Language teaching

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A blank canvas

September 22, 2022 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

See you later, summer

September 1, 2022 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language learning - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - Tennis - The UK

What do you really do?

August 21, 2022 by 0 Comments

My 14-year-old student has just resumed maths lessons with me, and after this morning’s algebra session in Dumbrăvița I met my English friend for lunch at Casa Bunicii, a restaurant just down the road. He and his girlfriend had just got back from a six-week road trip around central and eastern Europe. A storm had been brewing for a while, and as I cycled back home I got soaked to the bone but happily avoided being struck by lightning. I’m glad that the temperature has dropped after another sweltering few days.

The day I got back from my trip, I called Barclays because my bank card didn’t work in the UK. After an interminable wait, the call centre woman told me that my account had been closed because of Brexit. As a non-resident I can no longer have an account over there. “Are there any funds in your account?” Yes! I have, or had, five figures in there. She was looking at a blank screen. How can they do this? In 2022, in a supposedly civilised country, they can just disappear your account. (Bad grammar, I know.) I now have to go through a laborious process, lasting possibly three months, to hopefully get my money back.

I started with a new student on Tuesday. He wanted to start from scratch, in other words learn English in Romanian. Explaining English concepts in Romanian is no easy task for me. He seems to have a decent brain on him, and at least it was face-to-face and not online. He asked one question though that I get a lot. “What to you do for a job?” I do this. I teach English. “No, what to you really do, other than teach English?” People have a hard time believing that don’t also work for Bosch or something. A real job.

I’ve been trying to learn some Italian, in the hope that I’ll one day travel to a part of Italy where the locals are at the English level of my latest student. The good news is the internet is brimming with Italian resources, and I’ve even got a pretty handy grammar book. And it’s one notch down from Romanian in terms of complexity. The bad news is that it’s so easy to mix up Italian with Romanian, especially the simple stuff. Mai for instance means “never” in Italian, while in Romanian it means “more”. Many words end in i in both languages, but while in Italian the final i gets its full value, in Romanian it’s often a very short sound that can be close to inaudible. And so on.

Thinking about a hypothetical Birmingham-based heavy metal museum (I discussed this with my friend over there), in 2015 I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, one of many highlights of the city. At the Hall of Fame I clearly remember a woman in her twenties, who might have been autistic but it’s hard to tell, in her element and almost overcome by joy at being there. Seeing her living that dream gave me considerable pleasure.

No tennis today. The courts are waterlogged. I got two sessions in – both singles again – last weekend. After Saturday’s session I led 6-0, 2-2; the first set score flattered me as four of the games went to deuce. Sunday was a different story as I struggled to win the big points. I did hold on to win the first set 6-4, but then I fell 4-0 behind in the second. That’s a big hole to climb out of. I won the next two games, then the game after – which ended up being our last – was truly brutal. It must have gone eight deuces at least. It’s rare that I remember a specific shot in tennis – the game is nothing like golf in that respect – but as I held break point he came to the net and I put up a lob that landed in his backhand corner. Not only did my 60-year-old opponent retrieve it, which was impressive enough, but he hit a clean winner from it. It bounced so high that there simply wasn’t room between the baseline and the fence. I’ll remember that one for a while. On the last point, another break point, I lobbed him once again and he got that back too, but several shots later I was able to win the point. It’s a shame time ran out on us; 6-4, 3-4 is an interesting scenario to be in.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker - Tennis - Travel: Europe

Shame one of them has to win

July 11, 2022 by 0 Comments

It’s about time I wrote again, but what’s actually happened? I’ve booked some accommodation in Bergamo, so that’s something to look forward to. Vespas and Bambinas, or should I say Vespe e Bambine. I need to brush up my Italian. I still haven’t planned my stay in the UK. Where and when will I see my brother? And what about my friend in Birmingham?

I’ve got two new students. One of them is at a low level – not a problem, but as far as I can tell, he’s never learned how to learn. He reminds me of the Burmese refugee I taught in Wellington before coming over here. That guy left school at twelve to work on fishing boats; my current student probably stayed in the education system a bit longer, but he doesn’t have a handle on what to learn in what order. Sometimes he comes out with stuff like “Him tomorrow say me,” and he’ll keep repeating the same garbled phrase over and over, seemingly thinking that if he says it enough times it’ll magically become correct. Then he’ll ask me how to say something complex that requires a range of tenses. He’s a roofer and wants to work in Scandinavia. I’m pleased that he has the motivation and enthusiasm to have lessons with me, and I hope I can get him to learn more systematically. The other new student is a very pleasant woman in her mid-thirties who lives in Bucharest. She’s about to start a new job which requires a lot more English.

