I have just returned from a really lovely weekend at the British Esperanto Congress in Salisbury. This was only the second BK which I have attended, and I was a little apprehensive, both about some of the things I had volunteered to help out with during the weekend, and the fact that it was our first camping tent in Babel’s new tent. My anxieties about whether or not camping in Britain in April would prove to be a good idea were not helped by the horrible rainy weather which preceded the weekend, but luckily I was so busy with work that I didn’t have too much free time to dwell on it.

By a stroke of bad luck, I was working in London on Friday but needed to come back to Birmingham to take some files back to the office. The result was that Babel and I entirely missed the Friday of the congress. He drove down from Leicester to collect me on Friday evening, but it was gone 9pm by the time we left my house, and we had agreed in advance that we weren’t going to go all the way, so I had prebooked a hotel for us. Not just any hotel. Oh no, there was no expense spared on this weekend, and so I had reserved a room at the Travelodge Newbury Chieveley

If you enter the words “Travelodge Newbury Chieveley” into Google, the first result you will get is a Google map, puporting to illustrate where it is. Whilst I am sure the Travelodge website has adequate directions for how to reach all of its properties, when I was pdf-ing maps and directions for Babel to print, I was trying to organise several routes at the same time, and I decided to opt for Google directions as being the easiest option. I was in rather a rush when I did it, so I didn’t fiddle around zooming in and out to get the best possible picture of our destination, I just typed in the names of our destinations and placed blind faith in the power of Google. This proved to be a mistake

I could just tell you this story, and indeed I will, but to illustrate it more perfectly click here and see an illustration of how a bug in Google Maps means the website is capable of directing from the Travelodge Newbury Chieveley to the Travelodge Newbury Chieveley which thanks to some sort of hole in the space-time continuum is seemingly located in two different places at the same time, over 3 miles apart.

Now this might just sound like a minor annoyance, but it was in fact a major inconvenience. It was gone 11pm at night and very dark. I was pretty tired after having had a hard week at work in London and also pretty stressed by my attempts to read maps under the cover of darkness. Babel was also exhausted, having had to drive to Newbury from Leicester via Birmingham and probably equally stressed by having to listen to my directions. It was starting to rain, the windscreen was kind of smeary so we couldn’t really see where we were going, and a rather spooky sort of mist started to fall. Following Google’s directions, we left the nice safe A road we had been happily travelling down and turned off onto a narrow country lane. We progressed down a series of unlit lanes, each seeming more dangerous than the last, until eventually we got to one which had flooded and we were forced to drive through some pretty massive puddles. At this point it was tempting to turn back, as being honest this really didn’t look like the sort of area where anyone with any sort of commercial sense would locate a Travelodge, but I hadn’t had the foresight to print off an adequate map and so we didn’t really feel we had any option but to continue. I don’t really know how Babel felt, but personally I still had a blind and desperate hope that Google was actually going to win through and get us to our destination.

Eventually we hit Marlsdon Road, the final road on our instructions, and obediently progressed 0.6miles along it as instructed. There was no sign of a Travelodge so we progressed a bit further and a bit further and a bit further, until finally we were forced to come to terms with the fact that there was no Travelodge and perhaps we were going to have to spend the night sitting on a lane in deepest Berkshire.

I made a feeble attempt to ring Travelodge, but the only person working at that time of night had less idea than I did where Marlsdon Road was, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that Babel took the phone off me and tried a different tack, I’d probably still be sitting there now Happily Babel managed to establish that the thing to do was to get to the M4, so we drove all the way back the treacherous way we had come, and eventually arrived at the bright shiny lights of the hotel all in one piece, just the best part of an hour later than we intended. I was a bit of a gibbering wreck, expecting to be blamed by Babel for the entire fiasco on account of it being me who had printed off the directions, so there was rather a funny incident when I exclaimed “Thank God!” in response to us finally having arrived, and then immediately apologised for it when Babel started to correct me. I thought I was about to get a lecture on superstition, but it turned out he was actually on the verge of say that it was down to me, not God, because I’d spotted the sign which said Services

By happy coincidence Babel had some alcohol in the car , so we sat and drank it for a bit in order to destress. It must have been about one by the time we went to sleep and the alarm was set for seven, because Saturday was a very busy day indeed. After the rather insubstantial breakfast which Travelodge left outside our rooms the following morning, we were out of the hotel and on the road again by eight, and arrived at the campsite in Salisbury not long after our planned arrival time of nine.

