Poker

Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

It’s snot much fun

June 6, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a whole heap more to say last time, but didn’t want to bombard my vast readership with too much in one go.

Last Tuesday I went back to the neurologist for another consultation. My left nostril is “always on” and causes me considerable discomfort. The pressure builds up and builds up – and so does the pain – until eventually I’m able to blow the thick clear, colourless gunk out. Sometimes it shoots out with such force that I don’t know where it’s gone. Occasionally I can’t blow it out, and then I’m in a whole world of hurt – the pain can then become excruciating. I normally wake up in the middle of the night and have to give my nose a good blow – I’ve yet to devise a way of doing this in my sleep. I told the neurologist all of this, and he said that unfortunately most of the ENT specialists in Timișoara are lacking. He gave me the number of one who might be reasonable, but said that ultimately I might need to see one in Bucharest, and that wouldn’t be cheap. He quoted something like £2000, which I’d happily pay to get rid of this once and for all.

On Thursday I decided to give up on online poker, having lost the desire to play. I played one final session, finishing with a fourth and a third in my last two tournaments, then cashed out. Annoyingly they creamed something like 10% off the top – it was never anything like that high when I lived in New Zealand – but the remainder (around £1100 or NZ£2200) will be useful. So will the extra time. I’ll have a bit more time over the summer to work on these books which I haven’t forgotten about.

This afternoon, to my great surprise, I got through to my aunt on the phone. She rarely picks it up. She sounded fine, but admitted that physically she was a mess. I plan to cycle over to her place on Saturday, just like I did last summer. When I told her about the Barclays business, she said I needed to make an appointment at the branch, so I did as she suggested. I’ll visit Barclays in Cambridge on Friday (the day I arrive), then I’ll still have an appointment up my sleeve on Monday if that doesn’t work out, although that will mean making a special trip to Cambridge. Tomorrow I’ll need to get my electricity bill translated, once again. The whole thing slipped into the realms of farce ages ago.

Teachers have been on strike for the last two weeks. They’ve chosen the end of the school year, when all the big exams are held, for maximum disruption. I sympathise with them; teachers’ salaries in Romania are derisory. But giving teachers more money will hardly begin to repair Romania’s creaking education system. This is the subject of a whole separate post. (I need to make a series of posts on how stuff works, or doesn’t, in Romania.)

I played a strange set of tennis last night. I partnered Ionuț, a man of around my age, against his daughter and Gabriela, a competitive woman also in her forties. So yes, it was boys against girls. The girls won the first eleven points; in the end we won the set 7-5 despite (if I calculated correctly) winning two fewer points than them overall.

Nearly 300 people died in a horrific train crash in India on Friday. To see the grieving families was extremely distressing. The Wikipedia page on Indian railway incidents shows a litany of disaster over decades, although (this awful incident notwithstanding) they have reduced in frequency.

I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. Workers in New Zealand had the day off for King’s birthday. Doesn’t that sound weird?

Life :) - Other sports - Poker

This age thing

April 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I Skyped my aunt and uncle who live in Woodbury, just down the road from my parents. My aunt had just had her birthday and was recovering from a fall at home that had left her with two broken ribs and a punctured lung. My uncle, who is a year older than Joe Biden, has clearly slowed down a lot from when I saw him at my brother’s wedding and then here in Timișoara. His mannerisms and sense of humour were still there, but he didn’t say a lot. My aunt, though she’s aged physically, is still as sharp as ever. I don’t know where they’ll go from here. They’ve got a huge house and many acres of land which used to be (still is?) their business. This age thing, dammit.

I finally made some progress with Barclays yesterday. I got quite a bit out of the Scottish guy on the phone. They’d sent me at least one letter that had gone to my old address. They also sent me a letter earlier that day requesting even more information, despite all my efforts. He assured me that this letter had gone to the right place. The guy was able to tell me what my URN was – this is a clearly vital six-digit number without which I won’t see a penny. I still need to get an authorised proof of address – a bank statement or power bill – but when I ask any of the notaries in town to give it their seal of approval, they won’t have a bar of it. I explained that over the phone, and he said that my other option is to get the British embassy in Bucharest to approve it. Perhaps common sense will prevail and Barclays will bypass this step, but I wouldn’t, um, bank on it. I might well have to trek all the way to Bucharest. I don’t have a car (yet).

