Life :)

Life :) - The UK

A flashback to nineties dickdom in the UK

November 2, 2022

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’m not into cars at all – I don’t even have one at the moment – but I’ve just watched a 1993 documentary about company cars, and oh boy. Depressing, fascinating, and hilarious, all at the same time. It’s part of a series called From A to B, and I remember watching bits of it when it aired nearly 30 years ago, but not this particular episode. It features men – only men – and they’re all weapons-grade dickheads practically jerking off over their company cars that are so incredibly mundane. It’s got to have the right trim and the right badge in the right conspicuous place because I deserve it. It was all about the letter i, which meant fuel injection – a billboard at the start of the programme punningly proclaims “The i’s have it.” And coat hangers, for fuck’s sake, so everyone can see that you’re the man in the suit. Imagine if this was my dad, I kept thinking. In the whole 48 minutes, there’s not a tinge of irony to be seen, and no one moment stands out. All the drivers are equally odious, and there’s line after line of unintentional comedy gold. I often think of the first half of the nineties as some golden age for Britain – optimism, freedom of expression, but most of all sanity, and it’s easy to forget that there was some mindnumbingly shallow shit too. I’m guessing they didn’t even have to hunt that far to find the protagonists.

After watching that window into nineties Dismaland, the 2022 version of Britain that I fleetingly visited last week doesn’t seem that bad. The owl to-whooing outside my brother’s place at night, the rich autumn colours, the fish and chips followed by sticky date pudding – there were moments to like. But so much of everyday life seemed grim. I arrived back in Romania to a feeling of comfort and relief. (By the way, actual Dismaland, Banksy’s theme park which popped up in south-west England in 2015, is something I would have loved to visit. I was in New Zealand at the time, and at any rate tickets were dismally difficult to obtain.)

I’ve had a sore throat and other cold symptoms since Sunday, and yesterday I took a Covid test which was negative. (I really wouldn’t want my parents catching Covid from me when they arrive here on Saturday.) I’m also in a bit of a bind because my antidepressant is no longer available. Thankfully I’ve got some stashed away, but it looks like I’ll need to switch from citalopram to the similar escitalopram very soon. (Discontinuing a drug at the drop of a hat like this is bloody dangerous, but this is Romania.)

Yesterday was Halloween, and today was Day of the Dead, where people visit graveyards. Yesterday, therefore, the markets were full of pumpkins and chrysanthemums.

Family - Life :) - The UK

Four years and a magical piece of life — Part 1

October 31, 2022

by plutoman 0 Comments

So I flew into Luton on Thursday night. No problems whatsoever with the flight, but I had to wait ages for my tiny suitcase to come off the carousel. (Unlike when I flew with Ryanair in July, I couldn’t just take it on the plane with me without paying extra extra on top of the extra I’d already paid to have the bag in the first place.) And there they were. Mum and Dad. After almost four years. A lovely moment. Then they told me about all the fun and games they’d had getting to and from their accommodation. Mum had been phoning and texting and emailing me to go to this place, no that place, no, stay where you are, not realising that in post-Brexit Britain my phone was only good for playing whatever the 2022 equivalent of Sudoku is. (I guess that would be Wordle, but as that requires the internet, it couldn’t even do that.) We stayed in a nice new eighth-floor apartment in a block called Calibra, after a Vauxhall car that came out when I was ten. (There is or was a Vauxhall plant nearby.) When I lived in New Zealand it always felt great to see my parents again after a period of a few months, so you can imagine how it felt after that long. Late that evening I ate a small pork pie; it had been years since my last one.

I slept well. Mum was keen to make an early start the next morning, but somebody had commandeered the only working lift. When we were finally ready to get away in the hire car (Dad was driving), we noticed something stuck to the windscreen. A parking ticket, with a time stamp of around half-six that morning. A hundred quid, reduced to sixty if you paid early enough. Public services, like for instance the NHS, are buckling under the weight of Brexit and Covid and too many bloody people in the damn country and not enough people running the country who actually care, but they make sure parking wardens are out in force early in the morning. Mum wasn’t a happy camper. They didn’t know not to park there, and it looks like they’ll get out of having to pay. It took at least four hours to reach my brother’s place near Poole. At one point there was torrential rain. The GPS directions were often unclear. For Dad it was hard work. We all agreed that we wouldn’t want to live in the UK again.

It was quite something for my parents to see their other son and daughter-in-law after all this time, and of course, their grandson. Six weeks old. It was hard to prise him away from Mum’s arms. She’s always been in her element with small children – it was her job for forty years after all – and she was in heaven with a child of her own flesh and blood. He got passed around to all of us, and I must say I enjoyed holding him too; it was a new experience for me. Most of the time he just slept, except of course when my brother and sister-in-law would have really liked him to be asleep. I think they will be very good parents to him.

I brought my laptop with me, and liked being able to hole myself up in the study and give online lessons. Outside my teaching, it was hard to do very much there. The TV or the radio was on most of the time, usually both, so even reading a book wasn’t that easy, not when it was in a foreign language. TV is, bizarrely to me, still of huge importance to British society. Game shows and cookery programmes and people actually caring who gets voted off. Bake Off. Strictly. Celebs I’ve never heard of doing shit I don’t care about. It seemed endless. We also got a fair dousing of good old British rain. On Saturday, when I was working, Dad and my brother went to a car boot sale and picked up a second-hand 1000-piece jigsaw of military planes in the sky, which we painstakingly tackled but got nowhere near finishing. We spent didn’t even know if the puzzle was complete. (A few years ago I started to liken my life to a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle with about 300 pieces missing. Forget even trying to make an approximation of what’s on the lid of the box. It’s time I made something else.) Twice we went to the upmarket nearby town of Wimborne. Mum bought me a checked fleecy jacket from a shop there, saying it was a Christmas present. It was reduced, but still well above my usual budget. The food was great, pretty much universally. One night we ordered curry. Another time we had Stilton sausages. Yummy. On my last night there, we had fish and chips. Apart from the food, one of the highlights was the beautiful autumn colours.

Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Tourists

October 3, 2022

by plutoman 0 Comments

As we hit October and the leaves turn, I miss the view I had from my city-centre window even more. This morning I spoke to Mum and Dad. Only 18 days till I see them in the UK. They’ve now booked their flights to and from Romania; they’ll be here from 5th to 10th November. I wish they could have come for longer. We discussed the war in Ukraine, the stampede at a football match in Indonesia that killed 125 people, and how the UK seems to have slammed into reverse.

It’s been an interesting day. Yesterday I bumped into Mark (the guy who teaches at British School) as he was getting winter tyres put on his car. We agreed to catch up today. He heard about a guided tour of the Fabric area of Timișoara, where I happen to live now, taking place this afternoon. We had to sign up; I gave the tour people my phone number and said there’d be two people coming. Mark trekked over to my neck of the woods, and some other teachers from British School also made the trip. Not for the tour, but just for drinks. All nice people, from what I could tell. One of them, a smoker, had run a marathon – 42-point-something kilometres – in under four hours that morning. Mind-boggling for me. Mark then decided he’d rather stay at the bar than bother with the tour that was scheduled to take 2½ hours in a language he knew about a dozen words of. Then my phone rang. It was the tour guide. Why aren’t you here? Sorry mate, we’ve kind of got to do this. So the two of us joined the group. The guide could speak English, but conducted the tour in Romanian, so I interpreted for Mark, probably pretty badly because I got lost at times myself. We learnt about the large Jewish contingent that lived in the area, and how nationalities weren’t really a thing 200-odd years ago in Timișoara – your religion basically was your nationality. The guide stopped at buildings along the way – the CEO of the wool factory lived in this one, an internationally renowned violinist lived in that one – sometimes pointing out architectural details that I had missed. Then Mark had had enough so we paid the guide and left.

By that point it was just about time for me to go to tennis anyway. There was a new guy this evening – a teenager who had just taken up the game. Although his forehand was good considering his lack of experience, he was struggling to get any sort of serve into play. We increased his number of serves allowed per point from two to infinity, and still he struggled. Hardly surprising, really. You either need a coach or to practise yourself with a bucketload of balls. A game situation with everyone watching, even if it’s a casual game, is the worst of all.

Hopefully this week I can finalise my new-look teaching room, or close to it. I may even put some pictures of it on here.

I played in four poker tournaments last night. I cashed in three despite making bad starts to all of them, in one case losing 97% of my initial stack (!), but couldn’t convert my big comebacks into big finishes and only made a modest profit. My bankroll is $1015.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A blank canvas

September 22, 2022

by plutoman 0 Comments

Not an awful lot to say, except that I spoke to my brother on Friday. His wife was holding their son on the fifth day of his life. Fifth day, with a whole world of possibilities stretching out before him, quite possibly until the end of this century. Everything is still on the table. There’s something amazing, almost thrilling, about that. There’s so much we don’t know, however, about the world he will experience. The signs don’t look good. In my nephew’s first few days on the planet, Putin has stepped up the threat of nuclear war. Will my nephew have anything like the opportunities his parents and (even more so) grandparents had? His own place to live? Readily available jobs? Any jobs? Will jobs as we know them even exist in 2045? Presumably we’ll still need builders and plumbers and electricians. Hopefully teachers, too. But perhaps not taxi drivers or paralegals or actuaries. Or even surgeons. The really good news for my nephew is that he has eminently sensible and financially secure parents. That will give him a huge advantage.

This morning I went to the fruit and vege market that sells local produce and is open just twice a week. On the way back I saw a old woman with a walking stick picking figs from an overhanging tree. I hadn’t realised that fig tree – or any fig tree – was there, but then I haven’t been to that market and come back that way very often since I moved to my new place. I asked her if she wanted some help but she preferred my money instead. I then picked a juicy fig.

This evening I had my first lesson with a ten-year-old boy. We had a conversation, read a few pages of George’s Marvellous Medicine, then did a matching exercise of opposite adjectives. He said he was happy to come back. (His mother told me he was apprehensive before tonight’s lesson.)

I didn’t mention that ten days ago I watched the men’s final of the US Open, between Carlos Alcaraz and Casper Ruud. The new generation. A great match, and 19-year-old Alcaraz (the winner in four sets) looks like being a superstar in the making, if he hasn’t already got there. I was hoping Ruud would win, as looked likely when he twice held set point in a long 12th game at the end of the third set. The match really hinged on those moments. Alcaraz had played a succession of marathon matches to reach the final and looked tired, but when he escaped and dominated the tie-break, he could make a dash to the finish line.

Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Tiresome talk

September 19, 2022

by plutoman 0 Comments

I played tennis tonight. We’d booked the court till eight, and it was getting pretty dark by then. Seeing the crows fly overhead made me miss living in that part of town. Where I am now is fine, but being in the centre was quite magical, especially at the beginning.

Yesterday morning I had a Skype conversation with my parents before cycling to Dumbrăvița for my lessons. What started out as a pleasant chat about the little one morphed into anti-woke diatribe by Dad. I find the whole thing, on both sides, extremely tiresome. I’m not woke in the slightest and I find some of the newfangled linguistic innovations jarring to say the least, but it isn’t something I can get worked up about. Sure, it all seems a little odd to me, and I imagine it seems a great deal odder to someone 30 years older than me, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Dad was likening the woke movement to flat-earth or anti-vax, which is a false equivalence because those fly in the face of well-established facts. Being requested to call someone “they” instead of “he” or “she” might annoy you; being opposed to vaccines actively kills people. What I find interesting is the most vehemently anti-woke people are those least affected. It’s like my parents’ regular complaints about all the Maori words on the TV and radio. Perhaps it has gone too far – I don’t live in NZ anymore so I don’t really know – but Mum doesn’t meet a Maori from one year to the next, and the last time I checked she didn’t even know what a koha was.

Something Mum complained of yesterday was the majority having to “kowtow” to minorities. Well Mum, being in the majority does give you significant inbuilt advantages which you’ve probably never even taken the time to consider, and giving some of that back once in a while to those less fortunate seems pretty reasonable to me. These sorts of discussions aren’t easy for me – although I get on well with my parents, we don’t really inhabit the same world. (My brother’s world is closer, so he probably doesn’t have the same issues.) My parents are about to buy a brand new electric car. Dad recently sold a painting for something close to what I’ll spend on my next car if I buy one. We’re orders of magnitude apart. (On the subject of advantages, as an immigrant to Romania from a richer country, I have certain privileges here. It’s important to be aware of them.)

I hope I can get back to baby talk in my next conversation with Mum and Dad. Covid was great for my relationship with them, when I look back. It affected everybody, and we were in agreement on masks, vaccines, the lot.

I took second place in a poker tournament earlier today. I was lucky to get that far, but having reached the heads-up stage it’s a bit of a mystery how I didn’t win. I’m still down a little for September, which has been a torrid month. I got absolutely nowhere in any of the three WCOOP tournaments I played.

Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis - The UK

What’s in a name?

September 5, 2022

by plutoman 0 Comments

Any day now I’ll be an uncle. They’re keeping everything a surprise. Even on the subject of names, I’ve heard nary a whisper. That strikes me as a little odd, because names matter. They’re part of one’s identity. Take, for instance, Nina Nannar, one of the reporters on the local news when I was at university. She was teased mercilessly at school over her name (what were her parents thinking?) but when she got married she found that her identity was so wrapped up in her name that she kept the Nannar! My brother also has alliterative names, and though they don’t make it to anything like Nina’s level, they give his name a don’t-mess-with-me simplicity. As for my name, I lack double initials, but my first and last names are close alphabetically, so I know my place (so to speak) even when the sorting is done by first name, as seemed to be common in my employee days. My full first name has a high letter count. When I was little I thought it was great (Look! I can write my whole name!), but later all those letters just became a pain. In Romania, middle names garner a bit more attention, so all my ID cards and bank cards and various bits of paper have my (much shorter) middle name on them too. Sometimes I wish that could have been my first name instead. But in truth my name is fine; my parents chose well.

I had a chat to my brother last night. He was pretty peeved by our parents’ lack of enthusiasm at their upcoming trip. “If they’re only going to spend a few days with us, what’s the point? It’s been four years. I don’t think they give a shit, honestly.” I’m more inclined than him to give them the benefit of the doubt. They aren’t young anymore, and Dad has been spooked by Covid. My brother is still bitter about my parents emigrating to New Zealand in the first place, and that’s something I don’t really get. We were grown men (23 and 22) by that stage. My brother had even been to Iraq. They could do what they liked. And Mum’s teaching at that same school was making her stressed and unhappy. Another ten years of that and I’d dread to think.

My teaching room now has yellow walls. There is no Resene in Romania which is just as well. That must be one of the biggest rip-offs in NZ. Their stores have play areas to encourage customers to browse even longer at vastly overpriced tins of paint on shelves where they pretty much spam you with eleven near-identical hues of ochre called Omaha Sands or some other crap. And several hundred dollars later, you’re out the door, ready to paint the dream. Anyway, there were two only yellows available to me, an insipid one and a bright one. I went for the bright one, fearing it would be sort of tennis-ball shade, but it’s about what I was aiming for, so that’s nice. It took a while, though.

Tennis. Only one session this weekend because the courts were soaking on Saturday following a heavy downpour. We started a bit earlier though, so we got two hours in before the light faded. Last weekend was interesting; there was a woman who lives in Sydney with her boyfriend and was back for a short time in her native Romania. I played with her against Domnul Sfâra, who isn’t far off ninety (!), and a teenage girl. My partner hadn’t played much. In a slightly comedic set we got to 4-4, at which point Domnul Sfâra asked if we could play a tie-break. We did, and when we reached 8-8 the old man asked to come off the court. We persuaded him to stay for what might have only been two more points, and we eventually lost the tie-break 11-9. Another funny thing (in a different set): that teenage girl managed to a serve four aces in a single 16-point game.

I’m going away the day after tomorrow. It’ll be somewhere near Brad. I’ve had to cancel and rearrange lessons, which is always a pain, but seeing some new scenery and getting to speak Romanian for three days straight will make up for that.

Poker. I played some tournaments on Friday and Saturday and got absolutely nowhere. Tomorrow I’ll have a go at the $11 WCOOP single draw. The structure could be better, but I’ll try my best in what probably won’t be a star-studded field.

In the UK, I’ve just heard that Liz Truss will be the new prime minister. Man the lifeboats.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

See you later, summer

September 1, 2022

by plutoman 0 Comments

Today is the last day of a very hot summer and the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, which Mum and I heard about over the PA on a Malaysia Airlines flight just before we landed in Kuala Lumpur. We were on the way home to England after spending four weeks in New Zealand. For the next week at least – Diana Week – it was as if nothing else mattered; millions must have descended on London on the day of the funeral. I also remember the black humour. What’s the difference between a Skoda and a Mercedes? Diana wouldn’t be seen dead in a Skoda.

I’ve now started the process of zhoozhing up (“zhoozh” is one of those not-really-spellable words) my teaching room. I put the primer on today, and tomorrow I’ll lather on the first coat of yellow, with the second following on Friday. It might end up being a dayglo disaster, for all I know. At least the huge mirror, that takes up almost an entire wall, will break up the block of colour somewhat, and then there will be bookshelves and eventually all kinds of maps and posters covering the walls. My current paucity of face-to-face lessons enables me to do this. I have picked up some new students, but others have dropped off. Tomorrow I do have four lessons scheduled, but three of them are online with the other in Dumbrăvița.

I had a good poker session at the weekend, cashing in all three tournaments I played, giving me a $43 profit. Easily my biggest score came in single draw where I was lucky enough to win a couple of flips against a player who went all in constantly, knocking him out in third place, and I then came through a long heads-up session to win the tournament. The WCOOP (World Championship of Online Poker) is coming up, and I hope to play at least three events in that. When that is done and dusted, maybe I’ll knock the whole thing on the head like I did ten years ago.

One of the 15-year-old boys I teach has just got back from his family trip to Zanzibar. It’s part of Tanzania, which is extremely poor. His mother has sent me some of the more incredible holiday photos I’ve ever seen, with such beauty and poverty at the same time. She managed to somehow get inside a dirt-floored classroom, which accommodates nearly 100 pupils at a time; she sent me a picture of the blackboard from this class filled with all the types of the English conditional.

I was glad that the Artemis 1 launch got postponed because I’d lost track of time and would have missed it. It’s now scheduled for 9:17 pm (my time) on Saturday.

I don’t do Wordle very much now, but this was my stripy attempt at yesterday’s:

Family - Life :)

The travel bug (squashed)

August 25, 2022

by plutoman 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents yesterday, shortly after they nearly set light to their fence and heaven knows what else. The ashes they’d disposed of were hotter than they thought, and soon their garden was in flames. Emergency over, we discussed their travel plans. Dad used to be keen to push off anywhere at the drop of a hat. Not now. Since he last left New Zealand, he’s had a major health scare and he’s been understandably spooked by the spectre of Covid. He also had a check on his heart recently; they found that his aortic arch was unusually wide, and they won’t know whether it’s expanding (which would be bad news) until he has another check-up next year. He should have been having regular checks ever since his aortic valve replacement way back in oh-five, but that was done in the UK and he slipped through the net in NZ. On top of that, he’s had a long run of splitting headaches. As for Mum, she now finds all the organisation and online booking (which inevitably she has the privilege of doing) a pain in the arse, and I can’t say I blame her. They have two kids in Europe and a grandchild coming fast, so they’re flying over, but I’m not putting any pressure on them to come and see me in Romania. They’re arriving in London on 12th October, when the new addition should be three weeks old.

Last Monday when I dismantled the massive wardrobe that was in my teaching room, I got a surprise. At the back of the top shelf, seven feet up, was a brown Gucci box which I fully expected to be empty. But no, it had a women’s Gucci bracelet watch inside. Worth a fortune? A fake? I googled Gucci watches and then went to the watch repairer next to Auchan in Iulius Mall. He put a battery in it and said that it probably is the real deal, but from Gucci’s “cheaper” collection, i.e. it would have been bought for hundreds, not thousands. It’s not the sort of watch that appreciates in value, so it might be worth £100 or maybe a tad more. Rather than selling it, I’ve decided to give it to my sister-in-law when I next see her, hopefully in October.

My big thing (by my standards) right now is doing up my teaching room. After tonight’s lesson in it, which will be almost entirely in Romanian, I’m going to set about painting it. I spoke to Dad about this yesterday. Paint it magnolia, he said. Too late, I’ve already bought a big tub of yellow paint. Real yellow. When I was growing up, my parents were always painting everything magnolia, a “colour” that I could never see the point of. It’s quite a departure for me to be painting or DIYing anything. I mean, this is the first time in my life I’ve really had my own place. My flat in Wellington was mine in name only. And here there’s extra motivation, because it’s a room I’ll be using for my business. The “teaching zone”, which I want to look distinct from the rest of my flat.

It’s late summer, so the fruit is great right now. On my last trip to the market, I bought some lovely crisp apples that reminded me of the Worcesters we had in England. There are peaches and nectarines and plums. Mountains of plums. I read somewhere that Romania is the world’s second-biggest exporter of plums, and yesterday I could see why. I went to Mehala, an older district of town where the streets have wide berms, many of which are lined with plum trees. I now have some accurate scales; I picked 5.9 kilos of plums, but I could have removed the decimal point from that and still wouldn’t have scratched the surface. Those trees were loaded; even the odd branch had collapsed under the weight of the fruit.

My teaching hours are, for the moment, way down. It gives me the chance to go for longish bike rides like I did this morning, work on my Romanian, and yes, attempt to do up my classroom before all the students (hopefully) come back.

Environment - Language learning - Life :)

Stay cool, everybody

July 18, 2022

by plutoman 0 Comments

When I had a short interview for my high school at age eleven, I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. A weatherman, I said. “You’re the first person to say that.” My grandmother worked in the Met Office for the RAF, and she told me about weather balloons and anemometers and such like. I always liked the weather maps and fronts and isobars that appeared on TV and in the newspapers. The BBC forecasts always highlighted freezing temperatures (zero or below) in blue, while 25 degrees or above was coloured orange. That was where hot started. Anything much above that – which was rare – and the whole country would descend into a collective madness of buckling train tracks and heatstroke. So here’s this week’s forecast for Cambridge, where I was born:

Cambridge actually holds the UK’s current record (39), set just three years ago.

Today and tomorrow, the southern part of the UK (i.e. where most of the people are) will get extreme, and in some cases lethal, temperatures. The UK is hopelessly unprepared for this. They’ve got politicians telling people to wear sun cream and enjoy the sunshine. Oh yes, what fun. Others are saying, “I survived 1976, so I’ll be fine.” Well, this will be a much sharper, more intense heat than the neverending summer of ’76 which my mother often talks about, and if you remember ’76 (as Damon Albarn does in this song), you’re no spring chicken. This hellish heat will become more and more commonplace in the UK. Of the five who remain in the race to be the next prime minister, only one of them gives half a shit about climate change and the environment, and he’ll probably be eliminated today.

I played tennis twice – singles with the older guy – at the weekend. Not so hot, in more ways than one. On Saturday I won the first set 6-2, but even at the end of that set I was starting to tire. I really had to dig deep to win the second 7-5. In the third I was 5-1 down, and struggling physically, when time ran out. A similar story last night when I won the opening set 6-3. Then Domnul Sfâra, aged 87, made a guest appearance. We hit with him for a while; I was mostly in awe of him being on the court at all. He shuffled off and left us to it. I won the second set 6-1, but then he attacked relentlessly in the third, which he won 6-3.

I’m trying to learn some Italian before I go away. I won’t have many opportunities to use it immediately, but I hope I can go back to Italy for a longer time next year.

Life :) - Photos - The UK

Games, trip plans, and some pictures

July 14, 2022

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’m getting plenty of work in the run-up to my trip away. Six lessons yesterday, four today. I finished off the New York version of my skyscraper board game with both the teenage boys today. Both games finished with identical 21-15 scores (a loss and a win for me). They were both a bit more clear-cut than the time we played the Chicago version. The different buildings – some bigger and harder to build than others – appear in a random order in the game, and in both these latest games the big guns like the One World Trade Center and Central Park Tower came out towards the end, when it would have more fun if they’d come out at the start when you have more time to complete them.

Not long now until my holiday, which could still be marred by the latest Covid wave, a record heat wave, and a veritable tsunami of flight delays and cancellations. My brother and sister-in-law said they’d be happy to meet me off the plane at Stansted on Thursday the 28th, then they’ll take me down to their newish place in Poole. I expect I’ll spend the weekend with them. After that I’d like to see my friend in Birmingham where the Commonwealth Games will be in full swing – since I was in New Zealand for the successful Auckland games of 1990, this event has become a bit of an anachronism, but it’s probably the only chance I’ll get to see (for instance) live weightlifting. Or we might end up meeting in London instead if getting to Birmingham from my brother’s place all gets too hard or too expensive or both. Then I plan to spend the rest of my British break at my parents’ flat in St Ives. I’m pretty excited about the Italy bit before and after my stay in the UK.