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Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

A few tips

April 3, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching a YouTube video on tipping in the US. It was already way out of hand when I visited in 2015. Waiters, who for some bizarre reason are exempt from minimum-wage laws in states that have a minimum wage, behaving like performing seals, and all that unnecessary time-consuming awkwardness. But at least then I paid cash for virtually everything and didn’t have to cope with the guilt-inducing touch screens that have proliferated since then, often at places where people aren’t providing a service at all – they’re just doing their jobs. My cousin who lives in the US said he was once so appalled by the service at a restaurant that he manually entered a $0.01 tip on one of those screens. The solution to all this “tipflation” is obvious – stop tipping entirely, pay staff what they deserve, and incorporate that into the price of the food or whatever else you’re providing. In an otherwise good video, they got one thing badly wrong: they said the word “tip” stands for “to insure promptness”. No it doesn’t. It doesn’t stand for anything; it’s just a word. Not every short word has to be an acronym. Incidentally, I often use “tip” in my lessons as an example of an English word with several meanings.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open during last night’s snooker, where commentators gave their tips as to whose cue tip would be the steadier and who would be tipped out of the tournament, his career perhaps headed for the tip. The semi-final between Shaun Murphy and Mark Selby went to a deciding 19th frame; I only found out the result (Murphy won) when I got up this morning. After reading and grocery shopping, I met the English lady in town. After a lesson on Tuesday in which I struggled to teach pronouns to a beginner student, because they work differently in his native Romanian, I suggested that we sit down together and get a handle on these damn Romanian pronouns once and for all. Every solo attempt I’ve made so far to properly learn them has ended in failure. So we had coffee in Piața Unirii and we went through the accusative and dative pronouns. The third-person accusative pronouns are gender-dependent but the third-person dative ones aren’t, and that’s just the start of it.

We had mild weather today and it was busy in town. Some tourists are now making their way to Timișoara, perhaps to see what the “Capital of Culture” fuss is about. I was struck by a young couple carrying backpacks and dressed in clothes of every colour of the rainbow; not so long ago that was commonplace, but now there’s a certain drab conformity in what young people wear.

I had a good session of tennis this evening. Domnul Sfâra, now 88, was there. My partner commented on how good his reflexes were for a man of his age. The diminutive Domnul Sfâra was on the other side of the net, and we won 6-2 6-2.

After 32½ hours last week, I’m expecting something lighter this week.

Books - Family - Headaches - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

A life of slime

April 2, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s been a wet, miserable day. After my first outing on the tennis court last Sunday, you could forget it today. It’s been a real mixed bag – only 3 degrees and sleet on Tuesday, but beautiful yesterday.

Life with my sinus problem ain’t a whole lot of fun. I haven’t had one of those excruciating headaches since December, but the low-to-medium-level pain (like I have right now) is unremitting. Blowing my nose eases the pain; often I only have to tap the right side of my nose and a jet of colourless slime shoots out of my left nostril at a rate of knots. Sometimes I don’t even know where the gunk has gone. Dad said it’s in Embarrassing Bodies territory – get on TV and maybe I could be sorted. Whenever I blow my nose during our Skype calls, Mum says, “I hope you don’t do that in your lessons.” I do try to tone it down, but what about me, Mum? She’s more bothered that I might briefly annoy my students than she is about my pain. I shouldn’t be surprised. Dad suffered from terrible migraines when I was growing up, and Mum’s sympathy cable was permanently unplugged. The only emotion she showed was anger. What will they think of me if we don’t show up to Jackie’s party? Or if I turn up alone? Thankfully Dad’s migraines are fewer and farther between these days.

On Monday I managed to catch my brother on WhatsApp when my nephew was up and about. It was great to see him grinning away on his playmat, but my brother and his wife are struggling with lack of sleep. My brother looked whacked. In the middle of my call, my sister-in-law’s parents showed up to provide some respite, but I could tell my brother would have preferred it if they’d stayed away. I don’t envy him one bit. Some time ago he said it’ll be a “one and done”, but we’ll see. This morning I read an article about only children. They’re selfish and spoilt according to the stereotype, but people with siblings can sure as hell be selfish and spoilt too.

Last night I had an interesting lesson with the Romanian guy who lives in London; he now has two sons. He’d just made a trip back to Romania, and said he felt a sense of greyness on his arrival back in the UK. I know exactly what he means because I’ve felt the same thing many times. That journey from the airport; the grey M25 and M11 with an equally grey sky overhead. He said that people in Romania were happier despite being poorer. That was something I noticed on only my second evening in Timișoara. It was a sunny Sunday October evening and I was walking along the road from the guest house to the university campus to grab some dinner. I passed a constellation of ugly communist-era blocks of flats which had a park outside, full of basic play equipment and half a dozen cheap-looking ping-pong tables. Kids were playing, people were walking their dogs, and all the ping-pong tables were being used. I was amazed how happy everybody seemed. I got the same feeling last night – another sunny evening – when I collected my 15 litres of water; not much money but a real sense of community. In contrast, when I have my lessons in well-to-do parts of town where Porsches abound, there’s no sense of community at all.

This afternoon, in one of those well-to-do areas, I managed to convince my 15-year-old student that a haggis was a hedgehoggish creature that inhabits the Scottish highlands. We read an article on Haggis scoticus from the Daily Record. Then I asked him to check the date on the article, which was 1st April 2021.

Last Sunday I had a wander through the woods with Mark and his two dogs. It was great to be out in nature and to hear the hammering of woodpeckers and humming of insects instead of the rumble of traffic. One thing I love about Timișoara is how easily you can escape from urban life.

The culmination of the snooker season is upon us once more. The sport is going through a rough patch with several Chinese players having recently being banned for match fixing. I also wonder where the fresh new faces will come from: it seems to be a middle-aged man’s sport. Is whiling away hours in a snooker hall, rather than on TikTok, even something a teenager would do these days? At the moment the Tour Championship, featuring the season’s top eight players, is in full swing, then later this month it’ll be the big one – the World Championship, the one event in the game that dwarfs all others.

I’m currently reading The Twisted Ones, which (unsurprisingly) is a horror novel. The author is Ursula Vernon, who wrote the book under the pen-name T. Kingfisher.

Life :) - Other sports

They’re all popping off

February 27, 2023 by 0 Comments

It felt good to give this flat a proper clean this morning while listening to the local radio. The rain hasn’t abated, and the main headline was the flood alerts, in all their lurid colours, all over the country. There was also (following our recent shaky spell) plenty of airtime given to all the earthquake-prone buildings in the area. It was as if I’d been transported back to whence I came. They then had a sports programme on. All three local second-division football teams are doing terribly. Even the best of them, the announcer said, may still avoid avoiding relegation.

This morning my parents told me that their indoor bowls club had packed in because so many of the players had died. I suggested that dying isn’t a new thing, but of course there are no new players to replace those who have bitten the dust. My parents couldn’t have given a damn about indoor bowls, but it highlights a bigger problem. All these clubs that used to bring people together are folding. Dad’s model aero club consists of a handful of blokes with an average age of 70-odd. At one time, people came from far and wide to see other people fly their model planes. Even Caroline Bay, which would have been heaving in the summer when Mum was a girl and was even very popular as I remember it, doesn’t attract many people these days.

John Motson, the famous English football commentator, died last week. He was catapulted into the limelight as a young man in 1972 when he covered the greatest FA Cup shock ever, as Hereford beat Newcastle. There are very few of the great commentators left; those distinctive voices beamed into millions of living rooms, bringing people together. (See previous paragraph.) Here is Formula 1 commentator Murray Walker (1923-2021) trying his hand at snooker commentary; it’s hilarious.

Today I’ve been wondering what on earth happened to Matei’s dog. They didn’t really seem to know. Yesterday I saw him with his head poking out of a thick plastic bag, ready to be buried.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

I can gather all the news I need on the weather report

February 6, 2023 by 0 Comments

Edit: I see I’ve used that Simon and Garfunkel song lyric as a post title before. It is one of my favourite songs, so it can’t be helped.

On Friday my UK-based student asked me what “gusts of three degrees” meant on the weather forecast. He said he’d heard it several times. A frost and three degrees, maybe? He insisted that it was gusts. Sorry mate, I’m struggling with that one. But it did make me wonder about weather forecasts. Sometimes they just kind of wash over you, don’t they? If Catriona MacLeod came on Radio NZ and said there’d be “gusts of three degrees, south-westerly fog patches, and moderate to heavy drizzle later in the ranges, rising to 30 knots”, half the listeners wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

Here in Timișoara, the actual weather has been pretty nippy. When I went out today in mid-afternoon, the temperature was zero. Yesterday was one of the windier days I can remember here, with the exception of this day. It was also wet. Getting to my pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița on my bike, worried that my left handlebar grip might fly off at any moment with all the moisture, wasn’t much fun. After my maths lesson I had my 252nd session with Octavian. I feel bad because, although he’s now got a pretty handy command of English, he still has a very non-native pronunciation – he hasn’t got a proper handle on the English r or th sounds, nor can he properly distinguish the vowel sounds in bit and beat, or bet and bat – so I spent almost the whole session on pronunciation drills.

What a horror day last Tuesday was. This blog tells me that 10/8/16 was pretty bad; perhaps 31/1/23 was even worse. I felt so hopeless and overwhelmed by everything, and had lost control of my emotions. When I think about it I’d been feeling anxious for some time, and my memory and concentration had shrunk to comatose goldfish level. It reminded me of the last time I worked in life insurance, when I couldn’t remember what I’d done five minutes earlier, let alone on the previous day. I really need to act on those first warning signs – take a day or two off, whatever – before things spin drastically out of control. Since Tuesday I’ve bounced back reasonably well, I feel. I’m trying to get back to what I did during the initial stages of Covid which, bizarrely enough, were quite a positive time for me because my life became quieter and simpler. I planned each day the night before, went to bed early, got up early, and executed the plan as best I could. Grocery shopping was always first thing on Monday at the exact same place. I’m going back to that routine now. It’ll be harder because of my increased workload and the books – things are bound to get in the way – but if I have to put something off until the next day because of something out of my control, that’s OK. Tomorrow, apart from my four lessons, my list consists of shopping (I’ve made a list), tidying this flat which has become a mess, cooking, booking flights to NZ (I’ve got to bite the bullet on that one, and bugger the cost), calling the plumber, spending an hour on the dictionary, and reading.

Yesterday Birmingham City – Blues – scored twice in the last few minutes to win 4-3 at Swansea, snapping a run of five straight losses in the league. Mayhem ensued when the winner went in.

New Zealand - Other sports - Writing a book

The magic of the Cup

January 30, 2023 by 0 Comments

Near-biblical rainfall, landslides, homes falling into the sea. That’s what Aucklanders have been dealing with in the last few days. Mum said last night that four months’ worth of rain fell in three hours in places. At least four people have died. I had the usual hell-in-a-handcart stuff from my parents, though I keep agreeing with them more and more; we’ve entered what I’ve already called on this blog a post-optimism world.

It’s weird how I sporadically get interested in various sports. Now it’s FA Cup football. I watched bits of Birmingham’s entertaining 2-2 draw at Blackburn on Saturday – Blues opened the scoring in just the third minute, were 2-1 down immediately after half-time, but 18-year-old Jordan James equalised in the 91st minute, just after he came on as a substitute. What a moment for him and for the supporters who are going through an ugly spell right now – they’re struggling in the league and everybody hates the current owners. The end of the match was marred by racial abuse towards Neil Etheridge, Blues’ Filipino goalkeeper. The replay is tomorrow night at St Andrew’s, Birmingham’s home ground which I visited a few times more than 20 years ago. Yesterday I dipped into Brighton’s 2-1 win over Liverpool, which featured a stunning late winner, then saw a marvellous match between Wrexham (currently outside the league) and Sheffield United (in the second tier), which finished 3-3. The Welsh club were recently taken over by a pair of Hollywood actors. Their kit sponsors are TikTok. I remember Wrexham’s run to the quarter-finals in 1996-97; back then they were sponsored by Wrexham Lager. Alcohol sponsorship has now been banned, so instead we’ve now got endless betting firms, big banks, and the likes of TikTok – collectively they’re doing at least as much harm as booze.

When I watched those games yesterday, my attention wasn’t squarely focused on them – I was working on my dictionary, adding entries and tweaking them here and there. It’s a big effort that I know might be for very little. I’ve had no choice but to my other book – the novel – on the back burner for now.

Language teaching - New Zealand - Other sports - Politics

Knowing when to go

January 19, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had another online lesson with that boy who cried. It was hard work – he rarely uttered anything apart from “yes”, “no”, and “I don’t know” – but at least he didn’t cry this time. Later I’ve got that maths lesson again. Yesterday I had a terrible session with the four twins. Having already exhausted all topics with them, I tried a printable domino-style words-and-pictures game that I found online – lots of painstaking printing and sticking – but the game descended into farce because there were too many cards and they were unable to read the words on them; none of them can read in English beyond words like “cat” and “dog”. The rest of the session turned into a load of nothing. It didn’t help that my mood was terrible and my enthusiasm at rock bottom.

