by That 21-year-old has managed to get Covid, or so he said, so neither of this week’s scheduled lessons have happened. Covid does certainly provide people with an excuse, if they really just don’t fancy it for whatever reason. For now, though, I’ll trust him.
My cold didn’t last long, by my standards. Last weekend I was still suffering, so I didn’t play tennis. Instead I played a few poker tournaments from the micro buy-in series. The last of them was a marathon: I went 5¾ hours in the single draw, hanging on and hanging on and for a fleeting few minutes I thought, heck I could win this thing, get my name on the trophy (wouldn’t that be nice?) before ultimately finishing 17th out of 1300-odd entrants. I didn’t make much money – so much of the money is handed out to the top three or four, even in a big-field tournament. My bankroll is $1015. This weekend there’s another series taking place – it’s the brainchild of Mason Pye, a Twitch streamer, and includes anything but no-limit hold ’em. My kind of series. We’ve got a wet weekend in store – perfect for poker.
Last night I had a Zoom call with my friend from university. He’d just been to Manchester and Blackpool for his birthday. We talked about the contrast between visitor-friendly Manchester (a city I’ve never ever been to) and his home city of Birmingham, which does little if anything to promote itself. We’re talking Romanian levels of promotion here. Even Liverpool, which I visited in 1998, does a much better job there. He talked about Lord of the Rings, so much of which is Birmingham-based, and how the city completely failed – refused – to take advantage of the film series that came out in the early 2000s. (When I moved to New Zealand at that time, you couldn’t move for Lord of the Rings stuff. I flew out on a 747 which had been totally Middle-Earthed up.) My friend told me the alarming news that his 40-year-old sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer, but should be OK. What a shock though.
It’s been an unusually warm and windy Thursday in Timișoara. A whopping 23 degrees, with a strong breeze – a southerly, and I’m guessing force 6 on the Beaufort scale. Seeing the autumn leaves swirl in a whirlwind is quite beautiful.