There’s a lot of talk and WhatsApping in this apartment block about gas installation and central heating. We should soon get a gas pipe fitted that will heat the whole block from top to bottom, like I had in the other place. I rarely needed central heating there. Somebody from the gas company came in and took some measurements, and he’s come back with a quote for NZ$5000 (£2500) to put gas central heating in my flat. My worry is that when we get to winter, the price of gas will be so high that I won’t dare use it.

When I moved in, I only got one set of keys. At least one more set is out there, somewhere, but I’ve never seen them. (The vendor has been massively unhelpful here.) On Friday, the old lady who lives on the first floor took me to the key shop on Piața Traian, a very Romanian outfit which you got to via a courtyard. The key lady had two dogs, including a female Rottweiler – I think – who was happily sleeping on the floor. She cut both my front door keys and made a replacement intercom swipe thingy, but when I got home one of the front door keys didn’t fit and the swipe thing didn’t work either. Two trips later and I got the other front door key to fit but still no luck with the intercom doohickey, so next week I’ll go somewhere else and see if I can get that sorted.

The men’s final at Wimbledon is almost upon us. I’m playing singles tennis later, so if the match goes beyond three sets I won’t see the end of it. What a line-up. An anti-vax super-spreader against an egomaniac. A bully. There were kids like Kyrgios when I was at school. Both finalists are extraordinary talents, however, and you can’t take your eyes off Kyrgios when he plays. You never know what’s coming next. Djokovic is the clear favourite, but it wouldn’t be massive shock if Kyrgios was to win. He’ll be insufferable if he does. There was quite a turnaround in yesterday’s women’s final where Rybakina grabbed the match by the scruff of the neck in set two; her hold from 0-40 in 3-2 in the third was the key to her victory over Ons Jabeur, who I hoped would win. Yesterday’s men’s doubles final was a belter of a match. A slow burner you might say, not because of the tennis but because the players were largely unknown and the crowd didn’t fully get into it until the later stages. I was hoping the super tie-break could be avoided, but no such luck. The Australian pairing, who had saved five match points in their semi-final, won the shoot-out 10-2 – a procession in the end, after an encounter that had been on a knife-edge throughout.

Poker. I haven’t mentioned that for ages because it’s way down my priority list. I had one win at the end of May, and since then I’ve had a torrid time, playing 35 tournaments without making the top three once. It should be easier to snag a podium position now that the fields are smaller because the Russians are gone – they were rightly kicked out shortly after the war started – but things just haven’t happened for me. I just need to be patient.

The temperature has dropped from the high 30s to something bearable. I might write again tomorrow and talk about the crazy business with Boris.

Language teaching - Life :)

Game time

June 30, 2022 by 0 Comments

I don’t think I’ve totally lost my marbles yet, although many of the Romanians I meet think I already have for deciding to live here. I’ve been wondering how I’ll cope should I survive long enough to be marble-free, be that thirty years or twenty or ten, because even now I’m almost drowning in a sea of passwords and captchas and invalid formats. Today was particularly bad because I had to reactivate stuff and make payments using my new bank card. Then when it came to logging into plutoman – logging into me – I needed three attempts. My fingers just weren’t going the right way anymore.

Talking of aging, June is almost over, and that’s the month that reminds me that my parents aren’t getting any younger. Dad has just turned 72; Mum had her 73rd birthday two weeks ago. The last time I saw them they were 68 and 69. I miss them a lot. October isn’t far away.

It’s been a scorching June. We hit 35 today, and we’ve got 38s forecast for both tomorrow and Friday. Luckily, unlike today, I won’t have to go anywhere. Today my lessons got a bit messed up because somebody came over to take measurements for installing gas in this block. I went up to one of the apartments on the fourth (top) floor to have a discussion (or more like a listen) with the gas man. The heat up there was something else.

Today I finished the first plays of my new skyscraper board game with the two teenage boys. This morning I was surprised to see that my student’s family had acquired a kitten. We read a bit, and then finished our game. I lost 22-19; it became clear that he would win when we each had about four turns left of our allotted 30. (The game lasts 60 turns – or 60 months – regardless of the number of players.) In the game with the other kid which we concluded this evening, I won 23-19, and it was only clear I would win on my penultimate turn. Most importantly, the boys seemed to enjoy themselves and were obviously engaged enough the first time around that they could still remember how the game worked a week later. Interestingly, they each had different tactics.

Wordle. I thought I might bomb out today as I needed all six attempts. This is the fourth time it’s taken me all six since I started in January. I hoped GAFFY (an adjective for someone who makes lots of gaffes) wasn’t a word.

I had an easier time in Romanian. STARE is a common word in that language just like in English, so I often start with that word in both languages. (It doesn’t have the same meaning in Romanian, where it means a state or situation.) As for my lucky guess ALUNA, that’s a hazelnut.

Woodle is a harder version of Wordle, which I try every evening. Woodle tells you how many greens (letters in the word in the right place) and yellows (letters in the word but in the wrong place) you have, but not which letters they are. If standard Wordle is pool, Woodle is snooker. Here was my attempt today, where I started with four frustrating turns but then struck gold. Attempts are unlimited; today’s six is roughly average.

On a forum I suggested a variant of Wordle which lies about one letter every row, then somebody (who knows how to codify or whatever it’s called) made it. Independently of me, of course. I really like this one, which gives you eight attempts. The red letters are the lies:

Language teaching - Life :)

Old English

June 13, 2022 by 0 Comments

I Skyped my parents this morning from the café next to the market and by the river. It was a bit noisy there so I moved to a bench by the river bank. It was already hotting up; a shirtless man on the other side of the river hauled in a fish. On Friday I sent Dad a depressing article about the beautiful River Wye being polluted – killed – by chicken factories along the river. He spent much of his childhood around the Wye, which was then teeming with salmon.

Dad mentioned that a new autism clinic had opened in Wellington and it was a shame I wasn’t still there and able to help out in some capacity. Helping people with autism was near the top of my list of career options when I left my insurance job in 2009, but that never eventuated.

The lady whose birthday was last weekend lent me two small English textbooks entitled Eckersley’s Essential English – triple E – dating from the fifties or so. They aren’t without value today, even if the language is outdated. The illustrations are delightful; they remind me of the John Thompson’s elementary piano books that I learnt from when I was little. Here are a few pages:

Interestingly in the second picture she’s circled the pronunciation of “always” with a schwa, as if she didn’t quite believe it. It does seem extremely old-fashioned; I’m not even sure the Queen says it that way. Or Jacob Rees-Mogg. In the eighth picture the author seemed to think that marquesses were something a student needed to know about.

It’s that time of year again that everything smells in Timișoara. The ripe fruit, the lime trees, the general scent of summer heat. That’s nice, but on Friday there was also the distinct whiff of pollution when cycling along the busy roads. Unfortunately that is a problem here.

The weather put paid to tennis once again yesterday, but it should go ahead later today.

Buying property - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

The bells are tolling on my old flat

May 16, 2022 by 0 Comments

This morning I got the keys. After eight months or so of looking at apartments that mostly have views of other apartments, this bit has all happened at breakneck speed. As long as you’ve got the money, nobody cares. It really is just like buying a car. Or a shaorma. My brother was amazed when I told him how fast the process is here (in the UK it really drags on) and it was actually at least twice as quick as I told him it would be.

After getting the keys I called my parents and gave them a Skype tour of the flat on my phone. They were remarkably impressed, and not at all bored by my showing them every room in minute detail. At 81 square metres it’s plenty big enough for one person, and it’s amazingly well kitted out, right down to lime green cutlery that matches the kitchen cupboards. Initially I’ll have to buy very little. The only thing that’s semi-urgent, living-wise, is a new mattress on at least one of the two beds. My teaching room will require some thought and a little expense.

I panicked a bit last Wednesday when I tried to pay the vendor online and was met with a bewildering array of fields that I didn’t know how to fill in. I got to the bank when it opened the next morning, and the lady was so helpful. She even laughed at the bank account code – ROBU, which probably stands for Romanian Banks United or something, but is also the name of the ex-mayor of Timișoara. She really put my mind at ease. Sometimes nothing beats a real human being. I say sometimes, because in Romania there’s no guarantee that you’ll get that level of service; it was my lucky day.

A couple of work highlights of a very warm second week of May come to mind. First, I did a longish translation from Romanian to English that included a 105-word behemoth of a sentence. So much translation out of Romanian involves gutting crazy-long sentences. Second, I contacted Macmillan to see if they still had the audio of a lovely podcast interview from 2007 of somebody called Boris who does consultancy work but whose dream job is to be a clown. (I used it once before in a test that I created.) Alas, it had disappeared into the ether, but I was impressed by the Macmillan guy’s prompt reply.

