Tennis

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.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker - Tennis - Travel: Europe

Shame one of them has to win

July 11, 2022 by 0 Comments

It’s about time I wrote again, but what’s actually happened? I’ve booked some accommodation in Bergamo, so that’s something to look forward to. Vespas and Bambinas, or should I say Vespe e Bambine. I need to brush up my Italian. I still haven’t planned my stay in the UK. Where and when will I see my brother? And what about my friend in Birmingham?

I’ve got two new students. One of them is at a low level – not a problem, but as far as I can tell, he’s never learned how to learn. He reminds me of the Burmese refugee I taught in Wellington before coming over here. That guy left school at twelve to work on fishing boats; my current student probably stayed in the education system a bit longer, but he doesn’t have a handle on what to learn in what order. Sometimes he comes out with stuff like “Him tomorrow say me,” and he’ll keep repeating the same garbled phrase over and over, seemingly thinking that if he says it enough times it’ll magically become correct. Then he’ll ask me how to say something complex that requires a range of tenses. He’s a roofer and wants to work in Scandinavia. I’m pleased that he has the motivation and enthusiasm to have lessons with me, and I hope I can get him to learn more systematically. The other new student is a very pleasant woman in her mid-thirties who lives in Bucharest. She’s about to start a new job which requires a lot more English.

There’s a lot of talk and WhatsApping in this apartment block about gas installation and central heating. We should soon get a gas pipe fitted that will heat the whole block from top to bottom, like I had in the other place. I rarely needed central heating there. Somebody from the gas company came in and took some measurements, and he’s come back with a quote for NZ$5000 (£2500) to put gas central heating in my flat. My worry is that when we get to winter, the price of gas will be so high that I won’t dare use it.

When I moved in, I only got one set of keys. At least one more set is out there, somewhere, but I’ve never seen them. (The vendor has been massively unhelpful here.) On Friday, the old lady who lives on the first floor took me to the key shop on Piața Traian, a very Romanian outfit which you got to via a courtyard. The key lady had two dogs, including a female Rottweiler – I think – who was happily sleeping on the floor. She cut both my front door keys and made a replacement intercom swipe thingy, but when I got home one of the front door keys didn’t fit and the swipe thing didn’t work either. Two trips later and I got the other front door key to fit but still no luck with the intercom doohickey, so next week I’ll go somewhere else and see if I can get that sorted.

The men’s final at Wimbledon is almost upon us. I’m playing singles tennis later, so if the match goes beyond three sets I won’t see the end of it. What a line-up. An anti-vax super-spreader against an egomaniac. A bully. There were kids like Kyrgios when I was at school. Both finalists are extraordinary talents, however, and you can’t take your eyes off Kyrgios when he plays. You never know what’s coming next. Djokovic is the clear favourite, but it wouldn’t be massive shock if Kyrgios was to win. He’ll be insufferable if he does. There was quite a turnaround in yesterday’s women’s final where Rybakina grabbed the match by the scruff of the neck in set two; her hold from 0-40 in 3-2 in the third was the key to her victory over Ons Jabeur, who I hoped would win. Yesterday’s men’s doubles final was a belter of a match. A slow burner you might say, not because of the tennis but because the players were largely unknown and the crowd didn’t fully get into it until the later stages. I was hoping the super tie-break could be avoided, but no such luck. The Australian pairing, who had saved five match points in their semi-final, won the shoot-out 10-2 – a procession in the end, after an encounter that had been on a knife-edge throughout.

Poker. I haven’t mentioned that for ages because it’s way down my priority list. I had one win at the end of May, and since then I’ve had a torrid time, playing 35 tournaments without making the top three once. It should be easier to snag a podium position now that the fields are smaller because the Russians are gone – they were rightly kicked out shortly after the war started – but things just haven’t happened for me. I just need to be patient.

The temperature has dropped from the high 30s to something bearable. I might write again tomorrow and talk about the crazy business with Boris.

Family - Life :) - Tennis

Building up

June 20, 2022 by 0 Comments

It’s proper aroma-filled summer now; it’s almost the longest day. Luckily we haven’t quite been swamped by the heat wave that enveloped countries further west, though today we’re forecast to hit 34, which is plenty hot enough. The kids have started their very long summer holidays – they get almost three months here – so some of them are taking a break from English lessons.

Yesterday Mark, the teacher at British School, came over to my new flat. Then we had some beers at a bar near the market. It was nice to show him a part of Timișoara that he hadn’t yet explored. He and his girlfriend are heading off today on a seven-week tour of Europe. Lucky them.

My big project in the last few days has been creating a new board game. The theme is skyscrapers; players have to accumulate resources such as steel, concrete and glass, and then start building. It has three versions – Chicago-based, New York-based, and international. The tallest, most resource-heavy buildings score the most. There will be occasional “shocks” such as earthquakes or landslides or stolen metal (yes, you can steal steel). It took me a while to research just how many tons of steel were required to build Sears Tower and all the other buildings I’ll be using in the game, how deep the foundations were, and so on. This week I hope to try the game out on one of my long-time teenage students. I’ll be on safe territory with him; even if it’s a complete flop – which it could be – he won’t hate me for it.