The campsite really was delightful. The location was just perfect, being near enough for us to easily walk into the town centre but far enough from the main built up area for us to be able to enjoy a beautiful view of Old Sarum when we crawled out of the tent in the morning. There were quite a lot of caravans there but not very many tents at all so we had plenty of space in the field, and the toilet facilities were very clean and well kept too.

I had absolutely no idea how to put up the tent, and so I had to defer to the superior knowledge of Babel, who had practised it some weeks previously at his sister’s house. It didn’t seem to go quite as smoothly this time as it did then, and neither of us had any idea what was wrong with it, but for some reason it kept collapsing when Babel was convinced that it was supposed to be able to stand upright on its own. Things were about to become very stressful indeed, but as luck would have it, two other Esperantists were camping in the same field and they happened to emerge from their tent at just the right moment to give us a hand with ours. I for one was very grateful

The complicated, making it stay upright part over, Babel was able to sort out the tent pegs on his own and we were soon driving into the centre of Salisbury , towards the kongresejo. Once again the directions let us down slightly, suggesting we drive through something which was quite clearly a brick wall, but Babel was able to come up with an alternative route and we ultimately arrived at Sarum College with plenty of time for me to have a cup of coffee and a biscuit and Babel to park his car before the EAB AGM commenced at 11.

The AGM was… well, perhaps it’s better just to leave it at “the AGM was”. It was pretty much how everyone had expected the AGM was going to be, except probably a bit worse, and by a strange coincidence Babel and I ended up with ring side seats for the action. Things dragged on for so long with a rather boring discussion of kapkotizoj that the meeting had to be closed before there was time to hear the results of the voting, and so I was forced to eat my lunch whilst still not knowning whether or not I had been voted onto the committee

Lunch was actually rather nice, and in general the food over the course of the weekend was very good. I say that with no small amount of surprise, because I am one of the fussiest eaters in the world and so for me to say that food is good, it really has to be! It had turned into a beautiful sunny day by this point so Tim and I went outside to stroll around the cathedral square with Sam before heading back inside to hear the election results. I genuinely did feel a bit nervous, and was very relieved to be ultimately voted in with only one person against. It seems fairly clear who that one person was, especially as they blanked me in the corridor earlier in the morning and have apparently described me to someone else as “antagonistic and scathing”. This is probably the only time in my life where I shall be described as antagonistic, and it amuses me so much that Babel has very kindly changed my tagline in the JEB forums to reflect it

The first scheduled lecture of the afternoon was a talk by Graham Blakey about Gaston Waringhien. Being honest, I only attended this because I happened to be sitting in the room when it was about to start but I’m really glad I did because Graham spoke very eloquently and I learnt a lot After that there was supposed to be some free time and I was just on the verge of sneaking off somewhere to grab a much-needed coffee when I was tracked down by Malcolm and hauled kicking and screaming back to the rehearsal of ‘Sonĝo de la kursgvidanto’, the Marjorie Boulton play which Paul was organising for the Sunday. I confess that being in plays really isn’t my sort of thing, being the timid sort of person that I am, and so my enthusiasm for taking part was rather limited, even though I was obviously only an extra and didn’t have very many lines. Even in the few words which I did have, however, I managed to mess things up, being wholly incapable of pronouncing ‘vortinundaj’ correctly, and it was also a bit worrying that my role involved me having to pretend to faint, not once but twice!