Two singles tennis matches this weekend, both against Florin, the 60-year-old guy who comes from the Nadia Comăneci era when sport really mattered. Yesterday I won 6-4 6-3 – it was a rather scrappy match lacking many rallies but chock-full of service breaks, 13 of them in fact. That evening I went to the “boat” bar (or restaurant) by the river, with him, his wife and a friend. As well as some beers I had sarmale and mămăligă, about as Romanian a meal as you can get. Florin’s wife likes to talk about all matters linguistic, so we had a good conversation. Beautiful Romanian words came up like ogoit and prispă. It was nice to be totally within my comfort zone. (I suppose that doesn’t happen very often.) In today’s match with Florin, I dropped only two points in the first five games. I then led 6-1 2-0. But he hung in there, I started to wobble especially on serve, and I surrendered meekly towards the end of the set, losing it 6-4. I didn’t love my chances in set three, but I remembered all those times in about 2005 or ’06 that I came through matches like this, and after I eked out the early games he started to spray errors and I won the third set 6-0. Tennis is weird. Then, after we got off the court, it happened. I bumped into S, whom I met on Tinder in 2018. There was always a lot of her anyway, but now she’s seven months pregnant. “I’m practically a planet,” she said. With her obvious news, it was nice to have some of my own. Maybe we’ll meet up again. I might invite her to a housewarming, in which case I’d better remember that she’s vegetarian. (Not many of them in these parts.) S was with a friend, whose name I could tell began with an A because she was wearing a big “A” necklace. (I could also be pretty sure than it ended with an A, because just about all female names in Romania do, the only exception I can think of being Carmen.) Bumping into S for the first time since December 2019 reminded me of a lovely novel I read: Three Dollars by Elliott Perlman. The book is set in Melbourne in the eighties. At intervals of several years, the protagonist bumps into a woman called Amanda, and each time he only has three dollars to his name.

I’m writing this from the old place. The place with the bells going off 96 times a day. I’ll miss the bells; they’ve ruled my life for the last 5½ years.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker - Romania

Happy Easter

April 22, 2022 by 0 Comments

My birthday – another one – was on Wednesday. It was just a normal day for me; I didn’t even see anybody face-to-face except when I looked at yet another apartment. (That decision isn’t getting any easier. I’m glad it’s now the long Orthodox Easter weekend, so agents are unlikely to hassle me for a few days.)

Yesterday I had my last lesson with a 16-year-old girl. Her mother had contacted me the day before to say that it would be the last one. We’d had some good and productive sessions in the last few months, so seeing the clock tick down on our final meeting was rather sad.

The weekend before last, I went to Lake Surduc with Mark (the teacher) and his dog (or really his girlfriend’s dog). It’s funny how I see him quite often but haven’t seen his girlfriend since around Christmas. She probably doesn’t like me. I can imagine their conversations. “I suppose you’ll be seeing your mate this weekend, then.” “I might do.” “God, he’s so boring!” “He isn’t really. And you don’t exactly like trudging through mud, do you?” Maybe she’s just very conscientious and spends her Sundays making lesson plans for the following week like my mother used to do. Anyway, Surduc is about an hour’s drive away. I’d been there once before, when my friends from St Ives came over in 2017, but we didn’t stop apart from to ask locals if there was any nearby accommodation. This time they’d clearly had a deluge of rain overnight – it was extremely muddy. There was no path around the lake, so you had to clamber through the adjoining wood. There were plenty of ups and downs. We passed shepherds on their small farms, and at one point we were met by six menacing dogs that had come from the farm below. On the shore of the lake we saw dozens of four-pointed (tetrahedral) seed pods that looked like medieval weapons. These came from water chestnut trees. We also saw some rather large shells. I had to cycle to his place in Dumbrăvița and back, and I later played two sets of tennis, so I managed to burn off some calories that day.

Some of those spiky seed pods
A shell and a muddy Doc Marten

Today is Orthodox Good Friday, or as they call it here, Vinerea Mare (“Big Friday”). I’ve just had a lesson with a lady in Bucharest, and I’m about to try and make a Romanian-style marble cake, following a video on Youtube (in Romanian) that has had ten million views. Easter is a much bigger deal here than in most of the English-speaking world, and it seems relatively free of commercialisation. It’s a family occasion, with a lot of traditional food. It’s the only time of year that Romanians normally eat lamb – as well as roasting the meat, they use the innards to make drob, a kind of loaf that also has an egg inside. There’s the usual sarmale and salată de boeuf, then for dessert they have various cakes including pască, which is made with sweet cheese.

