by 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.