Jacinda Ardern has resigned as prime minister of New Zealand. Good decision, I’d say. Most leaders are ego-driven, desperate to retain power at all costs, and they outstay their welcome by years. She dealt admirably with the horrors of the Christchurch mosque shooting, then the initial stages of the pandemic. Had National retained power in 2017, I imagine thousands more New Zealanders would have died of Covid “to keep the economy moving” or some such tripe, and the economy wouldn’t have moved any faster. Quite the opposite, in fact. Set against chaos of Trump and the like, her leadershup was a beacon of calm. Latterly, though, her star has fallen. The disappointment, as I see it, is that Labour won a majority in 2020 – almost unheard of in the MMP system – but have totally failed to use it. Housing is a zillion-dollar disaster. Mental health for many Kiwis continues to be a mess. (Mental health provision got noticeably worse in my time there; here was a chance to reverse that.) My parents are always telling me that local farmers can’t get workers from overseas to do the jobs that Kiwis won’t. I don’t know anything about this Luxon bloke who may well be prime minister by the end of this year, except that he’s probably less of an arse than Judith Collins.

On Tuesday night I watched a football match for the first time in ages. Birmingham City, a.k.a. Blues, a team I saw several times at university, were playing Forest Green Rovers away in the third round of the FA Cup. Forest Green are based in Nailsworth, a town of 5000-odd in the Cotswolds, and the smallest town in England ever to host a league football club. They’re owned by renewable-energy business moguls and everything at the club is fully vegan. During the game, flashing advertising hoardings counted up the number of plastic bottles thrown away, millisecond by millisecond, and other depressing environment-killing stats. Forest Green took the lead with a stunning goal in the eighth minute. Birmingham were terrible in the first half, though I liked their young player Hannibal, mostly because of his name. Their manager must have dished out a bollocking at half-time because they sprang into action and equalised just after the break. The big moment came at 1-1, when Blues’ keeper pulled off a scarcely believable double save. Though the atmosphere was mostly flat – the magic of the FA Cup is nothing like it once was – it was worth watching the game just for those ridiculous saves. Blues soon took the lead and saw out the remainder of the match. Forest Green were unfortunate not to at least force a replay; Birmingham now go to Blackburn in the next round.

Yesterday, before my bad session with the four kids, a fresh breeze blew, and as I was sitting at my desk hundreds of helicopter seeds hit my window before slowly twirling to the ground. At first I thought they were insects. This isn’t normal for mid-January, is it?

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Other sports - Writing a book

The boon of the book (so far)

January 8, 2023 by 0 Comments

The book based on my time with the guy in Auckland has been uppermost in my mind this week. Many hours spent on it. For my mental health it’s been a real boon. Let’s hope I can keep the momentum going.

Fifty years ago my mother was on the ship from New Zealand to England; it left port on 1st January 1973: a six-week voyage (probably not an inaccurate term) via the Panama Canal. She paid $666 for a return ticket – a fraction of the cost of an airfare back then. When the return leg didn’t happen, she was able to recover half of what she’d paid.

My bathroom is done, or just about. I just need to get the bath painted. The work and materials cost about 12,000 lei (a bit over £2000, or around NZ$4000). My parents said you can just about pay that for a set of taps in New Zealand. As for them, they’re about to get the builders in for an altogether more ambitious renovation. They’ll probably need to vacate their house for a period. They’d been stressed because of delays in getting the builders to come. Soon they’ll take delivery of a new electric car. I often wish Mum and Dad could be content with cooking, eating, watching the flowers grow, and playing euchre with their friends, like my mother’s own parents did.

On Thursday my brother had keyhole surgery to repair his knee ligament which had been shot to pieces from overuse in the army. He said he was under general anaesthetic for an hour, and described the experience as like something out of Red Dwarf – that hour was mysteriously deleted. He talked about the artificial intelligence revolution, embracing the concept much more than me. He said, “It’s all fast-evolving mathematics.” Fast-evolving mathematics, you say? (He got an F grade in his GCSE maths.) Are you just making shit up, I asked him. I said that fast-evolving mathematics has been responsible for a lot of misery, like the 2008 crash. To demonstrate I turned my camera around and scrawled a random formula on my whiteboard (making shit up), then added a fudge factor to it. He then said I looked like one of those Open University professors in the eighties, complete with beard. This was, I suppose, what you call banter.

