Language teaching

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Music

Is it worth the risk?

August 16, 2020 by 0 Comments

A few words on Covid-19 in Romania. To go a bit Antipodean, it’s not that flash here. The first wave was barely a trickle compared to what we’re experiencing now, and we aren’t doing a whole lot to make things better. Masks, yes. We’ve been hot on masks since April, and I’m sure lives have been saved as a result. Bars and restaurants are still only open outside. And, well, that’s about it. Physical distancing has just about gone by the board if the bakery today is anything to go by. Traffic is back to normal for the time of year. Way too many people think this is over, for some bizarre reason. Way too many people don’t believe Covid was ever real in the first place. This is a nation of ostriches. I’ve got a new student starting on Tuesday who I don’t know from Adam. I gave him the option of having online lessons, implying that I’d really really prefer it if he didn’t come here, but he didn’t take the hint. Are 90-minute face-to-face lessons even worth the risk at this point? Obviously I want the work, but if I catch Covid I might not be able to work again for bloody ages.

John Campbell came out with an intriguing video yesterday about the surprisingly low rates of severe Covid-19 disease in sub-Saharan Africa, even accounting for the much younger demographic than in European countries or the United States. We’re talking an order of magnitude lower. South Africa, however, was pretty much in line with Europe (worse if anything – so much corruption leading to limited access to health care). It’s good news for those countries, but a bit of a mystery, especially when you consider the prevalence of HIV which massively compromises your immune system. Is it lower obesity? More time in the sun, leading to higher vitamin D levels? (But South Africa is also sunny.) My theory is lack of travel and lack of work in unventilated, air-conditioned offices means that people aren’t picking up those potentially lethal viral loads, while low obesity rates and higher vitamin D probably help too.

The first song on yesterday’s Musicorama (Radio Timișoara’s daily music programme) was Time to Say Goodbye by Sarah Brightman (she turned 60 yesterday) and Andrea Bocelli. That gave me goosepimples. They played it at my grandfather’s funeral in 1999; I wasn’t there for my grandmother’s funeral but I’m pretty sure it would have been played there too. It must be extremely popular at funerals. The next song they played was the pretty cool I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper by 18-year-old Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip, which I’d never heard before. Musicorama has introduced (or reintroduced) me to a vast array of artists. Recently they showcased Sparks, whose songs range from amazing to downright weird. In the first category are This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us and Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth, both from the seventies, and the fantastic new song All That. Another band I’ve been getting into lately are the modern Belgian group Absynthe Minded.

This afternoon I made 48 cards with opposite adjectives (such as rich and poor), complete with pictures, for the ten-year-old girl I teach. They’ll be useful for other kids too. I made cards with opposites (adjectives, verbs and nouns) soon after I started teaching here, but even the easiest ones contain pairs like deep/shallow and wide/narrow, which aren’t that easy. Yesterday I made a 9×9 crossword containing words that are common to both languages but mean completely different things, such as drum (road in Romanian) and sting (Romanian for “put out”, e.g. a fire). Ignoring the accents, there are some interesting ones, like străin (foreign), strânge (to gather, collect, raise money), and seamăn (something or somebody alike). There are two sets of clues, one for each language. Such a crossword isn’t easy to make because your stock of words is extremely limited.

There has been a fiasco in the UK with A-level results. No exams this year for obvious reasons, and 18-year-olds’ futures have been left to the whim of an arcane, nonsensical algorithm. Pupils have sometimes dropped multiple grades from their mock exams in January or what they were predicted to receive, and those from deprived backgrounds have often fared the worst. I’ve read heartbreaking stories of people about to be the first from their family ever to go to university, only for their dreams to be shattered. On a lighter note, there have been jokes about ABBA turning into AC/DC. By the way, I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory when it came to my A-levels. Doing completely the wrong subjects (with the exception of maths) didn’t help.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Writing a book

Steady progress with the book

August 11, 2020 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my aunt this morning. We both had an almost total lack of news. It was hot in Earith where she lives, just like here, so at least this time she couldn’t contradict me on the weather front.

My work volumes are relatively low so I’ve been working on the book. I’m now up to letter I of the dictionary part. My Romanian teacher is now tackling the first (most important) part which contains all the big-ticket items, in other words the mistakes that even good speakers make over and over. She’s made a good start at correcting my Romanian, which as I’ve said before, isn’t up to this kind of task.

