Life :)

Life :)

Coming back, I hope

February 24, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Maybe my five-day ordeal is coming to an end. I had three lessons today, and one of them was literally painful – I had to move from my desk to the couch, which I can when it’s online – but I managed. Just yesterday I was worried out of my skin. I’d become so tired and weak and my whole existence had taken on a metallic tinge. I was scared I might nosedive like I did in 2001. In the evening I decided to see the doctor – it was a Tuesday, so I knew he’d be there. My walk there was slow, and I stared for a while at a “lost dog” notice. When it was my turn to see him, instead of taking me into his room I was shunted into a corner of the waiting room where I attempted to tell him what was wrong. (I’d prepared to tell him the details in Romanian, but this threw me.) “Wait here, and you’ll have a Covid test.” I waited for an hour until ten, then thought bugger this, I need to sleep and I’m pretty sure I haven’t got Covid symptoms, so I gave up and went home.

I’m now trying to stay off the internet as much as I can (which with my work isn’t a lot). I know the TV is depressing right now with everything brewing in Ukraine, but the internet is something else.

Tomorrow I have five lessons, so that’ll be a test.

Life :)

It’s all two much

February 22, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is 22/2/22. It reminds me of my job in Wellington, where we had a scheduled coffee meeting at 11:11 on 11/11/11. Then my new boss came the following week, and soon after that my job careened off a cliff.

I’ve had a terrible last few days. On Friday night at around 11 I suddenly had pain in my stomach and spent the whole night going back and forth to the loo. I think I had food poisoning from some leftover chicken I’d probably left in the fridge too long and later made a soup out of. I continued feeling terrible the next day, and cancelled the only lesson I had that day. No worries though, it’ll surely soon be over. On Sunday morning I woke up feeling just about normal. Great. Just rest, drink gallons of water and some electrolyte powder, and I’ll be fine. I joined two poker tournaments because why not, and two hours later when I was still involved in one of them, I was in agony. I had to lie on my tummy, and looking at the screen made me feel even more ill. I soldiered on, and bizarrely won the most excruciating tournament I hope ever to play. Although the pain eventually subsided I felt that something was eating away at my stomach and I had low energy. And I’ve been depressed. Being ill makes me feel very very alone. Yesterday I got through a painful 90-minute lesson with the twins. Please just let this be over. I also had a new student – a Bucharest-based woman of 34 who looks much younger – and we had our first proper lesson last night.

I’ve been looking forward to bedtime and dreading having to get up in the morning. In between lessons I’ve been reading – something about the internet has made me want to avoid it, although I did read about the cross-country skier whose penis froze and thought, I suppose things could be worse. My biggest fear has been of falling into a deep depression, like I suffered in 2001, when suddenly getting off the couch became an effort. Yesterday my phone rang three times and I didn’t answer. This morning I noticed I’d lost weight. I called my parents and we had a long chat, and that definitely perked me up. I’ll try and have a proper lunch now, then get through my lessons, and with a bit of luck I can be back to some sort of normality, whatever that means.

I’d meant to write about all the flats I looked at last week, including one on the tenth floor, but that dropped way down my list of priorities.

Coronavirus - Life :)

Don’t need the stress, and a pleasant bike trip

February 14, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Maybe, just maybe, we’re now nearing the end of the pandemic for real. People here thought it was all over in the summer of 2020, and incredibly they thought the same a year later when it was blindingly obvious (given the pitiful vaccination rate) that more Romanians were yet to die from Covid than had already done so. Țara struților, I remember saying. Nation of ostriches. But the Omicron variant is acting as a like-it-or-not vaccine, so we could be entering the final lap of the Covid marathon. This morning my parents told me that New Zealand’s daily figure for infections had whopped up into the 800s, which will soon seem a tiny number, like on my graphs. It’s now in South Canterbury – there are a smattering of cases in Timaru. Right now, they know zero people who have caught Covid; that will soon change. (The majority of people I know in Romania have had it, at pretty much every level you could imagine, and in some cases twice. I’m fortunate not to know anybody who has died from it.) Perhaps this week it will show up in Geraldine, then the week after on their street. Thankfully both my parents are triple-jabbed, and with the possible exception of Dad’s blood tests, they could get by for a month without leaving the house if they really had to. They might just about have half a cow in their freezer.

