The cathedral bells rang out in earnest this morning. What for? It’s the Feast of the Ascension in the Orthodox calendar. As I write, some kind of parade is about to begin on the steps of the cathedral. Someone is testing the microphone: “doi, zece, doi, zece”. Where I come from you go “one, two” and perhaps “three”, but Romanians say “two, ten” instead. No idea why. (Update: A brass band has started up.)
Last time I neglected to mention the role of religion in people’s attitudes to the pandemic and the vaccines. The impact is huge. A prime example here is No-Vax Djoković, a devout adherent to the Serbian Orthodox church, which is very similar to the Romanian version. Both Britain and New Zealand benefit from being increasingly secular countries. (Djoković had a battle on his hands last night against the impressive Matteo Berrettini, but survived a hiccup in the third-set tie-break to edge through in four. They started the match at 8pm local time; the spectators were forced to leave during the fourth set to avoid falling foul of the 11pm curfew. That was bizarre.)
I had a lesson this morning with a woman who caught Covid in early April along with her husband and small son. They’re still all suffering from memory loss, fatigue, and a succession of colds. Scary stuff.
In some sad news, the Bigăr waterfall, which I visited with my parents in 2017, collapsed on Monday evening. It was a popular tourist attraction, enhanced by being slap-bang on the 45th parallel north (the opposite of which might be familiar to certain readers of this blog). The weight of moss and the build-up of limestone caused it to give way.
21st June 2017
I see that Auckland has leapt to the top of the ranking of the world’s most livable cities, with Wellington in fourth place. I’m not quite sure who’s measuring this. Lack of virus obviously comes into it, but last time the I visited Auckland I was sorely disappointed. A soulless city, with house prices beyond livability for most.
On Tuesday I got my first haircut in eleven months. A good job done. My next chop might be ages away.
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.
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.
My apartment here in Timișoara has been sold. The agent told me on Monday. Luckily I can stay here, and I certainly want to for the time being. Then that evening I got a surprise knock on the door from the elderly couple on the sixth floor. They’d heard this place was for sale and were interested in buying it. I had to tell them that it had been sold hours earlier.
On Sunday I played tennis again with the smoker in his late sixties who coughs and spits his way through the game. We talked vaccines, as we all do right now, and I expected him to be one of Romania’s many anti-vaxers. He just fits the profile. But no, he’d been pfully Pfizered and was quite vocal about all the “idiots” who refuse the jab. I shouldn’t have been so quick to pigeonhole him. When he started smoking, probably half a century ago, practically all men in Romania smoked. And it’s really hard to give up!
I had a good chat with my cousin in Wellington on Monday. It’s funny dropping in on Virus-Free World. It sounds like some mythical land, a Shangri-La. They’re about to introduce a trans-Tasman bubble with Australia. Fingers crossed that doesn’t all blow up in their faces.
Last weekend the Boat Race took place. I didn’t watch it; I didn’t even know it was on. It was one of those things I watched as a little kid, hoping Cambridge would win, because I was born there and lived just down the road, and because I thought their duck-egg bluey-green colour was way cooler than Oxford’s boring dark blue. But Oxford always bloody won. Last Saturday’s race was interesting because Covid restrictions it took place on the Ouse at Ely, just around the corner from where I grew up, instead of on the Thames, so Cambridge had home advantage of sorts. And they won both the men’s and women’s races.
In my last post about everything becoming too big, I totally neglected to mention the Ever Given, the gargantuan quarter-mile-long cruise ship that was wedged in the Suez Canal for six days, blocking about 12% of all global freight. We’re bursting at the seams here.
I played a single draw poker tournament this morning, or at least attempted to. My connection to their server kept cutting out. It was hopeless. I only saw about dozen hands in the times I sporadically reconnected. After blinding way down and busting out, I contacted support asking what I could do to mitigate the problem (I had no internet issues other than with their server), and if they could refund my small buy-in. They got back to me pretty quickly and, to my surprise, refunded my buy-in as a “goodwill gesture”, though with a big dose of “this is your fault”. This didn’t happen to the others at your table, so you can’t blame us. It reminded me of the time I got a wisdom tooth taken out and was in agony during and after the extraction. The anaesthetic didn’t properly work, and I was up all night bleeding and in excruciating pain. When I went back to the dentist, whom one of my work colleagues accurately dubbed “the Indian Butcher”, he strongly suggested that it was my fault because my experience “doesn’t usually happen”. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to get a refund, but I don’t know how to prevent being disconnected again.
