My big plan

Life :) - My big plan - Politics

Nerve-wracking

June 23, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Voting in the EU referendum has begun (well voting in person has; I sent in my postal vote three weeks ago). I don’t know which way it’ll go and I’m extremely nervous. It could affect me and millions of other people profoundly and it’s just so binary. What’s more, I have to attend a meeting between two and four tomorrow afternoon, when over the half the results will come out. If I’m lucky I might be able to follow the headline figures on my phone. It’s times like these I wish I was more normal and only had to worry about the ABs (and if they lost I’d have plenty of mates to commiserate with).

I wish we’d heard more of this kind of rhetoric from the Remain side. It’s a wonderful, rousing speech. More of that and we’d be looking at a crushing win for Remain, but instead…

I got my new passport yesterday, with the words “European Union” on the front.

I told my boss I’m leaving, in the middle of what has been a stressful week for him, not that I’ve never known him to have a non-stressful week. I think he was OK with it.

Language teaching - Life :) - My big plan

Made my mind up

June 13, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I always feel energised after my English lesson and tonight was no different. I started off with a “twenty questions” game where my student had to guess the five items in a shoebox I’d brought along. After randomly guessing that the first item was a book, he struggled a bit. He kept wanting to guess specific items rather than attributes: Is it red? Is it soft? Can you eat it? Is it made of wood? Do you use it in the bathroom? But we got there in the end. I then showed him some pictures of a typical Kiwi winter and we “commentated” on them. Lots of useful words there: scarf, hood, walking stick, steam, smoke, logs, chimney, stuck, mud, and so on. And that was the end of the lesson. Time flies when you’re having fun, and for me (and hopefully for him too, but I can’t really tell) it is fun. He also said he wanted to get a job working in a park or garden and would be happy to study first; I’ll ring up the council tomorrow and ask what they can do.

I’ve made up my mind now. I want to teach English, learn foreign languages, study linguistics (maybe one day becoming really knowledgeable in a specific field) and travel. Lots and lots of travel. And that’s pretty much it. I’ve given on making money beyond what I need to survive with a modest level of comfort. It feels good to know what I want, and don’t want, out of life. If I hadn’t gone on that fantastic trip to America last year I probably still wouldn’t know.

I still don’t know where to base myself in Romania. My parents had reservations about Timișoara, but they were around lack of shops the likes of which you find in cities with tourism, unrenovated buildings, and a slightly dated public transport system. None of those three things bother me. Timișoara almost certainly will modernise its trams, but I’d actually like to try the old ones first. And I’d much rather get there before Emporio Armani does than after. Sibiu is incredibly picturesque and is much more “done up” – I think it got a cash injection from becoming Capital of Culture in 2007, but it doesn’t have all the markets and old trams that I know I’ll like. Sibiu has other stunningly beautiful places nearby, well, within a few inches on my 12-miles-to-an-inch map, and that’s significant plus for sure, and it has the possibility of volunteer teaching in rural areas close by, which would help me get my foot in the door. Timișoara would be better if I wanted to get to other places in different countries such as Belgrade. And of course there are other places I could go like Oradea in the north-west which I really like the look of.

Talking of Belgrade, you can take a train from there to Bar on the coast of Montenegro, a 12½-hour trip taking in 245 tunnels and 435 bridges, all for 21 euros! I must do that, after first catching a train or bus, or both, from wherever I decide to base myself in Romania.

Shocking scenes from Marseille (another place I want to visit – stupidly long but totally awesome train ride, here we come) at the weekend. Lots of criticism levelled at the police for not segregating the English and Russian fans, but all that tribalism, all that visceral hatred that necessitates segregation in the first place, it’s just so far from me that I have a hard time understanding it. The behaviour of the Russians makes one fearful of what might happen at the 2018 World Cup. But the events in southern France pale in comparison to the mass shooting in Orlando. Just terrible. Sometimes I fear for the future of humanity.

