Tennis

Family - Language teaching - Politics - Tennis

He’s back, and so is Mum’s stress

November 17, 2023 by 0 Comments

I spoke to Mum last night, not long after she’d picked up Dad from the airport. After seeming pretty calm while Dad was away, she suddenly looked stressed again. She was frustrated with the building work progressing too slowly and having to cook for two people with facilities that are even more limited than when I was there. Dad’s journey, which included a 16-hour Dubai-to-Sydney leg, was tiring but he managed. It wasn’t as arduous as my trip, which could have gone horribly wrong in a number of ways. (Of course I’m a lot younger and should be able to cope with the more taxing route.)

I had two more phone chats with Dad before he left, and they helped clear the air after the argument I had with him earlier. I felt upset that my parents attach such a shockingly low financial value to seeing their own family, but also bad that I ended up in an argument with a mild-mannered man like my father. In our last chat he said he’d spoken to my brother who expressed similar views to mine. He’s getting it from both of us. His last meeting with his sister went fine; he’d been an enormous help to her over that month. I wonder what will happen next. Will her children bother to visit?

I see that David Cameron, who isn’t even an MP, is back in cabinet as foreign secretary. Appointing someone to the Lords and then giving him a cabinet position is a new one on me. I thought you had to be, like, elected or something. Shows you what I know.

Tennis finished for the season on Sunday. It was just me and Florin, and this time common sense prevailed – the surface was slippery after the previous day’s deluge, so we just hit balls for an hour without keeping score.

Plenty of work. I had that boy for two hours again this morning, just like last week. It’s a real test of stamina. I’m trying to gently persuade one of my students to stop having lessons with me – she’s extremely spoilt and unmotivated, and she’s taking up a slot I could give to someone else.

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis - The UK

Maths, newness, and unwanted grub

October 23, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I went to tennis but nobody showed up. As I was waiting in vain, Dad called me. He’d just come back from my brother’s place in Poole, and was tired after a seven-hour bus journey full of traffic jams. He said he wouldn’t want to live in the UK again. New Zealand is on a human scale, he said. I see what he means. I remember seeing a road sign around Wanaka: “Christchurch 424 km”. In Romania you see signs showing similar distances. But travelling through southern and central England, you rarely see much above 60 or 70 miles, or 100-odd kilometres. Everything is on top of each other – there are no gaps that allow you to breathe. Dad enjoyed seeing the family – he had nothing but positive words for his grandson – but his (and my brother’s) mental energy was taken up with sorting out his email and phone; he’s always got some tech issue. As soon as he got back, he saw his sister who was surprisingly chatty.

Yesterday I made a cottage pie (something British!) and quince crumble to give to Viorica and Petrică, the couple in their late sixties who live on the top floor. Viorica has been so helpful to me. Without her, I’d be having cold showers all through winter. This is too much, she told me, and spooned half of the food onto some plates, leaving me with the other half. A few minutes later my doorbell rang, and she handed me back almost all of the half that she’d originally taken. “I appreciate the gesture,” she said. But not the food, obviously. When I gave her the pie she asked me where the beef had come from. Kaufland, I said. Maybe she sees supermarket meat as poor quality or something. Older Romanians have these ideas, I’ve noticed. Oh well.

On Saturday I only had one lesson – two hours of maths with Matei. He’d just got an A grade in a test, which will allow him to take the extended GCSE maths paper. He only needed a C for that, so in other words he smashed it. That’s obviously great. I still think he can improve though. He’s good at following processes – move this over to the other side of the equation, now square both sides – but still lacks a good understanding of how numbers fit together. When I say numbers, I mean fractions, decimals, percentages, roots, powers, the lot. He reaches for the calculator at the first opportunity. Funnily enough, one thing that helped me with this when I was growing up was a crappy calculator with an eight-digit display, which my maths teacher called a “Noddy calculator”. Tap in 1 + 2 x 3 =, and it would tell you 9, not 7. So I’d learn about the order of operations, which at the time we called BODMAS. My Noddy calculator preferred SAMDOB. Divide 2 by 3 on that same calculator, and you’d get 0.6666666. Multiply that by 3 and it spat out 1.9999998. As the real answer is clearly exactly 2, that taught me something about the perils of rounding. A handy feature was being able to quickly repeat an operation over and over again by mashing the equals button. If you started at 1 and repeatedly multiplied by 2, you’d see that (a) the final digits cycle through 2, 4, 8 and 6, and (b) the numbers get very big very fast – just like the grains of rice on a chessboard – until they got too big for the screen. Dividing by zero was an immediate no-can-do. Why was that, I wondered? On fancier Noddy calculators with a square root button, you’d see that repeating square-rooting brought you closer and closer to 1. Now kids have better calculators – even the ones on their phones are way superior to Noddies – but the old Noddies gave you a better idea of how numbers fitted together. Plus you could tap in 5318008, turn your screen upside down, and have a giggle – this doesn’t work on your phone. After maths on Saturday, I really did play tennis. This was singles again with the other Florin. I lost two games out of the 23 we played.