My friend from Birmingham emailed me yesterday to say that he’d just seen his mother (who lives in the same city) for the first time in months, all masked up and physically distanced. No hugs. His father died about seven years ago. That must be hard. My parents live on the other side of the world so seeing each other is hard enough, virus or no virus, but when your mum is just there… I have been toying with the idea of a trip to virtually virus-free New Zealand. (NZ likes to be free of things. GE-free, pest-free, predator-free, smoke-free.) I’d have to quarantine for two weeks, but I could work in isolation.
The numbers are going back up in Romania, no doubt about it. The more contagious UK variant is, slowly but surely, becoming the dominant one. The weather is rapidly improving – we’ve had glorious days that have felt like May – but we could be in for a spring just like in 2020, under national lockdown. Unlike the UK, Romania is employing a two-jab strategy, so while 600,000 Romanians have now received both shots of the vaccine, most people are still fully exposed. (Anybody who has only just had their first dose is fully susceptible, too.)
Last week was the tenth anniversary of the deadly Christchurch earthquake; 22/2/11. I was still living in Auckland then. Three weeks earlier I’d had an interview in Wellington for the job that I didn’t want. I was going through a bout of depression, though the previous evening I’d managed to play tennis. (Yes, tennis night was Monday. From memory I lost my singles but won the doubles.) I was in Devonport library when I heard the news, and a couple of hours later my boss at the insurance broker’s on Queen Street called me to ask if I wanted my old job back. I’d worked on claims for the first Christchurch quake until December. Yes, please! I was back there the next morning. A meaningful job with no bullshit (especially in such circumstances). I had a relaxing ten-minute ferry journey each way. Then in another three weeks they offered me the Wellington job, and with much (justified) trepidation I took it.
On Thursday I had one of those rare car-crash lessons. It was my first lesson with a woman who said she knew no English whatsoever. The charger port on my laptop had broken, and no matter which way I wedged the cable in the socket, it wouldn’t charge. I used some very good materials from the Lingoda site, but had to explain them in Romanian (with difficulty) while being distracted by watching the battery level drop like a stone. My laptop was about to die so I resorted to using my phone, and I must have seemed rather unprofessional. I’ve since managed to make a connection again – I daren’t move my laptop a millimetre from its current spot on my desk – and I hope I can get it fixed on Monday. Hopefully my new student hasn’t already given up on me.
Four more poker tournaments today. The first one (Omaha hi-lo) lasted barely ten minutes. A crazy five-way all-in on the flop, I had good equity, but none of it materialised. Then single draw, which came to an abrupt halt when my good hand was outdrawn. Then pot-limit badugi. I made a very fast start, then went card dead, then kept sticking around until I was the short stack with only three remaining out of 100 entries. I survived some hairy moments and eventually eliminated one of the other players for a useful bounty. (Makes a change.) I didn’t last too long heads-up, but I made a $48 profit for finishing second. This evening I played the limit badugi and chipped up well, but when my big pat hand got outdrawn in a monster four-way pot, that was pretty much that, and I fell four places short of the money. I’ve made a couple of hundred this month; my bankroll is $353.
We were supposed to restart tennis today, but someone decided to call it off because it was too windy. Too windy?! You gotta be joking. In Wellington, that would have been a joke.
I no longer own a property. I do however own a meaningful sum of money, finally.
