by On Monday I found out that Petrică, one of the guys I used to play tennis with, had died at the age of just 57. He died a month ago of a heart attack. When I first played with him he leapt around the court. I remember partnering him in a set of doubles which we lost 6-1. If you’d just let me take my shot occasionally, maybe we wouldn’t have got thrashed. The next thing I knew, he’d developed kidney problems and was on dialysis. He still played tennis, but was limited to half an hour at a time. I’ve been in touch with a female friend of his; she said she’s in no mood for anything Christmassy. Petrică is the second of the tennis group to pass away: Domnul Ionescu, who was 70 or so, died of cancer at the beginning of 2022.
In other sad news, yesterday I had a lesson with my London-based student. I asked him if he had any news. Looks like I’m getting a divorce. He’s 35, with two boys aged five and two. I get the impression they got married nine years ago (in Romania, before moving to the UK) because it was just what you did, and now they’re facing a divorce which is just about always stressful and traumatic. With divorce rates hovering close to 50%, I often wonder whether getting married is ever really worth it. I mean, getting married is pretty damn stressful in itself, not to mention expensive.
This morning I opened a letter from my family friend in St Ives whom I spent considerable time with in August when I visited. Getting a letter these days is really quite something.
On Sunday I met both Mark and Dorothy in town, one after another with a longish break in between. I met them both at Berăria 700 which has reasonably priced food and drinks. Mark is almost ten years older than me, and I like to ask him about his memories of the seventies, growing up as he did in Tamworth, which isn’t far from Birmingham. This time he talked about people driving bubble cars. Being born right at the start of the Thatcher–Reagan era and growing up in Cambridgeshire rather than say the north of England, I sadly have no memories of a time before money was everything, except perhaps when I was really little and rampant capitalism hadn’t fully kicked in. I’m thinking of the funny little shops that still existed in St Ives back then, or the local auction in which Dad would scout around for antique furniture. (There’s still an auction in St Ives now, but the bottom has really dropped out of the antique market in the last 40 years.) Being born in 1980 means I can remember nothing that came before, but everything that came after.
I could really see the stark difference between the beginning and the end of the eighties when I read two of Garrison Keillor’s books, one published in 1981, the other in 1988. In the space of a few years, money had morphed from being a tool for buying useful goods and services and providing security, to being a thing in itself that fairly ordinary people wanted to acquire. Share prices were suddenly read out on radio bulletins as if they were things that mums and dads ought to know about, rather than being hidden away in tiny font in some obscure section of the paper.
Music. Lately I’ve been listening to Joan Armatrading. She was born in St Kitts and Nevis, as it is now called, but moved to Birmingham at a young age. She came out with a number of hits in the seventies and eighties. Love and Affection (1976) is wonderful; Drop the Pilot (1983) isn’t bad either.
Here are some pictures of town on Sunday evening:
