by This morning I called my parents from the Mehala car market. I recently looked at the many hundreds of photos from my trip around Romania in 2016. Isn’t this country beautiful? So far I’ve only been able to scratch the surface of it, so wouldn’t it be great to have my own set of wheels? I’m apprehensive about the whole thing though; buying and owning a car in Romania seems bureaucratically onerous and could add further layers of life admin that send my whole wobbly edifice crashing to the ground. And I really don’t want to spend much. Plus, if you write a blog you can find out the exact date that you last did something. I last drove a car on 1/10/17, which is bloody ages ago. On Wednesday I’ve got my medical tests – all six of them! – which I need for a Romanian licence, then I’ve made an appointment for 15th May to actually get my licence converted over. Probably something or other won’t be in order and I’ll have to come back weeks later. I know the drill by now.
It’s the last day of April, when Timișoara is guaranteed to be beautiful. Cycling through tree-lined Mehala on a quiet Sunday is quite lovely. Not all of it was quiet this morning, though. At the huge Orthodox church there was the usual hubbub of people coming and going, and there were queues of people filling up big bottles from the well. According to the official list, there are 92 wells dotted around the city, but the one outside Mehala Church has the best water, or so they say. I tried to encourage Mum and Dad to come to Romania next spring. They must be thoroughly sick of my brother and I banging that drum, though I hope they’re happy that their kids want to see more of them.
The snooker. Yikes. Two gripping semi-finals and a very late night for me. In the first match, Luca Brecel (who had pulled off an extraordinary win over O’Sullivan) trailed Si Jiahui 14-5 with 17 being the target. In other words, Si was playing out of his skin and Brecel was gone. Until he wasn’t. Brecel went for broke, and got lucky when Si missed a green in the last frame of Friday’s brilliant session. Everything the Belgian player touched turned to gold, and he continued in the same vein when they returned yesterday. I didn’t see the end of the match because I was playing tennis, but he won eleven straight frames and ran out a 17-15 winner. Nobody had previously won a match at the Crucible from nine frames behind. I just hope the loss – on his debut – doesn’t permanently scar the Chinese player. If that match was free-flowing, the other semi between the two Marks – Selby and Allen – was the polar opposite; it was chess with balls. Selby’s shtick is to grind his opponent into the dust with tactical play. Allen just happens to be rather good at that type of snooker too, and the two of them tore hunks out of each other in a match spanning 13½ hours. The balls ran awkwardly and sizeable breaks were rare. Even the aging Scottish referee seemed to put on extra years during the match. Last night it seemed Mark Selby had finally worn his opponent down as he led 16-10, needing just one for victory. Great, some sleep! But Selby kept missing chances to win. Each frame was a drawn-out battle. Allen squeaked out five of them to close to within one, then at last Selby got in around the black and sealed the deal. Even then, he had a black barely wriggle into the corner pocket. I’m two hours ahead of the UK, and the match finished at ten to three my time. There’s now the small matter of the final between Brecel and Selby, where the winner is the first to 18. The conventional wisdom is that Selby will win, perhaps easily, but I’m not so sure. For one thing, you’d expect Selby to be shattered after his efforts.