by Today is my 36th birthday. I brought some cake and biscuits to work, but other than that it’s just another day, although it is a reminder that yet another year has flown by and I need to do something with my life.
Some numbers geekery: 36 is both a square and a triangular number. You can arrange 36 snooker balls in a square with six on each side, or in a triangle (which is more what one does with snooker balls) with eight on each side.
What’s more, the current year is a triangular number too. If you happen to have 2016 snooker balls lying around, you could arrange them in a nice pretty triangle with 63 balls on each side.
I gave my third English lesson on Monday. It went well, far better than last week’s one where I think I overwhelmed and confused my poor student. This time we talked about the world of work and didn’t stray much from that (apart from the bit where he tried to tell me that, unlike in Myanmar, there isn’t much farming in New Zealand). Half-way through the session I thought to myself, this is great. I’m helping someone, he’s appreciative of my help, and we’re both clearly enjoying this.
I made myself the underdog in my first-round singles match in the club champs, but it was a toss-up really. My opponent is undoubtedly more technically proficient than me, but his approach to the game is more casual than mine even if he plays more than I do. I won four games in a row to go 5-2 in front in the first-to-nine match, and felt I might win comfortably, but in the following game I seemed to forget how to serve. Three double faults cost me dear as I was broken in the first of five consecutive deuce games; I lost four of them and we were all square at 6-6 (the game I won was thanks in part to a stone-dead net-cord that left my opponent seething). Six-all became seven-all and it was down to the wire, but I then played my best two games of the match, winning them both to love, for a 9-7 win. I played well to reach the second round but once I got there nothing went right. I was flat-footed, my first-serve percentage was low, my unforced error rate ballooned, I lost control of my forehand, and before long I’d lost the match, 9-1. It wasn’t a match I expected to win, but I didn’t think I’d go down in a heap like that. Oh well. That’s how it goes sometimes, but the reality is that I’m not playing nearly as well, or enjoying the game nearly as much, as at the start of the season.
The doubles, both the men’s and the mixed, went as well or as badly as I thought it might. My most enjoyable match was a men’s match that we lost 9-4. My partner has only been playing tennis for a matter of months and played remarkably well, considering. He has a Filipino partner. His small daughter, Luz, was sitting courtside. He pronounced the name “luzz” to rhyme with “buzz”, and looked at me blankly when I said that it means light in Spanish. I can see that both the “lose” and “loose” pronunciations could be problematic in English, but I still prefer either to “luzz” which doesn’t do justice to such a beautiful name. Talking of parents pronouncing their kids’ names in unusual ways, I recently met a woman who had a two-year-old daughter called Arya. “Everyone keeps saying it wrong. It’s not ‘aria’, it’s ‘aah-ya’, as in ‘aah-ya going to the party?'” Well I’m sorry, if you give your daughter an unusual name that people haven’t seen before, they’re going to say it how they see it, and in this case that’s “aria”. Poor Arya.
Tomorrow I’ll be seeing Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which I’m expecting to be at least ten times better than Batman and bloody Superman.
