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Family - Life :) - Photos - Poker

Simplifying life

February 8, 2021 by 0 Comments

We’ve had a mild – spring-like – start to February. I think back to a Saturday in late October, the city enveloped in thick fog, ambulances wailing incessantly, and the very real possibility of Donald Trump’s re-election looming darkly. In spite of two deadly hospital fires in Romania since then, things do seem much less awful now. People are being vaccinated. In the UK, more than eleven million people have now had their first jab, including my aunt and sister-in-law.

I hadn’t used FaceTime video for a while until last Tuesday. Mum, what’s happened to you? She looked shattered and had four cold sores on her lips. (She’s long been prone to them. Stress seems to bring them out.) The 40-degree day had taken it out of her, I think. That, plus all the house-related stuff. They now want to move, maybe as soon as next month. This, and a realisation that they should simplify their lives, has all happened quickly. They’re about to put in a “deadline sale” offer on a place in Geraldine. I’m all for the change. They don’t need the hassle of owning and maintaining multiple properties. I was relieved when they called me from Hampden on Thursday that Mum was back to her usual self.

I FaceTimed my parents again this morning. Dad asked me if I get tired after a big day of lessons. Yes I do! But the tiredness is nothing compared to the feeling I got from working in insurance. This week, during some spare time, I used an Excel macro to try and model a limit poker tournament. In my insurance work I had to use macros and Access and (occasionally) fancier tools to model or analyse this or that, and I kept running into the same problem, that I didn’t care about what I was modelling or analysing, which anyway was only a tiny piece. Where, or indeed if, that piece fitted into the whole picture was mostly unclear to me. If I’d been modelling poker tournaments or tennis tie-breaks or coronavirus cases or elections or flood forecasting (I did that in a job once), things might have been different. (Some people get an almost euphoric high from just using the tool. In fact some practically whack off when they hear those processors whirring away. I’m not one of those people.)

Three poker tournaments yesterday. I cashed in one, finishing fourth of 90 or so, but again (this is a theme) I was hurt by it being a bounty tournament. Though I came back well from being almost dead and buried early on, my short stack meant I couldn’t amass many bounties. I felt I made good decisions throughout all three tournaments, and on all of my bust-out hands I got my money in with the best of it. My bankroll is $163.

Tomorrow morning it’s back to ANAF. Here are some pictures:

A well in Parcul Regina Maria
This well in Piața 700 is out there, man
Well, well, well. This one on Strada Alba Iulia has four taps and is covered in first names
Someone filling up his bidoane (big bottles) outside the church in Iosefin
This place looks haunted
“Don’t stop to read this. Stay healthy.”
This was once where people learnt to bake bread
An old street sign. Strada Iosif Rangheț. The small writing says “militant of the communist front”.
Before and after
Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Music

The big chill

January 14, 2021 by 0 Comments

The snow I mentioned last time pretty much melted away, but now the white stuff is coming down properly.

Dad sent me a great video about Fen skating. The Fens – the pancake-flat part of East Anglia which I lived on the edge of – regularly floods and sometimes freezes. Before the half-arsed winters we get now, the meadows might be frozen for weeks, and people would skate on them, especially Bury Fen, near Earith where my aunt lives. I had a go once or twice, but was just about talent-free. The Fen skating tradition dates back at least a couple of centuries, and racing was serious business that drew bumper crowds. The men in the video are getting on a bit now; they reminisced about the famous winter of 1962-63 and three successive harsh winters in the 1980s – people came in their thousands then to participate or watch. They said that another deep freeze could revitalise the tradition, but I’m not so sure. Even the eighties are a world away now. Back in Romania, temperatures are forecast to dip into the double-figure negatives, so the Bega might freeze as it did during my first winter here. There was even ice fishing.

I watched the replay of Dad’s cousin’s funeral. The video only lasted half an hour, and a good part of that was music before and after the service. I couldn’t see very much. He was a potter, and much of the focus was on the relative fame he achieved in that sphere. He was a PR man, he gave lessons, he talked pots, he was all over social media, he met the great and the good of the potting world on his travels, and he blew his own trumpet loud and often. The complete opposite of my father, in other words, who can’t stand any of that stuff (you can see where I get it from) and has always preferred to let his paintings speak. He was described in the service as being curmudgeonly, cantankerous, and always right. Surly is the word I would use. I think he was actually quite friendly though if you got to know him (I never really did).

Coronavirus deaths in the UK have reached 100,000. Yesterday 1562 deaths were recorded. (On a per capita basis, this is equivalent to almost 8000 in the US.) People are often dying alone. Bodies are piling up in mortuaries. This level of excess death hasn’t been seen since the Second World War. It’s a tragic toll.

Last night’s Musicorama was dedicated to Joan Baez, who has just turned 80. What a voice, and what an incredible life she has led inside and outside of music. In the winter of 2015, just before I started this blog, I found myself playing Diamonds and Rust over and over. On Monday’s show that a variety of artists including Sting. Why do I like his All This Time so much, I wondered. Ahh, because it sounds so much like Paul Simon.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos - Poker

A few pics (and a spot of poker)

December 30, 2020 by 0 Comments

It’s currently a ridiculous 12 degrees on the penultimate day of a crazy year, and the fourth anniversary of the day I moved into this flat. I remember that day well. All I had was a suitcase, a backpack, and a view. It was like a dream. I could have ended up anywhere but I’m slap-bang in the middle of this beautiful city. That’s mad. And then the next day the square was absolutely heaving. New Year is (under normal circumstances) a big deal here.

I’ve had a big last quarter of 2020 on the work front. A third of my hours this year have come since 1st October. To put that another way, my daily volume over the last three months has been 50% higher, on average, than in the first nine months. Yesterday I had five sessions (8½ hours) and felt I could have done better. I’d run out of things to do; I was winging it. Since I moved exclusively online, where there are fewer tools at my disposal, winging it has been a more prominent feature. One of my sessions was with the ex-professional poker player; he pointed me towards a database you can use to scout out fish in PokerStars hold ’em games.

Yes, poker. On Monday night I made $24 from a badugi tournament. I came fifth out of more than 100 players, surviving for 3¾ hours. It’s funny getting back into that again. The adrenalin rush of hitting a big hand or calling a big bluff. People made more moves than I remember a decade ago, or maybe they did then too and I just didn’t notice. I’m a better watcher of the game than back in the old days. My demise, or almost, came when I was dealt the 41st best hand in the game (which is better than it sounds), but my opponent made the 39th. That left me almost chipless, and two hands later I was out. After a couple of other cashes (and some non-cashes, of course), my bankroll is $97, which gives me just enough of a buffer to play the cash games. My goal isn’t really to make money (though that would be nice), but to enjoy the game and play a whole lot less robotically than I feel I used to.

When I called my parents last night, Dad had gone to Temuka to get his blood checked, so I was able to have a good chat with Mum. As long as we avoid all talk of Dad’s health, we get on extremely well. It will be a long time before I hug her again.

Here are some pictures of Timișoara (where else?):

Central Park, 20/11/20
This is Serbian. “Who is the fastest in the city?”
Some old maps of Timișoara Fortress
Gearing up for the “Romania without masks” protest.
Christmas dinner
Books - Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - The UK

A strange festive season

December 26, 2020 by 0 Comments

On Wednesday night, I met one of my students. She paid me for my lessons, then showered me with gifts. It was dark, but there was clearly a book (in Romanian, inevitably), some sarmale, and a cozonac. Damn. You’ve wrecked my Christmas Eve cooking plans. (I’m serious. I’m not great at planning, and when I do make a plan, it throws me for a loop when someone makes me suddenly abandon it.) I can still make some salată de boeuf, I suppose. But when I got home, I opened the glass container to find some salată de boeuf. She must have read my mind. Or this blog. I’ll have a go at all that Romanian cuisine some other time.

On Christmas Eve, not a lot happened. I had a lesson with the woman in Brașov. She’d forgotten that we’d scheduled a meeting for Christmas Eve, and when I called her at 8am she was still in bed. We eventually had the lesson at ten. No grammar or anything taxing. Just chat about Christmas and Covid-related stuff. She said she was glad Romania is always behind other European countries, because it means the vaccine will be safer when it gets here. Then I got the business about allergic reactions. Then the stuff about the MMR vaccine causing autism, which is utterly, dangerously, false. In the evening I heard that the Brexit deal had gone through. With days until the deadline, there were only two real options. This was the second worst option. I was sad to learn that Britain will no longer be part of the Erasmus programme, which I took advantage of in 2000-01. None of the students left out in the cold were old enough to vote in the referendum. (Die-hard Brexiteers will applaud this, of course. Erasmus is for the elite, or some such shit. It even sounds Latin, doesn’t it? Mr Erasmus was in fact a philosopher and monk from Rotterdam. Since the programme began in the late eighties, over three million students have taken the opportunity to study abroad in Rotterdam. Or anywhere.)

Not that much happened on Christmas Day either, really. It was a wet day. (One of my ex-students sent me a video clip of her Christmas morning in Austria. It was snowing there.) Mum and Dad called me from Hampden – they’d had their Christmas dinner in Moeraki. I ate some of all that Romanian food I’d been given (I felt far more grateful than I did on Wednesday night), drank some Romanian drink (the red wine was called Sânge de Taur, “Bull’s Blood”), and read my book. I’ve almost finished Kate Atkinson’s extremely clever Life After Life, which didn’t do much for me at the start (this is too clever) but quickly grew on me. Once I’ve finished that, I’ll start on my present, Inocenții by Ioana Pârvulescu. That will keep me going. My brother called me; he and his wife had done a normal Christmas dinner for the two of them, with all the turkey and pigs in blankets. He’d have been quite happy not to bother, I think, but she takes Christmas pretty seriously. My brother told me that St Ives had been flooded. Not the south side where we lived that often got flooded before the embankment was built in 2006, but north of the river where most people live. It’s been a very crappy Christmas for them. I dread to think what Christmas will do to the Covid situation in the UK. I don’t think 25th December dominates anywhere in world like it does there. Then I spoke to my aunt, who immediately asked me if I was bored. She’s obsessed with boredom. No, and so what if I am. There are far worse things in life than being bored. Thanks to Brexit, from the middle of next year my pre-pay phone plan will no longer include calls to the UK.

Dad’s cousin, whom I called my uncle when I was growing up, died on Tuesday (the 22nd). I don’t know if there will even be a funeral, let alone where or when or how. He’s one of a number of male family members to have died of cancer a few months either side of their 70th birthday. Dad, now six months past his 70th, has been through the wars but keeps hanging in there.

I was going to meet my student couple later today at their rather nice-looking house Sânandrei, but she’s just texted me to say she’s ill. It would have been my first real time spent with other humans for ages, and last night I was contemplating what to wear. My blue shoes? Hopefully we can still catch up.

Coronavirus - Family - Poker

A tragic year

December 21, 2020 by 0 Comments

This morning I woke up to an email from Dad. His cousin, who is 69 and was diagnosed with a brain tumour five months ago, is now in a coma. Dad had wondered why his cousin wasn’t replying to his emails. Maybe he just didn’t want to. Now we know he wasn’t able to. Dad’s cousin is the son of my grandmother’s younger sister, who died of cancer herself in her fifties. A potter by trade, he married quite young and they had a daughter. As kids we visited them in Wales quite often. We found him scary. He was six foot five and didn’t like children. His wife always seemed lovely though. Eventually they split up, and he found a Korean woman half his age. They had a son who must be about seven now. It’s all so awful.

Mum was telling me about a friend of hers from the UK who visited my parents in Geraldine a few years back. Her husband died in January, and then in July she lost her daughter who was 45 or so. This has been a horrific year for so many people. It can’t end soon enough.

On Friday night (my time, so Saturday morning in NZ) I got the usual bullshit from Mum. Dad had a bad headache and wanted to crawl into a hole, but they’d arranged to go out that evening, so obviously it was a pretend headache that wouldn’t have existed if they hadn’t planned anything. Stop that shit now, would you?

Late this afternoon I saw an anti-mask protest about to kick off in Piața Operei. What’s going on all over Europe and America is enormously frustrating to watch. I thought we might see these vaccines in the middle of 2021 if we’re lucky. But we have at least three vaccines ready to roll now, in one of humanity’s greatest feats. We can just about reach out and touch the end of this nightmare. All we have to do is get through this winter. But no, we’ve decided to spaff this whole thing up the wall. In the UK, they’re dealing with a new, more transmissible strain of the virus, and I just had an alert on my phone (four beeps) to say that air travel from Romania to the UK and vice versa has been banned.

I played some online poker this afternoon, including a micro-stakes triple draw tournament which I bombed out of after 80 minutes. Not before some interesting hands, though. It was weird getting my eye back in again. Annoyingly, PokerStars has a habit of crashing my laptop, so I don’t know how much more I’ll play until I can sort that out. I’ve had a few chats about poker with my ex-professional student. What comes over loud and clear from him is that live poker is a very stressful way to try and make a living.

Update: I’ve just watched Matt Hancock, the Secretary of Health in the UK, being interviewed about the new strain of the virus. He looked shit scared, honestly.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The latest worry

December 14, 2020 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents on FaceTime this morning and I was just about to hang up when their landline phone rang. Mum took the call. This sounds medical. What’s going on? Apparently Dad had blood in his urine when they were down in Queenstown, and the phone call was about an appointment to get that checked out. This week he also has his scheduled 18-month post-cancer-operation check-up. Mum told me not to worry. What the hell? Of course I’m going to worry. And if they’d got that call a minute later I would never have known.

Yesterday my aunt called me. We chatted for half an hour – that’s probably some kind of record. She started off, as usual, saying she was bored and depressed. The depressed part I sympathise with; you have some say over the bored bit though. She said her antidepressant wasn’t doing the trick, so I gave her the name of mine, though it might not be suitable for her (if she could get a doctor to prescribe it anyway). We had a friendly chat, about hairstyles among other things. She was all there and half-way back but her world has become oh so small. I’m sure things would be very different if my uncle was still alive.

This afternoon I played tennis for the last time until the spring. Tennis has been of real benefit to me. Plenty of exercise and a fair bit of Romanian too. Today I finally figured out what a da din mână means. (Mână is Romanian for hand.) The phrase means to just rally, without playing a game. The first time I heard it was when one of the women wanted to go for a pee behind the bushes, and the rest of us rallied while she was busy. Does it mean to pee, I wondered. There are lots of Romanian expressions involving mână. One of the most common is sărut mâna, literally “kiss hand”, which is used when you say goodbye to a (usually older) woman. The t is silent.

Since the US election I’ve been following the news less. Most of the time it just isn’t worth it. Three incompetent prime ministers (in their own ways) have helped push Britain to the brink of a nonsensical tear-down-everything exit from the EU while the pandemic rages on. (Hopefully I’ll be safe here.) And Donald Trump is fast-tracking executions before he leaves office, while 3000 Americans are dying every day from Covid. He really is a piece of shit, isn’t he?

I remember the 2003 rugby World Cup final very well. I watched it at my grandmother’s place; it was a few days before getting on the plane to New Zealand where I would start my new life. How sweet it was to see England lift the cup. Against Australia. In Australia. In the 100th minute. (When I arrived in NZ, they were still dissecting the All Blacks’ semi-final exit.) But I was reading that Steve Thompson, who was in the cup-winning side, can’t remember winning it. He even forgets his wife’s name sometimes. Gee whiz. He’s barely older than me. He’s one of several ex-elite rugby players to suffer from dementia.

We’re racing towards Christmas. It’ll be my third in five years spent alone, and I’m fine with that. No stress. I’ll attempt to make some Romanian food. Sarmale. A ciorbă. Maybe even a cozonac if I get really ambitious. I’ve got some vișinată, which is lovely, and even some țuică if desperation sets in. (Google these things if you like.)

I had 33½ hours of lessons last week.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Why didn’t he tell me?

December 9, 2020 by 0 Comments

The busker outside has just been playing La Fereastra Ta (“At Your Window”), an early-eighties hit by Cluj band Semnal M. I remember hearing it when I listened to Romanian radio online in the months before coming here, and trying to make sense of the lyrics. In my letterbox I’ve just had a note telling me I have to pick up a small package from the post office. I was hoping it would be the books Mum ordered for me, but I think that because it’s “small” it’ll be the CD I ordered off Ebay: Mwng from Welsh band Super Furry Animals. The whole album is in Welsh. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. (I also bought one or two items of clothing on Ebay, but they seem to have vanished into thin air.) Talking of music, the Kinks song Apeman came on the radio a few days ago. A great song which expresses how I feel about 21st-century life, even though it came out fifty years ago. Leave modern life behind and massively simplify everything. In some ways, that’s what I’ve done. A funny thing though – they bleeped out the first word of “fogging up my eyes”. It does sound suspiciously like “fucking”, but in reality it isn’t, and at any rate I’ve heard expletive-laden songs in English on the radio here which have been left uncensored.

Romania’s parliamentary elections have produced a split decision. The PSD (clear winners last time) are the biggest party again, but with a far smaller vote share this time, and it looks like they’ll be locked out of a coalition. The forward-thinking USR-plus (who were in third place, and may form part of government along with PNL who finished second) came top in Timișoara. There’s also a new party on the scene called AUR (which means “gold”); they’re anti-lockdown, anti-mask, and anti even thinking Covid is real. AUR got 9%, nearly twice the threshold for entering parliament, in a shock result. My student last night said they only did so well because of their shiny name. Turnout was abysmal, even considering the pandemic: only about a third showed up. And we’re currently rudderless. Ludovic Orban, the latest prime minister in a long line of them since I washed up in Romania, has quit. We still have a president, though.

After my two tricky lessons last night, finishing at 10:15, it was a great pleasure to talk to the woman who lives near Barcelona this morning. The woman I saw last night at seven is always so vacant. The lights are on but nobody’s home. What am I doing wrong? Help me! When I gave up on grammar exercises and asked her about her Christmas plans, she mercifully turned her dimmer switch up a notch or two. Then it was the poker guy with a big-stack ego. He’s so bloody good and knowledgeable about everything and loves saying so. I had 90 nauseating minutes of that. (Apart from those two students, everybody else I have is great, so I can’t complain.) The woman in Spain told me she didn’t like weddings. Join the club, I said. (Except my brother’s.) I bet loads of people don’t like weddings but don’t dare admit it.

I’ve been scouring statistics about verb tenses. (That’s the present perfect continuous.) There are twelve tenses in English, and I’ve been teaching them, concentrating on what I think are the most important ones. In speaking, more than half our verbs are in the simple present. (Not the present continuous, which some Romanians use continuously. That’s far less common.) About 20% of what we say is in the past simple. When we write a story, we’re generally writing about the past, so the percentages tend to flip. In my last blog post, which included an account of a tennis match, roughly 60% of what I wrote was in the past simple. All the stats I saw online confirmed what I thought. Five tenses are important enough to warrant serious study, including the problematic present perfect. Another three are useful once you’re at a pretty decent level. As for the remaining four (like the past perfect continuous – “I had been waiting at the station all day”), you can get by perfectly fine without them.

I spoke to my brother last night. They were in the middle of laying their parquet flooring. Eleven hundred strips of wood, each requiring two screws. It looked like painstaking work. My sister-in-law should get a shot of Pfizer any minute. I recently had a strange dream about my brother, although he wasn’t actually there. No, he’d gone to the moon (!) and Mum was naturally worried about him. Why didn’t he tell me?!

Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Tennis

It feels impossible

November 29, 2020 by 0 Comments

It’s now been confirmed exactly, to the dollar, how much each of us will receive from the sale of our apartment block. I’ve memorised the six-digit number as if it were an old phone number from when I was a kid. (When I was growing up, some of us had five-digit numbers, others six.) Commission and lawyers’ fees will still come out of that, but it’s beyond my wildest dreams. It’s surreal, honestly. Other owners have said, now I know what winning Lotto must feel like. This nine-year nightmare has been a defining feature of my life. Would I have come to Romania otherwise? It feels impossible that it’s now coming to an end, and with this outcome.

I’m in no hurry when it comes to figuring out my next step. Do I buy something in Timișoara, and if so, what? (I should really wait until I’m sure I can stay here.) How about the UK instead, or would that be a really terrible idea? As far as real estate is concerned, I’m clueless and frankly not that interested, but I’ve got options now that I never expected to have. Ideally I would like a sunny house with a small garden, maybe some fruit trees, and a place where I can work. That’s about all.

This must be a weight off my parents’ minds, too. When I got the news that my place had been yellow-stickered, Mum and Dad were on holiday in Europe and I didn’t dare tell them until they got back. I didn’t want to wreck their holiday.

I played tennis today with three members of a family (husband, wife, and their nine-year-old boy who can certainly play a bit). We played three sets, one in each configuration. The most enjoyable set was the one with the boy, which we lost 7-5. The temperature couldn’t have been more than two degrees, but that didn’t seem to matter.

My parents have gone over to Milford Sound for a trip, taking advantage of the lack of foreign tourists. They hope it might be like the one we did as a family 31 years ago. Milford Sound, Doubtful Sound, Lake Te Anau and the glow-worm caves, it was all magical. One time the captain let my brother and I drive the boat. Such a different time.

Dad has a 1957 MGA. He bought it in the UK in ’91, at which time it was red. (He’s now had it for nearly half its life.) It was black when it was shipped out new (and left-hand drive) to the US, as the vast majority of MGAs were. I went with Dad to the classic car yard before he bought it for £6000, and I remember he first went round the bodywork with a magnet, wondering why a part of it didn’t attract, but eventually thinking nothing of it. It was a beautiful-looking car, very curvaceous, and I always liked the leathery smell of it. None of that insipid plasticky stuff. When my parents moved to New Zealand in 2003, it went in the shipping container. Just recently he’s had it reworked and resprayed, the steering swapped over, and the engine reconditioned (all at no inconsiderable cost, I’m sure). He found out it had once been in an accident, with layers of filler applied, hence why there was no metal for that magnet to pick up. He’s now got his car back, in a lovely robin’s-egg blue, or Cambridge blue, or perhaps face-mask blue.

November hasn’t been a bad month. Trump lost. Hooray! (I’m already fed up with the cynicism about Biden being just more of the same. I really really want Biden to succeed and I think he can.) At least three vaccines have demonstrated impressive levels of efficacy. And now, totally unexpectedly, I’ve found myself in a position to build something, to plan for the future, to even feel I have a future. Who cares if it doesn’t get above two degrees.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

Another dark day for Romania

November 16, 2020 by 0 Comments

Tragedy struck Romania last night. Ten people died in a fire in the Covid wing of a hospital in Piatra Neamț, in the north-east of the country. I’m looking at the gruesome pictures on TV now. They still don’t know what caused it. Perhaps the fire was fuelled by the supplementary oxygen, or maybe it was a short circuit. To Romanians it brings back dreadful memories of the Colectiv nightclub fire that took place five years ago, killing 64 people. Did we learn nothing, they are saying today.

In brighter news I’ve played a decent amount of tennis this weekend, every point of it partnering the same woman. Yesterday there was a new woman on the other side of the net – a good player whose kick serve made it clear that she’d been coached – and we went down 6-3 6-4 3-2, though we led 3-1 in the first set and were unlucky not to at least make it close. Then today I had my work cut out once again, with two men across the net. I had to run everything down. We played 3½ sets, and from our point of view we finished up at 6-3 6-2 3-6 1-4. I played well but it was taxing physically and mentally, and I tired towards the end. My partner brought along some homemade apple pie.

The highlight of my work week was pretty clear. Half-way through my Google Meet lesson with an eleven-year-old girl, the “share screen” function stopped working. What do I do now? I asked her about music. Do you play an instrument? Do you like any singers or bands? I don’t want to say it, but I’ll write it, she said. The words “Sex Pistols” suddenly appeared on my screen, followed by “God Save the Queen”. Wow. Why do you like the Sex Pistols? How do you even know about them? Do you know they were British? She said her parents often played their songs.

I haven’t mentioned my book much recently. With my higher teaching volumes, I haven’t done as much. I’m now on the P section of the dictionary, which is taking ages. Dad, however, is now helping out with illustrations. So far he’s come out with a nifty cartoonish style, and he’ll use the same cartoon character in each picture, adding “extras” when necessary. The tricky bit (well, to me it’s all tricky, but the tricky bit even for a talented artist like my father) is to convey the relevant language point in each picture. That’s absolutely crucial. I have three lessons tomorrow – a light day – so I hope I can make more progress with the dictionary.

Covid. There are tentative signs that it’s getting better in Timișoara. The numbers of new cases have dropped off slightly. I still hear far more ambulance sirens than normal, but fewer than two or three weeks ago when they seemed incessant. Tentative signs, as I said, and with winter almost upon us. I’ve been trying to get a flu jab, with no luck. The pharmacies don’t have any available. To get me through the long, dark winter I’m now taking a cocktail of vitamin D, zinc and selenium. It would be nice to think that one of the vaccines – hopefully not the Russian Sputnik V vaccine – will be with us by the spring.

As soon as I got back from this afternoon’s exertions on the tennis court, I had a long chat with my cousin who lives in New York state. I spoke to both him and his Italian wife. The virus is tearing through the entire country now, making the first two waves seem like mere ripples. Of course we talked about the election. Just imagine if Trump had won re-election. Just. Imagine. And he wasn’t far off. People have been too quick to justify, or normalise, what we’ve seen from Trump since election day and the four years before. None of it is justifiable or normal.

My brother and his wife have moved into their new house. I’ll talk to them when they get their internet sorted. My brother quite likes fiddling with this or painting that, so I think he’ll enjoy having something extra to do over the winter while Covid otherwise restricts his options. As for my parents, they’ve put themselves on a list for a section of land in Geraldine, so they can build on it. It’s about 750 square metres, less than a tenth of what they currently have. Mum won’t want to be mowing that lawn much longer. I was hoping they’d abandon Geraldine, which has become rather geriatric, and buy something with a house already on it. If they don’t sell one of places in the meantime, they’ll – temporarily at least – own five properties. To me, owning five properties is about as realistic as owning three arms.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Tennis

What would she think?

November 2, 2020 by 0 Comments

I sometimes wonder what my parents would think if they stumbled upon this blog. They’d probably be horrified, especially Mum. But in fact I get on really well with Mum, better than ever before, for all kinds of reasons including (more recently) the pandemic which has strengthened our family bond. (I now have family photos all over my flat.) The main reason though is that I’ve been far happier since I moved to Romania, and that has lifted Mum’s mood too, so we’ve both managed to escape that spiral of negativity. (My brother had a pretty tough time a few years ago too, and he’s indescribably better now.) Another noticeable difference is that Mum respects me more because I’ve done a thing off my own bat. I mentioned that to Dad recently and he agreed with me.

When I spoke to Dad, he asked me what might have happened if I’d taken the job in Timaru instead of going to Auckland. At the beginning of 2004, when I was living with my parents in Temuka and desperate for a job, I went door-knocking on various banks and (now defunct) finance companies in Timaru. Most of them gave me short shrift, but a nice lady at BNZ was happy to sit down with me for a chat, and look over my CV. Perhaps in the same week (I can’t remember exactly) I flew up to Auckland for an interview with a life insurance company. I got the job in Auckland, and was extremely excited to do so, but I fell into a pit of depression almost the moment I started. Then Mum got a call from the lady at the bank, offering me a job, but it was too late by then. I said to Dad that I almost certainly would have been happier in the short term if I’d worked at BNZ, but within a few years banks had become even more sales-focused and I would have hated that.

I played tennis this afternoon. A welcome distraction. The court had been resurfaced since our last game – that’s the main reason why we couldn’t play for a while – and what a difference it made. Added to that, the setting was quite beautiful with all the autumn colours. I played with somebody new, the wife of one of the other players. As we walked to the courts, she was wearing an N95 mask (I just wore a cloth one) and I when she spoke to me I could hardly make out a thing she said. Da, da. On the other side of the court were her husband and an older guy. My partner was better than the woman I normally play with. We raced out to a 5-1 lead in the first set, but she visibly tired and we had to fight to even reach a tie-break, which we lost 7-4. After a quick fag break (not for me), we kept the same partners for the second set and I expected we’d go down in a heap, but instead we won 7-5 in a great set of tennis, full of long rallies and hard-fought deuce games. The two sets took 1¾ hours, excluding the fag break. I served five or six aces, well above average for me.

The UK announced their lockdown last night. (Or was it just for England?) Loads of baffling slides that you could hardly even see, followed by Boris saying that people must stay at home and also that they are free to leave home for a variety of reasons. (This Youtube clip from Matt Lucas never stops being funny.)

My brother should be moving house this Thursday. They’re upsizing. (Maybe they’ll be expanding.) The enthusiasm for moving comes from his wife, not him – I’m not sure it’s the sort of place he would have picked.

Yesterday I had a lesson with the woman in Bucharest who uses the same Romanian news app that I do. We had beeps and bloops every few minutes during the lesson. Nearly 6000 new Covid infections and 101 deaths. Simona Halep was positive. Then we heard that Sean Connery had died. My student said all the news (the earthquake in Greece and Turkey, the stabbing in Nice) was all getting a bit much. I said, just wait until next week. She said she expected Biden to lose because he’s “a hundred years old”. OK, he’s too old, but his opponent is too old and a giant turd.