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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.

Family

It’s a boy!

September 18, 2022 by 0 Comments

On Thursday lunchtime, with no warning whatsoever, I got a message from my brother: “Baby boy”. I just about fell off my chair. Then there were some pictures of the baby looking rather bashed about, as indeed he had been, then the name. We’d never even discussed names, but it’s exactly what I would have chosen. Fully 75% of his great-grandfathers were blessed with that timeless name, which is also my middle name.

His head wasn’t in the right position, so he needed a rather primitive and barbaric-looking forceps delivery, poor little chap. Though he managed to avoid being born on September 11th, he was born at 9:11 in the morning. He weighed 7 lb 11 oz, in other words slap-bang on the average. Mother and baby stayed overnight and went home the next day.

My mum is well chuffed. Her sister’s kids have been pumping out grandchildren for her at a dizzying rate – she now has thirteen of them – and now Mum’s finally got one. For our family as a whole, this is something really quite special. A wonderful oasis of hope. Yesterday I got a lovely photo of my brother holding his son who looked much less battered than the day before; I liked it so much because I could see in my brother’s eyes what he was thinking. I have a miraculous piece of life in my arms. I’ll readily admit to a certain amount of envy too. It’s an experience that, in all probability, I’ll never have.

I’ll get to see my nephew in under five weeks when I make another trip to the UK. I hope I get many more opportunities after that. Kids are quite wonderful, even if (especially if?) (only if?!) they’re not your own. In the last few years I’ve spent thousands of hours teaching children, and I feel very lucky to have had that chance. On Thursday, right after I got the news, I had two hours with 15-year-old David. In 190 sessions, I’ve seen him grow from a painfully timid boy who said “I don’t know” almost every time I asked him a question (for fear of getting the wrong answer) into a confident speaker of English who wants to become an airline pilot. His head is screwed on more tightly than either of his parents. Every session we spend a few minutes talking about planes. I often regale him of my experiences as a boy on three-engined planes like the 727 and DC-10, or when I sat in the cockpit of a 737 which my uncle captained. I like to think I’ve made a difference in all the sessions we’ve had together.

Yesterday I played Wordle for the first time in a while. For some reason my nephew’s name is valid in the international version of Scrabble, so I thought it would be in Wordle too. It was, and it gave me the second and fourth letters in the right place off the bat. After my second guess I had three letters. Ooh, but there are dozens of options. I used my third and fourth guesses to eliminate options, but still failed to get the word in six tries. For the first time ever I missed the word, and that’s when I started with my nephew’s name. Calamitous! I hope that isn’t an omen. (You might be able to guess his name now.)

I had a pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița earlier today, both with teenage boys. It’s pretty soggy here now. I’ve got poker planned for this evening.

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.

Family - Life :)

The travel bug (squashed)

August 25, 2022 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents yesterday, shortly after they nearly set light to their fence and heaven knows what else. The ashes they’d disposed of were hotter than they thought, and soon their garden was in flames. Emergency over, we discussed their travel plans. Dad used to be keen to push off anywhere at the drop of a hat. Not now. Since he last left New Zealand, he’s had a major health scare and he’s been understandably spooked by the spectre of Covid. He also had a check on his heart recently; they found that his aortic arch was unusually wide, and they won’t know whether it’s expanding (which would be bad news) until he has another check-up next year. He should have been having regular checks ever since his aortic valve replacement way back in oh-five, but that was done in the UK and he slipped through the net in NZ. On top of that, he’s had a long run of splitting headaches. As for Mum, she now finds all the organisation and online booking (which inevitably she has the privilege of doing) a pain in the arse, and I can’t say I blame her. They have two kids in Europe and a grandchild coming fast, so they’re flying over, but I’m not putting any pressure on them to come and see me in Romania. They’re arriving in London on 12th October, when the new addition should be three weeks old.

