Language teaching

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

Not fit for much

December 6, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’ve got a cold, again, though this one is worse. My left sinuses are killing me, causing my eye to puff up slightly, and I’m inhaling steam to relieve the pain. It’s about time I got myself a neti pot. The only good news is that I slept very well last night – when was the last time I got nine hours? – so I felt more refreshed this morning. Today is a lazy day – add the rain to the pain, and I’m not fit for much other than online poker. I played three tournaments this morning, making two final tables in which I finished fourth and fifth. My bankroll is $1208.

I had a funny week of work. My brand new student, whose Skype name was something like (but not quite) “madi96”, didn’t show up. I don’t want be generationist, but those young people, dammit. Millennium Man, who started with me a few weeks ago, has given up on me too, without saying anything. On Thursday I started with the eleven-year-old twins, and the boy never showed his face for the whole 90 minutes. He said his camera wasn’t working, but I wasn’t too sure. I asked him to sit next to his sister (whose English was impressive), but he didn’t want to. On Friday I had a bad lesson with the seven-year-old girl in Germany. We normally have two half-hour sessions (on Mondays and Fridays), but last week she started swimming lessons on Mondays, so we had a full hour session on Friday. Bad idea. She was bored in no time. How many more minutes? Um, forty. She was clearly expecting a number like three. When I asked her a question, she didn’t even say yes or no, I just got grunts. Hunhnuh. So what do you want to do? I don’t know. Are you bored? Hunhnuh. Please make it stop.

I’ve been getting messages and phone calls from the father of Matei, the boy I taught for two and a half years. “Don’t forget about us,” he texted me this morning. Now he wants me to give Matei (aged 13½) maths lessons. The only time I ever taught maths was in Auckland in 2010. He wants lessons to be face-to-face, not online. (He and his family are all vaccinated.) I can do it I suppose – probably on a Saturday, and I won’t be playing tennis on that day until the spring – but it’ll takes me half an hour to get over there on my bike, so they’ll have to pay for it.

Mark, the guy who teaches at British School, invited me to join him on a road trip, but I simply couldn’t take him up on that offer. I’ll poke my head out the door now, despite the grim weather. That’s as far as I’m going.

Buying property - Language teaching - Music - Poker

We all need a lift

November 26, 2021 by 0 Comments

I had a new and interesting discussion topic in this morning’s lesson: golf. My student lived and worked in the UK and still does a lot of business with corporate Brits. Football is their biggest small-talk topic; golf is number two. It’s amazing quite how much jargon there is in the golf world, and how many normal everyday English words take on a different, specific meaning on the course: club, drive, rough, bunker, eagle, and so on. Oh, and bogey. The sport is almost non-existent in Romania, and his knowledge of the game was unsurprisingly similar. We happened to talk about this as Mum was coming to the end of a four-round golf marathon. I suspect she’ll tell me how it all finished up when we talk tomorrow.

I had a look at another flat on Monday. It was in the same block – the delightfully named U4 – as the two apartments I viewed last Friday, but you access it via a different entrance. Just like the place I owned in New Zealand, this flat is on two floors – but unlike the Wellington flat which took up the bottom two storeys, this place is on the fourth and fifth floors, and the lack of a lift is a deal-breaker for me. Not for me exactly – I’d manage – but when you’re trying to run a business, liftlessness is a serious minus. What a shame, because this spacious apartment otherwise had a lot to recommend it. There were balconies on both floors. Everything looked much sturdier than I’d seen in previous viewings. The build quality seemed to be there. I’ll have to keep looking.

Poker. Another tournament win yesterday, my third in eleven days. It’s been feast or famine this month, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Three wins and little else besides, and you’ll do much better than a string of 7ths and 11ths and 16ths, which is more the norm for me. This latest win came in no-limit single draw, and I was extremely lucky to reach the final table, let alone run out the winner. I played four tournaments in all yesterday, including an attempt at pot-limit five-card draw (high), which came to a screeching halt when I ran my pat queen-high straight into a pat threes full. I spent some time on Tuesday working out an equivalence between very strong hands in badugi, five-card draw and deuce-to-seven lowball; in big-bet draw games, it’s vital to know just how strong – probabilistically – your hand actually is. I made $62 overall yesterday; my bankroll is now up to $1194.

My favourite album right now is the one Romanian folk-rock band Celelalte Cuvinte (which means “the other words”) put out in 1987. Listen to it here.

Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Trying to keep up

November 15, 2021 by 0 Comments

I had seven lessons scheduled for Thursday. That would have been a record, but by the Romanian law of low averages it was pretty unlikely that they’d all actually happen. In the end, only four did. The guy who probably didn’t have Covid cancelled, then the new woman cancelled because she’d had a fight with her boyfriend, then I got a message from the twelve-year-old girl’s mum to say that she was ill. In the final case I had no complaints.

