Coronavirus

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The new religion

April 9, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Where I come from it’s Easter, but in Romania, where the Orthodox church dominates, we have to wait a week.

My teaching volumes were down last week, mainly because of the girl who has gone to Dubai and the 20-year-old guy who told me he “couldn’t see me again”, quite possibly because I argued with him about his favourite topic – cryptocurrencies. (A misnomer if ever there was one. They aren’t currencies at all.) Crypto is nothing short of a religion in Romania, but if you don’t have a willy, or if you do have one but it’s over 35 years old, you’re highly unlikely to be an adherent.

This morning I had a 7:45 start for my online lesson with the woman who lives near Bucharest, then it was off to Dumbrăvița for maths with Matei. My route goes past one of Timișoara’s many second-hand clothes shops – there are always hordes of people outside waiting for it to open at 9:30 – then I pass the tram cemetery full of rusty Ceaușescu-era hulks, then I go over the railway line. The crossing is at the 571-kilometre post but I don’t know what it’s 571 kilometres to. Bucharest, which would make sense, is less; Constanța, by the Black Sea, is certainly more. The crossing is dangerous because often the lights flash and the barriers go down but no train appears for several minutes; drivers often give up and turn back, while bikers and pedestrians go round the barrier. Then of course eventually the train does come. There are flowers outside the crossing.

Yesterday I had a long Zoom chat with my cousin in Wellington. Her two eldest sons are at university. I saw the youngest one (going on 15) who plans to join the police. We talked about the fallout from the pandemic and I mentioned that I used to watch Dr John Campbell’s Youtube channel. In fact I watched it near-religiously in the early headless-chicken days; I found his videos informative, unbiased, and a voice of calm. Around Christmas 2021 I felt I’d gleaned all the information I needed from his channel, so I stopped tuning in. Since then, unbeknown to me, Campbell has gone off at a sinister tangent, peddling misinformation about vaccines and drugs like ivermectin, and falsely saying that Covid deaths have been inflated. What a shame.

The temperature plummeted in the early part of the week. On Tuesday we had unseasonal snow and howling winds. Out of my window I can see an aerial that wobbles if a bird lands on it; in the strong wind it was swaying madly and I wondered if it would come crashing down. I live in one of the blocks in the background of the photo below. The aerial is atop a corner shop (dairy in New Zealand); next to that is some cosmetic place and a popular bar (known as a birt here) where the locals sit outside. On the right is a street with two slightly different names.

Tomorrow I’m meeting up with Mark. Our plan is to play pool or snooker at a hall not too far from where I live. I haven’t done that for ages. I was always so hopeless, and although I liked snooker, I never enjoyed pool very much because it was always dominated by extroverts and drinking and flirting. Right now, the qualifiers for the World Championship are going on – a ten-day do-or-die marathon where players have to negotiate as many as four best-of-19-frame matches to book a place at the hallowed Crucible. I’ve been dipping into some of the commentary-free matches. Stephen Hendry fell at the first hurdle. He was barely a shadow of the young whippersnapper who utterly dominated the game back in the nineties.

The centre of town last Sunday
Coronavirus - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Poker - Tennis - The UK - Travel: Romania

An active day

September 26, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been an active day for me: 19 km on my bike, a spot of hiking, and some tennis. At 9am I met my teacher friend on the outer edge of Dumbrăvița, then I went with him and his dog to Nădrag, just over an hour’s drive away. There we walked along a track to the top of a ridge, then descended quite steeply until we followed a stream back to the car. That all got my heart rate up, and as always, my Doc Martens did the business. This evening’s tennis was doubles. I partnered a woman I first met at yesterday’s session. She’s a decent player. Three years older than me, she lost her 68-year-old father to Covid in 2021. She said he had nothing wrong with him before he was struck down by the disease. I wanted to ask her if he’d been vaccinated, but thought better of it. There are trees overhanging two corners of the court we play on. Normally they don’t cause a problem, but occasionally a high ball will bring them into play. Tonight I had to practically thread a backhand through the branches, golf style.

Yesterday I had two English lessons and one maths. In the maths lesson I went off on a slight tangent (not literally; trig is still to come) when I explained that three 8-inch pizzas for the same price as a 16-inch pizza is a bad deal. In one of my English lessons we finished off one of those skyscraper games, though this time a longer version involving international buildings instead of only American ones. I had a huge lead from our first session, but ended up winning only 36-33 and could easily have lost. That comebacks are possible is a good sign for the game. It still needs the odd tweak here and there, and a little something extra which I haven’t figured out yet.

I spoke to my brother again last night. There’s only so much you can say about nappies. Both he and his wife were tired. There are a lot of things I hadn’t thought about. When does the colour of a baby’s eyes become fixed? Today I wondered whether my nephew will be left-handed; both his parents are, as is his paternal grandfather. (I’m right-handed, but play tennis left-handed. Just like Rafael Nadal.)

It seems the UK has returned to some sort of normal after a fortnight of wall-to-wall royalty. The Queen was an amazing woman without doubt, but some of the response was beyond ridiculous. Cancelling hospital appointments because they clashed with the funeral? Utterly ludicrous. Then there was the clampdown on anti-monarchy protests. An expression of a totally legitimate point of view. As I said a couple of posts ago, it’s not only woke that’s gone mad.

I had a crappy poker session on Friday night. Knowing that I had to get up the next morning didn’t help my decision-making; perhaps I shouldn’t have played at all. My bankroll is currently $999; it was $1026 at the start of the month.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Social struggles

March 28, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today I had lunch with the tennis crew and some of their friends. The wife of one of the guys I play with sings in a choir at the church in Piața 700, and some of them were from there. All in all, there were 14 of us, including Domnul Sfâra, the 87-year-old man who still (somehow) plays tennis from time to time. Most of them hadn’t caught up with each other since the pandemic started. At one point there was a go-round-the-table thing, where everyone was expected to speak in turn, and amid the jokes that mostly zoomed over my head, there was much discussion of everyone’s medical trials and tribulations, Covid-related and not. Romanians are far more open than Brits when it comes to discussing this stuff, though the woman who sat next to me – white as a sheet and no more than seven stone – didn’t say what she’d been through. It wasn’t until it was my turn that I realised the round-the-table thing was actually happening. “So I have to speak now?” Yes. How did you end up in Romania? Always this question, which never gets any easier to answer. When I told people what I did for a living, there was then a short discussion of the English language. And and end are pronounced the same, somebody said. No no no! Just no! Two different vowels. Miles apart. On a daily basis I deal with people who think that send is something you find on a beach, or that a bet hangs upside down, because for some historical reason Romanians and speakers of other central and eastern European languages use their e vowel to represent our short a vowel, when it would serve them better to use their a instead. We stayed from twelve till about three. It was great that everybody got to see each other after such a long time, and they all seemed such nice people, but that sort of thing is never easy for me, even in my own language.

Romania has now suffered 65,000 Covid deaths. Because some of them would have died anyway, it’s hard to gauge the impact of vaccine refusal on that number. However, we know that two-thirds of the deaths occurred after the vaccines became readily available in spring of 2021, and the vast majority of those who died once the vaccines were available hadn’t taken them, so we’re looking at a very large number of preventable deaths, orders of magnitude greater than other tragedies like the Colectiv nightclub fire which killed 65 people on the night and in the weeks afterwards. It’s utterly appalling.

I’d planned to play poker this morning, but once I knew this lunch was happening and I wouldn’t be finished in time, I decided to play last night instead. I was pretty tired this morning after that, and putting our clocks going forward didn’t exactly help. I haven’t played a lot since I had the stones, though last week I did make $76 in a tournament for finishing second and snagging plenty of bounties. My bankroll is $2005.

