Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

A beast

October 13, 2020 by 0 Comments

My brother’s in Scotland on heaven knows what exercise. I’ve just tried FaceTiming him, but no luck. Before that, I had two phone calls in quick succession from new students. I’m going to be snowed under with work at this rate. Five lessons scheduled tomorrow. My energy levels are depleted for whatever reason, so that might not be ideal, but at the moment I only have to leave the house twice a week.

Rafael Nadal. What a beast that man is. A ridiculous 13 Roland-Garros titles, and 20 grand slams altogether, tying Federer’s mark. Nadal and Djokovic were only in their fifth game of what was tennis of the highest order, when I left to play my own version of the game. I was a bit bummed honestly, because I could hardly take my eyes off what I was seeing. It took, I think, 46 minutes for Nadal to win the first set 6-0; that must be some kind of record for the longest whitewash set. In the whole match Nadal made 14 unforced errors. Fourteen. Extraordinary stuff. Interestingly, he won by dominating the shorter rallies. I wouldn’t be shocked to see Nadal reach 25 slams.

My tennis was eventful too. Domnul Sfîra wasn’t there. Perhaps he was watching the final. He’s a keen fan of the professional game. I played with the woman against two men, and I played one of the cleanest sets I can remember as we won 6-3, winning all our service games including all three of my partner’s. (By some crazy nonsensical tradition, she serves the first game of every set she plays. Always, always, always.) From memory I made only one unforced error, and I played quite aggressively, especially at the start. In the fourth game one of our opponents, who was serving, got mad. Because it was his first service game of the evening, the “double faults don’t count” rule was in play. He was struggling to get the ball in the service box, and his unusually high rate of lets weren’t helping either. Then I played another set with the same partner, though one of our opponents was different. Again she served the first game, meaning she served two games in a row. This time we weren’t doing so well – I think we were 3-0 down – when I abruptly changed direction to chase a ball, felt a jabbing pain in my knee, and almost keeled over. I decided to leave the game at that point, and maybe I’ll take break next weekend.

There are new rules in place for Timișoara now, as we’ve breached the threshold of 1.5 cases per 1000 inhabitants over a two-week period. Masks are now a must practically anywhere you go. In a recent John Campbell video, he talked about some of the secondary complications, sometimes long-term, of Covid-19. One of the more surprising is derealisation, when you feel that nothing is real, that you’re watching everything on a video. Campbell said he’s had that, and so have I. While playing tennis (more than once), while shopping at Sainsbury’s, and once even in a job interview. It’s scary stuff.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

Selfishness is killing us

October 11, 2020 by 0 Comments

On Friday one of my regular students – the one who said that she wanted to get Covid – told me that her husband had tested positive. They and their son have to quarantine for two weeks. She’d also had symptoms including a 39-degree fever. Brilliant. I was very glad I’d told her to stay away last week, but was she carrying the virus when she came here the previous Thursday? I wasn’t feeling 100% myself. Tiredness, lack of energy, the usual stuff. As for wanting to get the virus, she said look at Trump, 30 years older than me and he looks fine now. Where to start? That’s a sample size of one, and Trump has had a cocktail of about eight drugs and procedures including antibody treatment. Good luck getting that in Romania.

The Covid numbers are skyrocketing. (Just look at those graphs.) In a recent video, John Campbell talked about the selfishness of people hopping on planes in the middle of a plague, exercising their “unalienable rights”, as he put it, to go wherever they want whenever they want. It drove me mad to hear my students talk about their travels during the summer. Croatia, Greece, the Black Sea. There’s this, um, virus thingy which you might have heard about. And the jam-packed Black Sea resorts sound ghastly to me, virus or no virus. In the past I’ve gone up to five years without travelling internationally, but you buggers have gone away every year for the last ten. Is it really such a hardship to stay at home just this once? As for people complaining that they can’t get home from their jolly, I have zero sympathy. I think if we could have closed those resorts and basically sealed the borders, we wouldn’t have squandered the progress we made in the spring. But thanks to you selfish bastards, here we are.

