Tennis

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.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Poker - Tennis - The UK - Travel: Romania

An active day

September 26, 2022 by 0 Comments

It’s been an active day for me: 19 km on my bike, a spot of hiking, and some tennis. At 9am I met my teacher friend on the outer edge of Dumbrăvița, then I went with him and his dog to Nădrag, just over an hour’s drive away. There we walked along a track to the top of a ridge, then descended quite steeply until we followed a stream back to the car. That all got my heart rate up, and as always, my Doc Martens did the business. This evening’s tennis was doubles. I partnered a woman I first met at yesterday’s session. She’s a decent player. Three years older than me, she lost her 68-year-old father to Covid in 2021. She said he had nothing wrong with him before he was struck down by the disease. I wanted to ask her if he’d been vaccinated, but thought better of it. There are trees overhanging two corners of the court we play on. Normally they don’t cause a problem, but occasionally a high ball will bring them into play. Tonight I had to practically thread a backhand through the branches, golf style.

Yesterday I had two English lessons and one maths. In the maths lesson I went off on a slight tangent (not literally; trig is still to come) when I explained that three 8-inch pizzas for the same price as a 16-inch pizza is a bad deal. In one of my English lessons we finished off one of those skyscraper games, though this time a longer version involving international buildings instead of only American ones. I had a huge lead from our first session, but ended up winning only 36-33 and could easily have lost. That comebacks are possible is a good sign for the game. It still needs the odd tweak here and there, and a little something extra which I haven’t figured out yet.

I spoke to my brother again last night. There’s only so much you can say about nappies. Both he and his wife were tired. There are a lot of things I hadn’t thought about. When does the colour of a baby’s eyes become fixed? Today I wondered whether my nephew will be left-handed; both his parents are, as is his paternal grandfather. (I’m right-handed, but play tennis left-handed. Just like Rafael Nadal.)

It seems the UK has returned to some sort of normal after a fortnight of wall-to-wall royalty. The Queen was an amazing woman without doubt, but some of the response was beyond ridiculous. Cancelling hospital appointments because they clashed with the funeral? Utterly ludicrous. Then there was the clampdown on anti-monarchy protests. An expression of a totally legitimate point of view. As I said a couple of posts ago, it’s not only woke that’s gone mad.

I had a crappy poker session on Friday night. Knowing that I had to get up the next morning didn’t help my decision-making; perhaps I shouldn’t have played at all. My bankroll is currently $999; it was $1026 at the start of the month.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A blank canvas

September 22, 2022 by 0 Comments

Not an awful lot to say, except that I spoke to my brother on Friday. His wife was holding their son on the fifth day of his life. Fifth day, with a whole world of possibilities stretching out before him, quite possibly until the end of this century. Everything is still on the table. There’s something amazing, almost thrilling, about that. There’s so much we don’t know, however, about the world he will experience. The signs don’t look good. In my nephew’s first few days on the planet, Putin has stepped up the threat of nuclear war. Will my nephew have anything like the opportunities his parents and (even more so) grandparents had? His own place to live? Readily available jobs? Any jobs? Will jobs as we know them even exist in 2045? Presumably we’ll still need builders and plumbers and electricians. Hopefully teachers, too. But perhaps not taxi drivers or paralegals or actuaries. Or even surgeons. The really good news for my nephew is that he has eminently sensible and financially secure parents. That will give him a huge advantage.

This morning I went to the fruit and vege market that sells local produce and is open just twice a week. On the way back I saw a old woman with a walking stick picking figs from an overhanging tree. I hadn’t realised that fig tree – or any fig tree – was there, but then I haven’t been to that market and come back that way very often since I moved to my new place. I asked her if she wanted some help but she preferred my money instead. I then picked a juicy fig.

This evening I had my first lesson with a ten-year-old boy. We had a conversation, read a few pages of George’s Marvellous Medicine, then did a matching exercise of opposite adjectives. He said he was happy to come back. (His mother told me he was apprehensive before tonight’s lesson.)

