by I was going to say it’s been a warm day, but no, it’s been positively hot. Nudging 30 degrees, and people were taking advantage of it. A far cry from six weeks ago when people were clearly scared to leave the house.
This afternoon’s lesson went well. My student showed his appreciation at the end. I spent some time yesterday and today translating The Magic Finger from English to Romanian, so I won’t sound quite so clueless when I we go through the last twenty-odd pages tomorrow. With intermediate students this isn’t a problem, because with them I only ever need to translate individual words or explain the gist of a sentence in English; I never have to translate whole texts into Romanian. It’s good practice though.
Little Richard has died. I didn’t know that much about him, but what an entertainer he was. (Isn’t Youtube great?) In his day he must have been a sensation. Right now, in a different dimension, I’m watching a traditional Romanian music show on TV. Dili-dili-dili-dili-dum, with violins going at a hundred miles an hour. The last song was all about the pride of being from Botoșani, which I always think of as șobolani (meaning “rats”).
I watched Boris Johnson’s speech. Lots of talk about the R (reproductive) rate, which they now say is between 0.5 and 0.9 (why such a range?), but no talk of masks. Madness.
My brother is fine. He went back to work last week. For some reason we ended up talking about the stock market before running out of things to say.
