by I’d only just hit “Publish” on my last post when I got an audible red alert from the Biziday app, its highest level of notification. Coronavirus had hit Timișoara. Predictably, the affected woman had travelled from Italy. So far there’s little sign of panic here beyond the occasional face mask.
This morning’s student told me he now wants to move to the UK. It might not be the cure-all that he expects. He comes every Saturday, and at the end of today’s session he correctly pointed out that it was his fifth meeting with me this month. He’ll have to wait 28 years to have the pleasure of seeing me five times in February again. I have vague memories of a maths lesson 28 years ago today (yes, a Saturday – my school was decidedly weird) where my teacher said something about the palindromic date: 29/2/92. I have much clearer memories of 29/2/16 – flying from Timaru to Wellington after I’d seen my brother and future sister-in-law, wandering through the airport at the other end, and feeling sick because there’d be no escape from my flatmate when I got home. It shouldn’t have been anything like that horrible, but it was.
I had a busy evening yesterday: a lesson with the two boys in Dumbrăvița, then a session with the 18-year-old girl in Strada Timiș, then just enough time to have a late dinner before my Skype lesson, which finished at 10:30. With the young woman I played perhaps my favourite game, where I ask my student to bet on whether words are real or fake. “Scurvy?! There’s no way that’s a real word.” Coming up with dozens of fake but plausible words was time-consuming but fun. In the middle of the game, I thought, this isn’t a bad life really.
At this time of year the streets are lined with mărțișoare, which are talismans (I want to write talismen but that can’t be right) that men give to women to mark the beginning of spring on 1st March, and all the optimism that’s supposed to go with it. Some of the handmade ones are pretty cool. This year I’ve given a mărțișor to all my female students.