This morning I gave my first maths lesson of 2023. Matei, who started at British School when it opened in 2019, said he now thinks in English, even when he’s alone in his thoughts. For me, a foreign language becoming dominant in my life like that is hard to imagine. He said he uses Romanian at home with his parents and his dog, but that’s about it. His Romanian lessons at school are relegated to minor importance. That verged on sad for me. On the way to our lesson I cycled on the cobblestones of Piața Traian, then had to negotiate a wobbly old yellow tricycle; the man sitting on it reminded me of Omar Sharif, though it must have been watching Doctor Zhivago recently that made me think that. That all lasted seconds and seemed perfectly normal, but before coming to Romania it would have been bizarre.

The darts. What a match the final was between the two Michaels, van Gerwen and Smith. In the second set, van Gerwen left 144 after six darts, but missed double 12 for a nine-darter. Nothing too crazy there, but Smith himself was on 141 after six darts and proceeded to check out on double 12 for a perfect leg. That had never happened before and the commentators couldn’t cope. Van Gerwen, the clear favourite, was just a notch below his best; Smith took advantage. I had a lesson in the morning and I couldn’t watch the end of it. When I went to bed, Smith was 5-3 up. Either there would be a big shock or a big comeback, and it was the former, Smith winning 7-4 after a tense finish.

Song of the last few days: Aimee Mann’s Save Me. It’s a masterpiece. It’s part of the soundtrack to Magnolia, a three-hour film that I saw once but can’t remember anything about except the boy who peed his pants on a quiz show.

The weather. It’s like April, with sunshine and temperatures rising into the teens. The mild conditions mean I can get to my lessons easily, but it does all feel weird. This time six years ago I was waking up to temperatures in the negative teens.

Life :) - Other sports

New Year’s party — match report

January 2, 2023 by 0 Comments

Right, that New Year’s party. It’s over.

After being told that bow-ties weren’t required, I tried to wear stuff that was smart enough but me at the same time, in a vain effort to reduce my anxiety. As luck would have it, I only had a short walk to the party. On the way someone was cooking a pig on a spit. The venue was a substantial building that a year ago didn’t exist. There were forty or fifty of us there; I joined a table of nine – the tennis people and their friends. At the head of the table was Radu, a real matahală – a giant. There was a smorgasbord, a word which Joe Bennett said sounds like a pig in a trough, so we got our snouts in. The music wasn’t up to much – there were two rather pedestrian singers of around sixty and someone else on a keyboard. They did waltzes and other Romanian songs from two generations ago. Later they moved on to hits of the eighties, both Romanian and what you might call Europop. More to my liking, but when they sang in English (baybee! baybee!) it sounded faintly ridiculous to my ears. The musical experience would have been far better with just a CD or record player and some speakers.

There was a raffle in which everyone was guaranteed a prize. The top prize was a weekend for two in Brașov, the second prize was a weekend for two somewhere else, and although I’d have loved to visit these places (I still haven’t been to Brașov yet) I dearly hoped I wouldn’t win either of the two main prizes – the last tickets to be drawn – because I wouldn’t have had anyone to go with. It was a great relief to see my number drawn among the first ten and to win a kind of wicker basket. At 10pm we had ciorbă de perișoare – meatball soup, and then my brother rang me. I was able to get outside and take the call; I was grateful for the break. The evening progressed glacially – there was nothing to do except eat, drink, and talk. The clock ticked painfully slowly towards midnight. We went outside just before twelve to see the fireworks, and as 2022 became 2023 it was like a war zone out there. Unlike past years when I’ve been in the centre of town, this time I was in the backblocks and people were setting off bangers randomly in the streets.

At 12:30 the steak came out. Good steak, but I wasn’t in the mood for eating, and certainly not drinking, by this point. I often liken social events to air travel, and this was like crossing time zones on Garuda, no longer knowing what was day or night or up or down. Another hour passed. Then the big prizes were drawn, then we had dessert (a kind of chocolate layer cake), then at 2:10 I made the move, 6½ hours after I arrived. They were all nice people at the table, but I couldn’t keep it up any longer. There was some relief at getting away, but I was worried I’d have a splitting headache like I did four years ago after attending a New Year’s party in a kind of bunker. I have had a headache today, but nothing on that scale.

