by I’m having a slightly frustrating week thanks to all the cancellations I’m getting, but if I’m lucky I’ll still hit the 20-hour mark. These days I seem to have temporary frustrations, and isn’t that great? At the sprightly hour of 7:30 this morning I had a lesson with a beginner who intends to move to Edmonton in Canada next year. It’s a pleasure to work with him, but it’s always interesting getting him to read. What comes out of his mouth is at times independent of what’s on the page. It reminds me of Mum trying to teach my brother to read, or this bit from the Royal Variety Performance a couple of years ago (fast forward to 4:24, or alternatively watch it all – it’s pretty funny).
Last week Octavian, my ten-year-old student, told me that as much as he loved Crazy Rabbits (the board game I made), he’d quite like to play something else next time. That meant I had to make another, probably more complex, game (or buy one, but that would be more expensive and less fun). I had to make something that would stand the test of time. I thought of making a space-themed game, and found a fun-looking spacey board online which was supposed to have 100 spaces but only had 94. It was also watermarked, meaning I’d need to pay a subscription (no thanks) to download the unadulterated version. I painstakingly removed the watermark as best I could using a slightly better (and free) version of Paint, and squeezed in an extra six spaces in such a way that you wouldn’t notice. I numbered the spaces in fives – each space represented five light years – and then I had to figure out the mechanics of the game. The goal, I decided, was to be the first to drive all three of your spaceships the 500 light years from start to finish. The skill, such that it exists, is in choosing which ship to move on which turn – you have to decide before you roll the dice. Some spaces give you extra turns or get you to draw cards that make good or bad things happen to either you or your opponent. I tested the game on Tuesday with Matei – it was my 51st lesson with him, so the risk that he wouldn’t want to see me again if he hated the game didn’t seem too great. He liked it but found some of the rules a bit counterintuitive (move 25 light years – five spaces – if you roll a four, for instance) and wished we used two dice instead of one. So I added a second die and simplified the rules quite a bit, and played it with Octavian yesterday. Space Race. He seemed to be a fan.
Something has been puzzling me. I followed one of the Cambridge textbooks with my Skype student (ex-student, thankfully), and one section was on travel. It gave a list of the “fifty places you must visit before you die”, of which my parents live in number four, and asked the student to pick his or her must-see places from the list. To my surprise, my ex-student put Dubai at number one. Last week I reached the same section of the book with another student, and once again Dubai was top of her list. Seriously, what is the fuck is going on here? The probability that they’d both choose Dubai at random is 0.04%. All-out nuclear war in the coming year is far more likely than that. I can understand why you might want to work in Dubai for a limited time (to make loads of dirhams), but not everyone goes to Dubai for work, or to visit friends and family who are working there, or even as a stopover to break up the journey between two places that actually have human rights. No, significant numbers of people go to Dubai to go to Dubai, to lurch from one soulless air-conditioned shopping mall to another, and then come home. How bizarre. I mean, I know bits of Timișoara are a bit shit, but at least they’re real shit.
The Christmas market is in full swing, and the pungent but pleasant whiff of mulled wine fills the air. Last night some young women in traditional Romanian dress were singing what I imagine were traditional Romanian Christmas carols.