I didn’t mention that ten days ago I watched the men’s final of the US Open, between Carlos Alcaraz and Casper Ruud. The new generation. A great match, and 19-year-old Alcaraz (the winner in four sets) looks like being a superstar in the making, if he hasn’t already got there. I was hoping Ruud would win, as looked likely when he twice held set point in a long 12th game at the end of the third set. The match really hinged on those moments. Alcaraz had played a succession of marathon matches to reach the final and looked tired, but when he escaped and dominated the tie-break, he could make a dash to the finish line.

Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Tiresome talk

September 19, 2022 by 0 Comments

I played tennis tonight. We’d booked the court till eight, and it was getting pretty dark by then. Seeing the crows fly overhead made me miss living in that part of town. Where I am now is fine, but being in the centre was quite magical, especially at the beginning.

Yesterday morning I had a Skype conversation with my parents before cycling to Dumbrăvița for my lessons. What started out as a pleasant chat about the little one morphed into anti-woke diatribe by Dad. I find the whole thing, on both sides, extremely tiresome. I’m not woke in the slightest and I find some of the newfangled linguistic innovations jarring to say the least, but it isn’t something I can get worked up about. Sure, it all seems a little odd to me, and I imagine it seems a great deal odder to someone 30 years older than me, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Dad was likening the woke movement to flat-earth or anti-vax, which is a false equivalence because those fly in the face of well-established facts. Being requested to call someone “they” instead of “he” or “she” might annoy you; being opposed to vaccines actively kills people. What I find interesting is the most vehemently anti-woke people are those least affected. It’s like my parents’ regular complaints about all the Maori words on the TV and radio. Perhaps it has gone too far – I don’t live in NZ anymore so I don’t really know – but Mum doesn’t meet a Maori from one year to the next, and the last time I checked she didn’t even know what a koha was.

Something Mum complained of yesterday was the majority having to “kowtow” to minorities. Well Mum, being in the majority does give you significant inbuilt advantages which you’ve probably never even taken the time to consider, and giving some of that back once in a while to those less fortunate seems pretty reasonable to me. These sorts of discussions aren’t easy for me – although I get on well with my parents, we don’t really inhabit the same world. (My brother’s world is closer, so he probably doesn’t have the same issues.) My parents are about to buy a brand new electric car. Dad recently sold a painting for something close to what I’ll spend on my next car if I buy one. We’re orders of magnitude apart. (On the subject of advantages, as an immigrant to Romania from a richer country, I have certain privileges here. It’s important to be aware of them.)

I hope I can get back to baby talk in my next conversation with Mum and Dad. Covid was great for my relationship with them, when I look back. It affected everybody, and we were in agreement on masks, vaccines, the lot.

I took second place in a poker tournament earlier today. I was lucky to get that far, but having reached the heads-up stage it’s a bit of a mystery how I didn’t win. I’m still down a little for September, which has been a torrid month. I got absolutely nowhere in any of the three WCOOP tournaments I played.

Poker - Politics - Tennis - Travel: Romania

The intrigue awaits

September 7, 2022 by 0 Comments

I haven’t really been following the US Open, but early this morning I saw the end of the quarter-final betwen Nick Kyrgios and Karen Khachanov. Kyrgios dominated the fourth-set tie-break to take the match into a rip-roaring fifth – these two players don’t mess around – but he dropped serve in the opening game of the decider after playing a tweener, and Khachanov was able to cling onto his service games despite a low first-serve percentage. The Russian, who was allowed the compete under a neutral flag, won the final set 6-4 to make the semis of a grand slam for the first time. The match finished at 1am local time. With Nadal and Medvedev out, there will be a new men’s grand slam champion no matter who wins. Kyrgios said he was devastated at losing; the draw had really opened up for him.

I didn’t have a great time at the virtual poker tables last night. I bombed out of the WCOOP single draw after an hour and a quarter. I’d been hovering at or just above my starting stack for a while, but then called a huge bet, which I probably should have folded, with my big but sub-monster hand. I was shown 85432, the fifth-best hand in the game. That all but ended my participation. My saving grace was that I’d qualified via a satellite, so it only cost me a dollar or so. I’ll hopefully try my hand at a couple more of these WCOOP thingies.