I only had one lesson today, with the eleven-year-old boy who lives with his grandmother. I beat him in the Formula One game for the fourth time running. He’s a mild-mannered kid but I think he was ever so slightly pissed off today. In the first couple of games he didn’t exactly apply optimal strategy, but now it’s pretty much dumb luck. Today he drew a card that sent him into the pit stop on the last lap, and I was able to overtake him.

Last week we had that awful explosion in Beirut. At first I thought it was a terrorist attack, but it was a terrible accident. The warehouse was on the waterfront, right next to a grain silo, so the blast took out much of the city’s food supply. As well as the hundreds who have died, about 300,000 people have been displaced. Lebanon was in a deep enough crisis already, exacerbated by Covid-19, so this is an utter tragedy. It was impressive to see Emmanuel Macron make a hasty visit to Beirut, appearing in a packed crowd and risking getting Covid-19; I could hardly imagine Boris Johnson doing something similar. I’ve just read that the Lebanese government have quit.

Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump shows signs of narrowing. His average lead looks to be seven points, or perhaps half a point more. There are under three months to go, and early voting starts soon in some states. I see this election as a giant IQ test, but even if the country passes it (i.e. significantly more people vote for Biden than for Trump), will their sham of an electoral system hold up enough to be rid of the bastard?

Coronavirus. Romania is in what looks like a plateau, but it has spread to just about all parts of the country. My panic level has dropped just a tad, but I don’t know how justified that is.

Mum and Dad got their birthday cards from me yesterday. Their birthdays were six and eight weeks ago.

Family - Language teaching

Awful old news

August 4, 2020 by 0 Comments

I had my weekly-ish chat to my aunt today. At the start, I mentioned the weather as a way of making small talk. When I told her it was hot here, she corrected me by saying that no, it wasn’t hot where she was, as if her weather was the correct weather, as if her poxy village was the only place on the planet that even had weather. But by now I’m used to her disregard for the world outside her ever-shrinking bubble. We then moved on to a fairly normal conversation, including the awful news of her and Dad’s cousin’s brain tumour.

Dad called me at ten to midnight on Saturday. Mum was at church, and Dad has never been that hot on numbers or times. I was in bed but not yet asleep. His previous day had been one to forget. He’d been struggling all day but he went to a theatre production in Geraldine with Mum and some others – it was one of those fake obligations that Mum imposes. He felt faint during the show and was in the middle of a row with no easy way out. He made it to the intermission, when he sensibly decided to leave. He’s had to change his blood pressure pills because the old ones had been phased out, and that has caused havoc. Then when he got home, he learnt that his cousin had been diagnosed with a (probably inoperable) brain tumour. That sounds impossibly awful.

His cousin is 69 and lives in mid-Wales. He’s been a successful potter. We used to see him once or twice a year when we made our trips over there. He must be at least six foot five, and he’s never exactly been fond of kids, so my brother and I found him intimidating as small children. A few years ago he split up with his wife (a lovely person, I’d always thought) and married a Korean woman about 30 years younger than him. The last time I saw him was at my uncle’s funeral in 2002. (On that occasion his daughter, who was grossly overweight, went straight through a wooden chair.)

Not much news other than that. I had my weekly masked lesson with the eleven-year-old boy today. Any time I try a new game, whether with a kid or an adult, I’m taking a bit of a gamble. Today I tried the rummy-style card game I made up with the pictures that begin with different letters of the alphabet, and it was a bit of a flop, unfortunately. That’s the way it goes, sometimes. After the session I felt sorry for his grandmother who told me she had “a thousand and one” health problems. The masks began to make even more sense.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

Don’t you get it? Stay the **** at home this summer!

August 2, 2020 by 0 Comments

We’ve had some pretty warm weather this week, though we were spared the intolerably high temperatures seen near the banks of the Danube, and of course I now have few face-to-face lessons. This morning I had another lesson with the chap in Austria, who said that Romania’s coronavirus figures are probably deliberately overstated. Don’t know about you, but if was going to fabricate the numbers I’d make them go down, not up, and anyway I’m finding all these conspiracy theories tiresome, not to mention dangerous. Apart from that, our lesson went well as always. A highlight of the teaching week was another game of Maths Millionaire with Octavian. When we ran out of time, he’d got to £32,000 but had run out of lifelines.

