by Wednesday’s 90-minute Romanian lesson was curtailed when our teacher, based in Deva, lost power. We finished the session this morning at ten, so Dorothy and I met up at eight for a coffee. She’s in the last week of her sixties; her 70th birthday is next Thursday and she’s having a party of sorts two days later (my brother’s birthday, in fact) in Buzad. She sometimes intersperses Romanian words into her sentences, such as grătar, which means barbecue. (She plans to have one of those in Buzad.) At one point she said that something was grătarred. We pondered how this should be spelt. I said that it should definitely be with double r because grătar has final stress; she said she’d employ an apostrophe instead. Dorothy asked me how my mother was. She remembered Mum’s cancerous lump. I’d almost forgotten about that Tuesday until I reread the WhatsApp exchange I had with my brother. All the swearing and panic. Dorothy and I always have good chats. I often feel more comfortable with people of a very different age (up or down) from my own, or with people with different cultural backgrounds. They’re likely to think, oh he’s young, or he’s old, or he’s British, when in fact he’s just weird.
In the last week or two I’ve felt a sense of impending doom. This extended heat wave has left me confined to home in the daytime and starved of sleep. Other, richer, parts of the city (such as Dumbrăvița which is technically outside Timișoara) have suffered regular power outages. Up there they almost all have air con and many even have swimming pools and pumps. The grid can’t cope. It’s been a particularly weird heat wave; Europe has been split by two air masses – a cool one in the west that has pushed up and intensified our scorching one.
It’s not just the heat. It’s the darkness everywhere. Trump has picked Jance Dance Vance (or whatever he’s called) as his running mate. Someone who compared Trump to Hitler eight years ago. Trump is talking about God a lot. God kept Trump alive when he was shot. All those evangelical idiots are lapping it up. Unless Biden pulls out of the race toot-sweet (and maybe even if he does), things look very ugly indeed. I wish I could just ignore it all, like Formula One. I’m not interested in Formula One (even though I made a game for kids that is loosely based on it), so I can happily ignore any headlines or articles on the subject. But American politics profoundly affects us all. It doesn’t help that I’m out here on Ukraine’s doorstep. There was a wonderful feeling of relief following the UK election. Those experts, rather than yes-men, brought into government in a clean break from Tory incompetence and corruption. Sadly though, the UK is bucking the trend.
There have been IT outages all over the show today, caused by a software update by a firm called CrowdStrike. The name sounds bloody scary. My initial reaction was that if this pisses off a few tech bros for a few hours then good, a bit like last year when I saw scenes of orcas ramming luxury yachts. Good on ’em. But then I saw that public transport and even hospitals have been affected. Everything is growing too fast and is now, slowly but surely, coming apart at the seams. (WordPress, which this blog uses, is still running I think.)
It’s a shame that I don’t enjoy watching sport anything like I used to. It was once a biggish part of my life. Even in 2017 (which was a great year, looking back), I filled in Wimbledon draws and watched baseball. But everything growing too big, too fast, has turned me off. This week the Open golf is on – it’s being played at Troon in Scotland – and because golf happens at a slow pace I thought I’d dip in. Today they’re playing the second round of four. It’s worth watching for the views of the isle of Arran, which I visited in February 1997 (I became quite ill there – I wasn’t equipped for the extreme conditions), and the trains clattering by alongside the 11th hole. They have three commentators at the same time – one too many in any sport – and the ads are infuriating. I saw something from Accenture that talked about “Gen AI”, “unlocking insights” and “putting a digital trove of information into users’ hands”. I know golf is corporate and all, but I couldn’t be the only one shouting “Piss off!” at the screen. (Accenture are worth hundreds of billions of dollars and hardly anyone knows what they even do.)
Dorothy said I really should get away in between 14th August (when I get back from the UK) and 29th August (when we go to Vienna). I think I will.
