Month: October 2022

Family - Poker - Politics - The UK

Four years and a magical piece of life — Part 2

October 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Liz Truss had resigned from her disastrous seven-week stint as leader on the day I arrived in the UK, and the latest (abbreviated) race, which Boris Johnson mercifully pulled out of, dominated the news. Rishi took over from Lizzie, and suddenly everything was going to be fine and dandy once more. Yeah, right.

I gave a lesson on my last morning in that country I called home half a lifetime ago, then we looked at some old slides of my brother and I when we were little, and even before then when Mum and Dad had barely met. The ones from our early childhood were incredible to look back on; I think we’d forgotten how primitive things were back then in our largely run-down house before it all got done up, or perhaps we were just too young to remember. Then it was time to go. Mum and Dad took me to the coach station in Poole. On the way, we got a call from my brother to say that I’d left half my laptop charger there. It was too late to turn back. Bugger. That put a dark cloud over the next 24 hours for me. The station wasn’t in an obvious place either, but a helpful lady directed me to it – down the underpass and past all the local buses – and I was on my way.

I had to take two buses to get to the airport, first from Poole to Victoria Coach Station in London, and then to Luton. Almost six hours including the short gap in between. I searched for laptop cables using the National Express wi-fi, and considered ordering one to arrive in the following day or two, but figured with a bit of luck I might somehow get by until my parents come to Timișoara on 5th November. Fortunately my first bus arrived at Victoria Station on time. A youngish woman who had one arm was in the Luton queue (gate 10); she was concerned that her return destination was blank on her ticket, and she really needed to get the bus to Luton to avoid missing her flight, but I couldn’t help her. She asked a woman in uniform who has no help whatsoever. Finally a much more useful uniformed man told her she had to go all the way down to the desk at gate 0 to get a new ticket printed. (British bus and train authorities love the number zero for some reason.) She had to jump the queue there to get back before the bus left. On the bus I had a good chat with her. It turned out she was a Paralympic triathlete who had been in the UK in a vain search for an obscure medicine. She competed for Hungary in last years Paralympics in Tokyo, and was flying back to Budapest. She started off as a swimmer, and attempted to qualify for Athens as a teenager, before finally making it in her thirties. When we get to Luton I’ll only have an hour so I’ll have to run. You should be good at that, I said. I got her name out of her, but no phone number, and that was that.

I touched down in Timișoara just before two in the morning, as scheduled. Unlike at Luton, my mini suitcase appeared on the carousel almost immediately, and a taxi soon whisked me off back home. Like everything else in Romania, the cost of taxis has shot up. It felt good to be back, though the laptop business was eating away at me. I tried charging it via USB-C, but no luck. After almost giving up (will one of my students have a charger that works?), I saw my old HP charger out of the corner of my eye. It was so old it still had a New Zealand plug on the end of it. But I have adapters for those, and it worked. I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. I can hardly function without my laptop.

On Friday my parents left Poole and drove down to St Ives, only to break down at a service station on the M25. According to my brother they were already an hour late, at waiting for the AA to come and get them up and running again added another two hours. I’d dread to think what state Mum would have been in. On more than one occasion when Mum wasn’t around, Dad told me that Mum’s stress levels had been through the roof on their trip. The funny thing is that Mum keeps her real stressed-out self such a guarded secret that even my brother doesn’t know what she can be like. I wonder what version of her I’ll get when they come over next weekend. I’m guessing it won’t be the epitome of calm and cheerfulness – besotted by her grandson – that my brother and sister-in-law saw. We’ll see. As for me, I don’t know when I’ll next return to the UK. I’d love to play a part in the little one’s life, however fleeting.

The next few days will be taken up by lessons and getting ready for Mum and Dad. I might try and book a ticket for a play or a concert – I think they’d like that. This weekend I’ve given two lessons, played some reasonable tennis, and played five poker tournaments including a second place this morning.

Family - Life :) - The UK

Four years and a magical piece of life — Part 1

October 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

So I flew into Luton on Thursday night. No problems whatsoever with the flight, but I had to wait ages for my tiny suitcase to come off the carousel. (Unlike when I flew with Ryanair in July, I couldn’t just take it on the plane with me without paying extra extra on top of the extra I’d already paid to have the bag in the first place.) And there they were. Mum and Dad. After almost four years. A lovely moment. Then they told me about all the fun and games they’d had getting to and from their accommodation. Mum had been phoning and texting and emailing me to go to this place, no that place, no, stay where you are, not realising that in post-Brexit Britain my phone was only good for playing whatever the 2022 equivalent of Sudoku is. (I guess that would be Wordle, but as that requires the internet, it couldn’t even do that.) We stayed in a nice new eighth-floor apartment in a block called Calibra, after a Vauxhall car that came out when I was ten. (There is or was a Vauxhall plant nearby.) When I lived in New Zealand it always felt great to see my parents again after a period of a few months, so you can imagine how it felt after that long. Late that evening I ate a small pork pie; it had been years since my last one.