Saturday morning was cold, with thick fog. I went to the market in Mehala, which isn’t a million miles from that house I’d looked at the previous day, but didn’t buy anything. When I came back I had my lesson with the young couple, which went fine. I then watched an episode of Black Mirror. Hang the DJ, season four, episode four. I nearly didn’t watch it because I knew it was all about relationships, something I find ever so slightly triggering, but it was great episode and I’m glad I watched it.

After Black Mirror it was time for some poker. A fixed-limit badugi tournament with a $5.50 buy-in and 96 entries. I haven’t run well in that tournament in general, and on multiple occasions I had one foot out of the exit door. But I kept surviving, and when we got down to six players, all my Christmases came at once. I amassed a big stack which I never relinquished, and although we had a protracted short-handed battle, I was able to run out the winner for a profit of $90 in a little under four hours. What a surprise that was. It was my first win in 90 tournaments – that sounds bad, but in the intervening period I had four second places and two thirds. Yesterday, normal service resumed – three tournaments in which I got precisely nowhere. My bankroll is now $1096.

I’ve been listening to End of the Line by the Traveling Wilburys. (When I was younger, I imagined it was Wilberries, a kind of fruit. It’s only one letter away from those wimberries that I picked over the summer.) It’s a great song, and one that reminds me of the simple Twizel house we lived in on Princes Street in Temuka in the winter of ’89, before moving to a place on Richard Pearse Drive. We had no TV, and made do with the radio that was tuned to either 93 Gold or Radio Caroline. We always got the results from races eight, nine and ten. The scratchings and quinellas and trifectas. Racing seemed a big part of Kiwi life back then. I’m pretty sure one of the bedrooms had a waterbed, which were all the rage in the late eighties over there. There was always the pungent smell of chimney smoke, which we never had in the UK.

I played tennis again yesterday. Once again it was singles with the guy of nearly sixty who is like the Duracell bunny. How does he never get tired? I won the first two games, then he won the next three. I edged back in front, and on his serve at 4-5 down, he led 30-0 but I levelled the game at 30-all. The next point was an exhausting long rally, which I won to bring up set point, but I hit long on both the next two points and he dominated the rest of the set. I think that long point ultimately cost me. I was soon in a deep hole at 5-7, 1-4, having lost seven games out of eight. I was struggling physically while he was as fresh as a daisy. I also couldn’t win the important points. He had a killer shot to my backhand corner that I found hard to combat, and he saved plenty of game points with it. Despite the fatigue and sweat, I clung on, and reached 4-4. At 30-all in the next game, I had him pinned to both sidelines before eventually winning the point ten shots after I thought I’d won it. But he played the next three points as if nothing had happened, winning them all. Quite extraordinary. He led 30-0 in game ten to move within two points from victory, but I won the next four points to break him. At 5-5 I held serve from 15-40, but then he held to love to force a tie-break. I won the shoot-out 7-4 and we finished all square, but I was left wondering how somebody of that age could be so fit. I saw that sometimes with the trip leaders on the day tramps I did around Wellington. Is it all in the genes?

Here are some pictures of abandoned Timișoara. There are ex-swimming pools dotted around the city. If you look closely you can see the name of Morărit CILT, an old flour mill.

A sunny afternoon along by the Bega
Coronavirus - Language teaching - Music

Don’t freak out!

October 28, 2021 by 0 Comments

It’s a beautiful Thursday morning here. I’ve already had two lessons. The Rapid Bucharest football team bus has just pulled up outside the cathedral. They’re playing Poli Timișoara in a cup game this evening.

During a lesson on Tuesday afternoon I started to feel less than 100%. A stuffy nose, a few sniffles, fatigue. Normally I wouldn’t think anything of that – they’re typical symptoms of a cold – but when I’m living in a country where daily Covid death tolls are in the 500s, that’s panic-stations territory. As it happens, I was paying the doctor my monthly visit that evening, and naturally I asked him if I should be alarmed. He took my temperature and measured my oxygen saturation level, and said I was probably fine. I slept badly that night and had all sorts of weird dreams, and the morning after I felt (and looked) pretty groggy. I called my parents and asked them not to freak out. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Covid but I got a rapid test from the pharmacy anyway. It isn’t easy to do the test – how to I swab my tonsils without wanting to gag, or twizzle the swab around several times in my nostril without sneezing? As expected, the test (which has a high false-negative rate) was negative. Yesterday I improved throughout the day, and last night I slept well. Mum called me back last night, and was glad I looked better. South Islanders are understandably mad that two cases of the virus are now in Christchurch. Why there are no restrictions on flights between north and south beats me.

