by I’ve been in Romania almost a month and haven’t had a single cup of tea yet. Well actually that’s not quite true. I’ve had the odd herbal or fruit infusion, with ‘odd’ being the operative word, but not a single cup of NBT: normal bloody tea. But today I was in Auchan, a large French-owned supermarket, and I found a packet of Earl Grey with a picture of Big Ben on the box. Hooray! I haven’t had a cup yet because I haven’t been given access to the kitchen yet, but give it time. (I know, when in Romania and all that, but a cuppa is a fairly basic human need.)
The marketing manager at the “promising” language school asked me what I do in my spare time. I mentioned tennis. He said he played too, and added that he was “really good”. I said that in that case he’d probably thrash me. He then said that he was carrying some excess weight. Then he talked about learning English. “I didn’t learn much because the teachers were poor. I was the best in my class though, and always got ten out of ten of course.” He said Timișoara had much more to offer culturally than either Bucharest or Sibiu, and of course he was born in Timișoara. He described my Romanian as “very poor” before upgrading it to just “poor” on the evidence of about ten words in total. If you multiply his ego by about twenty you get…
Donald Trump. The US election is just four days away, and as I’ve said before, Trump could easily become president. Only it’s even more likely now. FiveThirtyEight are saying he has a 35% chance of victory. The odds and the map are changing all the time as new polls come in, and it feels more relevant to me than on previous occasions because I’ve actually been to America. (It’s 14 months since I was there. Campaigning had already begun. The whole process is a disgraceful waste of time and money.) I see both North Carolina and Florida have flipped from pale blue to pale pink in the last few minutes. Trump is still behind Clinton by about three points in the national polling average, but (1) that gap could close before Tuesday, (2) even if it doesn’t, there could be a modest polling error, and (3) he could conceivably lose the popular vote by a point or more and still win the election; the Electoral College favours him. So in other words, it’s on a knife-edge. I wonder if their estimation of Clinton’s chances – roughly two out of three – is a touch on the high side. If you’re 4-3 up in a set of tennis, you’ll win about two out of three times. (I’m assuming here that you have a 50:50 chance of winning each point whether serving or not – a reasonable assumption for me, but not for, say, a Wellington regional player, and certainly not for the marketing manager of that language school before he put on those extra kilos.) But imagine you’ve been 4-1 up and have lost the last two games. Momentum is against you; the trend is not your friend; your opponent, like Trump, has the wind in his sails. I think that’s the situation Clinton is in.
My cousin, who I met in upstate New York last year, is contemplating leaving the country if (in his words) the idiot wins.
The Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years (!), and even then they almost let it get away. By all accounts Game 7 was one of the great baseball games and the Cubs’ win one of the great moments in baseball (maybe American sport in general, but my knowledge of the other three major American sports verges on non-existent).
The markets in Timișoara are fantastic (I’ll talk about them in another post) but the one in Oradea, near the fortress where I stayed, still wins.
