by At the moment I’ve got this inexplicable fatigue I get from time to time. Last night I went to the pub with Bogdan – of course we sat outside, and the waitress took our contact details, with times and dates, in case of a positive test. I was yawning most of the evening.
Today I’ve been thinking how my brother and I will see our parents any time soon. We’re both stuck on the other side of the world, in countries that are swimming in Covid. Romania has set a new record for cases the last two days running (see my graphs above). I’m still watching John Campbell’s videos, pretty much religiously. Wednesday’s video could have done with a health warning – the part on South Africa was so harrowing as to be almost unwatchable. Rat-infested hospital wards covered in shit and blood. Caesarean sections are largely unavailable to mothers, so babies are dying, all because of systemic corruption. All over Africa and much of the rest of the world, the people in power are exactly the people who shouldn’t be in power. (And of course if they need an operation, they just hop on a plane to Paris or wherever.)
On Tuesday a student disinfected my desk, but Monday’s lesson with the eleven-year-old boy was the most interesting. I was reading from a David Walliams book (The Demon Dentist) when he asked me to “give him more space”. At first I didn’t understand what he meant, but he was referring to the virus. He didn’t want me so close. I held out the book at arm’s length. Then he said that next time we both need to wear masks. He lives with his grandmother, and he doesn’t know where I’ve been, so he’s hardly being crazy. He also praised me for being so creative with my various cards and games, and honestly that was lovely. (Imagine being praised for creativity, of all things, when I worked in insurance.)
I rarely remember my dreams, but just before five this morning I had a dream that damn near freaked me out. S (who I met on Tinder) and I were cooking a meal. (This never happened in real life.) We were speaking Romanian, and she told me Narenție! I didn’t know what this meant, but she explained that it meant to mix everything together, just like the English word “narentious”. I woke up feeling quite unsettled. Surely I can’t be learning Romanian words in my sleep. I got up and checked narenție in my paper dictionary, then online, but didn’t find anything. Relieved, I went back to bed. (As for “narentious”, that gives me no Google hits at all. I’ve got a lesson soon with Laurențiu, which is kind of similar, and maybe that’s where my brain dredged up that nonsense word from.)
