by This morning one of my students called me to say he won’t be coming to our lesson tomorrow because his 64-year-old father had died of a heart attack. His parents live in the country and his father was out doing heavy physical work in the blazing sun. Yeesh. What do you say when somebody’s father dies so suddenly at a too-young age? He says he’ll be back to see me on 22nd September, but seriously, just when you’re up to it again.
Just last night I happened to be reading about Romania’s low life expectancy relative to other EU countries, especially among men, and especially in the countryside where people are poorer and have less access to healthcare. For a man born in 1956 in rural Romania, 64 is probably about average. Heart disease is the number one killer.
I had a good lesson this morning. My student couldn’t get the sound on Zoom to work, so we made do with WhatsApp. She got the present simple. To be in all its forms, and the positive forms of all other verbs. She’s got that first brick in the often-flimsy verb wall in place. After that we played Taboo and she added half a dozen words to her vocabulary. I happily extended the lesson to make up for all the faff at the start. Our next session will be on Wednesday. (I’m grateful for the 7:30 starts which are forcing me to get up earlier and helping me structure my day.)
My parents keep me updated on the Kiwi coronavirus situation, and I keep telling them that Romania is getting about as many cases daily as New Zealand has had in total. Tomorrow Romanian restaurants and cafés are opening up again inside. You can count me out, thank you very much.
In the last six months, coronavirus has shone a 500-megawatt spotlight on Western society in 2020, and not in a good way. The misinformation, the politicisation, the tribalism, the selfishness, the entitlement, the steaming pile of shit that is social media – it’s hard not to feel extremely pessimistic. I was just reading an article about Marseille’s anti-mask, anti-science, anti-Paris warrior – he’s all over social media, potentially killing the city’s residents with his advice, but they don’t care because he’s on their team. No country is immune from this nihilism, not even New Zealand who are perhaps the nearest thing to it.
In New Zealand, they seem to have good scientists who people (by and large) respect. One of these is Siouxsie Wiles, infectious disease expert. Judging by her long curly pink hair, she’s probably ever so slightly mad, but she’s done no end of good during the pandemic. As I said about Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in another post, mad does not have to be evil; most of the time mad is good.
Yesterday, as I heard the strains of Por Una Cabeza and Vara la Țară from the buskers on a scorching late-summer day, I thought of how much time I’d spent alone this summer, even more than usual. The odd face-to-face lesson, the occasional drink with Bogdan, a few games of tennis, and that’s been just about it.
Last week I spoke to my brother – it was great to see him in such an upbeat mood. The UK Covid situation seemed to have dragged him down, even if he was managing fine from a practical perspective – but being back at work has given him a much-needed boost.
A pigeon has just laid an egg in a ledge outside my laundry.
