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The benefits (perhaps) of big sport

November 20, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’ve got tennis this afternoon, straight after my lesson with the young couple. It’ll probably be singles again with that super-fit guy. We chatted after last weekend’s game, and he attributed his fitness in part to growing up (and going to school) under communism in the Nadia Comăneci era. Sport was a top priority then, as it simply wasn’t when I grew up in the UK, and isn’t now in 21st-century Romania. Sure, we all did gymnastics and swimming and team sports, but unless you were one of the best at football or cricket, we were pretty much going through the motions. I know I was. We certainly didn’t have scouts visiting schools to eye up the best young talent, as they did in Romania. I was, however, exposed to a higher-priority regime when I spent those six months in New Zealand as a nine-year-old. There were inter-school tennis competitions, inter-school athletics competitions, and cross-country runs. I participated in all of that and hated the lot, even tennis, a sport that I otherwise liked.

I saw two more flats yesterday, both in the same block in the Fabric area, which is to the east of where I live now. The block was designated U4, as in “U4 me”, but I don’t think those places were quite for me. In Romanian, U4 is pronounced “ooh patru“. They weren’t bad apartments at all, but do I know what I’m taking on here? I left feeling more confused than anything.

After my Moderna booster, I felt fine for the rest of the day, but at night I got the shivers and slept no more than three or four hours. The next day I felt a bit tired and groggy, but soon I was back to normal. Some short-term grogginess seemed a small price to pay for the level of protection that the extra jab should give me, especially seeing that I’m in Romania where getting a severe case of Covid is a riskier proposition than it would be in New Zealand, for instance.

Mum and Dad missed out on seeing their one-in-800-year near-total eclipse of a blood-red moon. It clouded over at just the wrong time. I had a chat to them this morning. All is well there, although they have taken on a pretty big project with their new house. I also spoke to my brother, who was on his own – my sister-in-law was attending a conference in Liverpool.

Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Time to make something happen

July 13, 2021 by 0 Comments

I ended yesterday’s post saying I hoped England’s first major final in 55 years wouldn’t go to penalties. It damn well did. The game started with a hiss and a roar. We had the rousing Italian national anthem (the less said the better about England’s dirge) and then within two minutes of kick-off, Luke Shaw (or as the Romanian commentator said, Luke Show) had scored. England didn’t really ever look like adding to their lead, and Italy dominated the second half. England looked buggered in extra time. Thirty minutes of that, then here we go again. As soon as I saw six-foot-five Donnarumma (awesome name) square up against Pickford, I thought, this looks ominous. I had no idea how massive the Italian keeper was, and what’s more, he’s only 22. The fall-out from the match has already been nasty and insular, as it would have been had England won. Race-based idiocy and irrelevant bollocks about Brexit. Mum will be happy – her mate Novak won Wimbledon to make the grand slam tally between the Big Three 20-20-20, and England didn’t win. So that’s my fleeting interest in Big Sport over with for a while.

I’ve been reading back over the early days of this blog. I was buzzing, wasn’t I? These days I’m on a pretty even keel, and that’s way better than where I’ve been in the past, but I wouldn’t mind getting late 2015 back, or even late 2016 when I washed up in Romania. So how can I do that? First, I’ve gotta gotta gotta move away from this flat, as fantastic as the location is. I need a place of my own, with an office just for teaching. Some comfortable furniture. A record player. A car, so I can push off from time to time and see more of this beautiful country. It’s time I established something. Made something happen. I’ve also got to get back to this damn dictionary. More about that next time.

Getting away will help me plan at least some of this. I’ve booked my train journey from Timișoara to Iași (15 hours – travelling by train makes Romania seem massive) and four nights in the city that almost borders the Republic of Moldova. I leave early next Tuesday morning. Then I’ll explore the surrounding villages, though I haven’t booked that part of the trip yet. We’ve got more scorching weather this week: 38 tomorrow and a ridiculous 40 on Wednesday.

Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Slow-motion setting finally switched off

July 12, 2021 by 0 Comments

I might be back in business, finally. Lately I’ve been mooching around my flat, just about getting by, but then the moment I step outside, ugh. Heavy going. Putting one foot in front of the other has been a major effort. I’ve felt frozen by the hot, beating sun, if that makes any sense. Now my cold is still there, but this morning I found myself walking at just about my normal pace and managing with the sun. That’s a relief; feeling close to normal means I now feel safe booking trains and accommodation.

This morning I got a surprise call from my aunt; I spoke to her last weekend following her husband’s passing. She’d called me by accident – she meant to call her only son, who lives in Perth (she has four daughters). Soon after that I had a lesson with the young couple. The river of classes has slowed to a trickle, so a bonus lesson on a Sunday was welcome. It was one of my better sessions; we went over the present simple verb forms – positive, negative, question, to be and not to be – before moving on to food. They said they were rooting for Italy in tonight’s Euro final against England. I expect most Romanians, if they’re following it at all, will do the same.

It’s finals weekend at Wimbledon. Ashleigh Barty made all the running in the final against Karolina Plíšková – she won the opening 14 points as Plíšková seemed anaesthetised, as a Romanian commentator put it – but it oh so nearly slipped away from her. When she finally held on in the third set, you could see how much it meant. Wimbledon was the one. Then the women’s doubles final managed to be even more dramatic. The all-Russian team of Vesnina and Kudermetova led 6-3 5-3, had two match points, and could only have been millimetres away from wrapping up a comfortable win. Fate somehow conspired against them, and Elise Mertens and Hsieh Su-wei dragged the match into a third set, which extended into overtime. The last time such a match had reached 6-6 in the third was in 1998, when Hingis and Novotna beat Davenport and Zvereva 8-6; back then, top women’s singles players were serious about doubles too. The Russians served for the match again, at 7-6 in the decider, but Mertens and Hsieh broke back and won the following two games for victory. Both teams won the same number of points, 112, but the contrast in emotions at the end could hardly have been starker.

The men’s final is just a few minutes away. Matteo Berrettini has been very impressive and his raw power could cause Djoković some problems. I expect Djoković to win yet again, but we’ll see. Then a bit later Berrettini’s countrymen will take on England at Wembley. Dreams will be made and shattered. Twelve men will be immortalised, or not, largely due to events out of their control. One or two might even be villainised – think David Beckham in ’98 or Gareth Southgate himself after missing that penalty in ’96. Heaven forbid it goes to spot kicks.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The park

July 9, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’m on day twelve, at least, of feeling like rubbish. Going to the park this morning was the most exciting thing I’ll do all day. I brought a flask of coffee and read a couple of chapters of my book. It was already 30-odd degrees, but at least there was a breeze. I FaceTimed my parents, expecting my battery to die at any moment, but just like me, it ran on fumes. They were fine. They’ve now had both doses of Pfizer, with no side effects to speak of, and the sale of their house will go unconditional any day now. We discussed the tennis, and briefly the football. Dad thought England had already won the competition, when in fact the final against Italy takes place on Sunday night.

When we hung up, two men in their sixties, one grossly overweight, sat down on the bench next to mine. They talked about the football, then switched to politics. After some time, a friend of theirs showed up on his bike. He wore a Germany football shirt that he’d almost certainly bought at a second-hand shop, and on his left forearm he sported a faded blue heart-and-arrow tattoo with an illegible name underneath. He talked extraordinarily loudly, his sentences punctuated by laughter and filler words like ba and păi. Then a fourth man arrived, also on his bike. His name was Ghiță, a diminutive of Gheorghe. He wore a red-and-white striped shirt, with just a single button done up in the middle. The tattooed bloke had a conversation with him, mostly one-way, cutting across where I was sitting. I find people talking across me unbearable in any language and at any volume, let alone the combination I faced then, so at that point I upped and left.

The lady from tennis, Magda, also phoned me when I was in the park. For the second week running I had to say I wouldn’t be playing.

I hadn’t watched any of the Euro matches, but did stay up to watch England’s nerve-jangling extra-time win against Denmark. They’ve got a very good team and a fantastic manager, and now they stand on the brink of history. Staying up until after half-twelve was no issue; my body clock is way out of whack. I had no work the next morning either; my hours have suddenly dropped through the floor.