After a nice run of final tables (but no wins, dammit) I withdrew $1375 from my PokerStars account. Of course I didn’t quite get all of that because they hit you with a withdrawal fee and an exchange rate margin that adds up to nearly 5% (or at least it did in my case). I’ve now got $719 sitting in my account. Maybe I should have withdrawn the whole lot and ended this unproductive distraction for good, but the SCOOP tournament series is coming up soon, so I thought I’d at least try my hand at that.

This was the scene outside my window last night, following a screech of tyres and metal. I don’t think anyone was badly hurt.

Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching

How times — and words — change

April 4, 2022 by 0 Comments

We had beautiful weather at the start of last week with temperatures in the 20s, but we’ve been plunged right back into winter on 3rd April. We even had a light flurry of snow earlier today. Tennis has been impossible this weekend. What a turnaround.

I’ve got my new Samsung phone. I’m enjoying the extra real estate of a 6.5-inch screen, the battery lasts what feels like ages after my recent iPhone experience, and the camera does its job. The bad news is that I’m constantly monkeying around with settings to stop it from doing really maddening things, and failing almost every time, but at least I have a working phone. On Monday or Tuesday or whatever day it was, I FaceTimed my parents for the last time on my old phone; when I hung up, the battery percentage was way down into single figures, and no book no matter how heavy would keep the cable in place for it to charge. Damn. What about my contacts? My students and stuff? I’d tried importing them before with no success, so now there was only one thing for it: I scribbled down all the names and numbers as fast as I could before the battery went dead, which it did 15 minutes afterwards, and then tapped them all into my new phone manually.

Some people are easy to teach. Others aren’t. The eight-year-old girl I see on Skype each week is firmly in the latter category. Seriously, what am I supposed to do with her for an hour? What can I even give her that she can’t already get from YouTube? (I know she watches a lot of YouTube videos.) You’re bored, she told me on Friday, in the second half of the session when her father was (annoyingly) present. You’re telling me I’m boring, aren’t you? No, she doesn’t mean that, her father assured me. Of course not. Yeah, right. None of this is her fault, and I can only imagine what primary school teachers went through when they taught online during the pandemic.

Yesterday morning I had my maths lesson with Matei. We’re going through past “checkpoint” papers, which are exams they give you in the UK at age 14 but don’t immediately count for anything. (He’s going through the British system.) At the start of the session his mother gave me icre – fish-egg paste on pieces of bread, and doboș, a Hungarian layered cake. At ten in the morning, I had to work my way up to the icre, like edging into sea water that I know is too cold, but I finally took the plunge and it was fine. The doboș was delicious. After the session, his parents told me about an online influencer who knew all kinds of magic tricks to get people to view your content, and I was made to watch a video about him on their smart TV. Mercifully, it was only a few minutes long. What makes you think I should see this?

I looked at another property yesterday, and will get to see one more tomorrow. The owner of the place – a lady in her seventies and no more than five foot tall – was lovely. She seemed a typical older Romanian woman, with all her preserves jarred and labelled in the pantry. Talking to older Romanians gives me a fascinating window on their lives, and makes a nice change from hearing about ambitious career plans and trips to Greek islands.

I’ve been watching a weird series on Netflix, with a weirdly long title to match: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. Some exercises I did last week on car parts made me think of some other weirdly long titles from the recently (and sadly) departed Meat Loaf: I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That), and Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are. Both those songs were on the hugely successful Bat Out of Hell II album, which came out when I was a teenager.

This was my attempt at yesterday’s Wordle:

I was lucky to get so close with my second guess, but as for the actual solution, I thought, when did people start using this word? Luckily, there’s something called Google Ngrams which shows you how word frequencies have changed over time in printed material. You can even compare words, such as trope and tripe. Trope has indeed exploded in my lifetime:

Below is how the spelling of the country I live in has changed in English over two centuries. I certainly prefer the current spelling, which only took over in the 1970s. Note how mentions of Romania (spelt in any way) peaked during the Ceaușescu era, and dropped off a bit in the 1990s.

