Life :)

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The (ever so slightly sad) end of ultramarathons

October 24, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Timișoara is beautiful in autumn, don’t you think? I took these pictures on Saturday in one of the many parks. I even sent them to S, who was in Prague and will be until Friday.

This week has the makings of my busiest week of work since May. It’s telling that even when things aren’t plain sailing, they’re still miles better than they ever were in insurance. I’ve just finished a business English lesson with a married couple. Business English isn’t my favourite discipline, because it often involves industry-specific vocabulary that I might be a bit shaky on (as was the case tonight when the focus was on logistics), and that whole world of Powerpoint and organisational charts is no longer one I inhabit. Yesterday evening I had my second lesson with the two sisters, this time in their sixth-floor apartment not far from the main hospital, instead of at my place. As usual, finding the specific apartment block was no simple task. But things really got problematic at the end of the lesson. We overran, and then I managed to get lost in Block City, which by now was pitch black. I ended up being late for my next lesson back home, even though I jogged some of the way. I called my student to warn him, and he seemed to be OK with it.

Two pieces of tennis-related news. First, Djokovic and Nadal are due to play each other in an exhibition in Saudi Arabia on 22nd December. The match is even named after the Saudi Arabian king. After the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, they should take a stand and pull out of this obscene spectacle now.

Second, Wimbledon have announced a final-set tie-break, starting in next year’s championships. It’s the first change to the scoring system there in 40 years. I’m glad the shoot-out will come in at 12-12, as I suggested it might, rather than 6-6. That seems a reasonable compromise, although it’s a shame they haven’t made the final exempt from the new rule. Wimbledon got a ton of negative press after the 6½-hour Anderson–Isner semi wreaked havoc with the schedule, and I don’t blame them for making this move. Part of me, on the other hand, will miss these occasional ultramarathons. Isner–Mahut was simply mindblowing. Neither the Australian Open nor Roland-Garros have made a similar announcement yet, but I fully expect tie-breaks to feature in deciding sets there in the very near future, either at 6-6 or 12-12.

One sport that can still, in theory, continue indefinitely is baseball. Game one of the World Series between the Red Sox and the Dodgers is tonight.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Running the whole gamut: some of my new students

October 20, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a foggy Saturday morning in Timișoara. Normally I’d be working now, but both the kids I’m supposed to be teaching are apparently sick. It’s been a little disappointing this week, with five cancellations and only 19½ hours of lessons, although with a plethora of new students the immediate future is rosier. The lowish volume didn’t stop my work week being interesting. On Tuesday I went to the nearby Universitatea de Vest for my first session with a teacher of Romanian and linguistics. She said it felt quite strange to be a pupil rather than a teacher. We had a great chat about all matters language-related. If she has time I’d really like her to give me some Romanian lessons. That evening I had a two-hour lesson with two new students: sisters who are both studying medicine. They were at very different levels; I’d put the older sister at a solid 5 on my 0-to-10 scale, while the younger one was at a 1½ so I communicated with her mostly in Romanian.

Thursday was a slightly strange day which didn’t finish until 11:15 pm following a late-night session with my student who once lived in Milton Keynes (she’s at level 9, almost fluent, so how do I help her?). Yesterday I had four lessons. In the morning I had a new student who surprised me when he said he was 47. He looked 55 at least. He then said that he’d inadvertently taken ten years off. We then talked about numbers – he struggled to hear the difference between “thirty” and “forty” when I said them. With my eleven-year-old I did a session on maps and directions. One of my maps included a pub, and I remarked that the boy’s surname was Cîrciumaru, which means “publican” – a cârciumă is a pub. (Under the spelling reforms of 1993, the letter “î” was replaced by “â” except when the letter was the first or the last in the word, but personal names generally kept the old spelling. As for place names, you’ll see both old and new.) Romanian surnames can be quite interesting; last night’s lesson was with a chap whose name was Tărbuc, which is some kind of fishing net.

Last Sunday I caught up with S. We had a lovely late afternoon and evening. We spent some time in the art museum which was fascinating when I think about it, and then just wandered through the botanic park on the way to the Timișoreana restaurant in the square (the prices had shot up since I last visited when my parents were here in June) and finally to my place. She says she needs to escape the fake corporate world before it’s too late, and would like to be either a university lecturer or a high school teacher, even though either of those (particularly the latter) would result in a loss of income. Of course I’ve been there, and for me the need was even more pressing. At least she seems to have found some success in that artificial environment, which I rarely did. We discussed books. She said she’d lend me The Handmaid’s Tale after I’ve finished reading a biography of Charles Darwin. She’ll be back in Timișoara again in a week.

This morning I made myself read about the likely fate of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian journalist who was brutally murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month. It’s very hard even to comprehend. Seriously, where do you even start? Yesterday Donald Trump (finally) said something about the murder being “bad” and “sad”. WTF?

In much brighter news, this morning I had my first-ever draw in ISC Scrabble. It was a 13-minute game, a bit shorter than I usually play, so whenever I found a play that scored a decent amount I generally slapped it down. I got some high-scoring tiles early on, and used them to open up a useful lead, but my opponent found a fantastic nine-letter bingo (OUTRaNGED) using the OU that I’d just played, which greatly reduced my advantage. When he was able to score well with the second blank I thought I’d had it. I was lucky that he didn’t have a winning out play (I don’t think). The best he could do was block my winning play, and by playing out I could only tie the scores at 387 apiece. It also tied my best-ever score without a bingo. I had just four seconds left at the end, while he had over five minutes. Maybe I’ll be as fast as him when I’ve played 21,000 games, as he has done. Prior to that game I’d won seven games out of eight.

The Red Sox have stormed into the World Series with a 4-1 win over the Astros, thanks in part to a stunning game-deciding catch in the fourth game, one of several breathtaking catches in the last few days. Their opponents are still unknown: the series between the Brewers and the Dodgers has gone right to the wire, with the deciding seventh game being played in Milwaukee tonight.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Picking up

October 14, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

A solid week of work: 23 hours, with not a single cancellation. With new students coming aboard and some existing ones clambering back on deck in the coming weeks after various business trips, I expect to have my hands pretty full in the near future. This morning’s lessons with the sister and brother weren’t the easiest: their family seems to be slightly dysfunctional and that doesn’t help. I felt sorry for the girl who was tired and impatient: she complained of being overloaded with homework and under unnecessary pressure from her mother. On Thursday night I reached a milestone as my 50th student came through the door; she was the woman I met last week at one of the ferry stops. Her English is very good indeed. She had lived in Milton Keynes, which she described as a fake, soulless place. Yesterday I saw number 51, an eleven-year-old boy, in his fourth-floor apartment within striking distance of Iulius Mall. He was a fan of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? game I often play with kids. After the session, his dad was almost shovelling money into my hand. Um, it’s only 60 lei, not however many hundred. He did insist on “tipping” me an additional 10 lei. By Western standards Timișoara is poor, but there’s no shortage of well-off people, and sometimes I wonder if I could get away with charging double what I currently do. (I have pushed my rates up a bit. A year ago I would have charged just 50 lei.)

S arrived back in Timișoara a couple of hours ago, but will fly back to Prague after just one full day. We plan to meet at the art museum tomorrow.

The Red Sox did close out the series against their bitter rivals, after a bit of a bum-squeaker in the fourth game, and tonight they start their best-of-seven series with the Astros, an exceptionally strong team, particularly in defence.

Scrabble. Three games today, and not a blank to be seen on my rack. The first game was pretty nondescript, my opponent used both blanks to form the only bingo of the game, and I fell to a 52-point loss. The second game was far from nondescript as my opponent out-bingoed me 4-0 and won 466-387. After being pummelled by bingos from all sides, to get within 80 wasn’t a bad effort. That 387 was in fact my highest ever score without a bingo. Also notable was my opponent’s 102-point play; remarkably that was the first three-figure play I’d seen in any of my ISC games. My highest remains at 98. Game three: I played an early bingo (BEAMIER), my opponent replied with a bingo mid-game, but I was able to edge him out 379-335.

I drink loads of water. More than the two litres a day the man on the radio keeps telling me I need to consume. But I still get dehydrated all the time. It could be the effects of Citalopram, the antidepressant I take. On Thursday I asked my doctor to take my blood pressure. The reading was 110/70, which according to the doctor is below average but still absolutely fine. He told me I should perhaps drink more liquid to ensure it doesn’t drop any lower.

Timișoara is beautiful at any time of year, but in the autumn it’s really quite stunning. Sitting by the river this afternoon made me think that there isn’t anywhere else I’d rather be.

Language teaching - Life :)

Yanking

October 10, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

In the past, when I was dissatisfied with my job, some people would say to me, “It’s only a job. There’s a whole life outside that.” Interestingly, most of those people were women. I’m not sure I agree. Even if you can switch off from work when you’re not there (which I could, most of the time), the routines of your job provide a drum beat for everything else in your life. I’m sure that being happier in my job has been a big part of my improved mental health.

No cancellations so far this week. That’s great. Saying that, my young Italian student, with whom I’ve had 50 lessons so far, has mysteriously disappeared. Today I had three lessons. First up was the eleven-year-old boy, who will soon be hopping on a plane to Hong Kong with his dad. I forgot to mention that during the Pigman lesson we read a chapter from David Walliams’ Demon Dentist that happened to feature the word yanking. My student kept pronouncing this as wanking, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Everybody was wanking as hard as they could, to get his tooth out.” He eventually got a handle on the correct pronunciation of yanking, as well as the meaning of the word, but then he wanted to know what was so funny about wanking. “Tell me what it means. I’ll ask my dad if you don’t.” (His dad speaks good English.) I told him that it was in fact a German word.

This evening I had my 80th session with my first ever student. He spent 30 hours last weekend manning one of the polling stations for the referendum, which he thought was an enormous waste of time and money. I completely agree with him. At his polling place, under 200 votes were cast, a turnout of roughly 15%, lower even than the meagre national average. He said just eight votes were tallied for “no”, and a further three for both “yes” and “no”. The national turnout just crept above 20%, well below the required 30%, so the referendum was declared void.

Later I had my first session since late June with a woman who got married shortly after that. She was happy (and so was I) to spend most of the session showing me her wedding photos (she got married in a forest near Miercurea Ciuc) and her honeymoon snaps from Portugal. She was a bit shocked to see me with a beard, and having lost a fair bit of weight.

The series between the Red Sox and Yankees is being predictably unpredictable. Game one, the Red Sox almost let a lead slip away but just eke it out. Game two, the Yankees win pretty comfortably, and head back to New York with some momentum. But last night shows that momentum can count for very little. In game three Boston just kept hitting, including Brock Holt’s cycle, amazingly the first ever in the play-offs. What will happen next is anybody’s guess. Unfortunately all these games happen in the middle of the night for me, and only find out what happened the next morning. It’s pretty inconsiderate of the MLB not to schedule the games at a more convenient time for those of us who live in the Eastern European time zone.

Language teaching - Life :)

The S factor

October 7, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

A bad week on the teaching front was capped off by my trip to Strada Timiș yesterday. The 17-year-old girl was there but her little brother was elsewhere, and their mother hadn’t bothered to tell me. I helped my one student with her homework on bird and animal idioms (such as “to watch somebody like a hawk” and “the straw that broke the camel’s back”) and phrasal verbs. She had several sheets to get through, which consisted almost entirely of matching exercises. At times I gave her clues as to what the answer might be, but I could tell she was thinking, Just give me the bloody answer, would you? The more sheets we got through in 90 minutes, the fewer she’d have to do by herself. We get on well and our sessions are productive, but once again we were interrupted by regular dings and beeps from her phone. I told her she was obviously very popular. She said that those messages came from five social networks. She also made it clear that Instagram, not Facebook, is king among people born around the turn of the century. Of course Facebook own Instagram. They also own WhatsApp. At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if either Facebook or Google buy out Coca-Cola or Boeing.

S. Yes. She’s 33, five years younger than me. She works for a large multinational and is currently in the middle of a two-week business trip in Prague. She doesn’t eat meat. Last weekend I asked her how on earth she survives in mici-fuelled Timișoara as a vegetarian, but she assured me it isn’t actually that hard. Her English is almost entirely flawless; she’s developed an Irish-like accent with an appealing lilt. (In some ways her fantastic English is a pain. I want to improve my Romanian.) She isn’t sporty in any way (either playing or watching) but is into all the cultural stuff. She’s been all over the place but was born and bred in Timișoara, which by now she’s understandably fairly blasé about. We’ve been in contact every day since she’s been away.

Only 16 hours of work last week. That won’t cut it, unfortunately. That kind of volume neither brings in enough income nor gives me that pleasant feeling I get from being productive. For the coming week I’m a bit more optimistic – I could have two new students.

Language teaching - Life :)

One and done

October 6, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a bit of a crappy week from a teaching perspective: too many cancellations. Earlier today I phoned that utterly obnoxious guy who came over last weekend, on the off-chance he might want to come back, but I got a very decisive “no”. That was probably for the best. As a teacher it’s a great feeling to see my students succeed under any normal circumstances, but I don’t wish success on this person any more than I wish success on Donald Trump. After this latest “one and done”, I delved into my (entirely manual) records of my lessons and produced some stats on how long my students stick around. One in eight give up after one lesson. Plenty more call it a day soon after that: 35% don’t make it past lesson number five. After 15 lessons we’re into coin-flip territory: 49% make it past that point. When my students have put up with me for that long, we’ve normally built up some kind of rapport, and they tend to come back. By the 30th lesson, 36% of my students still remain, and 17% even survive beyond the 50th. These are still fairly small sample sizes and it’ll be interesting to see what happens to those stats in the long term.

It’s been a beautiful autumn day here. Not a cloud in the sky. I wandered back from Piața Traian, suddenly with all the time in the world after yet another last-minute cancellation, and met a part-British, part-Romanian family who were trying to figure out how the timetable for the Bega boats worked. They all seemed lovely people.

There’s a referendum on same-sex marriage in Romania this weekend. Oh wait, there isn’t; we haven’t magically been transported to the 22nd century after all. There is, however, a referendum on changing Romania’s constitution so that the definition of marriage explicitly excludes same-sex couples, i.e. so that it reads “between a man and a woman” instead of the current “between spouses”. (When the constitution was drawn up, “between a man and a woman” would have gone without saying.) If the vote passes, any changes will be purely superficial, because Romania is unlikely to recognise single-sex relationships in the lifetime of any of its current gay citizens, no matter what’s in the constitution. There will almost certainly be a whopping great majority in favour of the amendment, but the vote also needs a 30% turnout in order to pass. That sounds extremely low, and crazy, because casting a “no” vote could allow the threshold to be met and for “yes” to win. So the people who oppose the amendment are asking people not to vote at all. Last weekend I talked to S about this, and like me, she finds it insane that same-sex couples can’t get married in this day and age. That we agree on this bodes well. I want to write more about S in my next post.

Baseball: we’re down to the final eight. The Brewers, who have been involved in some seriously exciting games, are on an incredible tear. And the Yankees made it through their wild card game and face the Red Sox in a five-game series starting tonight.

I’m looking forward to the lessons with the kids tomorrow. Sunday will be the second anniversary of my arrival in Timișoara.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

They think it’s all over… but it isn’t

October 2, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

S has contacted me today from Prague, so that’s nice. She told me (in Romanian, yay!) about her technological woes and the wet weather there.

We’ve finally reached the end of the regular Major League Baseball season, only we haven’t, because not one but two of the divisions finished in a tie for first place, both in the National League. That’s after 162 games and roughly 500 hours of playing time for each team. Rather than use some sort of tie-breaker method, like head-to-head, run differential or number of ejections, the four teams involved will sort it out on the field. Two bonus 163rd games, that kick off (!) at 8pm and 11pm tonight, my time. The losers of these extra games don’t go home; instead they play each other in the wild card game tomorrow. For the loser of that game, it really is all over. This crazy turn of events is unprecedented, and productivity is likely to plummet in certain parts of the US. I’ll tune in to the first of the bonus games, between the Cubs and the Brewers at Wrigley Field, after my lesson. For the Red Sox over in the American League, things were much more clear cut. Maybe they eased off the gas just a fraction in September, but they still finished with 108 wins, or exactly two-thirds of their games. That’s the best record in the major leagues. Whether they’re the best team is another matter. Boston are very good and a heap of fun to watch, but I’d say the Yankees are about as good and Houston Astros (last season’s champions) are marginally better.

Only two lessons today. The first was on the verb “to get” and most (certainly not all) of its many, many uses. Tonight it’s likely to be either business English or an article on funky modern offices (the sort of places that I’d hate to work in). I’m getting a fair volume of phone calls now, so my hours should eventually increase from last week’s 22½.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

My weekend

October 1, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday was an interesting day. In the morning I had lessons with my latest brother-and-sister combo. (The previous pair seem to have blipped off the radar. That happens.) I tried to help the girl navigate her way through the “reading and use of English” section of the Cambridge exam, which isn’t exactly a breeze even for me. There’s a lot of emphasis on collocations in that paper: things like “under no circumstances” and “under no illusion” which you either know or you don’t. That makes actually teaching for the test relatively hard. Her speech is excellent though, so explaining things to her is relatively easy. Then came her brother. Body parts! They make such a great topic. We did the “Head, shoulders, knees and toes” song which I remember from when I was five, then Simon Says, then some matching exercises. Simon Says is always fun. “Now sit down.” [Sits down] “But I didn’t say Simon Says!” We also touched on pronunciation. At his young age, learning correct pronunciation is so much easier, so I really want to make sure he nails it. Then we worked on numbers. His school teachers appear to have taught him that English numbers stop at ten, so I was keen to put him straight. Finally we played some quick games (he won all of them; that helps) and at end of the lesson he said I was a much better English teacher than his one at school. Perhaps he was just buttering me up.

At 4pm I had my first lesson with a guy who contacted me last week. We’d spoken Romanian on the phone, but when he was here it was obvious that he could speak English very well. I’d put him at an 8½, perhaps even a 9, on my 0-to-10 scale. It was equally obvious that he was a complete twat. A truly odious man. He talked about his exploits at the gym (“I’m a really big guy”), his Mensa membership, and his ambition to be Romania’s president in ten years’ time (heaven help us). Then he said, “I’m not a humble person.” You don’t say. “I don’t like humble people.” I told him that I considered myself to be a humble person. He introduced several other topics, saying at one point that luck doesn’t even exist, a contention that I find absurd. He reminded me of the New Zealand man who John Campbell interviewed following the terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011. “When the bomb went off I was on my eighth repetition of a however-many-kg bench press, but naturally I finished my set.” I asked my new student if he wanted to come again at the same time next week, and he said he was so busy that he couldn’t possibly give a day or a time. I wouldn’t be surprised if I never see him again.

Later I met up with my Tinder friend (I’ve called her X previously on this blog, but I’ll now use her real first initial, S). We chatted in English (dammit!) and took a walk around Piața Unirii, which I think is her favourite part of the city. She showed me the map stone – a cool-looking stone inlaid into the square, showing a fairly vague outline of the old fortress. We then grabbed some food and drink at the popular Hungarian market in the centre of town before I invited her up to my flat. She seemed to really enjoy the view here, and it is fantastically wonderful. I told her that when I moved into this place it felt like a dream. We discussed the UK and New Zealand and our various plans, including the idea that I could set up a proper language school. She asked me whether I’d be happy to take on all the hassle that would entail, and I gave her a one-word, two-letter answer. Sadly I won’t be seeing S for two weeks at least: she’s off to Prague on a business trip.

Today I took my new (old) bike to Sânmihaiu Român. It’s not a bad Timișoara bike, and I love the simplicity of it. On the way I met sheep, goats and cows. It was all blissfully Romanian, and a great workout for me. When I got back I played six games of online Scrabble (talk about a change of scenery), winning four. My best move was PAcKAGED for 98, down from the P. I’ve still yet to play (or be on the receiving end of) a 100-point move. Before this session I was on a five-game losing streak, which included some ghastly games, such as a 311-249 loss which would be terrible in a home game, and an encounter that I dominated but because I forgot to check how many tiles were in the bag (partly due to being low on time), I allowed my opponent to go out with a bingo and claim an 18-point win. It was good to put those experiences behind me.

Language teaching - Life :)

Muddling along

September 25, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got a cold, and it’s bad enough that I’d have taken sick days in my previous life, but in my current incarnation I can sort of just muddle along unless I’m really sick. In fact, work helps matters. Yesterday I had four lessons, including one on the seventh floor of an apartment block on Strada Timiș in the Dacia area of the city, with the boy of nearly nine whose big sister I recently started with. To begin with I wasn’t optimistic – he was rolling around on the sofa in the living room, saying he didn’t want to do it, exhibiting (when I think about it) the sort of behaviour you sometimes see in autistic kids. But it turned out he was a fairly standard kid who liked basketball and pizza and Fortnite and Roblox, whatever the hell those last two are. He’s close to bilingual – Romanian and German – and sometimes he’d throw me by slipping in a few German words. The first lesson is always tough because you never know what they know, or whether they might decide they just hate you, but we only had an hour and I muddled along.

On Saturday I had my second lesson with his older sister, but it was more therapy than anything educational. She talked, at some length, about the difficult three months she recently spent in a school in Vienna. Her stories reminded me of the time I spent at that school in Temuka at a much younger age. All my reading and grammar exercises swiftly went out the window, and before I knew it our 90 minutes were up. From there I walked to Mehala market to look for a bike, and found an old green single-speed German one, probably dating from the late seventies or early eighties. It seemed in good nick. Pretty cool, I thought. I bought it for 250 lei and have already found it way more fun than my mountain bike. It’s also a good deal more practical – and faster – when I just want to get around an almost flat city. It only has a front brake and that will take a little getting used to.

On Friday I met my Tinder friend (from now on I’ll just call her X) and a café on one of the side streets off Piața Libertății. It wasn’t my kind of place – it had English signs everywhere and I usually avoid those kinds of places like the plague. I bought a flat white (only those kinds of places offer that) and when I was about to put sugar in it the barista stopped me in my tracks. You need to taste it first! I was given a piece of paper showing the origin of the beans: Cajamarca in Peru, which happens to be a place that featured in a lesson early this year and would be incredible to visit. Anyway we chatted, mostly in English this time, and she invited me to a board games session on Sunday evening at the apartment of her brother and his wife.

I was kind of looking forward to the board games night, because how scary can board games be? But the answer to that is actually quite scary when you’re playing with frequent gamers who even speak a different language to me. They did speak good English, but that was more of a hindrance than a help I think. We played Ticket to Ride, which I’d played years ago in Wellington, just twice if memory serves, and the mechanics of the game had long been forgotten. I took what to them must have seemed an eternity over my moves. “Oh, it’s my turn again. How did it come round so fast?” My strategy was far from optimal. After that we played two rounds of some head-messing Monty Python-themed game, one of which I won without even realising it. X’s brother and sister-in-law lived in a new apartment block in the south of the city, and their flat gave off a whiff of sophistication. Even modern-style board games are the domain of a certain type of person; by Romanian standards they’re expensive for a start. X’s sister-in-law had a habit of dropping English words into Romanian sentences, perhaps to sound sophisticated. I found that bloody annoying, I must say. Interestingly there were a lot of homemade alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, some of which I tried, as well as hand-knitted bits and pieces dotted around the place. Next time I go there, if there is a next time, I hope I’ll be a bit more relaxed. The experience did however make me a bit nervous about ever showing X my place.

After an incredible Indian summer, autumn is well and truly here now.

Language teaching - Life :)

Match report

September 21, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Like any other app or site whose main purpose is to connect with people, Tinder is a bit scary for me. Scary enough that I started scheduling time each day to ensure I’d actually use it. Monday: an hour of Romanian practice, then my lesson at nine, then coffee, then shopping, then Serbian study for an hour, then lunch, then an hour of Tinder before I prepared for my evening’s lessons. Only I didn’t last the whole hour because I got my first ever match which means we both liked each other, and then some chat thingy popped up on my screen. Uh, what happens now? She sent me a message, I replied, and we eventually agreed to meet at a café in the square on Tuesday evening after I’d finished work for the day.

Tuesday ended up being a pretty good day. In the morning I met up for coffee with a young couple who used to have boatloads of lessons with me, but worked over the summer. They’re about to start their final year at university. I met them at the same place I’d be meeting my Tinder match later in the day; that was a deliberate choice on my part. We had a lovely chat, speaking Romanian the whole time. I’m not sure if they’ll find the time to have any more lessons with me. After lunch I was off to Dumbrăvița for a lesson with my eleven-year-old, and when I arrived there all my lesson plans went out the window (that’s OK though; I can use them next week). My young student had a friend over to play Risk, or Risc as it is here, and they wanted to involve me. His friend was only ten, and almost entirely fluent in three languages: Romanian, French and English. I didn’t do a whole lot of teaching, and somehow got paid to play a board game with a couple of kids for two hours. They had some utterly bizarre house rules that I had an interesting time navigating. I won the first of our two games by sheer luck.

When I got home I had another lesson where I did my fortnightly fill-in-the-gaps lyrics game, this time with REM’s Losing My Religion, and then read and discussed an article on the obesity epidemic in the Western world, which I talked about last month on my blog. At eight it was time to meet my match. By five past, I wasn’t overly optimistic. She works in Corporateville, and when I told her how I make my living, her initial reaction seemed to be, what have we got here? As for her, she didn’t look quite the same as in her various selfies taken in exotic locations including Easter Island. But then everything, somehow, changed. We talked, half in English (hers is immaculate), half in Romanian, and we seemed to feel at ease with each other. When I told her that I shun social media and use a manual diary to organise my lessons, she called the hairy man opposite a hippie. I didn’t mind that one bit. We chatted for nearly two hours. We’re meeting again for coffee tomorrow morning.