Keeping those tourist numbers down

Things are certainly much better – and calmer – than a week ago. Not fantastically wonderful or anything, but I no longer feel hopelessly overwhelmed. My hours are down a bit, so I’ve been able to spend some time on my novel, though I’m constantly having to rework sections so that it meshes together properly, and even then I have doubts. Is this bit simply too boring? Then I’ve got the meeting for the other book, which was supposed to be last Tuesday but I’m glad got put back because things were still pretty messy then.

The last few days have been nondescript, which is no bad thing. My most interesting lesson was probably on Thursday, when my student of 22 or 23 showed me her CV. I’d put her at a 5 on my 0-to-10 scale. Her CV began with three introductory paragraphs where she blew her own trumpet and the rest of the brass section along with it. In included such phrases as “I wield automation tools”, “technical prowess”, “foster strong team collaboration” and “peak performance and user delight”. I asked her what “wield”, “prowess” and “foster” meant; predictably she hadn’t a clue. Then I told her to stop using AI to write her CV. Anybody with half a brain could tell that those weren’t her words.

I’ve had the usual chats with my parents. Lately Dad has spent a lot of time talking about UK immigration, which to be fair is a massively important topic, but sometimes I want a break from all the negativity associated with it. Yesterday he sent me a 35-minute YouTube video of a speech on UK immigration by someone from a right-wing think tank. Oh no, I have to watch this. The speaker made some perfectly valid points and some which I saw as invalid.

Yesterday I played tennis with Florin, as usual on a Saturday. We were surrounded by six beach volleyball courts; a noisy competition was in full flow. When things had calmed down half an hour into our session, we started a game. I was up 6-3, 1-1 when we finished. The most pleasing thing was that I didn’t suffer from the wobbly feeling on my service games.

Today I visited the dendrological park (that fancy word means “trees”) at Bazoșu Nou, a short trip from here. I parked next to a man of about thirty; he was with his small son who rode the sort of bike that didn’t exist when I was little, and clearly enjoyed the interaction with him. (I always feel a tinge of sadness when I see that; being 50% older than many fathers doesn’t exactly make that feeling go away.) To my surprise there was a man at the gate collecting a 10 lei entrance fee. Not far from the entrance were a pair of wordy information boards, one in Romanian and one in French, plus a map with no scale that showed vaguely what you might see. An American zone with sequoias. A giant oak tree. But from there, information was nonexistent. Is the oak tree two minutes away or half an hour? Is this oak tree the giant one or not? Nothing was labelled. The park was pretty and a relaxing place to stroll in, but some sense of what and where wouldn’t have gone amiss. I’d been in the park an hour, sometimes using my birdsong recognition app and wishing I had an app for trees too, when I thought, how do I get out of here now? Luckily I guessed right – all you could do in that rather large, mazy park was guess – and I was spared the Blair Witch stuff. Romania gets few tourists and they’re doing a good job of keeping it that way.

After the park I ended up in Recaș for the second time in four days – I had my lunch there on Wednesday – then got pulled over by the police. Ugh. “Do you want to know what rule you’ve broken?” I guess so. I expected to get done for speeding; I often don’t quite know what the speed limits are. The rule I’d broken was “headlights on at all times” rule. Only my sidelights were on. Apparently this is quite a new law (and crazy if you ask me, unless you ride a motorbike). He asked me to open the boot to make sure I had a full emergency kit (I did), then I was free to go, with no fine or anything. He was pleasant enough. I then stopped for lunch in a village called Brestovăț followed by a smaller village called Teș where the roads were unsealed and none of them seemed to go through the village despite my 2009 map which said otherwise.

I braved the car wash today. It worked by rechargeable card. You had to put at least 10 lei on the card, so I charged it up with the minimum. A 2½-minute blast with a high-pressure hose was supposed to eat up 5 lei, but when that was done the other 5 lei had mysteriously vanished too. I might try another one next time. I must say I’m enjoying the car. It’s my favourite of the five I’ve had so far. I know it’s a diesel, but I’m still blown away by the low fuel consumption. It gets roughly 50 miles to the gallon; my 1984 Nissan Bluebird got barely half that.

Positive plumbing and my latest trip

Good plumbing news. It turned out that the previous guy did a botched job of the seal around the bath, so we won’t need to smash the tilework after all. Or at least I don’t think so. The plumber put some silicon around the edge which the other guy didn’t bother with. I also got him to fix the loo in the small bathroom. I went with him to Dedeman in my car; we picked up a cistern and some other bits and pieces. He told me to go a completely different way there to what I would have done – he clearly knew better than me. He should finish the job tomorrow.

I had my first maths lesson last night with a 15-year-old girl who goes to British School. She’s struggling a bit with the subject; her almost nonexistent mental arithmetic isn’t doing her any favours. But I found her very personable and that makes her very teachable. I’m glad to suddenly have her as a student, right when my proportion of pointless lessons (which don’t help my mood) is at an all-time high. Teaching her will be far from pointless, and quite a challenge.

Monday was a warm one. I went for another long drive – about 250 km, skirting the borders of both Hungary and Serbia. My first stop was Periam, a town (or large village) of about 4000 people; a lot of our local stone fruit comes from there. Being a public holiday, it was extremely quiet there. I called my parents from a café: though it was closed I could still sit at one of the tables in the shady outside area. I then made a short stop at Sânnicolau Mare, a bigger town, before going back to Dumbrăvița via Jimbolia which is a fun name to say. At 4:30 I had maths with Matei on the eve of his final maths exam; we went through a bastard of a past paper from 2021.

The snooker is over. After a tournament in which the big guns didn’t really show up, Kyren Wilson is the champion, beating Jak Jones 18-14 in the final. He made a blistering start, going 7-0 up, but in the end he flopped over the line. Wilson won a drama-packed frame on a respotted black to put him one away, but Jones – the pressure off him – started reeling off frames. Jones was having fun and the crowd warmed to him, while for Wilson it wasn’t far off becoming his worst nightmare. Finally he got there. His reaction to winning was worth watching in itself, as was the very cute bit when his two sons joined him on the stage.

Forty years ago, snooker was massively popular in Britain and had a serious following elsewhere. Steve Davis, Alex Higgins, Dennis Taylor, a young Jimmy White – they were all household names. British football was in the doldrums – attending matches in crumbling stadiums was dangerous, the government of the day treated fans as animals, and very few games were televised. Snooker filled the gap. It was perfect for colour television – still pretty new – and back then there were only four channels, with few of the endless entertainment options we have now, not to mention social media which is a disaster zone. If snooker was on the telly, with its colourful characters, there’s a good chance you’d watch it and get hooked in. Nobody cared if a match took several hours; what was the rush? How the world has changed. Football is now a global gazillion-pound machine, while snooker is down to just one and a half household names in Ronnie O’Sullivan and maybe Judd Trump. Both sports are in grave danger of being Saudified.

Trains still stop at Periam

Romanian trees are often dați cu var, or whitewashed with lime, to prevent their trunks from cracking as a result of the extreme temperature variations between summer and winter.

Church, flowers and balls

This morning I went to Dorothy’s church, a 25-minute bike ride from here. Church has the potential for all sorts of awkwardness. Just like the Orthodox adherents, Romanian Baptists say Hristos a înviat, or “Christ has risen”, in place of “Hello”. Any reply from me, even the “correct” one, would instantly mark me as an outsider. I was surprised that they also celebrate Easter according to the Orthodox calendar. The service lasted two hours – even longer than the Christmas one – and was capped off by an extremely wordy sermon. In between were hymns accompanied by a guitar, a violin, and drums. All the way through were churchy Romanian words I didn’t know and have already forgotten – it’s not like I could look them up or note them down very easily. The congregation was half the size of the one at Christmas, but included kids who were all called on to read the odd verse or two. Communion, which I didn’t partake in, consisted of normal red wine and scraps of pita bread, not the special communion wine and wafers that we got at the Catholic church many moons ago when I did church. We had coffee and biscuits outside – once again I met that bubbly Australian woman who had sung vigorously.

When I got home the lady above me gave me some Easter food: drob (usually this contains lamb offal, but the one I got has chicken instead; it tastes good), sarmale (filled cabbage rolls), several slices of cozonac (a traditional bready cake), and another cake whose name I don’t know. She might have actually made all of that herself, so I have no reasonable way of returning the favour. Then I got in the car and went north to Fibiș (which is on the way to Lipova), then west to Orțișoara where I stopped for just a few minutes – there was a lovely hailstorm – before returning home.

