Language teaching

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Keep the customer satisfied

December 6, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been quite a tiring week, with late finishes and constant shifting of gears. On Thursday night I finished at 11:30 – my student needed to prepare for his rather important presentation the next day, and I was happy to help him with the English for three hours, even if my eyes were glazing over at all the unfathomable jargon. In another lesson my student attempted a translation of a football match report (one of the local teams had lost 5-0) from Romanian to English. That’s a harder task that you might imagine. The woman in Spain wanted me to read part of the lovely journal that my friend had written when she and her husband came here in 2017, particularly the bit about the level of customer service – approximately zero – that she’d got at the tourist information centre. A married couple and I discussed cheating in exams, which is (no surprise, perhaps) brazen and rampant here. It goes without saying, almost. Phones, headsets, the works. People are amazed to hear that I never cheated in exams. Seriously, I never did it. Way too risky, way too stressful, and anyway most of that fancy tech didn’t exist back then. The same guy who said that his mate transmitted answers to him via Bluetooth in a university exam (the mind boggles) also said that he received a watch as a birthday present one time, but had to get rid of it because he hated the giver so much. I can’t imagine detesting someone to that extent. (My brother’s ex-fiancée bought me a shirt for Christmas eight years ago. She was a nasty piece of work. But I still have the shirt now.) And then once again I’ve been bombarded by steaming hot grade-A bullshit about the virus and the vaccines. Take the damn vaccine, people.

I had three 90-minute lessons yesterday (Saturday), including one with a very smart 17-year-old who is taking his advanced Cambridge exam (CAE) next weekend. I can sense the neurons connecting in his brain faster than mine could ever do. Or ever did. He loves talking very excitedly about gaming, and I never know how to respond. There’s a game that he’s really into with an X in its name that has characters called Turians and Salarians. (“Now there are Turians with armour!” I’m supposed to get really excited at this news.) A Turian to me sounds like a ponging spiky fruit, while a Salarian makes me think of an overworked Japanese man in danger of karoshi. He says he finds the game educational because it teaches him about ancient civilisations, and I can believe that. I’m so out of the loop though. Computer games aren’t just something to pass the time on a wet afternoon. They’re serious business, worthy of serious expense on serious-looking keyboards and memory-foam chairs. (I’ve just checked. The game is called Mass Effect. There’s no X in the name after all.)

Things have hotted up. A week ago we barely got above freezing during the day, but yesterday we hit a spring-like 16. In between my three lessons I managed to squeeze in some tennis. After we finished the last set, the woman I partnered said I’d played “like a lion”. That’s the first time anyone has likened me to a lion, on or off the tennis court. It was a bit of recency bias, I think, because I played well at the end of our final set. We led 3-2 in that set (against two men), but lost the next two games, including on my serve, to fall behind. But then I played solidly and aggressively (is that lion-like?) in the final three games as we won 6-4. I struggled earlier in the session because the wind was howling – it was like being back in Wellington – and my game relies heavily on placement. It was a sunny afternoon, with a four-engined plane carving its path through the blue sky. After finishing our game I saw a large fat-bodied spider scuttling across the court, a species I hadn’t seen before. Last Sunday I played four sets of two-against-one (American doubles, I think they call it) with a man and a woman. In the first and last of those, I played as the one, and the stakes really do increase when you’re out there on your own. I did fine, winning both those sets, though the surface was slippery and my footwear wasn’t up to the job.

Parliamentary elections are taking place today in Romania. It already looks like there will be a low turnout, which will probably help the PSD, who are almost universally despised among the people I talk to. (After the PSD won the elections four years ago and pardoned dozens of corrupt politicians and other officials, people took to the streets. It was extraordinary to see. I wrote about it on this blog.)

I’ll have to decide what to do with this money that I thought I would never get. That almost certainly means buying property, but I don’t feel interested enough in the whole subject to make an informed decision.

