Family

I spoke to my parents this morning. Yesterday they went to Timaru for my uncle Graeme’s 80th birthday celebration. He’s the father of my cousin who lives in Wellington. He’s suffered from a lung condition for decades and has also had prostate cancer. In 1999 another of my uncles – one of Mum’s older brothers – came to stay with us in the UK, and my parents asked him how Graeme was. In his typically vivid way of speaking, he replied: “He’s got one foot in the grave and another on a bloody banana skin!” Well he died in 2014 at age 70, from cancer of the oesophagus, while Graeme is still going.

My cousin had travelled down with her three sons to celebrate her dad’s big eight-oh. Dad was intrigued by the youngest boy, aged 12½. You know, I think he might have a problem. Apparently he was obsessed with the cat, and was totally uninterested in any of the people present, except when he gave Dad a big bear hug out of the blue. He didn’t really talk. Dad thought he might be autistic, and he could see shades of me in how he behaved. I know my cousin recently took him out of the expensive school that his elder brothers also went to, and she wouldn’t have done that without good reason. So much time has gone since I saw him face-to-face, so I haven’t seen him grow into a near-teen, but he was always different from his brothers who were high achievers right from the start. My cousin kept a spreadsheet of all the words they knew by the age of two: the eldest one had a sizeable vocabulary, only for the middle boy to surpass that by his second birthday. She didn’t bother with the youngest one, though, because he’d hardly picked up a single word. The one thing that does stand out for me is the time I saw him at football practice. He often sloped off to the side, uninterested in the game, the whole idea of competing in a team seemingly alien to him, just as it was to me at that age.

I really did have problems, but they were largely masked by my capability at school; as a little boy I was unusually capable at reading and maths. Throughout my teenage years and beyond, I sort of got by. Few friends to speak of, but I muddled along in my unobtrusive way. Unlike my brother, I wasn’t much trouble. (Because of him, I flew under the radar a bit.) My parents thought I’d “sort myself out eventually”, and on the surface I did. I got into a quality university, came out with a good degree, got a good job. None of it was particularly easy, but I managed it. I could fake it for just long enough to maybe get through a one-hour interview, but in the job itself I couldn’t fake it. I might be expected to go out for drinks on a Friday night, four hours or more in a packed bar, and I’d just be itching to escape. (Covid must be a godsend for some people.) Or, even harder, I’d need to build up relationships with colleagues over months and years. I survived, in the only way I knew how, by keeping a low profile, but trying to keep that going just about killed me.

My problems might have seemed small, but they have affected me hugely. My ability to earn money and live comfortably, my ability to have fun, my ability to find a partner and have a family, all massively compromised. I came up with my online name “plutoman” when I lived on Pluto Place (what a name), but for me it worked because I was always on the outside, and mostly irrelevant. (At the time, Pluto had just been downgraded from a planet to a lump.) I liked “plutoman” (anagram of “not a lump”, by the way) because the “man” ending has always been slightly amusing to me, and the word then has lots of those nice friendly letters in the middle of the alphabet.

Living in Romania has been a breath of fresh air. I’m no longer living a lie. In this evening’s lesson I could play a video, make faces and wave my arms about, and that was absolutely fine. I really hope my cousin, a super-high achiever herself, recognises her youngest boy’s condition, or at least looks into it (maybe he’ll grow out of it – who knows) and doesn’t try and push him into jobs or university degrees or anything that could make his life unnecessarily stressful.

I played another poker tournament – single draw – this morning. Barely a dozen hands into the tournament, my 3000 starting stack had shrivelled to 200-odd as I called a shove with a pat 98 only to be shown a 96. So that was that. But no, I built my tiny stack up to over 4000, only for that to whittle down, and in the end I was the victim of a suck-out (my pat 97 got outdrawn) and that really was that. There were a couple of spots where (in hindsight) I was too tight. So much of this game is knowing your opponents.

My parents have put their offer for the house. Seems like a ton of money to me but I’m no expert on this stuff. Or rather, I haven’t a clue. They’ll find out in the next few hours, I expect. The stakes aren’t really that high – if they get it they win, but if they miss out they also win.

Dad diced with disaster again at the weekend. He fell off an unstable stepladder, his big pot of denim blue paint went flying, and so did he. He landed on his back in the grass, narrow missing a large rock.

I had a rare free evening last night, so I played a low buy-in poker tournament, and guess what, I won it. It had 165 entries including rebuys, and I was the last man standing after 4¼ hours. It was good old fixed-limit badugi, my mainstay, and my win came after a very barren run in that tourney. I wound up on tighter tables than usual this time, and played more hands than normal in the timeframe because so many of them ended long before showdown. I was pretty sure I was dead meat well before we entered the money, but when I got almost all-in, my opponent either misread his hand or was clueless, probably the latter. A bit later with a dozen players left, I hit a four-outer on the last draw to survive, meaning I had a 90% chance at that point of instant elimination. I rode my luck a bit from there, though when we got heads-up I was at a small chip disadvantage which became lop-sided when I lost the first few hands of our 62-hand battle. Luckily for me, my opponent wasn’t that great, and I gradually chipped away at him. On the last hand I hit a lovely low spade to make the second nuts – a colossus of a hand – and that was that. Because it was a limit tournament, I didn’t have to worry about knocking people out, and my win netted me an $85 profit. My bankroll is $296, almost twice what I started the month with.

Dad sent me some information about an app for learning Urdu. I don’t have much use for Urdu right now, though it would surely be fascinating. The Urdu script, known as Nastaliq, is difficult to typeset. Because of this, there is an Urdu newspaper called the Musalman, based in Chennai, that is handwritten – calligraphically – to this day. It’s a thing of beauty.

It’s been a slowish start to my work week, but I’ve got ten lessons scheduled for the next two days.