by Shortly after writing my last post, my young student couple decided to cancel all their lessons for the week, plus the following Monday’s ones, ten lessons in all. This was supposedly because of some last-minute tests or assignments at university. Then they gave me another phone call to say they wanted to come over for five minutes for some unknown reason. Right, so they’ll be telling me they want to jack their English lessons in entirely. At 10am on Wednesday the bell went. What are they going to say? They didn’t say an awful lot. Instead they gave me a Christmas hamper containing two bottles of wine, a panettone, and lots of chocolatey and biscuity and nutty things. That will certainly keep me going over Christmas. It is also shows that I’m appreciated for the work I do, and that makes it all feel worthwhile. It’s almost a new feeling for me and a very pleasant one.
In spite of the loss of business from that couple, I’ve had a reasonably productive week. The lessons with the ten-year-old boy are always fun. My friend from St Ives sent me Tim and Tobias, the first in a series of beautifully illustrated short children’s books that were written in the seventies and that I read at school in 1986 or ’87. A magic key formed a major part of the plot, but my student kept pronouncing ‘key’ as ‘kay’. I kept correcting him. Eventually he started shouting ‘KEEEEE!’ every time the word came up. We also played Space Race (my board game, that could still do with the odd tweak) and a bingo game that involves common objects (including keeeees) instead of numbers.
Black flags, as well as Romanian ones, are flying from the cathedral and the lamp-posts outside my flat, because the country is officially in mourning after the death of King Michael (and possibly because it’s also the anniversary of the bloody revolution in 1989). The king was flown to Bucharest from Switzerland on Wednesday. The funeral is tomorrow and Prince Charles will be in attendance.
My Scrabble record on ISC now reads twelve wins, three losses, although your win–loss record by itself is meaningless. It’s all about how good your opponents are. That’s why the rating system works so well. Wins against higher-rated opponents boost your rating a lot more than wins against weaker players, and the margin of your wins and losses affects your rating too. Today I figured out why ISC has a no-play feature. Put some people in front of a computer screen, with the ability to type messages to someone else, and they can’t help but be a complete arsehole. I reckon this guy, who became the first player on my no-play list, was probably an arsehole in his offline life too. I did learn two useful lessons from the game. One, don’t let people like that put you off. Two, not knowing words (or to be more accurate, not knowing the most useful words) is a huge handicap. With the game virtually neck-and-neck, I played TIE, not knowing that I’d provided my opponent with the chance to hook an S in front of it and play a winning bingo (VERITES, which I didn’t know either). I think I’ve just about got the 124 two-letter words down pat, and am now, systematically I hope, trawling through the threes.
