Tennis

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.

Books - Life :) - Tennis

Ploughing through

January 29, 2023 by 0 Comments

At last we’re getting some real winter with some proper chunky flakes of snow.

I’ve had a busy week: 30-odd hours of lessons plus preparation time and ploughing through the city on my bike to see kids without getting my wheels stuck in the tram tracks, writing and editing more of my “tips and tricks” dictionary, and all the ongoing medical stuff. I saw the ENT specialist on Thursday; after seeing the results of my MRI scan, she thinks I might have a fistula up there. I’ve made an appointment with the neurologist for 20th February. In the meantime she’s given me half a shelf full of drugs: an antibiotic, a probiotic, a nasal spray (another one), two variations of a plant extract to deal with both acute and chronic sinusitis, and prednisone (a steroid) to take on days seven to ten. It isn’t easy to manage the whens and hows of taking this many medicines when “life admin” is already a struggle.

The Australian Open has almost passed me by this year. I saw that big-hitting Sabalenka won the women’s title this morning, and Djokovic will probably win the men’s tomorrow. Andy Murray came through two gladiatorial matches in the first week, one of which lasted 5¾ hours. But I haven’t watched a single ball being hit. I’ve had neither the time nor the interest.

The ex-owner of this flat left a load of books behind (and that’s not all – more about that some other time). One of them was The Girl on the Train, which I got through pretty quickly. A real page-turner, but at the end I wondered what I’d just read. All three of the female characters were incredibly shallow, with such normal problems, that I found it hard to care what happened to them. The men were no better, except the ginger-haired bloke whom Rachel met on the train, or was it near the train, but he only made a cameo appearance. When I read the first few pages, the book was full of potential: a slightly mad woman gawking at people’s gardens twice a day from the window of her train and making up lives for those who reside there, and wondering what her fellow passengers must have thought of her. Then it veered uninterestingly (for me) off the rails.

I might have had my last session with the tearful boy. If that’s the case I won’t be disappointed.

Headaches - Life :) - Tennis

Thirty days hath December

December 12, 2022 by 0 Comments

I miss my old place. This morning is a good example of why. Until I started my lesson at eight, I didn’t even notice it was snowing. Last December I was surrounded by parks and trees and the clatter of trams and Christmas lights and strange blokes dressed up as goats, but now the outside is sadly much more ignorable. As I type this I can see a tree.

If there’s one day I’d happily scratch from the calendar, it would be New Year’s Eve. It’s just far too social for someone as asocial as me. In Romania it’s particularly bad because people don’t call it a day (or a year) soon after midnight. Oh no, they power right through till four or something ridiculous, so the whole monstrous thing might last eight hours. Imagine being stuck at an airport for eight hours. It happens. In fact it happened a lot in Europe this past summer. But picture this: at regular intervals during your ordeal at Gate 29, to avoid being bumped off the flight, you’re required to talk to one of your fellow passengers. Someone you don’t know from Adam. What’s more, every third time you say something, you must make that other person laugh. After first grabbing an alcoholic drink, obviously. You must also laugh every third time the other person says something, no matter whether you think it’s funny, because you know he or she will be kicked off the flight if you fail to do so. There’s a mutual understanding. Then, at the five-hour point, you’re suddenly obliged to dance with your fellow travellers. Imagine that! Fail to tango with these complete strangers and you might as well be carrying explosives. At New Year, millions of people choose to do something pretty similar to what I’ve described. They’re obviously barking mad. Off their rockers, the lot of them. Recently someone from tennis invited me to a New Year thing at a restaurant not far from where I live. Oh god. It costs 300 lei. (Pay extra for the privilege of being stuck at an airport for eight hours and having to make jokes with other passengers. Utter insanity.) I ummed and ahhed for a few days and then said yes because I didn’t want people to hate me. There will be food, that’s something. And maybe they’ll let me off if I duck out at around two. He’s not from here, he does things differently. I can always play that card, the joker up my sleeve.

I’m tired all the bloody time. I look back at early 2018 when I had a two-month spell without a single day off. Nearly five years on it’s all much more of a struggle. Getting to lessons from my new place takes longer, but it’s the regular headaches that really wear me out. I also changed my antidepressant recently – I was forced to – and who knows what that might have done. It’s hard to know what’s what. Last week I visited my doctor who gave me some pills for my high liver enzyme levels. Why they’re high I have no idea; I drink copious water, I hardly ever have fizzy drink, and as for alcohol I average something like two drinks a week – I work late every evening from Monday to Friday, and the last thing I want at 10pm is a beer. These pills contain silymarin, which is a flowering plant, and cynarin, which is extracted from artichokes. I’m also taking vitamin D again.

Tennis is over for at least another three months. I didn’t particularly enjoy my last session of the season. The woman on the other side shouted “yes!” every time we made a mistake (cut that shit out, seriously) and her partner was an explosive player who had all the right gear (an expensive Babolat racket, obviously) and seemed ever so slightly dickish.

This is shaping up to be a really busy week. I hope I can stay awake for it.

Language teaching - Other sports - Poker - Tennis - Writing a book

Fuq the World Qup

November 21, 2022 by 0 Comments

One of the benefits of teaching kids is that they sometimes teach you stuff. It was a cliché in the 80s and 90s that teachers would often ask one of their ten-year-old pupils how to operate a VCR. Last week one of my 15-year-old students (who wants to be an airline pilot) told me about an upcoming Istanbul–Timișoara route run by Turkish Airlines, which could be handy in getting me to and from New Zealand. I asked Turkish Airlines for some idea of a date; they told me it was “up their sleeves”. On Friday a 13-year-old boy told me all about the groups and teams and players in the World Cup which is about to start. “You’ll be my go-to man, then,” I told him, “because I won’t be watching any of it.”

Qatar. Even the word looks ridiculous. If a U-less Q was a criterion for hosting the event, they should have held it in Greenland. No end of possibilities there. I’d have been all over the games in Qaqortoq, Uummannaq and Ittoqqortoormiit. They could have kept it in summer; no air-conditioned stadiums required. I’d say they’ve missed a triq. (I remember Chelsea’s Cup Winners’ Cup match in the blizzard of Tromsø in northern Norway, back in 1997. It was a thing of beauty.) Seriously though, this World Cup stinks. Everything about it is jarringly wrong, right down to an anatomical-looking stadium, one of eight soon-to-be white elephants they’ve built in an area not much bigger than Wellington, at a cost of probably thousands of lives.

Earlier today I spoke to my friend’s girlfriend in Birmingham. She gave me some pointers on getting my work translated; the dictionary might be a bridge too far because of the sheer cost. She also put me in touch with a woman in Romania who knows something on the matter. The translation business is much bigger than I ever imagined; there are vast numbers of people online touting their services, even in relatively uncommon languages like Romanian.

After our chat, I played some online poker. Specifically, it was a triple draw tournament. I don’t particularly like triple draw, but I gave it a whirl and ended up finishing fifth for a modest profit of around $9. Once that was over, I read an article about a woman who had developed a tennis gambling addiction during the pandemic. Poor her. Her wagers included betting on the winner of the next point, which is asinine, but if you need the rush… She lost £40,000. I count myself lucky that I don’t have an addictive personality, or at least I don’t think I do. Also, it helps that I’m not well blessed in the ego department. In poker, if I think my opponents are better than me or the stakes make me feel uncomfortable (mainly because my opponents are likely to be better at higher stakes), I simply won’t play.

The incessant rain put paid to tennis today. Yesterday I got out there though, straight after finishing my three lessons. I enjoyed the session more than usual because we just rallied instead of playing a game.

Now I’ll do my usual Sunday night thing of rallying the troops (contacting my newer or less reliable students) before the week’s lessons start.

Family - Photos - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

A flappy board and some grounds for optimism

November 15, 2022 by 0 Comments

Above is the popular split-flap departure board at Timișoara Airport (5/11/22) showing that my parents’ flight had landed. These clicky clacky things used to be ubiquitous, but they’re now few and far between. Even this bad boy won’t be long for this world, sadly.

I don’t often get emails from Mum, but she sent me a newsy one on Saturday, perhaps from the local library as they don’t have internet access in their flat in St Ives. Yesterday they were going to the Remembrance Day parade. As Mum pointed out, all those years ago when there was still a small band of First World War veterans (!) we all had to wrap up warm. Not so now. They’re going down to my brother’s place on Wednesday, for four days. They’re taking the train which will be expensive. She talked about New Zealand’s dramatic win over England in the women’s rugby World Cup final, and how some New Zealanders are finding the women’s game a better spectacle than the more stop-start men’s version. I’d like emails to and from Mum to become a more regular thing. (I then got a message from Dad saying he really wasn’t feeling well.)

Another Mum thing. When they were here I played tennis; when I got back I saw Mum was following the Paris Masters final between Djokovic and the Danish 19-year-old Holger Rune on her phone. Djokovic had won the first set but was losing in the second. I found a stream for her, and the three of us watched the remainder of the match. What a finish it was, as Rune staved off six break points in a marathon last game (18 minutes?) to pull off a logic-defying 3-6 6-3 7-5 win. Mum was disappointed but I was happy the plucky teenager got the win in the biggest moment of his short career to date.

The newly renovated buildings, including the Lloyd “Palace”, in Piața Victoriei this sunny afternoon

The US midterms. Two years ago the gradual drip-feed of results added to the drama. What’s happening in Washoe or Clark or Pima or Maricopa? When will we get the latest dump? All these obscure-sounding counties that are actually not that obscure because they’re heavily populated. It’s been much the same this time around. The phenomenon of Trump has focused more international eyes on the minutiae of American politics than ever before. And rightly so – it’s all very consequential. I always go back to the 2000 election and the Florida recounts. A little over two years later, my brother was in sodding Basra and we were scared shitless. What if Gore, who (don’t forget) won more votes than Bush overall, had become president instead? The 9/11 attacks may still have happened, but I imagine the world in general would have gone down a less destructive path. Now there’s a chink of light with the Democrats holding the Senate (it would be nice if they could gain a 51st seat in next month’s Georgia run-off) and the Republicans probably gaining just a bare majority in the House. With what happened in war-ravaged Kherson on Friday as well, there is something to be cheerful about at last.

The impulsive and slightly repulsive Elon Musk recently bought Twitter for a barely imaginable sum of $44 billion, and it’s now it’s in some kind of malaise, freefall, meltdown, I don’t know what. A few years ago I joined Mastodon because I liked the name, but never really posted anything, so in the last few days I’ve been on there, trying to understand how it works, in the hope that I can find a social media platform that doesn’t totally creep me out.

My early new year’s resolution for 2023 is to get two books published. One on common mistakes that Romanians make in English (most of the donkey work for that is done) and another about a guy I used to play tennis with. How to make this all happen I’m as yet unsure about, but writing my resolution here won’t do the chances of it any harm.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Lack of problems can be a problem

November 14, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve just got back from dinner in deepest darkest Dumbrăvița with Mark, the teacher at British School. It was the first time I’d met his girlfriend (or fiancée actually) since last Christmas. He’d made chicken curry and banana cake. All very nice. Then he showed me pictures of their various European travels.

Before that I played tennis. We played one set that needs a mention, or else I’ll forget about it. Playing with Adelin, the guy who could barely hold a racket a few weeks ago but has sporting talent in spades, we trailed 2-4 with my serve to come. I gave them a generous call on a wide ball after a long rally to give them 0-30, which then became 0-40, but we reeled off the next five points for the game. We led 5-4 and 6-5 but wound up in a tie-break in which we fell 6-2 down. Adelin hit a stone-dead net-cord to save set point number three, and we won both the next two points on my serve to bring up set point at 7-6. Alas, we lost the last three points, and that was finally that.

My new students. First, the twins. Two sets of them, aged seven and nearly nine. I got them to write some basic information about themselves. Name, age, favourite food, favourite colour, favourite school subject, and so on. Maybe not the best idea because the seven-year-olds struggled a bit to write even in their native language, although I obviously helped them as much as I could. How you’re supposed to deal with thirty of the little blighters who all want your attention at the same time I have no idea. Then it was “head, shoulders, knees and toes” and Simon Says. “Now sit down … but I didn’t say Simon Says!” Every time I do this I think it’s bloody hilarious that I worked in insurance in a previous life. Just how? Then, on the same day, I had my first session with Ana. Another Ana. This one in her mid-thirties. A total change of pace from the harum-scarum stuff with the four kids. We had a nice chat with some general grammar points thrown in. Tomorrow I’ve got my first lesson with a 16-year-old girl.

A word on my tricky lesson with Luca, aged ten, on Tuesday. He arrived in tears. He said he’d had a terrible day in which he’d been bullied for being short. I told him he really wasn’t that short, and that he’s a rather good English speaker for his age (true) who will end up with a better job, and will earn more money, than the idiots at his school. His tears dried up and we had a productive lesson, although I bet he was dreading the next day. (While I was writing that paragraph, someone messaged me to ask what “posh” meant. I said “upper-class or elevated”. I didn’t mention anything about the etymology.)

I don’t have central heating in this place and am relying on the city system to heat the radiators. So far it’s working. Last winter was a nightmare for those on the city system and I was worried my parents might freeze while they were here, even before we hit proper winter, but they were overly toasty if anything.