Yesterday I lamented the end of extended final sets in tennis. It’s not an earth-shattering change; just look at the 2012 men’s Australian Open final. It was a titanic battle – no match has been quite that gladiatorial before or since – and it didn’t even get to 6-6 in the fifth set. (Djokovic beat Nadal 7-5 in the decider.) But it’s a symptom of what’s been happening in sport in general. Everything now has to be neatly packaged and shiny and pristine. Remove the kinks and imperfections and mud, and play it all in soulless air-conditioned stadiums in sodding Qatar. I find myself losing interest.

Here are some pictures of Timișoara in early spring:

The old Banca de Scont (Discount Bank), now done up nicely
The map stone in Piața Unirii, showing where the fortress used to be. This isn’t old; it was laid in 1987.
The Bega boats are back in business
Pink magnolias in bloom
Buying property - Coronavirus - Life :)

Could this be the one?

March 12, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Tuesday night all of Romania’s Covid restrictions were lifted in one fell swoop. Doing my supermarket shopping maskless will feel very weird; I’m sure I’ll still don my mask on my next visit or two. So Romania is clambering out of the pandemic at last – the country has had a torrid time, with the majority of deaths coming after the vaccines became available. It beggars belief, honestly.

Some good news on the flat front. Today I finally saw a place and thought, yes, this could be me. The kitchen cupboards are painted a lurid lime green, but that wouldn’t bother me. The appliances are modern, it gets the sun, it’s got plenty of space which I could turn into an office, and best of all I like the area. So many of the suburbs I’ve looked at have an absence of anything old, and that would get to me after a while. I had a look at a second place which had just been renovated and looked rather nice on the inside, but it was somehow too pastelly for me, didn’t get much natural light, and in the renovation process had been almost completely undoored. That doesn’t work for me at all. So I’ll have a decision to make, and then potentially all the legal stuff. Plus, should I be buying full stop? The economy is about as uncertain right now as the next lottery draw. Petrol prices have shot up so much that some stations might soon run out of digits on their displays.

My fridge-freezer has packed in. The light is on but there’s nobody home. I’ve been trying to get through a massive hunk of pork. My landlord came over tonight, and it looks like he’s going to order a new fridge. He took measurements, denoting the length (lungime) by capital L, and the width (lățime) by small l. That makes sense when the two words annoying begin with the same letter in Romanian.

I no longer have tummy troubles, but my drugs are about to run out. What will happen then?

Weather permitting, tennis might start up again this Saturday. Sadly there will be no Domnul Ionescu, who seemed such an integral part of the group.

Coronavirus - Life :)

Don’t need the stress, and a pleasant bike trip

February 14, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Maybe, just maybe, we’re now nearing the end of the pandemic for real. People here thought it was all over in the summer of 2020, and incredibly they thought the same a year later when it was blindingly obvious (given the pitiful vaccination rate) that more Romanians were yet to die from Covid than had already done so. Țara struților, I remember saying. Nation of ostriches. But the Omicron variant is acting as a like-it-or-not vaccine, so we could be entering the final lap of the Covid marathon. This morning my parents told me that New Zealand’s daily figure for infections had whopped up into the 800s, which will soon seem a tiny number, like on my graphs. It’s now in South Canterbury – there are a smattering of cases in Timaru. Right now, they know zero people who have caught Covid; that will soon change. (The majority of people I know in Romania have had it, at pretty much every level you could imagine, and in some cases twice. I’m fortunate not to know anybody who has died from it.) Perhaps this week it will show up in Geraldine, then the week after on their street. Thankfully both my parents are triple-jabbed, and with the possible exception of Dad’s blood tests, they could get by for a month without leaving the house if they really had to. They might just about have half a cow in their freezer.