Language teaching - Life :) - Music

Coincidences

November 22, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a pretty big week on the work front – 34 hours of lessons. On Thursday night I told my student how to spell “unnecessary”, eventually giving up on the whole alphabet lark and just typing it into the chat. I warned him that even native speakers struggle with that word. Then the next morning (yesterday) I watched the BBC and saw a big headline about unneccessary emails, with an unnecessary third set of double letters. (Double C makes no sense there. English spelling isn’t totally illogical.) Yesterday I had a lesson with a kid, and one of the exercises featured a girl called Layla. An unusual name, he said. Yes, I said, but it’s a famous song. And of course the song featured on Musicorama last night. Coincidences happen more often than you think, so even if you get two coincidences on one day, it isn’t all that coincidental.

My last lesson yesterday was with a new guy. He’s in his thirties. He said he used to be a professional poker player, and was happy to talk about his exploits at the tables, online and live. (He wasn’t hesitant in talking about his exploits outside poker, either. I’ve had a few students like that now.) I told him about my poker history, which while profitable, probably sounded pathetic to him. Avoiding hold ’em, the only real game in town? Only playing two tables at a time? (He said he could manage 16.)

On Thursday my brother called me from his new four-bedroom house, and gave me a mini tour. They’ve done pretty well to afford it. He gave me their rather long address. British addresses amuse me somehow. With most names or numbers, short is desirable. The number plate “V8” would cost a helluva lot more than something like V807 WGA. My online name “plutoman” wouldn’t be as much fun if it had a load of extra numbers or letters tacked on the end. But in the UK, there’s a certain cachet to having unnecessary words or even whole lines in your address. Stuff like “Rear of Willoughby Hall” or “Garrington Green, Long Langley Lane”. Is it the green or the lane? Make up your mind! If you have a short address, your residence is clearly deficient in some way. The address of my dive in Peterborough was something close to “7 St John’s Road, Peterborough” followed by the post code. That was it.

My brother told me that our cousin (based in Wellington, and a month younger than me) had split up with his wife. I went to their wedding in February 2012. They’ve since had two daughters, so that’s pretty sad. I don’t think there was anyone else involved; I’m guessing the issue is that my cousin has never graduated from the “lad” phase. The two kids didn’t do much to stop his drinking and partying. A key moment, I think, was when he travelled from Wellington to Barcelona to see Liverpool play in the Champions League final. (I don’t know if he actually saw the match.)

In a recent episode of Musicorama there was a song by Abba called The Visitors, from the album of the same name. It came out in 1981, just like my brother, so it was at the end of Abba. I’d never heard the song before, and it’s quite different from any of their earlier (and more commercially successful) stuff. There are bits of Jean Michel Jarre (’77), bits of Walk Like an Egyptian by the Bangles (’86), and elements of New Wave or whatever you call that early eighties sound. It’s a great song.

I was supposed to play tennis this afternoon, following my three lessons, but the rain put paid to that. I should be able to play tomorrow though.

Language teaching

The final vestiges of pre-winter

November 20, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Four lessons today. Soon that might count as an easy day – my hours keep climbing. This morning I had a lesson with the guy in Brașov who lived for a time in Coventry. We talked positively about the UK government’s plans to ban new petrol and diesel vehicles from 2030. I’m not exactly a huge fan of the current British government – they’ve mishandled the pandemic terribly and are still pissing about with Brexit as the country careens off a cliff – but credit when it’s due. After that I worked on the book. Last night the Romanian teacher got back in touch with me, and had nice things to say about the picture of Dad’s that I showed her, so that gave me a bit more impetus. I then went for a walk along by the river – today was sunny, and according to the forecast it’ll be the last day before winter sets in.

When I got back I made dinner, knowing I wouldn’t have time otherwise, then back to lessons. My hour with the 11-year-old girl went much better than it did last week. Then I had a two-hour session with a 13-year-old boy. In the last half-hour he wanted to watch a documentary, with English subtitles, on Netflix. We started off watching Behind the Curve which was about flat-earthers, but after two minutes he couldn’t handle the preposterousness of it any longer. I was happy with that – I’d already seen a documentary on the same subject – and I suggested we watched David Attenborough’s A life on Our Planet, which started off, poignantly, from the site of the Chernobyl disaster (itself the subject of a great documentary series). My student told me that the two greatest crises facing the planet are capitalism and pollution, in that order. They’re heavily interlinked, I said. When I was his age I didn’t know what capitalism even was.