Mum. Perhaps her biggest problem is her lack of problems. Most of us have had to deal with a disability or some mental or physical health issue or a messy break-up or an addiction or a tragic loss or a financial setback, or most likely a concoction of some of the above. These traumas and negative experiences make one more introspective, to question oneself, to be more self-aware. It’s great, obviously, that Mum has dodged most of the bad stuff and is enjoying a prosperous and healthy retirement. But if she’d had a bit more crap to deal with, she might now have the self-awareness to view situations more objectively.

Family - International travel - Photos - Poker - Tennis

Countdown mode and memories of Singapore

October 17, 2022 by 0 Comments

It’s only three days till I go away, so I’m on full don’t-forget mode now. I will forget something, though, I always do. I’ll be taking my laptop with me so I can give lessons when I’m away. Which lessons, I’m still not sure at this point, because Friday is normally a busy day for me but I don’t know what time my parents plan to get to my brother’s place on that day. Perhaps after this length of time I should prioritise family rather than work, I don’t know.

Last time I mentioned that my parents had spent two nights in Singapore on the way to the UK. In January 1987 we spent four nights there on the way back from our six-week stay in New Zealand. Back then I got very excited by anything big and futuristic and technological, so Singapore was fascinating to me. We stayed on the 20th floor of the 21-storey President Merlin hotel, Mum and my brother in room 2014, Dad and I in 2015. In the morning we would phone each other. There were malls everywhere, rising to six or seven storeys, full of shops selling gadgets that were unimaginable back home. Sports shops were everywhere, and we picked up my first proper tennis racket. I remember a cheap hand-held LCD racing car game where nobody could ever get more than 13 laps no matter how hard they tried. As for the food, my memories are hazy, but I clearly remember the time Mum ordered bee hoon for us all in a massive ground-floor food court, not having the foggiest clue what we’d be getting. It turned out to be some noodley dish which we all had great difficulty physically eating, and two Chinese girls had a good laugh at us from an upper-floor balcony. I remember Chinatown, where my parents bought various figurines that they probably still have today. It was a few days before Chinese New Year – the Year of the Rabbit was coming up, as it will be again in a few months – and there were parades with dragons. Most of all I remember the durians – large spiky smelly fruit. Like really ponging something nasty. On one day we took the boat over to Sentosa Island, but apart from the cable car I don’t remember that too well. All in all we had a great time because it was all so different from what we were used to. I visited Singapore once again in 2008 but it had changed. Obviously I was no longer a kid, so that sense of wonder had gone, but the malls seemed to have been taken over by designer clothes stores, the sort that you find at airports. Travel is going in that direction in general; with globalisation, places become more and more samey.

Chinatown, 2008 (including durians)

I played reasonably decent tennis at the weekend. The 18-year-old lad was there for both sessions, and he’s improving at a rate of knots. Mindblowingly fast. Two weeks ago he was playing cricket shots, had no backhand to speak of, and could barely get a serve into play. All very standard for someone who had hardly held a tennis racket before. Now he can reliably get his serve in, can rally from both wings, and is very tactically aware. All from just a few hours on the court. He’s clearly an all-round natural sportsman. To get to his level took me many many hours on my own, hitting against a wall, or rallying with my parents in the garden. Being anywhere near an actual tennis court would have been disastrous for me initially.

Poker. Another win on Saturday night, and this one (pot-limit badugi) kept me up until after two in the morning. I ran well and crucially collected bounties with regularity along the way. As we got short-handed I amassed a huge stack and was able to run over the table. Heads-up lasted two hands. My reward for winning and collecting so many bounties was a rare three-figure payout; I made $101 for my evening’s work – that was very nice indeed.

Family - International travel - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

They’re off!

October 10, 2022 by 0 Comments

My parents are currently on Singapore Airlines flight 298, an Airbus A350 registered 9V-SMM, and right now they’re passing by Fitzroy Crossing in north-western Australia. Flightradar24 is a great tool.

Mum and Dad will spend two nights in Singapore before flying to London, and a week after that we’ll all meet up as a family for the first time since Christmas 2018.