The second day of final-round qualifiers in the snooker didn’t quite match up to the first – there were more one-sided matches, and even someone who pulled out due to palpitations supposedly caused by the Covid vaccine. Matthew Stevens (one of the stars back in my day) wasn’t far off making it, but he lost 10-7 to David Gilbert. The real drama came in the match between Joe Perry, who comes from Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, and Mark Davis. As well as both being veterans of the game, they’re good mates. At 9-9, Davis had cleared the first four colours and needed a testing pink to qualify for the Crucible. Because his ranking had fallen, his place on the snooker tour also depended on the win. He missed the pink and left it over the pocket for his opponent. Perry potted it, of course, and then faced a long black for victory. It sailed into the top corner. Perry made it to the Crucible, and in doing so cost his friend his job. Yeesh. The tournament proper, with the all-time greats like O’Sullivan and Selby and Higgins, gets under way tomorrow.

Today I read about a barn fire on a Texas dairy farm that killed 18,000 cows. The sheer numbers are hard to believe. There are no regulations on fire safety in these sorts of farm buildings in America because, heck, cows are just stupid animals. The more I think and read about the treatment of livestock the less I want to consume it. If I didn’t live in Romania, where it’s quite hard to survive without meat especially in winter, I’d consider going vegetarian.

I haven’t mentioned poker for ages because I don’t play much these days. I did have a notable tournament yesterday, however. In the no-limit single draw I finished on the wrong end of a heads-up battle that seemed interminable. Of the 701 hands I played in the tournament, a whopping 347 were heads-up. I made $29 but the payouts were top-heavy and I would have made double that if I’d won.

Environment - Life :) - New Zealand - Photos - Poker - Travel: Romania

Earthquake weather

February 14, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

At around 5pm yesterday, a 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck about 170 km east of here, at a depth of 15 km. I didn’t feel it, but many in Timișoara did, and I think the recent scenes from Turkey and Syria spooked some Romanians more than normal. Yes, earthquakes are common in Romania, mostly in Vrancea in the south-east. About 1600 people were killed in the 1977 Vrancea quake, which Ceaușescu took advantage of by clearing out swaths of Bucharest to build even more brutalist concrete blocks. There’s often talk of building codes and yellow stickers which is all hauntingly familiar to me.

It’s an absolute mess – once again – in New Zealand’s North Island. The floods caused by Cyclone Gabrielle have displaced thousands, destroyed homes, and cut off whole towns. I worked for a water consultancy company twenty years ago; we produced maps that were fascinating in their way, delineating the extend of flooding at various levels of likelihood: once every 5 years, then 10, 25, 50, 100 and 200. Then there was a “climate change” line that blew everything else out of the water, so to speak. A 1-in-200-year event would be more like a 1-in-2, if the doom scenario came to pass. It already has. I was pleased to see James Shaw, the minister for climate, give such an impassioned speech in parliament.

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos on cities (mostly American and Canadian ones) and public transport. One word that keeps coming up is stroad – a hybrid of a street, which has shops and bars and other stuff that people actually want to visit, and a road, whose purpose is to transport people from one place to another. A stroad tries to be a street and a road, and fails at both. Stroads, with their mega-center malls and drive-thru everything, are all over America and Canada. They’re depressing places if you’re in a car – you’re constantly stopping – and even more depressing if you’re not in a car. When I watched the videos I thought how I often found myself on one of sprawling Auckland’s soul-crushing stroads – Wairau Drive or whatever it was called. Wellington seemed almost free of them. Romania is pretty stroad-free I thought, until I suddenly realised something when I was cycling to my maths lesson on Saturday morning with the temperature hovering around minus 6. I cycled past Iulius Mall, which now has what the videos call a lifestyle centre (ugh), then went down the two-kilometre-long Calea Lipovei until I hit the roundabout at the edge of Dumbrăvița. Hey, now I’m on a stroad. There you’ll find a big supermarket that existed six years ago, and the Galaxy shopping centre that certainly didn’t. It’s already a big choke point, but now they’re also building a drive-thru McDonald’s. Just what we all need.

On Saturday I went back along the stroad again – all of it this time, because I was meeting the English guy Mark who lives at the end of the four-kilometre stroad and down a long, muddy, unpaved road where nothing is more than five years old. I think that would mess me up mentally. We, and the two dogs he and his girlfriend now have, went in his car to a village called Bogda, 45 minutes away. In the village was a camp that was used by schools and had clearly flourished in communist times, but was now abandoned like so much else around here. There was a good walkway and we trekked along and back with the dogs. It was a bit higher up and there was snow on the ground. I struggled with sinus pain, especially as we got back to the car, but subsided and when I got back home I felt much better after all that exercise. In fact I’m a bit better all round now.

I played poker yesterday for the first time in a while, and made $41 thanks to my first ever outright win in five-card draw. Here are some pictures.

The abandoned camp buildings and bandstand

This well is still functional

Some street art

The stroad
Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Poker - Writing a book

A major upset

January 13, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday was a ridiculous day really. For the first time I ever, I made someone cry. I told the 12-year-old boy at the end of our online lesson that he was being a pain in the butt (do you understand that?), and look, I really don’t care about what you’re saying because it’s irrevelant and disruptive, then he burst into tears. His mother then came on the line and she was fine with me, but I might never see him again and if I do, the next few sessions are bound to be frosty. After that I had to dash off to see the ENT specialist. She was very nice and had a look a the results of my CT scan in 2019, then recommended me for an MRI scan (known as RMN in Romanian) which I’ll have on Monday in Giroc, a place that used to be a village to the south of Timișoara but has now been subsumed by it, just like Dumbrăvița to the north. The scan will use a contrasting dye, so I’ll first have to get an allergy test.

Later yesterday evening I had my first maths lesson with the 16-year-old girl who started English lessons with me in November. She’s been getting low maths grades, so wanted help there too. That was a tough session for me because I don’t know to talk about maths in Romanian. I was unsure how to say even simple stuff like “root two” or “a over b” or “x to the y“. I had great trouble articulating the “hundredth triangular number”. Even the alphabet posed a problem, because when spelling a word (say vatră), Romanians say the letters differently to how they pronounce them in an abbreviation (say TVR). The T, V, and R are pronounced differently in each case. So what do they do in maths? Buggered if I knew. I resorted to writing expressions and pointing to them. What does this mean? What does that equal? She showed me her intimidating textbook which was older than her. I only skimmed it, but found no shape or space or anything else to give relief from the unremitting algebra, and certainly nothing handy for everyday life such as compound interest. She showed me a test she’d had to do, all handwritten by the teacher. It all seemed very backward.

I’ve been working on my book. Forget about the 28th February deadline I gave for myself; this project will take a while. The important thing is to work on it daily, or almost, so I don’t lose momentum. I remember when my grandmother wrote her memoirs. In 2001 she began with great gusto, but then her enthusiasm drained away and then she started losing her mental sharpness. In 2008, when she was really losing it mentally – probably as a result of a stroke she’d had – she verbally attacked the publisher when he visited her house. In the end it only just got published at all, although it did, which was certainly something. I feel a bit more optimistic about my first book now – “the handy English hints for Romanians” book – after the elderly English lady showed interest. I asked her if she’d like to collaborate more fully.

There’s another book that seems to have captured Britain’s – and the world’s – imagination this week. My brother somehow managed to get hold of a free PDF version of it. If I read any of it, it will be to look at Harry’s (or whoever’s) writing style and see if I should incorporate or avoid it in my own writing. Apparently it’s staccato. Short sentences. Like this. The content itself doesn’t interest me at all.

Now that it’s 2023, Timișoara is officially the European Capital of Culture. Or one of them – three cities got the honour. My home town, as it now is, was supposed to be the capital in 2021, but Covid put that back two years. In the centre of town on New Year’s Eve there was a celebration of Timișoara’s status, with live bands. I wish I’d gone and seen that instead of what I ended up doing.

Last Saturday I made $96 in my online poker session. A surprising second place in triple draw, followed by a win in single draw. It’s a shame double draw isn’t also a thing. I won’t be playing much for the foreseeable future – I’m getting more than enough screen time as it is.

Family - Life :) - Poker

A new friend, and New Year dread

December 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

The building work in the bathroom is done; next week the plumber will do his bit. My teaching room, and just about my whole flat, is a mess.