A plague of crows this evening

Finally I had my 90-minute session with the 18-year-old Trump fan. First I told him that he needed to pay me for eight lessons, forgetting that he’d already paid me for the first two, which were face-to-face. I soon apologised, feeling like a right wally. With the Trump stuff and this, he probably hates me now, I thought. We went through an IELTS listening test. It became apparent that, like most of my students, he struggles with the English alphabet. I spelt out the word Adelaide and asked him to type it in the chat, but he was drowning in a sea of As, Es and Is. He even chucked in a Y for good measure.

The coronavirus picture in Romania is hardly great, but it’s less bleak than two weeks ago. We’re no longer experiencing exponential growth in cases. Timișoara might escape a full-on lockdown (and might not, too). A pared-down version of the Christmas market might still happen (and might not, too). Ditto the parades for Romania’s national day on 1st December.

On Tuesday’s edition of Musicorama (the local radio station’s brilliant music programme) they played The New OK, a new song by the American country rock band Drive-By Truckers. The video shows footage from the protests in Portland over the summer. I also like another new song of theirs, called 21st Century USA. As far as Americana goes, I’ve continued to watch Vlogs about small-town (mostly abandoned) America from the guy who calls himself Adam the Woo.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

Another dark day for Romania

November 16, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tragedy struck Romania last night. Ten people died in a fire in the Covid wing of a hospital in Piatra Neamț, in the north-east of the country. I’m looking at the gruesome pictures on TV now. They still don’t know what caused it. Perhaps the fire was fuelled by the supplementary oxygen, or maybe it was a short circuit. To Romanians it brings back dreadful memories of the Colectiv nightclub fire that took place five years ago, killing 64 people. Did we learn nothing, they are saying today.

In brighter news I’ve played a decent amount of tennis this weekend, every point of it partnering the same woman. Yesterday there was a new woman on the other side of the net – a good player whose kick serve made it clear that she’d been coached – and we went down 6-3 6-4 3-2, though we led 3-1 in the first set and were unlucky not to at least make it close. Then today I had my work cut out once again, with two men across the net. I had to run everything down. We played 3½ sets, and from our point of view we finished up at 6-3 6-2 3-6 1-4. I played well but it was taxing physically and mentally, and I tired towards the end. My partner brought along some homemade apple pie.

The highlight of my work week was pretty clear. Half-way through my Google Meet lesson with an eleven-year-old girl, the “share screen” function stopped working. What do I do now? I asked her about music. Do you play an instrument? Do you like any singers or bands? I don’t want to say it, but I’ll write it, she said. The words “Sex Pistols” suddenly appeared on my screen, followed by “God Save the Queen”. Wow. Why do you like the Sex Pistols? How do you even know about them? Do you know they were British? She said her parents often played their songs.

I haven’t mentioned my book much recently. With my higher teaching volumes, I haven’t done as much. I’m now on the P section of the dictionary, which is taking ages. Dad, however, is now helping out with illustrations. So far he’s come out with a nifty cartoonish style, and he’ll use the same cartoon character in each picture, adding “extras” when necessary. The tricky bit (well, to me it’s all tricky, but the tricky bit even for a talented artist like my father) is to convey the relevant language point in each picture. That’s absolutely crucial. I have three lessons tomorrow – a light day – so I hope I can make more progress with the dictionary.

Covid. There are tentative signs that it’s getting better in Timișoara. The numbers of new cases have dropped off slightly. I still hear far more ambulance sirens than normal, but fewer than two or three weeks ago when they seemed incessant. Tentative signs, as I said, and with winter almost upon us. I’ve been trying to get a flu jab, with no luck. The pharmacies don’t have any available. To get me through the long, dark winter I’m now taking a cocktail of vitamin D, zinc and selenium. It would be nice to think that one of the vaccines – hopefully not the Russian Sputnik V vaccine – will be with us by the spring.

As soon as I got back from this afternoon’s exertions on the tennis court, I had a long chat with my cousin who lives in New York state. I spoke to both him and his Italian wife. The virus is tearing through the entire country now, making the first two waves seem like mere ripples. Of course we talked about the election. Just imagine if Trump had won re-election. Just. Imagine. And he wasn’t far off. People have been too quick to justify, or normalise, what we’ve seen from Trump since election day and the four years before. None of it is justifiable or normal.

My brother and his wife have moved into their new house. I’ll talk to them when they get their internet sorted. My brother quite likes fiddling with this or painting that, so I think he’ll enjoy having something extra to do over the winter while Covid otherwise restricts his options. As for my parents, they’ve put themselves on a list for a section of land in Geraldine, so they can build on it. It’s about 750 square metres, less than a tenth of what they currently have. Mum won’t want to be mowing that lawn much longer. I was hoping they’d abandon Geraldine, which has become rather geriatric, and buy something with a house already on it. If they don’t sell one of places in the meantime, they’ll – temporarily at least – own five properties. To me, owning five properties is about as realistic as owning three arms.

Language teaching - Politics

Foreboding

November 3, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

A man by the name of Larry Sabato, who has followed US elections for six decades, said yesterday that he can never remember the sense of foreboding that there is now. I believe that. People are scared this time around. I’m scared. Will democracy itself even survive another Trump win? Could there be a civil war? How many lives will a Trump win cost? The stakes are enormous. (They’ve been enormous before, even if we didn’t know it at the time. For instance, my brother would probably never have ended up in Basra if Al Gore had won in 2000. But now the stakes are huge and we know it.) It’s no surprise that turnout is through the roof. In some states including Texas, more people have voted before election day than they did last time including election day.

Fivethirtyeight are still giving Trump a one-in-ten chance. But that doesn’t account for blatant cheating, or close races decided (probably in Trump’s favour) by the Supreme Court. There’s even a faint possibility of an electoral college tie, which (if I understand the rules correctly) would also likely go to Trump. Add in these unknowables and you might end up at something more like one in seven, which isn’t all that unlikely. Were you born on a Wednesday?

Pennsylvania looks like being the key. If Biden hangs on to the states Hillary Clinton won, and also wins Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (Trump won all three of these by less than one point in 2016), he wins the election. Biden is up big in the polls in Michigan and Wisconsin, but Pennsylvania is somewhat tighter. If he loses Pennsylvania, then he still has a shot (there’s Arizona and Georgia and so on), but if he’s doing worse than expected in one state, the same is probably true elsewhere, and the rest of the dominoes are likely to fall as well. It should be said that if Trump does win, he’ll probably have done so while losing the popular vote once again. Trump is really unlikely to actually get more votes than Biden. What a crap system.

Tonight’s lesson wasn’t going well at all for a while until we started to use a textbook and my student told me she’d studied in France on the Erasmus programme, just like I had done ages earlier. (She lived in Montpellier in 2015; I lived in Lyon in 2000-01.) Before that I saw the guy who until last week wanted to study in Amsterdam but has suddenly decided it would be way too expensive and wants instead to go to Aarhus in Denmark. (I always thought Aarhus was in the middle of our street.)

I’ve just heard a loud bang. A car has hit a bike. The cyclist is fine. Maybe that’s an omen for tomorrow.

Books - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Politics

Will the asteroid hit?

October 31, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

At the moment my days and weeks are passing in a fog of fatigue. Maybe I’m getting old, or more likely, I’m suffering from all the extra screen time. My lessons are now exclusively online. I preferred the face-to-face meetings and all the books and games and props. Now it’s a combination of Skype, Zoom and Google Meet. The latter two allow you to do all sorts of clever stuff; my younger students sometimes excitedly show me the various tricks which I promptly forget. Sometimes I feel like a schoolteacher in the eighties or nineties who struggled with the functions of a VCR. “Yes, miss, I know how to do it!”

My favourite lesson of last week was with a husband and wife whom I last saw nearly a year ago. I had my first lessons with them way back in September 2017. They’re really nice people, and it was a pleasure to see them (virtually, of course) in our three-way Skype meeting. They sat in separate rooms in their new house in Sânandrei, about ten kilometres from Timișoara. I’d always known the wife as Andreea, and was initially confused when she popped up on my screen as Eliza. Not that confused, because Romanians often have two first names which both get significant use. She explained that she’s Andreea to her friends but Eliza at work. She’s not a doolittle in the office, that’s for sure. Her whole day is taken up by answering emails of complaint, usually in English. She showed me a bunch of emails she’d sent that day, and I tried to help her iron out some kinks in her English and generally sound more human and less aggressive and robotic. “Photos unreceived,” she wrote at one point. Unreceived is in that grey area between a word and a non-word. In fact people in these multinational companies communicate all the time in this grey, lifeless, minimalist pseudo-English that would drive me mad. (This did drive me mad when I started working for an insurance company.)

The US election is almost upon us. It’s barely three days away. Biden is a pretty hefty favourite – in the “gold standard” Fivethirtyeight model, Trump has a one-in-ten chance of winning – not much, but it’s a 10% chance of something terrifying. It’s a bit like how I’d feel if there was a 1% chance of a giant asteroid impact in Timișoara. It’s also a bit like how some of us have felt about coronavirus, which Trump has so royally effed up on. I listened to a Fivethirtyeight podcast yesterday, and they said that if Trump wins, we’ve really got to question what any of this means anymore.

New Zealand voted against legalising cannabis in the referendum. The “yes” vote was around 46%, which will probably increase when the special votes come in, but it almost certainly won’t be enough. A missed opportunity, I’d say, and my guess is that if it wasn’t for the Covid-fuelled uncertainty, the result might have been different. I imagine they’ll revisit this in ten or twenty years. Interestingly, the assisted dying bill passed easily, and I would have voted for that too.

Mum has ordered me half a dozen books from Waterstones. Two of them are for my work. The rest are The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon (a book about depression – just what we all need right now), The Sixth Extinction (which we’re currently in the middle of), The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel (if it’s anything like the other book of hers I read, it’ll be amazing), and Word Perfect by Susie Dent (she first appeared on Countdown in 1992 and is now a minor celebrity). The books aren’t cheap – they come to just over £100, mainly because of the two work books. Study materials are so damn expensive. It’s always a pleasure to receive these gifts, but it would be nice if at our respective stages in the game I was buying stuff for Mum and not the other way round, and there was a time when I’d order my parents maybe a multifunctional printer or a case of wine. That time was about 2005.

On Thursday I called my aunt on her 73rd birthday. She didn’t want much of a chat. It’s always a bit frustrating talking to her. In our conversations (if you can call them that) you only get faint hints that she might care about what goes on in other people’s lives, and when you get that glimmer, it’s inevitably snuffed out in the very next sentence.

That’ll do for today (Saturday). About to have two lessons, with the bloke in Austria and the woman in Bucharest. And by the way, the mother who was messing me around with dates and times decided to give up on me. No great surprise.

Coronavirus - Language teaching

Sirens

October 26, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

After a sunny week it’s been a dull, miserable weekend. It could be late October in England. Last night our clocks went back, and this morning it dawned on me that I might not have real face-to-face contact with another human being until they go forward again. Five months. Five mostly cold, dark months.

Romania had its first confirmed case of coronavirus on 26th February, eight months ago. It’s already been a long haul. In June we’d almost beaten Covid, in the west of the country at least, but now we’re riddled with the stuff. I live two kilometres from the central hospital and I’m used to hearing ambulance sirens. In that respect, living here has been a continuation of my experience in Wellington where the ambulances screeched around the Basin on the way to the nearby hospital. But yesterday was something else. So many sirens. I even started to hear sirens in between the sirens. In my Skype lesson with the boy in Bucharest I could hear sirens at his end too. It’s all quite anxiety-provoking. Every lunchtime I get the latest Covid update on my phone app, with varying numbers of beeps depending on how bad it is. Six beeps and I know it’s terrible. Since Timișoara entered the “red scenario” on Friday, I’ve also had ear-splitting alerts on my phone, which (as far as I know) are only avoidable if I switch it off.

The red scenario kicked in when we passed three cases per 1000 inhabitants over the last fortnight. Schools are now closed, as are gyms and cinemas. Indoor bars and restaurants will close tomorrow. Why tomorrow? Why wait until after the whole sodding weekend to close them? Utterly barmy. Have the Romanians been getting tips from Boris? Personally I found the lockdown in the spring quite easy to manage, and I wish they’d bring in another one now. Then the numbers will surely come down, and instead of those sirens I’ll just hear the pleasant rattle of the trams.

Last week I managed 31 hours of lessons. Thursday was my busiest day, with five meetings. Two women on Skype in the morning, then rushing around in the afternoon. I had a lesson on Calea Aradului with the eleven-year-old girl, then I raced back home (kind of) on my bike for a two-hour Skype lesson with the boy of thirteen, then I heated up whatever meal I made earlier and wolfed that down in time for my face-to-face meeting with the guy who wants to study in Amsterdam. That face-to-face lesson, in which he told me he’d visited Bali, was probably my last of 2020.

Friday was a funny day. For the second week running the mother of the boy in Bucharest decided to postpone his lesson at the last minute, and only after I texted her a reminder. I asked her, what about 9am on Saturday? No, he’ll be too tired then. What sort of people am I dealing with here? Well, I have a lesson that finishes at 3pm, so how about 3:15? Yes. OK then. Yesterday, after my two other Skype lessons with students in Austria and Bucharest (they both went well), 3:15 rolled around. No sign of the boy or his mum. He showed up on my screen half an hour late, but I still gave him a full 90-minute lesson. It wasn’t as hair-pulling as last week’s session. As the clock ticked round to 5:15, the boy mysteriously disappeared from the screen. His mum called me to say that he’d accidentally knocked a cable out. I took the opportunity to confirm a time for next week’s lesson. She said Friday at five, just like this time, but you understand that sometimes more important things intervene, like yesterday when we were out with friends and couldn’t just leave them and come home. Sorry, that’s not OK, I said. You’re saying that your time is more important than mine, aren’t you, and that really isn’t OK. She didn’t argue with me, and said I was in the right, although I think she was taken aback. I heard an uff, or was it an ooff? I was equally taken aback by how she thought that her “more important interventions” were something I should just accept. That episode left a sour taste in my mouth.

Today has been dark and dismal, but not cold. I got out of the city centre and headed west along the Bega where I could sit on a bench and read my book, and get some respite from the sirens.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Photos - Politics

A lot to zinc about (plus some pictures)

October 19, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning I got hold of some zinc to go with my vitamin D. The wintriest-ever winter is on its way, and if I can boost my immune system inexpensively and harmlessly, I should absolutely be doing so.

Last week was quite a big one on the work front. Three new students. One of them is a friend of another student of mine – a Romanian who has lived just outside Birmingham (which is where I studied) for the last three years. I spoke first with her husband whose English was mindblowingly good – practically fluent, with a Brummie accent to boot. Then I had my two sessions with her on Skype – she’s one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. The other new people are Lucian, a bloke of about my age who works for a courier firm, and an 18-year-old guy (I had a rare in-person lesson with him) who wants to study in Amsterdam and needs an IELTS certificate. I’m trying to discourage face-to-face meetings. I had my work cut out with the ten-year-old boy in Bucharest – with no games or fun physical activities at my disposal, 90 minutes is an aeon.

Talking of Birmingham, I’ve been in touch with my university friend who lives in the centre of the city. I mentioned that tri-generational families are quite common in Romania, and there’s generally a fair bit of mixing between different age groups, to the point where the elderly are in danger of catching Covid from their children or grandchildren. He said that (of course) that isn’t the case in the UK outside Asian communities, and when I saw a heat-map chart that showed just how age-sorted Britain now is, I thought, isn’t that sad? (I talk to my parents two or three times a week, and I’m in regular contact with people aged between 10 and 85.) And it’s not just age groups where people are increasingly sorting themselves. Race, income, level of education, how they voted in the EU referendum, you name it. When I saw that chart, I thought it’s no wonder that UK is so fractured right now.

What a contrast between Britain and New Zealand. The UK’s response to Covid has been shambolic, and I can hardly blame Scotland and Wales and Manchester and maybe one or two others for giving central government the middle finger. I couldn’t follow the NZ election because I was working, but shock horror, you properly handle the biggest crisis facing your country in 75 years, you bring in the best scientists, your messaging is clear, you show compassion, and guess what, you’re rewarded in the polls. It’s not that complicated. Labour won the first majority under proportional representation, in the ninth election to be held under that system. Although it was a decisive result, there was a nice balance, with the Greens (climate crisis, hello?) and a resurgent ACT picking up ten seats apiece. It’s great they have a system that allows such balance unlike the US or UK.

I did catch up with my brother. He’d just got back from northern Scotland. He likes long drives, which is just as well. His phone has just about had it, so we struggled to communicate. What? Wh-what? I couldn’t hear a damn thing on the other end. He doesn’t want to spend the money on a replacement phone. His attitude to money has taken a complete one-eighty in recent years; in his twenties he got through more phones than I did hot dinners. Now he’s all into mortgage interest rates and stamp duty and whatnot. I found out that he had a dramatic time up in Scotland – he helped rescue an American destroyer, however the hell you do that.

I had an email reply from my friend from St Ives. She and her husband came to visit me in Romania in 2017. We hired a car and had a wonderful time. She was relieved that I’d finally been in touch for the first time in months, thinking perhaps I’d entered (Covid-induced?) depression. But no, it was a combination of forgetting and lack of news. In truth I haven’t had depression in Romania. Sometimes I’ve felt a bit down, but that pointlessness, that neverending desert, weeks, months, years of it, seems to be in the past.

After work yesterday I went for a longish walk through the parts of town I frequented when I moved here. It was quite nostalgic, which might seem a silly word but I’ve now spent 10% of my life in Timișoara.

No tennis this weekend. Some of the group have been unwell, and I might have given it a miss anyway after what happened with my knee last weekend. One of the guys brings his small dog along; here are some pictures from the tennis court, which isn’t in perfect nick as you can see, as well as a bunch of snaps from yesterday’s walk.

The old abattoir

Opposite the old abattoir, just along by the guest house I stayed in, is a park. It’s pretty rough, as is the area as a whole, but I still remember being in this park on my second evening in Timișoara and seeing it packed with all the ping-pong tables being used.

This was a building site four years ago. There are 108 flats in this block, plus Guban, a locally-produced brand of shoes.

This is where I lived for two months

Above was once a bakery. You can just about make out the pre-1993 spelling pîine (bread, now spelt pâine).

The slogan above says “A Romania without theft”. We recently had the local elections, and we’ll soon be having parliamentary elections too. This new party, USR (literally the Save Romania Union), is on the rise.

This stone commemorates those who died during the 1989 Revolution.

The beer factory
Tailor
A poem

Above is the Millennium Catholic church, completed in 1901.

This is where renowned writer Petru Sfetca lived.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

A beast

October 13, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

My brother’s in Scotland on heaven knows what exercise. I’ve just tried FaceTiming him, but no luck. Before that, I had two phone calls in quick succession from new students. I’m going to be snowed under with work at this rate. Five lessons scheduled tomorrow. My energy levels are depleted for whatever reason, so that might not be ideal, but at the moment I only have to leave the house twice a week.

Rafael Nadal. What a beast that man is. A ridiculous 13 Roland-Garros titles, and 20 grand slams altogether, tying Federer’s mark. Nadal and Djokovic were only in their fifth game of what was tennis of the highest order, when I left to play my own version of the game. I was a bit bummed honestly, because I could hardly take my eyes off what I was seeing. It took, I think, 46 minutes for Nadal to win the first set 6-0; that must be some kind of record for the longest whitewash set. In the whole match Nadal made 14 unforced errors. Fourteen. Extraordinary stuff. Interestingly, he won by dominating the shorter rallies. I wouldn’t be shocked to see Nadal reach 25 slams.

My tennis was eventful too. Domnul Sfîra wasn’t there. Perhaps he was watching the final. He’s a keen fan of the professional game. I played with the woman against two men, and I played one of the cleanest sets I can remember as we won 6-3, winning all our service games including all three of my partner’s. (By some crazy nonsensical tradition, she serves the first game of every set she plays. Always, always, always.) From memory I made only one unforced error, and I played quite aggressively, especially at the start. In the fourth game one of our opponents, who was serving, got mad. Because it was his first service game of the evening, the “double faults don’t count” rule was in play. He was struggling to get the ball in the service box, and his unusually high rate of lets weren’t helping either. Then I played another set with the same partner, though one of our opponents was different. Again she served the first game, meaning she served two games in a row. This time we weren’t doing so well – I think we were 3-0 down – when I abruptly changed direction to chase a ball, felt a jabbing pain in my knee, and almost keeled over. I decided to leave the game at that point, and maybe I’ll take break next weekend.

There are new rules in place for Timișoara now, as we’ve breached the threshold of 1.5 cases per 1000 inhabitants over a two-week period. Masks are now a must practically anywhere you go. In a recent John Campbell video, he talked about some of the secondary complications, sometimes long-term, of Covid-19. One of the more surprising is derealisation, when you feel that nothing is real, that you’re watching everything on a video. Campbell said he’s had that, and so have I. While playing tennis (more than once), while shopping at Sainsbury’s, and once even in a job interview. It’s scary stuff.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

Selfishness is killing us

October 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Friday one of my regular students – the one who said that she wanted to get Covid – told me that her husband had tested positive. They and their son have to quarantine for two weeks. She’d also had symptoms including a 39-degree fever. Brilliant. I was very glad I’d told her to stay away last week, but was she carrying the virus when she came here the previous Thursday? I wasn’t feeling 100% myself. Tiredness, lack of energy, the usual stuff. As for wanting to get the virus, she said look at Trump, 30 years older than me and he looks fine now. Where to start? That’s a sample size of one, and Trump has had a cocktail of about eight drugs and procedures including antibody treatment. Good luck getting that in Romania.

The Covid numbers are skyrocketing. (Just look at those graphs.) In a recent video, John Campbell talked about the selfishness of people hopping on planes in the middle of a plague, exercising their “unalienable rights”, as he put it, to go wherever they want whenever they want. It drove me mad to hear my students talk about their travels during the summer. Croatia, Greece, the Black Sea. There’s this, um, virus thingy which you might have heard about. And the jam-packed Black Sea resorts sound ghastly to me, virus or no virus. In the past I’ve gone up to five years without travelling internationally, but you buggers have gone away every year for the last ten. Is it really such a hardship to stay at home just this once? As for people complaining that they can’t get home from their jolly, I have zero sympathy. I think if we could have closed those resorts and basically sealed the borders, we wouldn’t have squandered the progress we made in the spring. But thanks to you selfish bastards, here we are.

I played tennis last night. We started with a typical set-up, me playing with the only woman, while on the other side were the 85-year-old bloke (Domnul Sfîra) and a younger guy. We got to 5-5, and because someone was waiting we played a tie-break which we won 8-6. After that, my memory is a bit hazy. Early in the next set I slipped and fell, and thought I might have torn a ligament in my left knee. I felt quite dizzy, and eventually staggered to the bench. Domnul Sfîra took over for a few games. One of the others had a knee brace so I put that on and gingerly joined the action. I iced my knee when I got home, and though it still hurts if I bend it fully, I should be fine.

So Iga Świątek won the French Open, beating Sofia Kenin comfortably in the end. Świątek was born in 2001 – yes, we now have people born this century winning grand slams. I watched the first eight games – that long eighth game was crucial – before playing tennis myself. I didn’t miss a whole lot; I think Kenin was compromised physically. Świątek played out of this world against Simona Halep and I’m not surprised she lifted the trophy, but heck, she didn’t drop a set the whole tournament, and every one of her seven matches was 6-something, 6-something. Amazing stuff. I thought she might suffer from stage fright in the final, but not a bit of it. She took home €1.6 million – less than Ashleigh Barty received last year, pre-Covid, but still a very hefty hourly rate. The most fascinating thing on both the men’s and women’s side has been the number of surprise packages that the tournament has thrown up.

I’m playing tennis again this evening, so I’ll miss most of the men’s final between Nadal and Djoković too. I have a habit of missing big tennis matches while playing tennis. The 1996 men’s Wimbledon final springs to mind. For me, the match of the tournament (so far – who knows what today’s final could produce) is the quarter-final between Dominic Thiem and Diego Schwartzman. What I saw was spellbinding. The drop shots (that’s been the shot of the tournament) and table-tennis-style retrievals by Schwartzman were out of this world. I’d just seen a crazy-long game – 15 minutes at least – in the second set, before giving back-to-back lessons for three hours, and the match was still going on after that. Predictably, Nadal was a bit too good for Schwartzman in the semi-final. The other semi was a fun match in the end, Tsitsipas coming back from two sets and match point down to force a fifth against Djoković. Tsitsipas seems mentally stronger now, and a real contender.

Teaching pronunciation when we’re both wearing masks isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and neither is teaching kids online. You gotta do what you gotta do.