Last Monday when I dismantled the massive wardrobe that was in my teaching room, I got a surprise. At the back of the top shelf, seven feet up, was a brown Gucci box which I fully expected to be empty. But no, it had a women’s Gucci bracelet watch inside. Worth a fortune? A fake? I googled Gucci watches and then went to the watch repairer next to Auchan in Iulius Mall. He put a battery in it and said that it probably is the real deal, but from Gucci’s “cheaper” collection, i.e. it would have been bought for hundreds, not thousands. It’s not the sort of watch that appreciates in value, so it might be worth £100 or maybe a tad more. Rather than selling it, I’ve decided to give it to my sister-in-law when I next see her, hopefully in October.

My big thing (by my standards) right now is doing up my teaching room. After tonight’s lesson in it, which will be almost entirely in Romanian, I’m going to set about painting it. I spoke to Dad about this yesterday. Paint it magnolia, he said. Too late, I’ve already bought a big tub of yellow paint. Real yellow. When I was growing up, my parents were always painting everything magnolia, a “colour” that I could never see the point of. It’s quite a departure for me to be painting or DIYing anything. I mean, this is the first time in my life I’ve really had my own place. My flat in Wellington was mine in name only. And here there’s extra motivation, because it’s a room I’ll be using for my business. The “teaching zone”, which I want to look distinct from the rest of my flat.

It’s late summer, so the fruit is great right now. On my last trip to the market, I bought some lovely crisp apples that reminded me of the Worcesters we had in England. There are peaches and nectarines and plums. Mountains of plums. I read somewhere that Romania is the world’s second-biggest exporter of plums, and yesterday I could see why. I went to Mehala, an older district of town where the streets have wide berms, many of which are lined with plum trees. I now have some accurate scales; I picked 5.9 kilos of plums, but I could have removed the decimal point from that and still wouldn’t have scratched the surface. Those trees were loaded; even the odd branch had collapsed under the weight of the fruit.

My teaching hours are, for the moment, way down. It gives me the chance to go for longish bike rides like I did this morning, work on my Romanian, and yes, attempt to do up my classroom before all the students (hopefully) come back.

Family - Photos - The UK - Travel: Europe

Getting away — part 4 of 5

August 13, 2022 by 0 Comments

On Wednesday the 3rd I left Birmingham after my 48-hour stay there. The bus went through Leicester, which seemed massive and full of monstrous architecture. We wended our way along streets dotted with shops called “Polski Sklep” and “Bunătăți Românești”. After several hours I arrived in Cambridge on a sunny evening; the bus dropped me off at Parkside, beside a park (!) where a cricket game was in progress. The local buses had changed since my last visit in the Mesozoic, and I was frantically trying to determine where my bus to St Ives went from – it wasn’t Drummer Street as usual – only finding out when it whizzed by. That meant another half-hour wait. It was a nice feeling to arrive at my parents’ flat in St Ives again. I liked the homely smell that it has.

In St Ives

The next morning, after a particularly good sleep, I read something online about taramasalata. I’d never eaten it before – its lurid pinkness and complete overkill of a name turned me off – so I decided to buy a tub of the stuff from Waitrose. That sort of food doesn’t last long when you open it, and anyway I’d be leaving in three days, so I ended up having lashings of bright pink paste with everything. I’m not sure I’ll have it again. I then met up with some old friends over coffee. These were the couple who came to visit me in Romania five years ago. He was very ill earlier in the year, and is in the middle of a long recovery. In the afternoon I took Mum’s bike out for a ride down the thicket and through the Hemingfords and Houghton, and then I went back to my friends’ place for dinner, which was almost all homegrown produce. She had earlier given me a tour of their extensive fruit and vegetable patch (not that “patch” does it justice).

