Tennis

Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Tennis

It feels impossible

November 29, 2020 by 0 Comments

It’s now been confirmed exactly, to the dollar, how much each of us will receive from the sale of our apartment block. I’ve memorised the six-digit number as if it were an old phone number from when I was a kid. (When I was growing up, some of us had five-digit numbers, others six.) Commission and lawyers’ fees will still come out of that, but it’s beyond my wildest dreams. It’s surreal, honestly. Other owners have said, now I know what winning Lotto must feel like. This nine-year nightmare has been a defining feature of my life. Would I have come to Romania otherwise? It feels impossible that it’s now coming to an end, and with this outcome.

I’m in no hurry when it comes to figuring out my next step. Do I buy something in Timișoara, and if so, what? (I should really wait until I’m sure I can stay here.) How about the UK instead, or would that be a really terrible idea? As far as real estate is concerned, I’m clueless and frankly not that interested, but I’ve got options now that I never expected to have. Ideally I would like a sunny house with a small garden, maybe some fruit trees, and a place where I can work. That’s about all.

This must be a weight off my parents’ minds, too. When I got the news that my place had been yellow-stickered, Mum and Dad were on holiday in Europe and I didn’t dare tell them until they got back. I didn’t want to wreck their holiday.

I played tennis today with three members of a family (husband, wife, and their nine-year-old boy who can certainly play a bit). We played three sets, one in each configuration. The most enjoyable set was the one with the boy, which we lost 7-5. The temperature couldn’t have been more than two degrees, but that didn’t seem to matter.

My parents have gone over to Milford Sound for a trip, taking advantage of the lack of foreign tourists. They hope it might be like the one we did as a family 31 years ago. Milford Sound, Doubtful Sound, Lake Te Anau and the glow-worm caves, it was all magical. One time the captain let my brother and I drive the boat. Such a different time.

Dad has a 1957 MGA. He bought it in the UK in ’91, at which time it was red. (He’s now had it for nearly half its life.) It was black when it was shipped out new (and left-hand drive) to the US, as the vast majority of MGAs were. I went with Dad to the classic car yard before he bought it for £6000, and I remember he first went round the bodywork with a magnet, wondering why a part of it didn’t attract, but eventually thinking nothing of it. It was a beautiful-looking car, very curvaceous, and I always liked the leathery smell of it. None of that insipid plasticky stuff. When my parents moved to New Zealand in 2003, it went in the shipping container. Just recently he’s had it reworked and resprayed, the steering swapped over, and the engine reconditioned (all at no inconsiderable cost, I’m sure). He found out it had once been in an accident, with layers of filler applied, hence why there was no metal for that magnet to pick up. He’s now got his car back, in a lovely robin’s-egg blue, or Cambridge blue, or perhaps face-mask blue.

November hasn’t been a bad month. Trump lost. Hooray! (I’m already fed up with the cynicism about Biden being just more of the same. I really really want Biden to succeed and I think he can.) At least three vaccines have demonstrated impressive levels of efficacy. And now, totally unexpectedly, I’ve found myself in a position to build something, to plan for the future, to even feel I have a future. Who cares if it doesn’t get above two degrees.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

Another dark day for Romania

November 16, 2020 by 0 Comments

Tragedy struck Romania last night. Ten people died in a fire in the Covid wing of a hospital in Piatra Neamț, in the north-east of the country. I’m looking at the gruesome pictures on TV now. They still don’t know what caused it. Perhaps the fire was fuelled by the supplementary oxygen, or maybe it was a short circuit. To Romanians it brings back dreadful memories of the Colectiv nightclub fire that took place five years ago, killing 64 people. Did we learn nothing, they are saying today.

In brighter news I’ve played a decent amount of tennis this weekend, every point of it partnering the same woman. Yesterday there was a new woman on the other side of the net – a good player whose kick serve made it clear that she’d been coached – and we went down 6-3 6-4 3-2, though we led 3-1 in the first set and were unlucky not to at least make it close. Then today I had my work cut out once again, with two men across the net. I had to run everything down. We played 3½ sets, and from our point of view we finished up at 6-3 6-2 3-6 1-4. I played well but it was taxing physically and mentally, and I tired towards the end. My partner brought along some homemade apple pie.

