by After a sunny week it’s been a dull, miserable weekend. It could be late October in England. Last night our clocks went back, and this morning it dawned on me that I might not have real face-to-face contact with another human being until they go forward again. Five months. Five mostly cold, dark months.
Romania had its first confirmed case of coronavirus on 26th February, eight months ago. It’s already been a long haul. In June we’d almost beaten Covid, in the west of the country at least, but now we’re riddled with the stuff. I live two kilometres from the central hospital and I’m used to hearing ambulance sirens. In that respect, living here has been a continuation of my experience in Wellington where the ambulances screeched around the Basin on the way to the nearby hospital. But yesterday was something else. So many sirens. I even started to hear sirens in between the sirens. In my Skype lesson with the boy in Bucharest I could hear sirens at his end too. It’s all quite anxiety-provoking. Every lunchtime I get the latest Covid update on my phone app, with varying numbers of beeps depending on how bad it is. Six beeps and I know it’s terrible. Since Timișoara entered the “red scenario” on Friday, I’ve also had ear-splitting alerts on my phone, which (as far as I know) are only avoidable if I switch it off.
The red scenario kicked in when we passed three cases per 1000 inhabitants over the last fortnight. Schools are now closed, as are gyms and cinemas. Indoor bars and restaurants will close tomorrow. Why tomorrow? Why wait until after the whole sodding weekend to close them? Utterly barmy. Have the Romanians been getting tips from Boris? Personally I found the lockdown in the spring quite easy to manage, and I wish they’d bring in another one now. Then the numbers will surely come down, and instead of those sirens I’ll just hear the pleasant rattle of the trams.
Last week I managed 31 hours of lessons. Thursday was my busiest day, with five meetings. Two women on Skype in the morning, then rushing around in the afternoon. I had a lesson on Calea Aradului with the eleven-year-old girl, then I raced back home (kind of) on my bike for a two-hour Skype lesson with the boy of thirteen, then I heated up whatever meal I made earlier and wolfed that down in time for my face-to-face meeting with the guy who wants to study in Amsterdam. That face-to-face lesson, in which he told me he’d visited Bali, was probably my last of 2020.
Friday was a funny day. For the second week running the mother of the boy in Bucharest decided to postpone his lesson at the last minute, and only after I texted her a reminder. I asked her, what about 9am on Saturday? No, he’ll be too tired then. What sort of people am I dealing with here? Well, I have a lesson that finishes at 3pm, so how about 3:15? Yes. OK then. Yesterday, after my two other Skype lessons with students in Austria and Bucharest (they both went well), 3:15 rolled around. No sign of the boy or his mum. He showed up on my screen half an hour late, but I still gave him a full 90-minute lesson. It wasn’t as hair-pulling as last week’s session. As the clock ticked round to 5:15, the boy mysteriously disappeared from the screen. His mum called me to say that he’d accidentally knocked a cable out. I took the opportunity to confirm a time for next week’s lesson. She said Friday at five, just like this time, but you understand that sometimes more important things intervene, like yesterday when we were out with friends and couldn’t just leave them and come home. Sorry, that’s not OK, I said. You’re saying that your time is more important than mine, aren’t you, and that really isn’t OK. She didn’t argue with me, and said I was in the right, although I think she was taken aback. I heard an uff, or was it an ooff? I was equally taken aback by how she thought that her “more important interventions” were something I should just accept. That episode left a sour taste in my mouth.
Today has been dark and dismal, but not cold. I got out of the city centre and headed west along the Bega where I could sit on a bench and read my book, and get some respite from the sirens.
