by Today I watched the second day of Romania’s controversial Fed Cup encounter with Britain that was played on clay (a surface that favoured Romania) in Constanța. It was controversial because of Ilie Năstase’s stupid remarks that saw him expelled from the competition. The first day’s two singles matches had been split, so whoever won two of today’s three matches would win. Simona Halep easily beat Johanna Konta (whose service action is nearly as weird as mine) but then came a much more competitive match between Irina Begu and Heather Watson. Begu won 6-4 7-5 after an enthralling second set that must have taken 70 minutes. The doubles therefore didn’t matter, and because it didn’t matter it was decided on a super tie-break with the British pair winning. Romania’s overall win was the result I wanted, even though they were playing the country of my birth. Weird, isn’t it?
I’m looking forward to this week. I’ll be teaching the boy again. Friday’s back-to-back lessons reminded me of how much I enjoy my new job. After this I couldn’t possibly go back to jobs where I was so unstimulated and unmotivated that I’d end up pissing about on the internet and then feel terrible about that. I just need more of this. On Wednesday I had a lesson with the cycling enthusiast – we study a song every second lesson (well, study is going a bit far) and this time I chose Penny Lane, the second Beatles song I’ve chosen so far. Quite reasonably he wondered whether Penny Lane was a street, a person or perhaps a shop. I explained to him what a mac was, then I had to explain what a poppy was. Poppy just happens to be mac in Romanian. That was funny. As for “a four of fish and finger pies”, I couldn’t really help him. He astutely guessed that “a four of fish” and “finger pies” were two separate items.
If I can get enough work, and it’s a big if, I have no reason to leave Timișoara. (If I can’t, I guess I’ll eventually have no choice.) I’ve got used to the 396 daily strikes of the cathedral bells, the pigeons sitting (and shitting) on my window sills, the whiff of hot bread from the bakery down below, and the old men playing chess and cards (those cards with wheels and cups and things, not the ones I’m used to) in Central Park. Just in case you’re wondering why it’s 396, you get one dong at quarter past, two at half-past, three at quarter to, and four on the hour. Every hour, day and night. So that’s ten dongs an hour or 240 per day. Then on the hour you get one additional dong per hour (from a different bell to the one that strikes every 15 minutes), e.g. eight dongs at 8 o’clock. All the numbers from 1 to 12 add up to 78, and we need to double that for AM and PM, so that gets us to 156 additional hourly dongs. Add that to 240 and we have 396. But that’s not all! There are several services every day, each marked by a vigorous peal of bells. The first of these is at 7am.
In about an hour and a half we’ll get preliminary results from the first round of the very intriguing French election.
