Yesterday I had my first “half-and-half” lesson with the teacher at Universitatea de Vest. In the Romanian half of the session, she kept complimenting me on my knowledge of the language, but said I need to relax a lot more when speaking it. I shouldn’t beat myself up when I can’t find the right word. Nor should I panic when I’m at the front of a long queue and I’m told to “Speak!”. That’s solid advice. She also helped me with those pesky pronouns. “She sent it to me.” Mi l-a trimis or Mi-a trimis-o, depending on whether the thing she gave me is masculine or feminine. You might add a mie at the end if you want to emphasise that she gave it to me and no-one else. It gets way harder than this, and after more than two years I still struggle.
I had a couple of Skype chats with New Zealand relatives, yesterday and today. They were shocked when I turned the screen around and everything was white; we’ve had another fairly major dumping of snow, including mega-snowflakes the likes of which I’d never seen before. My cousin and family might be coming over next January. Let’s hope so. I really miss the ten-minute drive to their place on a Sunday, seeing the three boys grow up, the roast dinners, the chats. Just as we were about to hang up, my cousin dropped a bombshell of sorts: her husband had just resigned from his job.
The watched the women’s Australian Open final this morning, and a bloody good match it was too. It lacked those long, scrambling, edge-of-your-seat rallies (the only point that fell into that category came at 5-5 in the first set and featured three net-cords), but apart from that, it was gripping stuff. The lefty-versus-righty match-up and the fact that they’d never played before added to the unpredictability. The drama dial got turned up to 9 when Kvitova saved those three match points. From 5-3 in the second set to 0-1 in the third, Osaka went through a stretch where she lost 11 points out of 12, then another where she lost 12 of 12. The stuffing had been knocked out of her. But she showed impressive fortitude in putting all of that behind her. At 2-4 in the third, Kvitova even fended off triple break point with a barrage of big serves, and at 4-3 Osaka might have cracked, but her own serve was brilliant throughout. Either player would have been a worthy champion (and don’t forget that Kvitova was stabbed two years ago) but Osaka has now won the last two grand slams and is the new number one.
Tomorrow we’ve got the men’s final. Djokovic against Nadal, yet again, in a repeat of the final from seven years ago, which might as well have been played on another planet. I’ll stick my neck out and say that this match won’t last almost six hours, because there’s now a super tie-break (boo!) if they get that far, and a proper shot clock. I can’t pick a winner though: they’ve both been in supreme form the last two weeks. The 2012 final was a bright spot in what was otherwise a shitty period for me. I moved house, something I wasn’t particularly interested in doing, everything went pear-shaped at my job, and my grandmother died. I still miss her. At times I wonder what she’d have made of my move to Romania. I think she’d have loved it here, actually. The late summer evenings, sitting out in the bars in the square, the buildings, the similarities between the Romanian language and Italian (she spent some time in southern Italy).
I’ve been watching the Brexit shambles, and it seems Britain of 2019 bears little resemblance to the country I was brought up in. A country of compromise, of pragmatism, of tolerance for others’ views. The actions of senior politicians in the last few months have been totally irresponsible. That includes Jeremy Corbyn, whose non-Brexit policies I have a lot of time for. Regarding Brexit, however, he just seems to want maximum chaos. As for Theresa May, I had sympathy for her in the early days of her tenure, but not any more. In 2017 she called an unnecessary election, thinking she could lead the Tories to a thumping majority without even showing up. That didn’t exactly happen, but she acted as if nothing had happened. Ten days ago her deal got annihilated in parliament. Still it was as if nothing had happened. In between, she has kowtowed to the extremists on the back benches of her party, while the country has become more and more polarised. The saga has become a game, where leavers want the gold medal they “earned” in 2016, they want it now, and sod the consequences. The tragic thing is that 2½ years have gone by since the referendum, and the multitude of reasons why so many people decided to give the middle finger in 2016 haven’t been addressed at all.
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