by It’s hot, and in the coming week we’re forecast to hit dizzying, hellish 37s, 38s and 39s. If you deal in Fahrenheit, that means we’ll be heading into triple digits. In California and Nevada they know all about triple digits at the moment. It sounds horrendous there. (When I lived in the UK it was common to talk in Fahrenheit when things got a bit balmy. Eighty-something just sounded hot. I don’t know if they still do that.) Here are some of the two dozen pungent lime trees outside my block of flats.
My aunt called me yesterday. It was the first time we’d spoken in a while: she’d been through a depressive spell of not picking up the phone. We chatted for half an hour; I have more in common with her than I realised. Her world has continued to shrink, sadly. I later spoke to my brother who said she never ventures beyond Earith and St Ives these days, not even to Cambridge which is 12 miles away. (She used to go there regularly, to shop until she dropped.) She was amazed to learn that the majority of Romanians are, and are likely to remain, unjabbed.
I had more anti-vax crap yesterday. I don’t mention vaccines anymore, but my student did, saying that they’re basically useless but his work had pretty much forced him to have them. He seemed a sensible guy.
Tennis was a bit awkward last night. I waited for my near-neighbour to appear, so we could walk to the courts, but he never did. When I got there alone, there were only the staunch anti-vax guy and his daughter. We played a set of two-on-one, then he made me play a set of singles with his daughter so he could spend the whole time on his phone. I then played singles with him, and was up 6-1 5-1 when we ran out of time. He had paid for the courts, and at the end I realised I didn’t have enough money to pay him back (because there were unexpectedly only three of us, I had to pay more), so I gave him what I had, promising to give him the remaining few lei tonight. He then went into a spiel: “we’re just here to enjoy ourselves”, as if I’d done something to prevent that. Something to do with the money? I’m guessing it was that. Or maybe it was our one-sided game? It wasn’t the first time he’d said that to me, but this time his daughter also joined in. Sometimes I don’t get people.
Some Romanians, like the woman who stopped lessons with me three weeks ago, are straight out of the series of books I read about Naples. Everything is about their emotions, how this or that utterance makes a person feel, and everyone is entangled in a cruel and exhausting game where they’re trying to outwit each other with their feelings. Practical considerations, like whether to protect yourself and others against a deadly virus, go out the window in that world.
No luck at the poker tables today. Not much skill either, perhaps. I made a particularly bad fold this morning in a single draw tournament against a maniacal player; I didn’t realise quite how maniacal. That game is extremely player-dependent. My bankroll sits at $737.