I’ve got a new student – a 21-year-old guy – and I had my first lesson with him this morning. Yesterday he introduced himself on the phone as Răzvan, but he popped up on Skype as the rather non-Romanian-sounding Memet. Today he told me he was a musician – a saxophone player in a travelling band – and he’s still enrolled in high school after having to repeat whole years, although he never actually attends any lessons. He said he wanted a change of lifestyle. A job? A career? A salary? Oh no, he said, my only boss is God. He didn’t seem particularly well educated (failing whole years isn’t a good sign); when I used the English word “precarious”, and then gave him the translation precar which isn’t an uncommon word in Romanian, he didn’t know what I meant. But he’s already paid me for today’s session and now plans to have two lessons a week, so he should be OK.

Last night my student gave me the happy news that she’d passed her driving test at her first attempt, having only started learning about three months ago. She told me she still feels uncomfortable driving at more than 40 km/h. Getting a licence at that stage of the game would have been unthinkable for me. It took me ages to get mine (at my third attempt, not counting the test that was postponed because of snow). British tests were bloody hard. Atypical of young men, I was low on confidence and unmotivated to get my licence until I really needed to. Running and insuring a car in the UK was ridiculously expensive, even back then. I then moved to New Zealand where I would have been utterly screwed if I’d been unable to drive.

In one of my weird dreams, a song started playing. Heck, what is that song? Ah yes, it’s one of those songs that I voted for to be the UK’s Eurovision entry, a very long time ago, by calling an 0898 number. It might have been ’93 or ’94. It’s amazing what your mind can dredge up in a dream. Yesterday I found it on YouTube – it’s Lover Come In, a beautiful non-Eurovision-y song written and performed by Brendan Faye, a Liverpool folk singer. It just missed out on being Britain’s 1991 entry (even earlier than I thought), coming second to some forgettable poppy crap that came in the middle of the pack on Eurovision night. Had Faye’s song been nominated, it could well have won the whole shebang, and I’d be hearing it now on Romanian radio 30 years later. (Eurovision is big here, for some reason.) I wonder what happened to him.

The MicroMillions series has started on Poker Stars. It’s a series of small buy-in tournaments with big fields in a wide variety of games. I plan to play two of these tournaments tonight.

Coronavirus - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

Keeping my distance and some old Romanian

October 10, 2021 by 0 Comments

This afternoon’s lesson with the young couple was a no-go after their son got sick, then tennis got washed out, so I finally got round to watching the 2011 film Contagion on Netflix. It wasn’t in the same league as Station Eleven, the brilliant pandemic-based book that I read 18 months before Covid, but it would have been instructive had I seen it in the early days of our real-life pandemic. Some things were strikingly similar. In the film, Forsythia was touted as a miracle cure on social media, just like ivermectin is right now, at the expense of vaccines that really do save lives. There were bats and what looked like wet markets. There was much talk of R-rates. There was someone complaining that spring and summer had been stolen from her, just like people have done in real life. (I found spring 2020 to be blissful.) An interesting idea in the film was a Vietnam War-style vaccine lottery where people get the jab earlier or later depending on what day of the year they’re born. Actually, it would be an utterly crazy idea when you think about it for five seconds, but it does make the assumption that the population would be desperate to get their hands on the stuff.

Daily Covid deaths in Romania are hovering around 300. This morning on the news I heard the L-word (in English, while everything else was in Romanian) for the first time during this dreadful third or fourth wave, however you prefer to count these things. I’d be all for a lockdown. The mess we’re in is due to the unvaccinated people, but the rest of us (the minority!) are massively impacted by this too. When hospitals are stretched to this extent, it’s not just Covid that could kill us.

Even though I’m fully jabbed, I’m still keeping the hell away from people. Luckily I can in a way most people can’t. Last night one of my students said he’d been to the gym. It seems utter madness that gyms should be open right now, even if you’ve got your green thingy. This morning I went to an open-air market; mask wearing was universal among shoppers although not among stallholders. I was in and out in 15 minutes. That’s the limit to how exposed I choose to be right now. But most people seem to have a higher bar, even if they’re unjabbed. It’s a far cry from the panic you saw in the early days, when people were elbowing revolving doors and disinfecting surfaces, even though we faced a less contagious variant back then. Of course, 18 months ago we thought that surfaces (or fomites, as they explained in the film) were a major mode of transmission.

In the absence of tennis I thought I’d talk about Domnul Sfâra, the 86-year-old who plays. He’s tiny – he can’t be more than five foot three. In a game I hit the ball directly to him, preferably to his forehand, and plop my serve over. He used to be a teacher, at a university I think, and spent some years in Moscow. He has a number of catchphrases. After sufficient warming up, he says M-am încâlziiit, meaning “I’m warmed up”. (Încâlzit only has one i. I spelt it with three to show that he draws out that final vowel.) If somebody misses an easy shot, he says siguranță prea mare, which seems to mean that they played it too safe, although in reality it’s usually the opposite. At a score of 15-15, he usually says “fifty-fifty”, in English, presumably thinking that’s actually how we say that score. The -teen and -ty numbers cause Romanians no end of confusion (and me too; I often simply can’t tell whether someone’s saying 13 or 30, say, so I repeat it back to them in Romanian). He usually says 0 as nulă, which I’m guessing is an older term for zero, as is commonly used in Romania today. (Nula is the usual term for zero in Serbian, and it seems that Slavic terms have sometimes been replaced by more Latinate words in recent decades. Prispă, meaning porch, has largely been supplanted by the much more boring terasă, for instance.) He also says the number three as tri, as I sometimes hear from old men on the market, instead of the standard trei.) As for “out”, which Romanians have stolen from us, he pronounces that with two syllables, a short ah before launching into a prolonged ooot.

From next week I’ll be having two lessons a week with the twelve-year-old girl instead of just one. She and her mum think I’m doing a good job. It’s nice to get that kind of feedback. She has come on in leaps and bounds since we started 15 months ago.

I’ll probably play some poker tonight. It’s been a mixed bag of late, although I seem to be improving in Omaha hi-lo, which has been something of a nemesis for me. My bankroll is $997.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - New Zealand - Tennis

Amid all the gloom, I’m more bullish on the flat thing

October 3, 2021 by 0 Comments

It’s been a rather depressing week. HMS Romania is sinking and the deckchairs are being rearranged as I write this. On Friday there was yet another fire in a Covid ward, this time in Constanța, killing seven. Smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, sprinklers, they’re practically a foreign concept here. The hospital’s fire safety certificate probably took some backhanders to get. (I spoke to my sister-in-law on Friday night, and she was incredulous that people actually died in a hospital fire. For the third time in a year.) As for Covid itself, nobody knows what you can and can’t do anymore, except that we now have the green pass which allows vaxed people to get into places that the unvaxed can’t, although I bet the “border checks” are pretty damn porous in places. I thought that tennis would be a no-go this weekend, but I got a call on Friday to say that I could play as long as I had my green pass. So yesterday I turn up at four, I show my green pass to the woman in the hut, and I’m good to go. Then Ionuț turns up, and hang on a sec, you haven’t been jabbed, have you? In fact I seem to remember you being vehemently anti. Hmmm, I bet he slips the woman a few extra lei and he gets to play. Fifty-fifty chance at a minimum. This is Romania. But no, sorry mate, no green pass, see you later. He didn’t complain, and a minute later he was off in his car.

The average daily death toll from Covid in Romania is nearing 200, and set to go much higher. How could it not when vaccination rates are so low and our restrictions are so watered down? In January I naively thought the pandemic would be just about over by now. I didn’t see Delta coming and I stupidly thought that people would jump at the first opportunity to get vaccinated just like I did. I mean, why wouldn’t you? The last six months have been a massive eye-opener.

I got a lot more enthusiastic about buying a flat last week. The agent sent me some pictures, and you know what, these are nice. Good locations too, outside the ultra-modern areas that might send me into a mental tailspin. Some of them were even fully furnished. They’re pricier certainly than the one I looked at two weeks ago, but I might just have to fork out the money. It’s money I have, after all. It’s been hard to tee up any viewings because of how things work (or don’t) here, pandemic or not, but hopefully I can see two or three in the coming week. I’ve got to do this.

I ended up getting into an argument with my parents this morning. Jacinda Ardern is now doing a pretty terrible job apparently, because of race relations. That’s Priority A to them, especially Mum. And everybody else in New Zealand thinks so too! Aha! There you go! I’m not saying that their concerns don’t matter, because they do, but from my vantage point New Zealand has far bigger problems than that, ones that affect people day to day. Number one is surely that it’s too expensive. How do you buy your first home? Maybe you simply don’t. But that’s hardly a problem my parents face, nor the people Mum talks to at the Geraldine golf club or her church coffee group. My point was that it’s dangerous to assume that everybody’s priorities are the same as yours, especially if 80% of the population don’t even live on the same island, and you rarely meet anyone under sixty. I remember my super-intelligent friend from university being almost certain that Remain would win the EU referendum by a mile because everyone he knew thought Brexit was a dumb idea. Same thing. “Everyone he knew” was a tiny cross-section. In 2014 I remember a colleague being shocked that National won the NZ election because “nobody voted for them”. Talking of 2014, John Key’s “hermit kingdom” comments were ridiculous. God, that “NZ Inc.” backdrop. I remember one of the CEOs I worked under (the only one who was a complete arse) used to go on about “En Zed Inc”, which I found nauseating.

Work hasn’t been bad, though I wouldn’t mind one or two more students. (A lockdown would help.) I had a whole hour with that seven-year-old girl. (Or perhaps more accurately, she had a whole hour with me.) She got through my exercises on numbers and colours and farm animals faster than I expected. Twenty minutes left. Now what? Some conversation, but it was hard. I’m hoping we have two half-hour sessions this week instead; an hour is a long time for someone of that age.

Sunny day today, with more Ionuț-free tennis (poor chap) in store for this afternoon.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker - Politics - Tennis

How exciting!

September 26, 2021 by 0 Comments

My uncle – another one – is celebrating his 80th birthday today. He and my aunt visited Timișoara after coming to the UK for my brother’s wedding. A retired (or semi-retired) farmer, he still does a ton of physical work. The idea of slowing down is alien to him. I guess he’s been lucky – he’s lived ten years longer than either his older or younger brother, who both died of cancer. Ten years ago I went to his previous big birthday bash – in the middle of the rugby World Cup, and we watched the All Blacks’ first match against France. Israel Dagg (what a name) was probably man of the match. The world has spun off in an altogether darker direction since then.

Mum and Dad are now in their new place. It was weird seeing them on FaceTime with the new backdrop. So much wood everywhere, including on the ceilings. Dad described parts of the new house as “horrendous” and in dire need of renovation, but his horrendous is my kind of meh. I would just about kill to have their new place, as long as I could transport it out of Geraldine. Just before the definitive move, they had a horrendous day where their lawnmower broke down and my uncle’s (birthday boy’s) trailer, which Dad had borrowed, also needed expensive repairs.

I need to move away from this flat but I don’t want to. That’s the situation I’m in. Again, I’m having flashbacks to 2011, although then I didn’t actually need to move. It’s just that society had told me that someone of my age should buy a property – you’re a failure if you don’t – and my job, which gave me the licence to buy, was a ticking time bomb. And yeah, I thought it might actually make financial sense. But there was no excitement then, and neither is there now. The phrase “How exciting!”, as it relates to buying property, drives me mad. My biggest worry with this move is that it could kill my mental health, which has been so much better ever since I moved to Romania.

Last Monday I did have a look at a place in the Bucovina area, near where I once had lessons. The agent led me up to the fourth – and top – floor of a Ceaușescu-era block. Pinned to the walls of the staircase, bizarrely, were pictures of islands and beach resorts with golden sand and deep blue sea. It was something you might have seen in a prison cell. At the flat I was greeted by an elderly couple who had lived there for 35 years, and a very yappy dog. Everything in the flat had a seventies or eighties feel about it. There was even an old typewriter. The flat was easily big enough, but it would have needed serious work. I mean, it would have been OK for me, but potential students would have found it a turn-off. No lift either (again, I would have coped), and perhaps the biggest minus was a lack of any sort of view.

Then on Thursday I tried to visit some agents. This isn’t like New Zealand or the UK; they’re not really interested in dealing with the public. The first place had an intercom system which nobody answered. They didn’t answer their phone either. Fantastic. Just round the corner was another agency, located in a modern fourth-floor office. It was the same company that I rented this place from when I arrived. A woman took down my details and we had a chat. She told me that the young employee who had just two lessons from me in 2016, but honestly changed my life by tipping me off about the flat I’m in now, had left the company to train as a psychologist. I told her about some of the areas I liked, then inevitably she started peddling brand new apartments in the south of the city. I’ve been to that area, and nothing is more than five years old. I’d worry that living there, even if it might be good for business, would leave me depressed. Maybe not, but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

What else? There’s a Hungarian festival on in the city, perhaps the last thing that’ll be “on” before the plug is pulled. Last night we had country music at Piața Operei and there was even a re-enactment of a battle. They’re selling various bits and bobs, Csiki Sör beer, and overpriced food.

I played singles tennis last night, again with that super-fit near-60-year-old. We only booked the court for an hour, and at the end I was up 6-4, 4-2. I lost the first three games. The first game went 16 points but was almost devoid of rallies. In the third game I had a break point, and hit a shot I thought he might struggle to return, but he ripped a cross-court forehand that was out of the top drawer, and the next two points slipped from my grasp too. It was all happening too damn fast. I made sure I had a good sit-down before coming up to serve. The games had been close, and there was no reason why I couldn’t come back. It was overall a good game with plenty of winners from both of us, although he lost concentration in the middle.