As hard as I try, that sort of event is too much for me, though there were many ways it could have been much worse. I’ve already decided I’m going to see in 2024 with a very small band of people, or even on my own.

I’ve been watching some of the darts from London. It’s a nice distraction. My highlight so far has been Mensur Suljovic, the 50-year-old whose facial expressions are a picture, hitting 161 to prolong his match with red-hot favourite Michael van Gerwen. The level of play in the match had been bordering on stratospheric, but in the deciding leg of the fifth set the Dutchman passed up a shot at the bull’s eye to win the match 4-1, expecting quite reasonably that he’d be back to clear up with 18 and double 16. But then in went treble 20, treble 17 and the bull from Mensur, and the commentators were speechless. Van Gerwen did win 4-2 in the end, and now he must be the favourite for the title. I’ve just seen quite a shock as Gabriel Clemens, the big German, took out Gerwyn Price 5-1 in the quarter-finals. Clemens was all over that treble 20 like you wouldn’t believe, and often he could afford to miss doubles at the end of a leg because he’d built up such a hefty lead. The big highlight in this match was Price, after a break at 3-1 down, re-entering the stage wearing building-site-style ear defenders to block out the crowd noise, and maybe distract his opponent. It didn’t work. Darts is a well-designed game that is great for drama, but it has nothing on snooker which has immense tactical depth. I’m already looking forward to the snooker World Championships in April.

Family - Life :) - Other sports

A low ebb

December 19, 2022 by 0 Comments

At about the time I wrote my last post, my nephew was in hospital. He was having trouble breathing and his oxygen saturation was down, so he spent the night there. He now appears to be fine, but it was a scary day or two. At that age, things can go so wrong so fast. This incident made me wonder if having kids is even worth it. From day one to day 10,000 or 15,000 or if you’re really (un)lucky 20,000, they’re a source of constant worry. How do you sleep at night? There’s gotta be some, I dunno, benefits to counteract the neverending stress.

Last week was probably my worst, from a mental health perspective, since I washed up in Romania way back when. Loads of lessons despite some last-minute cancellations, and those I coped with even if I sometimes got drenched on the way to them. But I’ve also had the builder here to help sort out my bathroom and at the same time throw everything out of balance, and I’ve just been, well, low. Those books, what’s the point exactly if (as is very likely) they never get published and hardly anyone reads them? Yet another exercise in futility, as if I haven’t had enough of those already. And of course I’m stuck here on my own, getting older, seeing my parents get older, wondering if and when I’ll need to go back to New Zealand and how on earth I’ll afford to live in a place where the average house costs a million dollars.

Yes, the bathroom. Last week the builder, a heavy smoker in his late forties, spent four days here gutting everything and making a start on the tiles. The builder’s name is Dan, and he’s back again today. The plumber, who should be coming on Wednesday, is Bogdan. So just like Dan, but he has to deal with the bog. Nominative determinism in action. It would have been easy if I could have just left Dan to his own devices but at times I’ve had to make decisions. Friday was a bit fraught. In a gap between lessons I went with him in his van, first to the tip, then to Dedeman where we spent well over an hour. That place, where everything is orange and blue, reminding me of Uncle Ben’s sauce, is disorienting at the best of times. In places like that I freeze, or even worse I concentrate on all the wrong things, like why it is that Romanians call the middle traffic light galben, or yellow, when they’re clearly orange. Is it because portocaliu, the Romanian word for orange, has too many syllables? (Officially in the UK, the middle light is amber, but nobody actually calls it that unless they’re trying especially hard to be an annoying twat. In the New Zealand road code – I’ve just had a look – it’s officially yellow even though everyone in NZ surely calls it orange. I see that Toby Manhire, writing about the Covid traffic light system, is no fan of the yellow designation.)

Back to Dedeman. I first had to choose some floor and ceiling tiles without pissing Dan off too much. Which browny grey or bluey grey or whitey grey do I choose? Shiny or semi-shiny or non-shiny? I almost thought, sod it, I’ll get the one with the bright pink fish. Then I chose a loo and a sink and a cupboard and so on and so forth. We made several stops as Dan got his quarter-tonne of cement and gypsum board and many other bits and pieces. I got so lost in there. “Get the trolley and bring it back to me,” he said. But, but, that’s like eight aisles away and I wasn’t paying attention. Back home, we had to haul the vast bags of cement up the stairs to my flat. I managed, but struggled to keep up with the smoker half-a-dozen years older than me.

