by Recently Dad found out that his mother had an account in a bank (or was it a building society?) that no longer exists. So he could reclaim the money, which might have been a fiver for all he knew, I ordered my grandmother’s death certificate online, then Dad got photocopies and other bits and pieces. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a few hundred. Even a thousand. Late last week he got a cheque in the mail (cheque – it’s still 1995 in the UK apparently) for about £11,500. A pleasant surprise. Dad will give my two UK-based cousins, now orphans after their mother died last year, a quarter each. My brother wanted Dad to keep the whole thing secret and not give his cousins a penny. He’s not a fan of his cousins – “they’re not nice people and they’ve had enough handouts already” was how he put it – but Dad couldn’t do that.
I was on the phone to my parents for an hour today. Most of that was taken up with money stuff. Not just that surprise windfall, but preparing to sell their third and fourth properties and seeing lawyers and accountants. From my vantage point, it’s all so bizarre. As I’ve said before on this blog, it’s like watching the All Blacks play Romania, 75-0 up in the last minute, desperate for one last push over the line before the final hooter. (OK, it’s more like 75-7 now. They switched off momentarily at the back when they bought the mad house.)
I’m still trying to lose weight. Since I started my effort, I’ve dropped three kilos, which isn’t nothing, but I’ve still got a paunch I’d like to get rid of and a couple of pairs of jeans I’d like to get into. Losing weight isn’t easy. Although I try not to write too much about it here, I still go days or weeks on end of struggling to enjoy a whole lot. Except food. When I’m in one of those spells, resisting the temptation to totally pig out on some big cheesy sausagey pasta-y thing takes some doing.
Yesterday I cycled to Sânmihaiu Român for the exercise. I was just finishing a coffee there when my brother rang. I moved out of the bar, in which some old geezers were playing a particularly loud game of cards, and sat in a gazebo, out of the sun. We discussed the windfall – those bloody cousins – and our parents’ need to offload those properties toot-sweet.
Wimbledon. It’s over for another year. The men’s final was a damn good match, with Sinner the winner and I suppose the grinner. He was the better man on the day. Still, it could have got hairy for him when he faced 15-40 on his serve at 4-2 in the fourth set, especially after what he endured at Roland Garros last month. His serve was brilliant throughout. Alcaraz and Sinner keep producing great matches and right now they’re a league apart from the rest. (I should mention that Sinner got away with one against Grigov Dimitrov in the fourth round. Dimitrov of Bulgaria was two sets up when he was forced to retire with a crippling injury to his right pec.) As for the women, I said last time that Amanda Anisimova’s winning shot in her semi-final – against the world number one – was “sublime”. Well, it went from the sublime to the ridiculous in double-quick time on Saturday. Iga Świątek whitewashed her. It was just the second 6-0 6-0 Wimbledon final; the only other was in 1911. (There was one rather more recent whitewash in a grand slam final, when Steffi Graf beat Natasha Zvereva in the 1988 French Open. Steffi was untouchable that year – she won the calendar slam and Olympic gold.) You had to feel for Anisimova. She had 40-15 in an early service game, I think four chances to win it, then it all just unravelled against an opponent who wouldn’t let up for a second. Please, just win one game…
Mum watched a lot more Wimbledon than me. That’s great. It’s helped to relax her. It’s also given us something nice to talk about. Mum and I often used to watch matches together. (We played a lot together, too.) Steffi and Novotna in ’93. Steffi and Hingis in ’99 at the French Open. I’ve thought today about that first time we were lucky enough to go to Wimbledon, for the first time, in ’98. We were members of a small tennis club that was allocated ten pairs of tickets. We went into a draw and our names came out of the hat. (Because the club was so small, our odds were decent.) Our tickets were for No. 1 court on the first Saturday. We took the train there. Before taking our seats, we watched a pair of clay-courters thrash it out on an outside court. It was jaw-dropping stuff. TV gives you no real appreciation for how hard those guys are larruping the ball. The only match we saw in its entirety on No. 1 court was Petr Korda – champion at Melbourne earlier that year – against Jérôme Golmard of France. Korda won in four close sets. (Golmard, I just found out, died of motor neuron disease at only 43.) Midway through the next match the rain came, as it so often does. There were conga lines and people in ponchos, but that was that. No roof back then. That No. 1 court had only just been built and the atmosphere in the stadium was surprisingly sleepy. Mum actually did fall asleep in the fourth set of the men’s match. I also remember smoke drifting across the court from a fire in a nearby apartment.
I’ve just started reading a book called Ella Minnow Pea. If that sounds like the middle of the alphabet, it is. It’s about a fictitious world in which letters of the alphabet are progressively outlawed. It reminds me that I need to write my series of posts about the alphabet that I’ve had planned for ages.
Still no news from the publisher about the fate of my book(s).