Luckily the rehearsal could only go on until half four because it was being followed by the JEB celebration. 2009 marks 50 years since the founding of JEB and in honour of the occasion, Babel had gone to no small amount of trouble buying two beautiful big sponge cakes and having JEB graphics printed on them. The end result was very impressive indeed, and utterly delicious of course, and all in all it was a very pleasant celebration, especially as EAB provided some wine for us to wash it down with

The JEB celebration was followed by a very professional Powerpoint presentation by our Polish guest Przemek about the preparations which are underway for the coming UK this summer. It was so interesting that by the end of it I was really wishing that I was able to have that week off work and Babel and I hadn’t already arranged to travel back from Prague on the Sunday after the IJK

Dinner was a very tasty chilli con carne, after which Babel and I shot back off to the campsite, the plan being to dump his car there and walk back into the town so that we would both be free to have a drink later if we so wished. The walk didn’t seem too long in the daylight, and we passed the time by talking to Mikeo on the phone about the happenings during the EAB AGM.

Once back in Salisbury there was just time to sit in on a session the documentary film crew wanted to hold with JEB before Tim and I had to cram in some last minute practise for the quiz we were about to host. I had been a little bit apprehensive about this during the day on the grounds that I don’t like reading aloud in front of people and I still don’t feel like my Esperanto is good enough for me to do so without embarrassment, but in the end I was glad to be presenting the quiz and not participating in it, because the questions were so difficult I didn’t know any of the answers

Once our duties were discharged, Babel and I headed off to the pub with everyone else but we only stayed for one drink because it was rather busy and we were conscious of the fact that we needed to walk back to our tent. I didn’t actually envisage this being a problem and the first part of the journey went well. We took the correct road out of the town centre, went under the subway, and when we went slightly wrong directly afterwards we managed to find our location on the map and get back on track. We knew that we had walked into the down via a back road which ran roughly parallel to the main road we had originally driven down to get into Salisbury, so all we had to do was to find this and keep walking in a straight line until we recognised the turning. We endeavoured to do this but after we’d been going for in excess of ten minutes, we both began to get rather concerned. Whilst we were pretty sure that we hadn’t missed the turning we needed, neither of us recognised any of the fairly distinctive buildings we were walking past, and so we came to the conclusion we must have gone wrong. It was pretty dark and we didn’t have an adequate map, so we decided to err on the side of caution and retraced our steps quite a long way back to the main road. We did make it to the tent in the end, but it must have been gone midnight before we arrived

It probably took me another 15 minutes to succeed in dressing myself in all the thermal clothing I had brought to wear in the bed, but the result was very functional and the experience of sleeping in a tent itself was far more pleasurable than I had anticipated. The only other two times I’ve been camping have involved sleeping on a very thin sort of mat through which you could feel the cold of the ground, but Babel had come prepared with an airbed as comfortable as my mattress at home The sleeping bag we had wasn’t the thickest in the world but because Babel is habitually overheating I was able to steal some of his body heat and it was only really a couple of hours in the early hours of the morning that I was woken up shivering.

Unfortunately sleeping in a tent means that you do tend to wake up fairly early, and so by nine Babel and I were up and dressed and in search of breakfast. Our first port of call was the Harvester up the road but it soon transpired that they didn’t do a breakfast menu, so we resorted to walking into Salisbury instead. I had thought that it might be slightly difficult to find somewhere open to get breakfast on a Sunday morning, but I hadn’t anticipated that it was going to be totally impossible. I guess I hadn’t reckoned with the fact of how posh Salisbury was going to be and that it therefore wouldn’t be filled with the sort of greasy spoon cafes which I was happily envisaging. We walked around for ages and I have to confess that I was starting to get a little grumpy due to lack of food Happily Babel had the brainwave to look for a MacDonalds though, and although this time last week I didn’t even know they did a breakfast menu, I can now thoroughly recommend it I had a totally delicious sausage and egg muffin which came complete with a very tasty hash brown and I enjoyed it so much that we ended up going to MacDonalds for breakfast the next day too

We timed our arrival at the kongresejo perfectly for a coffee break and then headed off to the dining room to hold the JEB AGM. This was much less stressful than the EAB version and I’ve already written up the minutes if anyone would like to see a copy. Business over, we moved outside to sit on the grass and had an enjoyable session with our Polish visitor Przemek, whose conversation was so exciting that two ducks came to listen to it too

After lunch came the production of the play, about which I have to say I was rather nervous and shaky. If I hadn’t had a little role in it, I think watching it would have been a thoroughly enjoyable experience, because the two main actors Sally and Peter were really really good, and the text itself was quite amusing I was pleased with myself that I managed to pronounce vortinundaj reasonably well and didn’t hit my head on a table and knock myself out whilst pretending to faint

I had to go to a quick meeting, after which Babel and I took advantage of the free time to grab some coffee and have a better look at Salisbury Cathedral. It really is an absolutely massive church and I think it would take the best part of day to go around and look at all the graves and inscriptions in it properly. Much to our surprise, we found that it contains the Magna Carta and we were able to go in and view it without paying. We couldn’t make out a single word of it, but it was impressive all the same

We hurried back to the college at 5 because we didn’t want to miss the start of John Well’s lecture on intonation. Unfortunately I belong to the category of people who couldn’t hear the difference between at lot of the sounds he was trying to make, but it was fascinating none the less and at least now I have confirmed to myself that I would never be good at speaking Chinese

That concluded most of the official programme of the congress, with the exception of the grand buffet in the White Hart Hotel. Again I was a little apprehensive about the food but it was actually delicious and I needed have tried to fill myself up with cake earlier in the day. We had the good fortunate to sit at the same table as Jean and David Bisset which was pleasant, and it was a very enjoyable experience overall, despite the fact in involved us drinking the most expensive glasses of wine we have ever had the misfortune to order in our entire lives Of particular interest was the pudding – Welsh Cakes – which weren’t something I would normally have tried due to the inclusion of raisins but which were actually really nice

There followed a very interesting presentation about Wales to prepare us for the BK in Llandudno next year. Part of me really enjoyed it because Wales is probably my favourite place in the whole wide world and it was nice to see pictures of places I recognised. On the other hand it was now so hot in the room that I felt like I was about to keel over and ended up wishing away the minutes until it ended. I am very excited about going to Llandudno next year though and I intend to book the entire week off work so that Babel and I can have a bit of a holiday in Wales afterwards. I figure I might as well, especially because I’ve just read that the IJK 2010 will be in Cuba and I have no intention at all of using a week’s holiday to attend that!!

For some people the congress ended there but Babel and I both had a day off work on the Monday and had arranged to visit Stonehenge with Gavan and Katarina. I intended to blog my impressions of Stonehenge in great detail, but am losing the motivation to do so because I’d got halfway through Sunday with typing this post when my browser crashed and some sort of error with the Wordpress autosave meant that I lost everything but the first two paragraphs. Having typed bulk of the post twice, I am starting to get a little tired

Stonehenge was impressive, although possibly not as imposing as I had expected, and because it was a sunny day and we were so far away from the stones I didn’t get any sort of eerie feeling at all. I did learn some stuff from the audio commentary but I found it a bit tedious how you had to walk around holding the handset to your head. Babel began to consider joining English Heritage but I really don’t think it’s worth it considering I’ve already paid for National Trust membership this year, though I might try to convince him to be cultured and come to some places with me over the summer

The next stop on our sightseeing tour was Devizes, a town which I swear I know the name of from some sort of book where the characters were in danger of being taken there and being hanged. Something makes me think it might be the smugglers in Moonfleet, but I’ve not read it for so many years I can’t be sure. It was a very attractive town at any rate and Babel and I drove in and out of it several times in our attempts to find a white horse which was engraved on the side of one of the local hills. It took us a while but we made it in the end and I was really rather excited to see it, albeit disappointed that once I was standing on it it wasn’t possible to fit it all into a photo.

After lunch in Devizes, it was time for Babel and I to head home. I’m pleased to say that the journey back was much less stressful than the journey there and we got to Birmingham in record time. A big thank you to Babel for driving me around all weekend, providing the tent and generally making it such an enjoyable experience. I did thoroughly enjoy the weekend – it felt like a proper holiday, not just a weekend – and I certainly wouldn’t have done so anywhere near as much had I been on my own

Tags: British Congress, Esperanto, Salisbury

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 11:43 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.