On Friday I had coffee with the woman in her early fifties whom I had lessons with in 2018 before she moved to Austria. She’s now come back to Timișoara. She had Covid in November, during the Delta wave, and said she wasn’t at all concerned despite (or perhaps because) she hadn’t been vaccinated. The survival rate is 99%, she said, as if somehow live and die are the only two outcomes. Some of the survivors have been to hell and back. She was fine. Lucky her. Anyway, she suggested I ramp up my teaching by joining British School in some capacity. Perhaps I could even teach maths there, she said. That all conjured up images of stress on a stick. WhatsApp groups filled with angry parents who’ve paid an arm and a leg for their kids’ education. I want to get a flat sorted before even thinking of anything on those lines.

So, on to today. Mark, the teacher, had the bright idea (no sarcasm) of going on a bike ride. He asked me if there were any good options, so at eleven we met outside the cathedral and set off on the track that I’ve now been on dozens of times. I suggested we stopped at La Livada, a friendly-seeming restaurant next to an orchard (which is what livadă means). Mark had a well-used mountain bike. I warned him that my bike wasn’t capable of high speeds, and neither was my body. We got there before twelve and grabbed coffees before getting something to eat. We both had a ciorbă (Romanian thick soup) and papanași, an extremely yummy fried pudding. We just sat around and chatted for a while. We both liked the place so I’m sure we’ll be back there. There wasn’t as much wildlife on our journey as I might have expected, though on the way back we saw a kestrel. On our return, Mark told me I went much faster than he’s used to. That surprised me, because I don’t think I’m a particularly fast cyclist. It was probably just a case of staying at by-myself speed, when I should have slowed down to with-someone-else speed. I’ve often been told I walk too fast.

My Sunday evening lesson with the guy in London isn’t far away.

Buying property - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Some sad news, and my latest flat search

February 13, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My neighbour called me yesterday to deliver the sad news that Domnul Ionescu, the 70-year-old tennis regular, had died just that morning. He’d died of lung cancer. It all happened remarkably quickly; in November I was playing tennis with him, often on the same side of the net. He was a heavy smoker. He could get through one set of tennis without a fag, but not two. He had a typical smoker’s cough, sometimes yacking out the contents into his hand. He was also pleasant to talk to, even if his favourite topic of conversation was how Romania had gone to the dogs. He was particularly scathing about Romanians’ attitudes to the pandemic; he’d been fully vaccinated. He loved following sport: tennis, football and handball. He worked for the railways, as some of the other tennis players do (or did), and as far as I can tell he reached quite a high position.

I got to look at four places on Wednesday. They were all built in the eighties and in a similar part of town.

The first one was a doozy. (Maybe I should choose that as my starting word for Wordle.) It was a biggish flat on the ground floor, owned by a couple in their sixties. The lady was cooking pancakes at the time. The place had unusual-looking archways and was eccentrically decorated, with no two walls painted the same colour. One of the rooms had snowmen and the like painted on the walls. Under the living room was a hidden storage space. One of the rooms could have been an office, but was rather small. In the bathroom, the sink and bath were shell-shaped, while the sink pedestal was in the shape of a fish. I had a certain admiration for the owners for deciding to decorate the place like this, and they seemed lovely. The woman even gave me two pancakes before I left. But really it was a non-starter. I told the agent I thought it was overpriced, and he agreed with me.

The second place also on the ground floor and had recently had a makeover. A large, typically Romanian elderly lady owned it. It was well furnished and had potential, but unfortunately was just too small. Then on to number three. I met the owner, a man of sixty or so, who might have been a welder. It seemed he could turn his hand to anything involving metal. I do admire people who have such practical skill. Unlike number two, this place was filled with cheap furniture. It had a garage I could have bought for a few thousand extra. Opposite was supposedly a brewery of some sort, which had ceased operations a long time ago. Just like the second place, this was also too small to run classes.