I’ve now been in Romania for just over seven years. In my head, I split that time into four phases. Phase one was from the moment I arrived (October 2016) until the summer of 2018, when everything was new and exciting. The sights, the sounds, the smells. The regular trips back in time. That proper first winter. Living in the centre of such a beautiful city and trying to build my teaching business (all those phone calls, when I could hardly speak the language!) was like nothing I’d experienced before. I look back at that time with great fondness. Then came phase two. Timișoara and English teaching had become normal. Routine. The newness had gone. That lasted until the outbreak of Covid. Terribly scary, and horrific for many people, but (and this probably sounds awful) at least it was something new. I enjoyed the quiet of the lockdown. The parks in the springtime with the birds and the flowers. The focus on the simple things. That third phase lasted two years until we clambered out of all the lockdowns and restrictions into a world of having to achieve again, and in my case a move and feeling unable to cope. I’d really love phase four to be over. New Zealand – that feeling of newness, of something different – was wonderful, but it was just a temporary respite.

Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Politics - Tennis - The UK

We should leave it at that

October 16, 2023 by 0 Comments

The rain is lashing down and I’m grateful for it – I’d have really struggled on the tennis court. I played two hours of singles with Florin yesterday; when time ran out I was up 6-1 6-2 4-6 5-0. That second set score was deceptive – the set was a real battle of attrition, full of long rallies and close games that I somehow won. My efforts left me bereft of energy for the third set, in contrast to the Energizer bunny almost two decades my senior down the other end. I then got a second wind from somewhere. Before tennis I had three lessons – one maths and two English. My 16-year-old English student reiterated what he’d said before, that if Russian forces hypothetically attacked Romania in a couple of years’ time, he’d do all he could to flee the country rather than defend it. He said, “What is there to defend?” Yeesh, where do I start?

So New Zealand has voted in a new National-led government. It was on the cards. I felt sorry for Chris Hipkins, who seemed to me a thoroughly good chap and a very hard worker, leading a dysfunctional party and in the end flailing around trying to make something happen to turn the tide that was rapidly going out on Labour. Because that’s really what that election was – a resounding vote against the incumbents rather than a positive endorsement of National. Indeed, National got a smaller share of the vote than they did in 2017 when they lost power to Jacinda Ardern’s Labour. Crucially this time though, they had some partners to (comfortably) get them over the line. What an opportunity Labour squandered. They won a rare majority in 2020, a mandate for real change, and then they pissed around on fringe issues that didn’t help to make people’s lives better, instead of say, let me see, building homes that people can actually afford. This all serves as a warning to the UK Labour Party. The next UK election is a year or so away, and with the Tories being frankly disgusting right now, Labour should win. But if they don’t use that power to bring about positive change (and boy does the country need it), it won’t mean a thing, and the Tories will likely be back in charge next time around.

On Monday I met a lady from New Zealand (an Aucklander) who lived in Timișoara from 2006 to 2010 and was back visiting the city as part of a round-the-world trip. She was staying with Dorothy. She was pleasant enough, but we just didn’t have that much in common. In the evening I had a new maths student – a 15-year-old girl – who came here for a two-hour session. The following day – the day Dad arrived in London – was a shocker for me. I didn’t quite plumb the depths of 31st January, but at times I got close as I felt overwhelmed. The “emergency” online maths lesson with Matei, which finished at 9:45 that evening, helped to calm me down. Work was going OK; it was just everything else that was a mess. Wednesday was the miraculous day of the Barclays money. Thursday was a weird one. I rode to the north of the city for my lesson with the spoilt teenage girl, but she wasn’t there. I rang the doorbell and called her on the phone. Nothing. I hung around for 20 minutes and went home. Oh dear. Did I offend her so badly that she wanted nothing more to do with me? Did she tell her father and they decided to get back at me? Just after I got home, she sent me a message to say that her phone had died, and we had an online lesson in the evening. On Friday the electrician was supposed to come but he didn’t. Later that day I had an allergy test – 24 pricks on my arms – which confirmed what I thought, that my sinus problems aren’t allergy-related at all. When the receptionist gave me the bill for the test (525 lei, equivalent to NZ$190 or £90), my jaw literally dropped. Now that allergies are out, I’m free to get my prescription for various pills and sprays, which I’ll take until Christmas.

I had a good chat last night with Dad. I usually do have good chats with him. His days are dominated by bus trips to see his sister at a private hospital in Cambridge. He’s able to take advantage of the £2 bus fares that the government introduced earlier in the year, and which I also benefited from in June. My aunt has ups and downs but the trend is clear. She isn’t going to bother with chemo now. In fact she told him that she’d like to pop off in her sleep, sooner rather than later. I spoke to my brother on Friday, and we both sort of agreed that it might be better not to see her. In July he brought the little one over to her place, and it was the highlight of her year. She called me immediately afterwards, and the way she spoke about meeting her great-nephew was quite touching. Perhaps it’s best to leave it at that.

Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis

A typical Saturday

October 2, 2023 by 0 Comments

All of a sudden we’ve hit the last quarter of the year, the one that includes – gasp! – Christmas. It also includes sodding Halloween, which I’ll soon be forced to discuss in my lessons with kids. I don’t have a problem with Halloween in itself, but in Romania we could do without yet another American import.

Yesterday I had five hours of lessons in Dumbrăvița. I’d planned to head to the English Conversation Club after that, then onwards to tennis. Despite taking ages to organise myself I left in plenty of time, but then I realised I’d forgotten something important and had to come back for it. That meant I had time to grab some biscuits from Kaufland to take to the club, but not enough time to also drink a coffee from the vending machine. Normally I have two coffees on a Saturday morning in quick succession, one from Kaufland and another from Matei’s dad. Yesterday though Matei’s parents were out, so I ended up going without coffee altogether. I did quadratic graphs with Matei, interspersed with random chat, then I dashed back to Kaufland for a mochaccino and a quick bite to eat before my two hours with Octavian.

I worry that 16-year-old Octavian’s rather non-native-sounding accent may now be set in stone. Is that my fault? In part, probably yes. Or more accurately, when I started teaching him six years ago (!) I was too inexperienced to know I needed to focus more on that aspect of his English. He also still makes a lot of word order mistakes – We went yesterday fishing – which I can’t beat out of him however hard I try. It’s all a little frustrating given how good his reading and listening are. Octavian made two big overseas trips over the summer. He spent four weeks in the UK, then another three with his family in the US – they visited New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and probably somewhere else I’ve missed out. I chatted to his mum about their US trip and she was shocked at the extreme poverty in so many parts of the country and the depressing lack of nutritious food. She was glad to get back home. Octavian enjoyed it more I think. As for the UK, he said that his favourite place was Norwich. How interesting. I only visited twice and liked it a lot, too. The market with brightly-coloured covers over rows of stalls, all on a slope, was gritty and crazy at the same time. Best of all I liked Norwich’s position, away from the hopelessly congested area surrounding London. The air was noticeably different there. The second time I visited Norwich was for a job interview in 2002. It was at Norwich Union, an insurance company that now goes by Aviva in all its dismal symmetry. The firm was (and presumably still is) big – its offices occupied several edifices in a row on one street. I enjoyed the train journey from Cambridge to Norwich and the lunch I got from the market. In between was the interview which wasn’t so great, in part because I didn’t really know what the job was about.