On Saturdays I always have a funny online lesson with a 24-year-old guy who lives near Cluj. He works in IT and wants to become a contractor. We’ve been practising interviews, and last time he got me to ask him some industry-specific questions that he had prepared. I didn’t have a clue what I was saying. To one question he replied by saying he used some software called Hamcrest. Hmm, I like that name. Where does it come from? I went to the Hamcrest site, whose logo is a surfer guy riding a wave of sliced ham, and I could deduce that the name is an anagram of “matchers”, but what they’re matching I have no idea. In the top-right corner of the Hamcrest site is an invitation to “fork me on GitHub” which reminds me of a a few days into my first real job when, out of the blue, a colleague asked if he could grab my dongle.

I managed a pair of two-hour tennis sessions over the weekend, and in both of them we played two against one, taking it in turns to play as the one.

Last week Dad had a check-up on his aortic valve, which he had replaced in 2005. Apparently there’s a gap where there shouldn’t be, and they’ll need to monitor it. I was worried that he’d need urgent surgery and my parents would be cancelling their trip to Europe once again.

Life :) - Politics - Tennis - The UK

A mix of old and new (including pictures)

June 7, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a phone call. It was a woman from the mattress company. She spoke so damn fast at the beginning that I almost blacked out. After all this time, Romanian on the phone can still be a real challenge for me.

Right now I’m living in a near-permanent state of fatigue. I don’t know if it’s the heat, the stress related to the move, the regular bike rides, or some combination. I don’t feel refreshed even after a full night’s sleep. Maybe I really need this new mattress.

I had a chat with my brother on Sunday. They still had the bunting out for the jubilee. It’s obvious that he’s had enough of life in the army. All the early starts and pointless trips are getting to him. Amazingly he’s started a correspondence university course in – I think – business management. He says he’ll finish it in 18 months. My sister-in-law, who is expanding, was more upbeat. Mum keeps referring to her future grandson as Herbie, which was the name of a guinea pig we used to have. (We don’t even know what it’ll be yet. It’s still an it.)

After being booed at the jubilee, Boris Johnson survived his confidence vote last night, but a whopping 41% of his Tory colleagues voted against him. His supporters – a bunch of overgrown schoolboys – banged their desks in unison on learning the result. A good result for the country, Boris said. In the medium and long term, I hope he’s right. A divided party with a lame-duck leader that staggers on to the next election, then gets well and truly stuffed. The UK ends up with a coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems, and the SNP. They introduce proportional representation. That would be good for the country.

Shortly before the jubilee celebrations, the British government announced that pounds and ounces and other imperial measurements could be making a comeback, not that they’ve totally gone away. I’ve always quite liked imperial measurements because they’re batshit mad and much more fun to say than the metric versions. I recently got one of my students to read a simplified version of Alice in Wonderland in which Alice’s heights had been converted into metres and centimetres, and it felt like we’d been transported to a lab. I still remember Dad (“you can’t even see those silly millimetres”) ordering sheets of glass for his paintings in inches, one by one, over the phone. “Twenty-four and five-eighths by seventeen and three-quarters.” The person on the other end would repeat the dimensions back to him, and the whole thing took on a poetic quality, a bit like the BBC shipping forecast. But, after being taught in metric and living all those years in New Zealand, and now Romania where non-metric is almost unheard of, it’s obvious that metric is far superior for doing actual calculations and when you’ve got to, you know, do business internationally. Going back to imperial would quite clearly be crazy.

The shipping forecast, read four times a day on Radio 4, has a place in British culture. It follows a strict format that hasn’t changed in decades, running through the evocative names of the shipping areas – 31 in all – always going round the British Isles clockwise in the same order: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, and so on. I liked listening to it as a kid, and I still remember the warnings of “hurricane force 12” in the storm of October 1987. It’s still popular today, even if it’s far less in demand, thanks to the internet. It reminds you that you’re part of something far bigger, that there are people out there exposed to the high seas, not in air-conditioned offices. Regular listeners get to know the announcers. I tuned in over the weekend and listened to a forecast read by Neil Nunes, who has quite a wonderful deep voice. He comes from Jamaica and started at the BBC in 2006. Apparently some rather bigoted listeners complained at the time that his voice wasn’t British enough. The late-night forecast is preceded by Sailing By, a beautiful song. (YouTube comments are nearly always awful, but the ones for Sailing By are delightful.) Other maritime countries, like New Zealand, have shipping forecasts too, but they don’t have the cultural signficance of the British one. The shipping areas are rattled off in a great 1994 song by Blur called This is a Low. Damon Albarn, whom I’ve seen live, likes referencing the sea in his songs.

