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Books - Family - Life :) - Poker

A wet Christmas

December 26, 2021 by 0 Comments

Another Romanian Christmas has come and gone: it’s now Boxing Day morning.

On the 23rd I called my parents before my lesson, which was really only a chat, and then played – and won – a poker tournament. After that I went for a 20 km bike ride, or thereabouts – despite my thick socks, my feet were like ice blocks and I couldn’t wait to get back home. I had another tournament win on my return; I’ve been running well of late. Both my wins came in badugi (first pot-limit, then fixed-limit). I made $110 on the day.

Then came Christmas Eve, a much warmer day than the previous one. More poker, because when you’re winning, you want to keep playing. Run your wins and cut your losses. I joined three tournaments. I came fifth in five-card draw, bombed out of single draw, and then the pot-limit badugi (which I’d won the day before) just ran and ran. This was a problem, because I had Romanian food to make. The English couple had invited me over to their place, and I thought I really should give them a taste of traditional Romanian Christmas food, or my attempt at it. So I tried to play poker and do Christmas stuff at the same time. I wrapped both the presents I’d bought, then rolled all the meaty oniony mix (that I’d previously made) in pickled cabbage leaves to make sarmale, all while the tournament was reaching its latter stages. It was after 3pm when I got knocked out in third, and that was almost a relief. I’d made a more modest profit of $26 for my day’s efforts. I finished off the sarmale – they didn’t need long in the oven – and then moved on to the salată de boeuf. (Why the partly French name, and why call it that when it contains chicken?) It also contains a wide variety of vegetables: potatoes, carrots, parsnips, parsley root, olives, gherkins, and gogonele, which are pickled unripe tomatoes.

Then it was all done, and I could pack up and cycle out to the English couple’s place, which according to Google Maps is 8.3 km away. The last bit is always tricky because they live on a half-built estate with unsealed roads, and it turns into a mudbath. Despite my lights I couldn’t see what was what. When I arrived we had a good chat, and ate all the bits and pieces. He’d made a curry, which reminded me of my time in Birmingham. They seemed to quite like the sarmale and salad. I finally managed to empty an oversized can of beer that somebody gave me as a present ages ago. Their big dog took centre stage for large parts of the evening. I didn’t stay late. It started raining on my journey home. Rain is forecast every day until the new year.

So yesterday was a wet Christmas Day. Apart from eating and drinking, not a lot happened for me. My parents had spent the big day down in Moeraki. They have no internet down there, but in the morning (my time) they FaceTimed me from a phone box in Hampden that provides them with a hotspot. It was hit-and-miss: sometimes I couldn’t see them, other times I couldn’t hear them, and other times I could do both but it was all jerky and breaking up. The Christmas wishes were much appreciated nonetheless. Dad said how much he preferred the low-key Southern Hemisphere Christmas, as opposed to the max-stress UK variety. I read the start of A Woman in Berlin, a harrowing diary of an extraordinarily clever woman in a city utterly defeated at the end of World War Two. After a long walk and some more food, I had no luck calling my aunt, but then got through to my brother and his wife. They’d had a typical British Christmas Day, unlike last year when they were heavily restricted.

This morning I had a Skype chat with my friend in Auckland, and then I went to the supermarket; it was almost dead there. I’ve got tidying up to do, then I might go out on my bike again; the rain has eased off, but it’s nippy out there. I have a lesson, but not until 8pm.

I’ll have to think what to do about poker. Last December I deposited $40. I now have $1408. Should I keep doing what I’m doing, or try something more ambitious, whatever that would even be?