Snooker. Some long scrappy frames last night. Stuart Bingham seemed to mentally check out at the end, allowing Jak Jones to win 17-12 when a very long night had looked in store. In the 27th frame Bingham laid a fiendish snooker behind the green. Jones’s first escape attempt clattered into the pink, sending reds flying. The referee and his assistant spent several minutes replacing the balls. Remarkably Jones hit a red on his second try, sparing everybody a repeat. Bingham won that frame in the end, but that was his last hurrah against a dogged opponent. It’s not going quite to well for Jones in the final – he took a pummelling in the first session against Kyren Wilson; at least he won the final frame to trail “only” 7-1 in the first-to-18 match. (Update: I’ve just watched a brilliant second session of high quality. There was a dramatic twist in the last frame in which Wilson got the snooker that he needed on the yellow, and then won after a 15-shot back-and-forth on the black. Wilson now leads 11-6.)

Painstakingly putting the balls back. At least they have a top-down camera now.

Palm Sunday in town last weekend

By the river at 8pm yesterday. It now gets dark at 8:45.

Orțișoara: a not-that-old sign for a closed-down ABC, the equivalent of a dairy in NZ

A typical flower arrangement using old tyres

Orțișoara’s volunteer fire department, right next to those flower beds

The war memorial in Orțișoara. Almost all the names here are German; the town was settled by Germans in the late 18th century.

Back to Buzad

After last weekend I went back to Buzad today, this time with Dorothy to visit her place there. My driving issues were: (a) the ignition key not turning, sending me into a panic until waggling the steering wheel sorted it out; (b) getting lost in the maze of Dumbrăvița’s back streets; and (c) the one-way system near Dorothy’s flat in Timișoara. The rural part of the journey was much more relaxing, even accounting for the potholes that had been scraped out and not yet repaired, as well as the trucks transporting material from the quarry in Lipova.

Dorothy’s house in Buzad is bigger than I imagined, and sits on a biggish plot of land with dozens of fruit trees: apples, pears, quince, plums, peaches, and even a large fig tree whose fruit already look big and tasty. They got a treehouse built in their colossal walnut tree. She and her husband had plans to use the place for a kid’s summer camp, and did run one in 2019, but then Covid came along and her husband got cancer and died in 2021. At the end of my stay there, I picked some elderflower to make cordial from, as well as some fennel and the heavenly-smelling rosemary.

Music. Dad sent me a link to Fisherman’s Blues, a beautiful song – what a fiddle – from the Waterboys, a British folk band. It came out in 1988, three years after their bigger hit (but not in the same league for me) Whole of the Moon. Several weeks ago I bought David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane on vinyl. The first track is the theatrical-sounding Time, which is deep and weird and complex to the point that it should be more famous. Maybe the lyrics about recreational drugs and “wanking to the floor” cost it some airplay back in the day.

Football. Blues travel to Huddersfield on Saturday for their penultimate game of the season. Lose and they’re done for, or close to it. Avoid defeat and they’ve got a fighting chance of staying up. By my calculations, win both their last games (the final game is at home to Norwich) and they have a 99% chance of avoiding relegation. Win one and draw one and they’re at almost 80%. However, Blues’ away record is notably shite, so those stats (which rely on ifs) may be hopelessly irrelevant.

Snooker. So far the pattern has been: tune in at 9pm, watch one player look dominant and poised to win, hit the hay, then wake up the next morning only to find the other guy has somehow won. Earlier today I saw Rob Milkins, nicknamed the Milkman but whose walk-on song is I Am a Cider Drinker. There’s a lot to like about the snooker. For now that is, until it packs up and goes to Saudi Arabia, when that’ll be that. Yet another sport ruined.

Here are some photos from Buzad:

Sad news about my aunt

My aunt passed away on Monday at the age of 76, just a week after I’d visited her in the home. My brother had brought his son along only a few days before that. We had no inkling that we would lose her so soon. Her oxygen levels were very low, as a result of her cancer, and she couldn’t be kept alive. That’s probably why I had such a job waking her when I saw her.

It is some consolation that my brother and I saw her, and had good conversations with her, during her final days. The other consolation is that she was very well looked after and she didn’t really suffer. Considering she was bedbound and spent her days staring at the ceiling, she was strangely at peace; perhaps that was the morphine. Since I heard the news I’ve been thinking of all the happy memories I have of her: the times when she made me smile and laugh. She had quite a knack for that. One time that springs to mind was when I joined her and my grandmother in southern Spain in January 2000. She had an interesting way, shall I say, of transporting her mother in a wheelchair. At a restaurant that served breadsticks, she started shoving them up her ears and nose and other orifices besides.

