by After that train wreck of a lesson, I didn’t sleep much on Monday night. Or Tuesday night. Even last night I didn’t do particularly well. Maybe I am just a bigot who can’t tolerate people with different views from my own. But in between I’ve had a bunch of lessons that have gone perfectly well, including one with am easy-going guy who said that Romania was better under communism and the country now suffers from “too much democracy”. Yikes. He’s 33 and would have been a toddler when the Ceaușescus came to a sticky end, so he has no more memories of living under communism than I do, but that’s his opinion and he’s entitled to it. But nobody is entitled to get on trains and planes and attend weddings and see Fiddler on the Roof at the fucking opera and potentially expose hundreds of people to a deadly virus. Sure, some people are hesitant and that’s understandable. What are the side effects? Haven’t these vaccines been concocted rather quickly? (Yes. And it’s one of the great feats of mankind.) How does messenger RNA work? You can reason with these people. The point-blank refusers, however, you can get fucked.
Last night I woke up suddenly. Where’s that awful music coming from? Then I remembered I’d set my alarm for 4am so I could watch Graeme’s funeral, streamed live from Timaru. I was a few minutes late and I when I connected, my cousin from Wellington – Graeme’s eldest daughter – was speaking (very well, as she always does). There was a big extended family present – he leaves behind his wife, five children and a baker’s dozen (as they put it) of grandchildren. Not everybody could make it because the Ashburton bridge, now shaky after the torrential rain, is making it hard to travel south from Christchurch. The speeches were brilliant, honestly. He was appreciated much more than I realised. He was a very good man, a family man, with a big heart. (His propensity to fart in inappropriate situations didn’t come up in the speeches, strangely enough.) I always got on very well with him – he could have conversation about almost anything – and my memories of him go back to our trip to New Zealand in 1986-87. I spent quite a lot of time with him in 2003-04 just after I arrived in NZ to live. He helped me find a second-hand car, and taught me what some of the farming equipment being auctioned off at the Temuka saleyards was. The last time I saw him was in Wellington in 2016, just before I left the country.
Three poker tournaments yesterday. I busted out of the PLO8 just before the money, then I came back from a poor start to finish third in the single draw for a $15 profit, then in the pot-limit badugi I built up a monster stack only to crash and burn for a min cash. My bankroll is $722. If and when it reaches $750 I plan to beef things up a bit, by playing five tournaments in a session instead of my current three, including the odd night session, and playing the occasional spell of cash.
It’s a beautiful sunny day here. Not a cloud in the sky. The birds are chirping away and the trams are clattering by.
