by My parents are currently on Singapore Airlines flight 298, an Airbus A350 registered 9V-SMM, and right now they’re passing by Fitzroy Crossing in north-western Australia. Flightradar24 is a great tool.
Mum and Dad will spend two nights in Singapore before flying to London, and a week after that we’ll all meet up as a family for the first time since Christmas 2018.
Last night my brother told me about all the messy midnight interludes that are suddenly a feature of his life. We then talked about our cousin – the 52-year-old daughter of my aunt whom I saw in August – and the fact that she hasn’t seen her mother in three years. Just imagine. You live in Somerset, four hours’ drive at the most from your isolated and vulnerable mum, you don’t make the trip in all that time, and somehow you think that’s OK. Just how? I know there was the small matter of a pandemic, but she wasn’t exactly dying to hook up with her mum on Zoom. People are crazy. Talking of crazy cousins, I have a cousin the same age as me in Wellington. I went to his wedding in 2012. He has two daughters; the youngest is probably five or six. He’s a big fan of Liverpool, and in 2019 his beloved team reached the Champions League final in dramatic fashion. So what did he do? Fly to Barcelona at the last minute to watch his team play Tottenham. You literally can’t get any further: if you could tunnel down from Wellington through the centre of the earth and back out the other side, you’d end up in Spain. He didn’t have a ticket for Camp Nou – that would be one thing. No, he watched the match on a big screen, then flew back home. Months later he broke up with his wife.
I played tennis twice at the weekend. On Saturday I went to the pub by the river afterwards. It was surprisingly empty for such as warm evening. It seems we haven’t still fully recovered from Covid and now we’ve got a whole load of other crap to worry about like skyrocketing energy bills and bridges being set alight in our vicinity that people want to save their money. The price of eating and drinking out has shot up too; in a classic case of shrinkflation, the beer glasses in this place are 20% smaller than they used to be. I don’t eat much meat these days normally, but the meal I had was a plate of traditional Romanian food, and was necessarily extremely meaty.
A guy from tennis is starting lessons with me tomorrow. He did mention it ages ago, but because he’s anti-vax and knew my diametrically opposed stance on the issue, I thought that might put him off. We’ll have the lesson online. More and more people are choosing to have their lessons online even if they live in Timișoara. At this rate they’ll render my new teaching room redundant.
Poker. I played seven tournaments at the weekend and got nowhere; my bankroll is now $996. Two of those were hold ’em which I hardly ever play. My poker dream is that GG Poker, the site that has now overtaken Poker Stars as the market leader, will one day add a bunch of other games to match the variety that Poker Stars offers. If that happens, I’ll be off to GG like a shot with four figures to play with.