The final apartment was the best of the bunch. It was in a slightly different area, and one I prefer, because it is relatively quiet and has more green space. The flat was a decent size, and one of the rooms could have made a good office. I wasn’t sure about the electrics – the wires hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen looked a bit dodgy. Like the first place, it had a hidden storage space (basement) under the kitchen, with a ladder going down. The owner didn’t stop talking – he was in hard-sell mode – and I wasn’t sure if I could trust him. Again, there was a garage that I could buy for an additional €5,500, on top of the €120,000 asking price of the flat. I wasn’t sure if it got much sunlight. I soon learnt that the apartment had been on the market for a year, and the owners have increased the price by €10,000 in that time. The owner showed me some paperwork with various unaccepted offers, all around the €100,000 mark.

This wasn’t wasted time, because I felt I got my eye in a bit, which I need to do because it’s such a big decision.

Last week was a better one for work as people recovered from Covid, some for the second time.

Poker. I’ve been less active of late, but I got in two tournaments yesterday. In the single draw I snagged the last of the eleven paid places, while in the badugi I had a good run, finishing fourth for a $43 profit. After that successful session my bankroll is up to $1740. If and when my profit reaches $2000 – that’s $300 away – I plan to withdraw most of it, leaving $700 in my account.

Buying property - Life :)

Still searching for the right place (and the right word)

February 9, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Doing the Wordle has now become an early-morning ritual for me. Although the game is hosted on a .co.uk site, today’s one was an American spelling. I see American spellings pretty often without batting an eyelid, but I don’t immediately think of them, so it was a challenge today. I was happy to get the word on my fourth attempt after deliberating for ages. What could it possibly be? The best part about Wordle for me is that I can use it as a teaching tool. When you’re sometimes giving hundreds of lessons to the same person, you can never have too many tools. The Romanian version is also great for me because it gets me to think about words differently. For instance, last week COAJA was one of the answers. Coajă means the skin of a fruit, or the shell of a nut or an egg. I could lump that together with coadă (a tail, or a queue) and coamă (a ridge, or a mane), so that those three words no longer took up three separate spaces in my brain. (Edit: there’s also coasă, which is a scythe, and coală, a scrap of paper, to complete a quintet.) Yesterday’s answer, by the way was SOFER. The French word chauffeur was borrowed into Romanian as șofer, and like in French it just means driver, without the added swank that comes with it in English. It’s funny how a nine-letter French word became a five-letter Wordle-valid Romanian word.

Today is a fairly big day for me, because I’ll get to look at two, maybe three, perhaps even four flats. I don’t even know which they will be – not for the first time, I’ll meet the agent outside a pizza place and go from there. Most the ones I’ve seen so far have merged into one big amorphous blob. At Mum’s suggestion I’ll go around with a checklist for each flat: sunlight, noise, wiring, security, furniture (that’s usually included), too open-spacey?, does it have a balcony?, parking, and so on and so forth. I really want to make some progress here, but I feel I’ve got two big handicaps. The biggest is that I’m on my own. Nobody to bounce ideas off or to tell me that the flat I’m eyeing up is ideal or utterly ludicrous. The other is that when it comes to home interiors, I’m colourblind, shape-blind, everything-blind.

Actually one of the places I looked at last week seemed pretty decent. This one was being sold directly by the owners, without an agent. That isn’t uncommon here. I met the owners, a very pleasant couple in perhaps their late sixties, who showed me around. The man first asked me whether my hair was natural or if I dyed it that colour. You seem young, he said. I was wearing a beanie (with my grey hair flopping out of it) and carrying a backpack. After I removed all of that, he could see I wasn’t that young after all. Once I’d been through all the rooms, I told them that I was a private English teacher and needed a room for work. The lady then said, well that explains why you have an accent. An accent? That’s one of the greatest compliments on my Romanian that I’ve ever received. I liked the area, and the flat was fine, if maybe a little overpriced. I really don’t know though.

On Monday I bought a fruit I hadn’t seen before – a nectarcot, a cross between a nectarine and an apricot (but apricot-sized). It tasted pretty good.

In my next post I’ll say how I got on today.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker

Wobbling slightly

February 8, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Saturday, after realising I’d hardly taken anything in of the flat I’d rushed off to see, it hit me. I’m struggling a bit here, aren’t I? I’ve got a pretty big decision to make, and I can’t motivate myself, while this dump, the one I’m living in now, is a mess and falling apart. How great the initial lockdown was two years ago. No decisions to make. Just do whatever you can to stay safe. Walk in the park once a day and smell the daffodils and tulips, and be thankful that you still can, meaning that you probably haven’t caught the virus yet. (Did people even call it Covid then? I can’t remember.) Traipse up and down the stairs eight times with water bottles on my back. Listen to the birds and the trains in the evening. At times I wish the Sigma Max plus-plus-plus variant could hit us, and we could all go back there. (It’s kind of crazy that Covid is actually pretty bad in Romania right now, far worse than at the start of the pandemic, but it’s predictably bad, so everyone’s sort of OK with it.)

