by I’ve just booked my booster dose of the vaccine, which I’ll get in ten days’ time, precisely 182 days after I had my second dose. (You have to wait at least 180.) I clearly remember the sunny March morning when I got my first jab. It was Astra Zeneca, concocted by the good, not-profit-making guys from Oxford. I came out of there brimming with optimism. A shaft of light at the end of the tunnel. We’ll get over this, and soon. At that stage there was Alpha but not the super-transmissible Delta, and little did I know that my position – taking the sodding jab – was a minority one in the country I happened to be living in. By May, when I got my second dose, the picture was far darker. Last week I had three lessons with a girl who had just turned twelve and become eligible for the vaccine. On Monday she proudly displayed her arm to me over Skype. Any side effects? No, just a slightly sore arm, like the vast majority of people. That was great to see.
Yesterday I met up with the English couple in Dumbrăvița. I took my old bike – the one that had been nicked – and it was painfully slow going. The area they live in is only half-built and the roads are still unsealed (I use the Kiwi word there), so it was all muddy after the heavy rain we’d had. After being practically attacked by their large one-year-old mongrel dog with gangly legs, we chatted for a bit, and the guy played me some of Gnossienne on his fancy touch-sensitive keyboard with full-sized keys. He followed that up with a few bars of Genesis’s utterly mad über-prog-rock tune Firth of Fifth. On paper, it looked like a chaotic mess of key and time signature changes. He said he’d passed all eight piano grades as an adult. Then we went to a restaurant called La Ioji (the first letter of Ioji is an i, not an l) where we sat outside and talked. I had ciorbă, a thick soup, and a beer.
From there I went home (a struggle) and almost immediately went to tennis. It was singles against that same guy, and it didn’t go well for me at all, for the simple reason that my footwear was totally inadequate for the slippery surface, so I could hardly move without slipping and sliding all over the place. We’d booked the court for two hours. To begin with we just rallied, and I was content to do this for as long as possible. Then, the inevitable. “Let’s play a game.” But you know I can’t move, right? I eked out the first set 6-4 on my fifth set point, and extended my winning run to five games as I went 2-0 up in the second. From 3-1 though, I lost seven games on the spin, including a long game which gave him the second set. I was paralysed out there. When you’re almost rooted to the spot, the rest of your game suffers too. When time ran out, I was one game from defeat, at 6-4 3-6 2-5.
Then it was online poker time. I played five low buy-in tournaments with very little joy, although the mix of different games made life interesting. My bankroll is currently $1008. Two more tourneys in store for later today.
