Writing a book

Life :) - Travel: Romania - Writing a book

When I get back…

July 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My last day before I go away is a soggy one. We had yet another thunderstorm overnight. I had a lesson with a UK-based guy on Friday night, and he was even more adamant than my previous student that I should have booked a flight instead of spending an eternity on painful Romanian trains. Why would you do that to yourself?

Right now, instead of thinking about my trip, I’m contemplating everything I need to do when I get back.

I’ve written 400 pages of my “tricky English words and phrases for Romanians” book (it needs a better name!), but I’ve hit the wall in the middle of the S section. The Romanian teacher from the university was helping me but gave up on me late last year, and it’s hard to keep motivated when you get unspoken feedback that what you’re doing is pointless. But heck, I’m on the S section. Three-quarters of the way through. It would be crazy not to finish it now. Once I’ve finally dealt with the word zone, it’ll still need a lot of tidying up. Have I repeated myself? Have I put in adequate cross-references? Can I make my example sentences a bit more fun and enticing? And so on, and so forth. Z won’t be the end of it. And I won’t have anybody else to help me. As is almost always the case no matter what I do, I’m on my own. I’ve promised myself to work on the book for a minimum of 15 hours a week.

Then there’s moving. Scary stuff, but if I want to move on with my teaching business, I’ve got to do it. I need to view houses and apartments and see what’s really out there. On Friday I met an ex-student who now lives in Austria but was back in Timișoara for a few days. She told me to avoid the trendy new apartment blocks because they’re overpriced and the build quality is lacking. That was my instinct too. However, she said she didn’t trust the vaccines, particularly the messenger RNA ones, and although she’ll be visiting several countries in the next few weeks including Sweden, some others have been scrubbed off her list because they require vaccination. As we were drinking our coffees, a man walked by wearing a T-shirt covered in handwritten Romanian text: “I’m unvaccinated and proud of it. I will not be controlled! Covid is a big lie!” And there was more. I asked my ex-student if he was one of her mates. Anyway, I’ll draw up a comprehensive checklist and get the ball rolling on the house stuff.

I also want to improve my language skills. Ten hours a week of that is the goal. Romanian, Serbian, Italian, French. So much is in one ear and out the other, because I don’t keep it up. Obviously I do keep my Romanian up by actually speaking it, but I’m improving slowly if at all. Languages are definitely a case of little and often, and that’s part of the plan. In the case of Romanian, the next item on the list would help…

Finding somebody. If only that involved just a checklist and x hours a week. Any tips from my many long-term readers would be much appreciated.

What I won’t do until September is advertise for lessons. A relative lack of work will help me kick-start the other stuff in August, and it’s pretty rare that anybody wants to start lessons in August anyway. I’m better off not wasting money on online ads, and instead waiting until the start of the new academic year.

Poker. I’ll still play on a Sunday morning and the occasional evening if I happen to free of work, but that’ll be it until I get the other stuff sorted. I haven’t played much lately anyway, and my few attempts haven’t been particularly fruitful. My bankroll is $704.

And one more thing. I must buy a bike. I had a look at some at Mehala Market. There was a modern racing bike I particularly liked, but at 1500 lei it was out of my price range. Now, thinking back, I probably should have just bitten the bullet and bought it.

That was going to be just about it, but this morning I had a “lesson” with a woman who was depressed and will be flying to Bucharest tomorrow to see a doctor. The whole session was devoted to that. Like many people who suffer from depression (especially women?), she goes round in circles when she talks, going over and over and over things that happened years ago. I was worried she’d do this with the doctor tomorrow, so I wrote down a list of bullet points (in Romanian, in an English class) so she could just present them to her.

After my lesson I called my parents. Dad had received an email from my cousin (his niece). She’s 50 and got married last year. They’ll soon be going on their honeymoon (it was delayed by the pandemic) and she asked Dad to contribute to the cost of it. She and her husband, who had been married before, aren’t short of money. Dad said he’ll ignore the request which is utterly outrageous. I mean, seriously.

