Tennis

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.

Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

It’s snot much fun

June 6, 2023 by 0 Comments

I had a whole heap more to say last time, but didn’t want to bombard my vast readership with too much in one go.

Last Tuesday I went back to the neurologist for another consultation. My left nostril is “always on” and causes me considerable discomfort. The pressure builds up and builds up – and so does the pain – until eventually I’m able to blow the thick clear, colourless gunk out. Sometimes it shoots out with such force that I don’t know where it’s gone. Occasionally I can’t blow it out, and then I’m in a whole world of hurt – the pain can then become excruciating. I normally wake up in the middle of the night and have to give my nose a good blow – I’ve yet to devise a way of doing this in my sleep. I told the neurologist all of this, and he said that unfortunately most of the ENT specialists in Timișoara are lacking. He gave me the number of one who might be reasonable, but said that ultimately I might need to see one in Bucharest, and that wouldn’t be cheap. He quoted something like £2000, which I’d happily pay to get rid of this once and for all.

On Thursday I decided to give up on online poker, having lost the desire to play. I played one final session, finishing with a fourth and a third in my last two tournaments, then cashed out. Annoyingly they creamed something like 10% off the top – it was never anything like that high when I lived in New Zealand – but the remainder (around £1100 or NZ£2200) will be useful. So will the extra time. I’ll have a bit more time over the summer to work on these books which I haven’t forgotten about.

This afternoon, to my great surprise, I got through to my aunt on the phone. She rarely picks it up. She sounded fine, but admitted that physically she was a mess. I plan to cycle over to her place on Saturday, just like I did last summer. When I told her about the Barclays business, she said I needed to make an appointment at the branch, so I did as she suggested. I’ll visit Barclays in Cambridge on Friday (the day I arrive), then I’ll still have an appointment up my sleeve on Monday if that doesn’t work out, although that will mean making a special trip to Cambridge. Tomorrow I’ll need to get my electricity bill translated, once again. The whole thing slipped into the realms of farce ages ago.

Teachers have been on strike for the last two weeks. They’ve chosen the end of the school year, when all the big exams are held, for maximum disruption. I sympathise with them; teachers’ salaries in Romania are derisory. But giving teachers more money will hardly begin to repair Romania’s creaking education system. This is the subject of a whole separate post. (I need to make a series of posts on how stuff works, or doesn’t, in Romania.)

I played a strange set of tennis last night. I partnered Ionuț, a man of around my age, against his daughter and Gabriela, a competitive woman also in her forties. So yes, it was boys against girls. The girls won the first eleven points; in the end we won the set 7-5 despite (if I calculated correctly) winning two fewer points than them overall.

Nearly 300 people died in a horrific train crash in India on Friday. To see the grieving families was extremely distressing. The Wikipedia page on Indian railway incidents shows a litany of disaster over decades, although (this awful incident notwithstanding) they have reduced in frequency.

I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. Workers in New Zealand had the day off for King’s birthday. Doesn’t that sound weird?

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Romania - Tennis

Back to nature

June 5, 2023 by 0 Comments

Lots of biking this weekend. This morning I met Mark at his place in Dumbrăvița and we cycled to the (relatively) nearby village of Covaci, then into the countryside, through fields of wheat and barley and rapeseed (though that had been harvested). As I realised we were at the highest point of a câmpie, a plain basically, I was reminded of Haddenham, a large village in Cambridgeshire and perhaps the highest point in that very flat county. (The Blossoms and Bygones open day held every May in Haddenham was really quite wonderful. The vintage cars, the traction engines, seeing horses being shod, trips on horse-drawn carts, going up the church tower and water tower, and best of all, cheap cakes and biscuits. This event seemed to run out of steam around the turn of the century, and Wikipedia tells me that it finished for good in 2013.) We saw two foxes and a hare (hares can run at around twice the speed us pathetic humans can) as well as several storks, and the puddles (of which there were many) were teeming with froglets. And, as always in Romania, so many insects. My old city bike, as opposed to Mark’s newish hybrid bike, coped OK with the narrow dirt tracks. Even on the paved roads there was gloriously little traffic; it was great to be away from the noise of people and their machines. We came back via another pleasant village named Cerneteaz (pronounced “chair-net-yazz“, or close to that; click for a late-eighties flashback) where we had a packed lunch. Traditional Romanian music was playing; we both agreed that we quite liked it.