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

Trying not to do a lot

July 5, 2021 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Books - Life :) - Poker - Romania - Writing a book

Hristos a înviat

May 3, 2021 by 0 Comments

The vagaries of the Julian calendar, the spring equinox and phases of the moon mean that today is Orthodox Easter Sunday. Sometimes it falls on the same day as what they call Catholic Easter (and what I would call “normal Easter”), sometimes it’s a week later, and sometimes (like this year) it’s a whole month later. Easter is big in Romania; I’d call it a tie between Easter and Christmas for which is most important here. Last night the tennis-playing couple (who live next door but one) gave me some salată de boeuf which, despite its partially French name, contains chicken rather than beef. They also gave me an egg painted the traditional reddish-brown using red cabbage, and invited me to “knock” it with another of their painted eggs. The “knocker” said Hristos a înviat (“Christ has risen”), then the knockee became the knocker and said Adevărat (“really”). Although I was unaware that it was a game, apparently I won because my egg remained almost unscathed through all the knocking.

At quarter past midnight I was woken up by the Easter vigil service at the cathedral. A huge throng of people with candles spilled out in front of the cathedral as a sermon played over the loudspeaker, much of which I actually understood. I wonder how many of those “vigilantes” picked up Covid. There have been services and processions and bells ringing out all this long weekend. I missed my first two Romanian Easters because I went to the UK. Then last year the restrictions meant that everything was far more muted. That leaves 2019, and I think I must have slept through the vigil service that year because I don’t remember seeing it. My blog posts from two years ago aren’t helping me. Just like last year, the Easter market has gone by the board, but they’ve Easterised the end of the square where I live, as in a normal virus-free year.

I still watch John Campbell’s informative Youtube videos on coronavirus, but I’m less dedicated than I was. After I watched one of his videos last week, Youtube suggested that I watch a different one from a American medical doctor and religious nutcase, called “Why I’m not taking the vaccine”. It had three times as many views and likes as Campbell gets (and he gets a fair few), and it attracted a long stream of comments saying that the deep state are trying to force us to take the vaccine and I’m not having any of it. I’m defiant! Six hundred thumbs up. Many commenters referenced the Bible. No Covid vaccine! Matthew 7:25 says so! I really doubt that the Gospel of Matthew said anything about vaccination or herd immunity. (I picked that verse at random; it happens to be about floods and storms, not a pandemic, but I’m sure you could find a connection there if you really wanted to.) Covid has been an eye-opener. I knew we had fake news and echo chambers, but here we have millions of people, some in positions of authority and influence, willing to dispense with the truth even when it comes to matters of life and death. I’ve even seen this in my own brother. A supporter of Brexit and the Tories, he’s happy to divorce himself from the reality that the British government have done a breathtakingly shitty job that has cost many thousands of lives unnecessarily, just because it’s his team. It’s become just like football.

I’m two-thirds of the way through Inocenții, a Romanian book that one of my students bought me for Christmas. It took me a while to get going, mainly because the language is hard. But I’ve made some headway finally. It’s all about a woman’s childhood in Brașov in the sixties, the early Communist period. The book is full of humour, though it certainly has its dark moments too. I’ve been jotting down words I don’t know, including some that I’ve come across before but forgotten, so I can look them up later. I think it’s the sixth Romanian book I’ve read.

Poker. Lately I’ve been playing tournaments exclusively. I’m at a bit of a standstill, with a run of tournaments in which I’ve either just missed out on or just made the money. I’ve been persevering with Omaha hi-lo, with little joy. Unlike the other games I regularly play, I can’t hand-read in Omaha hi-lo. That’s partly because the tournament buy-ins are tiny and people play any old junk, even hands that are real disasters like the 9993 that someone raised pre-flop with this morning. My bankroll is $661, although I expect that to drop a few dollars when I play the fixed badugi this evening. Pessimistic I know, but that tournament with its eight-minute levels plays like a turbo, especially in the early stages, and most of the time you’ll fail to make the money no matter what you do.
Update: As expected, that tournament was a waste of time. The game is played with three draws, but if I’d had ten I still wouldn’t have hit anything. Bankroll now $655. (I don’t exactly risk much of my bankroll in these tournaments.)

I’ve gone back to the dictionary part of the book I was writing, after losing heart when that Romanian teacher decided she had better things to do than help me. I’m now on the letter R, and I hope I can make some more progress this week.

