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Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Music - Poker

Years that end in one

April 19, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’ll be 41 the day after tomorrow. Yikes. Ten years ago today I started that job in Wellington; I only just lived to tell the tale. Ten years before that, I was doing my year abroad in Lyon and Mum came to stay with me for three days. I seem to remember us getting through plenty of pizza and wine. I’d just had a skiing accident (I haven’t attempted skiing since) and I was hobbling around the city. Ten years before that, on my 11th birthday, I was again with Mum, this time a bit closer to home in Bedford. I was taking part in a tennis tournament, and it rained and hailed and even snowed, highly unusual for the time of year. The tennis still went ahead, and I remember I won two of my four matches, just missing out on qualifying for the next stage. When I came back (rather damp) I was greeted by my best friend who was a year older than me; he was getting me all excited about starting at my new school in September. I can’t easily go back a fourth ten years, but I’ve just been looking at picture of our garden from the day after we moved into our family home which was (at the time) totally unsuitable for kids. The grass is knee-high and my parents have been incinerating something in the middle of it. There is washing on the line, and Mum is carrying my baby brother in her arms. Mum has dated the photo exactly to 14/10/81; my brother was eleven weeks old.

Romania’s Covid numbers are still high, but they’re coming down fast; hopefully the effect of the vaccines is starting to kick in. It’s very real here though. A woman cancelled a lesson on Thursday because she’d picked up the virus. Another of my students got Covid several weeks ago but is still compromised – he’s always run down and can’t smell anything. Yesterday some of the tennis players were in shock when they learned of someone’s death from the disease. At some level (minor for me; utterly devastating for many others) this is affecting us all. It’s maddening because so much was preventable. I have day-by-day figures since the pandemic started, but for Romania as a whole and for Timiș, my local area (hence the graphs). The daily new cases in Timiș (population around 700,000) for each of the 30 days of last June were 00200 01000 01100 00111 00020 01003. We had about as much virus as New Zealand at that point and could have ring-fenced Timiș or something a bit wider. Everyone could have had a great summer in the park or at the pool or at the pub or any other P-word, but no, they had to go to Greece or Turkey or the Black Bloody Sea (couldn’t think of anywhere worse in the height of summer, not that I’ve ever been there). How many deaths worldwide have been caused by stupid unnecessary travel? Well, officially there have been three million deaths, so I’d say at least three million.

On the subject of cutting back on travel, I read quite a moving piece in the paper about a Welsh sheep farmer in his early seventies who has remained single all his life and has never been out of the valley. He even eats the same dinner every day. But he wants for nothing. I thought it was lovely, and runs counter to everything that we’re told, to want more, bigger, better, to have big ambitious goals, to even strive for happiness. Yes, we must achieve happiness. You can’t just be content anymore. Do people still even use the adjective content, other than in negative contexts like “I’ll have to be content with that”? I remember at a young age asking my grandmother (Dad’s mum) what the purpose of life was. She said to be content.

I’ve just been listening to Out of Time, the REM album, which came out in 1991 (of course, it ends in one). A great album, and one of the Youtube commenters said that Low, Near Wild Heaven and Endgame are an unbeatably beautiful back-to-back triplet of songs. I have to agree.

Three poker tournaments at the weekend. I failed to cash in any of them. I played a fixed badugi this evening – that’s a rarity, and I only managed it because tennis was washed out. I had a good, highly aggro player at my table who plays an absolute ton of all kinds of games and must be playing with a nice fat bankroll. I don’t like the way I played my bust-out hand – my opponent correctly broke and outdrew me, when I might have got him to cling on hopelessly to his hand if I’d played it differently. My bankroll is $505, and I’ll be playing two more SCOOP tourneys this week.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Music

The big chill

January 14, 2021 by 0 Comments

The snow I mentioned last time pretty much melted away, but now the white stuff is coming down properly.

