by Mum and Dad have been back in New Zealand a week, but when I spoke to Mum on FaceTime she looked pretty much zombified. My Wellington-based cousin and her family had been staying there (a base for their skiing) so my parents weren’t really able to recover from their jet lag.
The last two weeks I’ve only just crept over the 20-hour mark and that’s likely to drop further as people take holidays. I’m tempted to go to Belgrade (again), and from there go on a very spectacular train journey to the seaside town of Bar in Montenegro. It would be an unforgettable experience I’m sure, and one that doesn’t come with a high price tag.
With my reduced workload I make the effort to study Romanian for an hour a day, usually first thing in the morning. It’s helping. There’s a site called Context Reverso, which gives words and phrases in context, with their translations, and I’m finding that invaluable. I’ve also started to learn Serbian, which is a totally different animal from anything I’ve attempted before, and I intend to write about that next time.
The weather here has been iffy of late. I wanted to have a good go at fishing at the weekend, but my attempt was severely curtailed. Fishing and lightning really don’t go well together. If I ever do catch a fish, I’ll be sure to post a photo here.
I watched the absorbing final round of the Open golf yesterday. Absorbing because the course, the wind and the final-day pressure made for a tough combination, even for the world’s top golfers. I was probably in the minority who didn’t want Tiger Woods to win, although I enjoyed seeing him out there. I was rooting for Tommy Fleetwood, ‘cos he’s cool, but when he dropped out of contention I was happy to see the uber-consistent Francesco Molinari claim victory in a ridiculously crowded field. The tournament was played at Carnoustie, famous for Jean van de Velde’s meltdown on the 72nd hole in 1999. The scenes, accompanied by Peter Alliss’s commentary, were quite extraordinary. The Frenchman won, but then he didn’t.
I’ve got back to playing online Scrabble again. Five games since Saturday; three losses. In game one I lost by just four points on a ridiculously blocked board, which I struggle with. I still think I made a tactical blunder towards the end. In the second game I learnt my lesson and sacrificed points to open the board up. This felt like a well-played game for me, and I won by 78. Game three: I got both blanks simultaneously, but plenty of crap to go with them. My solitary bingo wasn’t enough and I lost by 43. Game four: my opponent drew both blanks and very quickly made two bingos (they all play so damn fast, probably because the play much more than me, so a lot of the time they’re on auto-pilot). I made a bingo myself and started to close, but my opponent scored well on his final moves to beat me by 73. Game five: I was lucky to draw both blanks, eventually cruising to a 114-point win thanks to two bingos.