I’ve been in contact with the Romanian teacher about the book. She hasn’t had much time of late. I did a 900-word translation from her from Romanian to English as a form of payment, but she has a much tougher task on her hands in translating what I’ve done. I’d have liked to have written the book in Romanian myself, but I’m just not up to it. When it comes to anything half-way technical, I’m clueless. I shouldn’t be too downhearted though – my Romanian is getting better in general. My speech is more fluent, my listening is better, and I’m at least aware of some of the traps even if I still fall into them now and again. The tennis is helping.

Five of us were at tennis tonight, including Domnul Sfîra, the 85-year-old bloke. I played the whole time with the only woman. She always serves the first game of every set, and that only serves to put her team at an even bigger disadvantage. In the first set Domnul Sfîra was on the other side of the net, and we eked out a 7-5 win. One long set was enough for him, and he left the stage for my partner’s husband, and we lost the remaining action 6-3, 6-4, 3-1, not that any of that mattered. In fact playing with either the woman or Domnul Sfîra is good for me because I get more exercise that way. I was thinking tonight, while taking in all the trees in the vicinity of the court, that if you enjoy simple pleasures, this Romania thing isn’t bad at all.

That goddamn virus. Four-figure daily case numbers are the norm in Romania now, and deaths are increasing. Timiș is verging on hotspot territory. People (or should I say people with money) are still travelling overseas, as if it’s an entitlement. The Romanian teacher is about to head off to Greece, and when I questioned that idea, she thought I was some kind of corona-Nazi. Right now, we all need to stop travelling. No Greece, and no Black Sea either. Just for this one year. We’re in this mess in the first place because of rampant, selfish, unnecessary travel. I still think there should be much more freaking out in Romania full stop, although it was pleasing to see about 80% of people wearing masks at the market this morning, even though it was outdoors. I bought some goat’s cheese, tomatoes, peppers, onions, aubergines, sweetcorn, cucumbers, nectarines and some watermelon. The fruit and vegetables are quite wonderful at this time of year. I’ll probably pick some more plums in Mehala tomorrow morning. It’s a shame we don’t have figs, which were heavenly when I visited Montenegro and Bosnia.

My signed sale agreement on the flat in Wellington, which I sent in early June, never reached its destination. I can’t be arsed with getting it all notarised again and sent via an exorbitant courier, with no guarantee it will ever get there. Nothing is getting to NZ from Romania, or vice-versa, as far as I can see. If my lawyer insists on having the original documents, I won’t bother.

Coronavirus - Language teaching

Narentious

July 18, 2020 by 0 Comments

At the moment I’ve got this inexplicable fatigue I get from time to time. Last night I went to the pub with Bogdan – of course we sat outside, and the waitress took our contact details, with times and dates, in case of a positive test. I was yawning most of the evening.

Today I’ve been thinking how my brother and I will see our parents any time soon. We’re both stuck on the other side of the world, in countries that are swimming in Covid. Romania has set a new record for cases the last two days running (see my graphs above). I’m still watching John Campbell’s videos, pretty much religiously. Wednesday’s video could have done with a health warning – the part on South Africa was so harrowing as to be almost unwatchable. Rat-infested hospital wards covered in shit and blood. Caesarean sections are largely unavailable to mothers, so babies are dying, all because of systemic corruption. All over Africa and much of the rest of the world, the people in power are exactly the people who shouldn’t be in power. (And of course if they need an operation, they just hop on a plane to Paris or wherever.)

On Tuesday a student disinfected my desk, but Monday’s lesson with the eleven-year-old boy was the most interesting. I was reading from a David Walliams book (The Demon Dentist) when he asked me to “give him more space”. At first I didn’t understand what he meant, but he was referring to the virus. He didn’t want me so close. I held out the book at arm’s length. Then he said that next time we both need to wear masks. He lives with his grandmother, and he doesn’t know where I’ve been, so he’s hardly being crazy. He also praised me for being so creative with my various cards and games, and honestly that was lovely. (Imagine being praised for creativity, of all things, when I worked in insurance.)

