I was fortunate enough to have two weeks of over Christmas (mostly because I’d accumulated so much overtime throughout the rest of the year) and it was really lovely, both to have so much time without auditing and to have chance to celebrate Christmas with Tim for the first time in our own home The days before Christmas Day itself went by in a flurry of last minute present buying (once we’d got them under the tree, it looked like Tim had bought me twice as many as I’d bought him, so I had to go out on a last minute spending spree!), as well as a burst of last minute food buying, which resulted in us venturing as far as the hell that is Coventry in order to stock up on last minute food. On Christmas Eve we went to tea at my parents’ house and pretended to be continental by opening all our presents to each other on the spot. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, so Zamenhof Day 2009, the 150th anniversary of the birth of the creator of Esperanto, was technically yesterday. But yesterday I was rather busy and didn’t have time to blog about it, so what I thought would be cool would be to blog about it today, now that all the excitement is over, with links to all various pieces of Esperanto publicity surrounding the event

Tim got things off to a good start at the JEBsite, with an excellent post about who Zamenhof was and why he created Esperanto. As mentioned in Tim’s post, the most exciting part of the day was that, following a letter campaign from Esperantists who probably didn’t really believe this would ever happen, Google used the Esperanto flag as their themed doodle on a significant number of their national sites. Sadly the UK page wasn’t one of those which sported it, but others, including the German, French and Chinese, proudly displayed it for 24 hours, and you can see a collage of the different pages here Read the rest of this entry »

I still feel absolutely exhausted today after a rather crazy weekend. It seemed like such a good idea to book it, back in May, when I hadn’t even started looking at houses never mind decided to buy one in Nuneaton, and when I was blissfully unaware that I would be spending the following week working away from home in Oswestry.

It seemed like less of a good idea at 3.45am on Saturday, when my alarm went off Well, strictly speaking it was Tim’s alarm, because in a moment of madness, Tim had volunteered to get up and drive me to Birmingham airport. I had no idea how long this would take from Nuneaton, and there’s always the potential for us to get lost when I’m in charge of the navigating, so in all honesty we could probably have had an extra half hour in bed and I would still have got to the airport for 5.30 as required.

I feel rather guilty for having abandoned Tim for the entire weekend in order to go on holiday without him… especially because it was the weekend before his birthday… and in particular because today is his birthday and I’m not at home because of work He claimed he didn’t mind though, and he would have been thoroughly miserable if I’d brought him with me, because I was going to visit the Christmas markets in Nuremberg, and Tim is not exactly a big Christmas market fan!

We flew from Birmingham to Munich with Lufthansa, which would have been quite a pleasant experience were it not for the fact that Lufthansa have switched from hard cheese to soft cheese in their regulation cheese sandwich, and soft cheese is a rather revolting thing to try and eat at 7am in the morning. Especially when it’s a Saturday morning, because the best sort of Saturdays are those which don’t start until midday Read the rest of this entry »

Today I’ve hit the grand old age of 26 I suddenly feel rather old, though not as old as my mother was trying to make me feel earlier today when she got slightly confused and started telling me that I was now in my second half century!

It’s been a rather nice weekend. Yesterday was a quiet day – we did our housework in the morning (how terribly grown up!) and then in the afternoon Tim’s sister and her little boy came round to visit for a couple of hours. By 7pm it was exactly the sort of wet and windy November evening when one wants nothing more in life than to stay inside a warm and cosy house watching X Factor It was therefore exactly the sort of wet and windy November evening when one wants nothing less in life than to set out for that most godforsaken of hellholes more commonly known as Coventry. That was, however, precisely what we had resolved to do. Things in life which are worth braving Coventry for are few and far between, but they do exist; Ikea is the main one, but this weekend we had a different motivation in the form of a meeting with fellow Esperantist R, whose band were playing in one of the city centre clubs. Read the rest of this entry »

Alas, my poor blog has been somewhat neglected of late! It’s not been intentional, I just seem to have been rather busy for the past few months, and have got out of the habit of updating it.

The last posts I wrote were about the IJK in Liberec, and an awful lot of things have happened since then. We had a truly hideous time at the UK in Bialystok which I still intend to blog about at some point in the future because I still feel bitter about wasting a week of my holiday (and a not inconsiderable amount of money) going somewhere so ugly and pointless. Fortunately the pain of the experience is burned onto my brain so deeply that I suspect that this time next year, I will still be able to blog about it as if it were yesterday! Read the rest of this entry »

We had decided to leave at 09.30 to be on the safe side, knowing that we needed to catch a bus and a tram to get to the main coach station, but unfortunately when we stuck our heads outside the door we were greeted by a torrential downpour. We had no choice but to trudge through it to the bus stop, but as we stood there waiting it fortunately eased of slightly. The main problem was that the bus we were waiting for didn’t seem to arrive, and when we eventually figured out how the Saturday timetable worked, it emerged that there wasn’t going to be a bus until 10.25. I was worried that this wouldn’t give us enough time to catch our coach, so we reached the decision that we were going to walk into the town. Initially this went as well as walking a couple of kilometres pulling a suitcase can be expected to go, but no sooner had we arrived in the town centre when the storm broke again and we proceeded to get absolutely drenched.

And when I say drenched, I mean drenched! The rain was coming down in sheets and I was soon soaked to the underwear. We were all thoroughly miserable, but I couldn’t think of any solution to the problem other than us continuing to walk onwards for another 15 minutes, at which point we would hopefully find the coach. It was at this moment when Babel, who I assumed was not speaking to me because I had failed to organise this segment of the journey satisfactorily, piped up with the suggestion, “Why don’t we just take a taxi?!”. Read the rest of this entry »

Much to our relief, Sunday dawned an awful brighter than Saturday Breakfast was at the reasonably civilised hour of 8.30, and I have to say that the breakfasts in Liberec were on the whole really nice, much better than at the IJK in Szombathely last year. Every day we had two normal rolls, plus something else that was more sweet and cake-like, and then either ham or cheese or egg. Having consulted the programme the previous evening, we had noticed that there was an interesting excursion on Sunday morning called “Liberec from the air” and we decided to take part in it. Like so many Esperanto activities which sound like a good idea on paper, in reality it didn’t quite live up to expectations.

I hasten to add that this was not the fault of Liberec, but more the fault of the Esperantists we were with. We set off on a guided tour of the town centre, aiming for the Catholic church where we were meetin up with a group of people more committed than me who had got up early enough to go to Mass. But the people we were with walked sooooo slowly, it was unbelievable. And not only did they walk slowly, the guide stopped for a five minute break approximately every two minutes, talking at great and tedious length about things which weren’t interesting, cracking jokes which were painfully unfunny, and trying to pretend he spoke more languages than he evidently did Within only a few minutes, Babel and I were getting quite frustrated and from the start of the excursion we were at the front of the pack, eventually breaking off into a small group with a couple of others and reaching the town centre way ahead of everyone else. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is my third day back at work after one of the longest holidays I have ever been on. It’s not been a terribly good second day back at work, as I’ve been required to commute to London, and it feels very strange going back to accounting after over two weeks abroad!

Tim and I set off on our travels on Friday 17th July, and I finally returned home to Birmingham on Sunday afternoon, the 2nd August. The holiday got off to a less-than-smooth start for me, due to the fact that it was my sister’s graduation ceremony the day before we were due to leave. Now I don’t know what you’re like the day before you embark on a holiday, but I’m generally a bit frantic. I need to spend a couple of hours packing and repacking my case; desperately trying to fit everything in, making sure I haven’t forgotten anything, swapping things between my suitcase and my hand luggage… Then I like to spend an hour messing about with the tickets and making sure I haven’t accidentally mislaid any of them and that my complicated itinerary is imprinted on my brain. And then I like to wash my hair and have a last minute drive to answer all the email correspondence I’ve been putting off for weeks, but know I don’t want to come back home to.

Unfortunately none of this was possible this time around, which made me decidedly out of sorts. My sister graduated on the Thursday afternoon, and unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the actual ceremony because I was stuck at work desperately trying to finish my audit. I had, however, arranged to meet up with my family in the city centre afterwards and go for an evening meal. I envisaged meeting them at half six and being home again for eight, but just in case something went wrong, I decided to pack my case on Wednesday night instead.

It was just as well, because a complication with taking the departmental photograph meant that they didn’t arrive until quarter past eight. I was a litle fed up and stressed by this stage, having finished work at five. I was also a little bit wet, having had to walk from my office to Pizza Express in the pouring rain, on account of prematurely having packed my umbrella Nevertheless we had a very pleasant meal and it was all a lot of fun but it meant I didn’t get home until round about 11, having had no chance to sort out any of the things I wished to sort Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t already seen it, I was in my local paper last week

Here

There is also a very good article about Esperanto in The Times.

Here

I am currently in an internet cafe in Bialystok, Poland. Up until about an hour ago, I had not been having a very good day at all

Babel and I arrived here on Monday afternoon, following a long and unpleasant journey across most of Poland, utterly fed up and exhausted. We were fast asleep by 7pm on Monday, but yesterday felt better and decided to explore the town. With the help of some tourist brochures translated into Esperanto, we duly did so, a procedure which lasted approximately three hours. That is to say, within three hours we appeared to have seen every single sight which Bialystok possesses, and were thus rather at a loss for something else to do.

In the absence of any better ideas, we spent Tuesday afternoon getting drunk. Eight glasses of wine later it was time for bed, after a brief stop off at a nearby pizza place to grab an evening meal. We committed the grave mistake of sitting outside to eat with some friends… The result is that this morning I have woken up with in excess of twenty fly bites on my legs alone, with the upper half of my body being even worse off. I can’t count all the bites on my back because I can’t see them all, but I would hazard a guess that I must be the proud owner of about 50 bites in total. And yes, they itch like hell. All 50 of them, at the same time. It was pretty difficult to sleep last night Read the rest of this entry »