On Friday I had coffee with the woman in her early fifties whom I had lessons with in 2018 before she moved to Austria. She’s now come back to Timișoara. She had Covid in November, during the Delta wave, and said she wasn’t at all concerned despite (or perhaps because) she hadn’t been vaccinated. The survival rate is 99%, she said, as if somehow live and die are the only two outcomes. Some of the survivors have been to hell and back. She was fine. Lucky her. Anyway, she suggested I ramp up my teaching by joining British School in some capacity. Perhaps I could even teach maths there, she said. That all conjured up images of stress on a stick. WhatsApp groups filled with angry parents who’ve paid an arm and a leg for their kids’ education. I want to get a flat sorted before even thinking of anything on those lines.

So, on to today. Mark, the teacher, had the bright idea (no sarcasm) of going on a bike ride. He asked me if there were any good options, so at eleven we met outside the cathedral and set off on the track that I’ve now been on dozens of times. I suggested we stopped at La Livada, a friendly-seeming restaurant next to an orchard (which is what livadă means). Mark had a well-used mountain bike. I warned him that my bike wasn’t capable of high speeds, and neither was my body. We got there before twelve and grabbed coffees before getting something to eat. We both had a ciorbă (Romanian thick soup) and papanași, an extremely yummy fried pudding. We just sat around and chatted for a while. We both liked the place so I’m sure we’ll be back there. There wasn’t as much wildlife on our journey as I might have expected, though on the way back we saw a kestrel. On our return, Mark told me I went much faster than he’s used to. That surprised me, because I don’t think I’m a particularly fast cyclist. It was probably just a case of staying at by-myself speed, when I should have slowed down to with-someone-else speed. I’ve often been told I walk too fast.

My Sunday evening lesson with the guy in London isn’t far away.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker

Wobbling slightly

February 8, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Saturday, after realising I’d hardly taken anything in of the flat I’d rushed off to see, it hit me. I’m struggling a bit here, aren’t I? I’ve got a pretty big decision to make, and I can’t motivate myself, while this dump, the one I’m living in now, is a mess and falling apart. How great the initial lockdown was two years ago. No decisions to make. Just do whatever you can to stay safe. Walk in the park once a day and smell the daffodils and tulips, and be thankful that you still can, meaning that you probably haven’t caught the virus yet. (Did people even call it Covid then? I can’t remember.) Traipse up and down the stairs eight times with water bottles on my back. Listen to the birds and the trains in the evening. At times I wish the Sigma Max plus-plus-plus variant could hit us, and we could all go back there. (It’s kind of crazy that Covid is actually pretty bad in Romania right now, far worse than at the start of the pandemic, but it’s predictably bad, so everyone’s sort of OK with it.)

As I was writing the last sentence but one, I googled the name of an insurance product—which had Max and Plus in its name—that was sold by the large company I spent several years working for in NZ. For some reason the name popped into my head. I found out that the company, while large, was taken over by a three-letter-acronym behemoth in 2018, so no longer exists.

What I’m trying to say here is that my propensity for depression hasn’t gone away. I doubt it ever will. I’ve got to move, and until I do, and I’m (hopefully) settled in a new place, I’m probably in for a certain amount of mental turmoil. The good news is that it’s never that long until my next lesson, and connecting with a person for an hour or two (and no longer!) invariably lifts my mood.

New Zealand. There’s talk of opening up, and finally ditching the rather draconian MIQ set-up. I’d love to make a trip over there, but when could I do it? I’m thinking August, of a year to be determined.

I’m still Wordling. Mr Wordle (or Wardle, in fact) has now sold his idea to the New York Times for at least a million bucks, so I don’t know how long it’ll stay free. As well as the Wordle, I’ve been doing the Romanian version, plus a maths-based one called (appropriately) Nerdle.

Poker. I wonder if I’m enjoying that so much. Last week I decided to do a deal, which I basically never do. We got heads-up in five-card draw, and my opponent was happy to split the money 50-50 even though he had more chips than me at the time and (I thought) he was a better player than me. In those circumstances, doing the deal seemed a no-brainer. My bankroll is now $1694.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

My flat search, my brother’s job search, and 19/1/12

January 20, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a nippy Thursday morning here. I took this picture just before my lesson which started at eight. You can see the hoar frost on the trees and the near-full moon. The days are noticeably pulling out: a fortnight ago it was almost pitch black at that time.

I haven’t had much luck getting new students at the start of 2022, but yesterday I got a call from the mother of a 17-year-old girl, and I agreed to give her daughter tuition for her C1 Cambridge exam. Teaching for advanced-level exams is not my forte – they’re basically a game in which I lack experience, rather than a simple test of English – so I might not be much help.

No maths lesson with Matei this weekend – his family are going away. It’s been interesting being back in his room again. The huge world map on his wall always fascinates me because it makes Europe seem so small. He told me that his grandmother, whom I often had conversations with, is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. She must be almost eighty. That’s sad.

I saw the doctor on Tuesday to get my pills. I mentioned my headaches and gummed-up nose, but after seeing 35 Covid patients in a single day, his focus was on the virus which wasn’t my issue. (I took a rapid Covid test last week, just in case. I was negative.) He gave me the requisite temperature and oxygen saturation checks, and even checked my blood pressure and gave me a once-over with a stethoscope, and everything was fine. He then prescribed me a drug called Quarelin for my headaches. If I can’t rid of this head pain, and the frequency and duration reach the levels that Dad had to deal with when he was my age, life might not be worth living. I’m serious. Dad had a wife and family. I don’t.

I’ve finally dismissed that flat which initially seemed so promising. The lack of sun isn’t something I can risk. I look back at all those places in Auckland and Wellington, and the correlation between natural light and my mood – if not necesarily a causation – is definitely there. I’m interested in three more places and I’ll make some phone calls later today.

My parents told me that they heard a loud bang last Friday. What the hell was that? It was the Tongan volcanic eruption. They could hear it from 1500 miles away? Holy shit. The scenes following the eruption are of total devastation.

My brother wants to leave the army. He’s had enough of his courses that take him away from home five days a week and hardly inspire him anyway. He recently applied for a job which he didn’t get (unfairly, he thinks). He’s invariably grumpy and uncommunicative at the moment, so I really hope he can find something to cheer him up.

Poker tournaments. Since Christmas I’ve had one win and five second places. What a shame it isn’t the other way round. At the weekend I was heads-up in a $4.40 pot-limit badugi. My opponent covered me, just. I got dealt the 204th best hand in the game. That doesn’t sound very good, and it’s not, but heads-up against an aggressive opponent it shoots up in value. It was just a bit too good to fold. We got all our chips in, he turned over the 203rd best hand (!), and I had to be content with another runner-up spot. My bankroll is now $1562.

It’s now ten years since my grandmother died, four months prior to her 90th birthday. How time flies. I often wish she could have seen me in Romania. I sometimes dream about sitting in the square with her, having a coffee or a glass of wine, watching the world go by.

Coronavirus - Family - Poker - Tennis

A GOAT and a donkey

January 8, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Just a quick one from me this morning, as I’m about to head off to Dumbrăvița in the rain for my maths lesson. (Update: the rain has turned to snow.)

Omicron is now spreading like wildfire in Romania; the doubling rate of new cases is four days. The graphs at the top of this blog are already hopelessly out of date – I’ll soon go back to daily updates. In countries like the UK, where people have actually been getting vaccinated, the new variant has been mild, but who knows what it will do in Romania where (incredibly) the majority of the country is still unjabbed. We’ll soon find out.

I spoke to my parents on Thursday night. They gave me updates on all the renovations on their new house. They might have bitten off more than they can chew. I just hope they get professionals in as much as possible – it’s not as if they can’t afford to. Will this be the year we finally see each other? It’s been three years, and I miss them terribly. Thank heavens for FaceTime.

Mum and I talked about the Djokovic saga. She’s a fan of the Serb, so she was much more equivocal than me. (I used to like him too.) To my mind, Djokovic is getting what he deserves here. His attitude to Covid has been lamentable from the start. He organised the Covid Cup superspreader event in summer of 2020 and has been a vocal anti-vaxer. He’s idolised in Serbia and has surely convinced many thousands of Serbs to remain unjabbed like him. Then he tries to waltz into Australia, which has some of the strictest Covid rules on the planet. Bugger him. And I don’t care if he’s won the Australian Open nine times and he’s the GOAT and blablablah (or is it maa maa maa?). He isn’t the only one to blame. The authorities, especially Tennis Australia, have behaved appallingly here too. His appeal hearing takes place on Monday, and it’s possible he’ll still be allowed to play. If so, he’ll be booed to oblivion. I hope he’s deported on the next plane.

On Thursday I had a terrible day. Luckily I only had two lessons – one in the early morning and one in the evening. I’m now almost sure that what I thought was acute sinus pain is actually migraines. I had two or three hours of intense pain in the morning and around lunchtime, and it took the rest of the day to recover. Dad has suffered from migraines (with much greater duration and frequency than me) since he was a teenager, so I suppose it’s not a surprise that I’ve ended up getting them. I tried to watch Don’t Look Up on Netflix and listen to one of the Reith lectures (about AI), but even all of that was a struggle because I was hypersensitive to light and sound. More about that next time.

Poker. Two second places on Wednesday took my bankroll to $1477. I made $46 on the morning. I tried, with no success, to play razz, a lowball stud game. I’ll give that another go, probably at the weekend.

The apartment. I’m still very interested, but also very apprehensive. I’ve booked another viewing for Monday.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Language teaching - Poker

Merry and bright

December 17, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a very long phone conversation with my friends in St Ives – the couple who came to Romania in 2017 – as the Omicron variant rips through the country just in time for Christmas.

An interesting day today. After two early-morning lessons, I had another look at an apartment. Fortunately the bike shop was on the way, so I took it in to have a new inner tube fitted. (It was the valve after all, not a puncture, so I didn’t risk changing it myself and buggering everything up. I’ll pick my bike back up tomorrow.) The apartment was right next to a pizza place. It was on the fourth floor of another liftless block, and that basically made it a non-starter. I took off my shoes when I went in, and the diminutive man who owned the place gave me some size-six slippers to wear. In the living room was a bar which was stacked with top-shelf liquor. For guests only, he said. The apartment was fine, as was the area with its pleasant little grocery shops and shoe repairer, but without a lift it just isn’t an option.

I had two more lessons when I got back. One was with a twelve-year-old boy; at one point I explained to him what Brexit was. He didn’t seem a fan. “But why would they do that?” That’s a very good question, I said. He’s learning French as well as English, and he got full marks on a recent French test. I explained that he’ll still be able to live and work in France. In one of my morning lessons I explained the meaning of “merry”. It’s a fun word, and it’s a shame we don’t use it more, outside the set phrases “Merry Christmas” and “the more the merrier”, and the odd occasion when we might say that someone got a bit merry last night. That made me think of the origin of Merryland, the name of a narrow street in St Ives with a pub on it. Cool name, and something I’d like to have in my address, but where did it come from?

Three poker tournaments yesterday. I felt all at sea in my first tournament – Omaha hi-lo – and it made me think that the win I had in that discipline last week must have been a tiny flash in an enormous pan. I never have the slightest clue what anyone else has, and in poker that’s obviously a problem. Then came single draw, in which I ran hot at the beginning and amassed a hefty stack, only to finish ninth for a small profit. Finally, I played pot-limit badugi, where I rode my luck at one point to rocket into the chip lead. With three remaining I was in second place, ahead of a short stack, but I was dealt a pat 98 and had no choice but to get all my chips in against the leader with a 66% chance of winning. I lost and I was out in third. Still, not a bad morning, and after a slightly barren patch, my bankroll is back up to $1260.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Maths teaching