I played tennis last night. We started with a typical set-up, me playing with the only woman, while on the other side were the 85-year-old bloke (Domnul Sfîra) and a younger guy. We got to 5-5, and because someone was waiting we played a tie-break which we won 8-6. After that, my memory is a bit hazy. Early in the next set I slipped and fell, and thought I might have torn a ligament in my left knee. I felt quite dizzy, and eventually staggered to the bench. Domnul Sfîra took over for a few games. One of the others had a knee brace so I put that on and gingerly joined the action. I iced my knee when I got home, and though it still hurts if I bend it fully, I should be fine.

So Iga Świątek won the French Open, beating Sofia Kenin comfortably in the end. Świątek was born in 2001 – yes, we now have people born this century winning grand slams. I watched the first eight games – that long eighth game was crucial – before playing tennis myself. I didn’t miss a whole lot; I think Kenin was compromised physically. Świątek played out of this world against Simona Halep and I’m not surprised she lifted the trophy, but heck, she didn’t drop a set the whole tournament, and every one of her seven matches was 6-something, 6-something. Amazing stuff. I thought she might suffer from stage fright in the final, but not a bit of it. She took home €1.6 million – less than Ashleigh Barty received last year, pre-Covid, but still a very hefty hourly rate. The most fascinating thing on both the men’s and women’s side has been the number of surprise packages that the tournament has thrown up.

I’m playing tennis again this evening, so I’ll miss most of the men’s final between Nadal and Djoković too. I have a habit of missing big tennis matches while playing tennis. The 1996 men’s Wimbledon final springs to mind. For me, the match of the tournament (so far – who knows what today’s final could produce) is the quarter-final between Dominic Thiem and Diego Schwartzman. What I saw was spellbinding. The drop shots (that’s been the shot of the tournament) and table-tennis-style retrievals by Schwartzman were out of this world. I’d just seen a crazy-long game – 15 minutes at least – in the second set, before giving back-to-back lessons for three hours, and the match was still going on after that. Predictably, Nadal was a bit too good for Schwartzman in the semi-final. The other semi was a fun match in the end, Tsitsipas coming back from two sets and match point down to force a fifth against Djoković. Tsitsipas seems mentally stronger now, and a real contender.

Teaching pronunciation when we’re both wearing masks isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and neither is teaching kids online. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Coronavirus - Family - Politics - Tennis - Writing a book

A tyring week, and the latest on the book

October 5, 2020 by 0 Comments

Last week I had a stuffy nose and a bit of a cough and I wondered what was causing it. Then I figured it out. I’d replaced my bike tyre with a new white-rimmed one, and the fumes from the glue on the tyre were getting into my respiratory system. This has happened to me before. When I moved into my Wellington flat, the previous tenants had left an old umbrella which had a glue lining the spokes. And once I bought a glue-drenched pair of shoes that I had no choice but to chuck out. I’ve now tied my bike up in the lobby rather than keeping it in my flat.

This morning I had a Skype chat with my aunt and uncle who visited me in Timișoara after my brother’s wedding. That all feels like a lifetime ago now. My aunt is about to have a hip replacement. (My uncle has so far had hip, knee and ankle replacements, so now it’s her turn.) They’re also trying to get a refund of the $20,000 they spent on this year’s holiday that never happened. Apart for that, they seemed good, and busy as ever. It was a great pleasure for me to see them here, and I wonder if and when I’ll see them again.

Covid. With rapid increases in cases and hospitalisations, and winter around the corner, the situation is in danger of spiralling out of control. (It’s worse than it was when we locked down, and now we aren’t anything close to being locked down.) Maskless in-person lessons are now a no-go for me. They’re marginal even with masks. The markets, while they’re in the open, are jam-packed with elderly people, and I’ve decided to give them a miss too. One trip to the supermarket each week, in and out as fast as possible, and that’s my lot for the foreseeable future.

I was surprised how many people thought that Trump’s Covid diagnosis was fake. I mean, it’s possible, but given how breathtakingly irresponsible he’s been, it’s almost a wonder he’s stayed Covid-free for so long. I hope he survives and is humiliated in next month’s election. (Following his diagnosis, he gave a four-minute speech – edited I’m sure – in which he briefly seemed like a human being who vaguely cared about other human beings.) When I heard that Trump was positive, I emailed my university friend who in March placed a bet on Mike Pence to be the next president.

The Romanian teacher has found time in her busy schedule to work on translating my book, and it looks like this thing might actually happen. Still lots to do. Some exercises and quizzes. A slimmed down version of the dictionary. Dad’s illustrations, if he’s on board with that. But it would be quite something to have my work – a useful, practical work – in print. Crucially, the teacher has experience of publishing in Romania, and her own mother is semi-famous in her home of Alba Iulia for the books she has written.

I had my first Zoom lesson with a ten-year-old boy who lives in Bucharest. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also my last. It was like pulling teeth. Not his fault; Zoom with kids of that age is hard. The “highlight” was when I asked him to guess my age, and he said 55. It reminded me of the boy who wanted to know how much I weighed. Um, I actually don’t know. Then out came the scales. Thirty-odd kilos. Now it’s your turn. Oh, alright then. Seventy-eight! That’s even more than my dad! My English teacher’s a fatty! Ha ha!

Roland-Garros. I’ve just watched Simona Halep be overwhelmed 6-1 6-2 in the fourth round by Iga Świątek (pronounced something like “shfyon-tek”), a 19-year-old from Poland. Świątek was in the zone, rarely put a foot wrong, and Simona was out of ideas. Halep has always been vulnerable to zoning power-hitters. I also saw the final game of Martina Trevisan’s victory over fifth-seed Kiki Bertens, another big upset. Trevisan is a diminutive left-hander from Italy, and I earlier enjoyed her dramatic second-round win over Cori Gauff, which she eked out 7-5 in the third set. In round three she had match points against her. Ranked 159th in the world, she’s come all the way from qualifying to reach the quarter-finals. Seven matches in a row. Whatever happens, it’ll be like hitting Powerball for her.

We’re getting warm, windy, weird weather. Yesterday I sat in Central Park and read my book. The wind sprayed the water from the fountain onto me. Somebody put a piano in the nearby bandstand a few months ago, and this time there was someone who could actually play it, rather than a small kid hammering away at random. A woman was pushing a man with no legs in a wheelchair. They made three visits to my bench for money. I gave them 7 lei in total. I found a small yellow stylised wooden elephant, and realising it could land in six positions when you throw it, with vastly different probabilities (Pass the Pigs style), I took it home. It could feature in a kids’ game, when kids’ games become a feature again.

Life :) - Politics - Tennis

Total tennis

September 29, 2020 by 0 Comments

Today I watched a 15-minute YouTube video of largely abandoned small-town Mississippi – deep Trump country, surely – by TheDailyWoo. The commentator is amusing and has such attention to detail. So much of his video was sad but strangely beautiful. It’s one of a series – I also saw the Alabama one.

The New York Times dropped a bombshell by revealing that Trump had only paid $750 a year in taxes. I’m doubt this will shift many votes at all, but it keeps Trump in the news for all the wrong reasons, eating up the clock. There’s still time, of course, but unless the polls are systematically wrong, stagnating is no good for him.

Tennis. On Saturday we a storm in the afternoon, and even though it had passed by the time we were due to play, the courts were unplayable. Yesterday’s action went off without a hitch, though. I played men’s doubles, with the 85-year-old man on the other side of the net. He was incredibly lithe in the set we played. (I do alter my play to take account of his age, but not too much.) We led 5-3 and had three non-consecutive set points on my partner’s serve, but couldn’t close it out. At 5-5 we played a tie-break, because someone was waiting, and got taken apart 7-0 in the shoot-out. The senior among us shuffled off the court a winner, and was replaced by someone a bit younger. I kept the same partner. Again we led 5-3, and having lost my two previous service games easily, this time it was my turn to serve for the set. After numerous long rallies, as long as I’ve seen on TV the last two days, plus a double fault on set point, we got there on at least our fifth opportunity as the light was fading.

How weird it is to see the French Open being played in autumn with a bemasked skeleton crowd, but what I’ve seen so far has been utterly absorbing. Pure attritional, cat-and-mouse, clay-court tennis. Best of all, there are still no final-set tie-breaks at Roland Garros, and we’ve already seen some gargantuan, logic-defying matches, with scores into the teens in the fifth set despite many service breaks. Last night I saw the end of a match between two Argentines – Londero and Delbonis, which finished 14-12 in Londero’s favour in the final set. Londero served for the match five times and saved a match point. I thought it wouldn’t get nuttier than that, but tonight we had Colentin Moutet, a left-handed Frenchman, against Lorenzo Giustino of Italy. I thought Moutet would win – he looked the fitter and more composed of the two – and he served for the match three times, once getting to 30-0. But somehow the match refused to end. It was both gripping and draining to watch, and heaven knows what it must have been like for the players. Giustino really swung at everything on the return games and was the winner in the end, by the ludicrous score of 18-16 in the fifth, after six hours and five minutes over two days, despite being dominated for large chunks of the match. Giustino came through qualifying, so even if he totally crashes in the next round, this will be a useful payday for him.

At the weekend we had the Hungarian festival, which is always fun. It was smaller than usual, for obvious reasons. I got myself a bottle of Csiki Sör (pronounced “cheeky sherr”), the rather fruity Hungarian beer. It’s cool as hell honestly to live in a place where you see all these weird and wonderful languages.

Timișoara has a new mayor. Nicolae Robu, the distinctive-looking mayor of the last eight years is out, and Dominic Fritz (who sounds like a tennis player; he’s of German origin) is in. My students had told me that Robu was an overwhelming favourite to be re-elected, but it wasn’t even close. Robu got 30% of the vote, Fritz 53%.

Maybe it was that song Omaha by Counting Crows that told my brain I should be playing some form of Omaha poker.

Family - Life :) - Politics

Really hope I don’t get hooked again

September 28, 2020 by 0 Comments

Work is certainly picking up. Last week I had six early starts. The switch to mainly online teaching means I’ve now got students from around the country – Bucharest, Maramureș, Brașov – and beyond (one in Austria, one in Spain). One of the week’s highlights was when a boy showed me his flight simulator during our online lesson. It replicated the real-time weather conditions wherever in the world you happened to be. I asked him to go to Queenstown in New Zealand – he took off from there in the middle of the night, when I hoped instead he would try and land there (not the easiest of tasks). In another lesson I taught the time. When I asked him to tell me the current time, he told me his watch wasn’t working. You’re not getting away with that one, mate. And anyway, the cathedral clock is in full view.

Coronavirus had plateaued (what a weird-looking word) in Romania, but it’s heading back up again. Several European countries, such as Spain and France, and increasingly the UK, are having a tough time of it. Another particularly bad place is Israel. I was talking to my Wellington-based cousin this morning, and she said that many Orthodox Jews simply don’t believe in the pandemic. We had a good chat. Her eldest boy will be 18 next month – he’s two days too young to vote in the upcoming election, unless (and let’s hope not) Covid postpones it again. He plans to study at Canterbury, which is where his parents met. (They both have PhDs from there.) It’s amazing how time flies. I continue to be envious of New Zealanders and their near-total lack of virus. Flu and other respiratory illnesses were almost nonexistent over the winter. Strangely there has also been a huge downturn in premature births.

I went to the doctor on Friday to stock up on antidepressants. He had a very obese assistant who I’d never seen before. This bloke tested my oxygen saturation, which once again was fine. I asked about flu jabs, and I should be able to get one next month relatively cheaply and painlessly. This afternoon my aunt called me. She’d just been put on a new antidepressant that I’d never heard of, and it seems to be working.

I don’t know what prompted me to fire up Poker Stars again, but last week I decided to install the latest software and play a bit of no-limit Omaha hi-lo, just for play money. Back in the day I never quite mastered it. Just for fun I did two laps around a play-money badugi table. God, I could see why that game was so addictive for me. That feeling when you hit your draw, and the adrenalin rush of running a pat bluff. You really couldn’t beat it. (It helped that I was a winning player.) These days the player pool is much smaller, and I doubt it would be worth depositing and playing for real money again, when there are better things to do with my time. Part of the fun right now is that the interface is all in Romanian, so you get all the weird and wonderful translations of poker terms. A flush is simply a “colour”. A straight is a chintă, which I’m pretty sure comes from the French quinte. A king isn’t called a king (that would be rege), but popă. There are even strange names for the numbered cards. Romanian for seven is șapte, but in cards it’s called șeptar. Ten isn’t the usual zece, it’s decar. And so on.

The US election. Just over five weeks to go. Biden could crash in the debates. He could get Covid. All the economic figures between now and 3rd November could be bloody marvellous. The polls could be polling all the wrong people. The chips could just happen to fall in all the right places, so that Trump loses by five million votes and still claims an Electoral College victory, perhaps via the Supreme Court. But right now, Trump is losing.

Politics - Tennis

Social surprise

September 21, 2020 by 0 Comments

I’ve played tennis twice this weekend. To be honest, I do get slightly bored with playing exclusively doubles – I enjoy the physical challenge of singles and I’m better at it – but it’s certainly preferable to the alternative, which is no tennis at all. Last night they asked if I wanted to go to the pub with them after our games. I don’t like social surprises, and my first instinct, as it often is, was “no”. Where even is this pub? I went home, got a bite to eat, and joined them at the place beside the river where I sometimes go with Bogdan. I wasn’t allowed to squeeze onto their table – Covid makes squeezing a no-no – so we had to sit on two tables. I enjoyed the chat, especially with the wife of perhaps the best player among us. She described me as “nonconformist”. I usually find talking with older people – they were all older than me – more interesting than talking with younger people who can be rather superficial. Big generalisation, but people who lived under a different regime seem to have more interesting things to say.

Last weekend our game became almost secondary as people were following the final of the WTA tournament in Istanbul between Patricia Țig and Eugenie Bouchard, which was on a knife-edge. Țig saw three match points come and go at 5-3 in the final set, then three more at 6-5. She got there in the tie-break, on her eighth match point, for her first WTA title. This afternoon Simona Halep was a bit fortunate to get over the line in her semi-final with Garbiñe Muguruza; Halep led 6-3 4-6 5-1, then Muguruza came back to within one game, only to play an error-strewn service game (including double faults on the last two points) to hand Halep a close win.

This morning I spoke to my brother and my parents. Mum and Dad talked about the cannabis referendum in New Zealand. Mum will be voting against legalisation. (No surprise there. It’s a drug. Drugs are bad. If you legalise the drug, more people will take it. That’s just obvious. And it’s bad. And it will lead people on to other, even worse drugs. And that’s really bad.) I was surprised that Dad might vote against too, though he was undecided. For me, legalisation is a complete no-brainer. Loads of Kiwis smoke weed, and will smoke weed, legal or not. And it’s uncontrolled. (The fact that it’s illegal and uncontrolled is part of the attraction for young people.) Legalise it, and suddenly it’s regulated and taxed and boring. The strength will be limited. Police time and money will be diverted into things that actually matter, like violent crime, which marijuana almost never causes (unlike alcohol, of course). The proposed change is hardly a free-for-all – the legal age will be 20, higher than for alcohol which is far more dangerous. You’ll be allowed to possess half an ounce or grow a couple of plants. That’s it. And it will still most definitely be illegal to drive or operate machinery under the influence of weed. (That side of things needs to be beefed up a bit, I’d say.) I expect the bill will fail narrowly – the polls are close, but older people, who are mostly against it, are more likely to vote.

Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice, died on Friday night aged 87. Because this very old lady didn’t survive a few more weeks, the Republicans now have the chance to fill the vacancy with somebody who is likely to kill the Affordable Care Act. And kill people. Trump might now benefit from people’s attention being off coronavirus. The Republican party, and the whole American political system, really need to burn to the ground.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Travel: Europe

Onboarding some more students

September 19, 2020 by 0 Comments

Soon I’ll have my ninth lesson in two days. That’s getting back to pre-apocalyptic levels. Not every day, or pair of days, is like this, but the direction of travel is positive and I really can’t overstate the difference a steady volume of work makes to me. It’s hugely uplifting. There’s a new bloke who lives in Brașov, and after a few lessons with the upper-beginner-level woman from the north of the country, I’ve now started with her younger sister who lives in Spain. She’s at a much higher level than her sister – a 7 or 8 on my 0-to-10 scale.

Earlier this week I had a large Zoom meeting with members of the body corporate, to discuss the sale of our apartment block. I’m still always amazed by how quickly seemingly normal people switch into meetingese and really weird cadences. There are reasons FOR that. Oh yes. Next you’ll be telling me that my bags must be placed IN the overhead locker OR under the seat in front of me. We were told how many people had signed the agreement to this point in time, and there was discussion of onboarding those who still haven’t signed. The airline parallels kept coming back. But it wasn’t a bad meeting – everybody present had signed, or onboarded themselves, so the tension was gone. In fact there are now only three non-signers, and only one definite “no”, so they’ve decided to push on with the sale. It’s now officially on the market.

I had a good chat with my parents this morning, in between lessons. Mum reiterated that she doesn’t expect us to meet before 2022. We talked about our family holidays. Dad sent me a picture of me and my brother in Belgium in 1987, at a campsite with two similar-aged girls we met. That was a good holiday. I remember getting up at 2am so we could take the ferry from Felixstowe to Zeebrugge, a six-hour trip. The company was Townsend Thoresen; one of their ferries had sunk earlier that year on the same route, after someone had forgotten to close the bow doors, and there were a lot of fatalities. We travelled around the French-speaking Ardennes region, staying first at a campsite in a place called De Haan, before moving to the place where the picture was taken, alongside the Meuse river. The river had recently flooded the campsite which was still wet in places, and I wore wellies in the photo. The other family had a caravan and drove a Peugeot 504; we just had our extremely heavy old tent, and Dad drove the Mazda 626 they’d bought less than a year earlier. We visited Waterloo, Ypres, and Passchendaele where hundreds of New Zealanders had died. I remember having a tooth out while I was in Belgium, and finding 15 francs under my pillow in the morning.

Coronavirus cases have taken a sudden upward swing, as they have in much of Europe. (See my graphs.) Things could still get extremely ugly here. It was sobering to talk to my new student based in Spain this morning. Overwhelmed hospitals. Palpable fear everywhere. Economic carnage in the big cities that will take many years to recover from. I don’t think they ever fully got over the economic crisis that started in 2008.

In the last few days I’ve been listening to Manchester Orchestra, an American band. This Youtube video (nearly nine minutes) is quite magical. Imagine creating something like that.

Family - Life :) - Tennis

Kids and pics

September 16, 2020 by 1 Comment

If any of you are wondering what my little profile picture is, it’s of a busker drumming his guitar on Wellington’s Cuba Street. I thought I wouldn’t mind being him, so I took six snaps of him, and spliced them together to make a shaky, slightly manic-looking GIF. It’s cool that WordPress lets me use it as my pic.

I had a look at my posts from a year ago, and although the world has changed so much in that time, so much was the same: wishing I had a bit more work, Brexit, Sfânta Cruce, hot weather, and a gripping men’s US Open final that I failed to see.

Dominic Thiem came from two sets down to beat Alexander Zverev 8-6 in the fifth-set tie-break. It doesn’t get tighter than that, or harder to take for the loser. Zverev was distraught at the end. It’s the first time the men’s final has gone to 7-6 in the fifth. I’m happy for Thiem that he won – he’s been close in grand slams before – and this might help him to win another slam, one that won’t be “asterisked” by the absence of players like Nadal. I didn’t see the match – it started late and I had a lesson early in the morning.

It was striking how many children were milling around in town today, either with their parents or without. Today is the second day of the school year, but most schools are doing some hybrid system of both online and in-person teaching. In some parts of the country, this is a real challenge, because not everywhere has the super-fast internet we do. (Those mostly rural places tend not to have much Covid either, so they have the green light for school to go back as normal, but there are exceptions.) Seeing all those kids, and the kids I work with, those incredible bundles of life full of so much hope and joy, makes me a bit sad that I’m unlikely to have any of my own.

Sfânta Cruce – or Sfânta Corona this year, perhaps – was as big as ever. Crowds outside the cathedral late night, and a long snaking queue today. Earlier this evening it was right back to the bus stop. Masks, mostly, but not much distancing.

Dad sent me a nice picture of Mum and me in Ireland. We went there as a family when I was ten. It was a very different country in 1990; the Celtic tiger hadn’t begun to roar. They still used pounds (for money) and miles per hour. It was beautiful but also bleak. We boarded the newly kitted out ferry, named Felicity, at Fishguard in Wales, and that took us to Rosslare. We spent two weeks, mostly in Cork and Kerry, where we camped. Mum saw a priest in Kerry to help with a family history request. (Her family came out to New Zealand from Kerry in 1874.) The weather was good for the first week, but it rained almost non-stop the second week. We came back a different way, from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead, on an older ship.

Some good state polls for Biden today. “Only” seven weeks to go.

Here are some pictures.

Books - Coronavirus - Family - Tennis

Can’t put it down, but want to

September 13, 2020 by 0 Comments

I’m near the end of the third book in Elena Ferrante’s four-part Neapolitan series. It’s dramatic and unputdownable, and very hard to read at the same time. The violence, the backstabbing, everybody’s lives being so intertwined, every moment of every day being no more than the next move in an impossible game. I would like to visit Naples sometime, but the life portrayed in the series of books is my idea of hell, and there’s only so much of that I can take. A lot of it is just me, I’m sure. I think I’m a nice person, and I’m able to get on with and connect with most other people. But I rarely have close relationships, I’ve never been part of an in-group (with a complementary out-group), never at school, never at work, never anywhere; I’m just me, navigating my way through life as unobtrusively as possible. That’s how upending my life and coming to Romania wasn’t that hard, psychologically, even if it was somewhat challenging on a practical level. Quite possibly I have low-level autism – I used to attend groups for autistic people in New Zealand, originally because I wanted to work with autistic people – and found the frankness, the crap-cutting, to be refreshing. But in these books you’ve got the exact opposite of autism, if such a thing exists, where every word or action is hyper-analysed, given a secondary, tertiary meaning. It’s a fascinating read, but just gimme someone quiet and unassuming, somebody likeable, just one among the dozens of characters. Fundamentally, the lack of likeable characters is a problem for me.

Last night I tried staying up to watch the women’s US Open final between Naomi Osaka and Viktoria Azarenka, but even though it didn’t start that late – 11pm – I couldn’t keep my eyes open. It was a good match, the bits I saw anyway, and fortunes whipsawed wildly. Azarenka stormed out to 6-1 2-0, but Osaka then raced into a 1-6 6-3 4-1 lead. Then I woke up and things got exciting. Azarenka won a pair of long games to get back to 3-4 with her serve to come, but Osaka broke in the next game and served out for her second US Open title and third grand slam overall. Osaka was the first woman to win the final after dropping the first set since Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario way back in 1994. Osaka became something of a sensation for her masks. For each match, she wore a mask bearing the name of a black victim of police violence. Last night’s mask carried the name of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old black boy who was shot dead by a policeman in Cleveland six years ago. Her quarter-final mask had George Floyd’s name on it. The men’s final between Alexander Zverev and Dominic Thiem takes place tonight, but I can’t realistically watch it. Incredibly, it will be the first time that a man born in the nineties wins a grand slam. It hasn’t been a normal tournament. No juniors, no qualifying, no mixed doubles (though, outside Wimbledon, that functions as an exhibition anyway), and the men’s and women’s doubles draws reduced from 64 pairs to 32. Importantly, nobody was allowed to play both singles and doubles.

I should be playing tennis tonight. Last Sunday was our first session for four weeks, as some of the regulars had been away on holiday. The bloke who lives on my floor had grown a beard in that time, and I remarked upon that. He told me that his elderly mother had died, and it was a Romanian tradition for men not to shave for forty days afterwards. Death rites are quite complex here – a big part of them is the pomană – sharing of food at specific intervals after someone dies, with the final “feast” occurring after seven years.

Last Monday I played Monopoly for the first time this century, with the Romanian version. The eleven-year-old boy wanted to play. We were both pretty hazy about the rules. He started to build houses and hotels willy-nilly before I figured that something was probably amiss. Everything was in Romanian, and once I did myself out of £300 (euros, dollars, I honestly don’t know), thinking I had to pay £150 instead of receive it. I took photos of the board and bits and pieces, and we’ll resume tomorrow. Getting paid (real money) to play Monopoly isn’t too bad.

My aunt has had a lot of stomach trouble, and has been almost unable to see anybody about it. Waiting hours on a phone line that you have to pay for, and spending more hours in a waiting room if you even get that far – that’s all normal now in Britain’s almost third-world health system. It was bad enough before Covid, but since March the gaping holes have been laid bare for all to see. In the last six months, people have died in their tens of thousands of cancer and other non-Covid-related conditions, and will continue to do so over the autumn and winter – Covid case numbers are now climbing fast. My aunt would be better off in Romania.

Mum and Dad got back from Moeraki on Friday night, their time. They had better weather than was forecast. I was quite envious when they told me about getting fish and chips in Temuka on the way back, from the fairly rough-and-ready shop just around the corner from where my grandparents used to live.

Coronavirus - Tennis

X-rated (and a flashback to ’95)

September 11, 2020 by 0 Comments

The anti-vax thing is starting to do my head in. Yesterday I met my landlady to give her two months’ rent, and she joined the growing list of people I’ve met who say they won’t take the Covid vaccine if and when it becomes available. Jeez. If it’s been through all the various phases of clinical trials and jumped all the hoops, I’ll want to be first in line, but if my small sample size is anything to go by, the uptake in Romania will be insufficient for herd immunity.

Another thing – why do some people write vaxx with a double X? I’ve also seen the spelling doxxing for practice of releasing incriminating information, rather than the single-X version I would use. English is full of exceptions, as I don’t hesitate to tell my students, but the “double X doesn’t exist” rule is just about iron-clad. I’ve never used a faxx machine or watched boxxing or got my food mixxer fixxed. And it makes sense that you would never double X, unlike other consonants. (A double consonant shows that the preceding vowel is short, as in hopping, as opposed to hoping. But long vowels before X almost don’t exist, so there’s no need to make the distinction. The only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are coax and hoax, where the -oa- spelling indicates the long vowel, or diphthong, to be more accurate.)

The US Open, crowd-free of course, has been quite eventful, despite the absence of some star names. Simona Halep didn’t play. Her compatriot Sorana Cîrstea did, though, and beat top-tenner Johanna Konta in a close three-setter before falling agonisingly to Karolina Muchova. Cîrstea led 5-3 in the final set, then 4-0 and 6-3 in the tie-break, with two of the three match points on her serve. They all vanished, and she went down in the end, 9-7.

The big news though has been Novak, or should I say No-Vax. (Djoković is an anti-vaxer, and he got the virus himself at a stupid tennis party.) Frustrated at losing serve late in the first set against Pablo Carreño Busta, he hit the ball away in disgust, it happened to strike a female line judge, and rules being as they are, he was disqualified. He was unlucky, basically. Some people have attacked him on social media (he’s become a bit of target, sadly), and the line judge has also received a lot of hurtful and idiotic comments.

The Djoković incident reminded me of 1995 Wimbledon, where Tim Henman (who was still relatively unknown then) did something similar in a doubles match, and he and his partner were defaulted. The funny thing about that match was that Jeff Tarango (who had a tendency to lose it) was on the other side of the net. In a singles match almost immediately afterwards, Tarango himself was so incensed with the umpire over a line call that he stormed off the court, ending his tournament, and then Tarango’s wife slapped the umpire!

That 1995 tournament had a few moments, and they’re pretty fresh in my memory still. Greg Rusedski, who had just switched from Canada to Britain, had a good tournament, eventually losing to Pete Sampras in round four. Chanda Rubin played one of her customary marathon matches on an outside court. Boris Becker was up two sets in double-quick time against Cédric Pioline in their quarter-final, but the Frenchman squeaked out two tie-breaks and (if memory serves) went a break up in the fifth, only to be edged out in the end, 9-7, in the match of the tournament, on the men’s side at least. The women’s final between Steffi Graf and Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario had an extraordinary finish. At 5-5 in the third, they produced one of the all-time great individual games, Graf eventually breaking after 13 or 14 deuces. (Google tells me 13. That’s 32 points. Monumental at that stage of the match.) Then Steffi served out to love for yet another title. The men’s final in contrast was a bit of a disappointment. Becker nicked the first set on a tie-break, but after that Sampras dominated and won comfortably in four sets.

That’ll do from me. No let up from this extended summer we’re having. It’s crazy to think what it might be like in just two months, and how that might affect the Covid situation.