Dad sent me a great video about Fen skating. The Fens – the pancake-flat part of East Anglia which I lived on the edge of – regularly floods and sometimes freezes. Before the half-arsed winters we get now, the meadows might be frozen for weeks, and people would skate on them, especially Bury Fen, near Earith where my aunt lives. I had a go once or twice, but was just about talent-free. The Fen skating tradition dates back at least a couple of centuries, and racing was serious business that drew bumper crowds. The men in the video are getting on a bit now; they reminisced about the famous winter of 1962-63 and three successive harsh winters in the 1980s – people came in their thousands then to participate or watch. They said that another deep freeze could revitalise the tradition, but I’m not so sure. Even the eighties are a world away now. Back in Romania, temperatures are forecast to dip into the double-figure negatives, so the Bega might freeze as it did during my first winter here. There was even ice fishing.

I watched the replay of Dad’s cousin’s funeral. The video only lasted half an hour, and a good part of that was music before and after the service. I couldn’t see very much. He was a potter, and much of the focus was on the relative fame he achieved in that sphere. He was a PR man, he gave lessons, he talked pots, he was all over social media, he met the great and the good of the potting world on his travels, and he blew his own trumpet loud and often. The complete opposite of my father, in other words, who can’t stand any of that stuff (you can see where I get it from) and has always preferred to let his paintings speak. He was described in the service as being curmudgeonly, cantankerous, and always right. Surly is the word I would use. I think he was actually quite friendly though if you got to know him (I never really did).

Coronavirus deaths in the UK have reached 100,000. Yesterday 1562 deaths were recorded. (On a per capita basis, this is equivalent to almost 8000 in the US.) People are often dying alone. Bodies are piling up in mortuaries. This level of excess death hasn’t been seen since the Second World War. It’s a tragic toll.

Last night’s Musicorama was dedicated to Joan Baez, who has just turned 80. What a voice, and what an incredible life she has led inside and outside of music. In the winter of 2015, just before I started this blog, I found myself playing Diamonds and Rust over and over. On Monday’s show that a variety of artists including Sting. Why do I like his All This Time so much, I wondered. Ahh, because it sounds so much like Paul Simon.

Language teaching - Life :) - Music

Coincidences

November 22, 2020 by 0 Comments

It’s been a pretty big week on the work front – 34 hours of lessons. On Thursday night I told my student how to spell “unnecessary”, eventually giving up on the whole alphabet lark and just typing it into the chat. I warned him that even native speakers struggle with that word. Then the next morning (yesterday) I watched the BBC and saw a big headline about unneccessary emails, with an unnecessary third set of double letters. (Double C makes no sense there. English spelling isn’t totally illogical.) Yesterday I had a lesson with a kid, and one of the exercises featured a girl called Layla. An unusual name, he said. Yes, I said, but it’s a famous song. And of course the song featured on Musicorama last night. Coincidences happen more often than you think, so even if you get two coincidences on one day, it isn’t all that coincidental.

My last lesson yesterday was with a new guy. He’s in his thirties. He said he used to be a professional poker player, and was happy to talk about his exploits at the tables, online and live. (He wasn’t hesitant in talking about his exploits outside poker, either. I’ve had a few students like that now.) I told him about my poker history, which while profitable, probably sounded pathetic to him. Avoiding hold ’em, the only real game in town? Only playing two tables at a time? (He said he could manage 16.)

On Thursday my brother called me from his new four-bedroom house, and gave me a mini tour. They’ve done pretty well to afford it. He gave me their rather long address. British addresses amuse me somehow. With most names or numbers, short is desirable. The number plate “V8” would cost a helluva lot more than something like V807 WGA. My online name “plutoman” wouldn’t be as much fun if it had a load of extra numbers or letters tacked on the end. But in the UK, there’s a certain cachet to having unnecessary words or even whole lines in your address. Stuff like “Rear of Willoughby Hall” or “Garrington Green, Long Langley Lane”. Is it the green or the lane? Make up your mind! If you have a short address, your residence is clearly deficient in some way. The address of my dive in Peterborough was something close to “7 St John’s Road, Peterborough” followed by the post code. That was it.

