Coronavirus

Coronavirus - Poker - Tennis

Competition — an escape from all the bad news

August 21, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Sunday and Monday were hellishly hot, to the point where I struggled to sleep at night even with the fan going full blast, but later in the week the temperature fell and the air took on that late-summer feel. I played singles tennis on Sunday against the super-fit guy nearly two decades my senior. We started at 7pm but the temperature was over 30. At 3-1 down in the first set, I decided to slow the game down in the hope of drawing errors from his racket. (I was the one employing old-man tactics.) I won some close games to lead 5-4, only to then play a shocking return game. I eked out games 11 and 12 for the set, but it didn’t feel like a win. I was taking giant gulps of water while he was as fresh as a daisy. In the second set I found myself in a much deeper hole at 5-2 down, but my opponent then started to tire ever so slightly. I fended off two set points in the tenth game to level at 5-5, then in the last two games I was able to tee up on my two-handed backhand, which naturally targeted his slightly weaker backhand wing, and I ran out a rather fortunate 7-5 7-5 winner. A remarkable stat from the match: he double-faulted only once, while I didn’t do so at all. (He did swat some of my weak second serves away for winners though.)

In my only other competitive pursuit, I snapped a run of three winless months in poker tournaments to win two on a single day. I made $93 on Tuesday to take my bankroll to $877. My wins were in no-limit single draw and pot-limit badugi, and both times as we got heads-up I was what you might call in the zone. For such small-stakes tournaments I don’t think I’ve ever been so intensely focused. (I’m fully aware that it was luck rather than focus or skill that played the biggest part in my victories.) I’m still trying to get better at Omaha hi-lo, which is a fiendishly complex game.

The book. The finish line is coming into view; yesterday I hit the V section. (Nobody in Romania can say vegetable or vehicle.) The book might never see the light of day, but having already come this far… Putting aside a set number of hours each week has really helped.

Afghanistan. My brother has been following it much more closely than me. After all, he’s been there twice. Some of the scenes have been upsetting almost beyond belief. I recently started A Thousand Splendid Suns, by the same author who wrote the brillant Kite Runner. But this story is so harrowing that I wonder if I should even continue.

New Zealand is now under lockdown. The cluster of Delta cases has now spread to Wellington. What a bugger. I’m just glad they’ve gone fast and hard, and hopefully they can avoid the current Australian situation. Here in Romania, cases have risen tenfold in six weeks or so, and with our embarrassingly low vaccination rate, the near future is bleak. I can hear those ambulances in my head now. Soon I expect I’ll hear them for real every other minute.

I was going to write the next chapter about my trip, but I’ve gone on long enough already. That’ll have to be next time.

Coronavirus - Tennis - Travel: Romania

Romania trip report — Part 3 (Gura Humorului)

August 16, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last weekend at tennis, there were seven of us and it was my turn to sit out, along with the two old geezers. Domnul Ionescu, the old one (as opposed to Domnul Sfâra, the really old one) is always complaining about modern-day Romania and how it has gone to the dogs. This time he was talking about Romania’s vaccination rate. “We’re last in Europe in everything. Why do we even have to be last in this? Vaccination rates are a measure of a country’s civilisation, or in our case, lack of it.” Domnul Sfâra agreed, and so did I, of course. The English couple who came to visit me in Romania four years ago have now had their jabs. The husband was very reluctant to do so, and in the end he succumbed to social pressure. Telling, I thought, because how and why people get vaccinated hardly matters. If it’s only social pressure that does it, who cares? The fact is that in the UK that pressure exists. If he’d been in Alabama there’s no way he’d have got the jab, and in large swathes of Romania the social pressure, if anything, goes the other way.

Today I might be playing singles. It’s another scorcher here.

More on my trip. On Saturday the 24th – a sunny day – I left Iași, taking the train to Gura Humorului, passing through Suceava where I was able to have a quick look around the station. The journey took 2¾ hours. I met a nice lady on the train who pointed out my stop for me, because it wasn’t all that obvious. My guest house was on a main road about a mile from the station, and when arrived around 3pm, nobody was there. I just had enough battery on my phone to call the owner who said she’d come over. All the time on this trip I was battling a rapidly depleting battery. The owner, whose name was Simona, took down all my details and complimented me on my Romanian. From that perspective it was a good trip for me. I didn’t do much else that day except read my book – All the Light We Cannot See – and grab a basic dinner in town. Gura means mouth; the town isn’t exactly at the mouth of any river (there’s no sea!) but it’s at the confluence of two rivers, the Humor and the Moldova.

