Tennis

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.

Buying property - Tennis

That’s rubbish! (and 28/5/22)

May 28, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve done it. I’m fully here now. Weirdly, or perhaps not, this feels far less exciting than moving into my rented flat did 5½ years ago. That was a new beginning, a thrilling adventure, the first man on the moon. Something I wanted to do. This feels like an obligation.

I managed to get the remote control gizmo off Bogdan (the handyman) last night, so I’d be able to open the barrier for when the removal men came this morning. They’d obviously got a bit lost on the way. Should I ring them, or should I leave it for a bit? One of dozens of tiny decisions over the last few weeks that have been magnified as a result of having nobody to discuss them with. Eventually three men (the boss and his two younger assistants) arrived in an aging white Fiat van. The boss started going on about gunoi. Rubbish. You’ll have to pay extra for us to aruncăm (that means throw away) all that gunoi, because if we just dump it somewhere we’ll get an amendă (a fine). What?! I’d given them two addresses. Pick up from A, deliver to B. No gunoi. Zero bloody gunoi. I thought I’d made that clear. On the phone he’d quoted me 450 lei, and now he wanted to charge me 800. Eventually they agreed to shift my stuff for 550 lei (the best part of NZ$200 or £100). I’m pretty sure I got shafted because of my foreignness, but what could I do? I had very little furniture – it was mostly just bags and boxes – and as expected they moved it all in no time. Then the boss went on about having seven children and no money and could I help him because he hadn’t eaten for ages and so on and so forth. This is Romania, everybody.

Tonight I met my landlord and handed him the keys to the old place, putting the final full stop on that chapter of my life. In the last two weeks I’ve felt worn down with all the biking to and fro and dealing with things I don’t understand and eating stodgy fast food and wishing I could return to the simple life I had when I moved into the old flat. (In truth it probably wasn’t simpler, but my enthusiasm, which is lacking now, got me through.) I’ve also had a whole ton of online cancellations in the last week.

Simona Halep suffered a panic attack at the French Open yesterday, losing a three-setter that she probably would have won in two otherwise. Back in 2001 I had two panic attacks on the tennis court, and I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy. (It didn’t help that at the time I didn’t know what they were.)

Tomorrow would have been my grandmother’s 100th birthday. It’s also four years since my brother got married and my aunt and uncle came to visit me. Happy memories.

Buying property - Poker - Tennis

Half here, half there

May 26, 2022 by 0 Comments

This is my first blog post from my new flat. I don’t feel I’m fully here yet, because a lot of my stuff is still back at the old place. Finding some movers has proven harder than buying the damn flat in the first place. Either they quote some exorbitant price, probably because they think ka-ching as soon as I open my mouth, or they refuse entirely, or they say they’ll get back with a quote but never do. Maybe, with a bit of luck, the move will happen on Friday. Then I can set myself up here properly.

It’s been a tiring last ten days with all the beetling backwards and forwards (as Dad would say) between this place and the old one, and my face-to-face lessons that now take longer to get to than before. There has been a whole battalion of flashing orange men to contend with along the way. The new flat is far more kitted out than the old one, with swanky appliances that want to have a relationship with me. Leave me alone, will you? This place is several degrees cooler than the old one, and I almost froze during my first night here.

The only time I was able to relax was on Saturday night when I had some drinks with the tennis crew. That was after my singles match with Florin which I won 7-5 6-0 after being 4-1 down. I was so sluggish at the start of the match. I’ve been invited to someone’s holiday home in Brad (or somewhere in that vicinity) in early September. I’m looking forward to the total Romanian immersion if nothing else.

I could only find the time to play one poker tournament in the SCOOP series and that was tonight’s $11 badugi. It wasn’t a damp squib so much as a sodden one. I got knocked out on only my 30th hand without winning a single one. A shame because it was eight-handed and had decent-length 12-minute levels, but I kept missing and my opponents didn’t and that was that. Nothing I could have done.

I only had one eye on the Australian election. It was a great illustration of how preferential voting works, and yippee, they got rid of the bastards. Then today there has been absolutely horrific news out of Texas. Nineteen children and two teachers killed. Right now I’m reading more “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” bullshit. It’s too messed up for words.

