Month: November 2020

Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Tennis

It feels impossible

November 29, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s now been confirmed exactly, to the dollar, how much each of us will receive from the sale of our apartment block. I’ve memorised the six-digit number as if it were an old phone number from when I was a kid. (When I was growing up, some of us had five-digit numbers, others six.) Commission and lawyers’ fees will still come out of that, but it’s beyond my wildest dreams. It’s surreal, honestly. Other owners have said, now I know what winning Lotto must feel like. This nine-year nightmare has been a defining feature of my life. Would I have come to Romania otherwise? It feels impossible that it’s now coming to an end, and with this outcome.

I’m in no hurry when it comes to figuring out my next step. Do I buy something in Timișoara, and if so, what? (I should really wait until I’m sure I can stay here.) How about the UK instead, or would that be a really terrible idea? As far as real estate is concerned, I’m clueless and frankly not that interested, but I’ve got options now that I never expected to have. Ideally I would like a sunny house with a small garden, maybe some fruit trees, and a place where I can work. That’s about all.

This must be a weight off my parents’ minds, too. When I got the news that my place had been yellow-stickered, Mum and Dad were on holiday in Europe and I didn’t dare tell them until they got back. I didn’t want to wreck their holiday.

I played tennis today with three members of a family (husband, wife, and their nine-year-old boy who can certainly play a bit). We played three sets, one in each configuration. The most enjoyable set was the one with the boy, which we lost 7-5. The temperature couldn’t have been more than two degrees, but that didn’t seem to matter.

My parents have gone over to Milford Sound for a trip, taking advantage of the lack of foreign tourists. They hope it might be like the one we did as a family 31 years ago. Milford Sound, Doubtful Sound, Lake Te Anau and the glow-worm caves, it was all magical. One time the captain let my brother and I drive the boat. Such a different time.

Dad has a 1957 MGA. He bought it in the UK in ’91, at which time it was red. (He’s now had it for nearly half its life.) It was black when it was shipped out new (and left-hand drive) to the US, as the vast majority of MGAs were. I went with Dad to the classic car yard before he bought it for £6000, and I remember he first went round the bodywork with a magnet, wondering why a part of it didn’t attract, but eventually thinking nothing of it. It was a beautiful-looking car, very curvaceous, and I always liked the leathery smell of it. None of that insipid plasticky stuff. When my parents moved to New Zealand in 2003, it went in the shipping container. Just recently he’s had it reworked and resprayed, the steering swapped over, and the engine reconditioned (all at no inconsiderable cost, I’m sure). He found out it had once been in an accident, with layers of filler applied, hence why there was no metal for that magnet to pick up. He’s now got his car back, in a lovely robin’s-egg blue, or Cambridge blue, or perhaps face-mask blue.

November hasn’t been a bad month. Trump lost. Hooray! (I’m already fed up with the cynicism about Biden being just more of the same. I really really want Biden to succeed and I think he can.) At least three vaccines have demonstrated impressive levels of efficacy. And now, totally unexpectedly, I’ve found myself in a position to build something, to plan for the future, to even feel I have a future. Who cares if it doesn’t get above two degrees.

Life :) - New Zealand

What a result!

November 25, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I got an email from the body corporate in Wellington this morning. We now have a confirmed sale, at a price that surpassed our expectations so much that they wrote the amount in words after the numbers, just in case we thought it was a typo. The location – it’s prime real estate – must have brought out the competition. (There was a tender process.) I might break even, or perhaps a little better, after all the fees and what have you. That’s a massive result. When I bought the place I imagined I might do rather better than break even (ignoring all the mortgage interest) after nine years, but to escape from the wreckage of this catastrophe with just a few bumps and bruises, instead of being financially crippled for life, is amazing. Time to crack open the champagne!

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.

Politics

Biden! Harris! They did it!

November 9, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tuesday night. Oh man. I lay in bed at 2am glued to my laptop as the results from Florida came in. The big dump of ballots from Miami-Dade, where Biden massively underperformed relative to Clinton four years ago, was a bombshell. “I’ll be shocked if Biden wins Florida,” tweeted Matthew Isbell, a Florida expert. At that point it was clear we were in for a long night. More results trickled in and they too looked iffy for Biden. My 7:30 lesson had been cancelled (my most useful cancellation ever) and at around six I tried to get some shut-eye, to no avail. I got up at 7:30 expecting to see Trump on the verge of a second term, and allowed myself a smile when I saw that Wisconsin had been called for Biden and some networks had also projected Arizona in his favour. He was still in with a good shout.

Biden then gave a quick speech, in which he was predictably (but with justification) upbeat, and then came Trump who briefly took us into a very dark place by begging that millions of legitimate votes should be disallowed, wrongly saying that he’d won Pennsylvania. I spoke to Dad who said, that’s it then, Trump’s won. But unlike me, Dad isn’t exactly a numbers man. Those mail-in ballots, and there’s plenty of them, will be very friendly to Biden. Trump is trumping out of his arse, Dad. As for Mum, she was playing tennis, and very angry at Trump’s apparent win. She really can’t stick Trump.