Back in the guest house, I felt a mini-earthquake every time a truck went past. I slept well though, and early the next morning I visited the museum of local customs, where I was given a one-on-one tour. He said he could speak some English but I asked him to explain everything in Romanian. The traditions of the region – farming, cooking, religious festivals with all their superstitions – are still alive in large part today. They used – and still use – oxen to plough the fields, while most of the country uses horses. It’s all a century away from the likes of Fonterra. After the museum I trekked 6 or 7 km up to the monastery at Voroneț, which was built in the late 15th century in under four months. I couldn’t take any pictures inside without stumping up extra cash, but you can see the very colourful exterior painting. I wandered back to the town where I booked my train ticket for the next day and then slumped on a bench. Just like in Timișoara, men crowd around tables to play and watch various games, and there seemed to be a form of extreme backgammon in full swing. My dinner that evening was very chicken-heavy.

The following morning I had time to visit yet another monastery, simply called Humorului Monastery. This was a more interesting experience than Voroneț, because of the tower you could climb with claustrophobically narrow steps, and the view from the top which was breathtaking. I took a taxi to the monastery and while walking back (that’s where I took the picture of the cranes perched atop a lamp-post) a minivan pulled over, and the rather grumpy driver gave me a lift back for 3 lei.

Coronavirus - Environment - Life :) - Poker

Under the weather

July 2, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I picked up a cold at the beginning of the week, and that’s made things pretty shitty. This morning, after only sleeping a couple of hours (what a horrible night that was – it started with a big thunderstorm which set the tone) I’d lost my voice almost entirely. I had an online lesson at eight. I called my student, and planned to put on a video if she still wanted to have the lesson, but she was happy to call it off as soon as she heard me speak. So then the big question. It can’t be Covid, surely. I’m fully vaccinated, and there isn’t much virus swilling around at the moment. But then again. my symptoms aren’t far off what the Delta (Indian) variant gives you. I texted another of my students (who caught the virus last autumn) to ask her where she went for a test, and instead she came all the way over to my place and dropped off a self-testing kit. A Youtube video from the UK told me how to administer the test. Swab your tonsils four times on each side, then twizzle the swab around inside your nostril ten times. That was easier said that done – I wanted to sneeze at only the first twizzle. After the swabs, I was on tenterhooks for the next half-hour, to see if a second line showed up, next to the letter T. It didn’t; as expected I was negative. (Yes, I know these self tests are far from perfect, but I’ll trust it.)

How I picked up a cold I don’t know. The air con? I’ve hardly seen a soul. Mercifully the temperature has dropped off today, following the thunderstorm that lasted more than two hours last night. We’re now sitting at 29. There are second-round matches going on at Wimbledon, and I’ve got the TV on with the sound down in the background, but I can’t get into it, or anything else.

The searing heat (up to 48 degrees) and humidity in Canada have made for distressing reading. This planet is becoming less survivable by the year. All because, as far as I can tell, people want more shiny shit.

Yesterday I snapped a streak of 14 cashless tournaments by finishing second in a pot-limit badugi. This one player had been hounding me all morning in all three of the tourneys I played, and it was almost inevitable that he was the one to beat me when we got heads-up. I was very lucky to make it that far, but at one stage I was a significant favourite to run out the winner. My bankroll is $730.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

A dizzyingly hot week in store

June 21, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s hot, and in the coming week we’re forecast to hit dizzying, hellish 37s, 38s and 39s. If you deal in Fahrenheit, that means we’ll be heading into triple digits. In California and Nevada they know all about triple digits at the moment. It sounds horrendous there. (When I lived in the UK it was common to talk in Fahrenheit when things got a bit balmy. Eighty-something just sounded hot. I don’t know if they still do that.) Here are some of the two dozen pungent lime trees outside my block of flats.

My aunt called me yesterday. It was the first time we’d spoken in a while: she’d been through a depressive spell of not picking up the phone. We chatted for half an hour; I have more in common with her than I realised. Her world has continued to shrink, sadly. I later spoke to my brother who said she never ventures beyond Earith and St Ives these days, not even to Cambridge which is 12 miles away. (She used to go there regularly, to shop until she dropped.) She was amazed to learn that the majority of Romanians are, and are likely to remain, unjabbed.

I had more anti-vax crap yesterday. I don’t mention vaccines anymore, but my student did, saying that they’re basically useless but his work had pretty much forced him to have them. He seemed a sensible guy.

Tennis was a bit awkward last night. I waited for my near-neighbour to appear, so we could walk to the courts, but he never did. When I got there alone, there were only the staunch anti-vax guy and his daughter. We played a set of two-on-one, then he made me play a set of singles with his daughter so he could spend the whole time on his phone. I then played singles with him, and was up 6-1 5-1 when we ran out of time. He had paid for the courts, and at the end I realised I didn’t have enough money to pay him back (because there were unexpectedly only three of us, I had to pay more), so I gave him what I had, promising to give him the remaining few lei tonight. He then went into a spiel: “we’re just here to enjoy ourselves”, as if I’d done something to prevent that. Something to do with the money? I’m guessing it was that. Or maybe it was our one-sided game? It wasn’t the first time he’d said that to me, but this time his daughter also joined in. Sometimes I don’t get people.

Some Romanians, like the woman who stopped lessons with me three weeks ago, are straight out of the series of books I read about Naples. Everything is about their emotions, how this or that utterance makes a person feel, and everyone is entangled in a cruel and exhausting game where they’re trying to outwit each other with their feelings. Practical considerations, like whether to protect yourself and others against a deadly virus, go out the window in that world.

No luck at the poker tables today. Not much skill either, perhaps. I made a particularly bad fold this morning in a single draw tournament against a maniacal player; I didn’t realise quite how maniacal. That game is extremely player-dependent. My bankroll sits at $737.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker

Their first shots

June 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I was delighted to hear yesterday that my parents had just received their first dose of Pfizer. They didn’t expect it until the end of July, but Dad had to see the doctor in Timaru for something, and they offered both of them their jabs on the spot. That was great news. (I’m lucky to have parents who are so sensible and practical.)

This week Dominic Cummings leaked a bunch of Covid-related text messages from spring 2020, written by him, the prime minister and Matt Hancock. You’re not exactly innocent here either, Dom, but what a joke it would be if it wasn’t so deadly serious. They were worse than clueless. Those damn whiteboard brainstorms reminded me of that blue-sky 360 vision bullshit which might have been OK in the business-as-usual running of an insurance company but not when you’re a running a country in the grip of a deadly disease. It was all “how do we sell this”, as if they were tweaking income tax bands, and 15 months later they still haven’t moved on from that. The political system in the UK (and the US) is hopeless in a situation like this, because it provides all the wrong incentives. Massively restricting travel into the UK was so obviously the right thing to do, but no, it might frighten the horses for a few days.

At this time of year, Timișoara smells. The air is filled with the sweet scent of lime trees in full bloom, the markets are pungent with the smell of strawberries, and the sheer heat provides a certain aroma, even late at night. We’re forecast to reach 32 this afternoon; in the middle of next week we could hit an oppressive 37.

Poker. I tried to make a video of a tournament last night, with limited success. I’ve had some small cashes since I last wrote, and my bankroll is now $746.

Coronavirus - New Zealand - Romania - Tennis

It’s collapsing all around us

June 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

Anti-vax: just don’t go there

June 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

At 2pm on Monday I felt awful. I Skyped the boy whose anti-vax mother had given up lessons with me, but no reply. I tried again. Still nothing. Oh god, she’s pulled him out of lessons with me too, without even telling me. What a shame. He’s a nice kid, his English never ceases to impress me, and we’ve now had 70-odd very productive lessons. Then at 2:10 he came on the line. His school lessons are all over the place as a result of the pandemic, so he was a bit late. What a relief. Yesterday I had a first – I’ve done plenty of interview practice, but I hadn’t had a student give a phone interview in English during a lesson. It was a short but tough interview, with unexpected questions, mostly about her experience with the English language. The interviewer didn’t do a great job, honestly. When my student asked her to repeat a question, she repeated it at the same speed. The icebreaker – “Tell me about yourself” – came almost at the end. I hope my student doesn’t lose confidence after that.

At tennis on Saturday I met a guy who was convinced that the vaccines were useless and didn’t believe that mass vaccination was our way out of this mess. Me, my wife, my two daughters, we ain’t gettin’ no stinkin’ jabs. (They happily involve their kids in this lunacy too.) Last night I had a lesson with a woman who is getting married later this summer. She’s had both doses. The government’s policy is to severely limit attendance at weddings and baptisms unless guests have been vaccinated. Sounds great to me. But she’s having to uninvite dozens of her relatives and so-called friends who would prefer to miss her wedding than get the jabs. So I don’t go mad, I’ll avoid the subject from now on, unless the other person brings it up. It just isn’t worth it. Plus I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt. If someone’s anti, I’d rather not know.

So why is Romania awash with these buggers? The UK’s initial response to the pandemic was lamentable, but the vaccine rollout and take-up have been impressive. Demand is continuing to outstrip supply. New Zealand is struggling to get hold of the vaccines, but I’m confident that over 85% of the population, perhaps over 90%, will get jabbed when they can. That should be enough for herd immunity. Western European countries made a slow start (mainly because the EU did such a crappy job at the beginning) but they’re getting their act together now. But in Romania we’re currently at about 25% and stalling. It comes down to education (or the anti-education that platforms like Facebook give you), wealth (poorer people travel less, so have less personal incentive to get vaccinated), and civil duty. In the UK, to refuse the vaccine is to opt out of being a decent citizen. In NZ it will be the same, I’m sure. But not so here. If anything, the social pressure in Romania goes the other way, especially outside the main cities. Get jabbed and you’re seen as someone who can’t think for yourself. Easily taken in by government propaganda. Naive. A sheep. Romania’s low turnouts in general elections – usually around 40% – again demonstrate a lack of civil duty.

When I’ve had a the chance (not very often) I’ve been keeping an eye on the French Open. There have been some wonderful women’s matches in the last couple of days. I managed to catch most of Barbora Krejcikova’s topsy-turvy win over 17-year-old Coco Gauff after my trip to the market, and now Iga Świątek has her hands full against Maria Sakkari. I expected her to steamroll to victory, but she trails 4-6, 0-2 and is taking a medical time-out.

At the local produce market this morning I bought strawberries, cherries, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes and goat’s cheese.

Poker. Not much has happened since I last wrote. I had a weird badugi tournament last weekend in which I clung on for more than two hours without ever making better than a ten badugi. My bankroll is $714.

Coronavirus

Coronavirus in Romania — 6/6/21

June 7, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The numbers are down to a fraction of what they were two months ago. People are still dying, but the spike in the deaths chart is due to a catch-up in reporting of deaths from months past. The bad news though: most people won’t touch the vaccines. Unless that turns around pretty sharpish (and why will it?), Romania is probably screwed.

I’ve stopped pinning this to the front page, and won’t update again until the picture changes. Right now it’s crystal clear.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker

Am I a monster? And a big send-off

June 3, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.

Coronavirus - Language teaching

Lost an anti-vax student today

June 1, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

So often in the past few months I’ve bristled at people’s anti-vax stance, and today I just lost it. If you’re an anti-vaxer, you are wrong, wrong, wrong. Your actions are lethal, end of story. You are killing other people. The pro-vax and anti-vax positions do not have equal legitimacy. (She even mentioned her refusal to vaccinate her son, which is disgustingly irresponsible.) And that’s what I told my student in my tenth and last lesson with her today. I won’t go into any more details but it was an hour-long train wreck that I could (maybe) have avoided. Mercifully, it was only an hour. I was amazed when she pointed to a comment I’d made in a previous lesson about Romanians sometimes using English words in conversation because they want to sound sophisticated. She’d been offended by that. Like, how? If you get offended by that, I’m going to have a really hard time saying anything without piercing your tissue-paper-like skin. So that was it. I’m better off without her. I’ve also had lessons with her son, and they’ve always gone well. He has an impressive command of the language. I don’t know if we’ll continue. Pity the boy though. His parents have split up, and his mother seems a bit of an arsehole.

The anti-vax “debate” illustrates why we’d all be better off without social media. The evidence is crystal clear – just imagine where we’d be without mass polio vaccination. But so many people get all their “news” from Facebook that confirms what they want to hear.

It’s been a shitty day all round, really. This guy has been contacting me to help cheat on his English test in real time, and now he wants me to do his homework for him, as part of his stupid, nonsensical English course that won’t help him learn any English, not that he’s in the least bit interested in that. He just wants to pass. This morning I told him, this is not my job, but he insisted. I find him extremely aggravating.

My next lesson is in an hour. It’s with a guy I get on well with. Can’t wait. And Andreescu and Zidansek are at 7-6, 6-7, 7-7 in the first round of the French Open.