My big plan - Politics

The ins and outs of the EU referendum

June 11, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

At 1pm today, or 4am in Bucharest, I attempted to listen to the news on Romanian radio. My Romanian just allowed me to discern that one of the items was the hot-off-the-press Brexit poll, giving Leave a ten-point lead. That poll is by a company called ORB, and their methodology leads me to conclude that it’s complete garbage just like their previous polls, some of which gave Remain a whopping lead. (I’d love to see polling banned altogether in the last four weeks before an election or referendum.) But I think there has been a genuine move to the Leave side, and I’d now put Britain’s chances of leaving the EU at 50:50, perhaps even a shade higher. The betting markets still make Remain the favourites by about a 70:30 margin, but I don’t buy that. The high rollers are backing Remain; the mums and dads with a few quid to spare are backing Leave. Many people treat their bets as votes (and likewise their votes as bets) and a clear majority of bets are on Leave. I’d bet on Leave myself, because I think it represents great value, if it wasn’t for all the complications involved in setting up an online account in some non-sterling foreign currency (I say non-sterling because I expect the pound to plummet in the event of a Leave win).

The zeitgeist is very much with Leave, and that’s hard to combat. The scare tactics by the Remain side certainly aren’t cutting through. They needed to frame staying in the EU as something positive to vote for. In fact as I watch from the other side of the world, the level of debate from both sides has been appalling. What’s the plan if the UK stay in? What’s the plan if they/we decide to pull out? Maybe none of that matters. Maybe people aren’t interested in the facts anyway. All I hear about is even more dreadful immigrants if we stay and a third-world economy if we leave.

Dad registered with hours to spare before the original deadline, and he might well vote “out” (he happens to be in the UK so he’ll vote at the local polling station). I suspect my brother will vote “out”. I voted “in”, and I’m not ashamed to say that was largely out of self-interest. [Yikes. Another poll out with a ten-point lead for Leave. Phew, it’s the same one. Please tell me it’s the same one. See, they shouldn’t have polls at all this close to the vote.] This plan of mine isn’t just a plan, it’s a dream. It’s a long time since I had a dream with a realistic chance of becoming reality. If Britain wasn’t in the EU, my dream wouldn’t exist. I readily admit I’m too selfish to vote against my dream. I might still be able to live and work in the EU for some time because the “divorce” is unlikely to be immediate, but I don’t know. Nobody knows.

Another reason to vote “in”, for my mind, is that the “in” people seem nicer. I bet most of the English hooligans in Marseille are voting “out”. The CAPS LOCK “BREXIT!” brigade on online forums are mostly “outers”. The people who didn’t want voting extended after the website crashed (their stupid fault for leaving it till the last minute; sod ’em) were mostly “outers”, which is ironic considering how much they keep banging on about democracy. Most importantly the Conservatives who are likely to take over in the event of Brexit don’t seem particularly warm and fluffy, not even Boris Johnson.

Despite all that, I wonder how I’d vote if I still lived and worked in, say, Peterborough. It’s so long since I lived in the UK that I was only just eligible to vote. It’s six years since I even set foot in the country. If I’d seen the influx of Polish plumbers first-hand, I might well be voting out now.

Romania lost 2-1 to France this morning in the first match of Euro 2016. I was impressed with the number of Romanian fans there. I remember all the hype surrounding Euro ’96 which was played in the UK. It was huge, and all played with the catchy tune in the background that talked about thirty years of hurt (since England won the World Cup). It’s now fifty years. And talking of the nineties, two-hit wonders Ace of Base are playing on Romanian radio.

Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

I have to do this

June 6, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Friday I went to the theatre at Bats, a Wellington institution that, to my shame, I hadn’t been to before. I never normally have anyone to go to the theatre with, and unlike the cinema, I wouldn’t go by myself. I saw Love and Information with the bloke from the tennis club and his brother who had come over from Singapore. The play was weird. It flitted between dozens of seemingly unrelated scenes with no discernible plot. I think the play was about the sheer quantity of information, some of it deadly serious, some of it less so, that gets thrown at us almost constantly in the digital age we live in. We can’t possibly take it all in. Each piece of information, each tweet, each Facebook message (I guess, I don’t do Facebook) has an implied “you’re supposed to care about this” tacked on to the end. But we can’t care about it all. The trick in the digital age is deciding, out of every ten pieces of information chucked at you, which seven or eight to ignore. The star of the show for me was an old guy who in some scenes had dementia, and at one point hilariously described online sex as “virtual and great”. In one scene somebody rattled off umpteen words for “table” in various languages and I was disappointed not to hear the Romanian word masă.

Yesterday I went on a walk around Island Bay with a Meetup group. It was a beautiful afternoon and we had great views including of the South Island. Wow, what a difference. A few weeks ago a walk like that would have been a serious struggle. Even walking up the stairs was an effort. It’s great to have my physical energy back. I noticed the difference again today on the tennis court. My play was still very scratchy and I still had problems on serve, but at least I could move to the ball. One of the women who ran the English teaching course in February was there.

Someone recently put me in contact with a Romanian woman, and I got to speak with her yesterday. She seemed very nice but wasn’t really able to help me, mainly because she’s been out of Romania for such a long time. I think she thought I was nuts. She certainly managed to sow a few seeds of doubt in my mind. Should I even be doing this? She said it would be daunting for me because I don’t know anyone over there. But I think of the alternative – team meetings, strategic goals, service level agreements, performance reviews, desk moves, restructures, playing the pretending-to-care game where the avoidance of bad outcomes is the best possible outcome – and daunting doesn’t begin to cover it. And if I only ever went to places where I knew people I’d hardly go anywhere. (The possibility of long-term isolation is something that concerns me, I’ll admit that.)

Last Thursday we had our latest body corp meeting about seismic strengthening. We didn’t make all that much headway. There are so many decisions to make – what percentage of new building standard to strengthen to, when to have the work done, whether to employ a project manager or facilitator, and how to apportion the costs. The fact that these decisions depend on each other to an extent makes it especially hard. On the matter of dividing up the costs, I was amazed at the number of people who wished this to be done equally between the apartments. “We’re about fairness and equity here.” So am I, but an equal allocation is surely unfair, inequitable, and plain wrong. Some of the upper-level apartments have almost twice the unit entitlement of my apartment and the others on the lower floors, which means they’re almost twice the size and are worth nearly twice as much. Nobody would seriously suggest that someone who owned two apartments should pay the same as someone who owned one, would they? Would you like to pay the same income tax as your boss? This reminds me of the Poll Tax in the UK in 1990. It led to riots and the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.

I haven’t seen any of the French Open because I haven’t found a stream that works. Muguruza’s win over Serena last night didn’t surprise me that much. People forget that Serena is in her mid-thirties, and Muguruza has looked the goods for a while. I predicted the Spaniard to win the title in an email to a friend when they were playing the third round, but unfortunately I forgot to place my $20,000 bet. There’s a lot riding on the men’s final. Djokovic is surely the favourite to complete his career grand slam but I certainly wouldn’t write Murray off.

Language teaching - My big plan

Into focus

June 1, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Having this place to myself again is making a huge difference. I can relax! I’d almost forgotten the meaning of the word. It’s also brought my upcoming move into sharp focus. I’m really doing this.

Why am I doing it? Because I can. And because nothing good will come out of persevering with the alternative. I’m convinced of that. Why Romania specifically? Well I fell in love with the language almost the moment I clapped eyes on it, and gosh, the country is still so unspoilt, so wild, so raw, and that really appeals to me. Not that I’ve been there yet, unlike my parents, who are there now. They’re in Timișoara and tomorrow they’ll be taking a six-hour bus ride to Sibiu which, judging from the pictures I’ve seen online, is incredibly beautiful. They say the architecture in Timișoara is wonderful but many of the buildings are in fairly dire need of some TLC. Most people they’ve met can speak English but are some way from fluency, and that’s good for me if I intend to teach it. I keep seeing “danger maps” where Romania is coloured yellow or orange, a notch above Bulgaria and Hungary in the danger stakes and, for that matter, a notch above the US, where an average of 36 people were killed by guns per day last year, excluding suicides and accidents. My parents said they’ve yet to feel under the remotest of threats.