The cathedral at 12:15 last night
Just after 4pm today
Books - Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - The UK

A strange festive season

December 26, 2020 by 0 Comments

On Wednesday night, I met one of my students. She paid me for my lessons, then showered me with gifts. It was dark, but there was clearly a book (in Romanian, inevitably), some sarmale, and a cozonac. Damn. You’ve wrecked my Christmas Eve cooking plans. (I’m serious. I’m not great at planning, and when I do make a plan, it throws me for a loop when someone makes me suddenly abandon it.) I can still make some salată de boeuf, I suppose. But when I got home, I opened the glass container to find some salată de boeuf. She must have read my mind. Or this blog. I’ll have a go at all that Romanian cuisine some other time.

On Christmas Eve, not a lot happened. I had a lesson with the woman in Brașov. She’d forgotten that we’d scheduled a meeting for Christmas Eve, and when I called her at 8am she was still in bed. We eventually had the lesson at ten. No grammar or anything taxing. Just chat about Christmas and Covid-related stuff. She said she was glad Romania is always behind other European countries, because it means the vaccine will be safer when it gets here. Then I got the business about allergic reactions. Then the stuff about the MMR vaccine causing autism, which is utterly, dangerously, false. In the evening I heard that the Brexit deal had gone through. With days until the deadline, there were only two real options. This was the second worst option. I was sad to learn that Britain will no longer be part of the Erasmus programme, which I took advantage of in 2000-01. None of the students left out in the cold were old enough to vote in the referendum. (Die-hard Brexiteers will applaud this, of course. Erasmus is for the elite, or some such shit. It even sounds Latin, doesn’t it? Mr Erasmus was in fact a philosopher and monk from Rotterdam. Since the programme began in the late eighties, over three million students have taken the opportunity to study abroad in Rotterdam. Or anywhere.)

Not that much happened on Christmas Day either, really. It was a wet day. (One of my ex-students sent me a video clip of her Christmas morning in Austria. It was snowing there.) Mum and Dad called me from Hampden – they’d had their Christmas dinner in Moeraki. I ate some of all that Romanian food I’d been given (I felt far more grateful than I did on Wednesday night), drank some Romanian drink (the red wine was called Sânge de Taur, “Bull’s Blood”), and read my book. I’ve almost finished Kate Atkinson’s extremely clever Life After Life, which didn’t do much for me at the start (this is too clever) but quickly grew on me. Once I’ve finished that, I’ll start on my present, Inocenții by Ioana Pârvulescu. That will keep me going. My brother called me; he and his wife had done a normal Christmas dinner for the two of them, with all the turkey and pigs in blankets. He’d have been quite happy not to bother, I think, but she takes Christmas pretty seriously. My brother told me that St Ives had been flooded. Not the south side where we lived that often got flooded before the embankment was built in 2006, but north of the river where most people live. It’s been a very crappy Christmas for them. I dread to think what Christmas will do to the Covid situation in the UK. I don’t think 25th December dominates anywhere in world like it does there. Then I spoke to my aunt, who immediately asked me if I was bored. She’s obsessed with boredom. No, and so what if I am. There are far worse things in life than being bored. Thanks to Brexit, from the middle of next year my pre-pay phone plan will no longer include calls to the UK.

Dad’s cousin, whom I called my uncle when I was growing up, died on Tuesday (the 22nd). I don’t know if there will even be a funeral, let alone where or when or how. He’s one of a number of male family members to have died of cancer a few months either side of their 70th birthday. Dad, now six months past his 70th, has been through the wars but keeps hanging in there.

I was going to meet my student couple later today at their rather nice-looking house Sânandrei, but she’s just texted me to say she’s ill. It would have been my first real time spent with other humans for ages, and last night I was contemplating what to wear. My blue shoes? Hopefully we can still catch up.

Books - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Politics

Will the asteroid hit?

