by Windows 10 is starting to infuriate me. When it wakes up from sleep mode, I find that all my programs have shut down. I can’t work like this. I’ve googled things and tweaked a few settings, but I bet it’ll make no difference.
There’s one problem, if problem is the right word, that I keep running into in my lessons. The Man (and it usually is a man) Who Knows Everything. Who knows what he wants and how to get it. I find these people offputting, and my usual motivation to help them isn’t quite there, partly because I feel unable to help them anyway. They also seem to have everything. They’re already winning. What motivation is there to help one of life’s winners to win by even more? The poker guy, who has disappeared from the scene, was a bit like that. The super-smart 18-year-old who I saw on Saturday is like that. Lessons with him are never easy. This time I went through some expressions like “money for old rope” and “kick the bucket”. The rest of the time he told me about the world of gaming and anime that he inhabits. When I asked him whether he was a risk-taker, he said he played gacha, so obviously yes. Umm, what’s gacha when it’s at home? A kind of Japanese toy vending machine, from what I can tell, that he must play in a virtual form. It didn’t occur to him that I might not know what what the hell he was talking about.
On Friday I had a lesson with the 31-year-old guy who lives on the outskirts of London. He and his wife moved there from Bucharest almost three years ago, and they have an 18-month-old son whose little brother or sister is on the way. They’d just put an offer in for a house. The first one they looked at. Nearly £600,000. As you do when you’ve come from Romania. Heaven knows where their money has come from. I’m thinking he might not need me either.
This all reminds me of the maths tuition I did in Auckland in 2010. It was an eye-opener to see the insides of the houses where these teenagers lived. I’m supposed to get excited about pushing your privileged Oliver or Olivia from Excellence to Excellence Plus, am I? They weren’t all like that, of course, and the exceptions were where most of my motivation lay. Here, so far, the Men Who Know and Have Everything are the exceptions, and long may that remain so.
On Sunday I had a session with the 13-year-old boy who lives in Dumbrăvița, which is joined on to Timișoara, and is currently in lockdown for the second time since the autumn. Here in Timișoara we’ve been lockdown-free since May. The prevalence of Covid in Dumbrăvița has been consistently higher than here, and I think I know why. By Romanian standards, Dumbrăvița is rich. I’ve heard that it’s Romania’s second-richest suburb. It’s all BMWs and Audis, with the occasional Porsche and even a Maserati thrown in. When you go to Dumbrăvița it’s mostly dead. They’re all jet-setting and doing business deals just like this boy’s dad does in Hong Kong. They’re highly economically active. Most of Romania isn’t like that at all, and that’s why (I reckon) Covid hasn’t quite been the disaster in Romania (yet) that it’s been in western Europe.
The Covid situation in the UK is still dreadful. More than 1600 deaths have been reported today; the overall death toll is now in six figures. My brother, whose optimism has evaporated, said we might all be facing lockdowns for the rest of our lives. His wife had her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine last week. In Romania we now have five cases of the UK variant. If that takes over – and why won’t it? – we really will be in deep doo-doo here.
It was a huge relief to see Joe Biden’s inauguration go off without a hitch, after what happened two weeks earlier. President Biden. Sounds great. The near-octogenarian has his work cut out but I’m sure he’ll give it a damn good go. I’ve now been in Romania for three US presidents and six Romanian prime ministers.