Poker. Back-to-back second places, and big comebacks, on Friday, though I made such bad starts to both tournaments that I couldn’t get many of those damn bounties. After blanking all three of last night’s attempts, my bankroll is $979.

Work. It’s OK but I could do with more of it. (Someone called me wanting only face-to-face lessons. Um, there’s like this thing on the news that you might have seen.) Thursday was a good day, however. One boy in particular has come on so far in his English since I started with him that it blows me away. He’s gone from a kid who knew a few words and didn’t say boo to a goose to an intelligent teenager who has a bloody good command of English. It’s so pleasing to see.

Justin Trudeau has been re-elected prime minister of Canada despite his party losing the popular vote. Their system isn’t nearly as awful as the US one (stupid amounts of money, stupidly long campaign, stupid everything basically) but it still ain’t great. The Germans are going to the polls right now.

Boris Johnson resorted to his schoolboy Franglais shtick again last week. “Prenez un grip”, “donnez-moi un break”. Mildly amusing to an Englishman for whom mumbling pointless French phrases for five years was an iconic part of his upbringing, but it would have fallen flat elsewhere.

It might just be me, but I can’t see how we’ll ever escape from the environmental mess we’re in. Humans are just terrible at dealing with problems that happen incrementally over periods of time greater than a lifetime. We still think we can consume our way out of this. We can’t.

Sorry for making this post so long.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Tennis

Making myself move

September 18, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been on the phone, and I should finally get to look at a couple of apartments on Monday. I need to do this, but motivating myself hasn’t been easy. It’s scary, honestly, and anyway I’m quite happy being slap-bang in the centre of town. While Covid is still ravaging the country it hardly matters that my apartment isn’t ideal for face-to-face teaching or that the cheap-as-chips furniture is on the verge of falling apart. The two I’m interested in are both in a similar area of the city, near a park. If I bought either of them, I’d still have over half the proceeds left from my Wellington apartment, so maybe I could look at buying a rental too.

On Wednesday I started lessons with a seven-year-old girl who lives on the outskirts of Stuttgart. She was born in Germany and speaks both German and Romanian. (By their standards, they’re getting cheap lessons out of me.) With someone that young, it’s never easy, especially online. I mean, keeping your arse on the chair is a skill at that age. In a trial lesson, I only did half an hour with her. I showed her a picture full of stars of various colours. How many blue stars are there? What other colours can you see? When there were still the purple and orange stars to count, I asked her: “Are there any more colours, or gata?” (Gata means “that’s all”.) “Gata,” she happily proclaimed. Her father called me back yesterday to say that yes, she wants to carry on.

The US Open finals. When you think you’ve seen everything in sport, Emma Răducanu goes and rips up the history books. She came from nowhere to win 20 straight sets, one of the greatest prizes in the sport, and $2.5 million. I didn’t stay up and watch her final with Leylah Fernandez but kind of wish I had. Djoković then had his chance to rewrite history too, but he was surprisingly overpowered and outclassed by Daniil Medvedev who hardly put a foot wrong until the last few games. Djoković was flat, and Medvedev, who moved so well for such a big guy (six foot six), took full advantage. The Serb had taken many more hours than his opponent to reach the final and it showed. He might also have been better off skipping Tokyo, where the heat got to him. Still, the crowd, who didn’t know to shut up when a player is about to serve, nearly allowed Djoković back in it. I was glad that Medvedev closed it out in three sets.

Sir Clive Sinclair, of calculator, computer and electric vehicle fame, died yesterday. He was something of a hero where I grew up, not far from Cambridge. There was a Sinclair factory just down the road, and every man and his dog got hold of a Sinclair calculator, which took a 9-volt battery, in the seventies. I think my father still has his, with its blinking red digits. This must have been the second version; the first iteration was famous among maths geeks because if you tried to divide by zero it would actually attempt the calculation and go mad. For a short time (I was maybe seven) we borrowed one of his Spectrum ZX81 computers with rubber keys and that badass rainbow logo. I remember getting it to spit out increasing powers of two, and playing a game called Manic Miner on our second-hand TV; this involved hooking up a cassette player which made weird noises as the game loaded. Clive Sinclair was clearly a clever bugger. I remember seeing him on Late Night Poker, a UK-based poker tournament with hole-card cameras, in the summer of ’99. That was the first time I’d heard of Texas hold ’em.

As for my poker, I’ve managed to get nowhere in my last nine tournaments, and I’m essentially even for the month, with a bankroll of $933.

Mum and Dad are about to move. They keep digging things up of mine, or occasionally my brother’s. This morning Mum asked me if I wanted to keep a nineties-era Wallace and Gromit figure which once contained shower gel. In the end I said yes. They’re now looking forward to finally moving out, although Dad will probably miss their home of 17 years.

The virus is ripping through Romania now, as I knew it would. There was never any doubt. While temperatures remain high and the sun is shining it doesn’t feel too bad, but when we’re surrounded by autumnal fog and the ambulances are blaring every other minute, life will take on the stark metallic grey hue that it did last October, but perhaps even bleaker.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

I’m not a therapist

August 31, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had my 225th two-hour lesson – or should I say therapy session – with a woman who is becoming a giant pain in the arse. I would love her to go away. I have lessons with her son too, and those are highly productive, in complete contrast to anything I have with her. It amazes me how bright and well adjusted he is, considering both his parents are messed up in their own different ways.

Last Thursday I had a lesson with a guy in Brașov; these lessons are always productive and a pleasure. We spent the second half of the session on phrases to use at restaurants. One of these was “the hamburgers are off”, meaning “we’re out of hamburgers”. (Confusingly, we also use “off” to say that food has gone bad.) He said that if he was told that the hamburgers were off, he’d tell them to damn well turn them on then.

Having a bike again is a massive help. It speeds up my life, gives me more options. On Sunday I made a trip to Sânmihaiu Român, for the first time in ages, and got back just before the downpour. The rain totally wiped out the weekend’s tennis.

Poker. Well it hasn’t been that easy to play of late (see next paragraph) but I’ve had a good, or should I say lucky, August. My bankroll is $930, up $226 on the start of the month.

My laptop has been repeatedly crashing. Endless blue screens. CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED. Doesn’t sound good, does it? DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE hardly gave me warm fuzzy feelings either. DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Not less or equal?! Why not just say it’s more, for crying out loud? But more than what? Why be cryptic and meaningless at the same time? At UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION, the fourth blue screen error, I noticed my hard drive was pretty chocka so I dumped a load of my photos onto flash drives, thinking that might help, but it didn’t. Yesterday morning I took my laptop into the repair shop, and they told me I’d need to reinstall Windows 10. It crashed again the moment I switched it on when I came home; it gave me that crap about not less or equal. At that point I gingerly reinstalled Windows 10, and since then, touch wood, it hasn’t crashed. I rely on my laptop for everything. Without it I can’t do my job, it’s that simple.

Last night I talked to one of my students (mid-forties) about this general malaise that seems to have set in around the world, or the western world at least. From a collective standpoint, what’s there to look forward to anymore? What’s the new, big, positive change on the horizon? In the early nineties the Soviet Union broke up, Europe opened its borders, and the internet age began. Greater peace and prosperity, we all hoped. What have we got now? He said he was excited about the prospect of computers becoming more intelligent than humans and starting to dominate us. That doesn’t excite me, that’s for sure.

I was going to write the last part of my trip report, but I’ll tackle that in a separate post.

Language teaching - Travel: Romania

I’m not crap at everything (Warning: long post)

July 16, 2021 by 0 Comments

Last night we had a thunderstorm, and that should take the edge off the oppressively hot weather we’ve experienced lately. I’m now getting ready for my trip, booking this, planning that. I’ve just booked two nights at a guest house in Gura Humorului, a small town which has a famous 16th-century monastery. One of my students, a really nice guy, thought I was positively mad when I told him about my 15-hour-plus train journey to Iași. (I’m saying plus from experience.) “Couldn’t you find a flight?” Flight? Everyone’s got to be bloody flying everywhere. I never even considered flying; for the purposes of this trip, slow is good.

I often wonder how I ended up here, washed up in some place nobody’s heard of. (As much as I’d like my brother to visit if and when Covid is over, I can imagine what he might say. What are you doing in this shithole? Come back to St Ives. I can hear his voice now.) I like it here, of course. My mind tends to focus on all the big, important, life-defining things that I’m rubbish at. It’s a pretty long list. I’m crap at building relationships. I’m crap at working, or even being, with groups of people. I’m crap at being with any people for an extended period of time. I’m often crap at motivating myself. I’m often crap at organisation. In the past, my memory and concentration would turn to crap as a result of all the other crap, and what ever job I happened to have at the time, which generally made me feel like crap anyway, became a steaming pile of crap and I’d have no choice but to get the crap out of there. Then I’d move on to another job, and a couple of years later the same crappy thing would eventually happen, and so on. Regarding my lack of motivation over the last 10 to 15 years, I wonder how much has been caused my parents’ affluence, as bizarre as that might sound. I’m sure it has been a demotivator to know that, short of winning the lottery, I’m taking a giant leap backwards relative to their position regardless of what I do, because of all the other stuff I’m crap at, and that (along with the crap with my apartment in Wellington which is now mercifully over) perhaps gave me the impetus to cut the crap and come to Romania.

