by Yesterday was a crappy Friday. My sinus pain or migraine (I’m not sure which) started the night before, and I didn’t sleep a lot. I took plenty of paracetamol which helped, but I still felt washed out and sapped of energy. Four trips up and down the stairs were all I could manage. I had two lessons, and I had to apologise for yawning in my session with my UK-based student which started at 9pm. In the middle of the lesson we had a storm here. Today I’ve still felt lethargic and have done little other than read and talk to my parents (where they taunted me on FaceTime with lumps of Whittaker’s chocolate). I did my full eight laps of the stairs but was slower than usual. It’s bucketing down right now. We were in need of a good deluge.
It’s our penultimate weekend under full lockdown. I hope by the end of this month I’ll be able to read a book on a park bench while eating a punnet of strawberries. I have no desire to eat out or go shopping. I was surprised to see Piața 700 – an open air market I’ve mentioned several times on this blog – in full swing when I passed by on Tuesday. I kept well away from the produce and people. Another market, Piața Iosefin, has shut down after one of the stallholders tested positive.
Mum keeps me updated on cases and deaths from Covid-19 in New Zealand. Those who die in NZ are invariably old, often from care homes. In Romania that is not the case. The list is updated two or three times a day, and it’s full of not-that-old people. So far, 57% of deaths have been under-70s, including 27% under 60 and 10% under 50. Why? My first guess was that, even though I see old people all the time, Romania has a smaller proportion of elderly than a prosperous country like New Zealand. But no, Romania’s proportion of over-70s is in fast slightly larger than NZ’s (1 in 8 against 1 in 9, roughly). That’s not because Romanians live longer than Kiwis – they don’t! – but because so many young people have left the country, and women have just about stopped having babies, so the elderly make up a sizeable chunk of the population. In other words I’m puzzled by all the premature deaths here.
Here’s the first ten questions from Tuesday’s game of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with the twelve-year-old. I made these up pretty much on the fly. After the Boris Johnson question, I was tempted to ask how many kids Boris had, and make all the possible answers correct.