I don’t know yet when or where the funeral will be, or whether I’ll go over for it. (British funerals are sometimes weeks after a person’s death.) Dad won’t be travelling from New Zealand; he did his bit in the autumn when he visited her almost daily for a month.

Understandably, Dad’s mood has been low. He’s been struck by the realisation that, on his side of the family, it’s only him left of his generation. His cousins have gone too.

I went back to Recaș today with the plan to get a barbecue lunch which they serve there on Wednesdays. I called my parents from there. I thought that the blue sky in the background might lift Dad’s mood – we’ve had glorious whether here since, and even before, I got back. I showed Mum my car – she didn’t believe that my bright blue Peugeot had POM on its number plate. I didn’t have lunch there after all because I got a splitting sinus headache and just wanted to get home and take some Advil and have a banana sandwich which was all I could manage. On the way back I turned onto the motorway by mistake, so I got a surprise first taste of Romanian motorway driving. The road was mostly empty; the speed limit here is 130 km/h, more than I’m used to. Thankfully the Advil did the trick.

On Sunday I went on a much longer trip, first to Lipova by the Mureș River, then east, then south, then west, then north and finally back home. Over 300 km in all. I went on all manner of back roads, passing through villages with roads flanked by donkeys, goats, and old ladies whose reaction made me think that a real person passing through in a real car was quite an event.

The route I took on Sunday

A stork’s nest – a common sight – in Mașloc

Not much risk of flooding in the Mureș at Lipova with the weather we’re having

Today I took delivery of a 2009-edition road atlas of Romania. The scale is 1:300,000 or nearly five miles to an inch. It didn’t realise it would be such a vast tome; it also contains smaller-scale maps of the rest of Europe. I’ll buy a GPS gizmo too, though a physical map allows me to plan better and is just a nice object to have.

Trip to Buziaș

My student has cancelled her pointless lesson with me two-and-a-bit minutes before we were due to start, giving me the chance to write this.

Yesterday I went with Mark to visit Buziaș, a town of 7000 people, less than half an hour away. I was just about to head out on a 10 km bike ride to his place when he offered to pick me up (Calea Buziașului – the road to Buziaș – is quite close to me). A little while later I got a message from him – “Drop us a pin.” Sorry, what? Was that meant for me at all? Oh, you want me to share my location. I rarely get messages from native English speakers, so “drop us a pin” (with us meaning me) really threw me.

The main focal point of Buziaș is the park, substantial for a town of its size. It features a large covered walkway – wooden and quite ornate – that goes all the way around. That and all the trees, and the fact that it’s well maintained, make it a pleasant place to take a stroll in. But apart from that, there was endless abandonment like you see in so many Romanian towns. The ștrand – a swimming pool with sunbeds and a bar and a general beach vibe, but in this case abandoned decades ago – was an extraordinary sight. It’s now a decaying shell, overgrown with reeds. You could still see the slide, the changing rooms, and where they would have put the mici on the barbecue. Mark said that a Romanian of his age (he’s 53) would surely find the whole thing upsetting, for 40 years ago it would have been a fully functioning hive of activity.

Just before we left, we saw a painting of the brightly painted bandstand with the locals prancing around in traditional dress. The bandstand is still there, but the bright colours have gone. It’s been left to go like so much else. As we started our walk around the park, I pointed out something that looked like the tail fin of a plane. We didn’t pay that much attention, because obviously there wouldn’t be any aircraft there. After we’d nearly done a lap of the park, the tail fin came back into view, together with the rest of the plane. And a few other planes too. All old Soviet aircraft – Antonov, probably. It was part restaurant, part theme park. It’s functional, but only in the summer. Even though it was “closed”, we could still roam around and hop inside one of the planes, where it was all decked out for kids.

In the park was a large shiny white touch-screen device that looked only months old – and completely out of place. It had clearly been bought with EU funds. The big front screen was all in English. I pressed Start. Up popped the Buziaș council webpage, all in Romanian, with links labelled “Rubbish collection” or “Pay your rates” that didn’t even work. Great. If I go back in a couple of years the machine itself will likely be just a sculpture.

Party Land. Buziaș, where your heart is always healthy. Great use of Jokerman font.

