by The Romanian teacher from the university phoned me a little earlier. She’d been so busy with lessons, she said. Lucky bugger. She’d skimmed the first few pages of chapter one, and I got a slight inkling that she was unimpressed. I’ve been trying to write directly in Romanian, and I’m sure I’ve lost a lot of spontaneity that way. Maybe I should be writing my explanations, anecdotes, what have you, in English and then translating.
Dad is worried about me getting coronavirus. According to him, if my brother gets it, he’s guaranteed to spring back in no time, but if I get it, what with my history of pneumonia, I’ll be hooked up to a ventilator if I’m lucky. And I’m in Romania so I’d obviously be screwed. (As for Dad, he has risk factors out the wazoo. Or up the ying-yang, if you prefer.)
The list of Romania’s coronavirus deaths makes for sobering reading. Amongst today’s victims is a 27-year-old man from Sibiu county who died at home. At least here, the tallies are (for now) small enough that the deceased are listed individually, each one leaving behind friends and family, in some cases parents. In the UK, the latest daily figure of nearly 700 deaths just feels like a statistic, a data point.