Before I forget, I mentioned spelling bees in my last post. The documentary Spellbound, which charts the progress of eight youngsters from radically different backgrounds in the 1999 national bee, is a must-watch. It’s hard not to get emotionally worked up by it.

It’ll be an early start in the morning. My train will take me to Oradea and Cluj, before heading through the mountains on the way to Suceava and finally to Iași. The mountainous stretch should be very picturesque, and I’ll certainly post some photos of that and the rest of my trip. The city of Iași, the monasteries near Suceava, the mocăniță, and plenty more I hope. I don’t know if I’ll post while I’m away because it’s so cumbersome on my phone. We’ll see.

Books - Life :) - Poker - Romania - Writing a book

Hristos a înviat

May 3, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The vagaries of the Julian calendar, the spring equinox and phases of the moon mean that today is Orthodox Easter Sunday. Sometimes it falls on the same day as what they call Catholic Easter (and what I would call “normal Easter”), sometimes it’s a week later, and sometimes (like this year) it’s a whole month later. Easter is big in Romania; I’d call it a tie between Easter and Christmas for which is most important here. Last night the tennis-playing couple (who live next door but one) gave me some salată de boeuf which, despite its partially French name, contains chicken rather than beef. They also gave me an egg painted the traditional reddish-brown using red cabbage, and invited me to “knock” it with another of their painted eggs. The “knocker” said Hristos a înviat (“Christ has risen”), then the knockee became the knocker and said Adevărat (“really”). Although I was unaware that it was a game, apparently I won because my egg remained almost unscathed through all the knocking.

At quarter past midnight I was woken up by the Easter vigil service at the cathedral. A huge throng of people with candles spilled out in front of the cathedral as a sermon played over the loudspeaker, much of which I actually understood. I wonder how many of those “vigilantes” picked up Covid. There have been services and processions and bells ringing out all this long weekend. I missed my first two Romanian Easters because I went to the UK. Then last year the restrictions meant that everything was far more muted. That leaves 2019, and I think I must have slept through the vigil service that year because I don’t remember seeing it. My blog posts from two years ago aren’t helping me. Just like last year, the Easter market has gone by the board, but they’ve Easterised the end of the square where I live, as in a normal virus-free year.

I still watch John Campbell’s informative Youtube videos on coronavirus, but I’m less dedicated than I was. After I watched one of his videos last week, Youtube suggested that I watch a different one from a American medical doctor and religious nutcase, called “Why I’m not taking the vaccine”. It had three times as many views and likes as Campbell gets (and he gets a fair few), and it attracted a long stream of comments saying that the deep state are trying to force us to take the vaccine and I’m not having any of it. I’m defiant! Six hundred thumbs up. Many commenters referenced the Bible. No Covid vaccine! Matthew 7:25 says so! I really doubt that the Gospel of Matthew said anything about vaccination or herd immunity. (I picked that verse at random; it happens to be about floods and storms, not a pandemic, but I’m sure you could find a connection there if you really wanted to.) Covid has been an eye-opener. I knew we had fake news and echo chambers, but here we have millions of people, some in positions of authority and influence, willing to dispense with the truth even when it comes to matters of life and death. I’ve even seen this in my own brother. A supporter of Brexit and the Tories, he’s happy to divorce himself from the reality that the British government have done a breathtakingly shitty job that has cost many thousands of lives unnecessarily, just because it’s his team. It’s become just like football.

I’m two-thirds of the way through Inocenții, a Romanian book that one of my students bought me for Christmas. It took me a while to get going, mainly because the language is hard. But I’ve made some headway finally. It’s all about a woman’s childhood in Brașov in the sixties, the early Communist period. The book is full of humour, though it certainly has its dark moments too. I’ve been jotting down words I don’t know, including some that I’ve come across before but forgotten, so I can look them up later. I think it’s the sixth Romanian book I’ve read.

Poker. Lately I’ve been playing tournaments exclusively. I’m at a bit of a standstill, with a run of tournaments in which I’ve either just missed out on or just made the money. I’ve been persevering with Omaha hi-lo, with little joy. Unlike the other games I regularly play, I can’t hand-read in Omaha hi-lo. That’s partly because the tournament buy-ins are tiny and people play any old junk, even hands that are real disasters like the 9993 that someone raised pre-flop with this morning. My bankroll is $661, although I expect that to drop a few dollars when I play the fixed badugi this evening. Pessimistic I know, but that tournament with its eight-minute levels plays like a turbo, especially in the early stages, and most of the time you’ll fail to make the money no matter what you do.
Update: As expected, that tournament was a waste of time. The game is played with three draws, but if I’d had ten I still wouldn’t have hit anything. Bankroll now $655. (I don’t exactly risk much of my bankroll in these tournaments.)

I’ve gone back to the dictionary part of the book I was writing, after losing heart when that Romanian teacher decided she had better things to do than help me. I’m now on the letter R, and I hope I can make some more progress this week.

The cathedral at 12:15 last night
Just after 4pm today
Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

Another dark day for Romania

November 16, 2020 plutomanby 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 - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

A tyring week, and the latest on the book

October 5, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last week I had a stuffy nose and a bit of a cough and I wondered what was causing it. Then I figured it out. I’d replaced my bike tyre with a new white-rimmed one, and the fumes from the glue on the tyre were getting into my respiratory system. This has happened to me before. When I moved into my Wellington flat, the previous tenants had left an old umbrella which had a glue lining the spokes. And once I bought a glue-drenched pair of shoes that I had no choice but to chuck out. I’ve now tied my bike up in the lobby rather than keeping it in my flat.

This morning I had a Skype chat with my aunt and uncle who visited me in Timișoara after my brother’s wedding. That all feels like a lifetime ago now. My aunt is about to have a hip replacement. (My uncle has so far had hip, knee and ankle replacements, so now it’s her turn.) They’re also trying to get a refund of the $20,000 they spent on this year’s holiday that never happened. Apart for that, they seemed good, and busy as ever. It was a great pleasure for me to see them here, and I wonder if and when I’ll see them again.

Covid. With rapid increases in cases and hospitalisations, and winter around the corner, the situation is in danger of spiralling out of control. (It’s worse than it was when we locked down, and now we aren’t anything close to being locked down.) Maskless in-person lessons are now a no-go for me. They’re marginal even with masks. The markets, while they’re in the open, are jam-packed with elderly people, and I’ve decided to give them a miss too. One trip to the supermarket each week, in and out as fast as possible, and that’s my lot for the foreseeable future.

I was surprised how many people thought that Trump’s Covid diagnosis was fake. I mean, it’s possible, but given how breathtakingly irresponsible he’s been, it’s almost a wonder he’s stayed Covid-free for so long. I hope he survives and is humiliated in next month’s election. (Following his diagnosis, he gave a four-minute speech – edited I’m sure – in which he briefly seemed like a human being who vaguely cared about other human beings.) When I heard that Trump was positive, I emailed my university friend who in March placed a bet on Mike Pence to be the next president.

The Romanian teacher has found time in her busy schedule to work on translating my book, and it looks like this thing might actually happen. Still lots to do. Some exercises and quizzes. A slimmed down version of the dictionary. Dad’s illustrations, if he’s on board with that. But it would be quite something to have my work – a useful, practical work – in print. Crucially, the teacher has experience of publishing in Romania, and her own mother is semi-famous in her home of Alba Iulia for the books she has written.

I had my first Zoom lesson with a ten-year-old boy who lives in Bucharest. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also my last. It was like pulling teeth. Not his fault; Zoom with kids of that age is hard. The “highlight” was when I asked him to guess my age, and he said 55. It reminded me of the boy who wanted to know how much I weighed. Um, I actually don’t know. Then out came the scales. Thirty-odd kilos. Now it’s your turn. Oh, alright then. Seventy-eight! That’s even more than my dad! My English teacher’s a fatty! Ha ha!

Roland-Garros. I’ve just watched Simona Halep be overwhelmed 6-1 6-2 in the fourth round by Iga Świątek (pronounced something like “shfyon-tek”), a 19-year-old from Poland. Świątek was in the zone, rarely put a foot wrong, and Simona was out of ideas. Halep has always been vulnerable to zoning power-hitters. I also saw the final game of Martina Trevisan’s victory over fifth-seed Kiki Bertens, another big upset. Trevisan is a diminutive left-hander from Italy, and I earlier enjoyed her dramatic second-round win over Cori Gauff, which she eked out 7-5 in the third set. In round three she had match points against her. Ranked 159th in the world, she’s come all the way from qualifying to reach the quarter-finals. Seven matches in a row. Whatever happens, it’ll be like hitting Powerball for her.

We’re getting warm, windy, weird weather. Yesterday I sat in Central Park and read my book. The wind sprayed the water from the fountain onto me. Somebody put a piano in the nearby bandstand a few months ago, and this time there was someone who could actually play it, rather than a small kid hammering away at random. A woman was pushing a man with no legs in a wheelchair. They made three visits to my bench for money. I gave them 7 lei in total. I found a small yellow stylised wooden elephant, and realising it could land in six positions when you throw it, with vastly different probabilities (Pass the Pigs style), I took it home. It could feature in a kids’ game, when kids’ games become a feature again.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Writing a book

Steady progress with the book

August 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my aunt this morning. We both had an almost total lack of news. It was hot in Earith where she lives, just like here, so at least this time she couldn’t contradict me on the weather front.

My work volumes are relatively low so I’ve been working on the book. I’m now up to letter I of the dictionary part. My Romanian teacher is now tackling the first (most important) part which contains all the big-ticket items, in other words the mistakes that even good speakers make over and over. She’s made a good start at correcting my Romanian, which as I’ve said before, isn’t up to this kind of task.

I only had one lesson today, with the eleven-year-old boy who lives with his grandmother. I beat him in the Formula One game for the fourth time running. He’s a mild-mannered kid but I think he was ever so slightly pissed off today. In the first couple of games he didn’t exactly apply optimal strategy, but now it’s pretty much dumb luck. Today he drew a card that sent him into the pit stop on the last lap, and I was able to overtake him.

Last week we had that awful explosion in Beirut. At first I thought it was a terrorist attack, but it was a terrible accident. The warehouse was on the waterfront, right next to a grain silo, so the blast took out much of the city’s food supply. As well as the hundreds who have died, about 300,000 people have been displaced. Lebanon was in a deep enough crisis already, exacerbated by Covid-19, so this is an utter tragedy. It was impressive to see Emmanuel Macron make a hasty visit to Beirut, appearing in a packed crowd and risking getting Covid-19; I could hardly imagine Boris Johnson doing something similar. I’ve just read that the Lebanese government have quit.

Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump shows signs of narrowing. His average lead looks to be seven points, or perhaps half a point more. There are under three months to go, and early voting starts soon in some states. I see this election as a giant IQ test, but even if the country passes it (i.e. significantly more people vote for Biden than for Trump), will their sham of an electoral system hold up enough to be rid of the bastard?

Coronavirus. Romania is in what looks like a plateau, but it has spread to just about all parts of the country. My panic level has dropped just a tad, but I don’t know how justified that is.

Mum and Dad got their birthday cards from me yesterday. Their birthdays were six and eight weeks ago.

Life :) - Politics - Writing a book

I can’t breathe

June 3, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

There was a whole load of Spandau Ballet on Radio Timișoara’s Musicorama show this evening. I’m not a big fan, but my brother is, and it all reminded me of his Spandau Ballet-tinged wedding, two years ago now.

