by Last night I had two strange dreams. In the first, I was piloting a small plane and was in trouble (though I was surprisingly calm) until my brother got me out of it. I communicated with him via text or something. Soon after I had another near accident, which made me nervous about flying in small planes again. (In that dream, flying in small planes was a normal part of everyday life.) In the second dream I was in trouble at work for playing some kind of ball game (that I’d invented) during office hours. My boss seemed to quite like the game though, and thought I should market it. In fact he talked enthusiastically about a business opportunity. I was embarrassed about the whole thing and began to skulk around the office.
The “invented game” dream might have come from the board game I played with some of my students last week. This is the one Dad came up with back in 1993 or ’94 – racing cars around a three-lane track, where the fast lane gets you round faster, obviously, but requires more fuel. I refined his idea and a quarter of a century later started using it in my lessons. My 13-year-old student wanted a copy of the game that he could print out and play at home, so I sent him soft copies of the game board, the dashboards (showing fuel and completed laps), and the cards that you have to draw if you land on certain spaces.
On Monday night I started getting pain in my sinuses that continued through Tuesday and Wednesday. I also seemed to pick up a bug of sorts. I was devoid of energy for two days. On Thursday I was back to some sort of normal which was just as well – I had seven lessons that day. The pain hasn’t entirely gone away and I’ve had no choice but to take painkillers. Fatigue has been a major issue for a while; it isn’t helped by my waking up multiple times virtually every night.
On Monday morning I had my weekly Romanian lesson. Inevitably we talked about the election, or un-election. I suggested that Georgescu was similar to Viktor Orbán. Oh no, my teacher replied. Far worse. Cancelling the election so close to the final round was very clumsy and looks antidemocratic on the face of it. Oh shit, it looks like we might elect an anti-establishment figure that we don’t like, let’s cancel the election. But the truth is the election had been manipulated in a big way on social media. Georgescu’s assertion that he spent “zero lei” on his campaign was quite clearly a lie. And his credentials that I mentioned before – that’s he’s a scientist with a PhD – are probably made up too. Invalidating the election may have been cack-handed, but in the short term at least, Romania has dodged a major bullet here. Since I arrived here, the country has been moving, albeit slowly and unevenly, in the right direction. It is less poor than it was eight years ago. It came very close to throwing that progress away. By the way, Romania and Bulgaria have now been fully admitted to the Schengen area. That will mean that I won’t have to queue at the border to get into Hungary, whether in a car or on a bus or train, and more importantly, trucks won’t be held up for hours. There might still be checks until June; I saw contradictory information on that.
I had six maths lessons last week. In one of them I estimated pi using a round bowl, a tape measure and a piece of string. I got a value of 3.129, which was a lot closer than I expected.
The darts World Championship starts in London tonight. There’s a lot to like about the format, the colourful characters, and the fact that it takes place over the festive season. Last year I got fairly into it. This year I expect I’ll watch rather less: I really have to get the picture book finalised.