Buying property - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

The bells are tolling on my old flat

May 16, 2022 by 0 Comments

This morning I got the keys. After eight months or so of looking at apartments that mostly have views of other apartments, this bit has all happened at breakneck speed. As long as you’ve got the money, nobody cares. It really is just like buying a car. Or a shaorma. My brother was amazed when I told him how fast the process is here (in the UK it really drags on) and it was actually at least twice as quick as I told him it would be.

After getting the keys I called my parents and gave them a Skype tour of the flat on my phone. They were remarkably impressed, and not at all bored by my showing them every room in minute detail. At 81 square metres it’s plenty big enough for one person, and it’s amazingly well kitted out, right down to lime green cutlery that matches the kitchen cupboards. Initially I’ll have to buy very little. The only thing that’s semi-urgent, living-wise, is a new mattress on at least one of the two beds. My teaching room will require some thought and a little expense.

I panicked a bit last Wednesday when I tried to pay the vendor online and was met with a bewildering array of fields that I didn’t know how to fill in. I got to the bank when it opened the next morning, and the lady was so helpful. She even laughed at the bank account code – ROBU, which probably stands for Romanian Banks United or something, but is also the name of the ex-mayor of Timișoara. She really put my mind at ease. Sometimes nothing beats a real human being. I say sometimes, because in Romania there’s no guarantee that you’ll get that level of service; it was my lucky day.

A couple of work highlights of a very warm second week of May come to mind. First, I did a longish translation from Romanian to English that included a 105-word behemoth of a sentence. So much translation out of Romanian involves gutting crazy-long sentences. Second, I contacted Macmillan to see if they still had the audio of a lovely podcast interview from 2007 of somebody called Boris who does consultancy work but whose dream job is to be a clown. (I used it once before in a test that I created.) Alas, it had disappeared into the ether, but I was impressed by the Macmillan guy’s prompt reply.

Two singles tennis matches this weekend, both against Florin, the 60-year-old guy who comes from the Nadia Comăneci era when sport really mattered. Yesterday I won 6-4 6-3 – it was a rather scrappy match lacking many rallies but chock-full of service breaks, 13 of them in fact. That evening I went to the “boat” bar (or restaurant) by the river, with him, his wife and a friend. As well as some beers I had sarmale and mămăligă, about as Romanian a meal as you can get. Florin’s wife likes to talk about all matters linguistic, so we had a good conversation. Beautiful Romanian words came up like ogoit and prispă. It was nice to be totally within my comfort zone. (I suppose that doesn’t happen very often.) In today’s match with Florin, I dropped only two points in the first five games. I then led 6-1 2-0. But he hung in there, I started to wobble especially on serve, and I surrendered meekly towards the end of the set, losing it 6-4. I didn’t love my chances in set three, but I remembered all those times in about 2005 or ’06 that I came through matches like this, and after I eked out the early games he started to spray errors and I won the third set 6-0. Tennis is weird. Then, after we got off the court, it happened. I bumped into S, whom I met on Tinder in 2018. There was always a lot of her anyway, but now she’s seven months pregnant. “I’m practically a planet,” she said. With her obvious news, it was nice to have some of my own. Maybe we’ll meet up again. I might invite her to a housewarming, in which case I’d better remember that she’s vegetarian. (Not many of them in these parts.) S was with a friend, whose name I could tell began with an A because she was wearing a big “A” necklace. (I could also be pretty sure than it ended with an A, because just about all female names in Romania do, the only exception I can think of being Carmen.) Bumping into S for the first time since December 2019 reminded me of a lovely novel I read: Three Dollars by Elliott Perlman. The book is set in Melbourne in the eighties. At intervals of several years, the protagonist bumps into a woman called Amanda, and each time he only has three dollars to his name.

I’m writing this from the old place. The place with the bells going off 96 times a day. I’ll miss the bells; they’ve ruled my life for the last 5½ years.

Buying property - Other sports - Tennis

Stopped in our tracks

May 2, 2022 by 0 Comments

I played tennis this evening. After our session, the best doubles player on the court asked me once again if I wanted to play in his football team. I really wish I could play football. As a kid I found the whole thing a massive turn-off because it meant having to play with other kids. Footbally kids. They were the worst other kids. My dad had no interest in the game, and neither did my brother, so I never got into it. Instead I batted a tennis ball against a wall for hours on end with no other kids in sight.

I haven’t made any progress on the flat purchase since I last wrote. The lawyer business is a sticking point because I want to ensure I have my own lawyer, but the agent is pressuring me to use the same one that the vendor is using.

This afternoon I met the teacher guy and we headed out on our bikes to La Livada where we’d eaten and drunk once before. His bike is pretty dodgy, and his chain snapped after a kilometre or so. We went back to my place (I was slightly embarrassed to show him it in its current state) where he spent at least an hour trying to fix it using my tools and a Youtube video but eventually gave up. We ate and drank in the square (he always goes for more expensive options than me) and then his girlfriend picked him up and that was that. It was good to see him regardless.

Snooker. The semi-final between Judd Trump and Mark Williams was an extraordinary match, Trump winning 17-16. I was glued to it for most of its many hours. Williams had come from 12-5 down to lead 16-15 thanks to some amazing long pots, but Trump took the last two frames under immense pressure. I hoped Williams would win, because it would have made for more of a contrast in styles for the final. The final is a best-of-35 marathon, and Ronnie O’Sullivan is leading 5-3 against Trump after the first session. Just before I went to tennis, I saw O’Sullivan steal the incredible fourth frame on a respotted black after needing a snooker. The match resumes in a few minutes – they play nine more frames tonight. One of the few changes to snooker since I last followed it is walk-on songs. In 2003, these weren’t a thing. O’Sullivan’s is a great choice – Drops of Jupiter by Train, which came out in 2001. I thought song was a few years older, partly because everything about O’Sullivan screams nineties. The lyrics of Drops of Jupiter include “Milky Way”, as do (unsurprisingly) Under the Milky Way, a brilliant 1988 hit by The Church. Pondering those two songs made we wonder if there are companies or products out there called Milky Whey, and there are plenty.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Social struggles

March 28, 2022 by 0 Comments

Today I had lunch with the tennis crew and some of their friends. The wife of one of the guys I play with sings in a choir at the church in Piața 700, and some of them were from there. All in all, there were 14 of us, including Domnul Sfâra, the 87-year-old man who still (somehow) plays tennis from time to time. Most of them hadn’t caught up with each other since the pandemic started. At one point there was a go-round-the-table thing, where everyone was expected to speak in turn, and amid the jokes that mostly zoomed over my head, there was much discussion of everyone’s medical trials and tribulations, Covid-related and not. Romanians are far more open than Brits when it comes to discussing this stuff, though the woman who sat next to me – white as a sheet and no more than seven stone – didn’t say what she’d been through. It wasn’t until it was my turn that I realised the round-the-table thing was actually happening. “So I have to speak now?” Yes. How did you end up in Romania? Always this question, which never gets any easier to answer. When I told people what I did for a living, there was then a short discussion of the English language. And and end are pronounced the same, somebody said. No no no! Just no! Two different vowels. Miles apart. On a daily basis I deal with people who think that send is something you find on a beach, or that a bet hangs upside down, because for some historical reason Romanians and speakers of other central and eastern European languages use their e vowel to represent our short a vowel, when it would serve them better to use their a instead. We stayed from twelve till about three. It was great that everybody got to see each other after such a long time, and they all seemed such nice people, but that sort of thing is never easy for me, even in my own language.

Romania has now suffered 65,000 Covid deaths. Because some of them would have died anyway, it’s hard to gauge the impact of vaccine refusal on that number. However, we know that two-thirds of the deaths occurred after the vaccines became readily available in spring of 2021, and the vast majority of those who died once the vaccines were available hadn’t taken them, so we’re looking at a very large number of preventable deaths, orders of magnitude greater than other tragedies like the Colectiv nightclub fire which killed 65 people on the night and in the weeks afterwards. It’s utterly appalling.

I’d planned to play poker this morning, but once I knew this lunch was happening and I wouldn’t be finished in time, I decided to play last night instead. I was pretty tired this morning after that, and putting our clocks going forward didn’t exactly help. I haven’t played a lot since I had the stones, though last week I did make $76 in a tournament for finishing second and snagging plenty of bounties. My bankroll is $2005.

Yesterday I lamented the end of extended final sets in tennis. It’s not an earth-shattering change; just look at the 2012 men’s Australian Open final. It was a titanic battle – no match has been quite that gladiatorial before or since – and it didn’t even get to 6-6 in the fifth set. (Djokovic beat Nadal 7-5 in the decider.) But it’s a symptom of what’s been happening in sport in general. Everything now has to be neatly packaged and shiny and pristine. Remove the kinks and imperfections and mud, and play it all in soulless air-conditioned stadiums in sodding Qatar. I find myself losing interest.

Here are some pictures of Timișoara in early spring:

The old Banca de Scont (Discount Bank), now done up nicely
The map stone in Piața Unirii, showing where the fortress used to be. This isn’t old; it was laid in 1987.
The Bega boats are back in business
Pink magnolias in bloom
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis

No more marathons, and more’s the pity

March 27, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve got my TV tuned to BBC news, with the war now centred on Lviv in the west after the Kremlin said they’d concentrate on the Donbas region having been pushed back by the Ukrainians. Since the first morning of the war, none of this has made any sense at all. Joe Biden has just made a speech, saying at the end that “for God’s sake this man cannot remain in power”. Whenever I see Biden speak about the Ukraine war, I wonder what the orange turd might have come out with.

Today I had my maths lesson in Dumbrăvița – he did well on a practice exam paper – and then when I got home I had a last-minute cancellation, meaning I just one had English lesson before stepping on the tennis court. I played two sets, both with the woman who struggles a bit with her footwork, so I had to run a bit, which was no bad thing. It was a lovely early evening for tennis, and it’s been a great week of weather all round. Blue skies every day.

Yesterday I called my aunt, and this time she answered. I remembered to add “Auntie” before her name. She was much better than she can be. In the past she’s seemed unaware of anything beyond her four walls. She’ll say the weather is bad, I’ll then mention that it’s fine and sunny where I am, and then she’ll almost seem put out by my mentioning other weather. Incorrect weather, as she sees it. I got none of that yesterday. We spent most of the ten minutes or so discussing the war. She still did her usual trick of ending the “conversation” when I still had things I wanted to say.

My aunt would get on well with the eight-year-old girl in Germany whom I teach on Skype. Yesterday’s lesson with her was especially hard because her father was with her the whole time. I made what I thought were fairly strong noises to say that I’d prefer it if he’d damn well go away, but he paid no notice. Half-way through the hour-long lesson her mind wandered. She must be tired, I said to her father. No, she’s just bored, he said. There might not be a whole lot I can do about that. Her English has got noticeably better in the time I’ve taught her. I think that’s down to YouTube more than me; her accent is very American.

Wednesday saw the return of Zoli, my first-ever student here, way back in November 2016. I hadn’t seen him since the very start of the pandemic in Romania, two years ago, when I joined him on a trip to the mountains. As we drove there, he told me that the hut had been closed because of the virus and we’d have to sneak in, and I got angry at him for not telling me before. Though it was beautiful up there in the snow, I was aware that a tsunami of disease and death was about to hit us. I thought I might never see him again, so it was a great pleasure to receive a text from him to say that he wanted to restart lessons. Wednesday’s meeting was hardly a lesson: it was a chat followed by a game of Bananagrams.

I’ve ordered a Samsung phone to replace my iPhone 5½ (as I call it) which I got as a present almost five years ago. My present phone doesn’t charge unless I place a heavy book on it, and then its battery runs down almost visibly (actually visibly if I’m making a video call, say), so I end up not using it much. It’s a low-end Samsung, called an A13 (it cost about NZ$300 or £150) but it seems to do everything I could ever want and much more. What it won’t do, however, is FaceTime, so I’ll have to switch to Skype or WhatsApp or something for keeping in touch with my parents. FaceTime has been so convenient.

