by Today I had lunch with the tennis crew and some of their friends. The wife of one of the guys I play with sings in a choir at the church in Piața 700, and some of them were from there. All in all, there were 14 of us, including Domnul Sfâra, the 87-year-old man who still (somehow) plays tennis from time to time. Most of them hadn’t caught up with each other since the pandemic started. At one point there was a go-round-the-table thing, where everyone was expected to speak in turn, and amid the jokes that mostly zoomed over my head, there was much discussion of everyone’s medical trials and tribulations, Covid-related and not. Romanians are far more open than Brits when it comes to discussing this stuff, though the woman who sat next to me – white as a sheet and no more than seven stone – didn’t say what she’d been through. It wasn’t until it was my turn that I realised the round-the-table thing was actually happening. “So I have to speak now?” Yes. How did you end up in Romania? Always this question, which never gets any easier to answer. When I told people what I did for a living, there was then a short discussion of the English language. And and end are pronounced the same, somebody said. No no no! Just no! Two different vowels. Miles apart. On a daily basis I deal with people who think that send is something you find on a beach, or that a bet hangs upside down, because for some historical reason Romanians and speakers of other central and eastern European languages use their e vowel to represent our short a vowel, when it would serve them better to use their a instead. We stayed from twelve till about three. It was great that everybody got to see each other after such a long time, and they all seemed such nice people, but that sort of thing is never easy for me, even in my own language.
Romania has now suffered 65,000 Covid deaths. Because some of them would have died anyway, it’s hard to gauge the impact of vaccine refusal on that number. However, we know that two-thirds of the deaths occurred after the vaccines became readily available in spring of 2021, and the vast majority of those who died once the vaccines were available hadn’t taken them, so we’re looking at a very large number of preventable deaths, orders of magnitude greater than other tragedies like the Colectiv nightclub fire which killed 65 people on the night and in the weeks afterwards. It’s utterly appalling.
I’d planned to play poker this morning, but once I knew this lunch was happening and I wouldn’t be finished in time, I decided to play last night instead. I was pretty tired this morning after that, and putting our clocks going forward didn’t exactly help. I haven’t played a lot since I had the stones, though last week I did make $76 in a tournament for finishing second and snagging plenty of bounties. My bankroll is $2005.
Yesterday I lamented the end of extended final sets in tennis. It’s not an earth-shattering change; just look at the 2012 men’s Australian Open final. It was a titanic battle – no match has been quite that gladiatorial before or since – and it didn’t even get to 6-6 in the fifth set. (Djokovic beat Nadal 7-5 in the decider.) But it’s a symptom of what’s been happening in sport in general. Everything now has to be neatly packaged and shiny and pristine. Remove the kinks and imperfections and mud, and play it all in soulless air-conditioned stadiums in sodding Qatar. I find myself losing interest.
Here are some pictures of Timișoara in early spring:
