by Last night I played tennis with the language school guy who in actual fact no longer works for the language school. Instead he teaches privately as I do, while also working at Radio Timișoara as a sports news reader and commentator. On the bus I found him a bit rude and aggressive; he kept going on about what a shithole Timișoara is and how much he wants to leave the city, and perhaps even the country. We were being battered by a torrential storm, and I don’t think that helped. As we made our way from the bus stop to the indoor court we got soaked to the bone. Last time I beat him comfortably on the same (rather cramped) court, but this time I only scraped a draw, 3-6 7-5 from my perspective. In the early stages I struggled massively with my serve, and is often the case, the rest of my game unravelled. My return of serve is normally one of the strongest parts of my game, but I couldn’t believe how many returns I was ballooning over the baseline. At 3-6 0-2 I at last found some sort of form. I led 5-3 in the second set and I breathed a sigh of relief when I did eventually close the set out. A draw wasn’t great, but it felt so much better than a loss would have done. My opponent was much more consistent this time around, so perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. Among all the double faults I did manage three aces. Afterwards we had mici and a beer at Berăria 700 – there was live music even though the place was almost empty.
On Sunday night I spoke to my brother. He had some quite forthright comments to make about the latest in a line of terrorist attacks to hit the UK. He was in a good mood other than that; he’d just passed his test for an HGV licence. The UK election is coming up later this week. I’m fully expecting a handy Tory majority, but some way short of landslide territory. I get on pretty well with my brother, and it’s great that we’re now keeping in regular contact, but if he was standing for election in my electorate, I couldn’t vote for him. No bloody way.
Here are a whole bunch of recent-ish photos:
