Life :)

Films - Language teaching - Life :)

Freak-outs

September 29, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

My work volume has dropped off a little in the last week or two, so I’ve started advertising again. I put up an online ad, mostly in Romanian but with the last line in English: “I look forward to teaching you English.” Someone replied to my ad, questioning my command of my mother tongue. He didn’t think the -ing on the end of “teaching” should have been there. I swiftly corrected him; he was making a very common mistake.

Last night I bumped into Bogdan, the guy in his early forties who lives on the second floor of my block, in apartment 10. (I live at number 13, on the third of eight floors.) For months and months I saw him hanging around outside the apartment building, and until I got talking to him I never imagined he actually lived there. We decided to go for a beer in the square, just opposite our block, and he seemed reasonably switched on. He even knew a reasonable amount of English; he said he’d done eight years of it at school. He doesn’t work, and doesn’t currently have a functioning cell phone.

Among all the big news stories that flashed by in the first half of last week, I completely neglected to mention Thomas Cook, a big travel company that went to the wall. The number of people stranded overseas was in six figures. The modern company didn’t bear much resemblance to the outfit whose memorable slogan I remember as a kid: “Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it.” However, it was still headquartered in Peterborough and it will be a huge blow to the city.

When I spoke to my dad yesterday, he reminded me of the time (or one of the times) I completely freaked out when I was small. I would have been three or four, and we’d gone to the airport to pick up my grandmother who had flown all the way from New Zealand. I guess this must have been Terminal 3 of Heathrow. Even in the eighties it was vast and chaotic, and none of that helped, but I think it was the loudspeaker announcements that did it for me. I screamed and bawled, and broke out in a hot sweat. Dad said he wasn’t angry with me, but instead he felt powerless and sad. Another episode came in a shop called Habitat in the newly-opened Grafton Centre in Cambridge. On this occasion it was the thick ceiling pipes that I couldn’t handle. They totally spooked me. There were all manner of shops I just wouldn’t go into back then. Shops with freezers were a particular problem. I really didn’t like freezers. Except the dozens that must have been in John’s Freezer Centre in Godmanchester, where I often went with Mum; somehow those ones were OK. Tesco’s in Bar Hill was never an easy one for me. It was huge for a start, there were frequent tannoy announcements, and of course lots and lots of freezers. I was about seven when I got over all of this.

Dad and I also talked about the political situation in the UK, following the incendiary session in the Commons on Wednesday. We agreed that the risks associated with Brexit have now become secondary to the risks that Britain’s democracy will be irreparably damaged. Dad said that he voted to leave in 2016 because he wanted to “shake the tree” a bit. We had a good laugh at that. He now says he’d vote to remain in a future referendum.

I recently watched the five-part Chernobyl series. Very good. Chilling, but brilliant. I imagine the cover-ups and chicanery were even worse than depicted on screen. I certainly won’t be watching the Russian-made version.

Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Politics

Turning it up to eleven

September 25, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I watched live coverage of the UK Supreme Court’s unanimous and damning verdict. By an 11-0 margin, they ruled that Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament for five weeks was unlawful. Yikes. I never expected that for one minute. I mean, silencing parliament for more than a month just so you get your own way should bloody well be unlawful, but the law so often makes little sense. Lady Hale wore a very striking (and symbolic?) spider brooch as she read out the decision, and she bore a slight resemblance to my grandmother at a similar age. This latest episode in the Brexit saga has brought to the fore a pair of eleven-letter words that I wouldn’t like to have to say once I’d had a few (which hardly ever happens these days): prorogation and justiciable. To be honest I’m not entirely sure how to pronounce the latter of these even though it’s 9am and I’m stone-cold sober. I think I’d go with /dʒʌˈstɪʃəbᵊl/ (jus-TI-shuh-buhl), but it’s a weird word.

Boris was in America yesterday. He met Donald Trump, and the two of them are looking more and more alike. Trump now has a pair of eleven-letter words of his own to contend with: impeachment proceedings. (OK, an impeachment inquiry.) I was hoping it would never come to this, mainly because the impeachment process, if that’s what we get, may well galvanise support for Trump. Then on Monday we had 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg giving a very powerful and emotional speech in front of the likes of Trump. So much has happened already this week and we’re less than half-way through.

On Sunday I spoke to my parents. They’ve booked their flights to Europe; they’ll be coming this way in May and will stay here for ten weeks. Can’t wait. (But it is a very long wait.) They’ll be flying direct, which I warned Dad never to do. “But we’ll have three hours in Dubai,” Mum said. Bloody great. We ended up talking, for some reason, about the Māori language. In the three years I’ve been away, it seems to have exploded. Ring up your bank now, and apparently you get a Māori (or should I say Te Reo) lesson while you’re on hold. As if the god-awful music wasn’t bad enough. My parents and aunt and uncle resent all of this, and I don’t blame them. A lady in my apartment block just forwarded me a letter she’d sent to some MPs about our situation, and at the beginning and end of the letter she’d written a sentence in Māori, complete with macrons (which represent long vowels), like the one I’ve put on the a in Māori. This woman is 0% Māori, but presumably she thinks slipping into that tongue for a few lines will help her cause when dealing with politicians. It’s a beautiful, powerful language (and the argument that it isn’t a real language because it wasn’t originally written down is absurd), but Māorification seems to be going too far, and who knows where it will stop.

It’s real Autumn here now, and I don’t mind that at all. Spring and autumn in Timișoara are lovely.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Moving too fast

September 15, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been here a while now, and these “new” things keep coming back. As I write this, there is a large crowd outside the cathedral to celebrate the Feast of the Cross.

Feast of the Cross

Today I played tennis, for only the second time this year, in Parcul Rozelor. I was better than I thought I’d be, so I’m keen to play again soon. My opponent (not that we played a game) was of a similar standard to me, but about 30 kilos heavier, so I have a fairly good idea of what my strategy will be if we ever do start counting games and sets. For his part, he generated plenty of pace, but also had a penchant for slice and drop shots. After the game, he invited me to go for a beer in a bar by the Bega. He asked me about Brexit, among other things. That’s a hard enough subject to talk about even in my native language.

No, I didn’t see the men’s US Open final. On Monday, my fifth and final student that day asked me, how come you didn’t watch it? Well it started at midnight my time and didn’t finish until five, and that was reason enough. When you’ve got a packed day (as I had on Monday) or even a loosely packed day, you just can’t. Not when you’ve got a job that actually matters. Shame, I know. It was a real barnburner of a match.

Last week it became clear that I need to change tack when it comes to the way I teach. I was going to say I’m pushing my students too hard, but that’s not the right word at all: I rarely exert any pressure on them. More accurately, I’m getting them to move onto the next level too soon, and need to focus more on consolidation. I’m still learning myself.

It’s still pretty warm for mid-September, but according to the forecast the last embers of summer will be extinguished in the next three or four days. The lovely fruit and vegetables from the markets will soon be gone too. A summer of eating Romanian tomatoes from markets makes me wonder how I ever eat the tasteless, polished, uniformly round crap you get in the supermarket.

A few old Dacias in Piața Unirii this morning
Life :) - Politics

Feels so normal

September 8, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

It all feels so normal now. Hopping on an elderly tram full of mostly elderly people, many of them engaging in serious arm action whenever we happen to pass a church. Gypsy women getting on in their customary brightly-coloured dresses. Today one of the women was so large she took up about as much space as Jacob Rees-Mogg did on the front benches of parliament last week. This morning I took the 7 tram to Flavia, the very popular (and large) second-hand market, although I didn’t buy anything. I then visited Shopping City, one of (so far) two malls, and picked up a whole load of practical stuff for teaching. I’m trying to expand and jazz up my already extensive collection of handmade cards and games that I think of as my trademark as a teacher. Make everything as manual as possible. My students seem to like that, but it involves many an hour spent printing, cutting and sticking.

I had a chat to my parents this morning, just before I got on the tram. These days we’re in touch at least twice a week. They said how lucky they are to have the two sons they have. It felt wonderful to hear that. On balance, I think I’d prefer to be in my brother’s shoes, despite my successful lifestyle change. His longer-term future is rather more secure than mine. He’s married, he’s got good, close friends, he’s got a work pension, and all that stuff. Whether I even have friends is debatable, and somewhat scarily, the people I know don’t know each other. One of them could die and I might never find out. And then there’s the bit about potentially getting kicked out of the country I live in. Right now, and in the short term, things are absolutely fine. Heck, if I step back a bit, I can hardly believe how well my Romania plan has worked out. But give it five years, or ten…

Back to the present. On Thursday I had my first Romanian-English session for several weeks. I got a bit frustrated at the number of basic mistakes I was making. Those pronouns. I never quite get them. My fellow teacher was surprised to learn that someone as apparently bohemian as me (in her words) spent ten years in the insurance industry. She’d been to Poland and gave me a can of Polish beer. I gave her a bottle of Rakija I picked up in Stari Bar. She said she’d been looking at enrolment forms for her course which begins later this month, and seeing 1999 and 2000 birth years. Two thousand. How did that happen? We even have, for the first time, a 2000-born grand slam finalist in Bianca Andreescu. I note that on Tuesday, I’ll have spent as much time in 20-something as in 19-something.

Brexit. The drama dial turned to max for three days solid. But good god, it should never have come to this, whatever “this” even is anymore. The debate was worth having, but a binary, in-or-out referendum on something as complex as Britain’s relationship with its European neighbours, without any plan for a Leave result, was a terrible idea. Invoking Article 50, firing the starting gun on the exit process, without any plan as to how you might actually leave, was a terrible idea. Boris Johnson. Prime minister. Terrible idea. Suspending parliament. Terrible idea. (It’s a national crisis. MPs should be sitting every hour god gives until this is sorted out. Spending less time than normal in parliament is crazy and reckless.) Leaving without any sort of agreement with the EU at all is a terrible idea, and the 21 responsible and courageous Tories who voted against it, as the country looked into the abyss, got booted out of the party instantly. (What sort of democracy is this supposed to be?)

I watched some of the speeches at Westminster last week. The best was by Ken Clarke who was Chancellor when I was in my teens. One of those responsible Tories I remember from the deep, distant past. Clarke said that the referendum was a bad idea, he didn’t like the result, but democracy must be respected and the verdict should be implemented. But given the narrowness of the result and that wrecking the country he’s served for almost half a century doesn’t exactly appeal to him, a soft Brexit is the only sensible outcome.

Robert Mugabe is, finally, no more. Good riddance. I mentioned the news to two of my students yesterday; neither of them had heard of him. That reminded me of a time I mentioned Paul McCartney, who was unknown to my 30-year-old student. It’s not that my students are stupid, just that their “window” of knowledge is different from mine. On the other side, I was embarrassed when my 18-year-old student talked about the gruesome murders of two teenage girls in Caracal in southern Romania, and I hadn’t been following the national news.

Autumn seemed to start abruptly (as seasons do here) on Tuesday, and right now it’s tipping it down.

Language teaching - Life :)

Pushing off…

August 12, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got a couple of hours until I push off. It’s going to be a stinking hot day, both here and in Belgrade. They’re forecasting 37s and 38s. Tomorrow will be the same. I can see myself being holed up in my hotel room for the best part of the day.

After the Belgrade bit, the temperatures should plummet (yay!) and everything will be pretty damn awesome. I hope.

I do need a break. I haven’t had a proper one since Christmas. Last week (23 hours of lessons) things felt ever so slightly stale on the work front. Hours of Peppa Pig. Hours of Romgleză with that woman. Four hours with Matei in that café, where you either sit outside (hopefully in the shade) and be lost among layers of cigarette smoke, or inside where you’re confronted with the Solid Shit music channel on their TV and you can’t hear yourself think.

Timișoara’s centenary (as part of Romania) took place on 3rd August, and to mark the occasion they finally reopened Central Park, a lovely park that had been closed since May 2017, not long after I got here. God knows why it was closed for so long.

Timișoara celebrates its centenary
A new statue erected close to where I live. What’s it going to be?
The big reveal. It’s Maria, who was the Queen of Romania. This might be the city’s first statue of a woman.
Central Park
Central Park, with my apartment block in the background. The park is lined with sculptures of famous Timișoara men, but no women.
Let the games begin!
Life :)

Some time off

August 12, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

This afternoon I had a Skype chat with my cousin. He lives in upstate New York, and I stayed with him and his Italian wife (and saw the US Open with them) on my trip through America four years ago. (They weren’t married then. They tied the knot in Italy the following year.) I’d say my cousin has aged a bit. We talked about his job, my job, our parents, tennis, cricket, and I can’t remember exactly what else. Oh yes, he thought that S (regular readers might remember her) was still possibly a thing. We did venture briefly into the world of politics, and he thought Trump would probably fail in his re-election bid. “I hope he gets annihilated.” Well, so do I, but I wouldn’t bank on it. I’d put his chances of re-election at 50%, which admittedly is low for an incumbent presiding over a strong economy. So much will depend on who the Democrats nominate. On the bright side for us anti-Trumpers, the nominee probably won’t be as unpopular as Hillary Clinton was.

