by I FaceTimed my parents last night. Dad has been ill for about a week. He’s been running a temperature and at one stage he was passing out. An obvious advantage of FaceTime or Skype is that you can see who you’re talking to, but it wasn’t much of an advantage last night. Dad looked frightful. For the first few minutes of my conversation with him, Mum was outside. He said he’d had absolutely no sympathy from her – quite the opposite in fact. In all the years I can remember, Mum has never given any love or attention to Dad when he’s been sick. I can’t forgive her for that. Mum’s sister, and sister-in-law, would be gobsmacked if they knew how she treated him sometimes. In fact her family was gobsmacked in 2005 when Dad went back to the UK for major heart surgery (that almost killed him) and she stayed in New Zealand. When Mum got to the phone last night I could see the burning anger in her face. When Dad came back on the line at the end of our call, Mum made faces and hand signals behind his back.
The night before last I gave only my second English lesson in Romania. I loved every minute of it and so did Mihai, or at least I think he did. He’s a 27-year-old medical student, so not that young, and he recently did a two-month work placement in Wolverhampton. To live and work in the UK long-term he needs a good score in the IELTS exam. Before the lesson I spent some time boning up on how IELTS works. The exam is in four parts – reading, writing, speaking and listening. He wanted help on the writing and speaking parts. He’ll probably be sitting the exam as soon as January, and is prepared to go as far as Slovenia to avoid having to take it on the Sabbath. I was impressed with his enthusiasm and that rubbed off on me. Every time I used a word or expression he was unfamiliar with, e.g. “salient”, “out there”, “think on your feet”, he jotted it down. We talked about how wonderful it is to travel (he’s done a fair bit of hitchhiking, something I’ve never had the balls to do) and the benefits to Romanians of being in the EU. We’ve got another lesson pencilled in for next Tuesday. As I walked down the stairs from his fourth-floor apartment (there was no lift or anything fancy like that) I was just about bouncing with happiness. I felt that good.
The woman at the photocopy shop yesterday asked me if I taught English; she said she wanted to take the IELTS exam so she could live and work in Denmark, where I guess English is a requirement. She was amused by my Donald Trump ad, which showed him pulling quite a ridiculous face, saying “I know words. I have the best words.” Above the picture of the president-elect, I wrote “Want to speak better English than this guy?”. My Simpsons ad will show the familiar blackboard scene that features at the beginning of most episodes, but in my version Bart will be trying to write out a difficult-to-spell phrase like “I will accommodate English in my schedule” and getting it repeatedly wrong until he gives up. Anyway, the photocopy lady seemed to like my Trump ad, and we swapped numbers. Maybe she’ll be another client of mine. It’ll help that I’m bound to use her photocopy services many more times.
I was going to write about Donald Trump and the state of the world, but things have happened, so that will have to wait.