Amid all the news of the war, they’ve been showing the PR disaster that is P&O, the once-proud British shipping company. P&O stood for (and presumably still does stand for) Peninsular and Oriental, a name that conjures up the world’s great trade routes and general intrepidness. Now it’s Dubai-owned (ugh), and the name makes me think of an outfit that lays off 800 of its staff on Zoom without giving any notice, and now has a ship that is deemed unseaworthy.

And finally, back to tennis. Ashleigh Barty has decided to retire from tennis at the age of just 25, at the pinnacle of the game. After winning Wimbledon and then her home grand slam in Melbourne, she probably thought, just what else can I achieve, and why not play cricket or golf or any of the other sports I’m ridiculously talented in. Tennis will miss her, though; I remember not long ago hearing some commentators suggesting that she might be too nice to ever be a champion. In other news, the no-tie-break final set, which has produced extraordinary drama over the last half-century, is no more. The movers and shakers of the tennis world thought we’d all be better off without that suspense, and now all four grand slams will be (quote) enhanced by a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-all in the final set, as the Australian Open has employed since 2019. I’m always wary of that marketing-speak word enhance. The new system has been billed as a one-year trial, but you don’t usually trial something in the biggest events on the calendar. It’s possible that, say, Wimbledon reverts to what they used before, but in all likelihood this will be a permanent change. Well, until someone else comes along and decides to shorten things even further.

Buying property - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Is it worth the risk?

March 21, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve just come back from my second-most expensive grocery shop in Romania. The only time I spent more was in the headless-chicken initial days of the pandemic. Everything has shot up in price. This reminds me of 2008 in New Zealand, when a block of cheese hit $16 and they were practically giving gas-guzzling Ford Falcons away: petrol had smashed through $2 a litre, which seemed crazy at the time. This morning I met up with Mark, the teacher. We had a coffee; he also had waffles. We had a good chat, mostly about teaching, but he didn’t have much time because he was going to a barbecue soon after.

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei in Dumbrăvița, then two online English lessons when I got back, including one with a new guy who lives near Cluj. Most of my lessons are still online, but face-to-face is coming back gradually. After that I was on the tennis court for the first time this year. We’d planned to start back a couple of weeks ago, but we had a chilly first half of March. The tennis crew is depleted. Yesterday I partnered a teenage girl who is a national-level rower; we played against her father and the older guy I sometimes play singles with. We lost the first set 6-3, and in the second we’d fended off half a dozen match points to be at deuce for the umpteenth time in the tenth game, when time ran out on us. I wasn’t too bad. My serve needs some work; my only ace, which hit the sideline at 2-5 in the second set, came out of the blue.

A silver lining to those awful kidney stones is that I’ve dropped a few pounds. On Friday I had my first haircut since last June; the barber’s comb turned my long thick hair into unappetising grey spaghetti before it fell to the ground. I didn’t really want that much taken off, but hairdressing vocabulary is something I struggle with even in English. I do prefer the slimmer, less caveman-like me, though. (I still have the beard.) On Tuesday I’ll go back to the doctor, and maybe I’ll find out if my stones are still there. I don’t think I’ve passed them, but the pain has gone. Now I “only” have my intermittent sinus pain to deal with, plus the cold that never goes away. (If I’m outside on a chilly day, I have to blow my nose all the bloody time. When I played tennis yesterday I had to wipe my nose after every second point. That’s just life for me.)

That’s more than enough about me. My dad passed out on Thursday night, just after I wrote my last post. He somehow fell into the bath at about two in the morning, and blacked out. He was lucky not to injure himself. He came round, then eventually clambered out of the bath. The next day was a write-off as he had such terrible leg pain, but yesterday he assured me he was coming right. As for Mum, a rogue contact lens had got stuck up her eye, and when she extricated that she was fine. I wish I wasn’t so far away from them. I expect they’ll want to come to Europe at or around Christmas – there will be a new addition by then – but I’d like to make a trip to New Zealand too.

I want to move on with my life, which means finding a new apartment and running a proper teaching business from it, but last week’s near miss has made me even more skittish than I was before. The appalling war in Ukraine has made the local economy very uncertain, then when you add in that I don’t really know what I’m doing, and I’ve had my fingers well and truly burnt before…

I forgot to mention a horrific accident – or pair of accidents – that occurred earlier this month near the Black Sea in eastern Romania. It was a quiet evening, and I got alerts on my phone in Romanian, one of which made me do a double take. Is that really what it says? A MiG fighter jet went down in a remote area, in terrible weather, killing the pilot. Then a Puma helicopter flew out in search of the plane, and it too crashed. All seven on board the helicopter died.

Buying property - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Some sad news, and my latest flat search

February 13, 2022 by 0 Comments

My neighbour called me yesterday to deliver the sad news that Domnul Ionescu, the 70-year-old tennis regular, had died just that morning. He’d died of lung cancer. It all happened remarkably quickly; in November I was playing tennis with him, often on the same side of the net. He was a heavy smoker. He could get through one set of tennis without a fag, but not two. He had a typical smoker’s cough, sometimes yacking out the contents into his hand. He was also pleasant to talk to, even if his favourite topic of conversation was how Romania had gone to the dogs. He was particularly scathing about Romanians’ attitudes to the pandemic; he’d been fully vaccinated. He loved following sport: tennis, football and handball. He worked for the railways, as some of the other tennis players do (or did), and as far as I can tell he reached quite a high position.

I got to look at four places on Wednesday. They were all built in the eighties and in a similar part of town.

The first one was a doozy. (Maybe I should choose that as my starting word for Wordle.) It was a biggish flat on the ground floor, owned by a couple in their sixties. The lady was cooking pancakes at the time. The place had unusual-looking archways and was eccentrically decorated, with no two walls painted the same colour. One of the rooms had snowmen and the like painted on the walls. Under the living room was a hidden storage space. One of the rooms could have been an office, but was rather small. In the bathroom, the sink and bath were shell-shaped, while the sink pedestal was in the shape of a fish. I had a certain admiration for the owners for deciding to decorate the place like this, and they seemed lovely. The woman even gave me two pancakes before I left. But really it was a non-starter. I told the agent I thought it was overpriced, and he agreed with me.

The second place also on the ground floor and had recently had a makeover. A large, typically Romanian elderly lady owned it. It was well furnished and had potential, but unfortunately was just too small. Then on to number three. I met the owner, a man of sixty or so, who might have been a welder. It seemed he could turn his hand to anything involving metal. I do admire people who have such practical skill. Unlike number two, this place was filled with cheap furniture. It had a garage I could have bought for a few thousand extra. Opposite was supposedly a brewery of some sort, which had ceased operations a long time ago. Just like the second place, this was also too small to run classes.

The final apartment was the best of the bunch. It was in a slightly different area, and one I prefer, because it is relatively quiet and has more green space. The flat was a decent size, and one of the rooms could have made a good office. I wasn’t sure about the electrics – the wires hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen looked a bit dodgy. Like the first place, it had a hidden storage space (basement) under the kitchen, with a ladder going down. The owner didn’t stop talking – he was in hard-sell mode – and I wasn’t sure if I could trust him. Again, there was a garage that I could buy for an additional €5,500, on top of the €120,000 asking price of the flat. I wasn’t sure if it got much sunlight. I soon learnt that the apartment had been on the market for a year, and the owners have increased the price by €10,000 in that time. The owner showed me some paperwork with various unaccepted offers, all around the €100,000 mark.

This wasn’t wasted time, because I felt I got my eye in a bit, which I need to do because it’s such a big decision.

Last week was a better one for work as people recovered from Covid, some for the second time.

Poker. I’ve been less active of late, but I got in two tournaments yesterday. In the single draw I snagged the last of the eleven paid places, while in the badugi I had a good run, finishing fourth for a $43 profit. After that successful session my bankroll is up to $1740. If and when my profit reaches $2000 – that’s $300 away – I plan to withdraw most of it, leaving $700 in my account.