As I was writing the last sentence but one, I googled the name of an insurance product—which had Max and Plus in its name—that was sold by the large company I spent several years working for in NZ. For some reason the name popped into my head. I found out that the company, while large, was taken over by a three-letter-acronym behemoth in 2018, so no longer exists.

What I’m trying to say here is that my propensity for depression hasn’t gone away. I doubt it ever will. I’ve got to move, and until I do, and I’m (hopefully) settled in a new place, I’m probably in for a certain amount of mental turmoil. The good news is that it’s never that long until my next lesson, and connecting with a person for an hour or two (and no longer!) invariably lifts my mood.

New Zealand. There’s talk of opening up, and finally ditching the rather draconian MIQ set-up. I’d love to make a trip over there, but when could I do it? I’m thinking August, of a year to be determined.

I’m still Wordling. Mr Wordle (or Wardle, in fact) has now sold his idea to the New York Times for at least a million bucks, so I don’t know how long it’ll stay free. As well as the Wordle, I’ve been doing the Romanian version, plus a maths-based one called (appropriately) Nerdle.

Poker. I wonder if I’m enjoying that so much. Last week I decided to do a deal, which I basically never do. We got heads-up in five-card draw, and my opponent was happy to split the money 50-50 even though he had more chips than me at the time and (I thought) he was a better player than me. In those circumstances, doing the deal seemed a no-brainer. My bankroll is now $1694.

Life :) - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Hard to keep in touch…

January 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

What a final that was, all 5 hours and 24 minutes of it. I never imagined Nadal would find himself anywhere near the final, let alone winning from two sets down against Medvedev who is one of the best players on a hard court. I still don’t know how he did it. That game where he dug himself out of a love-40 hole at 2-2 in the third set was the catalyst for his fightback, and you could see Medvedev tire ever so slightly towards the end of that set. There were so many long, draining games in the match, going several deuces. Nadal won less than half the points – in the first set he was completely outplayed, and he got hardly any easy holds until the very last game. Just wow. There it is then, his 21st grand slam in extraordinary circumstances, with Roland-Garros around the corner. The French don’t take kindly to anti-vaxers either.

Last Sunday, on the morning of my trip to the fortresses, I heard from a friend I first met in Wellington back in 2011. She shifted to Auckland not long after that, and then upped sticks and moved to Naseby in Central Otago. I’d sent her some pictures of apartments – I still haven’t made much progress there. It was a huge pleasure to hear from her. To get up and see that message felt great. It’s sad that I’ve fallen out of touch with most of my NZ-based friends, and even some of my extended family, and that hasn’t been for want of trying. I send sporadic emails but don’t get replies, then eventually I give up. People are selfish. They want contacts that will give them results. Tangible benefits. Access to other people who will give them results and tangible benefits. Friendship itself doesn’t cut it. (It doesn’t help that I don’t use social media. Communicating with one person at a time, like in an email, is oh so cumbersome and inefficient.)

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei. I didn’t see him last Saturday because he’d gone with his family to Milan for the long weekend. As you do. My job as a maths teacher is to explain things that are obvious to me but non-obvious to him, and I partly failed to do that, as a result of my inexperience. I’ll revisit the topic at the start of next week’s session, after giving it a lot more thought.

Some good news, I suppose, about my book. I’ve completed my journey through the thousand or so words and expressions that baffle and bemuse Romanians. I still need to put some more meat on the bones in a few of the sections and add one of two appendices. But then what? How will this huge tome (that’s what it is) ever see the light of day? I could go back to the Romanian teacher at the university. She stopped communicating with me too. What is it with people?

