by In the past, when I was dissatisfied with my job, some people would say to me, “It’s only a job. There’s a whole life outside that.” Interestingly, most of those people were women. I’m not sure I agree. Even if you can switch off from work when you’re not there (which I could, most of the time), the routines of your job provide a drum beat for everything else in your life. I’m sure that being happier in my job has been a big part of my improved mental health.
No cancellations so far this week. That’s great. Saying that, my young Italian student, with whom I’ve had 50 lessons so far, has mysteriously disappeared. Today I had three lessons. First up was the eleven-year-old boy, who will soon be hopping on a plane to Hong Kong with his dad. I forgot to mention that during the Pigman lesson we read a chapter from David Walliams’ Demon Dentist that happened to feature the word yanking. My student kept pronouncing this as wanking, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Everybody was wanking as hard as they could, to get his tooth out.” He eventually got a handle on the correct pronunciation of yanking, as well as the meaning of the word, but then he wanted to know what was so funny about wanking. “Tell me what it means. I’ll ask my dad if you don’t.” (His dad speaks good English.) I told him that it was in fact a German word.
This evening I had my 80th session with my first ever student. He spent 30 hours last weekend manning one of the polling stations for the referendum, which he thought was an enormous waste of time and money. I completely agree with him. At his polling place, under 200 votes were cast, a turnout of roughly 15%, lower even than the meagre national average. He said just eight votes were tallied for “no”, and a further three for both “yes” and “no”. The national turnout just crept above 20%, well below the required 30%, so the referendum was declared void.
Later I had my first session since late June with a woman who got married shortly after that. She was happy (and so was I) to spend most of the session showing me her wedding photos (she got married in a forest near Miercurea Ciuc) and her honeymoon snaps from Portugal. She was a bit shocked to see me with a beard, and having lost a fair bit of weight.
The series between the Red Sox and Yankees is being predictably unpredictable. Game one, the Red Sox almost let a lead slip away but just eke it out. Game two, the Yankees win pretty comfortably, and head back to New York with some momentum. But last night shows that momentum can count for very little. In game three Boston just kept hitting, including Brock Holt’s cycle, amazingly the first ever in the play-offs. What will happen next is anybody’s guess. Unfortunately all these games happen in the middle of the night for me, and only find out what happened the next morning. It’s pretty inconsiderate of the MLB not to schedule the games at a more convenient time for those of us who live in the Eastern European time zone.