My brother told me that, according to some app he checks every five minutes, his house had dropped in value, in a currency that is itself dropping in value. Where’s it all going to stop? The pound is languishing at €1.064. British airports are now giving one euro (or less) for a pound, high-street bureaux may soon do the same, and before we know it the official rate – the one you see on sites like xe.com – might crash through the one-for-one barrier. Then we’ll all watch the same thing happen against the US dollar. And then, who knows? The Canadian dollar? The Bulgarian lev (currently two to the pound, and pegged against the euro)? I remember when the pound used to make me feel proud. I know it’s silly because the value of a unit of currency is arbitrary, but I’d look at the board at a Cambio Wechsel in Singapore or Bali or wherever, and the pound rate would jump out at me. It was always the biggest number. The Rolls-Royce of currencies. Now somebody needs to slam on the brakes before it hurtles over the cliff.

I’ll have money in all kinds of varieties and colours to contend with in the next twelve days. I say “contend with”, but weird and wonderful money is quite fun to deal with, really. I read that Montenegro doesn’t have a currency. That has the potential to be really fun, or not, but unfortunately Montenegro is pretty boring when it comes to money, and just uses the rather insipid euro with all its pictures of pretend bridges, even though it isn’t in the EU. Serbia’s note-heavy money is a bit more inspiring, while I’m looking forward to my first taste of the Bosnian convertible mark (currency code: BAM!).

My itinerary: tomorrow I’m taking the bus from Timișoara to Belgrade, where I’ll stay two nights, then I’ll the train from Belgrade to Bar (three nights in Bar), then I’ll need to take a bus and taxi to Mostar, where I’ll spend two further nights. From Mostar I’ll probably take another supposedly spectacular train to Sarajevo. Yes, I’ll be visiting some places that were all over the news in the nineties. I’d like to visit Jajce, a much smaller place in Bosnia, but I’m likely to just run out of time. A week on Friday I intend to be back in Belgrade and spend one night there on the way home. Whatever happens I’m just grateful for some time off.

Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Back from hell

August 8, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

It hasn’t been a bad day at all. After a good night’s sleep I had breakfast consisting of porridge, slices of watermelon, and a cup of tea, then I printed off what I needed for my three lessons. My first lesson from 9 till 10:30 was with a bloke of about 25; at one stage we discussed all kinds of names for all kinds of body parts. That gave me just enough time to pack and set off for my two hours with the woman who is afraid to speak English, and two more hours with Matei. I think the woman likes to have lessons with me because she’s a bit lonely. Predictably, about two-thirds of everything she said (and she says a lot) was in Romanian, although if anything that proportion has dropped a bit.

After the session, I FaceTimed my parents from the small park next to my student’s apartment block. Whenever I call them from outside, Mum is amazed; she says she wouldn’t dream of making a video call without WiFi because of all the data it chews up. In Romania, for a few quid a month (and without any contract) I have more data than I could possibly need. It’s a great pleasure to contact my parents. Perhaps Dad’s ordeal has brought us all together, but mostly it’s just that I get on so much better with Mum these days. Starting up a new life in Romania has helped a lot. I think she respects me for having the oomph to do my own thing, for being independent. It doesn’t feel that long since she saw an online job ad, and I felt I had to apply to keep her happy even though I knew it would damn near kill me. I got the job. I took it (to keep her happy?). It damn near killed me. I was 30, nearly 31. How bloody ridiculous. Those were the dark days. I’m so glad they’re over.

I had sandwiches and fruit in the park (the bread I buy is excellent but very sandwich-unfriendly), then I was off to Dumbrăvița to see Matei. The “lesson” was really just a chat in an outside café. He’d been to Tunisia and on a basketball camp in Serbia. After a quick stop at Piața Lipovei (the market) on the way back, I was home at 5:40. Unusually, I was done for the day. My first instinct was to pour myself a beer, as I often do whenever I get a free evening, but I didn’t because I’d read what alcohol can do to your sinuses.

Before today, you see, I’d gone through hell with my sinuses. Absolute agony. And all I could do was take painkillers. As well as the pain to contend with, I had virtually no energy, I was irritable, clumsy, hopelessly slow. For two nights I hardly slept. Yesterday I somehow survived my session with the six-year-old. I had the presence of mind to at least bring my laptop, and he just watched Peppa Pig non-stop. Are you bored with this yet? No. Fantastic! His mother wanted a chat with me afterwards. Please, just let me go! Today, after a proper night’s sleep, was a blessed relief.