Wordle. It’s taken the world by storm, in a way that no puzzle game has since Sudoku back in 2005. If you haven’t heard of it by now, it’s a daily game created by Josh Wardle (hence its excellent name) where you have to guess a five-letter target word. Enter your guess (which must be a real word) and it’ll highlight in green any letters that are in the right place in the target word, while any letters that are in the word but in a different place are coloured yellow. Letters that don’t appear in the word at all are highlighted in grey. Then you try again, until you (hopefully) home in on the final word. This was my attempt today. I think I got lucky:

I average about four guesses. The concept of the game isn’t new, and it’s interesting (and surprising) what takes off and what doesn’t. As someone who has created a whole ton of word and number puzzles in my time, I’m pleased that this has been a success. Why has it blossomed? Well, it’s simple, it’s pleasing on the eye, the coloured grids are shareable on social media (gotta have that), and best of all, you can only play it once a day. A couple of minutes, then gata, as they say in Romanian. The ultimate anti-Candy Crush. It takes you back to the days of internet cafés when you’d pop in for ten minutes to “check your emails” and then return to glorious disconnection.

Poker. Not my best session today, but it’s been a good January. I’ve made $205 this month, and my bankroll is now $1648.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

My flat search, my brother’s job search, and 19/1/12

January 20, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a nippy Thursday morning here. I took this picture just before my lesson which started at eight. You can see the hoar frost on the trees and the near-full moon. The days are noticeably pulling out: a fortnight ago it was almost pitch black at that time.

I haven’t had much luck getting new students at the start of 2022, but yesterday I got a call from the mother of a 17-year-old girl, and I agreed to give her daughter tuition for her C1 Cambridge exam. Teaching for advanced-level exams is not my forte – they’re basically a game in which I lack experience, rather than a simple test of English – so I might not be much help.

No maths lesson with Matei this weekend – his family are going away. It’s been interesting being back in his room again. The huge world map on his wall always fascinates me because it makes Europe seem so small. He told me that his grandmother, whom I often had conversations with, is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. She must be almost eighty. That’s sad.

I saw the doctor on Tuesday to get my pills. I mentioned my headaches and gummed-up nose, but after seeing 35 Covid patients in a single day, his focus was on the virus which wasn’t my issue. (I took a rapid Covid test last week, just in case. I was negative.) He gave me the requisite temperature and oxygen saturation checks, and even checked my blood pressure and gave me a once-over with a stethoscope, and everything was fine. He then prescribed me a drug called Quarelin for my headaches. If I can’t rid of this head pain, and the frequency and duration reach the levels that Dad had to deal with when he was my age, life might not be worth living. I’m serious. Dad had a wife and family. I don’t.

I’ve finally dismissed that flat which initially seemed so promising. The lack of sun isn’t something I can risk. I look back at all those places in Auckland and Wellington, and the correlation between natural light and my mood – if not necesarily a causation – is definitely there. I’m interested in three more places and I’ll make some phone calls later today.

My parents told me that they heard a loud bang last Friday. What the hell was that? It was the Tongan volcanic eruption. They could hear it from 1500 miles away? Holy shit. The scenes following the eruption are of total devastation.

My brother wants to leave the army. He’s had enough of his courses that take him away from home five days a week and hardly inspire him anyway. He recently applied for a job which he didn’t get (unfairly, he thinks). He’s invariably grumpy and uncommunicative at the moment, so I really hope he can find something to cheer him up.

Poker tournaments. Since Christmas I’ve had one win and five second places. What a shame it isn’t the other way round. At the weekend I was heads-up in a $4.40 pot-limit badugi. My opponent covered me, just. I got dealt the 204th best hand in the game. That doesn’t sound very good, and it’s not, but heads-up against an aggressive opponent it shoots up in value. It was just a bit too good to fold. We got all our chips in, he turned over the 203rd best hand (!), and I had to be content with another runner-up spot. My bankroll is now $1562.

It’s now ten years since my grandmother died, four months prior to her 90th birthday. How time flies. I often wish she could have seen me in Romania. I sometimes dream about sitting in the square with her, having a coffee or a glass of wine, watching the world go by.

