by Today Mum and Dad will have got the keys to their latest property. They’re quite stressed at the moment with trying to sell their current place as they head into autumn. Mum seems to spend half her waking hours dusting or vacuuming, in case somebody shows up out of the blue. They feel about as locked down as I am.
At the weekend I watched John Campbell’s fantastic video on the impacts of Covid on mental health: the depression and anxiety caused by all that worry and isolation. But what he didn’t mention were the anti-effects. If I had an office job and had been able to work from home for a year in relative peace, how would I cope with all those people again? With extreme difficulty, I’m sure. This was the case for me in 2011. I quit my insurance job at the end of 2009. For the next 15 months I travelled, read, played online poker, and did temporary work which I enjoyed because I never had to involve myself in all the crap. Then (and I still can’t believe it happened) I got sucked back into the corporate world. In my first few weeks there I was like a fish out of water. Possum in the headlights doesn’t begin to cover it.
Yesterday I heard that Murray Walker, the Formula 1 commentator, had died at the age of 97. This came as a surprise to me, because I thought he was already dead. Somebody quipped that Walker spoke like a man whose trousers were on fire, and that was why he was so memorable, even for someone like me who was mostly uninterested in motor racing. He voice was cars zooming around a track on a Sunday afternoon. These household-name sports commentators of my childhood and early adulthood are rapidly becoming history. Peter Alliss – it’s hard to imagine the 72nd hole of the Open championship without him – died in December aged 89. Then there’s Richie Benaud, voice of the Ashes, and Sid Waddell, voice of darts. Going further back, there’s Bill McLaren (rugby – again, what a voice), Peter O’Sullevan (horse racing, another sport I didn’t care about but was hard to avoid), Ted Lowe (snooker), Brian Johnston (cricket again), and Dan Maskell (tennis, “Oh, I say”). All gone. Dodgers baseball fans had Vin Scully, who commentated on their games, with extraordinary wit, for sixty-seven seasons until 2016. At 93, he is still with us. But these voices, beamed into our living rooms and onto our car radios seemingly since time immemorial, won’t be replaced. They’re gone for ever, as (for me) has sport itself, largely. I think back to England’s 1998 cricket tour of the Caribbean and how exotic and far away those islands seemed as I listened to ball-by-ball commentary on long-wave radio. As money has flooded top-level sport, that remoteness, that wonder, it’s all gone.
Four more poker tournaments at the weekend. Saturday evening’s fixed badugi went nowhere, then by Sunday the US had moved to summer time, meaning all the day’s tournaments kicked off an hour earlier. (They’ll be back to normal in two weeks, when we too put our clocks forward.) The early starts reduced the fields by about 20%. I had a good run in the single draw, picking up some monster hands to amass a big stack, but I couldn’t make much headway at the final table. I had a big stack to my left who kept bombing after the draw and I never made a hand I felt I could call (or check-raise) with. Being out of position in single draw is tough. I was out in fourth for a $21 profit. At the same time I made a deep run in the pot-limit badugi – being in contention in two tournaments simultaneously is fun when it happens – but though I finished sixth I only made $7 because I once again did a terrible job of picking up bounties. I had a particularly unlucky bust-out hand, but that happens. Then I ran badly once more in last night’s fixed badugi, winning four of the 78 hands I played. My bankroll is $436.
We generally get very nice weather in Timișoara – that could be another reason why it’s become my happy place – but right now it’s grey and wet and miserable.
Finally, I’ve just found out about this new website – radio.garden – which lets you tune in to any radio station in the world just by clicking on a map. You can spend hours on it.