This tomb, at the Parish Church in St Ives, is dated 1657

Then came Friday. The big day. The day I’d maybe see my aunt. My brother had warned me that she’d be almost unrecognisable from the time I last saw her in December 2018. I’d tried calling her the day before but got no reply, so I hopped on Mum’s bike for a six-mile ride over to my aunt’s place in Earith, passing through Needingworth and Bluntisham, knowing my trip might be in vain. Handily, they have a bike track all the way to Earith. I arrived at her four-centuries-old house which has two numbers and a name, and knocked on her cobwebby door. No answer. Then I phoned her. To my surprise, she answered. “I’m right outside your door,” I said. She got dressed, then let me in via the back gate. She had aged, a lot, and had put on several pounds. Her back greatly reduces her mobility, but she refuses to have surgery on it, saying it’s too risky. No, it isn’t. Without surgery, you face the certainty of being housebound very soon. But there was no point in saying that. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. At 9:30 in the morning, I half-expected her to offer me a glass of wine, but she seems to have cut back on that. Her house and garden looked in good nick. (Admittedly she has a helper.) We chatted for over an hour in her garden, when normally she doesn’t want to talk to anyone. It was all very pleasant. After I left, she offered to take me to the station on the day of my flight, and although it was easier for me to simply get the bus from St Ives, I appreciated that.

That afternoon I met my friends again. She and I walked through the meadow to the Hemingfords, and there I got a taste of how the other half really live. He met us at the end, the Three Jolly Butchers pub, in his car, because he can’t walk that sort of distance. In the middle, we had a pint in the beer garden at the Axe & Compass in Hemingford Abbots, which is just across the road from my old kindergarten, or “playschool” as we called it. At the Jolly Butchers we all ate something different. I had fish and chips again, and a cider – about twenty quid’s worth.

St James Church, by the river in Hemingford Grey

The next day I took the bus into Cambridge. I didn’t do a lot there. I wandered over to Midsummer Common where they have a big fair every June where loads of people get stoned, or at least used to. That day, instead of a fair they had “Our Place in Space”, a kind of exhibit of the Solar System. This was the start of the tour, and the four inner planets were all a short stroll from the sun. Walk across the common to the Cam and several miles beyond (it was all at scale), you could reach the outer planets, including (yes!) Pluto, but that would have taken me all day, so I abandoned that idea and instead grabbed an enormous coffee in a two-handled cup from Costa. I then bought some books from Fopp, which was always one of my favourite shops in the city, and more from Oxfam, though I knew most of them wouldn’t go in my luggage.

The inner planets
St Ives

I finished a second book, then saw my friends one last time, then saw I had a message from Ryanair telling me to be at the airport three hours before my flight. Flying is deceptively time-consuming. I had a quick chat to my parents until the data ran out on my phone – blame Brexit for that – and after a broken sleep I was off to Stansted.

Family - Photos - The UK - Travel: Europe

Getting away — part 2 of 5

August 12, 2022 by 0 Comments

My brother’s place – a four-bedroom house with an actual garden in a semi-rural part of Dorset – is something I could only dream of owning. (Or, more likely, the upkeep would be a total nightmare for me. I wouldn’t mind having their cat, though.) I got there in time to see the tail end of the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games on TV, with a mechanical bull and Duran Duran. A few days later I’d be seeing the action live.

I slept well, and my first full day in the UK went by quickly. My brother took delivery of a new bike, we went to the pub, my brother had a long chat with his neighbour and again at the local butcher’s where he got meat for the evening’s barbecue. He chatted away freely and I felt slightly jealous. After the barbecue, my sister-in-law offered me Eton mess. I had to admit that I didn’t know what Eton mess was. It’s one of those things I’d heard of and knew you could eat, but that was the extent of my knowledge. Just like Prosecco, which you can’t move for now, it wasn’t a thing when I last lived there almost two decades ago. (Eton mess is a dessert containing meringue, whipped cream, and various berries.) Then we sat down to watch the last ever episode of Neighbours.

Car boot sale

On Saturday morning I went to a car boot sale with my brother. These open-air household goods markets soared in popularity in the early nineties (“they’re better attended than church!”) and are obviously still very popular today. This one was big. For a combined fiver, I bought two games for my younger students. If I lived there, I’d be going all the time. My brother then showed me his record player and stereo system, which I quite fancied. (I don’t think he bought it for a fiver at a car boot sale.) The clear highlight of the day came in the evening when we ate fish and chips and mushy peas on Bournemouth Beach. Judging by the price, fish and chips have become something of a delicacy during my time away. Growing up, they were the treat to end all treats. The smell, the wait, the unwrapping, the proper greasy chunky chips. When my brother and I were little, there were abandoned sheds at the bottom of our garden and we pretended to run a fish and chip shop from one of the sheds. When we got home we saw a documentary on Kate Bush. I really enjoyed that. I think she’s amazing and really cool, and I’d definitely like to have some of her stuff when I get my record player.

Durdle Door

On Sunday we visited Durdle Door, which is a limestone arch on the renowned Jurassic Coast. It’s also a fun name to say. It was pretty busy there, but it would have been heaving, or rammed as Brits tend to say these days, if the weather hadn’t been overcast. We speculated as to how much money it would take for us to jump from the top of the arch. A million pounds? Ten million? We quickly settled on infinity. For me personally, the question becomes far more interesting if you leave the world of money. Would I jump if it meant I could have a family and all that normal stuff? Probably not – just watch this – but for sure it gets closer then. We also speculated on when the arch will collapse. It will one day. On the way back we stopped at Wareham, which lies on the River Frome, and had an ice cream. It was a typically British setting that doesn’t even begin to exist in Romania. Then we had a pint at a nearby pub and watched the second half of the women’s Euro football final between England and Germany. We only had one eye on the game. With ten minutes to go, Germany duly made it 1-1 and the match entered extra time. “They’ve fucked it up now, as usual,” my brother said. But no, the Lionesses scored in the added period and lifted the trophy. During the match my sister-in-law was cooking. “Hey Google, twenty minutes,” she said to her tablet. Ms Google confirmed, and the countdown commenced. I got strong Black Mirror vibes from that. My non-voice-activated phone timer gets plenty of use in my lessons, but when I’m cooking I think, it’s about quarter to now so that’ll be five-past-ish, and if I forget and it all burns to a crisp, no-one will see my calamity anyway. Such is life when you live alone.

Wareham


It was great spending time with them. They’re lovely people, both of them. Five years ago I said that if you didn’t know my brother, you might think he was a dick from some of the overconfident black-and-white stuff he came out with. But since then his sharp edges have been rounded off. He’s contemplating life outside the army, he’s doing a correspondence university course to helpfully aid him in that, and he’s a few weeks from becoming a father. As for my sister-in-law, she’s as nice as ever.

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 - Films - Poker - Travel: Europe

About to push off

July 25, 2022 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow is my last day before I go away. It looks like being a complicated, tiring day. Six lessons, interspersed by stuff that I would like to have done on Friday or yesterday when the city simmered in 40-plus-degree heat. I’ve ordered some made-in-Romania baby shoes (gender-neutral-ish, I hope) as a present for my brother and sister-in-law who will pick me up from Stansted, but who knows if they’ll be delivered tomorrow and whether I’ll be home at the time they deliver them. If not, I’ll have to find some other present and save the shoes for when I go over again in October, assuming I can do that.

Yesterday I had a long Zoom chat with my cousin in Wellington. She paints a very different picture of New Zealand from the one I get from my parents. None of the anti-Maori diatribes. Her eldest son is now in his second year at Canterbury. Number two can’t be far behind.

Poker. After going 42 tournaments without a top-three finish, this weekend I got the whole set of medal positions in just five attempts, for a profit of $102. I had two long, absorbing heads-up sessions, both in no-limit single draw. My third-place finish was in five-card draw, which is just like single draw except you’re trying to make good hands instead of bad ones. At one point this morning I was playing four different tournaments, each of them with different rules and at very different stages, all at the same time.

I’ve also watched The Big Short this weekend. I saw Margin Call at the Penthouse in Wellington all those years ago, and it’s hard to say which I like more. The bailout, the “too big to fail” aspect (there’s a film with that title too), and the fact that hardly any of those bastards went to jail and basically nothing changed as a result of the Global Financial Crisis, was a great tragedy.

Time to pack now. I leave Timișoara on Tuesday lunchtime.

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.

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.