Buying property - Films - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

A real headache

January 16, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

In a follow-up to the previous Thursday, I had a really really shitty start to this week – headaches and just no energy. On Wednesday, even though my headaches had pretty much gone, I’d taken a hammering from having what felt like a screwdriver jammed up my nostril for two days, and I couldn’t steel myself do anything outside my online lessons. On Monday I did manage to make it over to the apartment for a second look. It ticks a lot of my boxes – it would be great for teaching, I think – but the sun is a big issue. The flat has windows facing both north and south, but unfortunately the south-facing windows look out on tall apartment blocks that cut out the sun. I thought about this earlier today when the sun was streaming through my south-facing window as I washed my lunch dishes. Now I’m about to get the sun through my west-facing living room window. Before moving to Romania I faced ongoing battles with mental health. I now have that under control, and I hate to make a change that puts that in jeopardy.

Talking of weather, we got a fair dump of snow last weekend and early this week, making for picturesque scenes. On Thursday morning we plummeted to a rather brisk minus 12. This was as my parents were down in Central Otago to deliver paintings. Dad sent me a picture taken at a café in beautiful Ophir which I visited seven years ago.

On that awful Thursday – nine days ago – I watched the star-studded Don’t Look Up on Netflix, though I had to take it in chunks because the headaches were making me ultra-sensitive to light and sound. Some reviewers have panned the film, but it’s rather cool to pan something like that, and when all is said and done it’s likely to end up in four-star territory. Don’t Look Up is a pretty good parody of the post-truth times we live in, where everything is up for debate, everything must have two sides, social media is dominant, and the music is unbearably awful.

Even the Djokovic saga has polarised people, when it has no need to. The last ten days have been a bad look for everybody involved: the man himself, and the Australian government in its entirety. A 500-watt light has been shone on Australia’s pretty barbaric (and US-style) immigration practices. If Djokovic had any sense (I used to think he did), he’d have gone home by now of his own accord, but his ego is obviously too big for that.

Poker. I had another tournament win on Wednesday, which was nice. I’ve now had four goes at razz – a fourth place (which got my confidence up), a good run but far from the money, and two very early exits. My bankroll now stands at $1523.

Buying property - Life :) - Other sports

The most promising place so far

January 5, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve finally found a flat that might fit the bill. It’s fully furnished, just in case you haven’t had enough Fs yet, and it’s on the third floor of a block built in 1986, just off Calea Aradului, one of the arterial roads through the city. I say just off, but it’s pretty much on it. I had a look at it yesterday. At 110 square metres, it’s big for just one person – the same size as the place in Wellington that I’m thankfully no longer burdened with. I found that too big, but in my new situation bigger is better: I need the space for work. This place has three bedrooms (I could convert one of them into an office) and two bathrooms – or rather one bathroom and an additional loo. Crucially it has a hall with the rooms leading off it, unlike more modern designs. I shouldn’t have problem parking a car there, if and when I eventually get one, assuming I haven’t completely forgotten how to drive. As always, there are minuses. The third floor is right at the limit when running a business in a lift-free apartment block. The location is very handy to everything, but it’s not exactly quiet. (I even went back there this afternoon and stood outside the block with a decibel meter that I’d downloaded as an app. Over five minutes the average reading was 76, and when a truck went by it hit 90. Where I live now, slap-bang in the centre of the city, we average 72 in the daytime.) I’ll have very little of the green space I’ve enjoyed in the last five years, although there is a park within walking distance. I’m still unsure how much sun the place will get. So there’s plenty to think about.

New Year’s Eve with the neighbours was nice, if a little tiring. By two o’clock I could not longer stay awake, and I really didn’t need all that food. I realise now that under normal circumstances (that means no jokes or obscure subjects) I can manage fine in Romanian. I should be proud of that, I guess, even if I’m far from fluent. For the second year running, Covid put paid to the big fireworks display, so a lot of people let off their own. Hospitals had a busy time of it. On New Year’s Day I met Mark, the teacher, in town. We sampled the food from the market – mutton, which was a first for me in Romania – and then went for a beer.

Last night I stayed up to watch the darts final on a temperamental stream. A good match, with Peter Wright beating Michael Smith 7-5, taking home £500,000 for his efforts. (Smith got £200k.) The second leg of the match was almost like two blokes down the pub, it took so long for someone to finally hit double one, but the level improved markedly from there. The best match of the few I saw was Wright’s 5-4 quarter-final win over youngster Callan Rydz, needing a tie-break to just about get over the line.

Here are some pictures from my New Year’s Eve bike ride. Below is the semi-derelict church at Bobda. I sent the photo to Dad, who said I shouldn’t put in an offer on it.