Wimbledon has had its moments. I haven’t followed it as closely as in previous years. Ashleigh Barty’s win over Angelique Kerber yesterday was one of the more enjoyable two-setters I’ve seen. Barty will be a very popular winner if she beats Karolina Plíšková in tomorrow’s final.

I’ve been planning my trip. My idea is to take the train to Iași in ten days’ time (I hope I’m up to it by then), and then visit some towns and villages in the middle of nowhere, before taking a trip on the mocăniță (narrow-gauge train) from Vișeu de Sus, and eventually coming back home.

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Trying not to do a lot

July 5, 2021 by 0 Comments

For the last few days I’ve been living in the crawler lane, bogged down by coughing and headaches and lurid green mucky slimy custardy gunge. It’s been particularly bad first thing in the morning. I soldiered on with my online lessons on Friday and Saturday, and intentionally haven’t done an awful lot today.

Lately I’ve played poker on Sunday mornings, but today I did something much better. I had a FaceTime chat with my aunt, whose husband died at the end of May, and my cousin who lives in Wellington but was staying with her mother in Timaru. It was a great pleasure to catch up with them, particularly my aunt. I’m looking forward to the day I can fly over and see them. I fear that will be still some time away.

Before and after our longish chat, I watched three episodes of a documentary series on Netflix (which included a depressing part on deforestation in Romania), then I spent most of the afternoon on a bench in Central Park, reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. The weather was pleasant, and it was quiet; I couldn’t hear much apart from the jet of the fountain, the occasional train, and the clatter of tiles and dice from people playing rummy and backgammon. I’m fortunate to have such a lovely park on my doorstep. On one side is the river, on the other the train tracks, and I thought about how I might be on a train two weeks or so from now.

No tennis today, either playing or watching. For the last time, Wimbledon is taking a rest day on the middle Sunday. Next year they’ll play on all 14 days. It’s a sensible move. And I definitely was in no fit state to be running around a court.

I haven’t watched any coverage of Euro 2020, but after a 2-0 win over Germany and last night’s 4-0 thrashing of Ukraine, England are daring to dream.

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Need to escape this slump

June 26, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’ve been feeling down the last couple of days. No mental energy. No drive to do anything. The crazily hot weather hasn’t helped – I’ve been struggling to sleep. The reduction in my hours hasn’t been much fun either – work gives me energy to do other things as well as somebody to talk to. People have been going away, to Turkey, to Bulgaria, to attend weddings and baptisms and whatever else – events that didn’t happen in 2020. I could really do with getting away too, and will try to escape in the second half of July. My plan is to stay in Romania (it’s plenty big enough, especially if you travel by train) and visit the northern Moldova region, or Bucovina. I’m feeling cabin fever now.

My parents now have a buyer for their place in Geraldine. Dad is already talking about extending and renovating and gutting the new place. I wonder where the energy to even think about that kind of stuff comes from. They got six figures, only just missing out on a seventh (again, the mind boggles here), although it hasn’t yet gone unconditional. This is all excellent news obviously because their place had been on the market a while and they can now hopefully get on with the rest of their lives. This morning my student gave me two contacts in the real estate business; I’ll hit them up next week and hopefully get the ball rolling. I’m clueless there at the best of times, and now I’m adding a foreign language and totally alien systems and processes into the mix. I’m really fumbling in the dark.

New Zealand are inaugural World Test champions, when it looked for all the world that the English rain would have the final say. That’s a pretty big deal. Way bigger than, say, the America’s Cup. It’s NZ’s finest moment in the game, that’s for sure. They’re a brilliant team of cricketers and a great bunch of guys to boot. Good on ’em, that’s all I can say. World beaters at Covid, and now cricket. I wonder what’s next?

No Simona Halep at Wimbledon. That’s a shame.

Mum has just sent me an email with a picture of her plus three other women (combined age close to 300) holding aloft a big silver plate. It’s obviously a golf trophy of some sort. I’ll probably get all the details of that at the weekend.

Unusually, my weekend will be completely free of lessons. Tomorrow’s temperatures are forecast to be tolerable – a max of “only” 31 – so I’ll pop to the market and if I’m lucky I might find a second-hand bike.

My student told me all about the nai, or Romanian pan flute. A famous of exponent of this instrument is Gheorghe Zamfir; this is him playing Păstorul Singuratic, or The Lonely Shepherd. It’s quite lovely.

I’ve blanked my last nine poker tournaments; my bankroll has dipped to $718.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Poker - Tennis

Birthday, culture shock, and some games

June 14, 2021 by 0 Comments

It’s Mum’s 72nd birthday. If we used base 12, which we probably would if we had extra fingers and toes, a 72nd birthday would be a milestone, like a 50th birthday is for us in base-10 world. (As a kid, I would sometimes accompany my grandmother as she visited the record office to do family history. One time she looked through a book of baptisms from 1850-odd, and two babies were recorded – prominently – as having an extra finger, or perhaps two, on each hand. I found this hilarious.) Sometimes I’ve been critical of Mum, even on this blog, but these days we get on very well. The pandemic has helped, funnily enough. We’re in total agreement on just about everything Covid-related. Mum is a young 72. She’s managed to keep remarkably fit and healthy.

Yesterday morning I had a discussion with my student about our university experiences, hers rather more recent than mine. I said that I felt a bigger culture shock when I started uni than I did on my arrival in Romania. In truth it was way bigger. Constantly being surrounded by the same people, never being able to hide or escape, it’s a wonder I survived that first year.

A thrilling finish to the French Open. Djoković (boo!) came from two sets down to beat Tsitsipas in the final. I only saw the first three sets before I played tennis myself. I wanted Tsitsipas, who had played so well, to win. He also has a badass name. Tsitsipas, swarming the net like a tsunami of tsetse flies. (The French sometimes say tagada tsoin-tsoin and I don’t really know what it means, if indeed it means anything.) I wonder if Djoković is the first player ever to win a grand slam coming from two sets down in two separate matches. And by the way, the third set of his semi-final against Nadal was mad mad mad stuff for 95 minutes. Way out there, off the planet, it was that good. As for the women, Krejcikova won a tense final against Pavlyuchenkova, then topped it off by winning the doubles too, partnering Siniakova. The men’s doubles final was a cracker, with the local lads (Mahut of stupidly-long-match fame, alongside Herbert) making an improbable fightback to win.

Euro 2020, or 2021, has started. Last night one of the Danish players had a heart attack in the middle of a match with Finland and was resuscitated on the pitch. It must have been nightmarish for everybody. I was amazed that they later restarted the game. The incident reminded me of Fabrice Muamba, who played for Birmingham for a time, then suffered (and survived) a heart attack during a game.

Poker. I had a go at a bounty PLO8 tournament last night and went pretty far but only made a tiny profit. This morning I tried a non-bounty PLO8 but didn’t make the money. Then in the single draw I made a deep run, getting pretty lucky when my opponent made 65432 for a straight against my pat nine, and eventually finishing fourth. I also made the final table in the pot-limit badugi, and my luck quickly ran out when my seven ran into a better seven; I was out in eighth place, but not before scoring some nice bounties. My bankroll is up to $735.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Other sports - Poker

No Shangri-La for me, but at least I can stay

April 7, 2021 by 0 Comments

My apartment here in Timișoara has been sold. The agent told me on Monday. Luckily I can stay here, and I certainly want to for the time being. Then that evening I got a surprise knock on the door from the elderly couple on the sixth floor. They’d heard this place was for sale and were interested in buying it. I had to tell them that it had been sold hours earlier.

On Sunday I played tennis again with the smoker in his late sixties who coughs and spits his way through the game. We talked vaccines, as we all do right now, and I expected him to be one of Romania’s many anti-vaxers. He just fits the profile. But no, he’d been pfully Pfizered and was quite vocal about all the “idiots” who refuse the jab. I shouldn’t have been so quick to pigeonhole him. When he started smoking, probably half a century ago, practically all men in Romania smoked. And it’s really hard to give up!

I had a good chat with my cousin in Wellington on Monday. It’s funny dropping in on Virus-Free World. It sounds like some mythical land, a Shangri-La. They’re about to introduce a trans-Tasman bubble with Australia. Fingers crossed that doesn’t all blow up in their faces.

Last weekend the Boat Race took place. I didn’t watch it; I didn’t even know it was on. It was one of those things I watched as a little kid, hoping Cambridge would win, because I was born there and lived just down the road, and because I thought their duck-egg bluey-green colour was way cooler than Oxford’s boring dark blue. But Oxford always bloody won. Last Saturday’s race was interesting because Covid restrictions it took place on the Ouse at Ely, just around the corner from where I grew up, instead of on the Thames, so Cambridge had home advantage of sorts. And they won both the men’s and women’s races.

In my last post about everything becoming too big, I totally neglected to mention the Ever Given, the gargantuan quarter-mile-long cruise ship that was wedged in the Suez Canal for six days, blocking about 12% of all global freight. We’re bursting at the seams here.

I played a single draw poker tournament this morning, or at least attempted to. My connection to their server kept cutting out. It was hopeless. I only saw about dozen hands in the times I sporadically reconnected. After blinding way down and busting out, I contacted support asking what I could do to mitigate the problem (I had no internet issues other than with their server), and if they could refund my small buy-in. They got back to me pretty quickly and, to my surprise, refunded my buy-in as a “goodwill gesture”, though with a big dose of “this is your fault”. This didn’t happen to the others at your table, so you can’t blame us. It reminded me of the time I got a wisdom tooth taken out and was in agony during and after the extraction. The anaesthetic didn’t properly work, and I was up all night bleeding and in excruciating pain. When I went back to the dentist, whom one of my work colleagues accurately dubbed “the Indian Butcher”, he strongly suggested that it was my fault because my experience “doesn’t usually happen”. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to get a refund, but I don’t know how to prevent being disconnected again.

Coronavirus - Family - Other sports - Poker

The nightmare of normal

March 15, 2021 by 0 Comments

Today Mum and Dad will have got the keys to their latest property. They’re quite stressed at the moment with trying to sell their current place as they head into autumn. Mum seems to spend half her waking hours dusting or vacuuming, in case somebody shows up out of the blue. They feel about as locked down as I am.

At the weekend I watched John Campbell’s fantastic video on the impacts of Covid on mental health: the depression and anxiety caused by all that worry and isolation. But what he didn’t mention were the anti-effects. If I had an office job and had been able to work from home for a year in relative peace, how would I cope with all those people again? With extreme difficulty, I’m sure. This was the case for me in 2011. I quit my insurance job at the end of 2009. For the next 15 months I travelled, read, played online poker, and did temporary work which I enjoyed because I never had to involve myself in all the crap. Then (and I still can’t believe it happened) I got sucked back into the corporate world. In my first few weeks there I was like a fish out of water. Possum in the headlights doesn’t begin to cover it.

Yesterday I heard that Murray Walker, the Formula 1 commentator, had died at the age of 97. This came as a surprise to me, because I thought he was already dead. Somebody quipped that Walker spoke like a man whose trousers were on fire, and that was why he was so memorable, even for someone like me who was mostly uninterested in motor racing. He voice was cars zooming around a track on a Sunday afternoon. These household-name sports commentators of my childhood and early adulthood are rapidly becoming history. Peter Alliss – it’s hard to imagine the 72nd hole of the Open championship without him – died in December aged 89. Then there’s Richie Benaud, voice of the Ashes, and Sid Waddell, voice of darts. Going further back, there’s Bill McLaren (rugby – again, what a voice), Peter O’Sullevan (horse racing, another sport I didn’t care about but was hard to avoid), Ted Lowe (snooker), Brian Johnston (cricket again), and Dan Maskell (tennis, “Oh, I say”). All gone. Dodgers baseball fans had Vin Scully, who commentated on their games, with extraordinary wit, for sixty-seven seasons until 2016. At 93, he is still with us. But these voices, beamed into our living rooms and onto our car radios seemingly since time immemorial, won’t be replaced. They’re gone for ever, as (for me) has sport itself, largely. I think back to England’s 1998 cricket tour of the Caribbean and how exotic and far away those islands seemed as I listened to ball-by-ball commentary on long-wave radio. As money has flooded top-level sport, that remoteness, that wonder, it’s all gone.

Four more poker tournaments at the weekend. Saturday evening’s fixed badugi went nowhere, then by Sunday the US had moved to summer time, meaning all the day’s tournaments kicked off an hour earlier. (They’ll be back to normal in two weeks, when we too put our clocks forward.) The early starts reduced the fields by about 20%. I had a good run in the single draw, picking up some monster hands to amass a big stack, but I couldn’t make much headway at the final table. I had a big stack to my left who kept bombing after the draw and I never made a hand I felt I could call (or check-raise) with. Being out of position in single draw is tough. I was out in fourth for a $21 profit. At the same time I made a deep run in the pot-limit badugi – being in contention in two tournaments simultaneously is fun when it happens – but though I finished sixth I only made $7 because I once again did a terrible job of picking up bounties. I had a particularly unlucky bust-out hand, but that happens. Then I ran badly once more in last night’s fixed badugi, winning four of the 78 hands I played. My bankroll is $436.

We generally get very nice weather in Timișoara – that could be another reason why it’s become my happy place – but right now it’s grey and wet and miserable.

Finally, I’ve just found out about this new website – radio.garden – which lets you tune in to any radio station in the world just by clicking on a map. You can spend hours on it.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The latest worry

December 14, 2020 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents on FaceTime this morning and I was just about to hang up when their landline phone rang. Mum took the call. This sounds medical. What’s going on? Apparently Dad had blood in his urine when they were down in Queenstown, and the phone call was about an appointment to get that checked out. This week he also has his scheduled 18-month post-cancer-operation check-up. Mum told me not to worry. What the hell? Of course I’m going to worry. And if they’d got that call a minute later I would never have known.

Yesterday my aunt called me. We chatted for half an hour – that’s probably some kind of record. She started off, as usual, saying she was bored and depressed. The depressed part I sympathise with; you have some say over the bored bit though. She said her antidepressant wasn’t doing the trick, so I gave her the name of mine, though it might not be suitable for her (if she could get a doctor to prescribe it anyway). We had a friendly chat, about hairstyles among other things. She was all there and half-way back but her world has become oh so small. I’m sure things would be very different if my uncle was still alive.

This afternoon I played tennis for the last time until the spring. Tennis has been of real benefit to me. Plenty of exercise and a fair bit of Romanian too. Today I finally figured out what a da din mână means. (Mână is Romanian for hand.) The phrase means to just rally, without playing a game. The first time I heard it was when one of the women wanted to go for a pee behind the bushes, and the rest of us rallied while she was busy. Does it mean to pee, I wondered. There are lots of Romanian expressions involving mână. One of the most common is sărut mâna, literally “kiss hand”, which is used when you say goodbye to a (usually older) woman. The t is silent.

Since the US election I’ve been following the news less. Most of the time it just isn’t worth it. Three incompetent prime ministers (in their own ways) have helped push Britain to the brink of a nonsensical tear-down-everything exit from the EU while the pandemic rages on. (Hopefully I’ll be safe here.) And Donald Trump is fast-tracking executions before he leaves office, while 3000 Americans are dying every day from Covid. He really is a piece of shit, isn’t he?

I remember the 2003 rugby World Cup final very well. I watched it at my grandmother’s place; it was a few days before getting on the plane to New Zealand where I would start my new life. How sweet it was to see England lift the cup. Against Australia. In Australia. In the 100th minute. (When I arrived in NZ, they were still dissecting the All Blacks’ semi-final exit.) But I was reading that Steve Thompson, who was in the cup-winning side, can’t remember winning it. He even forgets his wife’s name sometimes. Gee whiz. He’s barely older than me. He’s one of several ex-elite rugby players to suffer from dementia.

We’re racing towards Christmas. It’ll be my third in five years spent alone, and I’m fine with that. No stress. I’ll attempt to make some Romanian food. Sarmale. A ciorbă. Maybe even a cozonac if I get really ambitious. I’ve got some vișinată, which is lovely, and even some țuică if desperation sets in. (Google these things if you like.)

I had 33½ hours of lessons last week.