I want to tell a story of amazing honesty, but in order to do so I first have to confess to a secret vice of mine; I’ve become addicted to the Caffe Nero Frappe Latte In my opinion, this is far superior to any other chilled coffee product available on the market right now; I refuse to drink at Starbucks since the fiasco detailed in this post, and whilst Costa’s Iced Latte is okay every once in a while, I don’t set much store by their Frescatos - last time I had one, the ice wasn’t properly blended and the resultant mush was almost too thick and lumpy to drink. Caffe Nero, in comparison, have a perfect drink, which tastes delicious and at £2.80 is no more expensive than its competitors. Read the rest of this entry »

I was struggling for ideas as to what to do this weekend, as every single forecast I had seen informed me that I was going to be subjected to two whole days of relentless, torrential rain. Well, that’s the last time I ever trust a BBC weather forecast again. Saturday was a reasonable day and Sunday was a lovely day, so Babel and I could actually have done something much more exciting than we actually did, but notwithstanding the lies of the Met Office, we did manage to have rather a pleasant afternoon in Stratford-upon-Avon. Read the rest of this entry »

I got this over at Damon’s blog.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you love.
4. Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5. Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them. Read the rest of this entry »

I remember quite a long time ago that someone I know posted a link to a quiz about sexuality in the JEB forums. At the time at which I took it, I was still at the stage when I wanted not only for everyone to think that I was straight, but also to be straight, and so it struck me that it might be quite cool to take it again now that I’ve relaxed a little bit

Also, I wanted a distraction because I have mislaid a French death certificate. I cannot for the life of me think what I have done with it If you saw my desk right now, you would actually struggle to see me, because I am being swallowed up by growing mountains of paper. I only have five files on the desk, which is by no means excessive, but my client has sent through printed information which is equivalent to several packets of printer paper and it’s just sort of swamping me. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I swear that yesterday I came across a French death certificate and an Italian death certificate. Now, I know they were there because I looked at them quite particularly to make sure they were death certificates, and because there were a couple of details I was initially unsure of, I contemplated whether it would be unethical to scan them in an send a copy to Babel for him to help me out. I didn’t reference them up and put them on file, however, because at that point in time I wasn’t auditing death benefits. And now that I am auditing death benefits, they have disappeared so completely that I would be tempted to believe they never existed, were it not for the fact that that would mean I had been hallucinating about foreign death certificates… Having been through all the paper on my desk once this morning, I am starting to get a little stressed about it, so the idea is that if I spend ten minutes doing something else I will calm down and then hopefully remember what I’ve done with them. So, erm, how straight am I?! Read the rest of this entry »

Having greatly enjoyed Kate Morton’s debut novel, ‘The House at Riverton’, earlier in the year, I was greatly excited a few months back when Babel very kindly bought me a copy of her second; ‘The Forgotten Garden’. It being quite a large book, I didn’t get around to starting it for some weeks, but when I was packing to go to Szombathely it struck me that it would be an ideal book to bring. No one wants to read something too heavy when they are on holiday, and whilst the size of the paperback meant it was actually quite heavy for packing, nevertheless I knew the content would be pretty light. The upside of the size meant I thought it would probably last me all week, although I did take the precaution of packing a few other books in case it turned out to be horrendously bad Read the rest of this entry »

People who are shockingly rude in work emails.

I’m not talking about insults. Rather, people who through either personality defects or sheer laziness insist on firing off a dozen one-line emails to you every day, despite the fact you are actually sitting in the same room.

There is one manager in my office who completely lacks communication skills of any sort. Unfortunately I end up working for her on pension scheme audits reasonably often, and instead of coming to speak to me and tell me what she would like me to do, she emails me with instructions, regardless of the fact that I may even be sitting next to her at the time. This creates a problem for me, because I have been told off in my appraisal for communicating with managers via email, but I feel I have to cover my own back by responding in an email also. If I don’t, I leave myself in a dangerous situation where she has a written record that she asked me to do something and I have no written record of the fact that I told her I’d done it, or hadn’t done it because there was some sort of problem. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just had a rather exciting sort of weekend That is to say, Saturday was a rather quiet day which I mostly spent trying to tidy the mound of papers in my room and decipher the opening chapters of Gunther Grass’ “The Tin Drum” in Esperanto. But Sunday my boyfriend came to pick me up in his car and we went to Twycross Zoo for the afternoon

It was actually a bit of a risk going, because the weather seemed to be so appalling bad all Saturday. Sunday dawned a bit brighter, and I managed not to get rained on when I went to Mass in the morning, but there was a high potential for showers. As we drove towards Twycross on the M42 we were engulfed by a particularly vicious shower, and I don’t know how my boyfriend managed to keep the car on the road, because I could barely see it. Luckily it was just about lunchtime, and so we stopped at a fairly pleasant pub in Appleby Magna and I had lasagne and some rather tasty chips. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just been watching ‘The Painted Veil’, a 2006 film adaptation of the novel by W. Somerset Maugham. I confess to never having read the book, or indeed anything at all by W. Somerset Maugham, but it was one of my father’s birthday presents and we were humouring him by sitting and watching it with him It was actually very good, although not, I think, a film to go to bed on, because it was rather depressing and disturbing. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday was two years exactly since I met Babel. I hasten to clarify that I am not aware of that fact because I spent my free time counting the days since I have known Babel - I spend quite enough of my work life counting without doing it in my evenings too - but just because it was the day after my father’s birthday, and conveniently my father’s birthday is always the same day each year Of course, when I say that I met Babel, what I mean is that I saw him in reality for the first time, having actually “met” him three months previously in the JEB forums. It is an interesting question as to whether you can “know” someone when you have never met them in real life. My sister asked me about this this morning in fact, because one of her friends has just split up with her boyfriend, and my sister seems to think the failure of the relationship is somehow based on the fact that they bumped into each other on the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

This was a book which Babel lent me, and it took me an incredibly long time to read. I’m not sure why, because I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was bad. Perhaps after how good he had told me it was, I just found it somewhat of an anti-climax. The premise of the book, which is that Hitler won the Second World War and is still in power in the 1960s, is an amazing, mind-blowing idea; the amount of thought which has got into recreating this version of the 1960s which never existed is deeply impressive; but somehow, the actual characters and plot failed to grab me and by the time I got to the end I was left with the feeling that I’d just read a rather mediocre thriller. Read the rest of this entry »