But I’m not crap at everything. Giving thousands of English lessons to more than a hundred people has made me realise that I’m actually half-decent at a few things that are come in pretty handy in my job. First of all, I can spell. I pride myself on being a good speller, and I kick myself when I get a word wrong (as I did in a recent email!). When I was twelve, in the pre-spell-check era, Dad got me to correct his spelling (which, at the time, was atrocious) for a book he was writing. I can’t watch footage of a spelling bee, a tradition that goes back to the 1800s in the US, without thinking, damn, why didn’t we have these in the UK? I might have won something. Alas, I was hopeless at football and not a whole lot better at cricket. Spelling bees certainly were a thing in small-town New Zealand in the late eighties. When I went to school in Temuka, a girl from the top class did well in what must have been the South Canterbury regional bee. It was all over the Timaru Herald and I remember thinking, how cool is that? As a bit of a joke, our teacher tested us (a class of nine-year-olds, about three years younger than the spellers in the bee) on a bunch of words that had come up; most of them were impossibly hard. A girl and I tied for the highest score; we got barely a third of the words correct.

On a similar theme, I can look up a word in a paper dictionary in somewhere between five and ten seconds. That’s because I’ve had lots of practice. My parents bought me a dictionary as a Christmas present one time, and I was immediately fascinated by it. The best thing about it was the IPA (pronunciation) transcriptions; I quickly became fluent in the sounds that make up English. Of course, it’s 2021 and we have no end of excellent online dictionaries as well as Google Translate (boo!), so I could get by perfectly well without being a fast dictionary looker-upper, or even being able to spell all that well, but they’re extra weapons I have in my arsenal. Another is an ability to read upside down almost as well as I can read the right way up, and that’s surprisingly handy. I could do that from an early age. I loved the Mr Men books, and I remember that Mr Impossible could read upside down. Hey, I can do that too. It’s handy because my face-to-face lessons are often literally face-to-face. In the last few years I’ve often found myself in a less-than-ideal cramped kitchen or bedroom where I’m opposite my student. I once managed to impress a twelve-year-old boy by reading a paragraph in Romanian upside down. Occasionally I’ve even written words upside down in lessons, but that skill still needs some work.

So I possess some skills that are mostly useless in 99% of jobs in the 2020s, but what else do I have? Well, I’m reasonably creative. I’ve made a bunch of games and exercises that have kept my students engaged, and they have a manual, tactile quality to them that appeals, especially to the little ones. It’s nice to have a job that allows creativity, after having that beaten out of me during all those years in the office. Follow the process, don’t ask questions, and you’ll make life easier for yourself. Talking of kids, I’ve had more lessons with kids than I expected when I took this giant leap into the dark, and I’m better at teaching them than I thought I’d be. I can be quite animated, and I play games like Simon Says which they find fun, and it’s exciting to teach someone with a long future, a world of possibilities, still in front of them. (Whenever we do Simon Says, or Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, I think to myself, this is mad. Totally mad. And awesome. I was supposed to be a bloody actuary, wasn’t I?)

I’m also better at thinking on my feet than I expected I’d be. It’s a skill I didn’t really have when I started out, but I’ve picked it up along the way. It just comes down to experience, drawing on what I’ve done before. For instance, last night I did a lesson on ordering food at a restaurant, and I pretended to order for a table of six. Sometimes my lesson plans go out the window. I can tell my student is tired or has had a tough day, and last thing he or she wants is to learn the conditional forms. Or they might tell me that they’ve got a job interview, in English, the very next morning.

Another important skill I’ve partly picked up is being able to communicate in Romanian. With kids it’s vital – they didn’t ask for a strange man to enter their territory and start babbling away to them in a foreign language – so being able to speak Romanian goes some way towards winning their trust. But with anybody it’s extremely useful. I constantly get asked what the word for x is. And very importantly, it helps me understand why Romanians say what they do in English. Please open the lights.

Finally, my most important skill, dwarfing any of the word-play stuff, is being personable, tolerant, and flexible. I sometimes fail here – I have little time for hyper-arrogant people or, right now, anti-vaxers (who intersect with hyper-arrogant people) – but I take pleasure in teaching people from all walks of life.

That’ll do. Apologies for making this so long.