My English lesson on Monday went reasonably well. I spent some time on minimal pairs, words that differ from each other by only one sound. For the long a / long i pairs I gave him lake/like, bake/bike, race/rice, hay/high and tail/tile, with accompanying pictures. He was fine with these, with the exception of tail/tile where he struggled to hear the difference between the two words. Learning another language helps me empathise with him here, but doesn’t help me get across the difference. Next week I’ll revisit those two words and say them very slowly. We also talked about football, in particular the Champions League final. I was pleased that he referred to the football vocab sheet I’d made for him.

I put my EU referendum voting paper, which was something of an IQ test, in the mail today. (The fact that I thought it resembled an IQ test probably says a lot about my IQ.) It’s fairly obvious which way I went. Which way the referendum will go is far from obvious.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

Humming

May 21, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

The last few days I’ve been humming. During the day everything has been beautiful, amazing, wonderful, and at night I’ve hardly slept. On Thursday, after my fifth night in a row of sleeping for a couple of hours max, I decided to take a sick day, only my second in over two years there. It was the perfect day for it, the sun was shining and my flatmate had moved out the day before. I walked around my local area for two hours or so, wide-eyed, taking photos of beautiful trees and houses that were now so much more colourful than I remembered. Other than that I gave the bathroom a good clean (it needed it – my flatmate was a rather aggressive user of the toilet) and studied some Romanian.

I’ve now got my Google set to Romanian: the “I’m feeling lucky” button is now “Mă simt norocos” and if I search for Sibiu I get aproximativ 32.100.000 (de) rezultate in just 0,57 secunde. The same goes for Google Maps, Google News and Google You Name It, everything is in Romanian including all the suggested search terms and my supposedly tailored results. As anti-Google as I can be at times (they are so pervasive), that’s pretty cool. There’s also a social network, Google Plus, which I’ve joined. It’s much smaller than Facebook or Twitter, with “only” a few million active members. I find the network part of Google Plus as confusing as hell (and of course all the terminology and help pages are in Romanian for me), but what I like about it is that it’s great for viewing and sharing photos, and I’ve spent hours staring at colourful photos of Sibiu and elsewhere. I might even post some photos of Wellington at some stage, and I’ll post the link here if that happens. I’ve even got an animated Romanian flag as my mascot or avatar or whatever you’re supposed to call it. I had to find one that wasn’t so fast as to drive everyone batty and to re-order the frames so that the first one looked nice (sometimes you only get to see a still photo and it defaults to the first frame). Yeah, working with animated images, or GIFs, is fun.

romania_done

 

I think what’s made me hum is the realisation that I’ve got so much freedom. I can be who I want and for years I didn’t even know it. Isn’t that something? Billions of people around the world don’t have that. In my own country we do pretty well in the freedom stakes, but so many of us are constrained by the situations we end up in. Take my boss. He plans to move house soon, but can’t move more than a mile or two because his three kids would have to move to a different school otherwise. He works extremely hard and his mind works extremely quickly but to me, as I watch him shove TV food down his throat while he rushes from one bullshit meeting to the next, none of it seems worth it. I used “TV food” there because of something I saw on a train in America. The guy in front of me in the food car dropped an armful of processed crap on the counter, and the bloke behind the desk tried to stop him from buying it: “You don’t want to be spending eighteen dollars on all that TV food.”