I rarely remember my dreams, but just before five this morning I had a dream that damn near freaked me out. S (who I met on Tinder) and I were cooking a meal. (This never happened in real life.) We were speaking Romanian, and she told me Narenție! I didn’t know what this meant, but she explained that it meant to mix everything together, just like the English word “narentious”. I woke up feeling quite unsettled. Surely I can’t be learning Romanian words in my sleep. I got up and checked narenție in my paper dictionary, then online, but didn’t find anything. Relieved, I went back to bed. (As for “narentious”, that gives me no Google hits at all. I’ve got a lesson soon with Laurențiu, which is kind of similar, and maybe that’s where my brain dredged up that nonsense word from.)

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

Can’t you see where this is heading?

July 12, 2020 by 0 Comments

I’ve had a sinking feeling this week, or perhaps a sense of déjà vu. Coronavirus cases are now climbing fast in Romania (see my graphs above!), and way too many people have their heads in the sand Trump-style and think it will magically go away. Perhaps the best indication that we’re likely to be in deep doodoo pretty soon is that many European countries have recently blacklisted Romania. My student in eastern Austria, a few kilometres from the border, is now unable to cross it and see his 90-year-old mother who lives in Arad. He and I had planned to meet up too.

We now have both the highest rate of new cases and the highest number of active cases since the pandemic began, but you’d never have guessed it by wandering around town tonight. The one real saving grace is that bars and restaurants are still only open outside, although last night I could hear the music from the club, and clubbing is about as dangerous as it gets right now. It’s got to be riskier even than flying. Another positive, maybe, is that we aren’t experiencing the searing heat – high 30s – that we sometimes get, that just about forces you inside where the virus spreads more easily. Remaining positive, Romania doesn’t have that ridiculously childish “you’re destroying our freedoms” attitude towards masks which is present in the US and sadly also the UK. And temperature checks are commonplace – we got tested before playing tennis tonight, even though that’s pretty safe.

In seems that states and countries all over Europe and America are trying to out-stupid each other. In Florida, where they’re in the shit frankly, they’ve just opened Disney World. I mean, c’mon. And in the UK where the government response has often been lamentable, the Tories still hold a significant lead in the polls. After all this, they’re still backing Boris. Even though his Covid hubris nearly killed him. (I wouldn’t be surprised if he suffers long-term complications.) You can now really back Boris by drinking in a pub, and on selected weekdays they’ll even give you up to £10 off a restaurant meal. Hmm, how about we spend our tenner on a Cytokine Storm? I wonder what that is. Sheer madness. The English and Scottish responses to the crisis have been increasingly divergent, and I imagine this (combined with a hard Brexit) will make it even more likely that the Scots decide to go it alone.

On Thursday I had my first lesson with a ten-year-old girl who lives in a large house not far from Calea Aradului. It was lovely and quiet there; you could hear all the birds in the garden. She seemed a nice girl, although I felt that her English lessons at school were probably a waste of time. I spoke a fair bit of Romanian. I wonder how many more face-to-face lessons I’ll have with her.

As well as playing tennis, I watched some today too. I saw a the last two sets of a video of the 1991 Wimbledon final where Steffi Graf squeaked past Gabriela Sabatini. It was a shame Sabatini didn’t win after serving for the match twice in the third set, but one extraordinary point where Graf scrambled incredibly well to avoid going down match point seemed to turn the tide. Graf was fitter than I gave her credit for. I didn’t see the match live – I was manning a game at a summer fair at school, where people rolled 10p pieces (the big versions, just before they were downsized) down chutes, to try and win money by landing on marked circles.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Tennis

Back on the court

July 6, 2020 by 0 Comments

I’m back on the court, and it feels good. I’ve played tennis twice this weekend at the courts in Parcul Rozelor – seven sets of doubles with older people including the couple who live on my floor. Socially it’s incredibly stress-free. One of the blokes is 85 (!) and still hits a pretty mean ball. He can’t move much, but heck, I can’t imagine being anywhere near a tennis court in 45 years’ time. Will there even be tennis courts then? There were six of us this evening – at one stage I sat out with a guy who has worked for the railways for 33 years, and he told me about practically every railway line in the region, past and present, in great detail. He even told me about the declivitate of the lines. I figured out what that meant when he said things like “2.1 per 1000”: he was talking about the gradient. He surprised me by saying that what is now a handful of courts of varying quality was once a big tennis stadium with a running track around it. Back in 1981, Romania played host to Argentina in the Davis Cup right were we were playing tonight and yesterday.

