by I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. They were pretty upbeat considering the stressful week they’d had. Mum told me that her cousin, who came to visit us in the UK in 1990, had tragically lost her 25-year-old son. He lived in Christchurch but last Wednesday he was in Wellington to see a concert at the TSB Arena. He fell in the water after the concert, and two days later his body was found. He was a primary school teacher and extremely well regarded. The kids go back tomorrow after their Easter break. Just truly terrible. When I lived and worked in Wellington, people fell in the harbour remarkably often, including someone I worked with, although he clambered safely to the shore. There are no railings or anything of the sort in the area. I guess they would damage the look of the place, or something. Now this teacher, a distant relative of mine, has had his life cut short by half a century or more.
I did have those five lessons with that young woman – a pretty handy English speaker already. In one of our sessions she told me about her stay in France a few years ago. “But there’s one place I’d really like to visit.” You’re 22, so I think I already know, but please please please let it be something else. “Dubai.” Jeez. I told her that it would be right at the bottom of my bucket list if you exclude places currently at war. I thought I had a particularly good face-to-face lesson yesterday with two women who are absolute beginners. In a 90-minute session we did numbers, colours, the verb to be, and simple sentences. I like X, I don’t like X, Do you like X? The cup is green, the pens are blue. It’s vital to keep things as simple as possible. You need to eliminate irregularities as much as you can to begin with, and introduce them step-by-step. So many teaching tools get this wrong and hit students with oxen and thieves on day one, which is frankly ridiculous.
Snooker. A crazy frame last night in the attritional second-round match between Mark Selby and Gary Wilson. At two frames all in a best-of-25, just two reds remained on the table, both surrounding the pink that was millimetres from dropping in. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. The referee gave them three shots each to resolve the stalemate, otherwise there would be a re-rack (50 minutes after the frame had originally started!). They did somehow get one red away from the pocket without sinking the pink, then Selby had an uncharacteristic loss of patience that allowed Wilson to clear up and take the lead. I fell asleep at that point. Selby, however, won the last three frames of the session to take a 5-3 lead into this afternoon’s session.
There were only three of us at tennis last night. Almost the whole time I played on my own against the other two, so I got plenty of exercise. I’ll be back on the court tonight.
Tomorrow I’ll have my first proper Romanian lesson. It should be very useful.