My brother told me that our cousin (based in Wellington, and a month younger than me) had split up with his wife. I went to their wedding in February 2012. They’ve since had two daughters, so that’s pretty sad. I don’t think there was anyone else involved; I’m guessing the issue is that my cousin has never graduated from the “lad” phase. The two kids didn’t do much to stop his drinking and partying. A key moment, I think, was when he travelled from Wellington to Barcelona to see Liverpool play in the Champions League final. (I don’t know if he actually saw the match.)

In a recent episode of Musicorama there was a song by Abba called The Visitors, from the album of the same name. It came out in 1981, just like my brother, so it was at the end of Abba. I’d never heard the song before, and it’s quite different from any of their earlier (and more commercially successful) stuff. There are bits of Jean Michel Jarre (’77), bits of Walk Like an Egyptian by the Bangles (’86), and elements of New Wave or whatever you call that early eighties sound. It’s a great song.

I was supposed to play tennis this afternoon, following my three lessons, but the rain put paid to that. I should be able to play tomorrow though.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Travel: Europe

Onboarding some more students

September 19, 2020 by 0 Comments

Soon I’ll have my ninth lesson in two days. That’s getting back to pre-apocalyptic levels. Not every day, or pair of days, is like this, but the direction of travel is positive and I really can’t overstate the difference a steady volume of work makes to me. It’s hugely uplifting. There’s a new bloke who lives in Brașov, and after a few lessons with the upper-beginner-level woman from the north of the country, I’ve now started with her younger sister who lives in Spain. She’s at a much higher level than her sister – a 7 or 8 on my 0-to-10 scale.

Earlier this week I had a large Zoom meeting with members of the body corporate, to discuss the sale of our apartment block. I’m still always amazed by how quickly seemingly normal people switch into meetingese and really weird cadences. There are reasons FOR that. Oh yes. Next you’ll be telling me that my bags must be placed IN the overhead locker OR under the seat in front of me. We were told how many people had signed the agreement to this point in time, and there was discussion of onboarding those who still haven’t signed. The airline parallels kept coming back. But it wasn’t a bad meeting – everybody present had signed, or onboarded themselves, so the tension was gone. In fact there are now only three non-signers, and only one definite “no”, so they’ve decided to push on with the sale. It’s now officially on the market.

I had a good chat with my parents this morning, in between lessons. Mum reiterated that she doesn’t expect us to meet before 2022. We talked about our family holidays. Dad sent me a picture of me and my brother in Belgium in 1987, at a campsite with two similar-aged girls we met. That was a good holiday. I remember getting up at 2am so we could take the ferry from Felixstowe to Zeebrugge, a six-hour trip. The company was Townsend Thoresen; one of their ferries had sunk earlier that year on the same route, after someone had forgotten to close the bow doors, and there were a lot of fatalities. We travelled around the French-speaking Ardennes region, staying first at a campsite in a place called De Haan, before moving to the place where the picture was taken, alongside the Meuse river. The river had recently flooded the campsite which was still wet in places, and I wore wellies in the photo. The other family had a caravan and drove a Peugeot 504; we just had our extremely heavy old tent, and Dad drove the Mazda 626 they’d bought less than a year earlier. We visited Waterloo, Ypres, and Passchendaele where hundreds of New Zealanders had died. I remember having a tooth out while I was in Belgium, and finding 15 francs under my pillow in the morning.

Coronavirus cases have taken a sudden upward swing, as they have in much of Europe. (See my graphs.) Things could still get extremely ugly here. It was sobering to talk to my new student based in Spain this morning. Overwhelmed hospitals. Palpable fear everywhere. Economic carnage in the big cities that will take many years to recover from. I don’t think they ever fully got over the economic crisis that started in 2008.

In the last few days I’ve been listening to Manchester Orchestra, an American band. This Youtube video (nearly nine minutes) is quite magical. Imagine creating something like that.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Music

Is it worth the risk?

