Month: July 2020

Family - Life :)

Fighting the fatigue

July 26, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Suffering from fatigue again, though nothing like last weekend. Today I was able to have a decent walk and play tennis without too many problems. I wandered into Mehala this morning, where the plum trees were packed. I’m pretty sure I picked some from the same tree outside the house where the woman shouted at me two years ago. I was going to say that Mehala is my favourite part of Timișoara, but in truth I’ve got lots of favourites. It’s probably my favourite residential area, though.

On Thursday night I went to the doctor to pick up my month’s supply of pills. I continue to be impressed by the level of medical attention I get here. I told him about my fatigue, and he tested my oxygen saturation (good), blood pressure (fine) and breathing (no problems). My temperature had already been checked on the way in to the surgery, and that was fine too. I told him I didn’t have a cough or fever when I felt so tired. He concluded that it almost certainly wasn’t coronavirus (I was pretty sure of that anyway) and prescribed me some multivitamin pills, one a day for 15 days. They contain, iron, zinc, selenium, manganese, fluoride, copper, folic acid, and a whole host of other minerals and vitamins, including a small amount vitamin D, which I’m taking a much larger dose of in a separate tablet. They also contain ginseng, which seems to be quite popular here. These pills won’t do me any harm.

I haven’t heard any more from my brother about the house. It was obvious when I spoke to him that the enthusiasm for moving came from his wife far more than from him. My best guess is that she’d like to have a family – she can’t hang around – and their current place isn’t very kid-friendly.

Tomorrow I’ll have my sixth one-hour session this week with the guy in Austria. That’s given me an unexpected boost.

Coronavirus - Life :)

Out of keff

July 20, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I think I’m over my three days of inexplicable fatigue. Uncontrollable yawning. Numbness in my limbs. Not wanting to do anything. In Romanian there’s a very handy word – chef – which we could do with importing into English. It’s nothing to do with food, and is in fact pronounced keff, which is how I’d spell it if it were an English word. It means desire to do a particular thing. Since Thursday I’ve been totally out of keff. Completely and utterly keffless. I still managed to drag myself around the tennis court twice though. Last night was hard work.

Over 90 workers have tested positive at the Smithfield meat plant here in Timișoara. They produce the Comtim brand of meat that you see everywhere. I’ve had students who work there. These meat plants have been an absolute menace all over Europe and the US; they have perfect conditions for the virus to spread.

I’ve just been on the phone to my brother. They’ve had an offer accepted on a house. In the UK nothing is finalised until they have the keys in their hands, but that’s a good start.

Coronavirus - Language teaching

Narentious

July 18, 2020 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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 - Life :)

Hair chop, and a second wave

July 9, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I got my hair cut. I wore a mask and had my temperature checked. When the barber put his comb through my long, thick, grey strands, it was almost like he was putting a fork through spaghetti. The mask straps made the bits around my ears rather tricky. He lopped off more than I bargained for, but that saves me going back there for while. I might not be able to anyway, because of these charts:

The charts show seven-day averages, so the bars for today (Wednesday) represent the numbers reported from last Thursday to today, inclusive. Taking an average means you eliminate any day-of-week effects (less reporting at weekends, for example) or other random stuff that might otherwise give a spurious peak or trough. Things aren’t looking too good, are they? Today 555 new cases were reported, giving a seven-day average of 411, taking us into territory not reached even in April when the effects of lockdown were still taking hold. Now the lid is pretty much off. But for how much longer?

Melbourne is now under a six-week lockdown.

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

Back on the court

July 6, 2020 plutomanby 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.

Family - Life :) - Politics

Unfathomable

July 2, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m having a better work week. Today I had four lessons – seven hours in total – and the boost that gives to my mental health makes everything else much more manageable, like, for instance, this flat going back on the market. I found out about that yesterday.

What an utterly mad first half of the year it has been. (My hair is now madder than ever, by the way.) I should be glued to Wimbledon right now, but a world in which people thwacked furry objects with bats, and other people queued to watch them do it, feels unfathomably far away. When will I next see any of my family?

Talking of unfathomable, what the heck is going on in the UK? How did we end up here? People throwing bottles and spreading Covid throughout Liverpool just because their team won the league. People shitting on beaches. People generally not giving a fuck. People handed a licence not to give a fuck because the people in power don’t either, beyond their own careers. A leader ripping whole hunks out of Trump’s book who is still remarkably popular (his fans include my own brother). I think how much better Britain would have handled the crisis back in 1995, when the country was led by John Major, who was very unpopular but objectively light years ahead of the charlatan currently in charge.

Last week I had something close to an argument with Mum. (That’s rare these days. Ever since my move to Romania, we’ve got on well.) She was blaming young people again. By young people, Mum means anybody under about 50. “They don’t have any money and for a lot of them it’s their own fault.” Um, OK. “They’ve got to have everything now.” Well yes, but whose fault actually is that? Are you really suggesting that they’re stupider than your generation? Seriously? Or maybe, just maybe, they’re essentially the same people, with at least 99.9% of the same DNA, but born into a very different world, with completely different decision paths available to them. Mum didn’t max out her credit card because there were no credit cards to max out. If Mum had been born in 1999 instead of 1949, I bet she’d be clambering over people to buy whatever the hell the latest number iPhone is. Honestly, this whole generation shaming, and it’s people of all generations who do it, is bloody ridiculous.