As I mentioned last time, Britain now has a new prime minister. It’s surely a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. In Boris Johnson’s leaving speech he compared himself to Roman or Greek gods, one or the other. It was all about him. He’s an egomaniac, pure and simple. He became more and more Trump-like during his time in office. Like Trump he was desperate for the power but had no interest in using it in a positive way, and he seemed totally devoid of empathy. And just like Trump, we might not have seen the last of him. But now, Liz Truss. Seriously. She appears to know bugger all about anything, and has already filled her cabinet with sycophants who know the same amount – a bunch of I’m-all-right-Jack climate-change deniers. A torrid winter is around the corner, and Britain will probably muddle through it and come out the other end in one piece, but it will be despite the country’s politicians, not because of them. I hope this lot get dumped out at the next election.

I’ll be off into the mountains, or sort of, just after lunchtime. Călin, one of the friends of the tennis crew – he works as a taxi driver – will pick me up. The drive will take about three hours. I’ll be staying three nights in a village called Blăjeni, near Brad. All the pictures I see of the area look extremely bucolic and beautiful. I’ve been given a list of food not to bring; yesterday I made a plum crumble and a pizza to take along. There are a load of unknowns around cooking and eating and sleeping and whatnot, but that all adds to the intrigue, I suppose.

Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis - The UK

What’s in a name?

September 5, 2022 by 0 Comments

Any day now I’ll be an uncle. They’re keeping everything a surprise. Even on the subject of names, I’ve heard nary a whisper. That strikes me as a little odd, because names matter. They’re part of one’s identity. Take, for instance, Nina Nannar, one of the reporters on the local news when I was at university. She was teased mercilessly at school over her name (what were her parents thinking?) but when she got married she found that her identity was so wrapped up in her name that she kept the Nannar! My brother also has alliterative names, and though they don’t make it to anything like Nina’s level, they give his name a don’t-mess-with-me simplicity. As for my name, I lack double initials, but my first and last names are close alphabetically, so I know my place (so to speak) even when the sorting is done by first name, as seemed to be common in my employee days. My full first name has a high letter count. When I was little I thought it was great (Look! I can write my whole name!), but later all those letters just became a pain. In Romania, middle names garner a bit more attention, so all my ID cards and bank cards and various bits of paper have my (much shorter) middle name on them too. Sometimes I wish that could have been my first name instead. But in truth my name is fine; my parents chose well.

I had a chat to my brother last night. He was pretty peeved by our parents’ lack of enthusiasm at their upcoming trip. “If they’re only going to spend a few days with us, what’s the point? It’s been four years. I don’t think they give a shit, honestly.” I’m more inclined than him to give them the benefit of the doubt. They aren’t young anymore, and Dad has been spooked by Covid. My brother is still bitter about my parents emigrating to New Zealand in the first place, and that’s something I don’t really get. We were grown men (23 and 22) by that stage. My brother had even been to Iraq. They could do what they liked. And Mum’s teaching at that same school was making her stressed and unhappy. Another ten years of that and I’d dread to think.

My teaching room now has yellow walls. There is no Resene in Romania which is just as well. That must be one of the biggest rip-offs in NZ. Their stores have play areas to encourage customers to browse even longer at vastly overpriced tins of paint on shelves where they pretty much spam you with eleven near-identical hues of ochre called Omaha Sands or some other crap. And several hundred dollars later, you’re out the door, ready to paint the dream. Anyway, there were two only yellows available to me, an insipid one and a bright one. I went for the bright one, fearing it would be sort of tennis-ball shade, but it’s about what I was aiming for, so that’s nice. It took a while, though.

Tennis. Only one session this weekend because the courts were soaking on Saturday following a heavy downpour. We started a bit earlier though, so we got two hours in before the light faded. Last weekend was interesting; there was a woman who lives in Sydney with her boyfriend and was back for a short time in her native Romania. I played with her against Domnul Sfâra, who isn’t far off ninety (!), and a teenage girl. My partner hadn’t played much. In a slightly comedic set we got to 4-4, at which point Domnul Sfâra asked if we could play a tie-break. We did, and when we reached 8-8 the old man asked to come off the court. We persuaded him to stay for what might have only been two more points, and we eventually lost the tie-break 11-9. Another funny thing (in a different set): that teenage girl managed to a serve four aces in a single 16-point game.

I’m going away the day after tomorrow. It’ll be somewhere near Brad. I’ve had to cancel and rearrange lessons, which is always a pain, but seeing some new scenery and getting to speak Romanian for three days straight will make up for that.

Poker. I played some tournaments on Friday and Saturday and got absolutely nowhere. Tomorrow I’ll have a go at the $11 WCOOP single draw. The structure could be better, but I’ll try my best in what probably won’t be a star-studded field.

In the UK, I’ve just heard that Liz Truss will be the new prime minister. Man the lifeboats.

Language learning - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - Tennis - The UK

What do you really do?

August 21, 2022 by 0 Comments

My 14-year-old student has just resumed maths lessons with me, and after this morning’s algebra session in Dumbrăvița I met my English friend for lunch at Casa Bunicii, a restaurant just down the road. He and his girlfriend had just got back from a six-week road trip around central and eastern Europe. A storm had been brewing for a while, and as I cycled back home I got soaked to the bone but happily avoided being struck by lightning. I’m glad that the temperature has dropped after another sweltering few days.

The day I got back from my trip, I called Barclays because my bank card didn’t work in the UK. After an interminable wait, the call centre woman told me that my account had been closed because of Brexit. As a non-resident I can no longer have an account over there. “Are there any funds in your account?” Yes! I have, or had, five figures in there. She was looking at a blank screen. How can they do this? In 2022, in a supposedly civilised country, they can just disappear your account. (Bad grammar, I know.) I now have to go through a laborious process, lasting possibly three months, to hopefully get my money back.

I started with a new student on Tuesday. He wanted to start from scratch, in other words learn English in Romanian. Explaining English concepts in Romanian is no easy task for me. He seems to have a decent brain on him, and at least it was face-to-face and not online. He asked one question though that I get a lot. “What to you do for a job?” I do this. I teach English. “No, what to you really do, other than teach English?” People have a hard time believing that don’t also work for Bosch or something. A real job.

I’ve been trying to learn some Italian, in the hope that I’ll one day travel to a part of Italy where the locals are at the English level of my latest student. The good news is the internet is brimming with Italian resources, and I’ve even got a pretty handy grammar book. And it’s one notch down from Romanian in terms of complexity. The bad news is that it’s so easy to mix up Italian with Romanian, especially the simple stuff. Mai for instance means “never” in Italian, while in Romanian it means “more”. Many words end in i in both languages, but while in Italian the final i gets its full value, in Romanian it’s often a very short sound that can be close to inaudible. And so on.

Thinking about a hypothetical Birmingham-based heavy metal museum (I discussed this with my friend over there), in 2015 I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, one of many highlights of the city. At the Hall of Fame I clearly remember a woman in her twenties, who might have been autistic but it’s hard to tell, in her element and almost overcome by joy at being there. Seeing her living that dream gave me considerable pleasure.

No tennis today. The courts are waterlogged. I got two sessions in – both singles again – last weekend. After Saturday’s session I led 6-0, 2-2; the first set score flattered me as four of the games went to deuce. Sunday was a different story as I struggled to win the big points. I did hold on to win the first set 6-4, but then I fell 4-0 behind in the second. That’s a big hole to climb out of. I won the next two games, then the game after – which ended up being our last – was truly brutal. It must have gone eight deuces at least. It’s rare that I remember a specific shot in tennis – the game is nothing like golf in that respect – but as I held break point he came to the net and I put up a lob that landed in his backhand corner. Not only did my 60-year-old opponent retrieve it, which was impressive enough, but he hit a clean winner from it. It bounced so high that there simply wasn’t room between the baseline and the fence. I’ll remember that one for a while. On the last point, another break point, I lobbed him once again and he got that back too, but several shots later I was able to win the point. It’s a shame time ran out on us; 6-4, 3-4 is an interesting scenario to be in.