I spoke to my brother last night. His wife’s family really go to town with Christmas activities, and he seemed almost envious of the non-Christmas I’ll end up having. He was grateful for the lockdown two years ago. We talked about our aunt who seemed pretty good on the phone when I spoke to her last week. But physically she’s a mess; my brother doesn’t think she’ll be around much longer. We discussed, of all things, the new notes and coins with King Charles’s portrait. He said that monarchs alternate the direction they look in, so Elizabeth faces right while Charles will face left (I knew that), and that queens wear crowns but kings don’t (I didn’t know that). Soon this will all be moot – cash is rapidly disappearing from Britain.

The deadliest and stupidest football World Cup ever is over. The football – none of which I watched – was a roaring success, as it was always going to be. Yesterday’s final surely ranks as one of the greatest games of all time, but why can’t they damn well decide it properly? (Five of the knockout matches, or about a third, went to penalties at this World Cup.) “Nobody has come up with a better way” is such a lazy argument. There are no end of better options. My favourite is to gradually remove players from each side after 120 minutes until someone scores. With all that space, someone is bound to. I’m aware here that I’m over 40 and younger people think shoot-outs are “sick” or whatever, so they’re unlikely to go away any time soon. By the way, I only maintained a vague interest in the World Cup (go Morocco!) because of the boys I teach, many of whom had never seen a normal World Cup before. For them, this is normal.

Language teaching - Other sports - Poker - Tennis - Writing a book

Fuq the World Qup

November 21, 2022 by 0 Comments

One of the benefits of teaching kids is that they sometimes teach you stuff. It was a cliché in the 80s and 90s that teachers would often ask one of their ten-year-old pupils how to operate a VCR. Last week one of my 15-year-old students (who wants to be an airline pilot) told me about an upcoming Istanbul–Timișoara route run by Turkish Airlines, which could be handy in getting me to and from New Zealand. I asked Turkish Airlines for some idea of a date; they told me it was “up their sleeves”. On Friday a 13-year-old boy told me all about the groups and teams and players in the World Cup which is about to start. “You’ll be my go-to man, then,” I told him, “because I won’t be watching any of it.”

Qatar. Even the word looks ridiculous. If a U-less Q was a criterion for hosting the event, they should have held it in Greenland. No end of possibilities there. I’d have been all over the games in Qaqortoq, Uummannaq and Ittoqqortoormiit. They could have kept it in summer; no air-conditioned stadiums required. I’d say they’ve missed a triq. (I remember Chelsea’s Cup Winners’ Cup match in the blizzard of Tromsø in northern Norway, back in 1997. It was a thing of beauty.) Seriously though, this World Cup stinks. Everything about it is jarringly wrong, right down to an anatomical-looking stadium, one of eight soon-to-be white elephants they’ve built in an area not much bigger than Wellington, at a cost of probably thousands of lives.

Earlier today I spoke to my friend’s girlfriend in Birmingham. She gave me some pointers on getting my work translated; the dictionary might be a bridge too far because of the sheer cost. She also put me in touch with a woman in Romania who knows something on the matter. The translation business is much bigger than I ever imagined; there are vast numbers of people online touting their services, even in relatively uncommon languages like Romanian.

After our chat, I played some online poker. Specifically, it was a triple draw tournament. I don’t particularly like triple draw, but I gave it a whirl and ended up finishing fifth for a modest profit of around $9. Once that was over, I read an article about a woman who had developed a tennis gambling addiction during the pandemic. Poor her. Her wagers included betting on the winner of the next point, which is asinine, but if you need the rush… She lost £40,000. I count myself lucky that I don’t have an addictive personality, or at least I don’t think I do. Also, it helps that I’m not well blessed in the ego department. In poker, if I think my opponents are better than me or the stakes make me feel uncomfortable (mainly because my opponents are likely to be better at higher stakes), I simply won’t play.

The incessant rain put paid to tennis today. Yesterday I got out there though, straight after finishing my three lessons. I enjoyed the session more than usual because we just rallied instead of playing a game.

Now I’ll do my usual Sunday night thing of rallying the troops (contacting my newer or less reliable students) before the week’s lessons start.