I slept well. Mum was keen to make an early start the next morning, but somebody had commandeered the only working lift. When we were finally ready to get away in the hire car (Dad was driving), we noticed something stuck to the windscreen. A parking ticket, with a time stamp of around half-six that morning. A hundred quid, reduced to sixty if you paid early enough. Public services, like for instance the NHS, are buckling under the weight of Brexit and Covid and too many bloody people in the damn country and not enough people running the country who actually care, but they make sure parking wardens are out in force early in the morning. Mum wasn’t a happy camper. They didn’t know not to park there, and it looks like they’ll get out of having to pay. It took at least four hours to reach my brother’s place near Poole. At one point there was torrential rain. The GPS directions were often unclear. For Dad it was hard work. We all agreed that we wouldn’t want to live in the UK again.

It was quite something for my parents to see their other son and daughter-in-law after all this time, and of course, their grandson. Six weeks old. It was hard to prise him away from Mum’s arms. She’s always been in her element with small children – it was her job for forty years after all – and she was in heaven with a child of her own flesh and blood. He got passed around to all of us, and I must say I enjoyed holding him too; it was a new experience for me. Most of the time he just slept, except of course when my brother and sister-in-law would have really liked him to be asleep. I think they will be very good parents to him.

I brought my laptop with me, and liked being able to hole myself up in the study and give online lessons. Outside my teaching, it was hard to do very much there. The TV or the radio was on most of the time, usually both, so even reading a book wasn’t that easy, not when it was in a foreign language. TV is, bizarrely to me, still of huge importance to British society. Game shows and cookery programmes and people actually caring who gets voted off. Bake Off. Strictly. Celebs I’ve never heard of doing shit I don’t care about. It seemed endless. We also got a fair dousing of good old British rain. On Saturday, when I was working, Dad and my brother went to a car boot sale and picked up a second-hand 1000-piece jigsaw of military planes in the sky, which we painstakingly tackled but got nowhere near finishing. We spent didn’t even know if the puzzle was complete. (A few years ago I started to liken my life to a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle with about 300 pieces missing. Forget even trying to make an approximation of what’s on the lid of the box. It’s time I made something else.) Twice we went to the upmarket nearby town of Wimborne. Mum bought me a checked fleecy jacket from a shop there, saying it was a Christmas present. It was reduced, but still well above my usual budget. The food was great, pretty much universally. One night we ordered curry. Another time we had Stilton sausages. Yummy. On my last night there, we had fish and chips. Apart from the food, one of the highlights was the beautiful autumn colours.

Family - International travel - Photos - Poker - Tennis

Countdown mode and memories of Singapore

October 17, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s only three days till I go away, so I’m on full don’t-forget mode now. I will forget something, though, I always do. I’ll be taking my laptop with me so I can give lessons when I’m away. Which lessons, I’m still not sure at this point, because Friday is normally a busy day for me but I don’t know what time my parents plan to get to my brother’s place on that day. Perhaps after this length of time I should prioritise family rather than work, I don’t know.

Last time I mentioned that my parents had spent two nights in Singapore on the way to the UK. In January 1987 we spent four nights there on the way back from our six-week stay in New Zealand. Back then I got very excited by anything big and futuristic and technological, so Singapore was fascinating to me. We stayed on the 20th floor of the 21-storey President Merlin hotel, Mum and my brother in room 2014, Dad and I in 2015. In the morning we would phone each other. There were malls everywhere, rising to six or seven storeys, full of shops selling gadgets that were unimaginable back home. Sports shops were everywhere, and we picked up my first proper tennis racket. I remember a cheap hand-held LCD racing car game where nobody could ever get more than 13 laps no matter how hard they tried. As for the food, my memories are hazy, but I clearly remember the time Mum ordered bee hoon for us all in a massive ground-floor food court, not having the foggiest clue what we’d be getting. It turned out to be some noodley dish which we all had great difficulty physically eating, and two Chinese girls had a good laugh at us from an upper-floor balcony. I remember Chinatown, where my parents bought various figurines that they probably still have today. It was a few days before Chinese New Year – the Year of the Rabbit was coming up, as it will be again in a few months – and there were parades with dragons. Most of all I remember the durians – large spiky smelly fruit. Like really ponging something nasty. On one day we took the boat over to Sentosa Island, but apart from the cable car I don’t remember that too well. All in all we had a great time because it was all so different from what we were used to. I visited Singapore once again in 2008 but it had changed. Obviously I was no longer a kid, so that sense of wonder had gone, but the malls seemed to have been taken over by designer clothes stores, the sort that you find at airports. Travel is going in that direction in general; with globalisation, places become more and more samey.

Chinatown, 2008 (including durians)

I played reasonably decent tennis at the weekend. The 18-year-old lad was there for both sessions, and he’s improving at a rate of knots. Mindblowingly fast. Two weeks ago he was playing cricket shots, had no backhand to speak of, and could barely get a serve into play. All very standard for someone who had hardly held a tennis racket before. Now he can reliably get his serve in, can rally from both wings, and is very tactically aware. All from just a few hours on the court. He’s clearly an all-round natural sportsman. To get to his level took me many many hours on my own, hitting against a wall, or rallying with my parents in the garden. Being anywhere near an actual tennis court would have been disastrous for me initially.

Poker. Another win on Saturday night, and this one (pot-limit badugi) kept me up until after two in the morning. I ran well and crucially collected bounties with regularity along the way. As we got short-handed I amassed a huge stack and was able to run over the table. Heads-up lasted two hands. My reward for winning and collecting so many bounties was a rare three-figure payout; I made $101 for my evening’s work – that was very nice indeed.

Family - International travel - Language teaching - Photos - Poker

Hand-wavey

October 14, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My work volumes are back up again. Six lessons scheduled for tomorrow. Last night’s student is at a basic level and I explained to him that you sometimes need to double the final consonant before adding the -ing ending. I normally leave it at “sometimes” unless they ask, because the rule is a little tricky to explain, especially when I have to do it in Romanian like last night. The rule goes like this: If the original word finishes with a single vowel followed by a single consonant, and has final-syllable stress (or only has one syllable), and it doesn’t end in w, x or y, then you double the last consonant before adding -ing, otherwise you don’t. And in British English we make an exception for words ending in a single vowel plus l – we double the l no matter where the word stress goes. My explanation got pretty hand-wavey I must say. (The same double-letter rules, by the way, apply to other suffixes too, most notably -ed but also -er, -y, -age, -able, and probably some others I’ve forgotten.) On Tuesday I had my first lesson with the tennis guy, which was mostly conducted in Romanian. This morning I had my first session with a woman in her thirties and that went pretty well – I could tell that she really wants to learn and would certainly care about where to put double consonants and the like if that subject came up. She’s at about a 5 on my 0-to-10 scale, plenty good enough to get by in English.

Mum and Dad have now landed in the UK. One week till I see them. They called me from their hotel room in the Bugis area of Singapore. (I wonder, how do you pronounce Bugis? Mum goes with /ˈbʊgɪs/ or /ˈbuːgɪs/, but for all I know it might be /ˈbʌgɪs/ or /ˈbuːdʒɪs/ or, who knows, a French-style /byʒi/.) It was a good idea for them to break up their journey with a stopover. (I have very fond memories of our four-day stay in Singapore in 1987. It was fascinating for a little boy.) Their trip was not without incident. Mum’s hand luggage tested positive for explosives (!) in Christchurch, and that meant that their suitcases had to be hauled out of the aircraft hold and tested. Mum’s elder brother had taken them to the airport, and he sometimes keeps fertiliser in the back of his van. Traces of fertiliser (you can make bombs out of that stuff) probably got onto her bag and triggered the alarm. My parents also had a load of convoluted Covid-related form-filling on their arrival in Singapore – just what you need after a ten-hour flight. I hope they’re now in St Ives and in some comfort. It’ll be quite something to see them again after what feels like an eternity.

I’ll be visiting the UK again in what feel like increasingly dark times for the country. Liz Truss’s government is historically unpopular because it’s historically crap, although Johnson wasn’t really any better. There are no maps or plans that make any sense. Winter is coming in more ways than one. People will die of poverty.

I’m finally back to winning ways in poker. I’ve played two tournaments since I my previous post, and I was victorious in one of them – the no-limit single draw. I had a lot of fun during that win, which netted me a $48 profit. At one stage there was someone at the table who didn’t know the rules, and an English guy (a decent player) tried to exploit him by calling with a junky hand, only to see the clueless player turn over a proper hand. The English guy recovered from that to make it all the way to heads-up against me, and all the time there was good-natured chat between us. I took a 2½-to-1 lead into heads up, then my nice opponent came back and took a healthy chip lead, but I was able to turn the tables again and take the win after 3½ hours and 432 hands. My bankroll is $1043.

On yesterday’s bike ride to Sânmihaiu Român
Family - International travel - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

They’re off!

October 10, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents are currently on Singapore Airlines flight 298, an Airbus A350 registered 9V-SMM, and right now they’re passing by Fitzroy Crossing in north-western Australia. Flightradar24 is a great tool.

Mum and Dad will spend two nights in Singapore before flying to London, and a week after that we’ll all meet up as a family for the first time since Christmas 2018.