When I was done with Octavian – we worked on an IGCSE reading paper – I had an hour with his six-year-old sister. You need to bring a lot of ammo to a lesson with someone that young. A colour-the-fish sheet might last five minutes if you’re lucky. While I was in the lesson, Dorothy messaged me to say that the English Conversation Club was off (yet again) because people had decided they had better things to do. Post-Covid everybody seems to have better things to do all the time. Not too far away is a place that sells second-hand bikes, and the cancellation allowed me to pop in there. Only two were for sale – apparently it’s the end of the season. I liked the look of one of them which was going for 1250 lei (£220 or NZ$450) so I may go back there. I then had time to kill before tennis. I went past the wooden-stick-making factory for the first time since I gave those lessons there years ago. The factory is still there, but so too is one of the many small malls that have sprung up around the city in the last five years.

Tennis. Singles again, with the same guy. From 2-2 and 15-40 on my serve I won the first set 6-2, despite not serving very well (with the exception perhaps of those two points in the fifth game). In the second set I led 2-1 but then he hit one of those purple patches to win the next four games. I closed to only 5-4 down and played a scrambling point to reach 30-all on his serve in game ten. I then made errors on both the next two points; it was disappointing to concede the set in that manner. What we managed of the third set (before darkness fell) wasn’t easy for me, but I’d built a 4-1 lead by the end. In theory you should only lose one time in nine with that lead, assuming both players are of equal skill and there’s no advantage in serving.
Update: We played again this evening. We had the court booked for an hour, which only gave us time to play one long set after we warmed up. We went to a tie-break which I lost 7-4. I thought I played fine but he’s such a tough opponent when he’s on form. I look back at the people I played in that season in Wellington and all the passing winners I was able to make. No such luck with this demon at the net. The key game I felt was on his serve at 4-4. I led 0-30, he hit the baseline to win the next point, then played an extraordinary point that I thought I’d won several times, then found the baseline once again to move to 40-30. I lost the game five points later without doing a heck of a lot wrong. If he keeps this up I’ll really have my hands full. If the weather isn’t too hot, he ties his King Charles spaniel to a post while we play, but he’s now been told not to bring it (her) anymore. We laughed about how life gets harder with each passing week as barriers are continually put up around us. Next to us were some girls playing volleyball. One of them wore a top that read “Scorpions 1993 World Tour”. She wouldn’t have been born for another decade and a half. I’ve mentioned this phenomenon – that’s what it is – on here before.

I now have no hot water. That’s the next stage in the long and circuitous process of getting my central heating set up.

Someone trying to sell a saxophone (and other instruments) at the market last Sunday

Some quite beautiful baroque music on the Bega last night
Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Why am I so damn tired all the damn time?

September 25, 2023 by 0 Comments

It was amazing in New Zealand. I’d wake up after a good night’s sleep (or even after a less than stellar night’s sleep) and feel refreshed. Now I’m back in Romania and I’m constantly tired. Yesterday I had to apologise for yawning in a lesson. I’ve mentioned this and two people have given the polluted city air as a reason. Could it also be the warm weather here? (Yesterday we broke 30.) What about the screen time? Or maybe it’s all the talking I have to do in my job? But back in 2018, say, I had busy work weeks one after another – often having to yap away for hours on end – and didn’t feel nearly as tired as I do now. Perhaps I was still energised by the relative newness and excitement of my lifestyle change. This fatigue seems to have coincided with my move to this apartment 16 months ago, so maybe it’s something about being here. Though my sinus problem doesn’t help, I can’t really blame that because it didn’t exactly go away in NZ where I felt much less tired.

On Friday I took a look at a car – a 19-year-old Dacia – just off Piața Bălcescu. It was just after lunchtime and the square was chocka. That made up my mind for me. There’s no way I could handle the stress of a car right now. For getting around the city, a car would be more of a burden than anything – and just think of all the added bureaucracy – so I’m going to wait until March before looking again. I should be pursuing two wheels rather than four; my latest old city bike has just about had it. The uneven roads and paths in Timișoara require something more robust, and it is slightly ludicrous that my main mode of transport – the thing I rely heavily on – dates from when I was in primary school.

Tennis. I was back on the court this weekend for two sessions of singles against my usual opponent. When you’re fatigued, singles will make you feel horribly exposed. Yesterday, something wasn’t right with the guy at the other end, and I led 6-0 6-2 2-2 when our time ran out, tiredness and all. Tonight though was an entirely different matter. I won two close games to start, then I lost seven games out of eight as he hit a deep purple patch that left me floundering despite not even playing that badly. From 3-6 0-1 he went off the boil just enough, and I came back to win the second set 6-2, at which point the heavens opened.