I flew off the handle yesterday when Dad suggested I max myself out by buying a place in the UK. Spend that much?! I don’t want to go back there again. Real estate is a sore point for me, and it doesn’t help that my parents have four properties and might be buying a fifth. I’m perfectly fine with the idea of buying a home – I’d like to have my own place in Timișoara – but the property market itself leaves me stone cold. My own experiences don’t help here. When I bought my flat in Wellington, people asked me if I was excited. What sort of question is that? I’ve just spent a ton of money, most of which I don’t have, and to pay off all that debt I’m using the income from my job which I probably won’t have in a few months either. (As it turned out, I didn’t have it in a few weeks. My salary almost halved at that point. Then a few months later my apartment block was basically condemned. Plus I was suffering from depression. All very exciting, right? Like riding the crest of a high and beautiful bloody wave.) No, buying that place felt like an obligation and nothing more. Done, ticked the box, phew. I was happy to oblige because I thought it would be the best move for me financially, even if paying off the mortgage might soon become a challenge. Renting it out was a good move certainly – my rental income in the last four years has helped me take giant hunks out of my mortgage – and to escape with the sort of money that can buy me something is a better result that I dared to imagine, but it’s perhaps understandable that I’m hesitant about diving straight back in.
But it’s not just that. To give yourself the best chance of avoiding poverty in New Zealand (or Australia or the UK, for that matter), you need to get on the property ladder. That’s becoming a harder proposition all the time, mainly because both Labour and National governments have done nothing to change the insane tax legislation that makes property investment more attractive than other (productive!) forms. Immigration policy and lack of cheaper housing haven’t helped either. As time goes on, you’re forced to enter the market later (unless you have wealthy parents), mortgage yourself even further beyond your eyeballs, and the profits you make will shrink as you spend less time in the market. But you still have to do it. It’s reality, but a very shitty reality. It beats me why anyone would be excited about any of that.
When I went anywhere with my parents in New Zealand, they always took detours to look at houses. If we happened to be in a town centre, they’d be peering in through real estate agent windows. It drove me nuts. And they were pretty low on the scale compared to others. They didn’t attend open homes as a hobby, for instance. As for my aunt who would come round and gossip about what places in Geraldine had sold and for how much – seven sodding sixty for whatever place up on the Downs – I’d just about lose it. Yes, always up on the Downs.
What a tennis match I got involved in yesterday. Singles. I hadn’t done that for ages. My opponent was 58 and super-fit. Much fitter than me. He plays other sports like football and possibly handball and volleyball too. I started well, moving out to a 4-1 lead. He won the next two games but I then served for the set at 5-3 and had two set points at 40-15. They came and went, and it was soon 5-5. His unforced errors were a big help to me as I got my nose in front again, and then came the 12th game. A ridiculous game. Lobs that he was able to retrieve, somehow. A gut-buster of a rally on my third set point that I lost. I was gasping for air after that. He had five chances to force a tie-break. On my fourth set point we had another crazy rally, and eventually he hit wide. After escaping with the set I was buoyed and he had a slight let-down. I led 3-0 in the second set. But then he came roaring back. I was up 4-2, but he levelled at 4-4, after I’d had points to win both those games. I then led 5-4 and 0-30 on his serve, and had a match point. I couldn’t put him away. He held on and broke me easily in game 11. Then we ran out of time; we’d booked the court for 90 minutes. He was an extremely tricky customer. Controlled aggression throughout, and solid on both sides. I needed to take big risks to hit winners against him. I hit uncharacteristic unforced errors which dented my confidence, and meant I got bogged down. My biggest failing was an inability to take the ball earlier; I felt I was giving him too much time. But his fitness, at his age, was remarkable, and it made me think I need to do something. Buying a better bike would be a start.
St Andrew’s Day (30th November), Romania’s national day (1st December) and Moș Nicolae (St Nicholas Day, yesterday) have gone by without a whimper. No market stalls outside. No slănină or mămăligă or mulled wine. None of those inescapable smells. It’s all very weird. Soon I’ll be having my third Christmas alone in five years, so that won’t feel weird at all.
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.
I got an email from the body corporate in Wellington this morning. We now have a confirmed sale, at a price that surpassed our expectations so much that they wrote the amount in words after the numbers, just in case we thought it was a typo. The location – it’s prime real estate – must have brought out the competition. (There was a tender process.) I might break even, or perhaps a little better, after all the fees and what have you. That’s a massive result. When I bought the place I imagined I might do rather better than break even (ignoring all the mortgage interest) after nine years, but to escape from the wreckage of this catastrophe with just a few bumps and bruises, instead of being financially crippled for life, is amazing. Time to crack open the champagne!
At the moment my days and weeks are passing in a fog of fatigue. Maybe I’m getting old, or more likely, I’m suffering from all the extra screen time. My lessons are now exclusively online. I preferred the face-to-face meetings and all the books and games and props. Now it’s a combination of Skype, Zoom and Google Meet. The latter two allow you to do all sorts of clever stuff; my younger students sometimes excitedly show me the various tricks which I promptly forget. Sometimes I feel like a schoolteacher in the eighties or nineties who struggled with the functions of a VCR. “Yes, miss, I know how to do it!”
My favourite lesson of last week was with a husband and wife whom I last saw nearly a year ago. I had my first lessons with them way back in September 2017. They’re really nice people, and it was a pleasure to see them (virtually, of course) in our three-way Skype meeting. They sat in separate rooms in their new house in Sânandrei, about ten kilometres from Timișoara. I’d always known the wife as Andreea, and was initially confused when she popped up on my screen as Eliza. Not that confused, because Romanians often have two first names which both get significant use. She explained that she’s Andreea to her friends but Eliza at work. She’s not a doolittle in the office, that’s for sure. Her whole day is taken up by answering emails of complaint, usually in English. She showed me a bunch of emails she’d sent that day, and I tried to help her iron out some kinks in her English and generally sound more human and less aggressive and robotic. “Photos unreceived,” she wrote at one point. Unreceived is in that grey area between a word and a non-word. In fact people in these multinational companies communicate all the time in this grey, lifeless, minimalist pseudo-English that would drive me mad. (This did drive me mad when I started working for an insurance company.)
The US election is almost upon us. It’s barely three days away. Biden is a pretty hefty favourite – in the “gold standard” Fivethirtyeight model, Trump has a one-in-ten chance of winning – not much, but it’s a 10% chance of something terrifying. It’s a bit like how I’d feel if there was a 1% chance of a giant asteroid impact in Timișoara. It’s also a bit like how some of us have felt about coronavirus, which Trump has so royally effed up on. I listened to a Fivethirtyeight podcast yesterday, and they said that if Trump wins, we’ve really got to question what any of this means anymore.
New Zealand voted against legalising cannabis in the referendum. The “yes” vote was around 46%, which will probably increase when the special votes come in, but it almost certainly won’t be enough. A missed opportunity, I’d say, and my guess is that if it wasn’t for the Covid-fuelled uncertainty, the result might have been different. I imagine they’ll revisit this in ten or twenty years. Interestingly, the assisted dying bill passed easily, and I would have voted for that too.
Mum has ordered me half a dozen books from Waterstones. Two of them are for my work. The rest are The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon (a book about depression – just what we all need right now), The Sixth Extinction (which we’re currently in the middle of), The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel (if it’s anything like the other book of hers I read, it’ll be amazing), and Word Perfect by Susie Dent (she first appeared on Countdown in 1992 and is now a minor celebrity). The books aren’t cheap – they come to just over £100, mainly because of the two work books. Study materials are so damn expensive. It’s always a pleasure to receive these gifts, but it would be nice if at our respective stages in the game I was buying stuff for Mum and not the other way round, and there was a time when I’d order my parents maybe a multifunctional printer or a case of wine. That time was about 2005.
On Thursday I called my aunt on her 73rd birthday. She didn’t want much of a chat. It’s always a bit frustrating talking to her. In our conversations (if you can call them that) you only get faint hints that she might care about what goes on in other people’s lives, and when you get that glimmer, it’s inevitably snuffed out in the very next sentence.
That’ll do for today (Saturday). About to have two lessons, with the bloke in Austria and the woman in Bucharest. And by the way, the mother who was messing me around with dates and times decided to give up on me. No great surprise.
This morning I got hold of some zinc to go with my vitamin D. The wintriest-ever winter is on its way, and if I can boost my immune system inexpensively and harmlessly, I should absolutely be doing so.
Last week was quite a big one on the work front. Three new students. One of them is a friend of another student of mine – a Romanian who has lived just outside Birmingham (which is where I studied) for the last three years. I spoke first with her husband whose English was mindblowingly good – practically fluent, with a Brummie accent to boot. Then I had my two sessions with her on Skype – she’s one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. The other new people are Lucian, a bloke of about my age who works for a courier firm, and an 18-year-old guy (I had a rare in-person lesson with him) who wants to study in Amsterdam and needs an IELTS certificate. I’m trying to discourage face-to-face meetings. I had my work cut out with the ten-year-old boy in Bucharest – with no games or fun physical activities at my disposal, 90 minutes is an aeon.
Talking of Birmingham, I’ve been in touch with my university friend who lives in the centre of the city. I mentioned that tri-generational families are quite common in Romania, and there’s generally a fair bit of mixing between different age groups, to the point where the elderly are in danger of catching Covid from their children or grandchildren. He said that (of course) that isn’t the case in the UK outside Asian communities, and when I saw a heat-map chart that showed just how age-sorted Britain now is, I thought, isn’t that sad? (I talk to my parents two or three times a week, and I’m in regular contact with people aged between 10 and 85.) And it’s not just age groups where people are increasingly sorting themselves. Race, income, level of education, how they voted in the EU referendum, you name it. When I saw that chart, I thought it’s no wonder that UK is so fractured right now.
What a contrast between Britain and New Zealand. The UK’s response to Covid has been shambolic, and I can hardly blame Scotland and Wales and Manchester and maybe one or two others for giving central government the middle finger. I couldn’t follow the NZ election because I was working, but shock horror, you properly handle the biggest crisis facing your country in 75 years, you bring in the best scientists, your messaging is clear, you show compassion, and guess what, you’re rewarded in the polls. It’s not that complicated. Labour won the first majority under proportional representation, in the ninth election to be held under that system. Although it was a decisive result, there was a nice balance, with the Greens (climate crisis, hello?) and a resurgent ACT picking up ten seats apiece. It’s great they have a system that allows such balance unlike the US or UK.
I did catch up with my brother. He’d just got back from northern Scotland. He likes long drives, which is just as well. His phone has just about had it, so we struggled to communicate. What? Wh-what? I couldn’t hear a damn thing on the other end. He doesn’t want to spend the money on a replacement phone. His attitude to money has taken a complete one-eighty in recent years; in his twenties he got through more phones than I did hot dinners. Now he’s all into mortgage interest rates and stamp duty and whatnot. I found out that he had a dramatic time up in Scotland – he helped rescue an American destroyer, however the hell you do that.
I had an email reply from my friend from St Ives. She and her husband came to visit me in Romania in 2017. We hired a car and had a wonderful time. She was relieved that I’d finally been in touch for the first time in months, thinking perhaps I’d entered (Covid-induced?) depression. But no, it was a combination of forgetting and lack of news. In truth I haven’t had depression in Romania. Sometimes I’ve felt a bit down, but that pointlessness, that neverending desert, weeks, months, years of it, seems to be in the past.
After work yesterday I went for a longish walk through the parts of town I frequented when I moved here. It was quite nostalgic, which might seem a silly word but I’ve now spent 10% of my life in Timișoara.
No tennis this weekend. Some of the group have been unwell, and I might have given it a miss anyway after what happened with my knee last weekend. One of the guys brings his small dog along; here are some pictures from the tennis court, which isn’t in perfect nick as you can see, as well as a bunch of snaps from yesterday’s walk.
The old abattoir
Opposite the old abattoir, just along by the guest house I stayed in, is a park. It’s pretty rough, as is the area as a whole, but I still remember being in this park on my second evening in Timișoara and seeing it packed with all the ping-pong tables being used.
This was a building site four years ago. There are 108 flats in this block, plus Guban, a locally-produced brand of shoes.
This is where I lived for two months
Above was once a bakery. You can just about make out the pre-1993 spelling pîine (bread, now spelt pâine).
The slogan above says “A Romania without theft”. We recently had the local elections, and we’ll soon be having parliamentary elections too. This new party, USR (literally the Save Romania Union), is on the rise.
This stone commemorates those who died during the 1989 Revolution.
The beer factoryTailorA poem
Above is the Millennium Catholic church, completed in 1901.
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