Today is the anniversary of the day I started going out with Babel. It’s the two year anniversary of that day, in fact, and so a proper anniversary we’re supposed to celebrate and not one like our 21 month anniversary which he can laugh at me for alluding to It was two years ago this afternoon, on our way home from an Esperanto weekend at Barlaston, that we formally got together, although to be fair, the more I think about it, the more I think we’d been in denial for quite some time about the idea that we might actually want to go out with each other. Last night I was searching for an email from someone else whose name begins with T, and accidentally ended up flicking through a few of the emails which I had sent to Babel back in the days where I allegedly didn’t like him at all. I was quite shocked by how outrageous some of the flirting was, and how he actually used to say such nice things to me He’s nowhere near as soppy now we’re actually a couple (more…)

I’ve just had a very nice weekend indeed. The actual week, and in particular the last two days of it, were utterly horrible. I’m currently working on my most hated client in Wantage, and this year is worse than all the awful years which have come before, by virtue of the fact that I am in charge, and not only have I been given too little people for too little time, the client’s financial accountant has moved on to pastures new and her replacement seems more interested in telling me about her son’s lesbian ex-wife than actually doing her job Nevertheless, I only went down on Thursday morning, so I shouldn’t technically have been that depressed and stressed by Friday evening. I actually wouldn’t have been, were it not for the fact that I proceeded to have one of the worst journeys of my entire life. (more…)

Yesterday was a highly momentous day in my existence. After in excess of no fewer than five months of trying and failing, I have *finally* got to the end of that monster of all books, The Tin Drum by Günter Grass. Or more precisely, I have just got to the end of the Esperanto translation, ‘La lada tambureto’, which I bought in Szombathely this summer. If I think back over my reading career to date, I am struggling to think of another book which I have disliked so intensely. I have read books which are boring, yes, but I haven’t found them to be simultaneously offensive. I have read books which are certainly offensive, but haven’t found them simultaneously boring. I have read books which revolved around some pretty unlikeable characters, but by and large even if a book essentially tells the story of a villain, the villain has some sort of redeeming feature, something which makes you think that after all he must be human and that perhaps he wouldn’t have gone down such a negative route in life if his mother hadn’t died when he was four, or some such. The main character in the Tin Drum is called Oscar, and I don’t believe he has any redeeming qualities at all. I actually only read to the end because I was hoping he might die a slow and painful death. He didn’t (more…)

Yesterday was a rather lovely day. Babel unexpectedly turned out not to have a shift at work, so came to collect me for lunch. We bravely headed into Birmingham city centre, which was a million times quieter than last time we visited it during the run up to Christmas, and we spent a pleasant hour or so looking around bookshops. My mother had given us some vouchers, and so we made a valiant effort to eat at Pizza Express, but both the outlet in the Bull Ring and the one in Brindley Place had queues pretty much coming out the door, and so we elected to have lunch at our old favourite Walkabout instead. We were very grown up actually, and shared a bottle of wine with lasagne

In walking to Brindley Place, it had caught my attention that the Odeon was showing the film ‘The Reader’. I desperately wanted to see the film, but the timetable at the Odeon was rubbish so I googled it and found that the cinema at the far end of Broad Street had a showing at 5.25. Babel agreed to come along with me and watch, and we just had time to stroll back towards the shops and grab a coffee before the film started. (more…)

Friday dawned, and with it the final day of the IS The unfortunate thing about these Esperanto events appears to be that as soon as I begin to relax into them, they appear to be over! What I did on Friday morning eludes me, but I had a rather exciting afternoon in Marburg together with a Brazilian guy now working as a doctor in the USA, and a girl from Kazakhstan who is studying in Moscow. It was a strange combination, but they were both really lovely people and it was fun not to have to go on my own. I’ve wanted to visit Marburg for ages, by virtue of the fact that so many people have told me what a lovely town it is, so it would have seemed a crying shame to be staying so close to it in Biedenkopf and yet not get chance to see it. Babel, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on and thus couldn’t explain to the others on the umpteen occasions they expressed regret that he hadn’t been able to make it, had seemingly no interest in sightseeing, but I wasn’t really too fussed; sometimes I rather like having the independence of being on my own, and I was secure in the knowledge that my German should be good enough to cope with any situations I encountered. Ultimately, however, it was nice to have company Especially when it got dark and the area around the station looked a little bit dodgy! (more…)

Tuesday was a quiet sort of day. After Babel disappeared off to teach his lesson, I decided not to attend the progresanta kurso (much as I had enjoyed it the day before) because I wanted to wash my hair and, more importantly, call my mother because it was her birthday. Phoning home was rather expensive, although I think it was worth it because she hadn’t expected it so it gave her a nice surprise. Washing my hair went relatively smoothly, although it took me a while to figure out the complexities of the shower, and as I hadn’t thought to pack a hairdryer with me, it was a rather damp Radio which eventually emerged at dinner time (more…)

As part of my flirtation with cpanel yesterday, I created a new folder called 2009 in which to house this year’s photos. Now I’m not entirely sold on all this cpanel business – it seems like rather a pfaff – so when I wanted to upload a photo of myself right now, I decided to be lazy and use the wordpress uploading button instead.

I selected the photo I wanted to use and clicked okay. My computer tried very hard to upload it, it really did, but in the end it failed and spat out an error message at me, saying that the server was unable to write to the parent directory

Initially I found this error message confusing and distressing. And then, suddenly in a flash, it came to me! When I’d created the folder, I’d not thought to change the default permissions from 755 to 777. I don’t know how I can have been so silly…

Uncharacteristically for me, I didn’t write any kind of diary or even take notes during the IS, and so for that reason I’m struggling to remember what happened on which day. I might have to abandon the chronological approach and go for just talking about what I can remember instead

Monday is a little hazy for a start. I *think* that this was the day I decided to attend the progresanta kurso which was being organised by Robert and taking place in the trinkejo. I didn’t attend all of the subsequent sessions but I was glad that I went to the initial one at least, because for the first time in the IS so far I began to regain a tiny bit of confidence. There wasn’t a specific structure to the lesson but we all went round and introduced ourselves, then discussed some grammatical queries. At the end we played a very silly game where each person had to say one sentence of a story in turn, kind of like Jackanory. The end result was utterly ridiculous but it was a good way of breaking the ice, and afterwards over dinner I was able to make conversation with a couple of people I’d never spoken to before. I would normally *never* independently choose to speak to a person I didn’t know, so I felt this was progress indeed (more…)

I interrupt these memories of the IS to bring you my definitive list of Esperanto acronyms which I wrote when I got a little bored in Oswestry this evening, and now feel rather proud of (more…)

Babel had some last minute lecture preparation to do the next morning, so rather than sitting around and moping I decided to go out and explore the town. By 10am I had already finished breakfast and was strolling along a small road which I later ascertained to be the main street of the town. Having now spent a week there, I would have been more inclined to call Biedenkopf a village, but I have been reliably informed by two Germans that it has more than 10,000 inhabitants, thus fulfilling the legal requirements to be able to call itself a town

In any case, it’s a pretty little place, albeit rather sleepy. That first Sunday morning I hardly saw another living creature as I wandered up and down the backstreets. Admittedly Sundays are generally quite sleepy in Germany with all the shops being closed, but even so… Almost the first building which I came across when I left the youth hostel and crossed the train line was the catholic church, and there was a big sign outside proclaiming that Mass would take place at 11. Now normally I would have no interest in attending Mass, rather the reverse in fact, but in this instance it struck me as a good idea; it would keep me busy for an hour, and it would also be somewhere nice and warm to sit, because it was becoming bitterly cold outside. (more…)