…is the foulest substance known to man. Having just gotten to the end of my third 330ml carton of the day, I feel qualified to make this judgement. I have been trying to drink it because I believe it to be good for me but it is absolutely thoroughly disgusting and so far the only effect it has had is to make me feel vaguely nauseous Indeed, it has just occurred to me to wonder whether there is an upper bound on the amount of cranberry juice a person is recommended to consume within a 24 hour period and whether I am in danger of surpassing it. I should perhaps have googled “cranberry juice side effects” before I started drinking it, but don’t dare to now because whatever they are I am sure I will be able to convince myself I am suffering from them. (more…)

Thursday was the day I had really been looking forward to all week. All the weather forecasts I had seen predicted it would be the best day of our short stay in Geneva, and my plan was to use it to visit Mount Salève, the mountain immediately above Geneva.

April is pretty much the worst time you could choose to go to Switzerland, by virtue of everything exciting being closed. With the exception of very high altitude resorts such as Zermatt, the skiing season is essentially over and the hiking season can not begin in earnest until June when the majority of the slush will have melted. April is just about the most dangerous time you could go up a mountain; the melting snow is ripe for avalanches and there is still enough of it left in terms of volume to cause some nasty damage. Avalanches are quite cool to watch from a distance but I have no desire to be in the close vicinity of one, and so it was that the region’s more exciting day trips (an excursion to Mont Blanc, for example) had to be ruled out (more…)

I’ll confess up front that going to Bern was a bit of an unnecessary extravagence. I forget now exactly how much the return fare for two people turned out to be, but I know I did a double take when the machine asked me for the required number of francs and wondered hopefully if I might possibly have pressed something wrong. I hadn’t, but my desire to escape French speaking Switzerland to a part of the country where they use a proper language was great enough for me to pay for the tickets regardless (more…)

The resolution to go to France got off to a slow start the next morning on the grounds that we didn’t know where we wanted to go. I recently did a translation exercise in an Esperanto course book where the passage described a Polish railway worker trying to sell a ticket to a man who neither knew nor cared where he was going, and our situation reminded me somewhat of that as we wandered vaguely around Geneva’s bus station looking for a vehicle which might be about to depart for France. No such vehicles appeared to be in existence and so my boyfriend approached a pair of drivers who seemed reluctant to recommend a destination, but mentioned that a bus to Annecy was departing in a little over an hour. Knowing next to nothing about the place, this was enough inspiration for us to shell out considerable quantities of francs for a ticket, and feeling excited in a reckless sort of way, we set off to kill another hour in Geneva. (more…)

I woke up with sore legs this morning which is a sure sign I must have had a good week I have indeed had a superb week in Geneva with my boyfriend and hardly know where to start with describing it. I am lacking the motivation to blog, in fact, because I would much rather lie here feeling lazy and happy than stir myself to do something useful.

Hmmm. Well, it all started on Monday morning at the regrettably early hour of half five. I didn’t wish my parents to know I was going on holiday with my boyfriend, a fact of which they would deeply disapprove, and so I had led them to believe that I was working in London again. That had a few unfortunate implications, the first being that despite not needing to be at the airport until nearly ten, I still had to leave the house at the time at which I would have done were I actually going to London (more…)

Thursday, 1st May will be the third annual Blogging Against Disablism Day.

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As a rule I find sport very difficult to understand, a fact which upsets me slightly if I dwell on it too deeply. It seems that any brain dead moron can understand the offside rule, and yet I can spend an entire football match trying to work out which team is England Wrestling, I think, is easier to understand than most sports because you don’t have to worry about goals or who’s supposed to be shooting in which direction, but it still appears to have some subtleties which are a bit beyond me (more…)

As me and two suitcases collapsed onto a train out of Marylebone yesterday evening, I was unable to stop myself exclaiming out loud; “Today has been an absolute bloody disaster!”

The man whom I had just sat down next to gave me a funny look. “There’s always tomorrow,” he said. I was unsure whether he meant that in a consolatory way or not. (more…)

I have never been hungover before, but I have discovered today that it isn’t a pleasant experience

I swear I didn’t drink that much last night! Really, I didn’t. I had three glasses of wine I remember drinking, plus a fourth glass I remember not drinking most of and that was all. I do remember feeling rather drunk at the time but I was still able to walk in a reasonablely straight line… I think…

I don’t know, but this morning I woke up and felt terrible! Really, really terrible I was sick before I went to work (I’ve never been made sick by alcohol before, even though I’m sure I’ve drunk more than that!) but I wasn’t too concerned because I thought being sick would probably make me feel better and less hungover. Hmmm. That transpired not to be true. (more…)

I have not been wilfully neglecting my blog recently, I have just been exceptionally busy. I know that sounds a bit lame, but I really have been It all started the Friday before last when I had the first of far too many recent five thirty starts to my day, in order to attend a course about Solicitors’ Accounts Rules at the London headquarters of my firm. A pleasant day, spent gazing out of a massive plate glass window in an eighth floor meeting room with a wondrous view across the city. Around lunch time the clouds cleared and I realised I could see the Gherkin, which was pretty cool We had a rather posh buffet with cute little burgers on sticks and the whole experience was marred only by the extreme lack of aptitude of the main presenter for public speaking and the fact that my friend Mark dropped part of his banana down a radiator vent (more…)