Made from mud and glass bottles, it’s supposed to be like this

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei, who had just got a D grade in a test at school. That disappointing result was little to do with him and a lot to do with his teacher who hadn’t really done her job properly. Her explanations had clearly been superficial, so no wonder when she dumped a demanding test on her pupils, they were mostly at sea. Matei showed me the unprofessional-looking test which had been cobbled together from at least four different past papers. The worst part was the marking scheme. Not every mark on every past paper is worth the same. One two-hour paper might carry 100 marks; another two-hour paper which has just as much stuff in it might only have 60 marks. If you’re going to just smoosh different papers together, you have to adjust the marks up and down accordingly. You’d think a maths teacher might have figured that out. After seeing Matei I met Mark at a restaurant called Astur, just off the main street of Dumbrăvița. Unusually there was a large, nicely mown beer-garden-style outdoor area. I was hungry so I had a carbonara and a beer as we sat in the full glare of the sun. (The tops of my legs certainly caught it.) As we were about to leave, my brother surprisingly called me and showed me my nephew, now closing in on nine months old and a different person from the previous time I’d seen him. He’d just uttered his first word: cat. He and the cat are best mates; they spend many hours in close proximity. It was a bit awkward to talk, so I called my brother back in the evening after tennis.

Mark and I soon parted ways, and I cycled to Giarmata Vii to look at yet another Dacia, this time a bright blue one from 2005. It was going for 1500 euros. It had one or two small spots of rust, and only had two weeks left on its ITP (MOT in the UK, or WOF in New Zealand). The owner took me for a ride around the village, and it seemed fine. I don’t know what to do. On Tuesday I looked at another car that seemed fine on the surface, but I found out that it had been in a crash that damaged both the right doors and the pillar and cost a lot to repair. At this rate, buying a car is looking as hard as buying a flat was. (I still have awful flashbacks to that meeting in the lawyer’s office on 5/5/22. My stress levels were off the scale.)

On Friday night I had my lesson with the guy who lives in London. He’d recently been to Alton Towers. I went there twice, in 1999 and 2003. The more famous rides, such as Nemesis, and Oblivion which was brand new in ’99, are still running. He’d also been back to Romania with his family to attend a wedding. They stayed in a hotel which he’d booked on booking.com. The hotel was dire and he duly left a one-star review. The hotel owners then tracked him down, found where he works in the UK, and gave his company a one-star review. What bastards. After he read articles about Boris Johnson and Philip Schofield, he said he’d read The Noonday Demon, a 2001 book about depression that I’d been meaning to get hold of. He said his wife suffers from depression but is denial of it. We had a very interesting conversation about the subject, in particular the number of people who are affected indirectly.

Tennis. I played last night for the first time in two weeks. I played with the teenage girl; her father and 88-year-old Domnul Sfâra were on the other side. We won 6-1, 7-6 (7-5). The local tradition of swapping the side you receive from with your partner every second game is weird and against the rules of tennis, and gets very confusing during a tie-break. Our first set point at 6-3 in the tie-break was the most incredible rally I’ve been involved in for some time; the fact that a near-nonagenarian was also involved made in even more remarkable.

Only four full days until I go away.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

A life cut short

April 23, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. They were pretty upbeat considering the stressful week they’d had. Mum told me that her cousin, who came to visit us in the UK in 1990, had tragically lost her 25-year-old son. He lived in Christchurch but last Wednesday he was in Wellington to see a concert at the TSB Arena. He fell in the water after the concert, and two days later his body was found. He was a primary school teacher and extremely well regarded. The kids go back tomorrow after their Easter break. Just truly terrible. When I lived and worked in Wellington, people fell in the harbour remarkably often, including someone I worked with, although he clambered safely to the shore. There are no railings or anything of the sort in the area. I guess they would damage the look of the place, or something. Now this teacher, a distant relative of mine, has had his life cut short by half a century or more.

