Month: October 2020

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.

Family - Politics

This does my head in

October 22, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Monday morning I got an email from Dad. He’d been round someone’s place for dinner, with Mum, despite having a migraine. At the dinner table he was on the verge of passing out, and excused himself so he could lie on the sofa. For the next day and a half, he felt really shitty. He never should have gone, obviously, but for Mum there’s always this bizarre loss of face. There’s massive shame in admitting that her husband suffers from migraines. That’s assuming she believes Dad is suffering in the first place and isn’t just being awkward. I really don’t know what she thinks. All I do know is that over the years, her attitude toward Dad’s obvious extreme pain has been unforgivable. It’s making me angry just thinking about it. Dad emailed me because he has nobody else he can talk to. I was careful to send him a very short separate email, without replying to his original message, because Mum often reads the emails he receives but never looks in his sent items as far as I know.

This morning I called my parents, and as luck would have it Mum was out playing tennis, so I was able to have a good chat with Dad. He said that Mum was very good when it came to his bowel cancer last year, I guess because it had the potential to kill him, but she has a blind spot when it comes to his (very frequent) migraines. When Mum got back from tennis I chatted with her for a bit. We get on very well these days. Mum really just wants the best for me, and she can see I’m much happier now. I just wish she wouldn’t make Dad’s condition even worse thanks to her lack of sympathy.

If you even half-believe the polls, the US election right now isn’t close. With under two weeks to go, Biden is up by about ten points on average and has biggish leads in the swing states. It’s not over just yet – there’s still time for Biden to get Covid or some other huge bombshell to shift the numbers enough to push Trump over the line, especially if there’s also a sizeable polling miss. If Trump loses by three points, he’s about 50-50 to win the Electoral College. But please please please no.

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.

Coronavirus - Family - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

A tyring week, and the latest on the book

October 5, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last week I had a stuffy nose and a bit of a cough and I wondered what was causing it. Then I figured it out. I’d replaced my bike tyre with a new white-rimmed one, and the fumes from the glue on the tyre were getting into my respiratory system. This has happened to me before. When I moved into my Wellington flat, the previous tenants had left an old umbrella which had a glue lining the spokes. And once I bought a glue-drenched pair of shoes that I had no choice but to chuck out. I’ve now tied my bike up in the lobby rather than keeping it in my flat.

This morning I had a Skype chat with my aunt and uncle who visited me in Timișoara after my brother’s wedding. That all feels like a lifetime ago now. My aunt is about to have a hip replacement. (My uncle has so far had hip, knee and ankle replacements, so now it’s her turn.) They’re also trying to get a refund of the $20,000 they spent on this year’s holiday that never happened. Apart for that, they seemed good, and busy as ever. It was a great pleasure for me to see them here, and I wonder if and when I’ll see them again.

Covid. With rapid increases in cases and hospitalisations, and winter around the corner, the situation is in danger of spiralling out of control. (It’s worse than it was when we locked down, and now we aren’t anything close to being locked down.) Maskless in-person lessons are now a no-go for me. They’re marginal even with masks. The markets, while they’re in the open, are jam-packed with elderly people, and I’ve decided to give them a miss too. One trip to the supermarket each week, in and out as fast as possible, and that’s my lot for the foreseeable future.

I was surprised how many people thought that Trump’s Covid diagnosis was fake. I mean, it’s possible, but given how breathtakingly irresponsible he’s been, it’s almost a wonder he’s stayed Covid-free for so long. I hope he survives and is humiliated in next month’s election. (Following his diagnosis, he gave a four-minute speech – edited I’m sure – in which he briefly seemed like a human being who vaguely cared about other human beings.) When I heard that Trump was positive, I emailed my university friend who in March placed a bet on Mike Pence to be the next president.

The Romanian teacher has found time in her busy schedule to work on translating my book, and it looks like this thing might actually happen. Still lots to do. Some exercises and quizzes. A slimmed down version of the dictionary. Dad’s illustrations, if he’s on board with that. But it would be quite something to have my work – a useful, practical work – in print. Crucially, the teacher has experience of publishing in Romania, and her own mother is semi-famous in her home of Alba Iulia for the books she has written.

I had my first Zoom lesson with a ten-year-old boy who lives in Bucharest. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also my last. It was like pulling teeth. Not his fault; Zoom with kids of that age is hard. The “highlight” was when I asked him to guess my age, and he said 55. It reminded me of the boy who wanted to know how much I weighed. Um, I actually don’t know. Then out came the scales. Thirty-odd kilos. Now it’s your turn. Oh, alright then. Seventy-eight! That’s even more than my dad! My English teacher’s a fatty! Ha ha!

Roland-Garros. I’ve just watched Simona Halep be overwhelmed 6-1 6-2 in the fourth round by Iga Świątek (pronounced something like “shfyon-tek”), a 19-year-old from Poland. Świątek was in the zone, rarely put a foot wrong, and Simona was out of ideas. Halep has always been vulnerable to zoning power-hitters. I also saw the final game of Martina Trevisan’s victory over fifth-seed Kiki Bertens, another big upset. Trevisan is a diminutive left-hander from Italy, and I earlier enjoyed her dramatic second-round win over Cori Gauff, which she eked out 7-5 in the third set. In round three she had match points against her. Ranked 159th in the world, she’s come all the way from qualifying to reach the quarter-finals. Seven matches in a row. Whatever happens, it’ll be like hitting Powerball for her.

We’re getting warm, windy, weird weather. Yesterday I sat in Central Park and read my book. The wind sprayed the water from the fountain onto me. Somebody put a piano in the nearby bandstand a few months ago, and this time there was someone who could actually play it, rather than a small kid hammering away at random. A woman was pushing a man with no legs in a wheelchair. They made three visits to my bench for money. I gave them 7 lei in total. I found a small yellow stylised wooden elephant, and realising it could land in six positions when you throw it, with vastly different probabilities (Pass the Pigs style), I took it home. It could feature in a kids’ game, when kids’ games become a feature again.