by I gave up painstakingly updating my Covid graph on 21st May, but it hasn’t gone away. Far from it. Today we reported 320 new cases in Romania, the most on one day since 8th May, and 16 more deaths. Active cases are edging back up. In this corner of the country we’ve got near–New Zealand levels, but it’s spreading like wildfire in Bucharest, Suceava and Brașov, and will surely be back here with a vengeance.
Today is Mum’s birthday (and Steffi Graf’s and Donald Trump’s). When I called her, my aunt and uncle (who visited Timișoara two years ago) were over for dinner. It was great to see them on FaceTime. They were shocked to see I now have a ponytail. I’m shocked to have one too.
Yesterday I had a bad day with my sinuses, or migraine (whichever it was), so today it was nice to sit on the riverbank and read my book, and get all the wonderful strawberries and cherries and apricots and tomatoes from the market (while I still can, before the second wave hits).
On Friday I had my lesson with the guy who lives on the outskirts of London with his wife and son whose first birthday it was. They’re looking at buying a house; he said they’d been to see a ghastly place costing £500,000. He showed me an online property evaluator with an intriguing feature called a happiness rating. You tap in a postcode and this needle waggles into position, telling you how happy everyone in the area is. It’s based on crime, deprivation, health, levels of education, and so on. I asked him to tap in the postcode of the flat I rented in central Peterborough in 2003, and the needle hardly budged. So sad. But I was reasonably happy there. My job didn’t pay a lot but I had interesting flatmates, played tennis, went bowling, went to the pub, and ate out from time to time. I often saw my grandmother. I made two trips to France, including beautiful Montpellier. I only had a six-month work contract which they happily extended, and they would have given me a permanent role. But my boss said he was unconvinced that flood mapping and forecasting was the best career path for me, and when my parents decided to shift to NZ, I convinced myself that I’d be better off over there.
Anyway, we read an article containing the word cusp, and I explained that the word is sometimes used in relation to star signs (which some Romanians take as gospel). Like me, he is on the cusp: he was born on 21/9/89. He has a family, a career, pretty soon he’ll have a house, and he has almost an extra decade to play with compared to me. Maybe I should have stayed in Peterborough.