October 31, 2020 by 0 Comments

At the moment my days and weeks are passing in a fog of fatigue. Maybe I’m getting old, or more likely, I’m suffering from all the extra screen time. My lessons are now exclusively online. I preferred the face-to-face meetings and all the books and games and props. Now it’s a combination of Skype, Zoom and Google Meet. The latter two allow you to do all sorts of clever stuff; my younger students sometimes excitedly show me the various tricks which I promptly forget. Sometimes I feel like a schoolteacher in the eighties or nineties who struggled with the functions of a VCR. “Yes, miss, I know how to do it!”

My favourite lesson of last week was with a husband and wife whom I last saw nearly a year ago. I had my first lessons with them way back in September 2017. They’re really nice people, and it was a pleasure to see them (virtually, of course) in our three-way Skype meeting. They sat in separate rooms in their new house in Sânandrei, about ten kilometres from Timișoara. I’d always known the wife as Andreea, and was initially confused when she popped up on my screen as Eliza. Not that confused, because Romanians often have two first names which both get significant use. She explained that she’s Andreea to her friends but Eliza at work. She’s not a doolittle in the office, that’s for sure. Her whole day is taken up by answering emails of complaint, usually in English. She showed me a bunch of emails she’d sent that day, and I tried to help her iron out some kinks in her English and generally sound more human and less aggressive and robotic. “Photos unreceived,” she wrote at one point. Unreceived is in that grey area between a word and a non-word. In fact people in these multinational companies communicate all the time in this grey, lifeless, minimalist pseudo-English that would drive me mad. (This did drive me mad when I started working for an insurance company.)

The US election is almost upon us. It’s barely three days away. Biden is a pretty hefty favourite – in the “gold standard” Fivethirtyeight model, Trump has a one-in-ten chance of winning – not much, but it’s a 10% chance of something terrifying. It’s a bit like how I’d feel if there was a 1% chance of a giant asteroid impact in Timișoara. It’s also a bit like how some of us have felt about coronavirus, which Trump has so royally effed up on. I listened to a Fivethirtyeight podcast yesterday, and they said that if Trump wins, we’ve really got to question what any of this means anymore.

New Zealand voted against legalising cannabis in the referendum. The “yes” vote was around 46%, which will probably increase when the special votes come in, but it almost certainly won’t be enough. A missed opportunity, I’d say, and my guess is that if it wasn’t for the Covid-fuelled uncertainty, the result might have been different. I imagine they’ll revisit this in ten or twenty years. Interestingly, the assisted dying bill passed easily, and I would have voted for that too.

Mum has ordered me half a dozen books from Waterstones. Two of them are for my work. The rest are The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon (a book about depression – just what we all need right now), The Sixth Extinction (which we’re currently in the middle of), The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel (if it’s anything like the other book of hers I read, it’ll be amazing), and Word Perfect by Susie Dent (she first appeared on Countdown in 1992 and is now a minor celebrity). The books aren’t cheap – they come to just over £100, mainly because of the two work books. Study materials are so damn expensive. It’s always a pleasure to receive these gifts, but it would be nice if at our respective stages in the game I was buying stuff for Mum and not the other way round, and there was a time when I’d order my parents maybe a multifunctional printer or a case of wine. That time was about 2005.

On Thursday I called my aunt on her 73rd birthday. She didn’t want much of a chat. It’s always a bit frustrating talking to her. In our conversations (if you can call them that) you only get faint hints that she might care about what goes on in other people’s lives, and when you get that glimmer, it’s inevitably snuffed out in the very next sentence.

That’ll do for today (Saturday). About to have two lessons, with the bloke in Austria and the woman in Bucharest. And by the way, the mother who was messing me around with dates and times decided to give up on me. No great surprise.

Books - Coronavirus - Family - Tennis

Can’t put it down, but want to

September 13, 2020 by 0 Comments

I’m near the end of the third book in Elena Ferrante’s four-part Neapolitan series. It’s dramatic and unputdownable, and very hard to read at the same time. The violence, the backstabbing, everybody’s lives being so intertwined, every moment of every day being no more than the next move in an impossible game. I would like to visit Naples sometime, but the life portrayed in the series of books is my idea of hell, and there’s only so much of that I can take. A lot of it is just me, I’m sure. I think I’m a nice person, and I’m able to get on with and connect with most other people. But I rarely have close relationships, I’ve never been part of an in-group (with a complementary out-group), never at school, never at work, never anywhere; I’m just me, navigating my way through life as unobtrusively as possible. That’s how upending my life and coming to Romania wasn’t that hard, psychologically, even if it was somewhat challenging on a practical level. Quite possibly I have low-level autism – I used to attend groups for autistic people in New Zealand, originally because I wanted to work with autistic people – and found the frankness, the crap-cutting, to be refreshing. But in these books you’ve got the exact opposite of autism, if such a thing exists, where every word or action is hyper-analysed, given a secondary, tertiary meaning. It’s a fascinating read, but just gimme someone quiet and unassuming, somebody likeable, just one among the dozens of characters. Fundamentally, the lack of likeable characters is a problem for me.

Last night I tried staying up to watch the women’s US Open final between Naomi Osaka and Viktoria Azarenka, but even though it didn’t start that late – 11pm – I couldn’t keep my eyes open. It was a good match, the bits I saw anyway, and fortunes whipsawed wildly. Azarenka stormed out to 6-1 2-0, but Osaka then raced into a 1-6 6-3 4-1 lead. Then I woke up and things got exciting. Azarenka won a pair of long games to get back to 3-4 with her serve to come, but Osaka broke in the next game and served out for her second US Open title and third grand slam overall. Osaka was the first woman to win the final after dropping the first set since Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario way back in 1994. Osaka became something of a sensation for her masks. For each match, she wore a mask bearing the name of a black victim of police violence. Last night’s mask carried the name of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old black boy who was shot dead by a policeman in Cleveland six years ago. Her quarter-final mask had George Floyd’s name on it. The men’s final between Alexander Zverev and Dominic Thiem takes place tonight, but I can’t realistically watch it. Incredibly, it will be the first time that a man born in the nineties wins a grand slam. It hasn’t been a normal tournament. No juniors, no qualifying, no mixed doubles (though, outside Wimbledon, that functions as an exhibition anyway), and the men’s and women’s doubles draws reduced from 64 pairs to 32. Importantly, nobody was allowed to play both singles and doubles.

I should be playing tennis tonight. Last Sunday was our first session for four weeks, as some of the regulars had been away on holiday. The bloke who lives on my floor had grown a beard in that time, and I remarked upon that. He told me that his elderly mother had died, and it was a Romanian tradition for men not to shave for forty days afterwards. Death rites are quite complex here – a big part of them is the pomană – sharing of food at specific intervals after someone dies, with the final “feast” occurring after seven years.

Last Monday I played Monopoly for the first time this century, with the Romanian version. The eleven-year-old boy wanted to play. We were both pretty hazy about the rules. He started to build houses and hotels willy-nilly before I figured that something was probably amiss. Everything was in Romanian, and once I did myself out of £300 (euros, dollars, I honestly don’t know), thinking I had to pay £150 instead of receive it. I took photos of the board and bits and pieces, and we’ll resume tomorrow. Getting paid (real money) to play Monopoly isn’t too bad.

My aunt has had a lot of stomach trouble, and has been almost unable to see anybody about it. Waiting hours on a phone line that you have to pay for, and spending more hours in a waiting room if you even get that far – that’s all normal now in Britain’s almost third-world health system. It was bad enough before Covid, but since March the gaping holes have been laid bare for all to see. In the last six months, people have died in their tens of thousands of cancer and other non-Covid-related conditions, and will continue to do so over the autumn and winter – Covid case numbers are now climbing fast. My aunt would be better off in Romania.

Mum and Dad got back from Moeraki on Friday night, their time. They had better weather than was forecast. I was quite envious when they told me about getting fish and chips in Temuka on the way back, from the fairly rough-and-ready shop just around the corner from where my grandparents used to live.

Books - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching

Life probably WAS simpler then

June 25, 2020 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother on Tuesday night. He’d just been down to St Ives. He said they’d taken their inflatable motor boat for a trip down the Ouse from St Ives to Earith. Around Earith there’s a complex network of tributaries and drains – you’re on the edge of the Fens there. I remember all that from the flood mapping job I had before moving to New Zealand. Earith is where my aunt lives, and they wanted to drop in on her, but she told them to stay away. Among older people there’s still understandable fear. We talked about the photos that Dad had sent us. Was life really so much simpler back then, or did it just seem it because we were kids? We settled on the former.

I told my brother that I’d just had a lesson on verb tenses, and he said, with a tinge of pride, that he didn’t know what a verb was. He doesn’t need to know what a verb is. (I don’t think he’ll be learning Romanian or Serbian or any other foreign language any time soon.) And at least he knows there are things called verbs that he doesn’t know about – his work day is filled with tanks and other machinery that I don’t even know I don’t know about. But his remark showed how different the British and Romanian education systems are. The Romanian system has serious issues, but at least practically everyone leaves school knowing that you can’t make a sentence without a goddamn verb. (My students are often amazed when I tell them that I’ve had to teach English grammar myself, long after leaving school, by a mix of trial-and-error and studying foreign languages.)

I’ve just finished Border by Kapka Kassabova, a tale of life, death and travel in the harsh, wild border regions of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. Three languages, three alphabets, dozens of irregular verbs. So much upheaval, so much history that I couldn’t keep track of, and so much violence. The author was born in Bulgaria in 1974, and moved to New Zealand with her parents in around 1993 after the iron curtain fell. She got sick of all the rugby and beer and what she probably saw as a general shallowness, and ended up in Scotland. She’s extremely clever and at times used language that lay at the borders of my vocabulary. I liked that she explained the meaning of both people’s names and placenames; that added to the mystique.

In a lesson yesterday I translated the word “porch” as prispă, before adding “does anyone still use this word?”. My student told me that young people probably don’t even know the word: the typical Romanian image – quite lovely to me – of an old lady on her prispă is becoming history. People now use the more boring terasă – the same word that they use for outside areas of cafés and bars – instead. They then translate terasă as “terrace” in English, but that doesn’t feel right. After all that time in NZ, I would say “deck”. When I was growing up we used “patio”. There’s also “veranda(h)” and probably a bunch of others.

As I said last time, Biden is leading Trump by 9 or 10 points in the poll averages. (Update: And crucially, he has big leads in swing-state polls, too.) If the election was held now, he’d be an overwhelming favourite, but of course it isn’t. One way this could play out is a bit like last year’s women’s Wimbledon final. Simona built a lead, but surely Serena would come back. She’s Serena! But she never came back. She was sluggish, there was nothing there. Simona hardly put a foot wrong and it was all done and dusted in 56 minutes. This is a terrible analogy I know, but it’s one of many ways the campaign and election could go. Heaps of time for it to change, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it did, but right now Biden is up by about 25 points among women and least 35 among college-educated white women. That’s massive. But Trump can at least console himself that among white men who don’t know what a verb is, he has a commanding 70-point advantage.

Books - Coronavirus - Life :)

The rule of 72

April 6, 2020 by 0 Comments

I’m writing this at my desk, watching the sunset out of my window which faces due west. It’s 8pm on a beautiful Sunday, and that’s only made the quietness and emptiness feel even weirder. Mostly empty antique trams are still clattering by, often crossing each other, but there is very little foot traffic, and any cars are pulled over by the visored, gloved policemen from cars 30433 and 30434. Most drivers are quickly waved on, but the woman in the red Dacia looks like she’s in some hot water.

