One of the very exciting things to happen during my blogging drought was the development of the plans Babel and I have for our summer holiday. I had originally managed to get the week from 18th to 25th July booked off work, and ever since January when we booked our flights from East Midlands to Prague, we have been intending to attend the Internacia Junulara Kongreso, a week-long event for young speakers of Esperanto which this year is being held in the Czech town of Liberec. Babel very uncharacteristically offered to arrange the flights, and got us a really good price with Ryanair. The only downside was that they don’t run a flight on the Saturday we wanted to fly back, so we booked a return ticket for the Sunday instead. I certainly didn’t regard this as being much of downside, because it gave us the opportunity to spend a weekend in Prague, a place I have wanted to go to for years (more…)

Tre ofte kiam mi ĉeestas Esperanto-aranĝojn, oni demandas al mi, kial mi parolas Esperanton. Multaj homoj kiujn mi konas havas tre bonajn respondojn al tiu demando. Ili ege interesiĝas pri lingvistikaj aferoj, ili volas malmultekoste vojaĝi al diversaj landoj, ili kredas ke lingva egaleco tre gravas… Ĉiuj tre bonaj kialoj, sed por mi neniuj el tiuj taŭgas.

Se iuj el vi fariĝos miaj amikoj ĉe Facebook, vi rimarkos ke en la skatolo sub mia profilbildo, kie oni rajtas skribi kelkajn vortojn pri si mem, mi skribis „Mi neniam intencis paroli Esperanton“. Fakte mi memoras iun tagon.. verŝajne estis en du mil kvar… kiam mi sidis en aŭtobuso en Birmingham, kaj parolis al amiko mia per poŝtelefono. En la mezo de la konversacio mi iomete koleriĝis, kaj mi memoras tute bone ke mi subite ekkriis, tre laŭte, „Mi neniam lernos Esperanton!“. Kio, do, okazis inter tiam kaj nun, por ke mi ne nur eklernu la lingvon, sed ankaŭ fariĝu membro de la estraro de la landa asocio. Estas bona demando, kaj por respondi al ĝi, necesas pensi pri kelkaj jaroj en la pasinteco kaj klarigi, kiamaniere mi lernis pri Esperanto. (more…)

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 (more…)

English version

Dum mi estis ĉe Esperanto-Domo en januaro, iu donacis al mi libron, kun la peto ke mi recenzu ĝin por brita Esperanto-ĵurnalo. Mi ne povis rifuzi sen esti malĝentila, kaj ĉiuokaze mi neniam rifuzus akcepti senpagan libron, sed mi sciis nenion pri la enhavo de tiu, nur ke temas pri feliĉo.

Pasis preskaŭ tri monatoj, kaj mi ankoraŭ ne legis la libron. Mi ricevis multajn librojn je kristnasko, kaj mi ankoraŭ havas monton de nelegitaj libroj en mia dormoĉambro! Tamen post du semajnoj mi iros al la brita kongreso de Esperanto, kie mi tre verŝajne renkontiĝos kun la viro kiu donis al mi la libron. Do, venis al mi la penso ĉi-posttagmeze ke mi almenaŭ malfermu ĝin antaŭ la kongreso! (more…)

On Sunday I did something I should have done a long time ago and tidied my bedroom. I’ve never had a messy bedroom, even as a small child, but this year it kinda started to get out of control, chiefly as a result of the wondrous number of books which Babel bought me for Christmas and my birthday. I had originally started piling these up on the desk in my room in a neat sort of heap, but the pile grew and grew and spread onto my chair and the surrounding floor space too at such an alarming rate that the whole lot was soon in serious danger of collapsing on top of me in the middle of the night, rather like a coal tip. It took a good few hours of dusting and rearranging, but finally I found a solution which involved disposing of some pointless shoeboxes and putting the majority of the clutter on my desk under one of my chairs. This might not sound like much of an improvement but my room looks substantially better for it and the advantage is that I can now keep my computer and our congratulations cards on my desk rather than on the floor. The wireless still isn’t working properly, but it’s still nice to have a computer (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…)

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…)

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…)