by My student, perhaps my only student right now, wants to go over both a text and a song in tomorrow night’s lesson. I’m going to play him Our House by Madness which came out in 1982 and I think is great for an intermediate English student, and print out an article on the Brixton Riots which took place the year before (if I can find a place to print anything out over the Christmas period). He might well already know Our House. Last week on the way to the lesson he had a Spice Girls album on in the car. When I asked him how his week had been, he used the good English expression “don’t ask”.
It has been a pretty messed-up year all round, and there are still four days of it left. We’ve lost so many cultural icons: David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, George Michael (on Christmas Day) and dozens more. Victoria Wood springs to mind as the kind of unassuming comedian the world needs more of, and she’s gone too. It feels that culture itself is on the way out. Musicians, actors, comedians, writers, they’re now all lumped in with journalists and academics as being out of touch with “real, decent, ordinary people” as Nigel Farage shamefully put it. Brexit and Trump were both, to an extent, triumphs of anti-culture. And let’s not overanalyse Trump’s victory. He’s a bigot, a narcissist and a bully, and many of the 63 million-odd people who voted for him did so because of that, not in spite of it. For me that’s scary stuff. But let’s not normalise the result either. As a kid I lived in the constituency held by the prime minister John Major. It received a fair bit of national attention at the election and attracted many candidates, perhaps ten, as a result. One of those was from the Monster Raving Loony party. It fascinated me just how many votes the Loonies got. John Major was a shoo-in to win his seat so some people thought, what the hell, and enough of them put their X next to the Loony candidate to propel him to the middle of the pack, ahead of some serious candidates. But in America they’ve gone eleven steps further by electing Mr Loony! Just wow.
Somebody called me in response to my Trump ad, even though he could speak good English and didn’t want or need any lessons. I think he was a little put out by my ad, which was meant as a joke more than anything. He admired Trump because “he has a winning attitude”. What a terrible reason to support him, or anyone. But he’s far from alone. People seem to want aggressive, uncompromising, authoritarian figures. I can’t see this ending well.
It’s been an interesting year for me personally as well. For four months I was stressed out to the max by my flatmate. Then I had to organise my big move, and that got pretty stressful too, to the point where I restarted my antidepressants at the doctor’s request. On 7th October I arrived here in Timișoara and I remember lying on my bed that first night and thinking how incredible that felt. I’ve done it! I’m in Romania! Since then I’ve travelled a bit, have managed to do some teaching (not nearly enough, but enough to know I love it), and most importantly, have found a place where I can live and work. I’ll get the keys to my new abode the day after tomorrow.
This might work out for me, it might not, but guess what, I’ve completely changed my life. Just typing that sentence makes me proud.
I played a second game of Words with Friends with my cousin, this time winning 458 to 381. I got the high-value letters and on one turn played DOZIER on a triple word with the Z on a triple letter. That’s the killer combination that is impossible in Scrabble, and it yielded 108 points of which one letter scored 90. My cousin replied immediately with TERMITES which gave her a 35-point bonus (it’s 50 in Scrabble), although she could have placed the same word elsewhere for a bigger score. She ended up with more points than in the first game when she beat me by over 80. Yep, we got some big scores in this game. In the long term, if we keep playing, we’ll be evenly matched I reckon.
