Other sports

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.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Scrabble

Flipping heck

October 29, 2018 by 0 Comments

I wound up with 22½ hours last week, which isn’t a terrible total. This week I’ve got a total of 31½ hours booked – a fairly busy week in other words – and I hope I end up with something close to that. Saturday morning’s session (I hesitate to use the word lesson) with the 17-year-old girl was interesting. As is her wont, she asked me not to bother with the Cambridge reading test practice I’d prepared, saying she’d rather have a 90-minute chat instead. In this time she told me about her exploits in the swimming pool, and showed me the medals (including a national bronze in breaststroke) to prove it. Her description of her training regime sounded rather, er, Romanian. Three hours a day, seven days a week. She described her programme and coach in good English, but switched to Romanian to say, “He hit me.” What with? His hand? Did it hurt? She said, yes it absolutely did hurt, and it was some rubber implement. She rummaged around in a cupboard trying to find one without success, then she brought up a picture on her phone. It was a flipper. Her coach hit her with a flipper. “But it motivated me to go faster.” On her mother’s advice she gave up swimming when she was 14. This morning I had a Skype chat with my cousin in Wellington and her family. Her eldest son is 16 and a very successful swimmer. I regaled them all of the flipper story.

It’s a shame I can’t watch the World Series. Well I could, but my sleep is too important to me. This morning I wanted to get up early, taking advantage of the clocks going back, and go fishing. I only spent an hour there and didn’t catch anything, obviously. But yesterday the third game went on so long that I was able to catch a fair chunk of it, including the wild 13th inning in which both teams scored. But I missed the end of it because I had go to Strada Timiș for my lessons with flipper girl and her little brother. (The game went for seven hours and 20 minutes, breaking all kinds of records. The Dodgers walked it off in the 18th.) The Red Sox bounced back last night in the fourth game to lead 3-1, and could wrap it up tonight. It’ll be party time, no doubt, in Boston if they do so. I don’t know if there’s another city on the planet as passionate about its sports teams.

Scrabble. I’ve now won eleven of my last twelve games and my rating has been gradually edging up. A bit more solidity on the three-letter words is helping me. My most memorable game among that dozen was one against a higher-rated player where I held a three-figure lead, only for my opponent to play a bingo on the triple lane while I was swamped with vowels. I made a clear blunder on one of my final plays, but got away with it, sneaking a confidence-boosting four-point win. And the very next game I lost by just three. That game illustrated the importance of the letter E in Scrabble, and indeed in English in general, as I only saw one E all game. I had a couple of milestone games: my first with four bingos, and my first 400-point game without a bingo at all. In my last game I out-bingoed my opponent 3-0 thanks to both blanks, but my opponent scored heavily on just about every turn, while I struggled with my post-bingo racks, and I had to sweat a bit on the way to a 49-point win.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The (ever so slightly sad) end of ultramarathons

October 24, 2018 by 0 Comments

Timișoara is beautiful in autumn, don’t you think? I took these pictures on Saturday in one of the many parks. I even sent them to S, who was in Prague and will be until Friday.

This week has the makings of my busiest week of work since May. It’s telling that even when things aren’t plain sailing, they’re still miles better than they ever were in insurance. I’ve just finished a business English lesson with a married couple. Business English isn’t my favourite discipline, because it often involves industry-specific vocabulary that I might be a bit shaky on (as was the case tonight when the focus was on logistics), and that whole world of Powerpoint and organisational charts is no longer one I inhabit. Yesterday evening I had my second lesson with the two sisters, this time in their sixth-floor apartment not far from the main hospital, instead of at my place. As usual, finding the specific apartment block was no simple task. But things really got problematic at the end of the lesson. We overran, and then I managed to get lost in Block City, which by now was pitch black. I ended up being late for my next lesson back home, even though I jogged some of the way. I called my student to warn him, and he seemed to be OK with it.

Two pieces of tennis-related news. First, Djokovic and Nadal are due to play each other in an exhibition in Saudi Arabia on 22nd December. The match is even named after the Saudi Arabian king. After the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, they should take a stand and pull out of this obscene spectacle now.

Second, Wimbledon have announced a final-set tie-break, starting in next year’s championships. It’s the first change to the scoring system there in 40 years. I’m glad the shoot-out will come in at 12-12, as I suggested it might, rather than 6-6. That seems a reasonable compromise, although it’s a shame they haven’t made the final exempt from the new rule. Wimbledon got a ton of negative press after the 6½-hour Anderson–Isner semi wreaked havoc with the schedule, and I don’t blame them for making this move. Part of me, on the other hand, will miss these occasional ultramarathons. Isner–Mahut was simply mindblowing. Neither the Australian Open nor Roland-Garros have made a similar announcement yet, but I fully expect tie-breaks to feature in deciding sets there in the very near future, either at 6-6 or 12-12.

One sport that can still, in theory, continue indefinitely is baseball. Game one of the World Series between the Red Sox and the Dodgers is tonight.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

They think it’s all over… but it isn’t

October 2, 2018 by 0 Comments

S has contacted me today from Prague, so that’s nice. She told me (in Romanian, yay!) about her technological woes and the wet weather there.

We’ve finally reached the end of the regular Major League Baseball season, only we haven’t, because not one but two of the divisions finished in a tie for first place, both in the National League. That’s after 162 games and roughly 500 hours of playing time for each team. Rather than use some sort of tie-breaker method, like head-to-head, run differential or number of ejections, the four teams involved will sort it out on the field. Two bonus 163rd games, that kick off (!) at 8pm and 11pm tonight, my time. The losers of these extra games don’t go home; instead they play each other in the wild card game tomorrow. For the loser of that game, it really is all over. This crazy turn of events is unprecedented, and productivity is likely to plummet in certain parts of the US. I’ll tune in to the first of the bonus games, between the Cubs and the Brewers at Wrigley Field, after my lesson. For the Red Sox over in the American League, things were much more clear cut. Maybe they eased off the gas just a fraction in September, but they still finished with 108 wins, or exactly two-thirds of their games. That’s the best record in the major leagues. Whether they’re the best team is another matter. Boston are very good and a heap of fun to watch, but I’d say the Yankees are about as good and Houston Astros (last season’s champions) are marginally better.

Only two lessons today. The first was on the verb “to get” and most (certainly not all) of its many, many uses. Tonight it’s likely to be either business English or an article on funky modern offices (the sort of places that I’d hate to work in). I’m getting a fair volume of phone calls now, so my hours should eventually increase from last week’s 22½.

Language teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Pigman

September 28, 2018 by 0 Comments

On Tuesday morning I got an email from one of the owners in my apartment block in Wellington. She asked me to tell my tenant to move his car from the car park, so that the cherry-picker could get access to the windows for the six-monthly clean. She knew I was in Romania, so I don’t know what she was thinking. I have no direct access to my tenant anyway. But we did get into a discussion about the earthquake shit, and it certainly is shit. I’m glad to be on the other side of the world.

Later on Tuesday I saw my eleven-year-old student in Dumbrăvița. He’s a lovely boy; it’s a pleasure to teach him. We now have two-hour sessions. Perhaps because he used to be the top-ranked chess player for his age in the county, he has no concentration issues in a stint of that length. Three or four sessions ago, I gave him a crossword that I’d created: it was one of a series of puzzles I’d made (and am still making) with a mixture of picture and definition clues. They’re mostly 11×11, but I sometimes use different grid shapes and sizes to liven things up a bit. This particular puzzle had “pigeon” in it, with a picture of the bird as the clue. He didn’t know the English word so I helped him fill it in. As soon as he saw “PIG” and the final N, he shouted “Pigman!” For some reason, the idea of a half-pig-half-man creature sent him into hysterics, and he said it would be awesome to find a puzzle where “pigman” actually was the right answer. So on Tuesday I surprised him with a “pigman” crossword, with a slightly grotesque hybrid beast sourced from Google Images as the clue. He didn’t see it right away, but when he eventually clapped his eyes on 12 Down and realised what it was, he got pretty damn excited and gave me a high-five. He even glued the completed puzzle to the cover of his English folder. After a few more sheets and games, we reached the end of the lesson, at which point I asked him (as I always do) if he enjoyed it. He said, yes, and the last one, and the one before that, and all of them! It’s a great feeling as a teacher to get that kind of response.

Baseball is weird, or to be more accurate, it’s very random. Last night I finished work at 10pm and then tuned in to the Red Sox game at home to the Orioles. The Orioles have had a terrible season, winning barely a quarter of their games, and are guaranteed to finish with the worst record in the Major Leagues. Boston, on the other hand, are sure to finish with the best record, giving them home advantage throughout the play-offs. When I started watching, Boston were already leading 10-3 in the bottom of the fifth inning. Their bats continued to explode as they added another nine unanswered runs. A complete blowout in other words. And it was first against worst, so that was to be expected, right? Well, the two sides met again just a couple of hours later (it was a doubleheader caused by a rain postponement the previous night) and in that second game, the Orioles won 10-3. In baseball, that sort of reversal, even on home turf, even against the worst team in the competition, is by no means unusual. That also means that come play-off time, when teams are of a similar standard, all bets are off.

I played an extraordinary game of Scrabble last weekend, slapping down two bingos to my opponent’s ridiculous four, and I lost 521-445, the highest-scoring game I’ve ever been involved in. And talking of Scrabble:

Language teaching - Other sports - Politics - Tennis

A cluster of random thoughts

September 9, 2018 by 0 Comments

I didn’t watch the women’s US Open final, but now wish I had, for the sheer drama alone. Serena is an incredible player but she’s also a bully, with a “Don’t you know who I am?!” attitude. She has a history of using her bullying tactics at the US Open in particular, where she knows the crowd will probably side with her (as, shamefully, they did in this match). This time she also made completely irrelevant comments about being a woman and having a daughter. I’m pleased that Naomi Osaka played great tennis and got over the line, even if Serena and an obnoxious crowd robbed her of that special moment of winning her first grand slam. Osaka even felt the need to apologise for winning. I suppose I shouldn’t feel too sorry for Osaka – she took home US$3.8 million, which is a crazy amount just for being rather good at whacking furry yellow objects over a net with a bat.

This year’s US Open has seen its fair share of upsets and retirements; the searing heat has been a major factor in the latter. The biggest shock on the men’s side was Federer’s loss to John Millman. I remember Millman from my first day at Flushing Meadows three years ago. I was queuing with my cousin and his fiancée, and Millman (who I didn’t recognise, but I saw his name tag) was at the next-door kiosk, trying to sort out something quite important for his match that was due to start in half an hour. I thought at the time he was clearly one of the have-nots of tennis. With his win over Federer he’ll make the world’s top 50, and he earns nearly half a million for reaching the quarter-finals, so he’s starting to do quite nicely from the game.

On a different day, Federer would have beaten Millman in straight sets, but on this occasion he wasn’t at his best on the big points. On the same day as this match, I watched the Red Sox beat the Braves by the totally flattering score of 8-2, a game in which they were outplayed for long periods, with the result in serious doubt until the eighth inning. After these two results in different sports, I thought about the importance of clustering and sequencing, in sport (and in life too). There are different concepts from timing, which obviously has a profound impact on results as well – a double fault or a walk can range in importance from meaningless to game-changing depending on when it occurs. Sequencing, or the order in which events happen, is also very important, as is clustering. As a rule, you’re better off if good things happen to you one after the other, but you spread your bad things out a bit. That’s very true in life too – we can often handle one issue at a time, but a pile-up of problems can send us into a tailspin. On the other side, achieving a major success (say, a deal with a large record label) relies on a series of positive events happening one after the other. Baseball analysts have tried to figure out what determines effective timing, clustering and sequencing, and the answer (in that sport at least) is very clear: luck.

Politics is one area where clustering is of paramount importance, especially in first-past-the-post systems. The clustering of Democrats in urban areas was a big (and understated) reason for Trump’s win in 2016. Clinton ran up the score in those large cities, making her vote inefficiently distributed. It also affects the other branches of government. Because their opponents are neatly clustered in areas of high density, and because they’re arseholes, the Republicans are able to gerrymander effectively, and that’s why the Dems will need a hefty popular-vote win if they want to take the House in November. Clustering isn’t always bad for political parties, however. If you’re a big party trying to form a government, it harms you, but it’s to your advantage if you’re a small party trying to get some representation in parliament. An interesting case (and a terrible advert for FPTP) was the 2015 UK election, where 3.9 million people voted UKIP but they won just a single seat because they weren’t a dominant force in any geographic area. In the same election, the SNP managed to achieve the best of both worlds, by being entirely “clustered” in Scotland but very unclustered within Scotland. Their 1.5 million votes (half of all votes in Scotland) gave them a whopping 56 of 59 Scottish seats.

I spoke to my parents yesterday. The All Blacks v Argentina game was about to start, and they pointed the camera at the haka. It sounded like a great game. Mum and Dad had just spent a few days in a chilly Moeraki.

Last week I posted about 100 flyers in letterboxes in Dumbrăvița, and I got a reply. Hopefully this week I’ll be starting with a 17-year-old girl and her 9-year-old brother.