Catch-up…
I apologise for the distinct lack of blogging over the course of the past week, and resolve to do better going forward 
After my rather wonderful birthday, I proceeded to have a rather miserable week in which I succumbed to a slight cold and had to get up at the godforsaken hour of five in the morning to commute to London. I was booked to a small audit in London, of a computer software business my firm had never dealt with before, and so there was some uncertainty over how long the job was going to take. For this reason the manager decided it was going to be too risky for me to book hotel accommodation, which I then might have to cancel at a later date and incur charges for, and thus I merrily agreed to commute. Commuting to London is something which sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea on paper, but when it gets to 5am, it’s cold and dark outside and your breathing resembles that of Darth Vader, it’s the sort of thing you wish you hadn’t volunteered for 
And God, was it dark?! I was aiming to leave home as close to six as I could, due to the buses into the city centre being infrequent and unreliable at that time of the morning. I naively hadn’t appreciated that at such an hour on a December morning it was going to be pitch black, so when I stepped outside the door on Monday morning I got quite a nasty shock. I am not anywhere near as scared of the dark as I used to be. I can remember when I was twelve and started secondary school, literally running the five minutes between the bus stop and my house practically in tears because I was so frightened to be outside in it on my own. The dark of the evenings doesn’t bother me so much now, I walk home in it every evening and it rarely registers with me. But the dark of the early morning is another thing altogether. The dark of the early morning is quieter and lonelier. I think it’s actually the loneliness of it which gets to me more than the darkness, because once I get to the street lamps and occasional passing car on the main road, I feel safe and stop panicking. But on my road, which is lit very inadequately and has little passing traffic, I freely admit that I am terrified. I couldn’t leave the drive each day without looking backwards to check no one was going to be following me. With this established, I would set off at a reasonable pace, telling myself in my head that this was all perfectly fine and nothing to worry about at all. But strangely, it seems the closer I get to the relative sanctuary of the high street, the more I begin to fear that something is going to stop me reaching it, and so it was that after two or three minutes of measured walking I would find myself jogging the last few hundred metres. Which was interesting, carrying a heavy rucksack along a pavement covered in ice. I only fell over once
Once I got safely to New Street station, the main excitement of the day would begin, with the Battle to Get a Seat on the Train. The rules of engagement are as follows. One must get to the platform long before the train is due to arrive, and stand there nonchalently as if one is not expecting a train at all and has merely come out at this time of the morning for the air. You should take care never to stand on the part of the platform where you actually wish to board the train. When it arrives, and a door stops perfectly level with you, it is necessary to ignore this, sprint several carriages up the station, and push in in front of someone else because you always like to sit in carriage C, not carriage F. The best way to board the train is with your elbows jutting out and balancing a cup of coffee. Extra points are awarded if you can manage to do this whilst conducting a conversation on your mobile phone. Once you are on the train you have several options. You can walk up and down the train in the opposite direction to everybody else, trying to find an imaginary seat reservation you’re sure you asked your secretary to make. You can get on and block the entire gangway with your briefcase whilst you remove your pinstripe jacket in a leisurely fashion and fold it into the overhead locker. It is imperative that at no point do you speak or acknowledge the existance of another human being, especially if you tread on them…
To be fair, the trains to London Euston are very nice. Although they would want to be, for 123 quid a ticket. And I wasn’t impressed on Tuesday to have paid that amount of money only to have my train cancelled and have to board the next one, which would not in itself have been a dreadful problem were it not for the other 300 people who were doing the same thing. The result was that I stood all the way to the Big Smoke, and it was one of the longest hour and forty five minutes of my life
The offices where I was working were in the vicinity of Moorgate tube station, which was rather convenient because it’s on the Northern line from Euston. I was quite impressed, because I managed to work out which of the four northern line platforms I needed to be standing at, then managed not only to board the train in the correct direction, but also to get off at the stop I was intending to. For someone with a sense of direction like mine, that is indeed an achievement 
I successfully located my junior at Moorgate on Monday morning and we found our way to the client. I shan’t even attempt to talk about the junior here, because if I did I would get incredibly wound up and never stop. I rarely end up working with people I utterly loathe, but I think he might just be the exception to my rule. Suffice it to say, once we’d got our computers out his first thought was not to go figure out where the kitchen was so we could get a coffee, but to ask me how “we” were going to decide who did what work and, when I allocated some work to him (me being the one who’s incharge and qualified and all), he queried whether I thought that was a good use of his time. Grrr!