Family - International travel - Photos - Tennis - The UK - Travel: Europe

Getting away — part 1 of 5

August 11, 2022 by 0 Comments

It’s been a while, but after two weeks away, I’m back.

On the Sunday before I left, I felt a sense of foreboding about my trip that I can’t remember feeling before. Things were bound to go horribly wrong. I played tennis that evening – singles once again – and finished (from my perspective) at 6-3, 6-3, 2-4. In the first set I led 5-0 with a set point in the next game, then my opponent started to play. At 5-3, 15-15 (shit! I’m going to lose this set now, after being up five-love), Domnul Sfâra arrived, and that perhaps knocked my opponent off his stride just enough for me. Tiredness, that near-permanent fatigue I’d been feeling, really hit me towards the end of our session. Monday was a busy day of lessons and goodbyes and finding some gender-neutral shoes for the new addition. I wasn’t able to get the made-in-Romania shoes delivered in time, so I bought some Reebok trainers with a friendly face drawn on the tongue; the woman at the checkout asked me if they were for a cat. And then I was off.

I had tons of time for my flight, but needed it all. When your previous flight was in a different epoch, expect the unexpected. I wore a mask to be on the safe side, mainly because of my heavily pregnant sister-in-law. At the airport I met a Frenchman in his seventies who had arrived too early and was in a state of anxiety and confusion. I empathised with him; the airport was full of information that was out of date or misleading or only partially correct. Signs abounded pointing to destinations that you could fly to from Timișoara ten years ago, which might as well have been the Eocene. Timișoara still has one of those delightful split-flap displays which are a dying breed. Whenever a flight takes off or lands, everything has to move up a row, and there’s something poetic about watching all those letters and digits flickety-flack into place every few minutes. If nothing else, the flick-flack noise attracts one’s attention like no video board ever could, unless it is designed to mimic the sound. (In Milan I saw a video board that did just that.) Anyway, I tried to help the Frenchman, apologising for my broken French. Once through security (and yes, I’m almost guaranteed a pat-down of some sort) we all had to stand on the staircase for what seemed like hours. I realised I’d become almost allergic to crowds.

We were delayed by an hour or so, but the flight itself was uneventful, and soon I was in the afternoon heat of Bergamo. I eventually gave up on finding a bus to my B&B on the outskirts of the city, and took an expensive (by my standards) taxi instead. I spoke some simple Italian with the taxi driver, making four languages for the day. (There was no point speaking Italian with virtually anyone else. In that part of northern Italy, it seemed anyone under fifty had more than a decent command of English.) The woman at the B&B was very pleasant. The place was like a farmhouse on the edge of the countryside, and it was popular with cyclists. I slept well but still felt tired the next morning. I had a hearty breakfast (I always appreciate that second B), called my parents, sent my brother a birthday message for his 41st, then made it up the hill to the very picturesque old town. I walked up the famous bell tower, eschewing the lift, making sure I’d reach the top just before the half-hour bell tolled. However, on reaching the top I’d forgotten all about that (this wasn’t the last time on my trip that I felt my age) and I got quite a shock two minutes later. Bonngg!! For a couple of hours I wandered around the old town, or high town as it was otherwise known, grabbing the odd coffee and gelato. I was grateful that it wasn’t so hot. I walked into the new town but found surprisingly little of interest there, so then I trekked back to the B&B.


