by Sunday and Monday were hellishly hot, to the point where I struggled to sleep at night even with the fan going full blast, but later in the week the temperature fell and the air took on that late-summer feel. I played singles tennis on Sunday against the super-fit guy nearly two decades my senior. We started at 7pm but the temperature was over 30. At 3-1 down in the first set, I decided to slow the game down in the hope of drawing errors from his racket. (I was the one employing old-man tactics.) I won some close games to lead 5-4, only to then play a shocking return game. I eked out games 11 and 12 for the set, but it didn’t feel like a win. I was taking giant gulps of water while he was as fresh as a daisy. In the second set I found myself in a much deeper hole at 5-2 down, but my opponent then started to tire ever so slightly. I fended off two set points in the tenth game to level at 5-5, then in the last two games I was able to tee up on my two-handed backhand, which naturally targeted his slightly weaker backhand wing, and I ran out a rather fortunate 7-5 7-5 winner. A remarkable stat from the match: he double-faulted only once, while I didn’t do so at all. (He did swat some of my weak second serves away for winners though.)
In my only other competitive pursuit, I snapped a run of three winless months in poker tournaments to win two on a single day. I made $93 on Tuesday to take my bankroll to $877. My wins were in no-limit single draw and pot-limit badugi, and both times as we got heads-up I was what you might call in the zone. For such small-stakes tournaments I don’t think I’ve ever been so intensely focused. (I’m fully aware that it was luck rather than focus or skill that played the biggest part in my victories.) I’m still trying to get better at Omaha hi-lo, which is a fiendishly complex game.
The book. The finish line is coming into view; yesterday I hit the V section. (Nobody in Romania can say vegetable or vehicle.) The book might never see the light of day, but having already come this far… Putting aside a set number of hours each week has really helped.
Afghanistan. My brother has been following it much more closely than me. After all, he’s been there twice. Some of the scenes have been upsetting almost beyond belief. I recently started A Thousand Splendid Suns, by the same author who wrote the brillant Kite Runner. But this story is so harrowing that I wonder if I should even continue.
New Zealand is now under lockdown. The cluster of Delta cases has now spread to Wellington. What a bugger. I’m just glad they’ve gone fast and hard, and hopefully they can avoid the current Australian situation. Here in Romania, cases have risen tenfold in six weeks or so, and with our embarrassingly low vaccination rate, the near future is bleak. I can hear those ambulances in my head now. Soon I expect I’ll hear them for real every other minute.
I was going to write the next chapter about my trip, but I’ve gone on long enough already. That’ll have to be next time.