All in all he was quite a weird guy, but believe me, if you stood him next to the client accountant, there was no contest. I can honestly say, I have never encountered such an inherently weird client in my entire life. His own boss, who is happily located a long way away from him in Australia, described him as “subhuman” – that’s how weird he is 
He was the sort of person who can’t look you in the eye when you’re talking, who can’t even utter a coherent sentence, and especially not one which bears any relation to what you just said. I would say that this could all be explained by the fact that he uses Linux, but I do actually know some people who use Linux and still manage to conduct conversations which don’t revolve around the evils of the Microsoft empire
The audit was happily rather easy, and although I got very grumpy travelling home every night through lack of food, I managed to get enough work done on site between Monday and Wednesday to justify working from the office in Birmingham on Thursday and Friday, and so I was reasonably happy
This Saturday was the day my sister and I had bookmarked for doing our entire Christmas shopping, and I looked forward to it with something akin to extreme trepidation, because I had no idea what sort of presents we were going to get for most people. In an attempt to miss the worst of the hellish Christmas crowds in the Bull Ring, we got to town just after nine and so had a couple of hours to walk around the shops in a confused and bewildered state before things really hotted up. It all seemed to take a terribly long time, but ultimately we were quite successful in our purchases. We bought my Dad a rather snazzy pair of cufflinks from Marks and Spencers, which was doubly good because I had some vouchers left so we saved £20 We needed to get two presents for my Mom because her birthday is over Christmas as well, which promised to be a little stressful, but in the end we did quite well, buying her something lacy from the German market for Christmas, and a beautiful Royal Albert mug for her birthday. We split up for a brief hour as well, which just gave me time to get a present for my sister as well, and of course at long last I managed to get something for Babel. I confess I had been a little stumped for ideas, having used up all my imagination for his birthday present, but literally on the bus that morning I had an idea for something he needed, and my sister helped me choose what will hopefully be something good
No shopping trip would of course be complete without a fair amount of eating and drinking. We started off with a frappe latte at a delightful branch of Caffe Nero which I have only just discovered in the city centre. Later in the afternoon we braved the vicious crowds at the German market, and managed to buy a rather delicious sausage in a roll over at the unfashionable side We had wanted to buy a cup of flavoured coffee to round it all off, but after a bit of confusion with the man on the stall, it transpired that he was only serving Irish Cream or Jamaica Rum, neither of which flavours we fancied, so we ended up with a take-away cup from Costa instead. After that we headed home pretty swiftly, having had just about enough of being bashed around in a sea of angry shoppers.
Sunday was a more relaxing day I finally got the lie in which I’d been dreaming about all week, and then in the afternoon Babel came over to pick me up and we went to our favourite Harvester for a spot of lunch. Being a little devoid of ideas for how to spend the afternoon, we figured we might pop into Redditch and watch a film at the cinema. I was absolutely positive there was a cinema in Redditch, and once we had negotiated our way round the ringroad a couple of times we discovered that indeed there was, but much to our disappointment, the only thing it appeared to be showing before 6pm was Madagascar 2. It didn’t look like my cup of tea, and we hadn’t seen Madagascar 1 anyway, so in the end we just had a little bit of a look around the shops and a leisurely coffee in Costa.
Mi ne volis reveni hejmen antaux la sesa, cxar mi ne volis cxeesti meson. Mi trinkis glason da rugxa vino kun mia tagmangxo, kaj estas granda peko cxeesti meson kiam oni estas ebria Babel tre afable konsentis veturigi min sencele dum preskaux horo, kaj kiam ni alproksimigxis al mia domo, li havis tre bonan ideon Do, ni atendis gxis miaj gepatroj forlasis la domon, tiam eniris kaj faris ion, kion oni vere ne faru en la domo de siaj gepatroj, aparte kiam ili estas en pregxejo. Estis tamen tre gxuinda sperto…
That was definitely the highlight of my weekend It was lovely to see Babel, and cheered me up as usual. The next few weeks until Christmas look set to be rubbish in terms of work – today is making me thoroughly miserable – but at least I have a nice memory of yesterday to hang onto 
Tags: christmas shopping, London, redditch, Work