The next morning after another breakfast where I had the works, I checked out of my relaxing accommodation and got a free bus ride to the city centre because I couldn’t figure out how to pay. I read my book – Anxious People by Fredrik Backman – by the fountains near the railway station until the dot of twelve when sprinklers for the plants suddenly came on and got me soaked. I soon dried off, and I was back on the bus to the airport. Bergamo Airport is modern and surprisingly big, considering the small size of the city. Evidently they’ve turned Bergamo into a hub of sorts. There were automated Covid-hangover toilets that barred you from entering at a certain level of occupancy. I thought I had ages before boarding, but I had an unexpectedly long hike to reach my gate. Two hours later I landed at Stansted, where my brother and sister-in-law picked me up in her almost-new Mazda, which must be a work car. (I panicked initially because we couldn’t find each other and every minute was precious. The parking fee – already exorbitant – became stratospheric after 15 minutes.) It was a real pleasure to see them again, and in three hours on the M-something and the A-something I was at their new house just outside Poole. My brother had changed – mellowed – since I saw him previously. I gave them the trainers which they put in the baby room next to the cot and pram and car seat and who knows what else.

Family - Politics - Tennis

He must be on the spectrum!

July 12, 2022 by 0 Comments

I saw yesterday’s Wimbledon final. Or rather I saw about 85% of it, because I watched it on Eurosport which has ads during changeovers, and a lot happens in the changeovers when Nick Kyrgios is playing. He played very well and in entertaining fashion as always, but Djokovic started to zone in on the return of serve, made Kyrgios move, and wore him down in the end. There wasn’t much in it though. I find it interesting that some people say Kyrgios is on the autistic spectrum. I see no sign of that – it’s become fashionable of late to say that anyone who behaves unusually is on the spectrum. He certainly does have demons that are not entirely within his control, not least an ego as big as his serve. He hasn’t matured enough to accept genuine defeat. He always has to fall back on the support crew or the umpires or the line judges or a drunk woman in the crowd or his opponent taking too long, so he doesn’t have to suffer the pain of really losing. It’s hard to say if Kyrgios will kick on from this success (reaching the final of Wimbledon and losing a close match to maybe the greatest of all time absolutely is a success) because he’s so inconsistent. Even in this tournament he almost lost to an unknown Brit in the first round. (Paul Jubb nearly jubbed him, going down 7-5 in the fifth set.) As for Djokovic, he’s now won four Wimbledons in a row and seven overall, tying Sampras who was the undisputed master of grass in the nineties.

During the third set of yesterday’s final, my tennis partner called me to say that it was raining at his place, 3 km from me, so we’d have to cancel. There wasn’t the merest dribble of rain here. Yeah, you just want to watch the end of the match, don’t you? This morning I went down to the courts and hit against the wall for an hour. A few years ago my father got somebody in Timaru to copy the family cine film that my grandfather took between 1963 and 1983 onto CDs. It starts in Italy when my grandfather was stationed there, but most of the footage is from the UK; my brother and I make cameo appearances right at the end. After my wall session I took my copy of the CD, which I can’t play, to a copy shop and the man put it on a flash drive for me. It’s great to have it, even if the film quality isn’t the same as the original cine film. My only complaint is the music which is a total mismatch with the film; I have to turn it off.

Going back to autism, my UK-based student said that one of his colleagues is almost certainly on the autistic spectrum. His home is apparently a menagerie of birds, bats and squirrels, and he has a habit of saying the first thing that comes into his head, offending people in the process, to the point where he’s been moved to an individual office. Now that sounds like somebody on the spectrum.

Boris Johnson. Is he on the spectrum? I doubt it. He is – was – just desperate to hang on to the job that has been his divine right since he was about eight years old. He has dealt well with the war in Ukraine, but everything else has been a mess. His resignation speech showed no contrition whatsoever. Good riddance. But who’s to say his replacement won’t be as bad? We might soon have a new name to learn to pronounce. I’m guessing Tom Tugendhat’s last name, which looks German, isn’t pronounced “tug end hat”. Penny Mordaunt’s surname is intriguing; it surely means “biter” and has kept an old spelling. Does the pronunciation of the final syllable follow the pattern of “daunt”? Or is it like “aunt”? It’s neither; apparently it’s just a schwa, so Mordaunt rhymes with “concordant” or “discordant”, whichever might be more appropriate.

I thought Japan was almost gun-free, but no, Shinzo Abe was assassinated last Friday with a homemade gun. He was a great leader, whatever you thought of him, and he was about the only leader who could make some sense of Donald Trump.