Today was our annual departmental “Away Day”. We have one of these experiences, which are supposed to foster team building, approximately once every six months. Last year we went to Wolverhampton Race Course, which on reflection was terribly civilised good fun. This year, HR were obviously feeling meaner, and had arranged for us to take part in a version of the “It’s A Knockout” competition, as formerly shown on tv in a decade before most of us were born (more…)

My Mom remarked with surprise tonight that I appear to be developing a social life! I think she was slightly bitter because my Dad has been out and about quite a bit recently too, whilst she’s been stuck at home. I haven’t been up to anything terribly exciting, but I have just been out for dinner two evenings in a row, which is fairly unusual. My boyfriend came to Birmingham this afternoon so we had lunch together, then I popped back to work for a few hours whilst he went to the library and we met up again at the end of the day. He was in such a good mood that I even managed to convince him to come to Pizza Express with me, which was rather cool (more…)

Tonight I went out for a sort of reunion with some of the people I work with. It may seem a bit strange to have a reunion with people who still work in the same office as you, but the nature of our job is that we spend precious little time in our office at all, and therefore see each other rather infrequently. There were seven of us who started together three years ago this coming September as accountancy trainees. Two have bitten the dust along the way; one girl disappearing in mysterious circumstances, and another guy being sacked for total incompetence. The five of us who remain have seen each other less and less often as time has gone by, and seeing as we’re now all on the verge of qualifying and becoming fully fledged ACAs, now seemed like a good time to get together and catch up on our future plans. (more…)

Last night I went to the Crescent Theatre to watch two plays out of their series called Fourplay. I like the Crescent, and have been there to see scores of plays over the years. Some of them have been incredibly good, some of them have been incredibly bad, but because it’s amateur theatre it’s cheaper than anywhere else in Birmingham, and that means you can take a bit more of a risk with what you go to see. I wouldn’t pay £30 for a night at the Rep unless I knew I was really going to like it. Fourplay, if you haven’t heard of it, is not as rude as it sounds, but an opportunity for four new directors to present four short, one-act plays. You can go to see the plays in groups of twos, and so it was that last night I dragged my boyfriend along to the theare to see The Lesson and The Bald Prima Donna, both plays by Eugene Ionesco. (more…)

I noticed this morning that it was July. I know, I’m a little slow But to be fair, the weather is so changeable that one might be forgiven for believing it was autumn. There are two implications of the fact that it is July. Number one, I need to turn over the pages on my wall calendar so that it no longer gives random visitors to my room the impression that it is still May. Number two, that it is now six months since January and therefore perhaps time to take stock of where I am up to with my new year resolutions. I know it is six months, because I counted it on my fingers (more…)

Bad geography!

I just went to the bank to try and sort out some holiday currency. I was aware it was a slightly complicated order, because I needed a large amount of Euros as well as some smaller amounts of Hungarian Forints and Slovak Koruna. I didn’t, however, think that such a proposition should be beyond the capability of Lloyds TSB.

The girl working at the counter would benefit from a few lessons in Geography. Fair enough, I don’t expect her to know the currency of Hungary, but after I’ve told her that it’s forints, I don’t expect to be contradicted and told that actually it’s Euros. Erm, no. It isn’t. Really. (more…)

Yet again I was bored on a train, and because I seemingly never learn from my mistakes, I decided to embark on another Esperanto ebook. There were plenty of translations of English-language works I already knew well which I could have chosen, but I decided to be brave and opt for something which I’d never heard of. That something turned out to be “Nuntempaj Rakontoj”, a collection of short stories by a Bulgarian author called GP Stamatov. Happily, the collection starts with an explanatory note, informing readers is a famous Bulgarian author who specialises in stories with a satirical twist, and that these tales have been translated from the Bulgarian by Ivan Krestanoff. So, this time there is no room for confusion as to nationality (more…)

I hardly dare to review another Esperanto language book on my website, but this evening I finally got to the end of a novel I have unsuccessfully been trying to read for three months: “La dua invado de marsanoj” by Arkadij and Boris Strugackij. When I was going on holiday to Geneva in April, I asked my boyfriend if he had anything in Esperanto he could pack for me to read on the plane, and this was what he produced from his limited collection. I had high hopes for it at the beginning, because in my younger days I used to be rather a fan of sci-fi, but over the course of five days I managed to struggle through at best forty pages of it before giving it up as unreadable It languished on the desk in my bedroom for several months before this Sunday I felt bored and decided to pick it up once again. I don’t like a book to beat me, and this time I was determined to get to the end of it (more…)