With new tennis partners come a new set of “house rules”. So far I’ve picked up three. First, don’t change ends. Ever. Second, you don’t have to receive serve on the same side throughout a set (though you can’t swap during a game!). In fact, changing sides seems to be compulsory and I’m supposed to magically know when to do it. Third, and this is the weirdest, double faults don’t count in your first service game of the playing session. That’s nice, but it has the potential to become embarrassing if you really can’t get the damn thing over the net and into the box. In my first service game yesterday I strung together five straight faults on a single point.

I’m hitting the ball better than I expected to, and the benefits, fitness-wise, socially, and with the language, should be significant. This could be quite a boon for me, as it was in New Zealand at times.

We’re going to be stuck with Covid for the foreseeable future. We’re averaging about 400 cases a day in Romania, just like during the first peak in April. Although we’re now testing a bit more, the trend is clearly upwards. The situation in Timiș isn’t clear: in the last three days we’ve had zero cases, then seven, then zero again. I figure if I’m going to get a haircut I should do so soon before it becomes too dangerous again.

On a worldwide scale there’s little to be optimistic about. The crisis has been politicised to a ridiculous extent in the US, the UK and elsewhere. “Masks are taking away my freedoms!” How bloody stupid can you get? People are getting extremely angry about things they shouldn’t be angry about, and are almost silent on things that really matter. I feel that everybody is complaining about the guttering on their house while it’s on fire. (I don’t put the Black Lives Matter movement in America in that category, by the way. Racism in the police and in many other walks of life is a massive problem there. It’s literally killing people.)

I saw Octavian on Thursday after a two-week hiatus; he’d been on an intensive Zoom-based advanced maths course. Seven hours of maths a day. And he wanted more maths with me. I gave him a maths-only version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He impressed me by knowing instantly that the square root of 18 was three times the square root of 2 (he’s nearly 13; I don’t think I knew that then), but he was flummoxed when I asked him which of 11, 12, 13 and 14 was the most likely total with three dice. I would have known at his age that 11 (along with 10) was the most likely. All in all, I think he’s marginally better than I was at the same age.

Another week will soon be kicking off. Only two lessons scheduled for tomorrow.

Books - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching

Life probably WAS simpler then

June 25, 2020 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother on Tuesday night. He’d just been down to St Ives. He said they’d taken their inflatable motor boat for a trip down the Ouse from St Ives to Earith. Around Earith there’s a complex network of tributaries and drains – you’re on the edge of the Fens there. I remember all that from the flood mapping job I had before moving to New Zealand. Earith is where my aunt lives, and they wanted to drop in on her, but she told them to stay away. Among older people there’s still understandable fear. We talked about the photos that Dad had sent us. Was life really so much simpler back then, or did it just seem it because we were kids? We settled on the former.

I told my brother that I’d just had a lesson on verb tenses, and he said, with a tinge of pride, that he didn’t know what a verb was. He doesn’t need to know what a verb is. (I don’t think he’ll be learning Romanian or Serbian or any other foreign language any time soon.) And at least he knows there are things called verbs that he doesn’t know about – his work day is filled with tanks and other machinery that I don’t even know I don’t know about. But his remark showed how different the British and Romanian education systems are. The Romanian system has serious issues, but at least practically everyone leaves school knowing that you can’t make a sentence without a goddamn verb. (My students are often amazed when I tell them that I’ve had to teach English grammar myself, long after leaving school, by a mix of trial-and-error and studying foreign languages.)

I’ve just finished Border by Kapka Kassabova, a tale of life, death and travel in the harsh, wild border regions of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. Three languages, three alphabets, dozens of irregular verbs. So much upheaval, so much history that I couldn’t keep track of, and so much violence. The author was born in Bulgaria in 1974, and moved to New Zealand with her parents in around 1993 after the iron curtain fell. She got sick of all the rugby and beer and what she probably saw as a general shallowness, and ended up in Scotland. She’s extremely clever and at times used language that lay at the borders of my vocabulary. I liked that she explained the meaning of both people’s names and placenames; that added to the mystique.

