I was fortunate enough to have two weeks of over Christmas (mostly because I’d accumulated so much overtime throughout the rest of the year) and it was really lovely, both to have so much time without auditing and to have chance to celebrate Christmas with Tim for the first time in our own home The days before Christmas Day itself went by in a flurry of last minute present buying (once we’d got them under the tree, it looked like Tim had bought me twice as many as I’d bought him, so I had to go out on a last minute spending spree!), as well as a burst of last minute food buying, which resulted in us venturing as far as the hell that is Coventry in order to stock up on last minute food. On Christmas Eve we went to tea at my parents’ house and pretended to be continental by opening all our presents to each other on the spot. (more…)

I still feel absolutely exhausted today after a rather crazy weekend. It seemed like such a good idea to book it, back in May, when I hadn’t even started looking at houses never mind decided to buy one in Nuneaton, and when I was blissfully unaware that I would be spending the following week working away from home in Oswestry.

It seemed like less of a good idea at 3.45am on Saturday, when my alarm went off Well, strictly speaking it was Tim’s alarm, because in a moment of madness, Tim had volunteered to get up and drive me to Birmingham airport. I had no idea how long this would take from Nuneaton, and there’s always the potential for us to get lost when I’m in charge of the navigating, so in all honesty we could probably have had an extra half hour in bed and I would still have got to the airport for 5.30 as required.

I feel rather guilty for having abandoned Tim for the entire weekend in order to go on holiday without him… especially because it was the weekend before his birthday… and in particular because today is his birthday and I’m not at home because of work He claimed he didn’t mind though, and he would have been thoroughly miserable if I’d brought him with me, because I was going to visit the Christmas markets in Nuremberg, and Tim is not exactly a big Christmas market fan!

We flew from Birmingham to Munich with Lufthansa, which would have been quite a pleasant experience were it not for the fact that Lufthansa have switched from hard cheese to soft cheese in their regulation cheese sandwich, and soft cheese is a rather revolting thing to try and eat at 7am in the morning. Especially when it’s a Saturday morning, because the best sort of Saturdays are those which don’t start until midday (more…)

Over the weekend I read another of the books which my sister had bought me for Christmas: ‘Sanisbar, oder der letzte Grund’ by Alfred Andersch. I was initially a little sceptical about the novel as I had never heard of the author before and the cover looked somewhat uninspiring, but by the time I had read the opening chapters I was completely hooked and couldn’t bear the thought of coming away to London for a fortnight without first getting to the end of it.

Published in the late 1950s, the book tells the story of a random group of people who all find themselves in the small German harbour town of Rerik in Autumn 1937. They each come from quite different walks of life, but are brought together by the one thing they have in common: a desire to leave Nazi Germany. From Rerik it is theoretically possible to escape to Scandanavia by boat, and thus the action focusses around one character, the unimaginative fisherman, Knudsen. Knudsen, who owns a boat, is the only member of the cast with the ability to attempt such an escape, but paradoxically the only person who has a good reason to stay where he is. His mentally disturbed wife would certainly be taken away to a concentration camp if he were to leave her unattended for too long. (more…)

On Sunday my family and I had been planning to visit a local National Trust property to look at snowdrops. Unfortunately, the presence of real and actual snow meant it was too dangerous for us to drive all the way to Shropshire on country roads, and so we all stayed at home instead. Feeling at a bit of a loose end, I decided to start one of the books which my sister had bought for me for my birthday: ‘Unvollendete Geschichte’, by Volker Braun.

I chose this one, being honest, because it was the shortest. It’s a long time since I last read something in German – probably at least six months – and I feel like I’m getting a bit rusty. Plus I actually enjoyed the relative novelty of reading in English with my Akunin book (as opposed to months of stuggling through ‘La Lada Tambureto’ in Esperanto), so I felt a bit luke-warm about more foreign language reading. Happily, once I got into it however, German came flooding back to me and I started to enjoy it (more…)

Yesterday, in the absence of ideas of anything better to do, Tim and I went to the cinema again, this time to see the film Valkyrie. We have admittedly been to the cinema rather a lot recently, but it’s not expensive if you go before 6pm, and there’s not a lot else to do when it’s cold and dark outside. I did suggest we went bowling, but that’s a lot more expensive and Babel was scared he was going to lose

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from the film, as I hadn’t actually heard anyone say it was any good. I heard a lot about it while they were filming it, mainly because of the controversy which was caused in Germany. There’s some sort of German law which says that Scientology is a dangerous cult, and because of that many people were very unhappy about the inclusion of Tom Cruise in the cast. There were refusals to let the crew film at certain locations within Berlin, and the family of Von Stauffenberg were said to be suspicious about the idea of a film in general. Since it’s been released, however, I’d scarcely heard anyone mention it on the tv, which perhaps isn’t a terribly good omen. (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…)

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…)

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…)