My mother still sometimes refers to the sort of computer you hold in your hand, like the one I’ve just bought, as a telephone:

It used to be unprintable, didn’t it? It’s now six times as printable as it was at the turn of the century.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis

No more marathons, and more’s the pity

March 27, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve got my TV tuned to BBC news, with the war now centred on Lviv in the west after the Kremlin said they’d concentrate on the Donbas region having been pushed back by the Ukrainians. Since the first morning of the war, none of this has made any sense at all. Joe Biden has just made a speech, saying at the end that “for God’s sake this man cannot remain in power”. Whenever I see Biden speak about the Ukraine war, I wonder what the orange turd might have come out with.

Today I had my maths lesson in Dumbrăvița – he did well on a practice exam paper – and then when I got home I had a last-minute cancellation, meaning I just one had English lesson before stepping on the tennis court. I played two sets, both with the woman who struggles a bit with her footwork, so I had to run a bit, which was no bad thing. It was a lovely early evening for tennis, and it’s been a great week of weather all round. Blue skies every day.

Yesterday I called my aunt, and this time she answered. I remembered to add “Auntie” before her name. She was much better than she can be. In the past she’s seemed unaware of anything beyond her four walls. She’ll say the weather is bad, I’ll then mention that it’s fine and sunny where I am, and then she’ll almost seem put out by my mentioning other weather. Incorrect weather, as she sees it. I got none of that yesterday. We spent most of the ten minutes or so discussing the war. She still did her usual trick of ending the “conversation” when I still had things I wanted to say.

My aunt would get on well with the eight-year-old girl in Germany whom I teach on Skype. Yesterday’s lesson with her was especially hard because her father was with her the whole time. I made what I thought were fairly strong noises to say that I’d prefer it if he’d damn well go away, but he paid no notice. Half-way through the hour-long lesson her mind wandered. She must be tired, I said to her father. No, she’s just bored, he said. There might not be a whole lot I can do about that. Her English has got noticeably better in the time I’ve taught her. I think that’s down to YouTube more than me; her accent is very American.

Wednesday saw the return of Zoli, my first-ever student here, way back in November 2016. I hadn’t seen him since the very start of the pandemic in Romania, two years ago, when I joined him on a trip to the mountains. As we drove there, he told me that the hut had been closed because of the virus and we’d have to sneak in, and I got angry at him for not telling me before. Though it was beautiful up there in the snow, I was aware that a tsunami of disease and death was about to hit us. I thought I might never see him again, so it was a great pleasure to receive a text from him to say that he wanted to restart lessons. Wednesday’s meeting was hardly a lesson: it was a chat followed by a game of Bananagrams.

I’ve ordered a Samsung phone to replace my iPhone 5½ (as I call it) which I got as a present almost five years ago. My present phone doesn’t charge unless I place a heavy book on it, and then its battery runs down almost visibly (actually visibly if I’m making a video call, say), so I end up not using it much. It’s a low-end Samsung, called an A13 (it cost about NZ$300 or £150) but it seems to do everything I could ever want and much more. What it won’t do, however, is FaceTime, so I’ll have to switch to Skype or WhatsApp or something for keeping in touch with my parents. FaceTime has been so convenient.

Amid all the news of the war, they’ve been showing the PR disaster that is P&O, the once-proud British shipping company. P&O stood for (and presumably still does stand for) Peninsular and Oriental, a name that conjures up the world’s great trade routes and general intrepidness. Now it’s Dubai-owned (ugh), and the name makes me think of an outfit that lays off 800 of its staff on Zoom without giving any notice, and now has a ship that is deemed unseaworthy.

And finally, back to tennis. Ashleigh Barty has decided to retire from tennis at the age of just 25, at the pinnacle of the game. After winning Wimbledon and then her home grand slam in Melbourne, she probably thought, just what else can I achieve, and why not play cricket or golf or any of the other sports I’m ridiculously talented in. Tennis will miss her, though; I remember not long ago hearing some commentators suggesting that she might be too nice to ever be a champion. In other news, the no-tie-break final set, which has produced extraordinary drama over the last half-century, is no more. The movers and shakers of the tennis world thought we’d all be better off without that suspense, and now all four grand slams will be (quote) enhanced by a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-all in the final set, as the Australian Open has employed since 2019. I’m always wary of that marketing-speak word enhance. The new system has been billed as a one-year trial, but you don’t usually trial something in the biggest events on the calendar. It’s possible that, say, Wimbledon reverts to what they used before, but in all likelihood this will be a permanent change. Well, until someone else comes along and decides to shorten things even further.