by Mum and Dad called me again from Hampden yesterday. It was a relief to see a smile back on Mum’s dial. She’s always more relaxed down there, away from what is now (let’s not mince words) a shithole. Mum seems strangely magnetised to that dreadful place which they should stay away from as far as humanly possible until the building work is completed.
Yesterday Dorothy messaged me to say there was a vinyl and book sale on at Scârț. Sounded good. Sale wasn’t quite the right word though – some of the LPs were really quite pricey. I picked up five second-hand records for a total of 300 lei (just over NZ$100 or £50): Selling England By the Pound by Genesis, Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel, 18 by Chicago, Oxygène by Jean-Michel Jarre, and Leonard Cohen’s greatest hits album. That’s a start; I just need an actual record player now. Oh, and I bought one book for 5 lei: H. W. Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, in Romanian.
Four English lessons today. I started at 8am with my Bucharest-based online student – I found out today that he’s only two months older than me – who wanted help with adverbs of manner and uncountable nouns, among other things. I was in contact with the east of Romania again for my second session, this time with a 35-year-old woman. She said that if her six-year-old son (her only child) doesn’t get what he wants for Christmas, he’ll make his disappointment very obvious. He’s still very little, I said, but by twelve he’ll have learnt to hide it. You can’t always get what you want. She said, no, he won’t do that when he’s twelve because I’ll have told him to fight for what he wants. If he doesn’t like something, even a glass of juice, I want him to make his feelings clear. I still remember at seven or eight telling a family friend that I didn’t like some juice – probably something Ribena-like – and wouldn’t drink it. My grandmother told me I was already too big to act in that way, and I think she was right. Little Vlad (I don’t think that’s his name) has the pleasure of going to intensive after-school classes, which include nine hours of English lessons a week. Right Vlad, I’m going to make you work stupidly hard, and in return you get to be total dick. That’s the modern way, it seems. She earns well by working extremely hard at an investment bank, doing something that I would find utterly pointless.
In between my first two English sessions was the Romanian lesson, which was mostly spent discussing the downfall of Ceaușescu during an unseasonably warm few days in the lead-up to Christmas 1989. Our teacher was 20 at the time; I would have guessed several years younger. Yesterday the song Timișoara, produced by Pro-Musica in the wake of the Revolution, came on the local radio. It starts with a few bars from the Romanian national anthem and turns into something spine-tinglingly powerful. I recommend that you watch the video. My third English lesson was with a 17-year-old girl who came to my place. We went through some B2 Cambridge papers. I struggled to get her to write anything. In the end she wrote about her “happy place”, the mall, but didn’t even say much about that. My final lesson was the twins who live near Piața Verde. Because it was our last meeting of the year we had an extended Bananagrams session, which is always fun.
The World Championship darts. It’s back on again. Though the game is skin-deep compared to the multi-layered wonders of snooker, this tournament can be worth a watch because it’s the pinnacle of the sport. If you can get past the tedious football-style chants, you find an event filled with personality and drama. I’m a big fan of the format which, like in snooker, is a straight knockout and calls for matches of increasing length as the rounds progress. In the pre-Christmas phase, matches are best of five sets. The top players only need one win, and anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, to book their place in the post-turkey stages. Yesterday I saw a great game involving the Canadian player Matt Campbell. He was two sets up and had multiple opportunities to win the match in three. His Filipino opponent Lourence Ilagan took advantage of his reprieve to tie the match at 2-2, only for Campbell to storm through the fifth in some style. After Christmas the matches are best of seven, and in the new year they get longer still, culminating in a best-of-13-set final.
Update: I’ve just seen Man-Lok Leung of Hong Kong (he goes by Hugo) win an absolute belter of a game against Dutchman Gian van Veen, coming from two sets down – and missing no end of chances – to win 3-2 in a joyous finale. He fired a whopping eleven 180s and was a very popular winner. A Kiwi by the name of Haupai Puha – he lives in Wellington – is on next, but it’s bedtime for me.