I did have those five lessons with that young woman – a pretty handy English speaker already. In one of our sessions she told me about her stay in France a few years ago. “But there’s one place I’d really like to visit.” You’re 22, so I think I already know, but please please please let it be something else. “Dubai.” Jeez. I told her that it would be right at the bottom of my bucket list if you exclude places currently at war. I thought I had a particularly good face-to-face lesson yesterday with two women who are absolute beginners. In a 90-minute session we did numbers, colours, the verb to be, and simple sentences. I like X, I don’t like X, Do you like X? The cup is green, the pens are blue. It’s vital to keep things as simple as possible. You need to eliminate irregularities as much as you can to begin with, and introduce them step-by-step. So many teaching tools get this wrong and hit students with oxen and thieves on day one, which is frankly ridiculous.

Snooker. A crazy frame last night in the attritional second-round match between Mark Selby and Gary Wilson. At two frames all in a best-of-25, just two reds remained on the table, both surrounding the pink that was millimetres from dropping in. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. The referee gave them three shots each to resolve the stalemate, otherwise there would be a re-rack (50 minutes after the frame had originally started!). They did somehow get one red away from the pocket without sinking the pink, then Selby had an uncharacteristic loss of patience that allowed Wilson to clear up and take the lead. I fell asleep at that point. Selby, however, won the last three frames of the session to take a 5-3 lead into this afternoon’s session.

There were only three of us at tennis last night. Almost the whole time I played on my own against the other two, so I got plenty of exercise. I’ll be back on the court tonight.

Tomorrow I’ll have my first proper Romanian lesson. It should be very useful.

Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

A few tips

April 3, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching a YouTube video on tipping in the US. It was already way out of hand when I visited in 2015. Waiters, who for some bizarre reason are exempt from minimum-wage laws in states that have a minimum wage, behaving like performing seals, and all that unnecessary time-consuming awkwardness. But at least then I paid cash for virtually everything and didn’t have to cope with the guilt-inducing touch screens that have proliferated since then, often at places where people aren’t providing a service at all – they’re just doing their jobs. My cousin who lives in the US said he was once so appalled by the service at a restaurant that he manually entered a $0.01 tip on one of those screens. The solution to all this “tipflation” is obvious – stop tipping entirely, pay staff what they deserve, and incorporate that into the price of the food or whatever else you’re providing. In an otherwise good video, they got one thing badly wrong: they said the word “tip” stands for “to insure promptness”. No it doesn’t. It doesn’t stand for anything; it’s just a word. Not every short word has to be an acronym. Incidentally, I often use “tip” in my lessons as an example of an English word with several meanings.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open during last night’s snooker, where commentators gave their tips as to whose cue tip would be the steadier and who would be tipped out of the tournament, his career perhaps headed for the tip. The semi-final between Shaun Murphy and Mark Selby went to a deciding 19th frame; I only found out the result (Murphy won) when I got up this morning. After reading and grocery shopping, I met the English lady in town. After a lesson on Tuesday in which I struggled to teach pronouns to a beginner student, because they work differently in his native Romanian, I suggested that we sit down together and get a handle on these damn Romanian pronouns once and for all. Every solo attempt I’ve made so far to properly learn them has ended in failure. So we had coffee in Piața Unirii and we went through the accusative and dative pronouns. The third-person accusative pronouns are gender-dependent but the third-person dative ones aren’t, and that’s just the start of it.

We had mild weather today and it was busy in town. Some tourists are now making their way to Timișoara, perhaps to see what the “Capital of Culture” fuss is about. I was struck by a young couple carrying backpacks and dressed in clothes of every colour of the rainbow; not so long ago that was commonplace, but now there’s a certain drab conformity in what young people wear.

I had a good session of tennis this evening. Domnul Sfâra, now 88, was there. My partner commented on how good his reflexes were for a man of his age. The diminutive Domnul Sfâra was on the other side of the net, and we won 6-2 6-2.

After 32½ hours last week, I’m expecting something lighter this week.