaks were rare. Even the aging Scottish referee seemed to put on extra years during the match. Last night it seemed Mark Selby had finally worn his opponent down as he led 16-10, needing just one for victory. Great, some sleep! But Selby kept missing chances to win. Each frame was a drawn-out battle. Allen squeaked out five of them to close to within one, then at last Selby got in around the black and sealed the deal. Even then, he had a black barely wriggle into the corner pocket. I’m two hours ahead of the UK, and the match finished at ten to three my time. There’s now the small matter of the final between Brecel and Selby, where the winner is the first to 18. The conventional wisdom is that Selby will win, perhaps easily, but I’m not so sure. For one thing, you’d expect Selby to be shattered after his efforts.

Family - Language learning - Life :) - Other sports

Losing my aspiration

April 27, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s a sunny morning as I write this. That helps enormously. In the old place, my mood wasn’t so weather-dependent. On Monday I had my usual lesson with the single set of twins in their ground-floor flat. No light ever penetrates the place. That would drive me to despair.

Earlier on Monday I had my Romanian lesson with Dorothy, the English lady, and Coco, our teacher. Coco has a good command of English but we all spoke Romanian throughout. She told me I needed to watch my pronunciation of the Romanian t. In English it’s aspirated – put your hand over your mouth as you say an English t, and you’ll feel a breath of air, but in Romanian it isn’t. To Romanian ears, an aspirated t can come across almost as a ch sound. There was so much else to unpack, such as when to use articulated nouns and when not to. Romanians have great trouble with this dilemma in English, and I still have fun and games with this in Romanian too. For instance, I started the previous sentence with Romanians, but in Romanian that would be Românii, which is the equivalent of the Romanians. Another quirk here is that nationalities and names of languages aren’t capitalised in romanian – I prefer that to what we do in english – but obviously Românii needs a capital R in my example because it’s the first word of the sentence. Coco is hot on all this stuff – she doesn’t gloss over it as some (often bad) teachers do – and she recognises that both Dorothy and I actually care.

Mum and Dad desperately need to simplify their financial lives. They recently committed to a three-year rental contract on one of their flats in St Ives, and they’ve had to open a new account with a different British bank so they can receive rent payments because their other account is about to be closed. All of this means being on hold at 11pm and pressing one and pressing two and getting nowhere. It’s all getting both of them down mentally, and in Mum’s case it’s affecting her physically too. I was happy yesterday when Mum said she’d been gardening, which is something she enjoys.

Snooker. Other than Luca Brecel’s 13-11 win over Mark Williams, the lack of close matches made the second round something of a disappointment, but the quarter-finals – four super-high-stakes matches played over just two days – definitely made up for that. Last night I had to pull the plug as Si Jiahui made it 11-11 against Anthony McGill. Ronnie O’Sullivan’s earlier exit ramped up the pressure in that final session to a near-unbearable level. Si won in the end, 13-12, to make the semis. What a tournament he’s had on his debut, having also come through three qualifying matches. McGill, who also had to qualify and had been playing so well, will be licking his wounds for sure. The real shock though was Ronnie. He’d built up a 10-6 lead against Brecel despite being nowhere near his best, and then from the snippets I saw of yesterday’s session he didn’t even want to be there. Brecel went for everything, got just about the lot, and rattled off seven straight frames in no time. The semis are Brecel against Si, and Mark Allen against Mark Selby. To my mind, Selby is the clear favourite because he’s so difficult to break down and he thrives in long matches. The semis, which start later today, are a marathon over the best of 33 frames.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

A life cut short

April 23, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. They were pretty upbeat considering the stressful week they’d had. Mum told me that her cousin, who came to visit us in the UK in 1990, had tragically lost her 25-year-old son. He lived in Christchurch but last Wednesday he was in Wellington to see a concert at the TSB Arena. He fell in the water after the concert, and two days later his body was found. He was a primary school teacher and extremely well regarded. The kids go back tomorrow after their Easter break. Just truly terrible. When I lived and worked in Wellington, people fell in the harbour remarkably often, including someone I worked with, although he clambered safely to the shore. There are no railings or anything of the sort in the area. I guess they would damage the look of the place, or something. Now this teacher, a distant relative of mine, has had his life cut short by half a century or more.