I’m now doing eight trips up and down the stairs each day. Today I met a very old lady on my second trip down, and I slipped up. I was in a world of my own, forgetting all about physical distancing protocol. I’ve chatted to plenty of lovely older people since I moved to Romania, including several of my students’ grandparents, and I can’t get used to them being potentially dangerous. I managed to get out for a quick bike ride and it was very strange to see the children’s park, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with no children.

The view from the stairs of my block, 7½ floors up
A kid-free kids’ park

I’ve been working my way through the second book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. Was Naples in the early sixties really like this? If so, I wonder what it’s like now. (I wanted to visit southern Italy this summer, but that will have to wait.) The acceptance and even praise (!) of domestic violence is quite shocking. Almost as hard to grasp is the normality and virtual expectation that a girl will be married at sixteen and pregnant at seventeen. Then there’s the conceit, the backstabbing, the constant game-playing, the pleasure people take from others’ misfortune, the hyper-sensitivity to every little thing anyone says or does. I’ve met several autistic people, and have some traits myself, but in this world people’s brains function in a diametrically opposite way from an autistic person’s. For me it would be an utterly terrifying place to live. These books are extremely character-driven rather than plot-driven, and I really appreciate the “who’s who” of the characters at the front of each volume.

Yesterday I talked about Benford’s law, which is coming into play during the coronavirus pandemic. Now I’ll talk about another useful rule for these scary times: the rule of 72. It’s a rule of thumb that tells you how long it takes for something (money, bacteria, coronavirus cases, basically anything) to double. Simply put, you divide 72 by the percentage increase per time period, and that tells you how many of those time periods it’ll take to double. For example, say you deposit a sum at the bank at an 8% annual interest rate (maybe you’re old enough to remember when you could do that!), then because 72/8 = 9, your money will double in approximately nine years if you just let it sit there. (The rule isn’t exact, but it’s close.) Turning to coronavirus, if the daily increase in cases is 12%, then cases will double in roughly six days. One nice thing about this rule is that 72 has lots of factors. At very high daily rates of increase, which we’ve seen at times in this pandemic in countries like Turkey, the rule does break down slightly, so if cases go up by 36% a day, it’ll take a little over two days before you have twice as many cases.

First thing tomorrow morning I’ll make my weekly trip to the supermarket. Back in 2000, this was the biggest supermarket in the city, but then came the malls and hypermarkets. I’ll be masked and gloved, as will the cashier, who is paid very little for her job but all of a sudden is putting her life on the line. Last week the cashier was struggling to press the keys with her gloves.

Some tentative good news, at last. Daily fatalities in Italy, though still shocking, are on a clear downward trend. Spain too seems to have peaked. France appears to be nearing the apex. Australia’s cases haven’t accelerated as, honestly, I expected them too. New Zealand, remarkably, still has only a single fatality. In Romania, it’s still too early to tell, but on Monday I would have expected the current death toll to be 250 or more; it currently stands at 151. I’ve noticed around the world that fewer deaths are reported at weekends and there is a catch-up early the next week, so I do expect that number to rise quickly.

Romania coronavirus 5-4-20
Books - Coronavirus - Language teaching

In like a lamb, out like a lion

April 1, 2020 by 0 Comments

March. What a month. Waaay back on the 4th (it feels a lifetime ago now) I had a lesson with those two teenage boys. When I asked them what they felt about the virus, the older one said that everyone will have forgotten about it in about the time it takes to say “coronavirus”. A week later their mum was clearly scared shitless by the whole virus thing, judging by the texts she sent me, and lessons were off until further notice. On the 6th, I had a lesson with two younger boys. Their mum was in the background, and when we’d finished she told me that the virus was being massively hyped up by the media. I said that the media were in fact understating the risks posed by the virus. The following week she told me to stay away.

