Tennis

Coronavirus - Poker - Politics - Tennis

Back in lockdown

March 8, 2021 by 0 Comments

I was about to do my weekly shop, but then I checked the rules and realised I couldn’t until after lunch. Timișoara entered lockdown last night at midnight, and supermarkets are reserved for over-65s between 10am and 1pm. Good decision all round. The sunny early-spring weather had brought crowds of people to the centre, especially in narrow streets like Strada Alba Iulia where you’re all hemmed in. Hospitals are just about bursting at the seams when the new variants are starting to proliferate, so this increase in activity is at exactly the wrong time. There’s been too much “can we get away with it?” and general pussyfooting around, so I’m glad they’ve put the hammer down. I wonder if that would have happened under Nicolae Robu, our old mayor.

Leadership matters more than people think. Would New Zealand have done so well had the 2017 election turned out differently (or should I say, as expected)? We’ll never know, but it’s just a hunch that National would have been all “we’ve got a goddamn rock star economy and we ain’t gonna shut it down”. Team of five million? Maybe. Be kind? I doubt it. NZ’s messaging has been inclusive, not divisive, and that’s gone a long way towards their resounding success up until now. To be clear, I still think National would have handled it miles better than the US or most of Europe.

The British people’s reaction to their disastrous response to Covid is increasingly maddening. The death toll is around 120,000, and tens of millions of Brits aren’t only OK with that, they like what they see. Now they’ve got their vaccines and all is forgiven, if they ever thought there was anything to forgive in the first place. It seems that if you supported Brexit and voted Tory in December 2019, you’ll support the government come what may. And now they’ve got their vaccines that the EU don’t have, so hahahaha in your face! Take that remainers, we’re winning! Who cares about all that death now.

I played tennis twice at the weekend, and it’ll be at least three weeks before I’m back on the court again. In both sessions – four hours – I played with Domnul Ionescu, a man in his late sixties with a smoker’s cough who spat on his hand every second point or so. On the other side was a woman of 30-odd and the bloke I had that singles match with just before Christmas. Petrică, one of the other regulars who must be in his early fifties, couldn’t make it. He’s suffered from a kidney problem for some time, he managed to pick up Covid, and now he needs dialysis.

Four poker tournaments yesterday. All frustrating in their various ways. I cashed in two of them but barely broke even. In the Omaha hi-lo I amassed a nice stack but couldn’t build it up into something imposing. I treaded water for a long time, then when we got down to three tables I min-raised my high-only hand in the cut-off. I was unlucky enough for both the blinds to wake up with A2 and good side cards. I correctly got all in pre-flop three ways because I had plenty of equity (one third, as it happened) but the board ran out horribly for me and I was out in 15th for a small cash. In the single draw I hung around but a big stack on my left kept going all in over my raises and I never felt I had enough to call. Being out of position is horrible in that game at the best of time. I had another good run in the pot-limit badugi, knocking three people out early, but the bounties dried up and at the final table my stack did too. I got a small payout for coming seventh out of 100. Then in the fixed badugi I started OK but couldn’t win the big pots when it mattered, and was out well before the money. My bankroll is $337.

Update: The Romanian authorities have come to their senses and approved the Astra Zeneca vaccine for over-55s. The notion that it was unsafe or ineffective for older people has been roundly disproven, but sadly too many people might already have been spooked by all that bollocks.

This morning Adi Bărar, who founded the highly successful Timișoara band Cargo, died after spending two weeks in hospital with coronavirus.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The latest worry

December 14, 2020 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents on FaceTime this morning and I was just about to hang up when their landline phone rang. Mum took the call. This sounds medical. What’s going on? Apparently Dad had blood in his urine when they were down in Queenstown, and the phone call was about an appointment to get that checked out. This week he also has his scheduled 18-month post-cancer-operation check-up. Mum told me not to worry. What the hell? Of course I’m going to worry. And if they’d got that call a minute later I would never have known.

Yesterday my aunt called me. We chatted for half an hour – that’s probably some kind of record. She started off, as usual, saying she was bored and depressed. The depressed part I sympathise with; you have some say over the bored bit though. She said her antidepressant wasn’t doing the trick, so I gave her the name of mine, though it might not be suitable for her (if she could get a doctor to prescribe it anyway). We had a friendly chat, about hairstyles among other things. She was all there and half-way back but her world has become oh so small. I’m sure things would be very different if my uncle was still alive.

This afternoon I played tennis for the last time until the spring. Tennis has been of real benefit to me. Plenty of exercise and a fair bit of Romanian too. Today I finally figured out what a da din mână means. (Mână is Romanian for hand.) The phrase means to just rally, without playing a game. The first time I heard it was when one of the women wanted to go for a pee behind the bushes, and the rest of us rallied while she was busy. Does it mean to pee, I wondered. There are lots of Romanian expressions involving mână. One of the most common is sărut mâna, literally “kiss hand”, which is used when you say goodbye to a (usually older) woman. The t is silent.

Since the US election I’ve been following the news less. Most of the time it just isn’t worth it. Three incompetent prime ministers (in their own ways) have helped push Britain to the brink of a nonsensical tear-down-everything exit from the EU while the pandemic rages on. (Hopefully I’ll be safe here.) And Donald Trump is fast-tracking executions before he leaves office, while 3000 Americans are dying every day from Covid. He really is a piece of shit, isn’t he?

I remember the 2003 rugby World Cup final very well. I watched it at my grandmother’s place; it was a few days before getting on the plane to New Zealand where I would start my new life. How sweet it was to see England lift the cup. Against Australia. In Australia. In the 100th minute. (When I arrived in NZ, they were still dissecting the All Blacks’ semi-final exit.) But I was reading that Steve Thompson, who was in the cup-winning side, can’t remember winning it. He even forgets his wife’s name sometimes. Gee whiz. He’s barely older than me. He’s one of several ex-elite rugby players to suffer from dementia.

We’re racing towards Christmas. It’ll be my third in five years spent alone, and I’m fine with that. No stress. I’ll attempt to make some Romanian food. Sarmale. A ciorbă. Maybe even a cozonac if I get really ambitious. I’ve got some vișinată, which is lovely, and even some țuică if desperation sets in. (Google these things if you like.)

I had 33½ hours of lessons last week.

Life :) - New Zealand - Tennis

Real estate, but it feels fake

December 7, 2020 by 0 Comments

I flew off the handle yesterday when Dad suggested I max myself out by buying a place in the UK. Spend that much?! I don’t want to go back there again. Real estate is a sore point for me, and it doesn’t help that my parents have four properties and might be buying a fifth. I’m perfectly fine with the idea of buying a home – I’d like to have my own place in Timișoara – but the property market itself leaves me stone cold. My own experiences don’t help here. When I bought my flat in Wellington, people asked me if I was excited. What sort of question is that? I’ve just spent a ton of money, most of which I don’t have, and to pay off all that debt I’m using the income from my job which I probably won’t have in a few months either. (As it turned out, I didn’t have it in a few weeks. My salary almost halved at that point. Then a few months later my apartment block was basically condemned. Plus I was suffering from depression. All very exciting, right? Like riding the crest of a high and beautiful bloody wave.) No, buying that place felt like an obligation and nothing more. Done, ticked the box, phew. I was happy to oblige because I thought it would be the best move for me financially, even if paying off the mortgage might soon become a challenge. Renting it out was a good move certainly – my rental income in the last four years has helped me take giant hunks out of my mortgage – and to escape with the sort of money that can buy me something is a better result that I dared to imagine, but it’s perhaps understandable that I’m hesitant about diving straight back in.

But it’s not just that. To give yourself the best chance of avoiding poverty in New Zealand (or Australia or the UK, for that matter), you need to get on the property ladder. That’s becoming a harder proposition all the time, mainly because both Labour and National governments have done nothing to change the insane tax legislation that makes property investment more attractive than other (productive!) forms. Immigration policy and lack of cheaper housing haven’t helped either. As time goes on, you’re forced to enter the market later (unless you have wealthy parents), mortgage yourself even further beyond your eyeballs, and the profits you make will shrink as you spend less time in the market. But you still have to do it. It’s reality, but a very shitty reality. It beats me why anyone would be excited about any of that.

When I went anywhere with my parents in New Zealand, they always took detours to look at houses. If we happened to be in a town centre, they’d be peering in through real estate agent windows. It drove me nuts. And they were pretty low on the scale compared to others. They didn’t attend open homes as a hobby, for instance. As for my aunt who would come round and gossip about what places in Geraldine had sold and for how much – seven sodding sixty for whatever place up on the Downs – I’d just about lose it. Yes, always up on the Downs.

What a tennis match I got involved in yesterday. Singles. I hadn’t done that for ages. My opponent was 58 and super-fit. Much fitter than me. He plays other sports like football and possibly handball and volleyball too. I started well, moving out to a 4-1 lead. He won the next two games but I then served for the set at 5-3 and had two set points at 40-15. They came and went, and it was soon 5-5. His unforced errors were a big help to me as I got my nose in front again, and then came the 12th game. A ridiculous game. Lobs that he was able to retrieve, somehow. A gut-buster of a rally on my third set point that I lost. I was gasping for air after that. He had five chances to force a tie-break. On my fourth set point we had another crazy rally, and eventually he hit wide. After escaping with the set I was buoyed and he had a slight let-down. I led 3-0 in the second set. But then he came roaring back. I was up 4-2, but he levelled at 4-4, after I’d had points to win both those games. I then led 5-4 and 0-30 on his serve, and had a match point. I couldn’t put him away. He held on and broke me easily in game 11. Then we ran out of time; we’d booked the court for 90 minutes. He was an extremely tricky customer. Controlled aggression throughout, and solid on both sides. I needed to take big risks to hit winners against him. I hit uncharacteristic unforced errors which dented my confidence, and meant I got bogged down. My biggest failing was an inability to take the ball earlier; I felt I was giving him too much time. But his fitness, at his age, was remarkable, and it made me think I need to do something. Buying a better bike would be a start.

St Andrew’s Day (30th November), Romania’s national day (1st December) and Moș Nicolae (St Nicholas Day, yesterday) have gone by without a whimper. No market stalls outside. No slănină or mămăligă or mulled wine. None of those inescapable smells. It’s all very weird. Soon I’ll be having my third Christmas alone in five years, so that won’t feel weird at all.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Keep the customer satisfied

December 6, 2020 by 0 Comments

It’s been quite a tiring week, with late finishes and constant shifting of gears. On Thursday night I finished at 11:30 – my student needed to prepare for his rather important presentation the next day, and I was happy to help him with the English for three hours, even if my eyes were glazing over at all the unfathomable jargon. In another lesson my student attempted a translation of a football match report (one of the local teams had lost 5-0) from Romanian to English. That’s a harder task that you might imagine. The woman in Spain wanted me to read part of the lovely journal that my friend had written when she and her husband came here in 2017, particularly the bit about the level of customer service – approximately zero – that she’d got at the tourist information centre. A married couple and I discussed cheating in exams, which is (no surprise, perhaps) brazen and rampant here. It goes without saying, almost. Phones, headsets, the works. People are amazed to hear that I never cheated in exams. Seriously, I never did it. Way too risky, way too stressful, and anyway most of that fancy tech didn’t exist back then. The same guy who said that his mate transmitted answers to him via Bluetooth in a university exam (the mind boggles) also said that he received a watch as a birthday present one time, but had to get rid of it because he hated the giver so much. I can’t imagine detesting someone to that extent. (My brother’s ex-fiancée bought me a shirt for Christmas eight years ago. She was a nasty piece of work. But I still have the shirt now.) And then once again I’ve been bombarded by steaming hot grade-A bullshit about the virus and the vaccines. Take the damn vaccine, people.

I had three 90-minute lessons yesterday (Saturday), including one with a very smart 17-year-old who is taking his advanced Cambridge exam (CAE) next weekend. I can sense the neurons connecting in his brain faster than mine could ever do. Or ever did. He loves talking very excitedly about gaming, and I never know how to respond. There’s a game that he’s really into with an X in its name that has characters called Turians and Salarians. (“Now there are Turians with armour!” I’m supposed to get really excited at this news.) A Turian to me sounds like a ponging spiky fruit, while a Salarian makes me think of an overworked Japanese man in danger of karoshi. He says he finds the game educational because it teaches him about ancient civilisations, and I can believe that. I’m so out of the loop though. Computer games aren’t just something to pass the time on a wet afternoon. They’re serious business, worthy of serious expense on serious-looking keyboards and memory-foam chairs. (I’ve just checked. The game is called Mass Effect. There’s no X in the name after all.)

Things have hotted up. A week ago we barely got above freezing during the day, but yesterday we hit a spring-like 16. In between my three lessons I managed to squeeze in some tennis. After we finished the last set, the woman I partnered said I’d played “like a lion”. That’s the first time anyone has likened me to a lion, on or off the tennis court. It was a bit of recency bias, I think, because I played well at the end of our final set. We led 3-2 in that set (against two men), but lost the next two games, including on my serve, to fall behind. But then I played solidly and aggressively (is that lion-like?) in the final three games as we won 6-4. I struggled earlier in the session because the wind was howling – it was like being back in Wellington – and my game relies heavily on placement. It was a sunny afternoon, with a four-engined plane carving its path through the blue sky. After finishing our game I saw a large fat-bodied spider scuttling across the court, a species I hadn’t seen before. Last Sunday I played four sets of two-against-one (American doubles, I think they call it) with a man and a woman. In the first and last of those, I played as the one, and the stakes really do increase when you’re out there on your own. I did fine, winning both those sets, though the surface was slippery and my footwear wasn’t up to the job.

Parliamentary elections are taking place today in Romania. It already looks like there will be a low turnout, which will probably help the PSD, who are almost universally despised among the people I talk to. (After the PSD won the elections four years ago and pardoned dozens of corrupt politicians and other officials, people took to the streets. It was extraordinary to see. I wrote about it on this blog.)

I’ll have to decide what to do with this money that I thought I would never get. That almost certainly means buying property, but I don’t feel interested enough in the whole subject to make an informed decision.

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.