When I spoke to Mum on Sunday, she said she wished New Zealand was still under lockdown. She cherished the peace and quiet. So did I. Here it’s back to queues of traffic and honking horns. I miss being able to hear birds in the park, and trains clattering by in the distance.

If things weren’t bad enough, America has taken yet another upsetting turn in the last week. The brutal crushing to death of George Floyd, captured in a harrowing nine-minute video – how many more George Floyds were never caught on camera? – has led to mass protests and riots, all in the middle of a pandemic. There are endless video clips of police violence. The disease will have spread in these protests and people will die. This strong backlash to police brutality feels like a tipping point, something that transcends America’s dreadful partisanship. Trump has been appallingly inactive and silent, outside of Twitter. If the election were held tomorrow, I would be confident in predicting the end of that vile creature, but it’s five months away, which in these extraordinary times is an eternity. Thanks to the vagaries of the electoral college, he could easily still win.

Britain can’t quite compete with the US, but they’re giving it a jolly good go. For the UK it’s been a perfect storm. After the immature 3½-year faff with Brexit, anyone with an ounce of common sense and humility got elbowed out of power in December’s election if they hadn’t been already, and now you’ve got a government who’d be out of their depth even under normal circumstances. Then coronavirus came along. Now they’ve ditched the remote parliament – the only good political thing to come out of this crisis – and today there were farcical scenes of a ridiculously long queue to vote.

I’ve spent most of the last two days working on a dictionary for problematic words for the book. I’m still near the beginning of the Cs – almost the whole alphabet still to do.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Writing a book

Possessions

June 1, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning’s service at the cathedral took place outside, but tomorrow will see another easing of the lockdown. Although other parts of Romania are still suffering, we now have very few active cases in Timiș, after being hit quite hard early on because of our proximity to the border. Let’s hope it stays that way. Yesterday I visited a bike shop – masks were mandatory, my temperature was checked on the way in, and at the checkout we all stood on blue circles two metres apart from each other. These measures will remain in force.

Last week the Romanian teacher gave me the encouragement to press on with my book, of which I’ve now written about 90 pages. After all the angst with the flat in Wellington, that put a much-needed spring in my step.

I’ve confirmed that I will sign the sale agreement, but I let the committee know that I wasn’t a massive fan of the way they’ve handled the process. They’ve been deliberately opaque about the number of signatures they’ve received, making each non-signer feel like they’re the only one, then putting a gun to their head by imposing a tight, and totally bogus, deadline. What tipped me into signing is that I just wanted out of the whole thing. I never want to hear of body corporates again. If I was still living there and had been exposed all this time to three-hour meetings and endless officialese and the chair’s oh-so-rounded vowels, I’d have gone round the bend.

Mum and Dad talked this morning about how materialistic the world has become. Dad said it’s horrifying how obsessed with stuff we’ve become since the sixties and seventies. Although I wasn’t around then, I really despise materialism, and living in Romania has allowed me to live an unashamedly simple life with few material possessions. And it’s not like I have the money to splash around anyway. This isn’t 2007.

The bike shop and back was a 9 km walk. All I needed was a new inner tube. But then I thought, I really could do with a new bike. The cheapest ones were 500 lei, but the one I really liked was 1200, or about NZ$440. It was a Dutch-style bike, with baskets on the front and back, and white tyres. Just what I would need to get to my lessons and the markets. I saw it was made in Portugal rather than Asia. That isn’t a ton of money to spend on a bike, though it feels like it. I should probably just damn well buy it.

Coronavirus - Writing a book

Inadequacy and bleakness

April 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a hopelessly unproductive day. In fact it’s been pretty shitty all round. I felt an enormous (and familiar) sense of inferiority when I met very briefly with the Romanian teacher. I couldn’t figure out how Zoom, this new thing, worked, and I could sense her exasperation when we resorted to using Skype instead. “Skype?! That’s fifteen years out of date.” Well, bugger you. I don’t live in your world of giving lectures and presentations to hundreds of people at a time, and going to Prague and Milan and wherever the hell else. I lead a basic life. She was very tired and I was glad when we ended the conversation. All those hours I’d spent working on that book had pretty much been a waste of time.

The UK death toll increased by nearly a thousand today, but the headlines were Boris, Boris and more Boris. Countries with very advanced healthcare systems all over Europe have been floored by this. Mass graves are being dug in New York. Worldwide, deaths are now officially in six figures, although in reality they have been there for some time. There is grimness almost everywhere you look.

We’re still getting amazing weather and the trees have burst into life with vivid green foliage. It’s Good Friday, or Big Friday as they call it here, except that Orthodox Easter, the one most people celebrate in Romania, is next weekend. No Easter market of course this year. Hopefully there will be a Christmas market. Will this be over in eight months? Today is also my parents’ 44th wedding anniversary. Just imagine being stuck with someone for that length of time. It sounds impossible. And now they really are stuck with each other.

Here is the latest graph:

Romania coronavirus 10-4-20
Coronavirus - Writing a book

Should stick to my own language

April 4, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

The Romanian teacher from the university phoned me a little earlier. She’d been so busy with lessons, she said. Lucky bugger. She’d skimmed the first few pages of chapter one, and I got a slight inkling that she was unimpressed. I’ve been trying to write directly in Romanian, and I’m sure I’ve lost a lot of spontaneity that way. Maybe I should be writing my explanations, anecdotes, what have you, in English and then translating.

Dad is worried about me getting coronavirus. According to him, if my brother gets it, he’s guaranteed to spring back in no time, but if I get it, what with my history of pneumonia, I’ll be hooked up to a ventilator if I’m lucky. And I’m in Romania so I’d obviously be screwed. (As for Dad, he has risk factors out the wazoo. Or up the ying-yang, if you prefer.)

The list of Romania’s coronavirus deaths makes for sobering reading. Amongst today’s victims is a 27-year-old man from Sibiu county who died at home. At least here, the tallies are (for now) small enough that the deceased are listed individually, each one leaving behind friends and family, in some cases parents. In the UK, the latest daily figure of nearly 700 deaths just feels like a statistic, a data point.

Romania coronavirus 3-4-20
Coronavirus - Writing a book

It’s awful everywhere

April 3, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

No lessons at all today, so I made some headway with my book. I really need a check-up with the Romanian teacher before I plough on too much further. I got a frustrated text from one of my students, who said she is putting herself in danger by showing up to work at her Italian-headquartered (!) coffee machine company. The more privileged employees are able to work from home, but for some reason they still have to deliver machines to Guatemala and Mexico. That’s bloody stupid. “C’est la fucking vie,” she texted me.

Everywhere you look on the map, coronavirus is various levels of awful. Things continue to look absolutely terrible in the US, with outbreaks springing up seemingly all over the country amid frankly dangerous leadership. The UK saw 569 new deaths in the latest daily update, a similarly tragic figure to yesterday. Italy might finally be getting on top of their unbelievably dreadful situation, and hopefully Spain won’t be far behind, although their numbers today were shocking. Globally, confirmed cases are at one million, a meaningless number really, while deaths (a much more meaningful figure, sadly) have passed 50,000.

Heaven help Africa when it spreads there. I read today that the Central African Republic, a country I know next to nothing about, has three ventilators for the entire population, which is similar to that of New Zealand. (As for the CAR’s area, it is about the size of France.)

Of the 23 deaths announced today in Romania (so far), 16 were men, including a 34-year-old man who was hospitalised in Suceava. Just awful. The fatality rate from COVID-19 is something like twice as high in men as in women. Perhaps it’s due to all the comorbidities like hypertension and diabetes that are more prevalent in men. (Originally they thought it was to do with smoking – about half of Chinese men smoke but very few women do, but the same gender imbalance has been seen in Italy and the UK too, even though smoking rates are much more even in both those countries.)

Here is the latest chart:

Romania coronavirus 2-4-20