by With the new year has come some proper winter weather; on Friday we topped out at minus two. Lessons are starting up again in dribs and drabs, and after each drib or before each drab I’m spending some time on my English book. Who knows if it’ll come to fruition, but I’ve painstakingly been through both physical and online dictionaries to find words, phrases and expressions that Romanians misuse or overuse or don’t use at all, or simply don’t know. I recently got my hands on a better-quality bilingual dictionary, published by Oxford. It’s much better than anything else I’ve seen, but it’s still got one or two oddities. For instance, the R section kicked off with an entry for Rabbit. That’s with a capital R. Rabbit was a phone service that was rolled out in the UK in 1992. You could only use your phone in special hotspots, mostly located in cities. In other words it was hardly better than a payphone. Rabbit survived about as long as a real one does, but apparently you can still see Rabbit hotspot signs in British cities today. That’s pretty cool. But how this ever made it into an Oxford dictionary, let alone one published in 2009, is beyond me.
I’ve just finished Me Talk Pretty One Day, a book by David Sedaris. It was well-written and funny, but I found it somehow lacking it substance. Comedy is great, but there needs to me something behind the humour. Reading that book, which I still enjoyed in parts, made me think I could have a go at this book-writing lark one day. Maybe I could use my language-based book as stepping stone. The best line in Sedaris’s book, before I forget to mention it, referred to his voracious appetite for cassette-based audio books while living in Paris. “Someone who reads a lot of books is a bookworm. Well I was a tapeworm.”
I’ve gone off sport these days, but I decided to watch the PDC world darts final on New Year’s Day. The wacky-looking Peter Wright pulled off a bit of an upset in his 7-3 win over the much younger Michael van Gerwen. It was closer and more dramatic than that score might suggest; their averages were almost identical, but Wright played at a more consistent level throughout, and won the majority of those crucial fifth legs. That victory, which came after a perilous path to the final, netted him a cool £500,000. After that I’ve watched some of the games from the BDO, which has moved away from its previous home, the Lakeside. The quality isn’t quite there, and neither is the prize money, but the drama most certainly is. Sudden shifts in fortune and final-set tie-breaks galore. The tennis-on-steroids scoring system is what makes darts (for me) surprisingly watchable.
Last year I managed 1287 hours of teaching, up from 1129 the previous year. I don’t expect I’ll hit those heights in 2020 because I plan to take more time off.
And there’s one thing I didn’t do in 2019 for the first time since 2002. Travel by plane.
