Life :)

Life :)

Some time off

August 12, 2019 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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.

Family - Hiking - Language teaching - Life :)

Some trip pics etc.

June 28, 2019 by 0 Comments

Today is Dad’s 69th birthday. He isn’t doing an awful lot, and I can’t blame him. His recovery will take time.

Right now he’s struggling to go to the loo properly, and asked me what my record is for time between visits. When I was eight, I once went 18 days. Then another 16 days. Then 15 days. Or something like that. But the first figure I know is accurate. Yes, back in 1988 I really did go two and a half weeks without a poo. All the prunes, and jars and bottles of this or that liquid from the doctor, just wouldn’t shift it. The pain was excruciating. When I finally went, holy shit.

After last week when I could hardly keep up, this week my load is much lighter. (I’m talking about work now; I’ve moved on from the previous paragraph.) As Dad said (and he’s had four decades of experience) that’s what happens when you’re self-employed. It’s either feast or famine. You can’t win. On balance I’m grateful for the reduced volume; having to trek around the city to give lessons isn’t a lot of fun when temperatures soar well into the 30s.

I’ve watched a fair bit of grass-court tennis on TV. The most compelling matches have been at Wimbledon qualifying. The stakes are just so high. Yesterday I saw Liam Broady (a Brit) in the final round, where the men play best of five sets. Broady was off like a rocket, leading 6-3 6-0 in no time at all, but sadly that was all the time it took for his higher-ranked French opponent Grégoire Barrère to click into gear. For two sets he’d been nowhere. Barrère simply had more firepower – his backhand was particularly pacy – and he reeled off the last three sets. The other match I watched yesterday involved Sabine Lisicki, runner-up to Marion Bartoli in 2013 (what a wonderful match-up that was). Six years is an eternity in tennis, though, and Lisicki has practically zero recent form. I wanted her to win yesterday against Lesley Kerkhove from the Netherlands, and she started almost flawlessly, storming through the first set 6-0. But her level dropped and Kerkhove had just enough composure to capitalise, winning each of the last two sets by 6 games to 4. That was a shame. This morning I hit against the wall next to the courts in Parcul Rozelor. I managed to fall over on the concrete and graze my knee, and hit a woman on the head with the ball. Not my best session. (Normally there’s nobody else there to hit.)

On Monday I had a lesson with Octavian, who will be twelve next month. It’s natural on a Monday to do the “How was your weekend?” thing. After he told me about his weekend, I proudly showed him my photos from 2000-plus metres. His impress-o-meter wouldn’t budge. “Yes, I’ve been there. Yes, I know. You don’t need to show me that!” I slapped my phone down in anger. Look mate, I know you travel business class to Hong bloody Kong with your dad and have been there and done that, but you’re being quite rude. The rest of the two-hour session went absolutely fine.

Here are some pictures from last weekend. I hope you’ll be a bit more impressed than Octavian.

Hut at Cuntu
The hut we stayed in
The generator for the hut
Climbing up Țarcu
We’ve made it!
A typically Romanian structure at the top of Muntele Mic
Chairlifts on Muntele Mic
The creepy reception area of what used to be Hotel Sebeș
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Romania - Travel: Romania

Scaling new heights (and Dad’s operation)

June 21, 2019 by 0 Comments

On Tuesday one of my students invited me on a hike this weekend, with him and about half a dozen of his mates, to the top of Țarcu Mountain, at an altitude of 2190 metres. I shifted and cancelled this weekend’s lessons (it was hard to do that at short notice) and accepted his invite. We’ll be staying at a hut on Saturday night. I know it will be beautiful up there and I really want to get away and also explore more of Romania, so saying yes was an easy decision. I’m still (as always in these situations) apprehensive, though. Will I be equipped enough? Fit enough? Waterproof enough? Then there’s all the social stuff. My student is Hungarian. So are all his mates. I can’t speak a word of Hungarian. (It’s amazing really that even the Hungarians can speak Hungarian, it’s so complex and unlike anything else on the planet.) But it has the potential to be a great experience and a whole lot of fun too. Part of the whole point of living in Romania is to have these sorts of experiences. I had a gap in my schedule this afternoon where I ran around the mall trying to find a sleeping bag and other bits and pieces.

Dad. That’s the big news. The operation went about as well as it could possibly have done. I haven’t managed to speak to him since Monday’s op: the reception on the top floor of the hospital is patchy at best. Mum has been very impressed by the staff at Timaru; they’ve looked after him very well. He had a big feed at Mum’s birthday dinner, which he described as being like the Last Supper. It was his final opportunity to eat anything solid. We now anxiously wait for the results of his biopsy.

I’ve got a tricky-ish day in store tomorrow (but even the trickiest days are miles better than life insurance ever was). Two hours with Mr I Don’t Know’s mum, followed by two with Mr IDK himself, then 90 minutes with the 7½-year-old boy, then a final hour with a new boy of just five. Definitely a challenge.

Life :) - Tennis

No stopping him

June 10, 2019 by 0 Comments

So Rafa has won a twelfth French Open title. So predictable but still so ridiculous. The first seven games of his final with Dominic Thiem were spellbinding. When Thiem broke out of the blue to snatch the second set, I thought, now then. Remarkably (or perhaps not; this is Rafa we’re talking about), Thiem won just two more games in the match, although the 6-1 score in the fourth set did an injustice to a very high-quality and enjoyable set of tennis.

Thiem’s two-day semi-final with Djokovic really had me on the edge of my seat. I rushed back from my lessons yesterday to catch the resumption of a match that had just about everything, including crazy weather conditions. The right man won, but he oh so nearly didn’t. He played a nightmarish four points from 5-3 and 40-15 in the final set, and was impressive in the way he bounced back to win against an all-time great.

On the women’s side, Ash Barty steamrollered her way to a very popular win yesterday. Her semi-final against 17-year-old Amanda Anisimova (who, make no mistake, is already the real deal) would have been crazy to watch, with more twists and turns than even the most twisty turny interclub matches I can remember playing or watching. Surviving such an encounter might have made her more relaxed for yesterday’s final.

I had no real luck on my return to the ENT specialist last week. He looked through the images from my CT scan; the images are “slices” taken at 5-millimetre intervals. He confirmed that my brain was, visually at least, OK (!). As for my maxillary sinuses, the left one especially was visibly full of gunk but he had no solution other than painkillers for the times I get the worst attacks. I was hoping for more than that. He didn’t recommend surgery because it’s actually fairly major, is far from guaranteed to solve the problem, and there isn’t anyone in Timișoara qualified to perform it. I’ve started a “pain diary” where I simply shade hourly cells in an Excel spreadsheet, darker grey representing greater pain. There are no white cells except at night, and sometimes not even then.

A few words about Scrabble. I feel I’m playing OK. I still don’t know enough words yet, and I’m still relatively slow, but I can sense continual improvement. After a run of 15 consecutive wins, my rating on ISC reached the dizzy heights of the 1500s, but I hit then hit some stormy weather for a few games when I couldn’t stop my opponents from scoring heavily, and I dropped below 1400. I’m back in the low-to-mid 1400s after a few comfortable wins, including one last night where I scored 551, six points shy of my record.

It’s hotting up here, and I can detect the sweet smell of tei as I type. The forecast on my phone is showing sunshine icons and temperatures with an initial three, stretching out as far as it goes.

Family - Life :) - Tennis

Better news from Dad

June 7, 2019 by 0 Comments

There’s been some much better news from Geraldine in the last few days. We now know that Dad has a low-grade cancer and he’s caught it early. We all hoped that was the case – he has no symptoms, after all. He’s not exactly out of the woods yet, and a huge ordeal awaits him in ten days’ time, but it’s still one hell of a relief. In March he had a stream of blood when he went to the loo – a one-off, but scary enough for him to ask questions. (A lot of men would have just let that slide.) That might not have been cancer-related at all, but an effect of the Warfarin he takes, so perhaps the heart valve replacement he had in 2005 didn’t only save his life back then, but also 14 years later. Perhaps. Until he has the op, we won’t really know.

Yesterday I watched Simona Halep’s match against Amanda Anisimova. Just wow. Both the last two years Simona reached the final of Roland Garros, and I met Mum and Dad on the evening of the match. The results weren’t the same, and neither were the places I met my parents (in 2017 it was at the airport; last year it was at the train station) but it was beginning to feel like a routine. This Saturday though, there will be no Simona in the final and my parents won’t be here either. That’s a bit sad.

Some things still have that lovely early-June feel about them. The strawberries, the cherries, the apricots, the big juicy tomatoes that make me wonder how I ever eat those crappy imported tomatoes at other times of year. And the smells. Blindfold me and earplug me and I’d still know I was in Timișoara. The most distinctive smell of all is the tei, or lime trees. Temperatures are starting to nudge 30, which is normal at this time of year, but the rain shows no sign of abating. Some houses in Timiș County have been flooded.

I’ve had five cancellations this week, so I’ve managed to watch more tennis than I’d bargained for. I get less pissed off by cancellations than I used to. Yes they’re annoying, especially at the last minute, but they give me the chance to recharge my batteries.

Family - Life :) - Tennis

Matter of fact

June 2, 2019 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother just after we found out about Dad’s cancer diagnosis. My brother was at the tail end of a three-week stint in North Carolina; he’ll be flying back to the UK tomorrow. His living quarters looked like a public loo, with pipes and shiny paint and bits of zinc.

We remarked how matter-of-fact Dad seemed about his situation. No despair, no blind optimism either, no mention of fights or battles, none of that ridiculous notion that cancer can be beaten by pure strength of will. My brother is thinking of travelling to New Zealand later this summer, but I’m not sure I see the point at this stage. At any rate, we won’t have much idea of Dad’s prognosis until after his operation in two weeks’ time.

Dad showed me on FaceTime some diagrams showing six types of bowel cancer surgery; his will be the least severe, with the smallest section of bowel to be removed. That is at least something.

There’s no let-up to this wet and stormy weather. Matei’s grandmother, who is in her mid-70s, said she could never remember anything like this. Dad informs me that after a very pleasant May, the temperature is now rapidly dropping in Geraldine.

The French Open has reached its half-way point. There have been so many great matches already. It was quite a dramatic day on the women’s side yesterday, with Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka both going out. Simona, after a bumpy ride in her first two matches, cruised through to round four.

Simona is also the name of my next student; our lesson starts in an hour.