Babel and I just had a delightful weekend at Esperanto House in Barlaston I’d been looking forward to the break away for ages, but by the time Friday afternoon came I was so incredibly stressed because of work that I just felt sort of sick and shaky and could hardly enjoy the delicious burger king Babel treated me to. Once we were in the Moosemobile and had managed to negotiate ourselves into the correct lane for going north on the M6, I managed to relax a bit, however, and a good dose of minstrel music always helps to make the world seem like a brighter place

In what would have been an astounding break with tradition, we nearly succeeded in getting to Barlaston on time, but were thwarted at the last minute by the effects of some heavy traffic combined with the road we intended to take towards the village being closed. We made it in the end though and after a bit of running around managed to locate our group, although trying to locate our room and the night porter took a bit longer. We had quite a nice room actually, with a double bed rather than two singles, and it was warm enough to be comfortable without being as stiflingly hot as the rest of the college.

Perhaps I had better explain that the aim of the weekend was to participate in a discussion group, talking about various (scarily!) intellectual themes in Esperanto. There were around ten people taking part in total, which was a nice number, and we got off to an interesting start on Friday evening with citizenship. I was kind of tired and my mind wasn’t really in an Esperanto-speaking sort of zone, but it was nice to listen to the opinions of those people who were able to speak fluently and throughout the course of the weekend I learnt quite a lot.

Having popped back to our room to unpack our stuff, Babel and I headed off to the pub after the end of the session in the hope of meeting up with everybody else. After a painfully long wait outside a level crossing, however, we found to our surprise that whilst the pub was literally full to bursting, there wasn’t an Esperantist in sight We managed to get a drink and somewhat illegally sat down in the darkened restaurant area due to the lack of any other available space, but whilst it was nice to have a drink it was hardly the most relaxing experience in the world because we were sitting only a few feet away from what appeared to be a one-man karaoke show Babel didn’t seem too concerned by it, but I found the persistant obscure hits from the 60s somewhat wearing, and in the end we had an early night.

Breakfast was at half eight the next morning, which for me is a horrendously early hour to be up on a Saturday, but Babel seems utterly incapable of having a lie in anyway, so we’d both been half awake for some time before that. The food at Barlaston isn’t exactly to my taste, but I have to say that the breakfasts are totally amazing, and my aim is generally to eat as much as I possibly can for that meal in case there is nothing I can face during any of the others

The discussion themes for Saturday were very varied. We started by discussing the title “Culture is Ordinary”, an essay written by Raymond Williams in the 1950s, and moved on to the global financial crisis. In the afternoon we tackled the Mona Lisa, as well as the more general theme of appreciating art and wine. The Mona Lisa was probably the most stressful session, because we were each given a passage from a book to translate into Esperanto during the break between lunch and the afternoon session. I had a stab at the first half of mine, but the sentences were so torturous that I was soon completely stuck, and it was lucky that Babel was there to finish it off for me. His Esperanto is so good that I could hardly write it down as fast as he was translating

Whilst art doesn’t interest me at all and I don’t find the Mona Lisa particularly attractive, I did actually learn a lot in that session about the history of the painting, how it had once been stolen and so forth. I wouldn’t go so far as to read a book on it, but it was more interesting than I expected

After the art appreciation session there was a chance to actually taste some wines, but despite the fact that I am now becoming quite partial to wine, I didn’t like any of the ones I tried at all I don’t know enough about wine to even be able to tell if it’s dry or fruity or whatever, but the expensive red wine which was apparently supposed to be good just tasted horrible to me, and served to confirm that I don’t have expensive tastes

Unfortunately by the time the wine tasting was over, it was too late for everybody to go to the pub and so we didn’t get chance to talk to any of the new people more informally. Tim and I went to the pub very briefly on our own because I was craving a glass of cheap wine to help me sleep, but that was all. The clocks went back on Saturday night which would ordinarily have given me an extra specially long lie in, but I swear that we must have been awake by seven again on Sunday morning and then had two hours to kill before breakfast. That dragged somewhat, but the rest of Sunday seemed to speed by, and all too soon it was lunch time and the course was over. I wasn’t in a desperate rush to get home, so Babel and I decided to stick around for a bit and actually had a delightful afternoon together Despite how much it had been raining in the night, it was now a beautiful sunny day, and having felt rather cooped up sitting in the same room all weekend, we decided to go for a little stroll around Barlaston. We wandered around for about an hour and I was utterly amazed that somewhere so beautiful and tranquil could be located so close to the horror that is Stoke on Trent Sufficiently exercised, we went back inside for a bit and I sat and watched while Tim edited some of the articles for the Language Show edition of Saluton.

I don’t know: maybe it doesn’t sound like the most exciting weekend in the world now I’m trying to put it on paper, but I really enjoyed it. The Esperanto aspect obviously, but also just getting to spend some time with Babel. We managed not to fall out, despite the fact that at various times I was both overly sensitive and rather bad at giving directions, and for me the only thing which could have made the weekend more enjoyable would have been if we could have gone back home together

Tags: Esperanto

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Esperanto. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.