What a sad start to the day. This morning I thought, what ever happened to the guy in Auckland? We first met in 2009 at one of the mental health groups, and we kept in touch from time to time after I moved away. I last saw him in 2016, just before I left New Zealand. We had a longish Skype chat on 30th August last year, then I tried contacting him again and never got a reply. This happens to me quite often, so I didn’t think much of it. Then this morning I googled his name and found out he had died within ten days of our chat. The information I found was scant, and came from a single page discussing the two Malaysia Airlines crashes; he’d been trying to publish a book on the subject. He almost certainly committed suicide. It was hard to find information because he had changed his name twice, I didn’t know any of his other contacts, and I’m not on Facebook. I don’t know his exact age but he must have been in his late fifties, perhaps even sixty. For a time he presented a radio show in Auckland. We had all these weird Skype calls which were mostly monologues – I rarely got a word in – but at least we were in touch. And now he’s gone. I feel bad that I didn’t look him up much earlier than this.
Just before my Romanian lesson I saw an email from Dad. He and Mum had just got back from Christchurch where they attended the funeral of the 25-year-old teacher – Mum’s cousin’s son – who drowned in Wellington Harbour the week before last. As Dad said, what on earth do you say to his parents who are now living in a personal hell? There’s nothing you can say after a tragedy like this.
Dad also mentioned that they met my cousin – the one whom I spoke to three weeks ago – and one side of her face had dropped. She’d either had a stroke or was suffering from Bell’s palsy. She’s 53. There had been no mention of that from her mother – Mum’s elder sister – but then she never mentions anything.
I watched the snooker last night, but not the last three frames because I couldn’t stay up that late. When I hit the hay, Luca Brecel was playing great attacking snooker and had built a 9-5 lead. I missed a lot: Selby hit back to make it 9-8, and in the process compiled a maximum break, the first ever in a World Championship final. I don’t regret having an earlier night because I absolutely needed it. They play the two remaining sessions later today.
Next time I might write about my Romanian lessons.
This morning I called my parents from the Mehala car market. I recently looked at the many hundreds of photos from my trip around Romania in 2016. Isn’t this country beautiful? So far I’ve only been able to scratch the surface of it, so wouldn’t it be great to have my own set of wheels? I’m apprehensive about the whole thing though; buying and owning a car in Romania seems bureaucratically onerous and could add further layers of life admin that send my whole wobbly edifice crashing to the ground. And I really don’t want to spend much. Plus, if you write a blog you can find out the exact date that you last did something. I last drove a car on 1/10/17, which is bloody ages ago. On Wednesday I’ve got my medical tests – all six of them! – which I need for a Romanian licence, then I’ve made an appointment for 15th May to actually get my licence converted over. Probably something or other won’t be in order and I’ll have to come back weeks later. I know the drill by now.
It’s the last day of April, when Timișoara is guaranteed to be beautiful. Cycling through tree-lined Mehala on a quiet Sunday is quite lovely. Not all of it was quiet this morning, though. At the huge Orthodox church there was the usual hubbub of people coming and going, and there were queues of people filling up big bottles from the well. According to the official list, there are 92 wells dotted around the city, but the one outside Mehala Church has the best water, or so they say. I tried to encourage Mum and Dad to come to Romania next spring. They must be thoroughly sick of my brother and I banging that drum, though I hope they’re happy that their kids want to see more of them.
The snooker. Yikes. Two gripping semi-finals and a very late night for me. In the first match, Luca Brecel (who had pulled off an extraordinary win over O’Sullivan) trailed Si Jiahui 14-5 with 17 being the target. In other words, Si was playing out of his skin and Brecel was gone. Until he wasn’t. Brecel went for broke, and got lucky when Si missed a green in the last frame of Friday’s brilliant session. Everything the Belgian player touched turned to gold, and he continued in the same vein when they returned yesterday. I didn’t see the end of the match because I was playing tennis, but he won eleven straight frames and ran out a 17-15 winner. Nobody had previously won a match at the Crucible from nine frames behind. I just hope the loss – on his debut – doesn’t permanently scar the Chinese player. If that match was free-flowing, the other semi between the two Marks – Selby and Allen – was the polar opposite; it was chess with balls. Selby’s shtick is to grind his opponent into the dust with tactical play. Allen just happens to be rather good at that type of snooker too, and the two of them tore hunks out of each other in a match spanning 13½ hours. The balls ran awkwardly and sizeable breaks were rare. Even the aging Scottish referee seemed to put on extra years during the match. Last night it seemed Mark Selby had finally worn his opponent down as he led 16-10, needing just one for victory. Great, some sleep! But Selby kept missing chances to win. Each frame was a drawn-out battle. Allen squeaked out five of them to close to within one, then at last Selby got in around the black and sealed the deal. Even then, he had a black barely wriggle into the corner pocket. I’m two hours ahead of the UK, and the match finished at ten to three my time. There’s now the small matter of the final between Brecel and Selby, where the winner is the first to 18. The conventional wisdom is that Selby will win, perhaps easily, but I’m not so sure. For one thing, you’d expect Selby to be shattered after his efforts.
It’s a sunny morning as I write this. That helps enormously. In the old place, my mood wasn’t so weather-dependent. On Monday I had my usual lesson with the single set of twins in their ground-floor flat. No light ever penetrates the place. That would drive me to despair.
Earlier on Monday I had my Romanian lesson with Dorothy, the English lady, and Coco, our teacher. Coco has a good command of English but we all spoke Romanian throughout. She told me I needed to watch my pronunciation of the Romanian t. In English it’s aspirated – put your hand over your mouth as you say an English t, and you’ll feel a breath of air, but in Romanian it isn’t. To Romanian ears, an aspirated t can come across almost as a ch sound. There was so much else to unpack, such as when to use articulated nouns and when not to. Romanians have great trouble with this dilemma in English, and I still have fun and games with this in Romanian too. For instance, I started the previous sentence with Romanians, but in Romanian that would be Românii, which is the equivalent of the Romanians. Another quirk here is that nationalities and names of languages aren’t capitalised in romanian – I prefer that to what we do in english – but obviously Românii needs a capital R in my example because it’s the first word of the sentence. Coco is hot on all this stuff – she doesn’t gloss over it as some (often bad) teachers do – and she recognises that both Dorothy and I actually care.
Mum and Dad desperately need to simplify their financial lives. They recently committed to a three-year rental contract on one of their flats in St Ives, and they’ve had to open a new account with a different British bank so they can receive rent payments because their other account is about to be closed. All of this means being on hold at 11pm and pressing one and pressing two and getting nowhere. It’s all getting both of them down mentally, and in Mum’s case it’s affecting her physically too. I was happy yesterday when Mum said she’d been gardening, which is something she enjoys.
Snooker. Other than Luca Brecel’s 13-11 win over Mark Williams, the lack of close matches made the second round something of a disappointment, but the quarter-finals – four super-high-stakes matches played over just two days – definitely made up for that. Last night I had to pull the plug as Si Jiahui made it 11-11 against Anthony McGill. Ronnie O’Sullivan’s earlier exit ramped up the pressure in that final session to a near-unbearable level. Si won in the end, 13-12, to make the semis. What a tournament he’s had on his debut, having also come through three qualifying matches. McGill, who also had to qualify and had been playing so well, will be licking his wounds for sure. The real shock though was Ronnie. He’d built up a 10-6 lead against Brecel despite being nowhere near his best, and then from the snippets I saw of yesterday’s session he didn’t even want to be there. Brecel went for everything, got just about the lot, and rattled off seven straight frames in no time. The semis are Brecel against Si, and Mark Allen against Mark Selby. To my mind, Selby is the clear favourite because he’s so difficult to break down and he thrives in long matches. The semis, which start later today, are a marathon over the best of 33 frames.
I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. They were pretty upbeat considering the stressful week they’d had. Mum told me that her cousin, who came to visit us in the UK in 1990, had tragically lost her 25-year-old son. He lived in Christchurch but last Wednesday he was in Wellington to see a concert at the TSB Arena. He fell in the water after the concert, and two days later his body was found. He was a primary school teacher and extremely well regarded. The kids go back tomorrow after their Easter break. Just truly terrible. When I lived and worked in Wellington, people fell in the harbour remarkably often, including someone I worked with, although he clambered safely to the shore. There are no railings or anything of the sort in the area. I guess they would damage the look of the place, or something. Now this teacher, a distant relative of mine, has had his life cut short by half a century or more.
I did have those five lessons with that young woman – a pretty handy English speaker already. In one of our sessions she told me about her stay in France a few years ago. “But there’s one place I’d really like to visit.” You’re 22, so I think I already know, but please please please let it be something else. “Dubai.” Jeez. I told her that it would be right at the bottom of my bucket list if you exclude places currently at war. I thought I had a particularly good face-to-face lesson yesterday with two women who are absolute beginners. In a 90-minute session we did numbers, colours, the verb to be, and simple sentences. I like X, I don’t like X, Do you like X? The cup is green, the pens are blue. It’s vital to keep things as simple as possible. You need to eliminate irregularities as much as you can to begin with, and introduce them step-by-step. So many teaching tools get this wrong and hit students with oxen and thieves on day one, which is frankly ridiculous.
Snooker. A crazy frame last night in the attritional second-round match between Mark Selby and Gary Wilson. At two frames all in a best-of-25, just two reds remained on the table, both surrounding the pink that was millimetres from dropping in. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. The referee gave them three shots each to resolve the stalemate, otherwise there would be a re-rack (50 minutes after the frame had originally started!). They did somehow get one red away from the pocket without sinking the pink, then Selby had an uncharacteristic loss of patience that allowed Wilson to clear up and take the lead. I fell asleep at that point. Selby, however, won the last three frames of the session to take a 5-3 lead into this afternoon’s session.
There were only three of us at tennis last night. Almost the whole time I played on my own against the other two, so I got plenty of exercise. I’ll be back on the court tonight.
Tomorrow I’ll have my first proper Romanian lesson. It should be very useful.
It’s my birthday, and my first thought when I woke up this morning was, jeez, people are going to want to communicate with me more than usual today and I’m not sure I’ll cope with that. Instant messaging stresses me out like you wouldn’t imagine. I wish I could go back to checking my emails every few days.
Mum and Dad called me first thing, to wish me a happy birthday. Mum was in a shitty mood, and I could hardly blame her because she was facing her own Barclays ordeal. (Mum deals with all my parents’ banking stuff, online and offline.) Then I got an unexpected message from S, whom I met on Tinder (ugh!) in 2018. Heaven knows how she remembered my birthday; my brother doesn’t even manage that. She now has a nine-month-old daughter.
I’ve got a new student who’s having five one-hour lessons with me today, tomorrow and the next day. She’s 22, lives in Cluj, and wants a job in IT just like almost everybody else in Cluj. This evening, during my second session of the five, I realised that I end an awful lot of sentences with “right”. I only knew this because she kept repeating the “right” right back at me. It’s like the time I accidentally recorded part of a lesson and realised how much my head (and not only my head) moves when I talk. I wonder what other (annoying?) mannerisms I might have.
Last weekend I was cycling down the Bega when I saw a whole pod (if that’s the word – I’m sure it isn’t) of freshwater turtles. Soon after that, my back wheel got a puncture. There are now kilometre posts along the river, and this happened at the 108 km point. To go home, I turn at about the 116 km post, and then ride another kilometre to my door. I didn’t have a repair kit, not that it’s easy to repair tyres on this Dutch bike anyway, so that was a decent walk. I did patch the inner tube without removing the wheel, but I got another flat this evening as I was coming home from my 4-till-6 lesson.
Some of those turtlesA long walk home
I wasn’t the only one taking pictures of the flowers in the park yesterday.
Too many lessons now to watch much snooker – that’s a good thing – but this afternoon I caught the tail-end of Joe Perry’s 10-9 loss to Robert Milkins, in a battle of players in their late forties. Perry had led 5-0 and 7-2, but developed a knack for missing almost anything. Fancy coming through qualifying on a black-ball decider only to then lose like that in the first round; that will be a hard one to take. Now they’re showing the fancied former champion Shaun Murphy in a close match with Si Jiahui. It’s the last first-round match; I hope Si wins and I don’t know why. Update: Si did win, 10-9. He led 9-6 but Murphy won the next three. In the decider, Si knocked in a break of 56 but was very unlucky not to be on a red after opening up a cluster, then Murphy ran out of position himself and tried to force the less experienced Si into an error. In the end Murphy couldn’t escape from a snooker and the 20-year-old Chinese player clambered over the line after a gripping final frame.
Yesterday was a Barclays day, so crappiness was guaranteed. I hadn’t slept well, my 8am student had slept in – she’d got back from Lisbon (nice) the night before – and it all got crappier from there. I called the Embassy about the authorisation business but the human I got through to at the third time of asking said they couldn’t help me and I should call a lawyer. Not a notary, the likes of which I’ve already dealt with, but an actual lawyer. I phoned some actual lawyers and they all said to call notaries instead. Great. I had quite a long chat with a notary who was pleasant and helpful but said in no uncertain terms that no notary or other legal person in Romania can legally certify a utility bill or bank statement. Simply put, Barclays will only release my funds if a legal person in Romania is happy to break Romanian law. Isn’t this bloody fantastic?
I felt shattered all day yesterday, a day that was low on lessons. Before getting on the phone, I went into town to visit some lawyers and notaries, including the one who dealt with my flat purchase, but they’d to make their long Easter weekend a bit longer. It was all a giant waste of time. I did grab two small pots of red paint on the way back so I could paint my bookcase before people start coming for lessons at the end of the week. I thought about what else I could paint. My bedroom? The sheer amount of white in that room was starting to get to me.
I’ve been buying some clothes and accessories on a second-hand site based in France. That’s meant communicating with people in French, especially the woman who sold me some cufflinks. (I didn’t have any, but I have a shirt that needs them.) So that’s been good practice. I’ve bought jeans, shorts, shirts, a bag, a jumper, the shirt that Marat Safin wore when he won the Aussie Open in 2005 (well not the exact shirt, but you know what I mean), and more besides. I’ve had to get them delivered to a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris, and with a bit of luck they’ll get forwarded to me as a job lot. I rarely buy clothes these days, so this has been something of an adventure.
On Monday I met the English lady at her place, and we chatted and tried to figure out some more tricky Romanian grammar. She has a Rolls-Royce brain, while mine is more like an old Peugeot. The great news is that from next Monday we’ll be having Romanian lessons with a teacher she knows. I mentioned that I’d been watching the snooker and she said that she found it terribly boring. Lots of people do, and that’s fine. In fact I often have it on in the background while preparing lessons or doing some other task; I’m not always totally engaged in it. That changed though on Monday when this happened:
A woman tried to glue herself to the table I was watching, but the referee manhandled her off it. Then a man jumped on the other table (above) and dumped a bag of orange powder all over it. They were protesters from Just Stop Oil, the same group who threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers last year. Why they targeted snooker for their protest beats me. Play resumed a little while later on the non-orange table, but the orange one had to be re-covered. Some excitement, certainly.
The great thing about the snooker is how much it means to the players. Luca Brecel, the Belgian top-ten player, had never won at the Crucible in five attempts. In his first-round match this time he led 9-6 but was pulled back to 9-9. When he potted the ball that got him over the line in the deciding frame, he banged the table with his fist in celebration, or was it relief? Finally. Yesterday I saw Anthony McGill move 6-3 up on a misfiring Judd Trump; that match resumes today. (Update: McGill won 10-6.) The first round is nearly complete; second-round matches are first to 13 over three sessions.
Today is the my last day of being 42. Last night the doctor asked me if I had any travel plans for the summer. I’ll be going quite a long way, I said. What, Japan? This was a joke on his part, and when I said I’d be going further than that he was taken aback a bit.
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.
My work volumes are way down as we approach Orthodox Easter which is a massive deal here. People here know that “normal Easter” is the week before (at least this year it is; it all depends on moon phases and such like) but they assume that we push the boat out with lavish traditional Easter meals like they do, and are quite underwhelmed when I tell them about chocolate eggs and hot cross buns and, um, not much else. Where I come from, the big attraction of Easter is simply the four-day weekend.
This week has marked the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, one of the biggest good news stories of my lifetime. Although the tensions are still bubbling under the surface, all that senseless violence that I remember growing up – usually accompanied by that bastard Ian Paisley’s rasping voice – came to an end. At the same time as the agreement was signed, we had severe flooding. The water came up our garden, as it had done in 1987 and again in 1992-93, but this time it was literally an inch or two from coming in our house. We had no power for at least a week, maybe two. The people around the corner weren’t so lucky and had to vacate their homes for months. While the flood waters were still receding I went on a field trip to Dorset, close to where my brother lives. I started university a few months later in September 1998, the same month that my brother joined the army. In January 2003 we had more flooding. At that point I was still scrambling around trying to find work after finishing university the previous summer. In March, with great relief, I started a poorly-paid job – a real job, nonetheless – at a water consultancy in Peterborough, and one of their projects at the time was designing an embankment to hold back the flood waters in St Ives where I grew up. The bank was duly built in 2006, although I don’t know if it will cope in the long term with the ravages of climate change. If I could wind back the clock I’d probably choose to stay in Peterborough, and in that job, instead of joining my parents in New Zealand.
The chat with my cousin last Friday was interesting. She said that neither of her two older boys, who are now both at university, drink alcohol, and that’s apparently not unusual. How times have changed. At university in the late nineties the social pressure to drink was enormous. Lad culture was at its peak in the nineties – you saw it everywhere, in football (which had become massively popular), on TV, and especially in comedy. Many young women embraced it; the word “ladette” was even bandied about. Admittedly this was the UK, but I don’t think New Zealand was much different. A less laddish culture is probably something we should celebrate, but its screen-heavy replacement isn’t much of an improvement. By the way, my cousin finds my parents’ latest property escapade even less understandable than I do.
I played pool with Mark on Sunday. As I expected, I was bloody awful. I potted one or two nice balls but really I was just guessing as to where to strike the cue ball. I had a special knack for potting the white, often without contacting any other ball. Mark wasn’t fantastic either, but he was better than me, that’s for sure. It was kind of fun to try something different. We each had a beer and shared a pizza. It’s quite a good set-up there; as well as a few pool tables they have one snooker table, but I think I’ll stick to watching that game.
Yesterday I watched 16 snooker players vying to reach the biggest event in the game. There’s a YouTube channel dedicated to this final qualifying round. There were so many close matches; all eight of them went to at least 10-6, and two of them ran to a deciding frame. The most dramatic of all was the Thai player Noppon Saengkham’s 10-9 victory over China’s Zhang Anda, which was decided on the final black. With only the black remaining, a snooker table seems impossibly large. I was glad Saengkham won because I remember him from last year’s World Championship in which he seemed a thoroughly nice chap. (Zhang might be equally nice, for all I know.) There was also a crazy finish to a match where the pink and black were tantalisingly over the same corner pocket with no other balls remaining; the English player Jordan Brown, trailing 9-7, had to contact the pink without potting the black, or else he was out. Eventually he missed the pink entirely and his Chinese opponent booked his place. The Chinese players obviously couldn’t speak English because they didn’t give interviews. Today 16 more players will go through the ringer.
I went to the local produce market this morning. An hour from now I’ll be seeing the four twins; I feel hopelessly underprepared for that.
Here are some pictures from one of the parks in town on Monday, and also the delapidated stadium next to the market this morning. The local football team Poli Timișoara played at the stadium until it was closed in February 2022; aptly the floodlights failed in the very last game, and Poli forfeited the match.
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.
It’s been a wet, miserable day. After my first outing on the tennis court last Sunday, you could forget it today. It’s been a real mixed bag – only 3 degrees and sleet on Tuesday, but beautiful yesterday.
Life with my sinus problem ain’t a whole lot of fun. I haven’t had one of those excruciating headaches since December, but the low-to-medium-level pain (like I have right now) is unremitting. Blowing my nose eases the pain; often I only have to tap the right side of my nose and a jet of colourless slime shoots out of my left nostril at a rate of knots. Sometimes I don’t even know where the gunk has gone. Dad said it’s in Embarrassing Bodies territory – get on TV and maybe I could be sorted. Whenever I blow my nose during our Skype calls, Mum says, “I hope you don’t do that in your lessons.” I do try to tone it down, but what about me, Mum? She’s more bothered that I might briefly annoy my students than she is about my pain. I shouldn’t be surprised. Dad suffered from terrible migraines when I was growing up, and Mum’s sympathy cable was permanently unplugged. The only emotion she showed was anger. What will they think of me if we don’t show up to Jackie’s party? Or if I turn up alone? Thankfully Dad’s migraines are fewer and farther between these days.
On Monday I managed to catch my brother on WhatsApp when my nephew was up and about. It was great to see him grinning away on his playmat, but my brother and his wife are struggling with lack of sleep. My brother looked whacked. In the middle of my call, my sister-in-law’s parents showed up to provide some respite, but I could tell my brother would have preferred it if they’d stayed away. I don’t envy him one bit. Some time ago he said it’ll be a “one and done”, but we’ll see. This morning I read an article about only children. They’re selfish and spoilt according to the stereotype, but people with siblings can sure as hell be selfish and spoilt too.
Last night I had an interesting lesson with the Romanian guy who lives in London; he now has two sons. He’d just made a trip back to Romania, and said he felt a sense of greyness on his arrival back in the UK. I know exactly what he means because I’ve felt the same thing many times. That journey from the airport; the grey M25 and M11 with an equally grey sky overhead. He said that people in Romania were happier despite being poorer. That was something I noticed on only my second evening in Timișoara. It was a sunny Sunday October evening and I was walking along the road from the guest house to the university campus to grab some dinner. I passed a constellation of ugly communist-era blocks of flats which had a park outside, full of basic play equipment and half a dozen cheap-looking ping-pong tables. Kids were playing, people were walking their dogs, and all the ping-pong tables were being used. I was amazed how happy everybody seemed. I got the same feeling last night – another sunny evening – when I collected my 15 litres of water; not much money but a real sense of community. In contrast, when I have my lessons in well-to-do parts of town where Porsches abound, there’s no sense of community at all.
This afternoon, in one of those well-to-do areas, I managed to convince my 15-year-old student that a haggis was a hedgehoggish creature that inhabits the Scottish highlands. We read an article on Haggis scoticus from the Daily Record. Then I asked him to check the date on the article, which was 1st April 2021.
Last Sunday I had a wander through the woods with Mark and his two dogs. It was great to be out in nature and to hear the hammering of woodpeckers and humming of insects instead of the rumble of traffic. One thing I love about Timișoara is how easily you can escape from urban life.
The culmination of the snooker season is upon us once more. The sport is going through a rough patch with several Chinese players having recently being banned for match fixing. I also wonder where the fresh new faces will come from: it seems to be a middle-aged man’s sport. Is whiling away hours in a snooker hall, rather than on TikTok, even something a teenager would do these days? At the moment the Tour Championship, featuring the season’s top eight players, is in full swing, then later this month it’ll be the big one – the World Championship, the one event in the game that dwarfs all others.
I’m currently reading The Twisted Ones, which (unsurprisingly) is a horror novel. The author is Ursula Vernon, who wrote the book under the pen-name T. Kingfisher.
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