I haven’t bitten the bullet and started my annual appraisal yet, but I have just been writing a couple of individual job appraisals. In particular, I have written a rather lengthy one for the two clients I audited in London in April. I have been talking to one of my friends today about life, the universe and why it’s all making me so terribly unhappy, and I’ve reached the conclusion that if I get nothing but negative comments for those particular audits, then I am going to quit my job. (more…)

And so this evening I find myself sitting in a freezing cold room at The Manor again. My mood has not much improved as the day has progressed and I am not impressed to be spending my Sunday evening here I just text one of my friends who has a car and thus doesn’t need to travel down until tomorrow morning, and we have made a pact together not to do the pre-course work. It only just actually occurred to me that there might be pre-course work, since no one had emailed me to request I do it. I dutifully logged into the relevant part of our intranet and downloaded it, but once I’d read a fraction of it, I decided I wasn’t going to do it. It is far too late and too cold to be calculating overhead absorption rates. Having a Maths degree, I am not very good at sums at the best of times anyway So yeah, I text my friend to ask if she had done the pre-course work and was suitably encouraged when she replied, “No, what’s the course actually on?” (more…)

I was feeling very depressed yesterday, so I decided to go to Malvern. The real reasons for feeling depressed were manifold, but the catalyst for deciding to do something so random was the fact that I couldn’t get to Leicester to have lunch with my boyfriend. Three months on, Cross Country trains persist in running rail replacement buses every weekend and are stubbornly ignoring my letter of complaint. Since my boyfriend had to be at work by quarter past two, and the journey from my house to Leicester essentially takes the best part of three hours when factoring in a bus via Coleshill, I would have to have got up at seven to have arrived at eleven and have three hours with him. Incredibly nice as my boyfriend is, it didn’t seem worth it. In fact, after the exhausting week I’ve had, I couldn’t have faced getting up that early for anyone (more…)

…is now due to Babel who has done something amazing with my website If you look at the sidebar you will see that it is displaying one out of a collection of several utterly adorable pictures of ducks. I’ve no idea how he did it, but by some piece of magic there will now be a random duck displayed every time I click on the homepage, which is rather exciting. I would say he was the best boyfriend ever, were it not for the fact that he persists in cultivating a ridiculous moustache

Today I found something which I had given up hope of ever finding I went to Warwick University today to attend an internal careers fair organised by my employer. I am far too exhausted now to blog about what a pointless waste of time this was and how much I hate corporate identity, though I would like to quickly draw attention to the total delusion under which the main speaker was suffering when she began to talk at length about how working for our firm gave us all an opportunity to make a real difference to the world. Hello?! Accountants don’t make a difference to the world. People who want to make a difference become nurses or teachers or firemen. They don’t become accountants, really. People who do become accountants do so, generally speaking, because they want to earn a lot of money and all their applications to investment banks were rejected. (more…)

…to Gavan for mending my website so that it finally displays properly in Internet Explorer My duck is especially pleased that his feet now connect to his body! Thank you also to Babel, obviously, for designing it in the first place

I’ve just spent a rather exciting weekend in Southport, attending the annual British Congress of Esperanto. I don’t want to write about it too much here, because I have to write a couple of articles about it and am in danger of getting bored before I begin, but it was very fun indeed

It started rather frantically on Friday evening with a mad dash to get out of work and onto the correct train. I actually failed miserably in that respect, despite having printed my itinerary off National Rail several days previously. I had indeed memorised the said itinerary and had no doubts at all in my mind that I needed to catch the 18.03 to Edinburgh, getting off in Wigan and continuing from there to Southport. Arriving at the station, I looked at the departure board and quickly established that the 18.03 to Edinburgh was departing from platform 8a. Cool. I text my boyfriend, who was meeting me from Leicester, and told him to meet me there. Progressing to the platform myself, I idly started reading the sign above my head which listed the intermediate stops on the journey, and was slightly confused by the fact that Wigan North Western was not given as one of them. Perplexed, I took my timetables out of my bag and confirmed that I was indeed supposed to travelling on the 18.03 to Edinburgh. Hmmm. How odd. (more…)

In a peculiar twist of fate, I met my ex on the bus this morning. I have only met him on the bus about three times in the last two years, so it was rather a surprise, especially considering he’d text me for the first time in six months yesterday. I feel like I ought to lie and say it was nice to see him, but it wasn’t particularly, it was just a little awkward. I didn’t have a lot to say to him and he never has a lot to say to anyone, so there were a few silences while I searched desperately for a conversational theme which didn’t make reference to my new boyfriend. (more…)

People who cannot spell my name!

I can just about accept that if I tell someone my name is Clare on the phone without spelling it, they may subsequently write me an email in which they call me Claire.

I cannot, however, in any way accept that if I email someone and spell my name C-L-A-R-E there is any excuse for them to click reply to that email and commence “Dear Claire”. It’s so incredibly rude to get someone’s name wrong. Especially when you’ve been working with them for over two years and ought to know better…

On the occasions when I allow myself to think about it, I find it frightening just how much of life depends on sheer coincidence. Even during my most religious moments I have never believed in predestination, but I can appreciate that in a way it must be rather a nice sort of belief to have. I can see the attraction of believing that everything in the world is following the well-ordered plan of a higher being and thus that ultimately, everything will turn out to be okay. The alternative, that we are blindly fumbling our way through a random chaos where a split second can change the direction of our lives forever, is rather more frightening. (more…)