Life :) - Travel: Europe

Getting away

August 3, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

One hundred years ago today, Timișoara (and the region of Banat, or most of it) became part of Romania. Before that, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I have a map of modern-day Romania on my wall; yesterday my student of about 25 explained to me what bits used to go where, and when. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well young Romanians know their history.

Yesterday a concert started up in the square to mark the centenary. Last night Phoenix (a well-known band from Timișoara who formed the same year as the Beatles (!) and whose music I like) played in the teeming rain. I didn’t even think about going to bed until they wrapped things up at midnight; it was pretty loud. It’s currently 10:30 in the morning and it’s been tipping it down the whole time.

In the last 36 hours I haven’t been feeling great (sore throat, stomachache and general lack of energy), and yesterday was a dead loss apart from the three lessons I had, two face-to-face at home and one on Skype. I didn’t have to go out, thankfully.

If my student couple hadn’t run into financial difficulties, I’d have been jetting off to Greece with them (and hordes of other Romanians) today. That wasn’t to be. Instead I’ll be pushing off on my own, a week on Monday. I’ll get the bus to Belgrade, stay two nights there, and then take the train to Bar, on the coast of Montenegro, where I’ll stay three nights. That train trip is a 12-hour journey through the mountains and literally hundreds of tunnels. It should be spectacular. To reserve a seat on the train, I had to contact a Mr Popović, who booked me a first-class ticket, for the same price (only €24) as a second-class one. He told me that it was a kind of promotion, to encourage people to use the service. After Bar I don’t know what I’ll do. Perhaps I’ll take the train to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, and from there go up through Bosnia and somehow back through Serbia to Timișoara. That will certainly involve buses, which are never as comfortable or as much fun as trains.

In my lessons I often ask people about their holidays and travel experiences. I always ask them to state their favourite means of travel. With the exception of a boy who said he found flying scary, they almost all show a preference for travelling by plane. It’s almost a case of, “Well, when I go on holiday, I like to travel more than a couple of hundred miles, and the only sensible way to do that is to fly. I mean, duh!” I find flying, short-haul flying in particular, to be quite stressful, and distinctly un-fun. Saying that, you couldn’t beat Wellington to Timaru on a sunny day.

On Tuesday I joined a Skype meeting of owners in our apartment block. People are full steam ahead when it comes to selling. All the talk, amongst the annoying meetingese (piss off with your “quantum” and “I’ll talk to that”) was about solicitors and conveyancing and whether we’d be happy to sell for x or y million, figures that I can only get a handle on when I calculate what I’d get for my apartment alone. (One owner, who wasn’t in the meeting, said he would sell for one dollar.) In the absolute best case scenario, I’d get back half what I bought it for, ignoring all the interest I’ve also paid. But this is almost beside the point. People have just accepted their fate, and I think they’re all mad. I can see it now. We sell. Great. We lose a ton of money but we can all get on with our lives. The developer has, in theory, six or seven years to do something with the mess they’ve inherited before it has to be razed to the ground, but as D-day approaches, they and various other developers across the city are granted an extension, then a second, then a third, and in the end they won’t have to do anything.

Oh, I’ve been trying to learn Serbian again, after dabbling with it a year ago. I might write my next post about that.

Family - Life :)

Time flies

July 29, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I called my brother last night. It was his 38th birthday. (How did we get so old, so fast?) He was in St Ives with his wife. They’d been to Cambridge which would be heaving on a Saturday in late July. My brother described the experience as hellish. (Cambridge reached a demonic, record-smashing 39 degrees on Thursday.) He mentioned Boris Johnson, and was just about salivating at the prospect of a hard Brexit. In the army, he’ll be fine in such a scenario. Millions, particularly in what remains of Britain’s manufacturing industry, probably won’t be though. My brother and I are very different people. While reading the brilliant Chasing the Scream, I figured that my brother is so vehemently against any relaxation of drug laws (sorry mate, it’s happening) that he wouldn’t get past page ten.

Yesterday I also had a Skype chat with a woman who lives in my apartment block in Wellington. There’s a consensus among owners to sell; many of them just want the sorry saga behind them and are happy to flog it off at almost any price. She doesn’t see things the same way and neither do I. The tacit acceptance of our fate has been mindblowing to me. We’re looking to lose a shit-ton of money through no fault of our own, due a nonsensical policy, and what, we just shrug our shoulders? We need to be getting together with the many hundreds of owners in Wellington and making a fuss. Making shock waves. Hell, it’s Wellington. People should arrange to meet outside the Beehive at a predetermined date and time, carrying placards and chanting something that rhymes, like they do in Romania. I don’t think the lack of young, energetic activist types is helping (at 39, I’m one of the younger owners).

Alphabet card game
Two winning hands in the alphabet card game (see previous post)
This low-flying biplane is dropping the Romanian equivalent of 1080
Life :) - Tennis

Middle Sunday

July 8, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

My father is making a quicker recovery that he or any of us expected, and maybe, just maybe, my parents will come over in the autumn. I don’t want to put any pressure on Dad though. Just flying all this way and back will take a lot out of him. But right now Timișoara is full of life and sound and flavour and colour, and I wish Mum and Dad could be here to experience it. In short, I miss them.

There’s both a jazz festival and a traditional music festival going on at the moment. Every year the performers from the traditional music festival announce themselves by parading up and down the square, and past my window. It’s a beautiful sight, and sound. Last night I checked out the festival, but I got there late because I’d been watching tennis, and didn’t have the greatest of vantage points. Too many advantage points, you could say. The singers and musicians and dancers mostly come from nearby countries, but my favourite act was from Colombia. (In Romanian, they spell this as Columbia, with a U, and the more I think about it, the more it would make sense if we did the same in English.) Colombia as a country sounds awesome, by the way. Tonight I’ll pop along to the last night of the show in plenty of time (no tennis!) and grab some food and beer from the numerous stands.

Middle Sunday. In some ways it’s my favourite day of Wimbledon. Unless the first week is seriously weather-affected, as it was in 1997 and on a couple of other occasions, there’s no play on that day, and that gives me a chance to catch up on all the other stuff.

Yesterday I saw quite a few matches, or chunks of them at least. Access to a stream was just about mandatory. The Tour de France had started, so only one channel on Eurosport showed the tennis, and they have a horrible habit of chopping and changing matches at will, and often at crucial stages.

The first match I saw was Sam Querrey against John Millman. Querrey loves the grass, and something about his playing style made it look all too easy. I never liked watching Pete Sampras, partly because he rarely seemed to have to work for his points, and Querrey is in a similar mould. The American had greater weight of shot, but Millman competed admirably, and took his opponent to two tie-breaks, the second of which was 10-8. The final score (a straight-set win for Querrey) didn’t do justice to the closeness of the match.

Then I dropped in on Elise Mertens’ draining encounter with Wang Qiang. They were in the midst of a gripping second-set tie-break, which Wang eventually squeaked 11-9 to level the match. Half-way through the third set, figures of 107 total points apiece appeared on the screen. This was to highlight how evenly matched the players were, but I was thinking, 214! That’s a huge number for two and a half sets. And very few of the points were cheap. No wonder they were so tired. Mertens played slightly better on the big points in the final set, and just held on for the win. This was an absorbing battle.

Mertens would play the winner of Kiki Bertens and Barbora Strycova. As fun as it would have been for the commentators to deal with Mertens and Bertens squaring off, I wanted to see Strycova win, which she did. I saw her play (and win) in New York in 2015, and I enjoyed her playing style which comes from being relatively short. She can’t rely on big shots; she has to scamper and craft points. Bertens, who has all the weapons, wasn’t at her best, and after a tight first set, Strycova won quite comfortably.

I think I like watching the shorter players in general, on both the men’s and women’s sides. Next up was Diego Schwartzman, a top-25 player despite being only five foot seven. He played a fantastic match against the much bigger Matteo Berrettini, generating surprising power on his groundstrokes. He was also deadly accurate. Schwartzman led by two sets to one, and had three match points on Berrettini’s serve in the fourth set. Berrettini, who wasn’t exactly having a bad day either, saved them all, took the ensuing tie-break 7-5, and then won a series of close games at the start of the fifth. Berrettini, leading 4-2 in the decider, came up with a couple of howlers on his serve to almost let Schwartzman back in, but again he was able to serve his way out of trouble. It was a shame the little guy lost by the finest of margins having played so well, but it was a terrific match, lasting over 4¼ hours.

I got back from the music festival to see another little guy by tennis standards, Dan Evans of Birmingham, complete his match against João Sousa. Evans (five foot nine) went down 6-4 in the fifth, and his reaction as he dumped a backhand in the net after chasing down Sousa’s drop shot on match point was priceless. The No. 1 Court crowd had obviously been treated to a fantastic match.

I expect that’ll be the most tennis I’ll watch on one day for a while.