It would be criminal for me to waste this freedom I have. I haven’t got a two-mile radius dammit, I’ve got a great big map. My train itinerary which will cover some of that map is likely to be:

  1. London to Paris via the Eurostar, 2½ hours;
  2. Paris to Munich, humming along at 200mph on a double-decker train (Seat61.com tells me to get a top-deck seat for the best views), 5¾ hours;
  3. Munich to Budapest overnight, 9¾ hours, and I’ll have a few hours to look around Budapest when I arrive;
  4. Either Budapest to Timișoara, 5 hours, arriving in the evening of day two, or Budapest to Sibiu, 10 hours (why so much longer I have no idea), arriving in the early morning of day three.

Without Seat61.com I don’t know where I’d be.

A week ago yesterday I had my performance review, the last one that will matter in my current job (and I’d prefer not to ever have another job where they’ll matter). I got through it OK, and that felt pretty good. The same evening I went to a regional tennis awards presentation. Someone at the club nominated me for an award for those nine consecutive singles wins I had, but there wasn’t much chance I’d ever win it. Most of the prizes went to the elite players who already win heaps of awards anyway. The best moment of the evening was when a bloke of about eighty, who had done so much work organising competitions over decades, was recognised with the volunteer of the year award; it brought a tear to his eye.

Talking of freedom, having this apartment to myself again, and the freedom that gives me, feels incredible.

Language teaching - My big plan

I can (almost) properly plan my dream now

May 17, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

My flatmate moves out tomorrow. I can’t believe I just wrote the last sentence. The last four months have taken quite a heavy toll on me – lack of energy has been an almost constant problem – and I’ve got a lot to pack into the next four.

My parents took off this morning. They’re away for ten weeks and will spend time in the UK, Italy and Romania! They’ve got four days each in Timișoara and Sibiu, with a train ride in between. I can’t wait to get FaceTime calls from those places. (For my birthday last month my parents gave me an iPhone 4 which they bought on TradeMe but it’s turned out to be unusable as a phone because it’s locked onto some mystery network. And, not to be ungrateful or anything, the screen is too small for 2016. I can still use FaceTime though as long as I have wi-fi.)

I still haven’t decided which city in Romania I’ll live in, although Timișoara is in the lead. I have decided however to take the train from London to get there, to make the experience as awesome as possible. Taking a train trip across Europe is a dream to me. I still have to figure out the best way to do it, with some help from Seat61.com.

My student pulled out of his English lesson yesterday, two hours before I was due to give it. He said he had to go to a friend’s party. I asked if he would reschedule for later in the week but he gave a firm no to that. That’s the third time he’s missed a lesson, if I include the one scheduled for Easter Monday. I’m not that happy with him. Is he just feigning interest? I think it’s human nature to a degree that you don’t value things you don’t pay for. Dad has always said that about giving paintings as presents. Maybe a small charge of $5 a lesson would be better, with a three-strikes-and-you’re-out-style policy for people who don’t show up without good reason (and parties don’t count). I suppose such a policy goes against the ethos of the organisation. It’s frustrating because I really want to do this. Last Tuesday I rushed into town to go to the resources library to pick up some material for last night’s lesson that didn’t happen. I spoke to a Czech lady who works there. She speaks almost perfect English and knows exactly what sounds students find difficult depending on where they come from. I thought, I wish I could be you.

I used a very famous baseball phrase in the preceding paragraph. The Red Sox are red hot right now. Sizzling. Offensively (and it feels weird to use that word in the American sense) they’ve been just about off the charts and it’s been a real team effort.

I played some bad tennis again on Sunday. I was sluggish, as is the norm of late. Afterwards I chatted to a guy whose exploits at the poker table put me firmly in the shade. I also had a meal – again –  with the gay bloke of about my age (or so I thought) who figured I was gay until I told him otherwise. As usual he only ate half his meal. He’s 41 as it happens, and had stomach cancer in 2008, so that explains his eating habits. He’d been given a 20% chance of survival. His story was inspirational.

New Zealand has been in the international news for the wrong reasons, with soaring property prices pushing both buying and renting beyond the means of many, forcing them to sleep in garages or cars. It makes me feel pretty guilty about being so desperate to be by myself.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan

Romanian commentary 8 (it’s happening!)

April 24, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

The timing of all these long weekends has been bloody terrible. I wish I could have saved the days up until my flatmate moves out. He should be out before the next three-day weekend, Queen’s Birthday, but I’ve a horrible feeling he’ll try to extend his time with me. That will be the last long weekend before I go away on 27th September. Yes, I’ve now booked my flight (a one-way ticket, how exciting is that?) so it’s happening! I plan to spend a few days in the UK before heading to Romania.

Yesterday I met up in town with the Romanian lady who my cousin knows through work. This was awkward, first because I didn’t know what time she wanted to meet so I had to hang around for hours, and also because she had somebody with her. Still, we got a chat a fair bit. She was very nice but she gave such a glowing description of Romania, especially the part of Transylvania that she hails from, that I didn’t know what to believe. She even spoke longingly of her childhood under the Ceaușescu regime.

I did get to speak some Romanian. She tried to get me to improve my pronunciation of the â or î vowel, which I mentioned before on this blog as being difficult because we don’t have even a near equivalent in English. It’s especially difficult when followed by i such as in pâine and câine, or in words that also contain the ă vowel such as sâmbătă, săptămână and smântână. I’d better make sure I try smântână. I was also struggling with rău, său and tău.

Another major sticking point for me was possessive pronouns. I wanted to say “my brother’s cell phone” which is celularul fratelui meu. Needless to say, that isn’t what I said. When you want to talk about an item that belongs to someone, you have to articulate it, i.e. say “the phone” rather than just “phone”. In this instance you do that by tacking ul on the end of celular. As for “brother”, which is frate, you need to articulate that and change it to the genitive case, because something belongs to my brother, and that gives you fratelui. Without the case change it would just be fratele, obviously. You finish with the masculine singular version of “my”, which is meu. Simple, right? If it was my sister’s cell phone instead, it would be celularul sorei mele. The last word, mele, is the feminine plural version of “my”, even though I’m only talking about one sister, because you always use the plural when dealing with feminine nouns in the genitive case. I mean, c’mon, everyone knows that. So, yeah. All this articulation and case changing on the fly, when you’re also trying to process what someone has just said to you, is a feat of mental gymnastics, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to master it.

She compared my attempt to learn Romanian with her experience of learning English. She said she was struck by how much “fill” English speakers use in speech compared to Romanians, and how she struggle to distinguish the fill from the content. I can believe that. I use “I mean”, “y’know”, “like”, “basically” and “I reckon” and numerous other fillers all the time. And they serve a really important purpose. Contrast “Don’t park here!” with “Y’know, it’s probably best if you don’t park here, yeah, [points] somewhere over there would be just fine.” In English, not using those fillers gives one’s speech a sharp, icy quality. A few times my flatmate has said things to me in a way that comes across as rather twattish, and it was only yesterday that I figured out why. He uses very few fillers; he’s a “Don’t park here!” kind of guy. He spends a lot of time during the day editing Wikipedia articles about armies and battalions, and it’s as if he doesn’t switch off from that mode when he’s talking. And he talks a lot. He also makes jokes, that I don’t think are nearly as funny as he thinks they are. So I find interacting with him more exhausting than with the average person, and believe me, I find average tiring enough.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople was simply brilliant. To call it a classic Kiwi film doesn’t praise it enough. It made me laugh, it made me emotional, it made me feel good inside.  I loved the scenery, I loved all the main characters, even the CYFS lady who I loved to hate. I really hope this film makes a splash internationally as it surely deserves to.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

It’s a fix

January 21, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Saturday I played Risk with a bunch of people from a Meetup group, including my soon-to-be flatmate. We played at my place. Having all these relatively unknown people over caused me some anxiety which didn’t entirely disappear when we started playing. I was playing with some clever people who knew their war history inside out and backwards and could spell and pronounce “hegemony” and even use it in a sentence. Two people brought along far newer copies of the game than mine, which was quickly deemed to be old hat. We played a version I’d never played before where the objective was to complete missions instead of dominating the world. I had the chance to eliminate somebody but decided against it in order to complete a mission. Half an hour later this decision backfired spectacularly as the bloke I could have knocked out knocked me out in last place. I then just wanted to go home, but I already was home. Bugger.

I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety at the moment. The imminent arrival of my new flatmate isn’t helping.

On Tuesday night I watched the second set of Simona Halep’s shock defeat to the 133rd-ranked Chinese qualifier Zhang Shuai in the first round of the Australian Open, with commentary in Romanian. I understood a few words here and there. It was a stunning performance by Zhang who completely overpowered Halep in the last five games. She was in the zone, hardly missing at all, and Halep seemed unwilling to change her game. I think she was just hoping – not unreasonably – that Zhang’s level would drop. This was Zhang’s first win a grand slam in 15 attempts; she was on the verge of quitting the sport. She has since followed that up with a convincing win over Alizé Cornet, ranked exactly 100 places above her.

There has been a lot of talk about match fixing in tennis in the last few days. This should come as no surprise. It’s an extremely easy sport to fix (much easier even than other individual sports like boxing), and with the array of bets available on sites like Bet365 that go right down to point-by-point level, you don’t even need to fix the whole match. It’s also a ridiculously top-heavy sport. The top ten amass vast fortunes, while those ranked in the 150 to 200 range struggle to make ends meet. If you’re ranked 200th in the world, you’re an incredible player. If I played the 200th best player in my country of just two million blokes, I’d probably win six or eight points in the entire (two-set, twelve-game) match. Now extend that to the whole world, and you get a player who eats, sleeps and breathes tennis, someone who spends many hours at the gym, on the practice courts, travelling to play tournaments in tinpot towns like Timișoara that nobody has heard of, and he can’t make a living from it. But you’re able to bet on his matches, and you can understand why the temptation to tip the very unbalanced tennis scales a little would be so strong for him.

I’ve got friend, of sorts, in Auckland who if I’m honest does my head in. But we had a chat last night on the phone and he was genuinely interested in my plans to go overseas, dropping the little man in Google Maps and telling me what he saw at his end. It was nice that someone was taking an interest.

Life :) - My big plan

Not a lot to lose

January 10, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

This has all happened out of the blue, but my flatmate will be moving in, perhaps next weekend but more likely the one after. I think – hope – this experience will be a lot less exhausting than the last one.

I’m looking forward to having some company as well as, obviously, the extra income. Having a mortgage hasn’t made life easy financially. In the last four years I’ve spent next to nothing on clothes, next to nothing on eating out, next to nothing on entertainment, next to nothing on my car (but see below), and next to nothing on my apartment itself. That’s five line items that a lot of people take for granted, but which for me are pretty much blank cells in the spreadsheet, not that I feel in any way deprived. There was the small matter of my trip to America a few months ago, but that was my first overseas trip since 2010. (Travelling overseas gave me such a boost that I simply have to do it again. For a good length of time. And soon. I just wish I could have made that boost last a bit longer.)

Those aren’t the only “blank cell items” in my life that many of us take for granted; I can add in a partner, a family, a career, and a real sense of identity, whatever that’s supposed to mean. And it’s because of all these blank cells that I can do what I’m planning to do later in the year. I don’t have much to lose. But I do have a British passport and an apartment I can hopefully rent out for $500 a week, and those are two positive reasons that I can do this. I’ll get a rental assessment soon and find out just how much I can get.

As for my car, I took it in last week and they told me the clutch and master cylinder would need to be completely replaced. I was quoted $1150, more than the car is worth, so that’s that. I can still drive it for a while, but it’ll only get worse. My parents have a spare car – a ’95 Mitsubishi RVR – and I might fly down there and drive it up here. There’s no point in buying anything if I can help it, when I only plan to be in the country for another eight months.

I’ve played tennis twice this weekend. Yesterday I was shocking, today a bit less shocking.