The highlight of my work week was pretty clear. Half-way through my Google Meet lesson with an eleven-year-old girl, the “share screen” function stopped working. What do I do now? I asked her about music. Do you play an instrument? Do you like any singers or bands? I don’t want to say it, but I’ll write it, she said. The words “Sex Pistols” suddenly appeared on my screen, followed by “God Save the Queen”. Wow. Why do you like the Sex Pistols? How do you even know about them? Do you know they were British? She said her parents often played their songs.

I haven’t mentioned my book much recently. With my higher teaching volumes, I haven’t done as much. I’m now on the P section of the dictionary, which is taking ages. Dad, however, is now helping out with illustrations. So far he’s come out with a nifty cartoonish style, and he’ll use the same cartoon character in each picture, adding “extras” when necessary. The tricky bit (well, to me it’s all tricky, but the tricky bit even for a talented artist like my father) is to convey the relevant language point in each picture. That’s absolutely crucial. I have three lessons tomorrow – a light day – so I hope I can make more progress with the dictionary.

Covid. There are tentative signs that it’s getting better in Timișoara. The numbers of new cases have dropped off slightly. I still hear far more ambulance sirens than normal, but fewer than two or three weeks ago when they seemed incessant. Tentative signs, as I said, and with winter almost upon us. I’ve been trying to get a flu jab, with no luck. The pharmacies don’t have any available. To get me through the long, dark winter I’m now taking a cocktail of vitamin D, zinc and selenium. It would be nice to think that one of the vaccines – hopefully not the Russian Sputnik V vaccine – will be with us by the spring.

As soon as I got back from this afternoon’s exertions on the tennis court, I had a long chat with my cousin who lives in New York state. I spoke to both him and his Italian wife. The virus is tearing through the entire country now, making the first two waves seem like mere ripples. Of course we talked about the election. Just imagine if Trump had won re-election. Just. Imagine. And he wasn’t far off. People have been too quick to justify, or normalise, what we’ve seen from Trump since election day and the four years before. None of it is justifiable or normal.

My brother and his wife have moved into their new house. I’ll talk to them when they get their internet sorted. My brother quite likes fiddling with this or painting that, so I think he’ll enjoy having something extra to do over the winter while Covid otherwise restricts his options. As for my parents, they’ve put themselves on a list for a section of land in Geraldine, so they can build on it. It’s about 750 square metres, less than a tenth of what they currently have. Mum won’t want to be mowing that lawn much longer. I was hoping they’d abandon Geraldine, which has become rather geriatric, and buy something with a house already on it. If they don’t sell one of places in the meantime, they’ll – temporarily at least – own five properties. To me, owning five properties is about as realistic as owning three arms.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Tennis

What would she think?

November 2, 2020 by 0 Comments

I sometimes wonder what my parents would think if they stumbled upon this blog. They’d probably be horrified, especially Mum. But in fact I get on really well with Mum, better than ever before, for all kinds of reasons including (more recently) the pandemic which has strengthened our family bond. (I now have family photos all over my flat.) The main reason though is that I’ve been far happier since I moved to Romania, and that has lifted Mum’s mood too, so we’ve both managed to escape that spiral of negativity. (My brother had a pretty tough time a few years ago too, and he’s indescribably better now.) Another noticeable difference is that Mum respects me more because I’ve done a thing off my own bat. I mentioned that to Dad recently and he agreed with me.

When I spoke to Dad, he asked me what might have happened if I’d taken the job in Timaru instead of going to Auckland. At the beginning of 2004, when I was living with my parents in Temuka and desperate for a job, I went door-knocking on various banks and (now defunct) finance companies in Timaru. Most of them gave me short shrift, but a nice lady at BNZ was happy to sit down with me for a chat, and look over my CV. Perhaps in the same week (I can’t remember exactly) I flew up to Auckland for an interview with a life insurance company. I got the job in Auckland, and was extremely excited to do so, but I fell into a pit of depression almost the moment I started. Then Mum got a call from the lady at the bank, offering me a job, but it was too late by then. I said to Dad that I almost certainly would have been happier in the short term if I’d worked at BNZ, but within a few years banks had become even more sales-focused and I would have hated that.

I played tennis this afternoon. A welcome distraction. The court had been resurfaced since our last game – that’s the main reason why we couldn’t play for a while – and what a difference it made. Added to that, the setting was quite beautiful with all the autumn colours. I played with somebody new, the wife of one of the other players. As we walked to the courts, she was wearing an N95 mask (I just wore a cloth one) and I when she spoke to me I could hardly make out a thing she said. Da, da. On the other side of the court were her husband and an older guy. My partner was better than the woman I normally play with. We raced out to a 5-1 lead in the first set, but she visibly tired and we had to fight to even reach a tie-break, which we lost 7-4. After a quick fag break (not for me), we kept the same partners for the second set and I expected we’d go down in a heap, but instead we won 7-5 in a great set of tennis, full of long rallies and hard-fought deuce games. The two sets took 1¾ hours, excluding the fag break. I served five or six aces, well above average for me.

The UK announced their lockdown last night. (Or was it just for England?) Loads of baffling slides that you could hardly even see, followed by Boris saying that people must stay at home and also that they are free to leave home for a variety of reasons. (This Youtube clip from Matt Lucas never stops being funny.)

My brother should be moving house this Thursday. They’re upsizing. (Maybe they’ll be expanding.) The enthusiasm for moving comes from his wife, not him – I’m not sure it’s the sort of place he would have picked.

Yesterday I had a lesson with the woman in Bucharest who uses the same Romanian news app that I do. We had beeps and bloops every few minutes during the lesson. Nearly 6000 new Covid infections and 101 deaths. Simona Halep was positive. Then we heard that Sean Connery had died. My student said all the news (the earthquake in Greece and Turkey, the stabbing in Nice) was all getting a bit much. I said, just wait until next week. She said she expected Biden to lose because he’s “a hundred years old”. OK, he’s too old, but his opponent is too old and a giant turd.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

A beast

October 13, 2020 by 0 Comments

My brother’s in Scotland on heaven knows what exercise. I’ve just tried FaceTiming him, but no luck. Before that, I had two phone calls in quick succession from new students. I’m going to be snowed under with work at this rate. Five lessons scheduled tomorrow. My energy levels are depleted for whatever reason, so that might not be ideal, but at the moment I only have to leave the house twice a week.

Rafael Nadal. What a beast that man is. A ridiculous 13 Roland-Garros titles, and 20 grand slams altogether, tying Federer’s mark. Nadal and Djokovic were only in their fifth game of what was tennis of the highest order, when I left to play my own version of the game. I was a bit bummed honestly, because I could hardly take my eyes off what I was seeing. It took, I think, 46 minutes for Nadal to win the first set 6-0; that must be some kind of record for the longest whitewash set. In the whole match Nadal made 14 unforced errors. Fourteen. Extraordinary stuff. Interestingly, he won by dominating the shorter rallies. I wouldn’t be shocked to see Nadal reach 25 slams.

My tennis was eventful too. Domnul Sfîra wasn’t there. Perhaps he was watching the final. He’s a keen fan of the professional game. I played with the woman against two men, and I played one of the cleanest sets I can remember as we won 6-3, winning all our service games including all three of my partner’s. (By some crazy nonsensical tradition, she serves the first game of every set she plays. Always, always, always.) From memory I made only one unforced error, and I played quite aggressively, especially at the start. In the fourth game one of our opponents, who was serving, got mad. Because it was his first service game of the evening, the “double faults don’t count” rule was in play. He was struggling to get the ball in the service box, and his unusually high rate of lets weren’t helping either. Then I played another set with the same partner, though one of our opponents was different. Again she served the first game, meaning she served two games in a row. This time we weren’t doing so well – I think we were 3-0 down – when I abruptly changed direction to chase a ball, felt a jabbing pain in my knee, and almost keeled over. I decided to leave the game at that point, and maybe I’ll take break next weekend.

There are new rules in place for Timișoara now, as we’ve breached the threshold of 1.5 cases per 1000 inhabitants over a two-week period. Masks are now a must practically anywhere you go. In a recent John Campbell video, he talked about some of the secondary complications, sometimes long-term, of Covid-19. One of the more surprising is derealisation, when you feel that nothing is real, that you’re watching everything on a video. Campbell said he’s had that, and so have I. While playing tennis (more than once), while shopping at Sainsbury’s, and once even in a job interview. It’s scary stuff.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

Selfishness is killing us

October 11, 2020 by 0 Comments

On Friday one of my regular students – the one who said that she wanted to get Covid – told me that her husband had tested positive. They and their son have to quarantine for two weeks. She’d also had symptoms including a 39-degree fever. Brilliant. I was very glad I’d told her to stay away last week, but was she carrying the virus when she came here the previous Thursday? I wasn’t feeling 100% myself. Tiredness, lack of energy, the usual stuff. As for wanting to get the virus, she said look at Trump, 30 years older than me and he looks fine now. Where to start? That’s a sample size of one, and Trump has had a cocktail of about eight drugs and procedures including antibody treatment. Good luck getting that in Romania.

The Covid numbers are skyrocketing. (Just look at those graphs.) In a recent video, John Campbell talked about the selfishness of people hopping on planes in the middle of a plague, exercising their “unalienable rights”, as he put it, to go wherever they want whenever they want. It drove me mad to hear my students talk about their travels during the summer. Croatia, Greece, the Black Sea. There’s this, um, virus thingy which you might have heard about. And the jam-packed Black Sea resorts sound ghastly to me, virus or no virus. In the past I’ve gone up to five years without travelling internationally, but you buggers have gone away every year for the last ten. Is it really such a hardship to stay at home just this once? As for people complaining that they can’t get home from their jolly, I have zero sympathy. I think if we could have closed those resorts and basically sealed the borders, we wouldn’t have squandered the progress we made in the spring. But thanks to you selfish bastards, here we are.

I played tennis last night. We started with a typical set-up, me playing with the only woman, while on the other side were the 85-year-old bloke (Domnul Sfîra) and a younger guy. We got to 5-5, and because someone was waiting we played a tie-break which we won 8-6. After that, my memory is a bit hazy. Early in the next set I slipped and fell, and thought I might have torn a ligament in my left knee. I felt quite dizzy, and eventually staggered to the bench. Domnul Sfîra took over for a few games. One of the others had a knee brace so I put that on and gingerly joined the action. I iced my knee when I got home, and though it still hurts if I bend it fully, I should be fine.

So Iga Świątek won the French Open, beating Sofia Kenin comfortably in the end. Świątek was born in 2001 – yes, we now have people born this century winning grand slams. I watched the first eight games – that long eighth game was crucial – before playing tennis myself. I didn’t miss a whole lot; I think Kenin was compromised physically. Świątek played out of this world against Simona Halep and I’m not surprised she lifted the trophy, but heck, she didn’t drop a set the whole tournament, and every one of her seven matches was 6-something, 6-something. Amazing stuff. I thought she might suffer from stage fright in the final, but not a bit of it. She took home €1.6 million – less than Ashleigh Barty received last year, pre-Covid, but still a very hefty hourly rate. The most fascinating thing on both the men’s and women’s side has been the number of surprise packages that the tournament has thrown up.

I’m playing tennis again this evening, so I’ll miss most of the men’s final between Nadal and Djoković too. I have a habit of missing big tennis matches while playing tennis. The 1996 men’s Wimbledon final springs to mind. For me, the match of the tournament (so far – who knows what today’s final could produce) is the quarter-final between Dominic Thiem and Diego Schwartzman. What I saw was spellbinding. The drop shots (that’s been the shot of the tournament) and table-tennis-style retrievals by Schwartzman were out of this world. I’d just seen a crazy-long game – 15 minutes at least – in the second set, before giving back-to-back lessons for three hours, and the match was still going on after that. Predictably, Nadal was a bit too good for Schwartzman in the semi-final. The other semi was a fun match in the end, Tsitsipas coming back from two sets and match point down to force a fifth against Djoković. Tsitsipas seems mentally stronger now, and a real contender.

Teaching pronunciation when we’re both wearing masks isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and neither is teaching kids online. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Coronavirus - Family - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

A tyring week, and the latest on the book

October 5, 2020 by 0 Comments

Last week I had a stuffy nose and a bit of a cough and I wondered what was causing it. Then I figured it out. I’d replaced my bike tyre with a new white-rimmed one, and the fumes from the glue on the tyre were getting into my respiratory system. This has happened to me before. When I moved into my Wellington flat, the previous tenants had left an old umbrella which had a glue lining the spokes. And once I bought a glue-drenched pair of shoes that I had no choice but to chuck out. I’ve now tied my bike up in the lobby rather than keeping it in my flat.

This morning I had a Skype chat with my aunt and uncle who visited me in Timișoara after my brother’s wedding. That all feels like a lifetime ago now. My aunt is about to have a hip replacement. (My uncle has so far had hip, knee and ankle replacements, so now it’s her turn.) They’re also trying to get a refund of the $20,000 they spent on this year’s holiday that never happened. Apart for that, they seemed good, and busy as ever. It was a great pleasure for me to see them here, and I wonder if and when I’ll see them again.

Covid. With rapid increases in cases and hospitalisations, and winter around the corner, the situation is in danger of spiralling out of control. (It’s worse than it was when we locked down, and now we aren’t anything close to being locked down.) Maskless in-person lessons are now a no-go for me. They’re marginal even with masks. The markets, while they’re in the open, are jam-packed with elderly people, and I’ve decided to give them a miss too. One trip to the supermarket each week, in and out as fast as possible, and that’s my lot for the foreseeable future.

I was surprised how many people thought that Trump’s Covid diagnosis was fake. I mean, it’s possible, but given how breathtakingly irresponsible he’s been, it’s almost a wonder he’s stayed Covid-free for so long. I hope he survives and is humiliated in next month’s election. (Following his diagnosis, he gave a four-minute speech – edited I’m sure – in which he briefly seemed like a human being who vaguely cared about other human beings.) When I heard that Trump was positive, I emailed my university friend who in March placed a bet on Mike Pence to be the next president.

The Romanian teacher has found time in her busy schedule to work on translating my book, and it looks like this thing might actually happen. Still lots to do. Some exercises and quizzes. A slimmed down version of the dictionary. Dad’s illustrations, if he’s on board with that. But it would be quite something to have my work – a useful, practical work – in print. Crucially, the teacher has experience of publishing in Romania, and her own mother is semi-famous in her home of Alba Iulia for the books she has written.

I had my first Zoom lesson with a ten-year-old boy who lives in Bucharest. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also my last. It was like pulling teeth. Not his fault; Zoom with kids of that age is hard. The “highlight” was when I asked him to guess my age, and he said 55. It reminded me of the boy who wanted to know how much I weighed. Um, I actually don’t know. Then out came the scales. Thirty-odd kilos. Now it’s your turn. Oh, alright then. Seventy-eight! That’s even more than my dad! My English teacher’s a fatty! Ha ha!

Roland-Garros. I’ve just watched Simona Halep be overwhelmed 6-1 6-2 in the fourth round by Iga Świątek (pronounced something like “shfyon-tek”), a 19-year-old from Poland. Świątek was in the zone, rarely put a foot wrong, and Simona was out of ideas. Halep has always been vulnerable to zoning power-hitters. I also saw the final game of Martina Trevisan’s victory over fifth-seed Kiki Bertens, another big upset. Trevisan is a diminutive left-hander from Italy, and I earlier enjoyed her dramatic second-round win over Cori Gauff, which she eked out 7-5 in the third set. In round three she had match points against her. Ranked 159th in the world, she’s come all the way from qualifying to reach the quarter-finals. Seven matches in a row. Whatever happens, it’ll be like hitting Powerball for her.

We’re getting warm, windy, weird weather. Yesterday I sat in Central Park and read my book. The wind sprayed the water from the fountain onto me. Somebody put a piano in the nearby bandstand a few months ago, and this time there was someone who could actually play it, rather than a small kid hammering away at random. A woman was pushing a man with no legs in a wheelchair. They made three visits to my bench for money. I gave them 7 lei in total. I found a small yellow stylised wooden elephant, and realising it could land in six positions when you throw it, with vastly different probabilities (Pass the Pigs style), I took it home. It could feature in a kids’ game, when kids’ games become a feature again.

Life :) - Politics - Tennis

Total tennis

September 29, 2020 by 0 Comments

Today I watched a 15-minute YouTube video of largely abandoned small-town Mississippi – deep Trump country, surely – by TheDailyWoo. The commentator is amusing and has such attention to detail. So much of his video was sad but strangely beautiful. It’s one of a series – I also saw the Alabama one.

The New York Times dropped a bombshell by revealing that Trump had only paid $750 a year in taxes. I’m doubt this will shift many votes at all, but it keeps Trump in the news for all the wrong reasons, eating up the clock. There’s still time, of course, but unless the polls are systematically wrong, stagnating is no good for him.

Tennis. On Saturday we a storm in the afternoon, and even though it had passed by the time we were due to play, the courts were unplayable. Yesterday’s action went off without a hitch, though. I played men’s doubles, with the 85-year-old man on the other side of the net. He was incredibly lithe in the set we played. (I do alter my play to take account of his age, but not too much.) We led 5-3 and had three non-consecutive set points on my partner’s serve, but couldn’t close it out. At 5-5 we played a tie-break, because someone was waiting, and got taken apart 7-0 in the shoot-out. The senior among us shuffled off the court a winner, and was replaced by someone a bit younger. I kept the same partner. Again we led 5-3, and having lost my two previous service games easily, this time it was my turn to serve for the set. After numerous long rallies, as long as I’ve seen on TV the last two days, plus a double fault on set point, we got there on at least our fifth opportunity as the light was fading.

How weird it is to see the French Open being played in autumn with a bemasked skeleton crowd, but what I’ve seen so far has been utterly absorbing. Pure attritional, cat-and-mouse, clay-court tennis. Best of all, there are still no final-set tie-breaks at Roland Garros, and we’ve already seen some gargantuan, logic-defying matches, with scores into the teens in the fifth set despite many service breaks. Last night I saw the end of a match between two Argentines – Londero and Delbonis, which finished 14-12 in Londero’s favour in the final set. Londero served for the match five times and saved a match point. I thought it wouldn’t get nuttier than that, but tonight we had Colentin Moutet, a left-handed Frenchman, against Lorenzo Giustino of Italy. I thought Moutet would win – he looked the fitter and more composed of the two – and he served for the match three times, once getting to 30-0. But somehow the match refused to end. It was both gripping and draining to watch, and heaven knows what it must have been like for the players. Giustino really swung at everything on the return games and was the winner in the end, by the ludicrous score of 18-16 in the fifth, after six hours and five minutes over two days, despite being dominated for large chunks of the match. Giustino came through qualifying, so even if he totally crashes in the next round, this will be a useful payday for him.

At the weekend we had the Hungarian festival, which is always fun. It was smaller than usual, for obvious reasons. I got myself a bottle of Csiki Sör (pronounced “cheeky sherr”), the rather fruity Hungarian beer. It’s cool as hell honestly to live in a place where you see all these weird and wonderful languages.

Timișoara has a new mayor. Nicolae Robu, the distinctive-looking mayor of the last eight years is out, and Dominic Fritz (who sounds like a tennis player; he’s of German origin) is in. My students had told me that Robu was an overwhelming favourite to be re-elected, but it wasn’t even close. Robu got 30% of the vote, Fritz 53%.

Maybe it was that song Omaha by Counting Crows that told my brain I should be playing some form of Omaha poker.

Politics - Tennis

Social surprise

September 21, 2020 by 0 Comments

I’ve played tennis twice this weekend. To be honest, I do get slightly bored with playing exclusively doubles – I enjoy the physical challenge of singles and I’m better at it – but it’s certainly preferable to the alternative, which is no tennis at all. Last night they asked if I wanted to go to the pub with them after our games. I don’t like social surprises, and my first instinct, as it often is, was “no”. Where even is this pub? I went home, got a bite to eat, and joined them at the place beside the river where I sometimes go with Bogdan. I wasn’t allowed to squeeze onto their table – Covid makes squeezing a no-no – so we had to sit on two tables. I enjoyed the chat, especially with the wife of perhaps the best player among us. She described me as “nonconformist”. I usually find talking with older people – they were all older than me – more interesting than talking with younger people who can be rather superficial. Big generalisation, but people who lived under a different regime seem to have more interesting things to say.

Last weekend our game became almost secondary as people were following the final of the WTA tournament in Istanbul between Patricia Țig and Eugenie Bouchard, which was on a knife-edge. Țig saw three match points come and go at 5-3 in the final set, then three more at 6-5. She got there in the tie-break, on her eighth match point, for her first WTA title. This afternoon Simona Halep was a bit fortunate to get over the line in her semi-final with Garbiñe Muguruza; Halep led 6-3 4-6 5-1, then Muguruza came back to within one game, only to play an error-strewn service game (including double faults on the last two points) to hand Halep a close win.

This morning I spoke to my brother and my parents. Mum and Dad talked about the cannabis referendum in New Zealand. Mum will be voting against legalisation. (No surprise there. It’s a drug. Drugs are bad. If you legalise the drug, more people will take it. That’s just obvious. And it’s bad. And it will lead people on to other, even worse drugs. And that’s really bad.) I was surprised that Dad might vote against too, though he was undecided. For me, legalisation is a complete no-brainer. Loads of Kiwis smoke weed, and will smoke weed, legal or not. And it’s uncontrolled. (The fact that it’s illegal and uncontrolled is part of the attraction for young people.) Legalise it, and suddenly it’s regulated and taxed and boring. The strength will be limited. Police time and money will be diverted into things that actually matter, like violent crime, which marijuana almost never causes (unlike alcohol, of course). The proposed change is hardly a free-for-all – the legal age will be 20, higher than for alcohol which is far more dangerous. You’ll be allowed to possess half an ounce or grow a couple of plants. That’s it. And it will still most definitely be illegal to drive or operate machinery under the influence of weed. (That side of things needs to be beefed up a bit, I’d say.) I expect the bill will fail narrowly – the polls are close, but older people, who are mostly against it, are more likely to vote.

Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice, died on Friday night aged 87. Because this very old lady didn’t survive a few more weeks, the Republicans now have the chance to fill the vacancy with somebody who is likely to kill the Affordable Care Act. And kill people. Trump might now benefit from people’s attention being off coronavirus. The Republican party, and the whole American political system, really need to burn to the ground.

Family - Life :) - Tennis

Kids and pics

September 16, 2020 by 1 Comment

If any of you are wondering what my little profile picture is, it’s of a busker drumming his guitar on Wellington’s Cuba Street. I thought I wouldn’t mind being him, so I took six snaps of him, and spliced them together to make a shaky, slightly manic-looking GIF. It’s cool that WordPress lets me use it as my pic.

I had a look at my posts from a year ago, and although the world has changed so much in that time, so much was the same: wishing I had a bit more work, Brexit, Sfânta Cruce, hot weather, and a gripping men’s US Open final that I failed to see.

Dominic Thiem came from two sets down to beat Alexander Zverev 8-6 in the fifth-set tie-break. It doesn’t get tighter than that, or harder to take for the loser. Zverev was distraught at the end. It’s the first time the men’s final has gone to 7-6 in the fifth. I’m happy for Thiem that he won – he’s been close in grand slams before – and this might help him to win another slam, one that won’t be “asterisked” by the absence of players like Nadal. I didn’t see the match – it started late and I had a lesson early in the morning.

It was striking how many children were milling around in town today, either with their parents or without. Today is the second day of the school year, but most schools are doing some hybrid system of both online and in-person teaching. In some parts of the country, this is a real challenge, because not everywhere has the super-fast internet we do. (Those mostly rural places tend not to have much Covid either, so they have the green light for school to go back as normal, but there are exceptions.) Seeing all those kids, and the kids I work with, those incredible bundles of life full of so much hope and joy, makes me a bit sad that I’m unlikely to have any of my own.

Sfânta Cruce – or Sfânta Corona this year, perhaps – was as big as ever. Crowds outside the cathedral late night, and a long snaking queue today. Earlier this evening it was right back to the bus stop. Masks, mostly, but not much distancing.

Dad sent me a nice picture of Mum and me in Ireland. We went there as a family when I was ten. It was a very different country in 1990; the Celtic tiger hadn’t begun to roar. They still used pounds (for money) and miles per hour. It was beautiful but also bleak. We boarded the newly kitted out ferry, named Felicity, at Fishguard in Wales, and that took us to Rosslare. We spent two weeks, mostly in Cork and Kerry, where we camped. Mum saw a priest in Kerry to help with a family history request. (Her family came out to New Zealand from Kerry in 1874.) The weather was good for the first week, but it rained almost non-stop the second week. We came back a different way, from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead, on an older ship.

Some good state polls for Biden today. “Only” seven weeks to go.

Here are some pictures.

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.