In a lesson yesterday I translated the word “porch” as prispă, before adding “does anyone still use this word?”. My student told me that young people probably don’t even know the word: the typical Romanian image – quite lovely to me – of an old lady on her prispă is becoming history. People now use the more boring terasă – the same word that they use for outside areas of cafés and bars – instead. They then translate terasă as “terrace” in English, but that doesn’t feel right. After all that time in NZ, I would say “deck”. When I was growing up we used “patio”. There’s also “veranda(h)” and probably a bunch of others.

As I said last time, Biden is leading Trump by 9 or 10 points in the poll averages. (Update: And crucially, he has big leads in swing-state polls, too.) If the election was held now, he’d be an overwhelming favourite, but of course it isn’t. One way this could play out is a bit like last year’s women’s Wimbledon final. Simona built a lead, but surely Serena would come back. She’s Serena! But she never came back. She was sluggish, there was nothing there. Simona hardly put a foot wrong and it was all done and dusted in 56 minutes. This is a terrible analogy I know, but it’s one of many ways the campaign and election could go. Heaps of time for it to change, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it did, but right now Biden is up by about 25 points among women and least 35 among college-educated white women. That’s massive. But Trump can at least console himself that among white men who don’t know what a verb is, he has a commanding 70-point advantage.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

When will I see you again?

June 17, 2020 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a lesson with a guy who admitted that he was addicted to fishing, to the point where he regularly dreams about it. It sounded like quite a good addiction to have. This was our first lesson since early March, before the lockdown.

I had a long chat with my parents this morning. I won’t be seeing them for absolutely ages. Not until we get a vaccine, which is probably a year away. For me, this has been the saddest part. I don’t know when I’ll next see my brother in the UK either. At least this is 2020 and not 1990, when hour-long video calls to the other side of the world would have practically been science fiction. Mum was disappointed that two new Covid cases had been imported into New Zealand from the UK.

Romania has seen 250 more cases and 10 deaths in the last 24 hours. Still way too many. I don’t know where we might head from here. There’s a lot of good simple stuff here – for instance, whenever I buy anything from the pharmacy (wearing a mask, of course) they give me another mask – but just about everything has now reopened, including malls. I was supposed to have a face-to-face lesson with a boy yesterday, but his mum changed her mind and we ended up still doing it remotely. I mentioned to him that malls had just reopened, and he said he wouldn’t be going anywhere near one because it’s too dangerous. But the fact is that after three months of being stuck, people have had enough. We’re seeing this all over the world. I don’t even talk to my brother about the virus anymore.

It really smelt of June today, with the sweet aroma of lime trees just about permeating the whole city. There’s no doubt about it, Timișoara has smells. When I moved in to this flat, the waft from the patisseries really got me, although that disappeared over the lockdown. The markets can be quite pungent, especially at this time of year, although the cheese section pongs all year round. Then the river has its own distinctive smell too. And then there’s the pigeon poo. And crow poo. I still remember visiting the UK in April 2018 and how good it felt, on my arrival in the middle of the night, to smell Timișoara again.

In March I asked Mum what her secret was for making such good pizza, and she gave me her recipe. Things got ugly with the virus almost immediately, and baking products became hard to come by, especially yeast. But yesterday yeast was back on the shelves, and I’ve currently got a pizza in the oven. I’m sure it won’t be anything like as good as Mum’s.

We’re having a run of wet, stormy weather. Here are some pictures I took this afternoon:

A busker about to start up
The Opera House getting an extreme makeover
So many pigeons
Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :)

Feeling fruity

June 16, 2020 by 0 Comments

Fewer new coronavirus cases today but I think that’s just a result of less testing and reporting; there were still 17 deaths.

Last night I didn’t sleep well – lots going on in my head and the humidity didn’t help either – and this morning I broke my routine of getting to the supermarket when it opens at eight (I was 45 minutes late). A reasonably productive day though.

I’ve recently been attempting alphabetic sentences with my younger students. We take it in turns – he’ll start with an A-word, I’ll add a B-word, he’ll say a C-word (though hopefully not that C-word), and so on. Or sometimes I’ll start, as in this sentence Octavian and I made: All bears can dig extremely far getting hotter in Japan killing ladies, men, near old police quickly running straight to uncle’s van with Xeroxes yelling “Zoo”. When I couldn’t sleep I realised that Octavian’s name is an anagram of vacation, which isn’t a word I ever use (being British and all that) but my students pretty much all do.

Here’s the glorious fruit at the market yesterday: