Environment

Environment - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

It’s 2020 but not everybody can see clearly

January 2, 2020 by 0 Comments

My parents called me to say they’d spent the first day of the twenties shrouded in smoke from Australia, with only outlines of the mountains visible on a sunny day. Geraldine is just over 2000 km, or 1300 miles, from the West Island. That’s a long way. By comparison, from here to London is 1050 miles. The fires have long since reached apocalyptic levels. Six million hectares of land have been burnt since the start of the season – an area a quarter of the size of Romania. Hundreds of millions of animals have succumbed, either directly or indirectly. People are fleeing to beaches to escape the flames. Life is happening under a permanent solar eclipse, and it’s happening all over the country, not just in a localised area. Their prime minister has his head either up his arse or in the sand. There’s no rain in sight. This is going to get worse before it gets better.

Last night I ate dinner at my normal time and then took the bus to Matei’s place. When I got there at around nine I was greeted with mountains of food that I hadn’t expected at all. At around eleven, people filed out into the garden where they’d lit a fire. Midnight came around quite quickly. As the clock ticked around to the new year, they had Abba’s Happy New Year playing, and that was a good choice: “It’s the end of a decade / In another ten years’ time / Who can say what we’ll find / What lies waiting down the line / In the end of eighty-nine”. Quite prophetic really; the western world changed beyond belief in the eighties. There’s even a line in there about every neighbour being a friend, but we went backwards on that score. By 12:30 I’d had enough, but I couldn’t get away from all the meat and rum and whisky and having to talk and listen. Where do you all get your stamina from? We then had our second short-lived power cut of the night. They’d also had a water outage earlier in the day – they said it gave them flashbacks to the Ceaușescu era. I hoped the power would stay off, but no such luck. One-thirty. They were still going. Eating, drinking, making jokes. Am I really that weird? At this point I’d have much rather been at home than there – It wasn’t remotely close – but I couldn’t easily escape. At around two I finally got away. I mentioned something about taxis, and Matei’s mother called me an Uber. I’d got through the whole of the 2010s without ever Ubering (or Airbnb-ing for that matter), but two hours into the new decade I found myself in the back of an Uber car. When I arrived, I opened my wallet to pay the driver, but apparently Matei’s mum had already paid via her app. As I said, I’d never taken an Uber before. Next time I’ll know. How Uber works, and how Romanian New Year’s Eve parties work, so I can pace myself better. I don’t want to miss out on these experiences. I just want to manage them, and who knows, maybe one day even enjoy them.

We’re at last back in a decade that actually has a name. The twenties. I wonder what, if anything, will be the decade’s defining features. Will there be twenties music and twenties hairstyles and twenties parties? I guess not. Society is so much more divided now. In the UK for instance, comedy, music, TV (four channels!) and culture in general used to unite everybody, even people who didn’t like it. Now the UK, perhaps since it hosted the Olympics in 2012, seems to be culturally dead. Brexit hasn’t helped.

How do we say years in English? This subject comes up a lot in lessons. Until now I’ve told my students that years in English split into four groups. (1) You say years before 2000 as two pairs of digits, so 1994 is nineteen ninety-four; (2) From 2000 to 2009, you say the year like a normal number: 2004 is two thousand and four; (3) From 2010 to 2019, you have a choice: 2014 can either be two thousand and fourteen or twenty fourteen; (4) From 2020, everybody will revert to the pre-2000 system, so 2024 will be twenty twenty-four. I think that’s accurate. But in the future there’s a chance that the system will retrospectively change itself. A kid born today might be so used to hearing things like “twenty twenty-eight” and “twenty thirty-two” and he’ll say 2009 as twenty oh nine or even twenty zero nine.

Environment - Tennis

Not into this

July 20, 2019 by 0 Comments

Last night I had an argument with my Skype student. I really hate having arguments with anybody, especially people who are my customers, but sometimes these things just happen. I’d suggested an article to read; it was about climate change and the lifestyle changes that five climate change scientists had personally made. “Could we do something else? I’m not into climate change.” What does that mean? I was more bothered about the philosophical problem with his statement than the fact that he (an intelligent man roughly ten years younger than me) appeared not to give a shit. Being into climate change (or not), in the same way that you might say you’re into football or not into Game of Thrones, simply makes no sense. Globally, the last five calendar years were the five hottest years on record. Climate change is a basic fact, like rain or death or needing to poo.

I suppose I have been more interested in environmental issues since I moved to Romania, which is a fairly immature consumer society. Watching Romanians consume reminds me of the eighties boom, with added smartphones. People here are caught up in an ever-escalating arms race: no matter what they do and have, they’re trying to catch up to someone else who does and has more. Just yesterday I spoke to a woman who had just spent £600 on her son’s fifth birthday party, and admitted that they spent all that money just so that her son wouldn’t feel deprived compared to others in his kindergarten group. None of my birthday parties (I don’t think we even called them parties) would have cost more than a tenner. Seriously. If routine £600 birthday parties for five-year-olds is where we’re at, in Romania of all places, no wonder we’re fucked.

My interest has also been piqued because, partly by accident, I no longer live a consumerist lifestyle. On the rare occasions I visit the mall (which, since its latest revamp, looks like an airport terminal on the inside), I happily walk past all the clothes shops, and pick up the few ink cartridges and pieces of stationery and basic food items I need. I’m out of there as fast as possible. I don’t drive. This is also by accident (where I live, there’s nowhere I can easily keep a car). This year I won’t be taking any planes, unless I decide to spend Christmas in the UK. Once again, this is by accident – if Dad hadn’t had his cancer operation, I’d have flown there in June. But it’s not all by accident. Even though I’m not shopping and consuming like most other people, I never for one moment think I’m missing out.

One thing I still do is eat meat. I now realise (for the first time) I could do without that too, at least over the summer months, because the locally-grown fruit and vegetables here are so tasty.

I’m trying to sort out a trip to Montenegro by train (no plane!) in mid-to-late August. I’ll write more about that in my next post.

So many people have described the Djokovic–Federer Wimbledon final in such glowing terms that I wonder if they saw the same match I did. Or Mum did – she sat up all night to watch it, and said it was bloody awful. I wouldn’t go anything like that far, but I’d say that to qualify as a proper classic, both players need to play at a sustained high level. That didn’t happen on Sunday. Where the match did massively succeed, however, was in the drama stakes. I read a piece that talked about the “excitement index” (EI), an objective measure of how exciting a match is, based on the average importance of each point in the match (not all points are created equal). The EI for the final was 7.5%, the highest ever for a men’s grand slam final, which meant that the difference between winning and losing each point had an average impact of 7.5% on each player’s chances of winning the match. Intuitively, given that over 400 points were played in the match, that’s a huge number. It was boosted by the tie-breaks (which are always high-volatility) and also the craziness that went on as the final set stretched beyond 6-6, particularly the two successive breaks from 7-7 to 8-8, and that knife-edge game at 11-11 when Federer held break points.

Environment - Language teaching - Life :)

Footprints

April 16, 2019 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching dramatic footage of Notre Dame Cathedral ablaze. I visited it back in 2003 when I met my French flatmate there (we’d lived in student-level accommodation in the middle of Peterborough). It’s sad to see what is a beautiful work of art go up in flames.

On the 15th of every month I do my meter readings. There are four meters in (or just outside) this flat: electricity, gas and two for water. Yesterday was meter day, and I also happened to read an article about carbon emissions, so I went online to calculate the size of my CO2 footprint (click here). I was surprised at the answer. The centre of this city is increasingly clogged up with traffic, while I don’t even have a car. I don’t fly very often. I don’t think I consume much at all, as I sit here proudly sporting a threadbare seven-year-old T-shirt with a picture of a clapped-out VW camper van on the front (yeah I know, VW, emissions…). But it calculated my footprint as 4.9 tonnes per year, compared to a Romanian average of 3.5. (The UK average is around 7, and for the Western world as a whole the average is about 11.) I did err on the high side with my estimates, figuring that there’s always something I forget, so it’s possible my real total is slightly less. The real negative for me is living alone. In the summer I have the air conditioner going full blast because the heat would be unbearable otherwise. A big plus, however, which the site didn’t take into account, is that I have zero kids. My parents must have an enormous footprint, emitting 8 tonnes last year on their flights alone, and I’d dread to think what my Wellington-based cousin’s figure would be (I might send her the link). As for me, I’m trying to make 2019 my first flight-free year since 2002.

Yesterday was a pleasant day. On the way to my lessons in Strada Timiș, I intended to go to the offices of insurance company to arranging a CT scan for my sinuses, but realised the offices weren’t exactly on the way so I wouldn’t have time. That meant I arrived at Strada Timiș a little early, so I sat in the nearby Parcul Dacia, where old men were playing backgammon, rummy and a traditional card game. The lessons went reasonably well. I played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with my 17-year-old student, who did rather well in the end, despite starting out deliberating whether Sweden or Switzerland was part of the UK.