Maths and the reality of Covid

December 12, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had my first maths lesson with Matei this morning, and also my first face-to-face lesson of any sort since September. The back tyre on my bike had a slow leak, and I arrived with only a minute to spare. It was good to see Matei, who now has a mop of long hair, rather like me. That’s pretty unusual for a 13-year-old in a fairly conservative country like Romania. We sat down – I had a comfortable but very impractical chair for teaching – and did some geometry problems. These were only 2-D, and no trig, so it didn’t matter that my maths was a bit rusty. Matei understood it all fine, but his weakness, I feel, is a lack of mathematical sense (or reasoning), and that’s difficult to teach. For instance, there was one question where he had to calculate how many 20-centimetre-square tiles you need to cover a floor measuring 20 by 5 metres. A simple problem, and he understood how to get the answer, but he couldn’t instinctively tell that it was a big floor, the tiles weren’t much bigger than his hands, and you’d therefore need lots of them. He also did what many not-great-but-not-terrible maths students did even back in my day, which was to reach for his calculator at the first opportunity. (I mean, 84 divided by 4, c’mon!) He goes to British School which follows the British system – all his lessons, except for Romanian and Spanish, are in English – so there were no language issues to worry about for either of us. It’s quite different from the Romanian system, and that’s the whole reason they contacted me instead of a Romanian.

In the middle of our lesson, Matei told me all about his father, who nearly died in autumn of 2020. The three of them – Matei and his parents – all came down with the disease; his father was the worst by far. He spent at least three weeks in hospital, requiring oxygen, and still needed an oxygen supply when he came home. At the worst point, he only had use of 30% of his lungs. Matei told me the common story of someone who gets a bit sick, then improves, only to find a day or two later that he can hardly breathe. The awful part was that his family couldn’t see him of course; they relied on FaceTime. Thankfully he made a full recovery – it sounded like it was touch-and-go. He’s in his early fifties and is carrying quite a bit of extra weight. Matei expressed his anger at anti-vaxers; I completely agreed with him (obviously, if you’ve been reading my blog).

When we got to the end of my lesson, I panicked. Where’s my phone? I couldn’t see it anywhere. I had a long and painful trip back on (and off) my bike, not knowing if my phone would be there when I got home. But it was. Phew. For some reason (being in a rush, mostly) I never took it off the charger. As for my bike, I hope it’s a puncture and not the valve, because taking off the back wheel on that thing is a complete nightmare – the gear hub and the brakes are in there, and it has a chain case. If it’s a puncture I can repair it without taking the wheel off at all.

This October was Romania’s deadliest month since World War Two, according to the official figures that have just been published. That includes March 1977, when there was that massive earthquake, and December 1989, when the revolution took place.

On Thursday I read this piece on Stuff (a New Zealand news site) about the plight of earthquake-prone building owners in Wellington, and thought how good it is to be out of that. Just think of all the meetings and emails and body corporate politics. I don’t get my rent anymore, but I don’t get any of that drip-drip-drip of unremitting powerlessness and desperation either. I was extremely lucky to come out of it as well as I did. The comments (there aren’t many) on the article aren’t too sympathetic to building owners. The only comment I agree with is (currently) the last one, saying that earthquake strength testing, and the rules around it, are a complete sham. (The NZ property market is a sham too. That’s half the reason so many people buy crappy properties in the first place, because that’s all they can afford. It would be better for the country in the long run if the whole thing would burn. Any party that proposes policies to at least singe it would get my vote.)

Yesterday morning I spoke to Dad, whose eye was running at the time. He had his other eye operated on in the UK in the mid-nineties, so that it wouldn’t run, but since the other one started running he’s just lived with it.

I’m still full of cold, though much better than a week ago. (These things never pass quickly for me.) I was going to join Mark (the teacher) on a road trip tomorrow, but the forecast is for rain and maybe snow, so we’ll probably meet up for a drink in town.