by Yesterday morning I switched on the seven o’clock news. To my shock, the first item (on Romanian TV) was a shooting that had taken place in two mosques in Christchurch. At that stage the details were fairly sketchy. “Between 9 and 25” deaths, they reported. After my first lesson, which finished at 9:30, I called my parents. Soon the death toll was being reported as 49, with dozens more seriously injured. The perpetrator is obviously a very sick individual, in the mould of Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011. I think the suspect even praised Breivik in his social media posts, although if you took everything you saw on social media at face value, you’d never leave the house.
New Zealand has seemed somehow immune from terrorism and extreme hatred, two islands of tranquillity in the Pacific. Now the country is dealing with its own 9/11. How could this happen? How could he get his hands on this sort of weapon so easily? I imagine legislation to tighten firearms laws will be rushed through parliament in the coming days. As for Christchurch, what a nightmarish nine years it has been.
For me, life has carried on as normal. Plenty of work this week (33 hours of teaching) with some quite knackering days mixed in. Yesterday I tried to get Albert (the seven-year-old) to watch Peppa Pig. It was otherwise a successful session, but Peppa Pig was a dead loss. This is boring. After less than five minutes. I get this quite a lot. I want to say “Get used to it buddy!” or “In a few years, being bored will be the least of your worries” or even “Tough shit!”. This morning’s lesson with the 17-year-old girl wasn’t easy. She has an £800 iPhone, which never stops beeping and buzzing and vibrating. Has she ever stopped to think that it’s weird to have a phone that most people in her city couldn’t dream of affording, having never earned a penny in her life? Today I wanted to take a hammer to it.
