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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.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The skis and ski-nots

January 19, 2020 by 0 Comments

This week has been pretty work-heavy and I’m OK with that. Today I had my 100th lesson with Octavian – he’s my third student to rack up three figures. My number of students (to date, since I arrived here) are rapidly closing in on that mark too – I got a call this morning from the mother of a ten-year-old boy who, on Monday, will be number 99. I was supposed to see Ammar (number 98) this evening, but he called me at the last minute to say he couldn’t make it. We’re meeting tomorrow instead. This morning I did meet the IELTS-obsessed Victor (number 97) for a 2½-hour session which he wants to make a regular Saturday fixture. We spent the first hour on a long essay he’d written – I can’t fault his commitment. As for Ammar, I’d like to ask him about his journey from Syria, but I don’t want to pry.

In my fourth winter here, I’ve learnt that Timișoara people can be divided into two groups – those who ski and those who don’t. It’s hardly an even split – skiing is beyond the means of most here – but the people I get to teach aren’t “most”, and among them, skiing is a status symbol. Like most status symbols, skiing comes in levels. Hiring skis and boots for an occasional weekend is one thing, but becoming an accomplished skier with all the latest gear and spending weeks at a time in some Austrian chalet requires a whole other magnitude of moolah.

After watching the darts last weekend, I dipped into some old footage on Youtube. First I watched the tail end of a 1984 semi-final involving Jocky Wilson. Back then, you could smoke and drink on stage. In fact it was almost compulsory. Jocky Wilson smoked and drank a lot. At the end of the match, which he lost by a whisker, Jocky collapsed as he tried to congratulate his opponent. Eight years later, and they’d banned the on-stage drinking, supposedly to clean up the sport’s image. As a little boy I remember darts was always on TV, but by 1992, perhaps due to the game’s seediness, they only showed one tournament. I watched the ’92 final live at my grandmother’s place; my brother and I were staying the night there. My brother wanted to watch the Crufts dog show, which was delayed by this marathon darts match that Phil Taylor won, famously beating Mike Gregory in a sudden-death leg. I then had a look at the 2004 BDO final, which I didn’t see because I’d just moved to New Zealand, I had more important things to do like find a job, and I doubt I couldn’t have seen it anyway in Temuka. Judging from the decor and the crowd atmosphere, it could easily have been the eighties, but the 2004 final was won by the one and only Andy Fordham. He must have been at least 30 stone, and his arms were thicker than my legs.

I had a good chat with my brother this week. They were about to buy some more hens; their current stock has been depleted to just two. He said they’ll get ex-cage hens that have been pecked to within an inch of their lives and have never seen the sunlight.

Family - Language teaching - Other sports

Dad, darts and a damn good student

January 14, 2020 by 0 Comments

Four lessons today. The last, with Ammar, a new student in his mid-twenties, was the most interesting. Ammar arrived from Syria in 2012. Since then, he’s found a Romanian girlfriend, picked up the local language to a standard I could only dream of, and studied medicine. His English is very good too (on my 0-to-10 scale, I’d put him at an 8) and he now wants to sit the IELTS so he can practise in the UK. He’s altogether a smart guy. His parents live in Malmö in Sweden. We’ll be meeting again on Saturday.

I spoke to Dad last night. He was much better. Maybe his headaches were really one big toothache, though that seems far-fetched. Their visitors were my US-based cousin whom I met on my trip there, and his wife. Dad said he was begging for them to leave. They’d been over for my aunt and uncle’s golden wedding celebration.

The BDO darts final was a good spectacle in a lively atmosphere. Both players were ripping into the treble 20 at the start, Jim Williams went two sets up, and I thought he might power to victory with a three-figure average. The critical moment of the match, looking back, came in the deciding leg of the third set. Wayne Warren needed six. Sounds simple, but it’s awkward. Two, double two? Straight down for double three? He chose the latter option, hit the single, but checked out on single one and double one. Miss that and he would probably have been 3-0 down in sets. Instead it was 2-1 and he could breathe. In the end, Warren’s performance in legs he started was decisive – his throw was never broken after the long intermission at three sets all. That included the 11th and final set where he zoned out at times, and was outscored, but he put all his energy into the legs in which he threw first. The match finished at quarter past midnight my time, so I was happy it didn’t stretch any further. Warren, the winner, is 57. Peter Wright, the winner of the more prestigious PDC title, is a couple of months shy of 50. Suddenly I don’t feel so old.

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

Lost in the fog

January 13, 2020 by 0 Comments

It’s been a very foggy weekend. The fog lifted for a time yesterday, but otherwise we’ve been blanketed in the stuff. Today is one of those negative days we get relatively often here, where the temperature stays below freezing all day.

This was the beer factory around noon today.

I had a half-hour chat with Mum on FaceTime this morning. I spoke almost exclusively with her because Dad wasn’t in a good state at all. He had a tooth out on Thursday and will now also need a root canal. (What horrible images the mere mention of “root canal” conjures up.) The pain from his extraction kicked in as the anaesthetic wore off, but now he’s also suffering from the severe headaches he’s been plagued with for the last six months. Predictably, Mum’s sympathy level was zero. She told me that at some point today or yesterday they had visitors, Dad didn’t want them to come over, but when they did he seemed to cope reasonably well, so he’s probably fine and it’s all in the mind. The same old selfish bullshit. Dad did show his face for a matter of seconds, then went back to bed. If this continues, they might have to reconsider their plans to come to Europe this summer, in which case I’ll be booking a trip to New Zealand.

The first full week of 2020 was a light one on the work front: only 19½ hours of lessons. While some of my students are probably gone for good, others were on holiday mode and will be back this week. I also started with two new students and have a third beginning tomorrow, so things are looking up. The guy who started yesterday seemed obsessive about IELTS and all things related to CEFR levels. I’ll try to expose him to as much real-life English as I can; just doing IELTS practice tests will only get him so far.

We’ve got the men’s BDO darts final this evening. The whole set-up has been chaotic and unprofessional at times, and the BDO as an organisation look like they’re dying on their feet. Plus the move from the Lakeside, which gave the tournament a pleasant eighties feel, hasn’t helped. But the ramshackle train is about to clatter to its destination, and two Welshmen have made it to the final. Wayne Warren (aged 57, so there’s hope for us all) beat Scott Mitchell 6-3 (a 49-year-old farmer) in the first semi-final. Mitchell led 2-0 but Warren turned it around in a pretty even encounter which could have gone either way; Warren just hit the double more often in those crucial fifth legs. It was a very watchable game. The other semi was closer on the scoreboard – Jim Williams (35) beat his older Belgian opponent Mario Vandenbogaerde (awkward spelling) 6-4 – but it didn’t captivate me in the same way. The play was slower, there were fewer big finishes, and it was getting late for me. They also showed the women’s final where the popular Mikuru Suzuki retained her title. Women’s darts has had a big boost – Fallon Sherrock hit the headlines when she beat two men in a row in last month’s PDC world championships – but the BDO insist on still having a women-only tournament, with insulting “woman-sized” match lengths (first to just two sets, except the final which is first to three).

I’ve just started My Brilliant Friend, the first in a series of four novels by Elena Ferrante. It’s based in a poor part of Naples during the fifties, and is so far a very good read. Dad spent some time in Naples as a boy in the early sixties, and I’ll give the book to him the next time I see him, whenever and wherever that is. I’d like to visit southern Italy one day – I could perhaps take the train to Bar in Montenegro like I did last summer, and from there I could take a boat across to Bari in Italy.

Books - Language teaching - Other sports

Rabbiting on

January 6, 2020 by 0 Comments

With the new year has come some proper winter weather; on Friday we topped out at minus two. Lessons are starting up again in dribs and drabs, and after each drib or before each drab I’m spending some time on my English book. Who knows if it’ll come to fruition, but I’ve painstakingly been through both physical and online dictionaries to find words, phrases and expressions that Romanians misuse or overuse or don’t use at all, or simply don’t know. I recently got my hands on a better-quality bilingual dictionary, published by Oxford. It’s much better than anything else I’ve seen, but it’s still got one or two oddities. For instance, the R section kicked off with an entry for Rabbit. That’s with a capital R. Rabbit was a phone service that was rolled out in the UK in 1992. You could only use your phone in special hotspots, mostly located in cities. In other words it was hardly better than a payphone. Rabbit survived about as long as a real one does, but apparently you can still see Rabbit hotspot signs in British cities today. That’s pretty cool. But how this ever made it into an Oxford dictionary, let alone one published in 2009, is beyond me.

I’ve just finished Me Talk Pretty One Day, a book by David Sedaris. It was well-written and funny, but I found it somehow lacking it substance. Comedy is great, but there needs to me something behind the humour. Reading that book, which I still enjoyed in parts, made me think I could have a go at this book-writing lark one day. Maybe I could use my language-based book as stepping stone. The best line in Sedaris’s book, before I forget to mention it, referred to his voracious appetite for cassette-based audio books while living in Paris. “Someone who reads a lot of books is a bookworm. Well I was a tapeworm.”

I’ve gone off sport these days, but I decided to watch the PDC world darts final on New Year’s Day. The wacky-looking Peter Wright pulled off a bit of an upset in his 7-3 win over the much younger Michael van Gerwen. It was closer and more dramatic than that score might suggest; their averages were almost identical, but Wright played at a more consistent level throughout, and won the majority of those crucial fifth legs. That victory, which came after a perilous path to the final, netted him a cool £500,000. After that I’ve watched some of the games from the BDO, which has moved away from its previous home, the Lakeside. The quality isn’t quite there, and neither is the prize money, but the drama most certainly is. Sudden shifts in fortune and final-set tie-breaks galore. The tennis-on-steroids scoring system is what makes darts (for me) surprisingly watchable.

Last year I managed 1287 hours of teaching, up from 1129 the previous year. I don’t expect I’ll hit those heights in 2020 because I plan to take more time off.

And there’s one thing I didn’t do in 2019 for the first time since 2002. Travel by plane.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Tick-tock

January 18, 2019 by 0 Comments

Occasionally one of my students does something extraordinary. That happened this afternoon. I gave her an IELTS writing exercise, where she had to write a letter about sub-standard student accommodation. Twenty minutes, a minimum of 150 words. As always, I had a go at the task at the same time. Hmm, too much noise? Problems with the heating? Too far away? What should I write about? These questions posed no such problems for my student. With barely half the time gone, she gleefully said “Done!” and presented me with a letter easily good enough to get the grade she’ll need when she does the exam. If she’d actually used the last ten minutes it might have been just about perfect.

Dad recently acquired a 9-carat gold pocket watch that his great-grandfather (or to be specific, his dad’s dad’s dad) had received as a present from work. He showed it to me over Christmas. For some reason he was happy to throw it away, or get some money for the gold. It’s a double hunter, meaning it has a lid on both the front and back. The case (monogrammed on the back) has been battered a bit, and the glass is missing, as is the second hand. We couldn’t get it to work. I told Dad I would take it in to one of the watchmakers here in Timișoara; he might be able to do something. The shop, on Piața Libertății, was a delight to visit. Every type of clock and watch, and piece of clock and watch, and tool for mending clocks and watches, was on display. Old cuckoo clocks were going off, left right and centre. It was like visiting a clock museum. Fitting the theme perfectly, the pocket-sized man who dealt with my great-great-grandad’s watch was about seventy. Two hours after handing it to him, I went back to find he’d got the mechanism going. Tick-tock, tick-tock. It might have been the first time it had tick-tocked for half a century, perhaps more. Unfortunately he didn’t have a glass that fitted, nor a second hand, but that’s a start.

The Australian Open is back, with its crazy hours. Last night a match didn’t finish until nearly quarter past three in the morning. We’ve also got a new tie-break rule. There are (sadly) no more advantage final sets; instead there’s a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-6 in the decider. Even if it feels gimmicky to me, there’s nothing wrong with the new rule as such; I just think the old one was better. We’re now robbed of the kinds of drama-filled long final sets we’ve seen at the Aussie Open in recent years, such as in both the Djokovic–Wawrinka matches (2013 and 2014) and both marathons Simona Halep was involved in last year. If they wanted to change it, I’d have preferred it if they’d gone down the route Wimbledon has done: a normal (less gimmicky) tie-break to seven points at 12-12. But that’s not what they did, and we’re now in the slightly mad situation where all four grand slams have different systems for determining the winner of close matches. The French Open is the only one to retain a no-limit deciding set, although I can’t imagine that will be for long. If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll eventually plump for the Aussie system.

Towards the end of last week I got hooked on the BDO world darts tournament. This isn’t the biggest and best tournament in terms of standard and prestige (that would be the PDC worlds) but it has that pleasant eighties feel about it. The story for me was really the women’s tournament, with Mikuru Suzuki of Japan steamrolling her British opponent in straight sets in the final, walking on (and off) to the strains of Baby Shark, doo doo doo doo.

Eighteen games of Scrabble in 2019 so far, and I have a 50% record. Last weekend I got utterly taken apart, 574-313, in my biggest loss ever. That took my record for 2019 to 4-9, but to my surprise I followed that up with five straight wins, including (in my final game) a 557-336 victory where I out-bingoed my opponent 4-0, two of my bingos scoring in the 90s.

I’ll leave discussion of the Brexit shambles until next time.