After Saturday’s washout, I played tennis on Sunday. It was a hot one, and I was relieved to be playing doubles and not singles. They had some kind of party on the beach volleyball courts next door, with music that I found almost unbearable. I partnered a 14-year-old girl against two men, and we played a heck of a set lasting roughly an hour. Following numerous deuce games, we got to 6-6 but then fell 6-1 behind in the tie-break. We saved four set points but my error on the fifth was the last shot of the set. We had to call it a day at 2-2 in the second set. After that we picked sour cherries from the laden tree next to the courts. It’s a great time for fruit right now.

As promised last time, here are some pictures.

I took this picture on Saturday night. Magda, on her 58th birthday, with Domnul Sfâra, 87.
A last picture of Piața Victoriei on the day I left for good.
A game of backgammon at Piața Lipovei. You can also see the egg and coffee machines.
A law firm. The two names are identical, just that one (Kovacs) is written in the original Hungarian way while the other (Covaci) has been Romanianised.
An old, and small, Pegas bicycle at the supermarket yesterday. This dates from communist times when these were virtually the only bikes around. In the last few years, modern Pegas bikes have come on the market, though they’re no longer made in Romania.
Buying property - Life :) - Tennis - The UK

Finding my bearings

June 5, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’m still at the disorientation – “Where does this go?” – stage of living in my new flat, and with none of the bells or clattering trams to fix me in either time or space. Instead of the early-morning trams shuttling workers to their six-till-two shifts in factories that make car headlamps or foam products, I now hear trucks that could be carrying anything anywhere. On the plus side, I hear more birds, and the location honestly isn’t bad. There are tram lines just out of earshot, the river is close by, and the big market, nestled among the old Austro-Hungarian buildings, is only a five-minute bike ride from here. Inside, it’s a mishmash of eighties bathrooms with old-style cisterns and chains, seemingly endless Ikea-like wardrobe space, and modern appliances that won’t stop beeping at me. Yes, OK, OK, give me a minute. This apartment block is one of half a dozen in what you might call a pod; in the centre of the pod is a car park which, as well as functioning cars, contains walnut trees, two abandoned souped-up VW Beetles, and a farm vehicle long out of commission. My particular block was built in around 1980 and comprises ten flats. My deeds, or whatever you call them here, tell me that I own 12.78% of the block, so more than my fair share, and as I potter about the place I get regular reminders that I have much more space than I need, especially now when all my lessons are either online or at my students’ places. It isn’t as bad on that score as my flat in Wellington; when I returned from my trip to America on a wintry September day in 2015, I almost burst into tears at how empty and lifeless it seemed. The good news is that I’m less exposed financially than when I bought my Wellington apartment, so even the worst-case scenario won’t kill me, assuming no Russian bombs descend on this city. On Friday I bought some home and contents insurance (with a war exclusion, of course) and ordered a mattress made here in Timișoara.

Yesterday my tennis was called off for the third time running. I’d only just left on my bike when it started to bucket it down. I stood under a tree for a while and then went to my neighbours’ (Florin and Magda’s) place back at the old block. I caught the end of Iga Świątek’s crushing win over Coco Gauff in the final of Roland Garros on their TV, and then we went to the restaurant by the river. It was a balmy evening and the rain had stopped. Not until people started turning up out of nowhere did I realise that the get-together was to celebrate Magda’s birthday. People chatted, and sometimes I was fully involved in the conversation while at other times I was trying desperately to tune in. (That’s not far off what happens, at best, in my own language.) I had some traditional Romanian food – that means meat – and three beers, which is a lot for me these days. I got home at about 10:30.

Jubilee celebrations are still going on in the UK, and that’s mostly what my parents wanted to talk about this morning. Mum said that 70 years on the throne is an incredible achievement. (As all it involves is not dying when you have the best healthcare imaginable, I’m unconvinced.) My brother’s house is apparently decked out in bunting. Although I’m no royalist (I’m agnostic – I really don’t care), I can hardly blame people for wanting a party (whatever the reason) after two years of lockdowns and not being able to get vital surgery or see their sick relatives. I emailed my friend in Birmingham (no royalist either) to ask how his long jubilee weekend was going, and I got a pretty clear meh in reply. Little sign of bunting around his way. I’m detecting a pretty strong north–south (or east–west) divide.

The French Open has been great from a tennis point of view, but the organisation has been lacking at times. I don’t like the way they’ve tried to make it more like the Australian and US Opens with night sessions starting ridiculously late. Some of the play has been sublime, but even when I was watching Nadal come up with an extraordinary passing shot at set point down against Sascha Zverev, I found myself pining for those women’s finals in the nineties, when people were smoking in the stands and you could tell that it was the French Open. Now it could be almost anywhere. I expected Djokovic to beat Nadal in their quarter-final, which at times threatened to outdo their famous Australian Open final. Zverev’s ankle injury in his match with Nadal was excruciating even to watch. Nadal got out of jail twice there (first by robbing Zverev of the opening set, and then being saved from a six-hour-plus match); he’s a huge favourite in the final against Casper Ruud.

Next time: some pictures.