by My work volumes are back up again. Six lessons scheduled for tomorrow. Last night’s student is at a basic level and I explained to him that you sometimes need to double the final consonant before adding the -ing ending. I normally leave it at “sometimes” unless they ask, because the rule is a little tricky to explain, especially when I have to do it in Romanian like last night. The rule goes like this: If the original word finishes with a single vowel followed by a single consonant, and has final-syllable stress (or only has one syllable), and it doesn’t end in w, x or y, then you double the last consonant before adding -ing, otherwise you don’t. And in British English we make an exception for words ending in a single vowel plus l – we double the l no matter where the word stress goes. My explanation got pretty hand-wavey I must say. (The same double-letter rules, by the way, apply to other suffixes too, most notably -ed but also -er, -y, -age, -able, and probably some others I’ve forgotten.) On Tuesday I had my first lesson with the tennis guy, which was mostly conducted in Romanian. This morning I had my first session with a woman in her thirties and that went pretty well – I could tell that she really wants to learn and would certainly care about where to put double consonants and the like if that subject came up. She’s at about a 5 on my 0-to-10 scale, plenty good enough to get by in English.
Mum and Dad have now landed in the UK. One week till I see them. They called me from their hotel room in the Bugis area of Singapore. (I wonder, how do you pronounce Bugis? Mum goes with /ˈbʊgɪs/ or /ˈbuːgɪs/, but for all I know it might be /ˈbʌgɪs/ or /ˈbuːdʒɪs/ or, who knows, a French-style /byʒi/.) It was a good idea for them to break up their journey with a stopover. (I have very fond memories of our four-day stay in Singapore in 1987. It was fascinating for a little boy.) Their trip was not without incident. Mum’s hand luggage tested positive for explosives (!) in Christchurch, and that meant that their suitcases had to be hauled out of the aircraft hold and tested. Mum’s elder brother had taken them to the airport, and he sometimes keeps fertiliser in the back of his van. Traces of fertiliser (you can make bombs out of that stuff) probably got onto her bag and triggered the alarm. My parents also had a load of convoluted Covid-related form-filling on their arrival in Singapore – just what you need after a ten-hour flight. I hope they’re now in St Ives and in some comfort. It’ll be quite something to see them again after what feels like an eternity.
I’ll be visiting the UK again in what feel like increasingly dark times for the country. Liz Truss’s government is historically unpopular because it’s historically crap, although Johnson wasn’t really any better. There are no maps or plans that make any sense. Winter is coming in more ways than one. People will die of poverty.
I’m finally back to winning ways in poker. I’ve played two tournaments since I my previous post, and I was victorious in one of them – the no-limit single draw. I had a lot of fun during that win, which netted me a $48 profit. At one stage there was someone at the table who didn’t know the rules, and an English guy (a decent player) tried to exploit him by calling with a junky hand, only to see the clueless player turn over a proper hand. The English guy recovered from that to make it all the way to heads-up against me, and all the time there was good-natured chat between us. I took a 2½-to-1 lead into heads up, then my nice opponent came back and took a healthy chip lead, but I was able to turn the tables again and take the win after 3½ hours and 432 hands. My bankroll is $1043.