Last night my brother told me about all the messy midnight interludes that are suddenly a feature of his life. We then talked about our cousin – the 52-year-old daughter of my aunt whom I saw in August – and the fact that she hasn’t seen her mother in three years. Just imagine. You live in Somerset, four hours’ drive at the most from your isolated and vulnerable mum, you don’t make the trip in all that time, and somehow you think that’s OK. Just how? I know there was the small matter of a pandemic, but she wasn’t exactly dying to hook up with her mum on Zoom. People are crazy. Talking of crazy cousins, I have a cousin the same age as me in Wellington. I went to his wedding in 2012. He has two daughters; the youngest is probably five or six. He’s a big fan of Liverpool, and in 2019 his beloved team reached the Champions League final in dramatic fashion. So what did he do? Fly to Barcelona at the last minute to watch his team play Tottenham. You literally can’t get any further: if you could tunnel down from Wellington through the centre of the earth and back out the other side, you’d end up in Spain. He didn’t have a ticket for Camp Nou – that would be one thing. No, he watched the match on a big screen, then flew back home. Months later he broke up with his wife.

I played tennis twice at the weekend. On Saturday I went to the pub by the river afterwards. It was surprisingly empty for such as warm evening. It seems we haven’t still fully recovered from Covid and now we’ve got a whole load of other crap to worry about like skyrocketing energy bills and bridges being set alight in our vicinity that people want to save their money. The price of eating and drinking out has shot up too; in a classic case of shrinkflation, the beer glasses in this place are 20% smaller than they used to be. I don’t eat much meat these days normally, but the meal I had was a plate of traditional Romanian food, and was necessarily extremely meaty.

A guy from tennis is starting lessons with me tomorrow. He did mention it ages ago, but because he’s anti-vax and knew my diametrically opposed stance on the issue, I thought that might put him off. We’ll have the lesson online. More and more people are choosing to have their lessons online even if they live in Timișoara. At this rate they’ll render my new teaching room redundant.

Poker. I played seven tournaments at the weekend and got nowhere; my bankroll is now $996. Two of those were hold ’em which I hardly ever play. My poker dream is that GG Poker, the site that has now overtaken Poker Stars as the market leader, will one day add a bunch of other games to match the variety that Poker Stars offers. If that happens, I’ll be off to GG like a shot with four figures to play with.

Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Tourists

October 3, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

As we hit October and the leaves turn, I miss the view I had from my city-centre window even more. This morning I spoke to Mum and Dad. Only 18 days till I see them in the UK. They’ve now booked their flights to and from Romania; they’ll be here from 5th to 10th November. I wish they could have come for longer. We discussed the war in Ukraine, the stampede at a football match in Indonesia that killed 125 people, and how the UK seems to have slammed into reverse.

It’s been an interesting day. Yesterday I bumped into Mark (the guy who teaches at British School) as he was getting winter tyres put on his car. We agreed to catch up today. He heard about a guided tour of the Fabric area of Timișoara, where I happen to live now, taking place this afternoon. We had to sign up; I gave the tour people my phone number and said there’d be two people coming. Mark trekked over to my neck of the woods, and some other teachers from British School also made the trip. Not for the tour, but just for drinks. All nice people, from what I could tell. One of them, a smoker, had run a marathon – 42-point-something kilometres – in under four hours that morning. Mind-boggling for me. Mark then decided he’d rather stay at the bar than bother with the tour that was scheduled to take 2½ hours in a language he knew about a dozen words of. Then my phone rang. It was the tour guide. Why aren’t you here? Sorry mate, we’ve kind of got to do this. So the two of us joined the group. The guide could speak English, but conducted the tour in Romanian, so I interpreted for Mark, probably pretty badly because I got lost at times myself. We learnt about the large Jewish contingent that lived in the area, and how nationalities weren’t really a thing 200-odd years ago in Timișoara – your religion basically was your nationality. The guide stopped at buildings along the way – the CEO of the wool factory lived in this one, an internationally renowned violinist lived in that one – sometimes pointing out architectural details that I had missed. Then Mark had had enough so we paid the guide and left.

By that point it was just about time for me to go to tennis anyway. There was a new guy this evening – a teenager who had just taken up the game. Although his forehand was good considering his lack of experience, he was struggling to get any sort of serve into play. We increased his number of serves allowed per point from two to infinity, and still he struggled. Hardly surprising, really. You either need a coach or to practise yourself with a bucketload of balls. A game situation with everyone watching, even if it’s a casual game, is the worst of all.

Hopefully this week I can finalise my new-look teaching room, or close to it. I may even put some pictures of it on here.

I played in four poker tournaments last night. I cashed in three despite making bad starts to all of them, in one case losing 97% of my initial stack (!), but couldn’t convert my big comebacks into big finishes and only made a modest profit. My bankroll is $1015.