Both Donald and Robu, the local mayor, are OUT

Wednesday and Thursday were grim days. The despair at how Trump, win or lose, received so many votes. The mounting Covid tallies as we sleepwalked into disaster. The sleep deprivation. The total lack of sun. I followed Twitter accounts of those in the know, such as the fantastic Jon Ralston in Nevada. There was great suspense every time a new batch of ballots was released. What do those numbers mean? Are they good or bad? I was madly googling names of obscure counties. By Thursday evening it was clear that Biden had done enough. I had a lesson with an 18-year-old guy, and we strayed into politics. Bad idea. Turned out he was a Trump fan. He even showed me his Trump book. He should be in prison, I said. He has no business being a free man.

Friday and Saturday went by in a holding pattern. To be honest I was enjoying the slow drip-feed of votes for Biden, particularly in Pennsylvania. There was much talk of lawsuits. Then at 6:30 on Saturday evening it happened. Pennsylvania was called for Biden, putting him on 273 electoral votes. There was a sudden outpouring of joy and celebration. People were dancing in the streets of Philadelphia, New York, and Washington DC. Power had been returned to the people. What a moment that was. Then last night came the speeches. Biden’s was perhaps his best yet. He could so easily have made occasional jibes at the now-lame-duck president, but he never did. And Kamala was wonderful. She has a great sense of humour. A stark contrast from the humourless egotism of the last four years. (I watched and listened, imagining with horror the pure hatred that would have emanated from Trump and Pence, had they been re-elected.)

It’ll be tough for Biden. It was a close election; the blue wave didn’t materialise. Trump, a bully, a liar and a cheat, has got 71 million votes and they’re still counting. The Senate (which has a huge Republican bias, more so than the Electoral College which is bad enough) will remain red unless the Democrats win both run-offs in Georgia (what a state that has been) on 5th January. The Democrats even lost seats in the House, though they keep control of it. And more immediately, Trump still has eleven weeks to do serious damage. The Dems are busily putting together their coronavirus taskforce, but they can’t do a damn thing until the orange monster vacates the scene.

It was amusing as hell to see the BBC cameras zooming in on Trump’s game of golf, minutes after the election had been called. He’ll soon have plenty more time for that. Until he’s banged up, that is.

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.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Tennis

What would she think?

November 2, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I sometimes wonder what my parents would think if they stumbled upon this blog. They’d probably be horrified, especially Mum. But in fact I get on really well with Mum, better than ever before, for all kinds of reasons including (more recently) the pandemic which has strengthened our family bond. (I now have family photos all over my flat.) The main reason though is that I’ve been far happier since I moved to Romania, and that has lifted Mum’s mood too, so we’ve both managed to escape that spiral of negativity. (My brother had a pretty tough time a few years ago too, and he’s indescribably better now.) Another noticeable difference is that Mum respects me more because I’ve done a thing off my own bat. I mentioned that to Dad recently and he agreed with me.

When I spoke to Dad, he asked me what might have happened if I’d taken the job in Timaru instead of going to Auckland. At the beginning of 2004, when I was living with my parents in Temuka and desperate for a job, I went door-knocking on various banks and (now defunct) finance companies in Timaru. Most of them gave me short shrift, but a nice lady at BNZ was happy to sit down with me for a chat, and look over my CV. Perhaps in the same week (I can’t remember exactly) I flew up to Auckland for an interview with a life insurance company. I got the job in Auckland, and was extremely excited to do so, but I fell into a pit of depression almost the moment I started. Then Mum got a call from the lady at the bank, offering me a job, but it was too late by then. I said to Dad that I almost certainly would have been happier in the short term if I’d worked at BNZ, but within a few years banks had become even more sales-focused and I would have hated that.

I played tennis this afternoon. A welcome distraction. The court had been resurfaced since our last game – that’s the main reason why we couldn’t play for a while – and what a difference it made. Added to that, the setting was quite beautiful with all the autumn colours. I played with somebody new, the wife of one of the other players. As we walked to the courts, she was wearing an N95 mask (I just wore a cloth one) and I when she spoke to me I could hardly make out a thing she said. Da, da. On the other side of the court were her husband and an older guy. My partner was better than the woman I normally play with. We raced out to a 5-1 lead in the first set, but she visibly tired and we had to fight to even reach a tie-break, which we lost 7-4. After a quick fag break (not for me), we kept the same partners for the second set and I expected we’d go down in a heap, but instead we won 7-5 in a great set of tennis, full of long rallies and hard-fought deuce games. The two sets took 1¾ hours, excluding the fag break. I served five or six aces, well above average for me.

The UK announced their lockdown last night. (Or was it just for England?) Loads of baffling slides that you could hardly even see, followed by Boris saying that people must stay at home and also that they are free to leave home for a variety of reasons. (This Youtube clip from Matt Lucas never stops being funny.)

My brother should be moving house this Thursday. They’re upsizing. (Maybe they’ll be expanding.) The enthusiasm for moving comes from his wife, not him – I’m not sure it’s the sort of place he would have picked.

Yesterday I had a lesson with the woman in Bucharest who uses the same Romanian news app that I do. We had beeps and bloops every few minutes during the lesson. Nearly 6000 new Covid infections and 101 deaths. Simona Halep was positive. Then we heard that Sean Connery had died. My student said all the news (the earthquake in Greece and Turkey, the stabbing in Nice) was all getting a bit much. I said, just wait until next week. She said she expected Biden to lose because he’s “a hundred years old”. OK, he’s too old, but his opponent is too old and a giant turd.