Lessons have been interesting. Many of my students have looked at my photos from NZ and expressed disappointment at the lack of pythons and crocodiles and spiders as big as your hand. A parrot? Telling them it can rip your wiper blades off does little to impress them. There’s also been a general sense of bafflement at the whole snow thing. Most Romanians simply don’t get that there’s another side of the world where seasons are reversed. One student asked, “Are they aware that we have Christmas in winter?” Oh yes, and most of their Christmas cards even depict winter scenes. That made him even more confused. “What about daylight savings?” Yep. I resisted the temptation to talk about Australia’s time zones that include half-hour offsets and some-do-some-don’t daylight savings.

Yesterday I worked with the top-2%-ers in Dumbrăvița. First I had two hours of maths with Matei who spent time with a Spanish family in Toledo over the summer, just like I did in France at a similar age. His family now have a conservatory which they’ve filled with exotic plants. Matei has got himself a record player and he played a few bars of Kanye West for me. I’d like a record player too (they call it a pick-up here), though certainly not to play even one bar of Kanye West. After Matei, I had two hours with Octavian who spent seven weeks combined in the UK and America (his pronunciation hadn’t improved as much as I’d hoped), then my first one-hour session with his six-year-old sister who knew more than I bargained for.

International travel - Tennis

The trip back — part 1 of 2

September 10, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’m back, groggy but just about in one piece.

On Friday we were almost out the door when the man who owned my parents’ property in the nineties decided to drop in. It was the first time they’d met this British-born chap who liked to talk, mainly about the work he’d done on the house. He was happy somebody had bought it – its fate otherwise would probably have been demolition and three townhouses plonked on the section. Despite the delay – over half an hour – we set off to the airport in plenty of time. The fish and chip shop at Rakaia had closed down, but crisis was averted when I saw “CHIPS” through the window of a café-type place in Dunsandel. We had very good fish and chips – my last for some time – for just $9 each. We then got lost on the way to my Jucy Snooze place near the airport. I half-hoped we’d never find it and I could somehow stay in New Zealand, but no such luck. Jucy Snooze ($43 a night) consists of “pods” of eight enclosed bunk beds. After checking in on a touch screen, I walked past a pod full of teenagers – Aussies probably – swigging beer from cans. Please don’t let there be seven of them in my pod. When I found my pod – this was 8pm – it was empty. I heaved my heavy suitcase into an upper locker and did the horrible bit – saying goodbye to Mum and Dad. The bed was comfortable. In fact the whole set-up worked very well. There’s a common room with a kitchen and a pool table which was still in use at 3:30 am, after I’d managed to get some kip.

The old Rakaia post office, shortly before sunset

The airport was a ten-minute walk from Jucy Snooze. My flight plan was beyond the capabilities of the machines, so two experienced and very helpful humans executed the complicated check-in procedure using a black screen that reminded me of those old mainframes I used to make changes to insurance policies, back in a previous life. I had to prove that I lived in Romania and had the means to get there from Budapest. My suitcase was barely half the 30-kilo limit on the way out. Since then I’d added a painting Dad had done of Piața Traian in Timișoara, an old camera of my brother’s that must have been expensive, a pair of navy Doc Martens I bought in Birmingham in 2002, some more shoes, half a dozen books, and other assorted paperwork. Now I was over by 1.3 kg. They said they’d wave it through, but staff at other airports might not be so lenient, so I moved some books into my hand luggage and I was good to go. My flight was at 6am.

The flights to Melbourne and Singapore were uneventful. We flew over the centre of Melbourne – the brilliant Queen Victoria Market and so many places to play and watch sport. Not far from the centre was an enormous cemetery. On the second flight I started watching Everything Everywhere All at Once but gave up on it. To my surprise, I was able to watch live tennis. The end of Coco Gauff’s victory over Karolina Muchova was spectacular. After Gauff had already had five match points, the pair concocted a spellbinding 40-stroke rally which Gauff won to set up another match point. Both me and the guy next to me (he was watching on his screen) applauded. Gauff duly closed out the match on the next point. Then came the second semi-final between Madison Keys and Aryna Sabalenka. Keys led 6-0 5-3, but Sabalenka used her great power to produce the goods at just the right time and win by one of the weirdest scores you’ll ever see in tennis – 0-6, 7-6 (7-1), 7-6 (10-5). I felt sorry for Keys who even led 4-2 in the final set and didn’t do much wrong. Sabalenka, who will be a well-deserved world number one when the new rankings come out tomorrow, forgot that the final tie-break was first to ten and thought she’d won when she reached 7-3. Fancy that, you’re the world’s best player and you don’t know the rules. In a slight upset, Gauff came from a set down to beat Sabalenka in the final. I didn’t even think about watching that match – I was too busy sleeping.

Family - New Zealand - Photos - Tennis - Travel: New Zealand

West Coast trip — part 4 of 4

September 4, 2023 by 0 Comments

On the first day of spring we caught some more of the US Open before making our way from Alexandra to my parents’ second home in Moeraki. The Pig Root was almost free of traffic. I was hoping we could have stopped in the lovely village of Ophir – rhyming with loafer and gopher and chauffeur – but no such luck as Mum was driving. We did pass through Ophir at least, and I managed to take one fuzzy picture out of the moving car. I could even have dropped in on my friend in Naseby again, but my parents were keen to press on. I spotted several ex-schools, underlining the great importance placed on education in the late 19th century, even in the most remote parts. Teaching was a highly valued profession. That was then, this is now. We reached Moeraki in what felt like no time.

Ophir

Back on to the US Open. This year it’s on normal TV – a channel called Duke – and that’s allowed Mum to get right into it. She’s been filling out drawsheets as I used to do. The coverage on Duke is aggravating – they flit between matches at the most inopportune times, and sometimes give you a split screen showing two matches at once and you can’t properly see either of them. We went for a walk along the beach when the tennis was over, then finished off the previous night’s curry with some extra rice while watching TV. Again. Endless bloody TV. The Repair Shop – a British programme where members of the public get items of great sentimental value restored – is actually worth watching. This time there was an old Singer sewing machine, an extremely valuable painting of Henrietta mourning her husband Charles I after his execution, and a yellow submarine toy from the Beatles film. As the submarine was beautifully restored, Dad and I talked paint colours. All the veridians and sap greens and leaf greens and cadmium yellows and burnt siennas. Dad was a great user of burnt sienna early in his career when rust and abandonment were his big thing. After the Repair Shop was a fly-on-the-wall documentary about life on a cruise ship – my idea of hell. Passengers on the ship were called sailors – ugh.

A foggy Moeraki
A boat disappearing over the horizon

The next morning was foggy – good weather for watching tennis. In the early afternoon, the match Mum had been looking forward to – the all-Serbian third-round battle between Djokovic and Djere – finally got under way. Djere djumped all over a subdjued Djokovic in the first two sets, but he ran out of djuice and Djokovic got the djob done in five sets. Not exactly plain sailing. While that match was on, the 33-year-old Romanian Sorana Cîrstea completed a gutsy three-set win over fourth-seeded Elena Rybakina. She has won again today, beating Belinda Bencic in straight sets, to make the last eight. The plan had been to go back to Geraldine after the Djokovic match, but because it went so long, Mum and Dad decided to stay a second night in Moeraki rather than drive back in the dark. I didn’t mind that – Mum is more relaxed in Moeraki than at home. We picked up fish (elephant fish) and chips from the very popular tavern in Hampden. More goes on in Hampden, where people actually live, than in Moeraki where most homes are holiday homes.

My parents’ place in Moeraki up above, with the neighbours’ yurt-like structure down below

A solitary seal
These pictures are from the Kaik, just down the road from my parents’ place

We played another game of Skip-Bo. I won, making the overall scores 4-4-4. That night when I was awake in bed, I attempted some discrete probability problems in my head. Dad had failed to win any of the last six games. A particular player failing to win six straight games has a probability of just under 9%, assuming all players have an equal chance in each game. That was straightforward. The chance that twelve games would split 4-4-4? When you don’t even have pen and paper at your disposal, that’s much harder to work out. I needed the 12th row of Pascal’s Triangle to even make a start. In the end I came up with a figure of a little under 7%, which felt about right. These after-the-fact probability calculations are a bit weird because the chance that something notable happens is always a lot higher. This can have serious real-life implications when determining, for instance, the severity of a flood. When you hear “one in 50 years”, be skeptical. They tend to look at how much rain fell in the wettest 5 minutes, then the wettest 15 minutes, then half an hour, an hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, and so on. Each of these figures is compared to historical records, then they take whatever of those time periods gives the highest one-in-x value. That’s how you get one-in-50-year floods every other month. Climate change isn’t exactly helping there either.

Yesterday we visited my aunt in Timaru – back on the other side of the 45th parallel – on the way back from Moeraki. We’d covered 1300 km on our circuit around the coast and up and down the passes. It was a good trip, helped hugely by the weather and lack of tourists. When we were back in Geraldine, my cousin dropped by with her daughter – they’d been skiing at Fox Peak. My time in New Zealand is rapidly coming to a close.

Life :) - Tennis

The final lap

July 30, 2023 by 0 Comments

This time next week I should be on the first leg of my journey, from Budapest to Istanbul (2 hours). That entrée will be followed by flights to Singapore (nearly 11 hours), Melbourne (7½ hours) and finally Christchurch (3½ hours). That adds up to almost 24 hours in the air, plus several more on the ground in between. I’ve decided to take the train to Budapest, then the bus to the airport. People have asked me why I didn’t book a door-to-door bus to the airport, and I probably should have done, though the train trip (the reverse of the last leg of my Cambridge-to-Timișoara train journey in 2016) should be enjoyable.

The very nice plumber has done his bit for now; yesterday I gave him a chunky wad of lei and we had a good chat before he left. He had to gouge holes in the thick walls to poke the pipes through, and some parts now look quite unsightly. Also he somehow knocked out the power in two of the sockets that I use all the damn time in my office. I’ll have to get an electrician in, and when I get back I’ll probably need to do some plastering. In Romania the “making good” bit seems to be the responsibility of the customer … sigh. There’s still a swamp of hopelessly opaque admin to wade through with the gas company and whatnot before I get the central heating up and running.

I played tennis tonight. I enjoyed it much more than last week because Gabriela wasn’t there. That sounds bad – I’m sure that if you take away her cheering of opponent’s mistakes on the tennis court, she’s absolutely lovely.

Family - Other sports - Tennis

Her great nephew is, well, great

July 25, 2023 by 0 Comments

Just twelve days to go now. The plumber is back, slaving away in the heat, after a week chilling (literally) in the mountains. Our minimum temperatures are causing as much havoc as our maximums. Tonight we’re forecast to bottom out at 23. Yuck.

My aunt called me, surprisingly, on Saturday afternoon. My brother had just been over to see her with his wife and son. It was the first time she’d seen my nephew, and was instantly besotted with him. He’s so handsome. She has four grandchildren of her own whom she doesn’t see from one year to the next; I found it quite touching that she felt such warmth towards my brother’s son. It helps that my brother and sister-in-law are a breath of fresh air compared to the animosity and high-maintenance crap that she gets from her own family. My aunt and I had a longer chat than usual. Last night I called my brother who was back on the south coast after a weekend in St Ives.

Yesterday wasn’t particularly enjoyable. The English Conversation Club met up at Porto Arte, which was (and still is) a lovely spot on the bank of the Bega. There was a bigger crowd than I expected and we spread out over two tables. I chose the wrong table. Two people had a long and heated debate, talking across me. One of them asked if he was speaking correct English and I had to admit that I hadn’t been listening. I’d drifted into my own world. The prices at Porto have ballooned since the pandemic, and that’s really taken the pleasure out of being there. When that was over, it was time for tennis. I played with one of the Florins, with Gabriela and the better Florin on the other side. Gabriela shouted “Yes!” every time my partner or I committed an unforced error. You don’t do that unless you’re ten years old or a complete arse, or both. If I did this in a singles match, I might expect my opponent to deck me. After 90 minutes of this (!), I eventually confronted her. “Cheering every time we miss isn’t OK at all. For God’s sake, stop it!” But her partner thought it was fine, and suddenly I was the problem. Perhaps it is fine in Romania. Buggered if I know. Not getting vaccinated was very fine here. Yesterday was a good example of why I like to avoid people.

Before I went out yesterday, I saw that the Open golf championship was entering its final round. The diminutive and unheralded Brian Harman was leading by five, and the weather was terrible. When I was younger I often used to watch the Open on TV, and the yesterday’s conditions had all the makings of a dramatic finish in the wind and rain. I wish I could stay home and watch it. When I got home I was glad to find out that Harman had won by six shots and I hadn’t missed anything. I read a report that contrasted his serene passage to victory with Greg Norman’s collapse at the 1996 Masters and Jean van de Velde’s final-hole explosion at the Open in ’99. Heck, these happened last century and people haven’t even begun to forget. Collapses in golf are more brutal than in any other sport. They’re slow burners, where the heartbreak slowly unravels, and there’s no defence – if you lose a big lead in snooker, it could be down to your opponent’s brilliance as much as anything, but when in golf you shoot 78 or triple-bogey the last hole, that’s all on you. I found footage of van de Velde’s escapades on YouTube, with commentary by the late great Peter Alliss. The Frenchman up to his knees in mud at one point. Apart from some extraordinary bad luck, part of the problem was that both he and his caddy were so underprepared, as if they’d gone hiking the Himalayas in jandals. (Some Kiwis actually did this a few years ago.)

Dad sent me this video about Romania, which went out in 2001. Since then the cities have changed beyond belief, especially Cluj which was showcased in the video, while the countryside has remained much the same. Tourism hasn’t really materialised – yet.

Life :) - Music - Tennis

New Zealand: where to go

July 10, 2023 by 0 Comments

My brother called me last night. As usual, he had a beer bottle in his hand. He said that his knee operation, scheduled for this coming Thursday, had been put back to 2nd August.

This morning I took the bike to Sânmihaiu Român in a repeat of last Sunday. Once again I grabbed a coffee from the bar, then sat on a bench and read, before moving to the gazebo when the hot sun drifted onto me. Next week will be properly hot; the dog days are now upon us.

With just 27 days until I get on the plane, I’m thinking of where I might go when I’m in New Zealand. Much will depend on my parents. They’ll want some respite from the building work in Geraldine, so I’m sure we’ll spend some time in Moeraki. I have a friend in nearby Naseby whom I obviously haven’t seen since I left NZ seven years ago, and I’ll certainly want to catch up with her. Central Otago as a whole is quite magical. I spent a few days with my parents there in the blistering dry heat of December 2014 – we camped at Omarama, where they have the gliders, and then at Omakau. I remember Ranfurly and Wedderburn and lovely Ophir. Maybe one day I’ll do the bike Rail Trail where you can ride from Hyde to Clyde and much more beside. The West Coast could be an option – I don’t think any of us have been there since 2009 – or how about the Catlins in the south? I’ve never been down there. A top priority would have been Wellington, but now that my cousin has cancer I might end up giving the North Island a miss completely.

I went to the very popular Festivalul Inimilor on Friday night – another open-air spectacle of traditional music from Romania and beyond. It was in Parcul Rozelor, next to where we play tennis. There were huge groups from Turkey and Serbia as well as my local Banat region. There was a sombre mood when the local group came on, because the man who founded it back in the sixties had passed away. The festival is free to attend, although there are a lot of food and drink stalls and even some selling traditional costumes. It was on again last night, and provided a noisy backdrop to our game of tennis. In the first set, I played with a woman slightly older than me named Gabriela against two men including 88-year-old Domnul Sfâra. It’s surprisingly hard to play against him, because you have no choice but to go easy on him. After winning a long opening game on my serve, we duly lost 6-1 without ever getting to deuce again. Then Domnul Sfâra exited stage left, and Gabriela and I found ourselves up against two guys both called Florin. We beat them 6-1 6-4 6-1.
Update: I also played this evening, again with musical accompaniment as Festivalul Inimilor entered its final night. This time I played five (extremely one-sided) sets. First I played with Domnul Sfâra, and we won 6-1 after losing a close first game – a repeat of last night. Then I played with one of the Florins against Gabriela and the other Florin, and from our perspective it finished a bizarre 6-0 1-6. Then I teamed up with Gabriela against both Florins, and we won 6-1 6-0.