Two lessons today, one of them with a ten-year-old boy on FaceTime instead of the usual Skype. That was a really awkward lesson. On a small phone screen and with no way of sharing documents or text, it was like teaching with both arms tied behind my back. At one point I introduced a simple word game, a bit like Countdown on British TV, but with seven letters. This kid knows his alphabet in English (most don’t) so I thought this would work. R for rabbit, E for elephant, G for gold, another E for elephant, and so on. After two minutes I asked him what words he’d made from the letters. “Rabbit,” he told me.

People are dying of this virus in shocking numbers. Nearly 400 additional deaths were reported in the UK today. In Romania we’re still at the point where age, sex, location and any comorbidities are given every time a death is reported. I’m just reading that the 81st recorded death in Romania (out of 82 so far) was a 70-year-old man. Her wife had died of the virus only yesterday. Three weeks ago they travelled to Turkey to get some medical procedure done. For now, the Romanian victims are still people rather than cold statistics, but for how long? There is clearly a desperate lack of testing here, because so many of those dying from the virus are being diagnosed on the day of death or in the post-mortem. I’d dread to think what the genuine case figures are. By the way, the whole city of Suceava, where the virus ripped through that hospital, killing at least 28 people, has been quarantined along with surrounding towns.

I’ve just received half a dozen books that Mum ordered for me online. The delivery man was alarmingly unprotected. She got me all three of the remaining books in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, Complete Serbian and Border – A Journey to the Edge of Europe. That lot will keep me going for ages, even under our reading-friendly lockdown.

It’s also a good opportunity to listen to music. A couple of great coronavirus tunes I didn’t know about until today: John Lennon’s Isolation and Fleetwood Mac’s Behind the Mask.

Some Brits just don’t get it. Not only are they buying more stuff every time they visit the supermarket (which makes sense), they’re also making more trips, which is bloody stupid. Everybody needs to be making fewer trips. As well as the increased risk in packed supermarkets, there’s also a greater chance of food being wasted, which we can ill afford.

Three charts now: cases, deaths and recoveries. Sometimes new figures are reported after I post them on this blog, but before midnight, in which case I have to apply some Tipp-ex.

Coronavirus cases in Romania 31-3-20
Books - Coronavirus - Language teaching

Starting to bite

March 12, 2020 by 0 Comments

Coronavirus. It’s affecting me now. No, I haven’t got it or anything, but people are cancelling lessons left, right and centre. One of their workmates has “weird symptoms”, or maybe they have to look after their kids who are now at home. Today I’ve been given a complete day off. This morning I went to the supermarket, stopping on the way to pick up my second-hand copy of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings that I’d bought on Ebay. I thought I might never get it; seeing that slip of paper in my letterbox was a pleasant surprise on a sunny day of no lessons. At the supermarket I wish I’d used the self-service checkouts that were introduced just before Christmas. I prefer to deal with real people, and evidently so do most Romanians. But with the self-service tills you avoid crowds of often elderly people. On the way back I read the first few chapters of my new book, which was once a present for somebody named Dani.

The response to the virus continues to be bizarre and politics-driven, most notably in the US where the only reason cases aren’t yet at sky-high levels is that they aren’t testing people. At times like this, Trump is a very dangerous man. Last night he took the nonsensical step of banning travel to the US from European countries inside the Schengen zone. So you’ll still be able to fly from either Romania or the UK. In his speech he called the coronavirus a “foreign virus”. No it ain’t! It’s a fully-fledged citizen of the US now. No green card required.

Last night I dropped in on the Champions League match between Liverpool and Atlético Madrid. You’re playing it in front of 50,000 fans? Seriously? Allowing all that air travel from Madrid or wherever else? And just in case the risk factors weren’t already through the roof, the match went into extra time (an extraordinary half-hour, it must be said).

Yesterday, in my lesson with the twelve-year-old boy, the Hangman words and phrases included “Virus”, “Wash your hands” and “Don’t touch your face”. As for now, this weekend’s trip to the mountains is going ahead, but watch this space.