I sent Dad the Luton video, which he watched. He said, well it’s all the immigrants, isn’t it? Luton does have a very high immigrant population, but there are also post-industrial towns all over the country which have very few immigrants and are just as crap. The picture is complicated, and grim all round.

On Saturday I called my brother and had a good chat with my sister-in-law. They were watching Gladiators – the very popular nineties series that has been brought back. Thirty-odd years ago, that was Mum’s Saturday night. Gladiators followed by Blind Date – two hours of trash TV. Fair enough after such a tiring week. My sister-in-law talked about the potential difficulty of getting three weeks off work to go to New Zealand and completing the trip before my nephew’s second birthday in mid-September when the cost would shoot up. We also touched on Mum’s trip with us two tiny boys in 1982, and the state of the house that she left Dad to deal with over that dreadful winter. Their penchant for buying completely inappropriate houses didn’t exactly end there.

A busy winter’s day and a trip to Arad

I’ve had a busy Saturday, chock-full of lessons. Two maths sessions – two hours apiece – and three English ones. Everything from a creative writing piece about a murder and tactile Little Mermaid books to construction of perpendicular bisectors and probability tree diagrams. Marginally preferable to yesterday though, when I took five paracetamol for my sinus pain.

It’s been cold. Actual proper winter, like my first one in Timișoara, not the half-arsed stuff we’ve had of late. On Monday it snowed all day, making for a pretty sight, but getting around the city for lessons was quite a challenge. Today was the first time since then that the mercury – ever so briefly – touched freezing point. We’d been at (minus) sixes and sevens all week.

Last Sunday – just before the wintry blast hit us – I met Mark in Dumbrăvița and from there we went to Arad in his car. I hadn’t been there for six years. Arad is a fine city, with beautiful architecture much like we have in Timișoara. (Just like my home, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire for half a century until the First World War.) After a good wander, be both agreed that in some ways we preferred Arad to its bigger cousin. (Timișoara is roughly twice the size.) There were all kinds of photo opportunities. We managed to go inside the Palace of Culture, which reminded me of the larger one in Iași; the lobby and the concert hall were both superb. The Mureș, a much more substantial river than Timișoara’s Bega, runs through the city. The Christmas market was still running, but rather than grab overpriced food from there, we had a major feed at one of a clump of kebab shops at one end of the main drag. Kebab Alley, we called it. Unlike Timișoara with its three main squares, Arad has one long, broad main street where everything happens, though some of the side streets were impressive too. After our kebabs, we decided to go back home. Mark had parked in an area of town not far from the centre called Boul Roșu – the Red Ox – but despite seeing a sign depicting a red ox, it took us a while to find the car. Coming home from that very enjoyable trip felt like the absolute end of any kind of holiday-related downtime.

My record player – turntable, if you like – arrived yesterday. It’s still in its box. Getting that going will be tomorrow’s “thing”.

Here are some photos from Arad, and of the snow.

Above is one of those Roman numerals date word puzzle thingies that I mentioned on this blog some years ago. But did they have to make it so complicated? Someone must have really pissed off whoever made this in 1779 (if I haven’t gone wrong somewhere – I may well have).

On the left is the old water tower which I visited in 2016

Earthquake weather

At around 5pm yesterday, a 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck about 170 km east of here, at a depth of 15 km. I didn’t feel it, but many in Timișoara did, and I think the recent scenes from Turkey and Syria spooked some Romanians more than normal. Yes, earthquakes are common in Romania, mostly in Vrancea in the south-east. About 1600 people were killed in the 1977 Vrancea quake, which Ceaușescu took advantage of by clearing out swaths of Bucharest to build even more brutalist concrete blocks. There’s often talk of building codes and yellow stickers which is all hauntingly familiar to me.

It’s an absolute mess – once again – in New Zealand’s North Island. The floods caused by Cyclone Gabrielle have displaced thousands, destroyed homes, and cut off whole towns. I worked for a water consultancy company twenty years ago; we produced maps that were fascinating in their way, delineating the extend of flooding at various levels of likelihood: once every 5 years, then 10, 25, 50, 100 and 200. Then there was a “climate change” line that blew everything else out of the water, so to speak. A 1-in-200-year event would be more like a 1-in-2, if the doom scenario came to pass. It already has. I was pleased to see James Shaw, the minister for climate, give such an impassioned speech in parliament.

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos on cities (mostly American and Canadian ones) and public transport. One word that keeps coming up is stroad – a hybrid of a street, which has shops and bars and other stuff that people actually want to visit, and a road, whose purpose is to transport people from one place to another. A stroad tries to be a street and a road, and fails at both. Stroads, with their mega-center malls and drive-thru everything, are all over America and Canada. They’re depressing places if you’re in a car – you’re constantly stopping – and even more depressing if you’re not in a car. When I watched the videos I thought how I often found myself on one of sprawling Auckland’s soul-crushing stroads – Wairau Drive or whatever it was called. Wellington seemed almost free of them. Romania is pretty stroad-free I thought, until I suddenly realised something when I was cycling to my maths lesson on Saturday morning with the temperature hovering around minus 6. I cycled past Iulius Mall, which now has what the videos call a lifestyle centre (ugh), then went down the two-kilometre-long Calea Lipovei until I hit the roundabout at the edge of Dumbrăvița. Hey, now I’m on a stroad. There you’ll find a big supermarket that existed six years ago, and the Galaxy shopping centre that certainly didn’t. It’s already a big choke point, but now they’re also building a drive-thru McDonald’s. Just what we all need.

On Saturday I went back along the stroad again – all of it this time, because I was meeting the English guy Mark who lives at the end of the four-kilometre stroad and down a long, muddy, unpaved road where nothing is more than five years old. I think that would mess me up mentally. We, and the two dogs he and his girlfriend now have, went in his car to a village called Bogda, 45 minutes away. In the village was a camp that was used by schools and had clearly flourished in communist times, but was now abandoned like so much else around here. There was a good walkway and we trekked along and back with the dogs. It was a bit higher up and there was snow on the ground. I struggled with sinus pain, especially as we got back to the car, but subsided and when I got back home I felt much better after all that exercise. In fact I’m a bit better all round now.

I played poker yesterday for the first time in a while, and made $41 thanks to my first ever outright win in five-card draw. Here are some pictures.

The abandoned camp buildings and bandstand

This well is still functional

Some street art

The stroad

An active day

It’s been an active day for me: 19 km on my bike, a spot of hiking, and some tennis. At 9am I met my teacher friend on the outer edge of Dumbrăvița, then I went with him and his dog to Nădrag, just over an hour’s drive away. There we walked along a track to the top of a ridge, then descended quite steeply until we followed a stream back to the car. That all got my heart rate up, and as always, my Doc Martens did the business. This evening’s tennis was doubles. I partnered a woman I first met at yesterday’s session. She’s a decent player. Three years older than me, she lost her 68-year-old father to Covid in 2021. She said he had nothing wrong with him before he was struck down by the disease. I wanted to ask her if he’d been vaccinated, but thought better of it. There are trees overhanging two corners of the court we play on. Normally they don’t cause a problem, but occasionally a high ball will bring them into play. Tonight I had to practically thread a backhand through the branches, golf style.

Yesterday I had two English lessons and one maths. In the maths lesson I went off on a slight tangent (not literally; trig is still to come) when I explained that three 8-inch pizzas for the same price as a 16-inch pizza is a bad deal. In one of my English lessons we finished off one of those skyscraper games, though this time a longer version involving international buildings instead of only American ones. I had a huge lead from our first session, but ended up winning only 36-33 and could easily have lost. That comebacks are possible is a good sign for the game. It still needs the odd tweak here and there, and a little something extra which I haven’t figured out yet.

I spoke to my brother again last night. There’s only so much you can say about nappies. Both he and his wife were tired. There are a lot of things I hadn’t thought about. When does the colour of a baby’s eyes become fixed? Today I wondered whether my nephew will be left-handed; both his parents are, as is his paternal grandfather. (I’m right-handed, but play tennis left-handed. Just like Rafael Nadal.)

It seems the UK has returned to some sort of normal after a fortnight of wall-to-wall royalty. The Queen was an amazing woman without doubt, but some of the response was beyond ridiculous. Cancelling hospital appointments because they clashed with the funeral? Utterly ludicrous. Then there was the clampdown on anti-monarchy protests. An expression of a totally legitimate point of view. As I said a couple of posts ago, it’s not only woke that’s gone mad.

I had a crappy poker session on Friday night. Knowing that I had to get up the next morning didn’t help my decision-making; perhaps I shouldn’t have played at all. My bankroll is currently $999; it was $1026 at the start of the month.