August 16, 2020 by 0 Comments

A few words on Covid-19 in Romania. To go a bit Antipodean, it’s not that flash here. The first wave was barely a trickle compared to what we’re experiencing now, and we aren’t doing a whole lot to make things better. Masks, yes. We’ve been hot on masks since April, and I’m sure lives have been saved as a result. Bars and restaurants are still only open outside. And, well, that’s about it. Physical distancing has just about gone by the board if the bakery today is anything to go by. Traffic is back to normal for the time of year. Way too many people think this is over, for some bizarre reason. Way too many people don’t believe Covid was ever real in the first place. This is a nation of ostriches. I’ve got a new student starting on Tuesday who I don’t know from Adam. I gave him the option of having online lessons, implying that I’d really really prefer it if he didn’t come here, but he didn’t take the hint. Are 90-minute face-to-face lessons even worth the risk at this point? Obviously I want the work, but if I catch Covid I might not be able to work again for bloody ages.

John Campbell came out with an intriguing video yesterday about the surprisingly low rates of severe Covid-19 disease in sub-Saharan Africa, even accounting for the much younger demographic than in European countries or the United States. We’re talking an order of magnitude lower. South Africa, however, was pretty much in line with Europe (worse if anything – so much corruption leading to limited access to health care). It’s good news for those countries, but a bit of a mystery, especially when you consider the prevalence of HIV which massively compromises your immune system. Is it lower obesity? More time in the sun, leading to higher vitamin D levels? (But South Africa is also sunny.) My theory is lack of travel and lack of work in unventilated, air-conditioned offices means that people aren’t picking up those potentially lethal viral loads, while low obesity rates and higher vitamin D probably help too.

The first song on yesterday’s Musicorama (Radio Timișoara’s daily music programme) was Time to Say Goodbye by Sarah Brightman (she turned 60 yesterday) and Andrea Bocelli. That gave me goosepimples. They played it at my grandfather’s funeral in 1999; I wasn’t there for my grandmother’s funeral but I’m pretty sure it would have been played there too. It must be extremely popular at funerals. The next song they played was the pretty cool I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper by 18-year-old Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip, which I’d never heard before. Musicorama has introduced (or reintroduced) me to a vast array of artists. Recently they showcased Sparks, whose songs range from amazing to downright weird. In the first category are This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us and Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth, both from the seventies, and the fantastic new song All That. Another band I’ve been getting into lately are the modern Belgian group Absynthe Minded.

This afternoon I made 48 cards with opposite adjectives (such as rich and poor), complete with pictures, for the ten-year-old girl I teach. They’ll be useful for other kids too. I made cards with opposites (adjectives, verbs and nouns) soon after I started teaching here, but even the easiest ones contain pairs like deep/shallow and wide/narrow, which aren’t that easy. Yesterday I made a 9×9 crossword containing words that are common to both languages but mean completely different things, such as drum (road in Romanian) and sting (Romanian for “put out”, e.g. a fire). Ignoring the accents, there are some interesting ones, like străin (foreign), strânge (to gather, collect, raise money), and seamăn (something or somebody alike). There are two sets of clues, one for each language. Such a crossword isn’t easy to make because your stock of words is extremely limited.

There has been a fiasco in the UK with A-level results. No exams this year for obvious reasons, and 18-year-olds’ futures have been left to the whim of an arcane, nonsensical algorithm. Pupils have sometimes dropped multiple grades from their mock exams in January or what they were predicted to receive, and those from deprived backgrounds have often fared the worst. I’ve read heartbreaking stories of people about to be the first from their family ever to go to university, only for their dreams to be shattered. On a lighter note, there have been jokes about ABBA turning into AC/DC. By the way, I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory when it came to my A-levels. Doing completely the wrong subjects (with the exception of maths) didn’t help.

Coronavirus - Language learning - Language teaching - Music

Hotting up

May 11, 2020 by 0 Comments

I was going to say it’s been a warm day, but no, it’s been positively hot. Nudging 30 degrees, and people were taking advantage of it. A far cry from six weeks ago when people were clearly scared to leave the house.

This afternoon’s lesson went well. My student showed his appreciation at the end. I spent some time yesterday and today translating The Magic Finger from English to Romanian, so I won’t sound quite so clueless when I we go through the last twenty-odd pages tomorrow. With intermediate students this isn’t a problem, because with them I only ever need to translate individual words or explain the gist of a sentence in English; I never have to translate whole texts into Romanian. It’s good practice though.

Little Richard has died. I didn’t know that much about him, but what an entertainer he was. (Isn’t Youtube great?) In his day he must have been a sensation. Right now, in a different dimension, I’m watching a traditional Romanian music show on TV. Dili-dili-dili-dili-dum, with violins going at a hundred miles an hour. The last song was all about the pride of being from Botoșani, which I always think of as șobolani (meaning “rats”).

I watched Boris Johnson’s speech. Lots of talk about the R (reproductive) rate, which they now say is between 0.5 and 0.9 (why such a range?), but no talk of masks. Madness.

My brother is fine. He went back to work last week. For some reason we ended up talking about the stock market before running out of things to say.

Coronavirus - Music - Politics - Scrabble

Work slowly picking up

April 17, 2020 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow I should have four lessons. I’ve picked up another student, a woman who is friends with Cosmin, the ex-student of mine who recently contacted me. She called me today and she spoke so fast that I had put all my concentration into understanding her. I was very stuttery in reply. The difference in speed and clarity between people is vast – Cosmin, for instance, is much clearer and more deliberate. This woman said she’ll need to start from zero, which probably means she knows only 10,000 words and seven verb tenses.

Yesterday I switched on the radio and just caught the incredible last minute or so of a song I recognised but couldn’t put a name to. They played it right to the end. Then this morning I remembered it was Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It’s just a beautiful song, and that synthesiser solo at the end takes it into the stratosphere. Hats off to Radio Timișoara for playing it and not cutting it off. I read that Greg Lake wrote the song when he was twelve. Sadly, both he and Keith Emerson died in 2016, leaving only Carl Palmer, the staggeringly dynamic drummer.

This afternoon I bumped into the woman who lives next door but one. She told me to be ultra careful because of all the people heading out to get supplies for Orthodox Easter. She was glad that Romania is not (yet?) at the levels of Spain or Italy, and was open-mouthed when I told her how many people had died in the UK. Yesterday I saw Bogdan, who lives on the second floor. He invited me over for birthday beers today, but I had to refuse.

Some figures from John Campbell’s latest video make the UK situation all the more alarming. There are considerably more additional deaths (i.e. deaths in excess of the average for the time of year) than there are deaths caused by Covid-19. That might be because some people are dying of coronavirus without being diagnosed, but it’s quite possible that people are dying of other causes because they are no longer receiving due care and attention, and if that’s the case it’s terrible. As far as I know, deaths in care homes still aren’t being included in the UK total. Common sense would suggest that the death toll is very high in care homes – they act as a petri dish for the virus.

Mum seems to have fallen out with her younger brother. He came to my brother’s wedding two years ago and then had a dreadful time with a bowel cancer operation that went horribly wrong. He’s also a Trump supporter who watches plenty of Fox News, and that’s where they fell out. When she told him to stop watching that piece of shit, he put the phone down on her. I don’t blame Mum, who after hearing over and over again from her brother how wonderful Trump is, finally snapped. Trump is a total arse, who in a parade of total arses manages to have no redeeming features whatsoever. He is quite simply all arse, and if you’re supporting him right now when far too many Americans are dying, that says quite a bit about you.

Finally, I played a game of Scrabble this evening for the first time since June. I was abysmal (which would have made a nice bingo). In the same vein, I played hangman with one of my younger students on Tuesday, the best we could on Skype. He found a site called something like “really hard hangman words” and gave me yachtsman. I got there, but heck, those five consonants in a row had me, um, all at sea for a while.