I did have those five lessons with that young woman – a pretty handy English speaker already. In one of our sessions she told me about her stay in France a few years ago. “But there’s one place I’d really like to visit.” You’re 22, so I think I already know, but please please please let it be something else. “Dubai.” Jeez. I told her that it would be right at the bottom of my bucket list if you exclude places currently at war. I thought I had a particularly good face-to-face lesson yesterday with two women who are absolute beginners. In a 90-minute session we did numbers, colours, the verb to be, and simple sentences. I like X, I don’t like X, Do you like X? The cup is green, the pens are blue. It’s vital to keep things as simple as possible. You need to eliminate irregularities as much as you can to begin with, and introduce them step-by-step. So many teaching tools get this wrong and hit students with oxen and thieves on day one, which is frankly ridiculous.

Snooker. A crazy frame last night in the attritional second-round match between Mark Selby and Gary Wilson. At two frames all in a best-of-25, just two reds remained on the table, both surrounding the pink that was millimetres from dropping in. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. The referee gave them three shots each to resolve the stalemate, otherwise there would be a re-rack (50 minutes after the frame had originally started!). They did somehow get one red away from the pocket without sinking the pink, then Selby had an uncharacteristic loss of patience that allowed Wilson to clear up and take the lead. I fell asleep at that point. Selby, however, won the last three frames of the session to take a 5-3 lead into this afternoon’s session.

There were only three of us at tennis last night. Almost the whole time I played on my own against the other two, so I got plenty of exercise. I’ll be back on the court tonight.

Tomorrow I’ll have my first proper Romanian lesson. It should be very useful.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

Take the long way home

April 21, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s my birthday, and my first thought when I woke up this morning was, jeez, people are going to want to communicate with me more than usual today and I’m not sure I’ll cope with that. Instant messaging stresses me out like you wouldn’t imagine. I wish I could go back to checking my emails every few days.

Mum and Dad called me first thing, to wish me a happy birthday. Mum was in a shitty mood, and I could hardly blame her because she was facing her own Barclays ordeal. (Mum deals with all my parents’ banking stuff, online and offline.) Then I got an unexpected message from S, whom I met on Tinder (ugh!) in 2018. Heaven knows how she remembered my birthday; my brother doesn’t even manage that. She now has a nine-month-old daughter.

I’ve got a new student who’s having five one-hour lessons with me today, tomorrow and the next day. She’s 22, lives in Cluj, and wants a job in IT just like almost everybody else in Cluj. This evening, during my second session of the five, I realised that I end an awful lot of sentences with “right”. I only knew this because she kept repeating the “right” right back at me. It’s like the time I accidentally recorded part of a lesson and realised how much my head (and not only my head) moves when I talk. I wonder what other (annoying?) mannerisms I might have.

Last weekend I was cycling down the Bega when I saw a whole pod (if that’s the word – I’m sure it isn’t) of freshwater turtles. Soon after that, my back wheel got a puncture. There are now kilometre posts along the river, and this happened at the 108 km point. To go home, I turn at about the 116 km post, and then ride another kilometre to my door. I didn’t have a repair kit, not that it’s easy to repair tyres on this Dutch bike anyway, so that was a decent walk. I did patch the inner tube without removing the wheel, but I got another flat this evening as I was coming home from my 4-till-6 lesson.

Some of those turtles

A long walk home

I wasn’t the only one taking pictures of the flowers in the park yesterday.

Too many lessons now to watch much snooker – that’s a good thing – but this afternoon I caught the tail-end of Joe Perry’s 10-9 loss to Robert Milkins, in a battle of players in their late forties. Perry had led 5-0 and 7-2, but developed a knack for missing almost anything. Fancy coming through qualifying on a black-ball decider only to then lose like that in the first round; that will be a hard one to take. Now they’re showing the fancied former champion Shaun Murphy in a close match with Si Jiahui. It’s the last first-round match; I hope Si wins and I don’t know why. Update: Si did win, 10-9. He led 9-6 but Murphy won the next three. In the decider, Si knocked in a break of 56 but was very unlucky not to be on a red after opening up a cluster, then Murphy ran out of position himself and tried to force the less experienced Si into an error. In the end Murphy couldn’t escape from a snooker and the 20-year-old Chinese player clambered over the line after a gripping final frame.