Last night my brother told me about all the messy midnight interludes that are suddenly a feature of his life. We then talked about our cousin – the 52-year-old daughter of my aunt whom I saw in August – and the fact that she hasn’t seen her mother in three years. Just imagine. You live in Somerset, four hours’ drive at the most from your isolated and vulnerable mum, you don’t make the trip in all that time, and somehow you think that’s OK. Just how? I know there was the small matter of a pandemic, but she wasn’t exactly dying to hook up with her mum on Zoom. People are crazy. Talking of crazy cousins, I have a cousin the same age as me in Wellington. I went to his wedding in 2012. He has two daughters; the youngest is probably five or six. He’s a big fan of Liverpool, and in 2019 his beloved team reached the Champions League final in dramatic fashion. So what did he do? Fly to Barcelona at the last minute to watch his team play Tottenham. You literally can’t get any further: if you could tunnel down from Wellington through the centre of the earth and back out the other side, you’d end up in Spain. He didn’t have a ticket for Camp Nou – that would be one thing. No, he watched the match on a big screen, then flew back home. Months later he broke up with his wife.

I played tennis twice at the weekend. On Saturday I went to the pub by the river afterwards. It was surprisingly empty for such as warm evening. It seems we haven’t still fully recovered from Covid and now we’ve got a whole load of other crap to worry about like skyrocketing energy bills and bridges being set alight in our vicinity that people want to save their money. The price of eating and drinking out has shot up too; in a classic case of shrinkflation, the beer glasses in this place are 20% smaller than they used to be. I don’t eat much meat these days normally, but the meal I had was a plate of traditional Romanian food, and was necessarily extremely meaty.

A guy from tennis is starting lessons with me tomorrow. He did mention it ages ago, but because he’s anti-vax and knew my diametrically opposed stance on the issue, I thought that might put him off. We’ll have the lesson online. More and more people are choosing to have their lessons online even if they live in Timișoara. At this rate they’ll render my new teaching room redundant.

Poker. I played seven tournaments at the weekend and got nowhere; my bankroll is now $996. Two of those were hold ’em which I hardly ever play. My poker dream is that GG Poker, the site that has now overtaken Poker Stars as the market leader, will one day add a bunch of other games to match the variety that Poker Stars offers. If that happens, I’ll be off to GG like a shot with four figures to play with.

Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Tourists

October 3, 2022 by 0 Comments

As we hit October and the leaves turn, I miss the view I had from my city-centre window even more. This morning I spoke to Mum and Dad. Only 18 days till I see them in the UK. They’ve now booked their flights to and from Romania; they’ll be here from 5th to 10th November. I wish they could have come for longer. We discussed the war in Ukraine, the stampede at a football match in Indonesia that killed 125 people, and how the UK seems to have slammed into reverse.

It’s been an interesting day. Yesterday I bumped into Mark (the guy who teaches at British School) as he was getting winter tyres put on his car. We agreed to catch up today. He heard about a guided tour of the Fabric area of Timișoara, where I happen to live now, taking place this afternoon. We had to sign up; I gave the tour people my phone number and said there’d be two people coming. Mark trekked over to my neck of the woods, and some other teachers from British School also made the trip. Not for the tour, but just for drinks. All nice people, from what I could tell. One of them, a smoker, had run a marathon – 42-point-something kilometres – in under four hours that morning. Mind-boggling for me. Mark then decided he’d rather stay at the bar than bother with the tour that was scheduled to take 2½ hours in a language he knew about a dozen words of. Then my phone rang. It was the tour guide. Why aren’t you here? Sorry mate, we’ve kind of got to do this. So the two of us joined the group. The guide could speak English, but conducted the tour in Romanian, so I interpreted for Mark, probably pretty badly because I got lost at times myself. We learnt about the large Jewish contingent that lived in the area, and how nationalities weren’t really a thing 200-odd years ago in Timișoara – your religion basically was your nationality. The guide stopped at buildings along the way – the CEO of the wool factory lived in this one, an internationally renowned violinist lived in that one – sometimes pointing out architectural details that I had missed. Then Mark had had enough so we paid the guide and left.

By that point it was just about time for me to go to tennis anyway. There was a new guy this evening – a teenager who had just taken up the game. Although his forehand was good considering his lack of experience, he was struggling to get any sort of serve into play. We increased his number of serves allowed per point from two to infinity, and still he struggled. Hardly surprising, really. You either need a coach or to practise yourself with a bucketload of balls. A game situation with everyone watching, even if it’s a casual game, is the worst of all.

Hopefully this week I can finalise my new-look teaching room, or close to it. I may even put some pictures of it on here.

I played in four poker tournaments last night. I cashed in three despite making bad starts to all of them, in one case losing 97% of my initial stack (!), but couldn’t convert my big comebacks into big finishes and only made a modest profit. My bankroll is $1015.