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Coronavirus - Family - Films - Life :) - New Zealand

Nearly half a lifetime ago…

September 12, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Twenty years ago today I was recovering from a nosedive brought on by recurrent panic attacks. In late June I was basically fine, but by mid-July I was plummeting at a thousand feet per second. But by now the drugs had started kicking in, and in an attempt to clamber out of the pit I’d fallen into, I was working nights at a sorting office. Dad picked me up every morning at four; I’m eternally grateful for what he did. In a few weeks I’d be starting my final year of university. (It looked for a while that I’d have to delay it. I just couldn’t function.) We couldn’t get Kylie’s latest hit out of our heads. So at half-two on a Tuesday afternoon I was at home with Dad, who was working in the studio. Then the phone rang. I picked it up. It was my grandmother, telling me to switch on the TV. I did, and told Dad he needed to watch it. For a few minutes we thought it might have been an accident. And then we saw the second plane hit. It seems that almost every American old enough to remember can remember where they were.

Staggering but true: neither of the two women’s US Open finalists was even born when 9/11 happened. They’ve both come utterly out of nowhere, in particular 150th-ranked Emma Răducanu who qualified and has therefore won nine straight matches to reach the final, without dropping a set. Răducanu (born 13/11/02) has a Chinese mother and a Romanian father (hence her name), was born in Canada but moved to London when she was two, and now plays for Britain. And there I was thinking I was a mongrel. Her opponent Leylah Fernandez (born 6/9/02), part-Ecuadorian, part-Filipino, and playing for Canada (!), is ranked only 73rd in the world and has gone to three sets in each of her last four matches. Far fewer surprises among the men, where Novak Djoković is one win, 18 mere games, from walk-on-water status. Nobody has won the calendar grand slam since 1969 because it’s damn near impossible to do. For one, Djoković had to overcome the undisputed King of Clay in Paris. Now he’s on the verge of being the undisputed King of Tennis.

Mum and Dad have been busy moving, shifting, lifting. They’re almost there, ready to move into their new house, which is actually reasonably old by NZ standards. If it was up to Dad they wouldn’t be moving at all, but I’m with Mum on this. Their current place seems unmanageably big, with a two-acre garden. If it isn’t too much yet, it soon will be, and right now they still have plenty of emotional energy (how?) for the move and everything that will come after.

If I’m really lucky I might one day see my parents in their new abode. They’ve managed to contain the latest outbreak in NZ, for now at least, and the South Island has remained Covid-free. No such luck in Romania, where they’ve practically given up. Cases are doubling every seven to ten days, and everyone’s going about their normal business in the NZ equivalent of level one-and-a-bit. The NZ opening-up plan is to vet travellers to the country based on rates of disease and vaccination in their home country and any other territories they’ve visited in the previous fortnight. Romania will surely be blacklisted. My idea, assuming the UK is on the green list by then, is to fly to the UK for two weeks before then flying to New Zealand. I’ll need an internet connection in the UK though. It’s hard not to feel some anger at Romanians. A warm, friendly, welcoming bunch of people, but somehow they’re willing to fuck up people’s health and their economy and their kids’ education and the country’s reputation and everything and everybody just because of their flat-earth beliefs.

On Thursday I called my aunt. I was shocked to get through; she hardly ever picks up the phone these days. I was almost as shocked that we had a normal conversation. She mentioned getting an MRI scan for her painful back, and the extreme difficulty of getting medical attention at all in the UK. The collateral non-Covid-related damage caused by the disease is immense.

Last Saturday I went to the film festival in the Summer Garden just across the road. I saw Nowhere Special, a drama based in Belfast and partly produced in Romania, and I didn’t have to pay a penny (or, as they say here, a ban). I won’t give any spoilers here, but it gets a big thumbs up from me. The Belfast accent isn’t the easiest to get right but James Norton certainly pulled it off.

It’s another glorious day here. I’ll be playing tennis a bit later.

Family - Travel: Romania

Romania trip report — Part 2 (Iași)

August 14, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been another week of soporific temperatures here in Timișoara. Yesterday I had sinus pain, and with that and the heat, I didn’t want to do a whole lot.

I tried to call my parents from the park this morning after my 9-till-11 session, but I didn’t get a reply. On Tuesday Mum told me about her exploits on the indoor bowling green (should that be mat? lane? track?) – she’d won an interclub doubles tournament. The indoor bowls “scene” is dying (literally – the average age is now above mum’s 72) and may not survive beyond the next few years. I’ve been reading about New Zealand’s border-opening strategy for 2022. By that stage the UK might be on the green list while Romania could be blood-red.

I’ve had some decent poker results – a second and a sixth from the four mini-buy-in tournaments I played on Wednesday – and my bankroll is now at $780.

So, more on my trip. After my eat-your-heart-out breakfast, I explored Iași (pronounced yash). Iași is a mish-mash. There seemed to be an even greater contrast between the beautiful and the ugly than where I live. The centre wasn’t a patch on Timișoara’s squares and surrounding parks. Bulevardul Ștefan cel Mare – Iași’s Champs-Élysées – was very smart, but partly spoilt by a near-200-metre-long apartment block that was almost unbelievably ugly, even for me, and I’m certainly used to eyesores now.

It was a grey old day. My first stop was the Trei Ierarhi, a beautiful 17th-century monastery. I questioned the wisdom of those kissing the icons. Then I visited the Orthodox cathedral, for me just a building, but for the vast hordes queuing to sign some kind of visitor’s book, it was something rather more. What I enjoyed most that day was the Palace of Culture, an impressive building at the end of the Bulevard, which contained four museums. I first went to the art museum (I got in without paying, because I didn’t know you had do and nobody checked my ticket) – there were some Romanian paintings I really liked, mostly of rural scenes, some I couldn’t stand, and not much in between. Then I visited the museum of technology, paying this time, and that was the most fascinating part of my day. Old gramophones, street organs, valve radios, primitive stereo systems, typewriters, machines that added and multiplied numbers, and even mobile phones from the eighties. One of the staff even got a cupboard-like machine to work. She cranked a handle, setting off hammers and clappers and cymbals on the inside (which were visible), as it played a noisy classical tune. Near the Palace of Culture was Casa Dosoftei, an 18th-century religious building which has since been converted into a museum of early Romanian literature. The woman could see me trying to decipher the old Cyrillic letterforms and she told me that it was all in Church Slavonic and I had no chance. Some of the old books were decipherable however, and they were things of beauty.

That evening I explored the train station, which is an interesting structure in itself, and made a big mistake as I sheltered from the pouring rain to have a shaorma and a beer in the pouring rain; there were beggars everywhere, and the weather meant I couldn’t easily escape them.

The next day, which saw a massive improvement in the weather, I walked to Copou where the old university is situated. It’s certainly the posh end of Iași. The main university building was quite spectacular. Inside was a cavernous hall, called the “hall of the lost steps” if memory serves. I was intrigued by this, and expected all kinds of cool Escher-style optical illusions, but was disappointed. In the Copou area there were multiple parks, much better kitted out than anything we have here, with assorted eateries and drinkeries. There was even a botanic park, a skate park and fun stuff for the smaller kids. I wandered around the local football team’s stadium – visitors are free to roam, and the running track surrounding the pitch was popular. I was wishing Romania had an equivalent to baseball in America – a sport that adds a pleasant drumbeat to summer over there, or at least did until very recently (more commercialism, fewer balls in play, and then of course Covid). Speaking of Covid, people gave markedly fewer shits about the virus than they do in the west of Romania. Masks were something to dangle from your wrist as an accessory, and vaccination rates were clearly through the floor. Big banners adorned town halls and leisure centres: Roll up for your PFIZER jab! The best one! No blood clots! No appointment necessary!

On my third and last day in the city, I took a bus to the end of the line and walked up a hill called Bucium. I walked for more than 5km, coming to a village called Păun (which means “peacock”). Suddenly everything felt very bucolic. I went further and sat down on the edge of a wood for a bite to eat. I then trekked back to the start of the bus line. The bus back to the city was slow. I found a marketplace near the train tracks and had a beer in an outside bar to the sound of Scorpions, which one of the patrons was playing on his phone.

The next morning, after my fourth big breakfast, I was off to Gura Humorului.

This is only part of that monstrous building
A delta is used stylistically as a Latin letter D on these signs
Romanian written in Cyrillic. The topless 8 is equivalent to a Romanian u.
For the living and the “gone to sleep”
The Metropolitan Cathedral
The Trei Ierarhi Monastery
Made in Timișoara
No ghosts, no weird illusions
The stadium of Politehnica Iași
This is right in the city centre at a busy intersection
The railway station
Family - Poker - Travel: Romania

Done my dash of trains and buses

August 4, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Just a very quick note to say that I got back to Timișoara on Saturday evening after a long stint on the bus. More about my travels next time, when hopefully I’ll have some pictures to show you. Sunday was a real scorcher here – one of the great things about my trip was escaping the searing heat.

I played a marathon poker session on Sunday morning, cashing in all three tournaments I played, including a pair of third places (in single draw and pot-limit badugi). My bankroll received a welcome $45 boost; it’s now $749. That evening I had a good chat with my brother and his wife. They’d been to London to celebrate my brother’s big four-oh; they visited Kew Gardens and ate at a pretty nice restaurant. They’d spent a few days in St Ives and managed to drop in on our aunt. He said I’d hardly recognise her now – she’s piled on weight and has let herself go. He said the front door had almost seized up from the length of time since it had last been opened. She’s used Covid as an excuse to make her world even smaller. My brother thought she might not be long for this world. Dad said he felt angry at how his sister, blessed with such natural talent and good looks, has been able to chuck it all away.

At the doctor’s surgery last night I met a British couple of my sort of age; they’d just arrived in Timișoara so that she could take a job here at a language school, following a one-year spell in Bucharest. Meeting anybody from the UK is such a rarity for me. We swapped numbers and I’m sure we’ll keep in touch.

Almost time for a lesson with Bianca.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The park

July 9, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m on day twelve, at least, of feeling like rubbish. Going to the park this morning was the most exciting thing I’ll do all day. I brought a flask of coffee and read a couple of chapters of my book. It was already 30-odd degrees, but at least there was a breeze. I FaceTimed my parents, expecting my battery to die at any moment, but just like me, it ran on fumes. They were fine. They’ve now had both doses of Pfizer, with no side effects to speak of, and the sale of their house will go unconditional any day now. We discussed the tennis, and briefly the football. Dad thought England had already won the competition, when in fact the final against Italy takes place on Sunday night.

When we hung up, two men in their sixties, one grossly overweight, sat down on the bench next to mine. They talked about the football, then switched to politics. After some time, a friend of theirs showed up on his bike. He wore a Germany football shirt that he’d almost certainly bought at a second-hand shop, and on his left forearm he sported a faded blue heart-and-arrow tattoo with an illegible name underneath. He talked extraordinarily loudly, his sentences punctuated by laughter and filler words like ba and păi. Then a fourth man arrived, also on his bike. His name was Ghiță, a diminutive of Gheorghe. He wore a red-and-white striped shirt, with just a single button done up in the middle. The tattooed bloke had a conversation with him, mostly one-way, cutting across where I was sitting. I find people talking across me unbearable in any language and at any volume, let alone the combination I faced then, so at that point I upped and left.

The lady from tennis, Magda, also phoned me when I was in the park. For the second week running I had to say I wouldn’t be playing.

I hadn’t watched any of the Euro matches, but did stay up to watch England’s nerve-jangling extra-time win against Denmark. They’ve got a very good team and a fantastic manager, and now they stand on the brink of history. Staying up until after half-twelve was no issue; my body clock is way out of whack. I had no work the next morning either; my hours have suddenly dropped through the floor.

Wimbledon has had its moments. I haven’t followed it as closely as in previous years. Ashleigh Barty’s win over Angelique Kerber yesterday was one of the more enjoyable two-setters I’ve seen. Barty will be a very popular winner if she beats Karolina Plíšková in tomorrow’s final.

I’ve been planning my trip. My idea is to take the train to Iași in ten days’ time (I hope I’m up to it by then), and then visit some towns and villages in the middle of nowhere, before taking a trip on the mocăniță (narrow-gauge train) from Vișeu de Sus, and eventually coming back home.

Books - Family - Life :) - Other sports

Trying not to do a lot

July 5, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

For the last few days I’ve been living in the crawler lane, bogged down by coughing and headaches and lurid green mucky slimy custardy gunge. It’s been particularly bad first thing in the morning. I soldiered on with my online lessons on Friday and Saturday, and intentionally haven’t done an awful lot today.

Lately I’ve played poker on Sunday mornings, but today I did something much better. I had a FaceTime chat with my aunt, whose husband died at the end of May, and my cousin who lives in Wellington but was staying with her mother in Timaru. It was a great pleasure to catch up with them, particularly my aunt. I’m looking forward to the day I can fly over and see them. I fear that will be still some time away.

Before and after our longish chat, I watched three episodes of a documentary series on Netflix (which included a depressing part on deforestation in Romania), then I spent most of the afternoon on a bench in Central Park, reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. The weather was pleasant, and it was quiet; I couldn’t hear much apart from the jet of the fountain, the occasional train, and the clatter of tiles and dice from people playing rummy and backgammon. I’m fortunate to have such a lovely park on my doorstep. On one side is the river, on the other the train tracks, and I thought about how I might be on a train two weeks or so from now.

No tennis today, either playing or watching. For the last time, Wimbledon is taking a rest day on the middle Sunday. Next year they’ll play on all 14 days. It’s a sensible move. And I definitely was in no fit state to be running around a court.

I haven’t watched any coverage of Euro 2020, but after a 2-0 win over Germany and last night’s 4-0 thrashing of Ukraine, England are daring to dream.

Family - Life :) - Music - Other sports - Poker

Need to escape this slump

June 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been feeling down the last couple of days. No mental energy. No drive to do anything. The crazily hot weather hasn’t helped – I’ve been struggling to sleep. The reduction in my hours hasn’t been much fun either – work gives me energy to do other things as well as somebody to talk to. People have been going away, to Turkey, to Bulgaria, to attend weddings and baptisms and whatever else – events that didn’t happen in 2020. I could really do with getting away too, and will try to escape in the second half of July. My plan is to stay in Romania (it’s plenty big enough, especially if you travel by train) and visit the northern Moldova region, or Bucovina. I’m feeling cabin fever now.

My parents now have a buyer for their place in Geraldine. Dad is already talking about extending and renovating and gutting the new place. I wonder where the energy to even think about that kind of stuff comes from. They got six figures, only just missing out on a seventh (again, the mind boggles here), although it hasn’t yet gone unconditional. This is all excellent news obviously because their place had been on the market a while and they can now hopefully get on with the rest of their lives. This morning my student gave me two contacts in the real estate business; I’ll hit them up next week and hopefully get the ball rolling. I’m clueless there at the best of times, and now I’m adding a foreign language and totally alien systems and processes into the mix. I’m really fumbling in the dark.

New Zealand are inaugural World Test champions, when it looked for all the world that the English rain would have the final say. That’s a pretty big deal. Way bigger than, say, the America’s Cup. It’s NZ’s finest moment in the game, that’s for sure. They’re a brilliant team of cricketers and a great bunch of guys to boot. Good on ’em, that’s all I can say. World beaters at Covid, and now cricket. I wonder what’s next?

No Simona Halep at Wimbledon. That’s a shame.

Mum has just sent me an email with a picture of her plus three other women (combined age close to 300) holding aloft a big silver plate. It’s obviously a golf trophy of some sort. I’ll probably get all the details of that at the weekend.

Unusually, my weekend will be completely free of lessons. Tomorrow’s temperatures are forecast to be tolerable – a max of “only” 31 – so I’ll pop to the market and if I’m lucky I might find a second-hand bike.

My student told me all about the nai, or Romanian pan flute. A famous of exponent of this instrument is Gheorghe Zamfir; this is him playing Păstorul Singuratic, or The Lonely Shepherd. It’s quite lovely.

I’ve blanked my last nine poker tournaments; my bankroll has dipped to $718.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Poker - Tennis

Birthday, culture shock, and some games

June 14, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s Mum’s 72nd birthday. If we used base 12, which we probably would if we had extra fingers and toes, a 72nd birthday would be a milestone, like a 50th birthday is for us in base-10 world. (As a kid, I would sometimes accompany my grandmother as she visited the record office to do family history. One time she looked through a book of baptisms from 1850-odd, and two babies were recorded – prominently – as having an extra finger, or perhaps two, on each hand. I found this hilarious.) Sometimes I’ve been critical of Mum, even on this blog, but these days we get on very well. The pandemic has helped, funnily enough. We’re in total agreement on just about everything Covid-related. Mum is a young 72. She’s managed to keep remarkably fit and healthy.

Yesterday morning I had a discussion with my student about our university experiences, hers rather more recent than mine. I said that I felt a bigger culture shock when I started uni than I did on my arrival in Romania. In truth it was way bigger. Constantly being surrounded by the same people, never being able to hide or escape, it’s a wonder I survived that first year.

A thrilling finish to the French Open. Djoković (boo!) came from two sets down to beat Tsitsipas in the final. I only saw the first three sets before I played tennis myself. I wanted Tsitsipas, who had played so well, to win. He also has a badass name. Tsitsipas, swarming the net like a tsunami of tsetse flies. (The French sometimes say tagada tsoin-tsoin and I don’t really know what it means, if indeed it means anything.) I wonder if Djoković is the first player ever to win a grand slam coming from two sets down in two separate matches. And by the way, the third set of his semi-final against Nadal was mad mad mad stuff for 95 minutes. Way out there, off the planet, it was that good. As for the women, Krejcikova won a tense final against Pavlyuchenkova, then topped it off by winning the doubles too, partnering Siniakova. The men’s doubles final was a cracker, with the local lads (Mahut of stupidly-long-match fame, alongside Herbert) making an improbable fightback to win.

Euro 2020, or 2021, has started. Last night one of the Danish players had a heart attack in the middle of a match with Finland and was resuscitated on the pitch. It must have been nightmarish for everybody. I was amazed that they later restarted the game. The incident reminded me of Fabrice Muamba, who played for Birmingham for a time, then suffered (and survived) a heart attack during a game.

Poker. I had a go at a bounty PLO8 tournament last night and went pretty far but only made a tiny profit. This morning I tried a non-bounty PLO8 but didn’t make the money. Then in the single draw I made a deep run, getting pretty lucky when my opponent made 65432 for a straight against my pat nine, and eventually finishing fourth. I also made the final table in the pot-limit badugi, and my luck quickly ran out when my seven ran into a better seven; I was out in eighth place, but not before scoring some nice bounties. My bankroll is up to $735.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker

Am I a monster? And a big send-off

June 3, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

After that train wreck of a lesson, I didn’t sleep much on Monday night. Or Tuesday night. Even last night I didn’t do particularly well. Maybe I am just a bigot who can’t tolerate people with different views from my own. But in between I’ve had a bunch of lessons that have gone perfectly well, including one with am easy-going guy who said that Romania was better under communism and the country now suffers from “too much democracy”. Yikes. He’s 33 and would have been a toddler when the Ceaușescus came to a sticky end, so he has no more memories of living under communism than I do, but that’s his opinion and he’s entitled to it. But nobody is entitled to get on trains and planes and attend weddings and see Fiddler on the Roof at the fucking opera and potentially expose hundreds of people to a deadly virus. Sure, some people are hesitant and that’s understandable. What are the side effects? Haven’t these vaccines been concocted rather quickly? (Yes. And it’s one of the great feats of mankind.) How does messenger RNA work? You can reason with these people. The point-blank refusers, however, you can get fucked.

Last night I woke up suddenly. Where’s that awful music coming from? Then I remembered I’d set my alarm for 4am so I could watch Graeme’s funeral, streamed live from Timaru. I was a few minutes late and I when I connected, my cousin from Wellington – Graeme’s eldest daughter – was speaking (very well, as she always does). There was a big extended family present – he leaves behind his wife, five children and a baker’s dozen (as they put it) of grandchildren. Not everybody could make it because the Ashburton bridge, now shaky after the torrential rain, is making it hard to travel south from Christchurch. The speeches were brilliant, honestly. He was appreciated much more than I realised. He was a very good man, a family man, with a big heart. (His propensity to fart in inappropriate situations didn’t come up in the speeches, strangely enough.) I always got on very well with him – he could have conversation about almost anything – and my memories of him go back to our trip to New Zealand in 1986-87. I spent quite a lot of time with him in 2003-04 just after I arrived in NZ to live. He helped me find a second-hand car, and taught me what some of the farming equipment being auctioned off at the Temuka saleyards was. The last time I saw him was in Wellington in 2016, just before I left the country.

Three poker tournaments yesterday. I busted out of the PLO8 just before the money, then I came back from a poor start to finish third in the single draw for a $15 profit, then in the pot-limit badugi I built up a monster stack only to crash and burn for a min cash. My bankroll is $722. If and when it reaches $750 I plan to beef things up a bit, by playing five tournaments in a session instead of my current three, including the odd night session, and playing the occasional spell of cash.

It’s a beautiful sunny day here. Not a cloud in the sky. The birds are chirping away and the trams are clattering by.

Family - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Some sad news from NZ

May 31, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I called my parents, and they told me that Graeme had taken a rapid turn for the worse and wouldn’t make it. Two hours later, he passed away. It’s all very sudden and very sad, even if he did extremely well to ever reach 80 after the lung problems he developed decades earlier that forced him out of work. I always felt a bit sorry for him. He helped bring up four daughters, who all turned out to be self-assured and successful, and one son who moved to Australia. He was always taking his daughters skiing or sailing, but despite all that, they treated him as a bit of an oddball and a joke in his old age. He was different from his wife who was has always been more active socially. She has always kept her cards close to her chest, and quite possibly he never stood a chance after his accident but she didn’t let on.

The funeral will take place in the next two or three days, but there’s confusion as to exactly when. South Canterbury is being blitzed by a weather bomb – relentless rain (approaching feet rather than inches) making Geraldine a virtual island.

Friday would have been both the 70th birthday of Dad’s cousin (who died in December) and the 99th birthday of Dad’s mother (who died ten years ago). Here’s a post I wrote about my grandmother’s 88th birthday, back on my old blog. That was the last time I ever saw her.

People getting old. Falling apart both physically and mentally. It’s such a dreadful thing to watch. Yesterday at the tennis court I watched it (the physical side of it, anyway). People’s bodies seemed to be falling to pieces. The guy with whom I played that unfinished energy-sapping match just before Christmas is having back trouble and is shadow of the man he was then. Viorica seemed even less mobile than usual. Then there’s Petrică with his kidney condition made worse by Covid. I kept thinking, heck, it must be my turn next.

Poker. In this morning’s PLO8, I almost fell short of the money but just before the bubble I escaped with a quarter of a three-way pot to survive. Straight after the bubble burst, I found myself almost chipless but ran my tiny stack up to something substantial thanks to some good starting hands, only for my opponent to hit a runner-runner wheel to eliminate me. Had I won that I would have been motoring, but it wasn’t to be. The pot-limit badugi was over in 20 minutes – I never won a hand. I made a monster, he made a bigger monster, and that was that. When that was over I was still in the single draw. (At one stage I was playing three tournaments, in three very different games, at the same time.) With eight remaining, I had a nice big stack and put it to good use on my short-handed table. I started the seven-man final table with 68,000 chips and the lead. With a following wind, or even just a gentle breeze at my back, I might have won the whole shebang and a load of bounties. Instead I faced a headwind. I did claim another handy bounty, but with four left I twice pushed with an equity edge but both times I lost out, and it was game over. Not a bad morning though – those bounties helped me make a $23 profit from the single draw – and after a slightly frustrating month in which I only turned a small profit, my bankroll is now $707. I feel I’ve made a bit of a breakthrough with Omaha hi-lo. A few deep runs and finally I might actually be getting it.

Family - Life :) - Poker

The green light, and a familiar scare

May 27, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I got my immigration card, so I’m now free to stay in Romania until 2026 under the provisions of Article 50. It’s a relief to get that out of the way. Now that I probably won’t be turfed out of the country, my next stop is to put down some roots here using the proceeds of the apartment I had in Wellington. But I don’t know where to start. A house or a flat? A new build or something more established? (The new blocks, and new areas, depress me.) Where I am now is perfect in many ways, but a huge rent hike is on the horizon, and I could do with being able to teach in a different place to where I eat. Plus I’d really like to have my own set of wheels.

My uncle Graeme, who turned 80 last month, had a major scare at the end of last week. He collapsed and vomited, and was quickly rushed off to hospital. There he had his aortic valve replaced, just like my father did at age 55. Graeme won’t be coming out of hospital for a while. This all reminds me of how Dad almost died following his operation. It really was touch and go. He had his valve replaced in the UK, while I was in Auckland. (Mum also stayed in New Zealand – we all make baffling decisions at some points in our lives, and this was her turn.) I spoke to him after the operation and everything seemed to have gone off without a hitch. But as he was on the verge of leaving hospital he couldn’t get out of bed. He had fluid in his lungs. My grandmother overheard one of the staff say that the fluid had probably coagulated and he was a lost cause. I remember when Mum called me, telling me to say a prayer for Dad because he might not make it. That was 16 years ago, around the time of the terrorist attack in London. I was studying for actuarial exams while also trying to devise a word-based version of Sudoku, the new craze.

When I spoke to my brother at the weekend it dawned on us. Mum and Dad might never come back to this part of the world again. I’d put the chance of that at 30%. We spent some time discussing the when and how of making a trip over to see them. As it stands, my sister-in-law isn’t allowed to set foot in the country.

Summer is almost upon us, and for the next four months I’ll be making regular trips to the outdoor markets. The strawberries have just started, as have the cherries, although they’re still rather pricy. The tomatoes are on their way. Soon we’ll have the watermelons and the stone fruit. All the lovely fruit and vegetables we get here are hard to beat.

Not much joy at the poker tables since I last wrote. I need to run better, basically. My bankroll is $690. Why am I doing this? Not for the money, clearly. I’m doing it for the mental workout. Can I at least get some way to mastering this game?