This morning I had a good chat with my parents. We talked about festive seasons past. Ten years ago (can it be that long?) my brother had all his mess with that crazy woman. Twenty years ago my grandfather (Mum’s dad) died, so Mum was over in New Zealand for that, and the rest of our family had a go-through-the-motions Christmas in England. What a crappy time that was for me, those first few months after university, applying for jobs I didn’t really want and getting nowhere while I packed boxes of CDs in a business park.

Nearly three years ago, just before Covid, I met an elderly couple who had arrived in Romania in 2001. Late in 2020, the husband died of pancreatic cancer. This morning I met his widow, who suffered badly from depression after her loss. She lives in a flat in Iosefin, or is it Elisabetin, the area I used to spend a lot of time walking around when I lived in the old place. It’s just over the river from there. Her block, which is something of a rabbit warren, was built in 1919. It has eleven-foot-high ceilings, what she described as “don’t look” wiring, and a courtyard where people have dumped their lives. Her place looks far more lived in than my bare-bones apartment. Her living room has around 2500 books, most of them bought by her husband, some of which you can’t reach without a stepladder. She is involved in the Baptist church which has been a source of friendship for her. She speaks good Romanian and has worked as a translator here. We talked at some length about language, and Romanians’ struggles to differentiate chicken and kitchen, Tuesday and Thursday, or fifteen and fifty.

I’ve just received the details of tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve party. Seven o’clock start. Jeebus. Why so early? I’ll have hit the wall multiple times and it will still be 2022. In Abu Dhabi. I’m dreading it.

On the 27th I played a whole suite of badugi tournaments and made $67. I might have to knock the online poker on the head because, when I’m trying to write a book, it’s too much of a time sink.

Language teaching - Other sports - Poker - Tennis - Writing a book

Fuq the World Qup

November 21, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

One of the benefits of teaching kids is that they sometimes teach you stuff. It was a cliché in the 80s and 90s that teachers would often ask one of their ten-year-old pupils how to operate a VCR. Last week one of my 15-year-old students (who wants to be an airline pilot) told me about an upcoming Istanbul–Timișoara route run by Turkish Airlines, which could be handy in getting me to and from New Zealand. I asked Turkish Airlines for some idea of a date; they told me it was “up their sleeves”. On Friday a 13-year-old boy told me all about the groups and teams and players in the World Cup which is about to start. “You’ll be my go-to man, then,” I told him, “because I won’t be watching any of it.”

Qatar. Even the word looks ridiculous. If a U-less Q was a criterion for hosting the event, they should have held it in Greenland. No end of possibilities there. I’d have been all over the games in Qaqortoq, Uummannaq and Ittoqqortoormiit. They could have kept it in summer; no air-conditioned stadiums required. I’d say they’ve missed a triq. (I remember Chelsea’s Cup Winners’ Cup match in the blizzard of Tromsø in northern Norway, back in 1997. It was a thing of beauty.) Seriously though, this World Cup stinks. Everything about it is jarringly wrong, right down to an anatomical-looking stadium, one of eight soon-to-be white elephants they’ve built in an area not much bigger than Wellington, at a cost of probably thousands of lives.

Earlier today I spoke to my friend’s girlfriend in Birmingham. She gave me some pointers on getting my work translated; the dictionary might be a bridge too far because of the sheer cost. She also put me in touch with a woman in Romania who knows something on the matter. The translation business is much bigger than I ever imagined; there are vast numbers of people online touting their services, even in relatively uncommon languages like Romanian.

After our chat, I played some online poker. Specifically, it was a triple draw tournament. I don’t particularly like triple draw, but I gave it a whirl and ended up finishing fifth for a modest profit of around $9. Once that was over, I read an article about a woman who had developed a tennis gambling addiction during the pandemic. Poor her. Her wagers included betting on the winner of the next point, which is asinine, but if you need the rush… She lost £40,000. I count myself lucky that I don’t have an addictive personality, or at least I don’t think I do. Also, it helps that I’m not well blessed in the ego department. In poker, if I think my opponents are better than me or the stakes make me feel uncomfortable (mainly because my opponents are likely to be better at higher stakes), I simply won’t play.

The incessant rain put paid to tennis today. Yesterday I got out there though, straight after finishing my three lessons. I enjoyed the session more than usual because we just rallied instead of playing a game.

Now I’ll do my usual Sunday night thing of rallying the troops (contacting my newer or less reliable students) before the week’s lessons start.

Family - Poker - Politics - The UK

Four years and a magical piece of life — Part 2

October 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Liz Truss had resigned from her disastrous seven-week stint as leader on the day I arrived in the UK, and the latest (abbreviated) race, which Boris Johnson mercifully pulled out of, dominated the news. Rishi took over from Lizzie, and suddenly everything was going to be fine and dandy once more. Yeah, right.

I gave a lesson on my last morning in that country I called home half a lifetime ago, then we looked at some old slides of my brother and I when we were little, and even before then when Mum and Dad had barely met. The ones from our early childhood were incredible to look back on; I think we’d forgotten how primitive things were back then in our largely run-down house before it all got done up, or perhaps we were just too young to remember. Then it was time to go. Mum and Dad took me to the coach station in Poole. On the way, we got a call from my brother to say that I’d left half my laptop charger there. It was too late to turn back. Bugger. That put a dark cloud over the next 24 hours for me. The station wasn’t in an obvious place either, but a helpful lady directed me to it – down the underpass and past all the local buses – and I was on my way.

I had to take two buses to get to the airport, first from Poole to Victoria Coach Station in London, and then to Luton. Almost six hours including the short gap in between. I searched for laptop cables using the National Express wi-fi, and considered ordering one to arrive in the following day or two, but figured with a bit of luck I might somehow get by until my parents come to Timișoara on 5th November. Fortunately my first bus arrived at Victoria Station on time. A youngish woman who had one arm was in the Luton queue (gate 10); she was concerned that her return destination was blank on her ticket, and she really needed to get the bus to Luton to avoid missing her flight, but I couldn’t help her. She asked a woman in uniform who has no help whatsoever. Finally a much more useful uniformed man told her she had to go all the way down to the desk at gate 0 to get a new ticket printed. (British bus and train authorities love the number zero for some reason.) She had to jump the queue there to get back before the bus left. On the bus I had a good chat with her. It turned out she was a Paralympic triathlete who had been in the UK in a vain search for an obscure medicine. She competed for Hungary in last years Paralympics in Tokyo, and was flying back to Budapest. She started off as a swimmer, and attempted to qualify for Athens as a teenager, before finally making it in her thirties. When we get to Luton I’ll only have an hour so I’ll have to run. You should be good at that, I said. I got her name out of her, but no phone number, and that was that.

I touched down in Timișoara just before two in the morning, as scheduled. Unlike at Luton, my mini suitcase appeared on the carousel almost immediately, and a taxi soon whisked me off back home. Like everything else in Romania, the cost of taxis has shot up. It felt good to be back, though the laptop business was eating away at me. I tried charging it via USB-C, but no luck. After almost giving up (will one of my students have a charger that works?), I saw my old HP charger out of the corner of my eye. It was so old it still had a New Zealand plug on the end of it. But I have adapters for those, and it worked. I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. I can hardly function without my laptop.

On Friday my parents left Poole and drove down to St Ives, only to break down at a service station on the M25. According to my brother they were already an hour late, at waiting for the AA to come and get them up and running again added another two hours. I’d dread to think what state Mum would have been in. On more than one occasion when Mum wasn’t around, Dad told me that Mum’s stress levels had been through the roof on their trip. The funny thing is that Mum keeps her real stressed-out self such a guarded secret that even my brother doesn’t know what she can be like. I wonder what version of her I’ll get when they come over next weekend. I’m guessing it won’t be the epitome of calm and cheerfulness – besotted by her grandson – that my brother and sister-in-law saw. We’ll see. As for me, I don’t know when I’ll next return to the UK. I’d love to play a part in the little one’s life, however fleeting.

The next few days will be taken up by lessons and getting ready for Mum and Dad. I might try and book a ticket for a play or a concert – I think they’d like that. This weekend I’ve given two lessons, played some reasonable tennis, and played five poker tournaments including a second place this morning.

Family - International travel - Photos - Poker - Tennis

Countdown mode and memories of Singapore

October 17, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s only three days till I go away, so I’m on full don’t-forget mode now. I will forget something, though, I always do. I’ll be taking my laptop with me so I can give lessons when I’m away. Which lessons, I’m still not sure at this point, because Friday is normally a busy day for me but I don’t know what time my parents plan to get to my brother’s place on that day. Perhaps after this length of time I should prioritise family rather than work, I don’t know.

Last time I mentioned that my parents had spent two nights in Singapore on the way to the UK. In January 1987 we spent four nights there on the way back from our six-week stay in New Zealand. Back then I got very excited by anything big and futuristic and technological, so Singapore was fascinating to me. We stayed on the 20th floor of the 21-storey President Merlin hotel, Mum and my brother in room 2014, Dad and I in 2015. In the morning we would phone each other. There were malls everywhere, rising to six or seven storeys, full of shops selling gadgets that were unimaginable back home. Sports shops were everywhere, and we picked up my first proper tennis racket. I remember a cheap hand-held LCD racing car game where nobody could ever get more than 13 laps no matter how hard they tried. As for the food, my memories are hazy, but I clearly remember the time Mum ordered bee hoon for us all in a massive ground-floor food court, not having the foggiest clue what we’d be getting. It turned out to be some noodley dish which we all had great difficulty physically eating, and two Chinese girls had a good laugh at us from an upper-floor balcony. I remember Chinatown, where my parents bought various figurines that they probably still have today. It was a few days before Chinese New Year – the Year of the Rabbit was coming up, as it will be again in a few months – and there were parades with dragons. Most of all I remember the durians – large spiky smelly fruit. Like really ponging something nasty. On one day we took the boat over to Sentosa Island, but apart from the cable car I don’t remember that too well. All in all we had a great time because it was all so different from what we were used to. I visited Singapore once again in 2008 but it had changed. Obviously I was no longer a kid, so that sense of wonder had gone, but the malls seemed to have been taken over by designer clothes stores, the sort that you find at airports. Travel is going in that direction in general; with globalisation, places become more and more samey.

Chinatown, 2008 (including durians)

I played reasonably decent tennis at the weekend. The 18-year-old lad was there for both sessions, and he’s improving at a rate of knots. Mindblowingly fast. Two weeks ago he was playing cricket shots, had no backhand to speak of, and could barely get a serve into play. All very standard for someone who had hardly held a tennis racket before. Now he can reliably get his serve in, can rally from both wings, and is very tactically aware. All from just a few hours on the court. He’s clearly an all-round natural sportsman. To get to his level took me many many hours on my own, hitting against a wall, or rallying with my parents in the garden. Being anywhere near an actual tennis court would have been disastrous for me initially.

Poker. Another win on Saturday night, and this one (pot-limit badugi) kept me up until after two in the morning. I ran well and crucially collected bounties with regularity along the way. As we got short-handed I amassed a huge stack and was able to run over the table. Heads-up lasted two hands. My reward for winning and collecting so many bounties was a rare three-figure payout; I made $101 for my evening’s work – that was very nice indeed.

Family - International travel - Language teaching - Photos - Poker

Hand-wavey

October 14, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My work volumes are back up again. Six lessons scheduled for tomorrow. Last night’s student is at a basic level and I explained to him that you sometimes need to double the final consonant before adding the -ing ending. I normally leave it at “sometimes” unless they ask, because the rule is a little tricky to explain, especially when I have to do it in Romanian like last night. The rule goes like this: If the original word finishes with a single vowel followed by a single consonant, and has final-syllable stress (or only has one syllable), and it doesn’t end in w, x or y, then you double the last consonant before adding -ing, otherwise you don’t. And in British English we make an exception for words ending in a single vowel plus l – we double the l no matter where the word stress goes. My explanation got pretty hand-wavey I must say. (The same double-letter rules, by the way, apply to other suffixes too, most notably -ed but also -er, -y, -age, -able, and probably some others I’ve forgotten.) On Tuesday I had my first lesson with the tennis guy, which was mostly conducted in Romanian. This morning I had my first session with a woman in her thirties and that went pretty well – I could tell that she really wants to learn and would certainly care about where to put double consonants and the like if that subject came up. She’s at about a 5 on my 0-to-10 scale, plenty good enough to get by in English.

Mum and Dad have now landed in the UK. One week till I see them. They called me from their hotel room in the Bugis area of Singapore. (I wonder, how do you pronounce Bugis? Mum goes with /ˈbʊgɪs/ or /ˈbuːgɪs/, but for all I know it might be /ˈbʌgɪs/ or /ˈbuːdʒɪs/ or, who knows, a French-style /byʒi/.) It was a good idea for them to break up their journey with a stopover. (I have very fond memories of our four-day stay in Singapore in 1987. It was fascinating for a little boy.) Their trip was not without incident. Mum’s hand luggage tested positive for explosives (!) in Christchurch, and that meant that their suitcases had to be hauled out of the aircraft hold and tested. Mum’s elder brother had taken them to the airport, and he sometimes keeps fertiliser in the back of his van. Traces of fertiliser (you can make bombs out of that stuff) probably got onto her bag and triggered the alarm. My parents also had a load of convoluted Covid-related form-filling on their arrival in Singapore – just what you need after a ten-hour flight. I hope they’re now in St Ives and in some comfort. It’ll be quite something to see them again after what feels like an eternity.

I’ll be visiting the UK again in what feel like increasingly dark times for the country. Liz Truss’s government is historically unpopular because it’s historically crap, although Johnson wasn’t really any better. There are no maps or plans that make any sense. Winter is coming in more ways than one. People will die of poverty.

I’m finally back to winning ways in poker. I’ve played two tournaments since I my previous post, and I was victorious in one of them – the no-limit single draw. I had a lot of fun during that win, which netted me a $48 profit. At one stage there was someone at the table who didn’t know the rules, and an English guy (a decent player) tried to exploit him by calling with a junky hand, only to see the clueless player turn over a proper hand. The English guy recovered from that to make it all the way to heads-up against me, and all the time there was good-natured chat between us. I took a 2½-to-1 lead into heads up, then my nice opponent came back and took a healthy chip lead, but I was able to turn the tables again and take the win after 3½ hours and 432 hands. My bankroll is $1043.

On yesterday’s bike ride to Sânmihaiu Român
Family - International travel - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

They’re off!

October 10, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents are currently on Singapore Airlines flight 298, an Airbus A350 registered 9V-SMM, and right now they’re passing by Fitzroy Crossing in north-western Australia. Flightradar24 is a great tool.

Mum and Dad will spend two nights in Singapore before flying to London, and a week after that we’ll all meet up as a family for the first time since Christmas 2018.

Last night my brother told me about all the messy midnight interludes that are suddenly a feature of his life. We then talked about our cousin – the 52-year-old daughter of my aunt whom I saw in August – and the fact that she hasn’t seen her mother in three years. Just imagine. You live in Somerset, four hours’ drive at the most from your isolated and vulnerable mum, you don’t make the trip in all that time, and somehow you think that’s OK. Just how? I know there was the small matter of a pandemic, but she wasn’t exactly dying to hook up with her mum on Zoom. People are crazy. Talking of crazy cousins, I have a cousin the same age as me in Wellington. I went to his wedding in 2012. He has two daughters; the youngest is probably five or six. He’s a big fan of Liverpool, and in 2019 his beloved team reached the Champions League final in dramatic fashion. So what did he do? Fly to Barcelona at the last minute to watch his team play Tottenham. You literally can’t get any further: if you could tunnel down from Wellington through the centre of the earth and back out the other side, you’d end up in Spain. He didn’t have a ticket for Camp Nou – that would be one thing. No, he watched the match on a big screen, then flew back home. Months later he broke up with his wife.

I played tennis twice at the weekend. On Saturday I went to the pub by the river afterwards. It was surprisingly empty for such as warm evening. It seems we haven’t still fully recovered from Covid and now we’ve got a whole load of other crap to worry about like skyrocketing energy bills and bridges being set alight in our vicinity that people want to save their money. The price of eating and drinking out has shot up too; in a classic case of shrinkflation, the beer glasses in this place are 20% smaller than they used to be. I don’t eat much meat these days normally, but the meal I had was a plate of traditional Romanian food, and was necessarily extremely meaty.

A guy from tennis is starting lessons with me tomorrow. He did mention it ages ago, but because he’s anti-vax and knew my diametrically opposed stance on the issue, I thought that might put him off. We’ll have the lesson online. More and more people are choosing to have their lessons online even if they live in Timișoara. At this rate they’ll render my new teaching room redundant.

Poker. I played seven tournaments at the weekend and got nowhere; my bankroll is now $996. Two of those were hold ’em which I hardly ever play. My poker dream is that GG Poker, the site that has now overtaken Poker Stars as the market leader, will one day add a bunch of other games to match the variety that Poker Stars offers. If that happens, I’ll be off to GG like a shot with four figures to play with.