Today I’ve hit the grand old age of 26 I suddenly feel rather old, though not as old as my mother was trying to make me feel earlier today when she got slightly confused and started telling me that I was now in my second half century!

It’s been a rather nice weekend. Yesterday was a quiet day – we did our housework in the morning (how terribly grown up!) and then in the afternoon Tim’s sister and her little boy came round to visit for a couple of hours. By 7pm it was exactly the sort of wet and windy November evening when one wants nothing more in life than to stay inside a warm and cosy house watching X Factor It was therefore exactly the sort of wet and windy November evening when one wants nothing less in life than to set out for that most godforsaken of hellholes more commonly known as Coventry. That was, however, precisely what we had resolved to do. Things in life which are worth braving Coventry for are few and far between, but they do exist; Ikea is the main one, but this weekend we had a different motivation in the form of a meeting with fellow Esperantist R, whose band were playing in one of the city centre clubs. (more…)

Alas, my poor blog has been somewhat neglected of late! It’s not been intentional, I just seem to have been rather busy for the past few months, and have got out of the habit of updating it.

The last posts I wrote were about the IJK in Liberec, and an awful lot of things have happened since then. We had a truly hideous time at the UK in Bialystok which I still intend to blog about at some point in the future because I still feel bitter about wasting a week of my holiday (and a not inconsiderable amount of money) going somewhere so ugly and pointless. Fortunately the pain of the experience is burned onto my brain so deeply that I suspect that this time next year, I will still be able to blog about it as if it were yesterday! (more…)

The most exciting thing to happen recently is that Babel and I are in the process of trying to buy a house

We’ve been thinking about moving in together for quite a long time, but it’s only over the course of the past few weeks that the discussions have really started to come to fruition.

The problem has always been where we are going to live, because I am from Birmingham and Tim is from Leicester. We have toyed with the idea of living in one place or the other at various points, but essentially I need to be near Birmingham for my job, and Tim needs to be near Leicester because he will hopefully be starting a PhD at the university there with effect from September. We thought about living in Hinckley, which is rather a pleasant place, but in the end dismissed it because the train connections aren’t good enough. Train connections are especially important to me because I don’t drive. (more…)

My blogging truly has been woeful of late So far I have only managed to come up with two excuses for this. Firstly, that I have been rather busy recently, both in terms of the hours I’ve been putting in at work and the amount of activities I’ve had organised at weekends. Secondly, that I feel under a bit of a cloud and there’s been lots of days when I’ve thought about writing, but anything I said would have sounded terribly depressed. As one of my elderly relatives always used to tell me as a small child, if you can’t say anything nice it’s better to say nothing at all (more…)

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day. Please visit Diary of A Goldfish for links to some more profound posts on the theme than mine

Disablism seems to me slightly different to other -isms (eg. racism, chauvenism) because many people still don’t seem to recognise it as a set of negative prejudices which they should be ashamed of possessing. Most people in their right mind at least realise that other people are liable to be offended by their racist/chauvenistic views, and are thus prone to preface their exceptionally racist and chauvenistic comments with the phrase “I don’t mean to sound like a racist (etc), but…”. This doesn’t, of course, ultimately mitigate the offence of what they are saying, but it does at least serve to prove that they *realise* that what they are saying could be construed as not the sort of thing which is said by a nice person. For reasons I don’t understand, disablism still seems to be lagging behind somewhat in these stakes so that people who are otherwise perfectly lovely genuinely don’t seem to twig that there is anything potentially wrong with their somewhat warped and misguided points of view (more…)

Blogging appears to continue to be at best spasmodic, which I regret, but I still seem to be very busy with work, and in the spare time which I have had, I’ve been trying to do things other than surfing the internet, mainly learning to type and to speak some limited Czech. Surfing the internet is at any rate severely hindered by the fact that our wireless connection at home is nearly permanently down, and since I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress it’s become virtually impossible for me to log in and make a post from my phone (more…)

I’m as obsessive about memes as Damon is, so when I saw this one I couldn’t not do it The rules are that you have to name seven things which make life bearable and which you couldn’t do without. You’re not supposed to list things like your house, because everyone needs a house and anyway that just makes you sound boring

Here goes… (more…)

I meant to write a blog post earlier in the week to say what a lovely time Babel and I had on Saturday. I have to admit that I was slightly apprehensive about the day, because we were scheduled to meet up with some old friends of mine from uni, who I hadn’t set eyes on since we all graduated together nearly four years ago. It was a bit of a strange situation, as last time I saw them I was obviously still with my ex who was also a good friend of theirs. Also because having not seem them for so long, I wasn’t sure I had a lot to say to them. But we went to our local Harvester which also happens to be their local Harvester, and managed to get through the two hours it took us to get served a main course and pudding without too many awkward silences. Thank you to Babel for coming with me (more…)

They don’t. Trust me.

A number of years ago I remember my friend Damon writing a series of posts in the JEB forum, in which he suggested that BT stands not for British Telecom but for Bloody Terrible. This is a sentiment with which I can now sympathise.

For the past twelve months or so, we have been fortunate enough to have wireless internet in our house. It was a highly exciting development when my mother agreed to have it installed, and it has been even more exciting since Babel bought me my own computer and I can actually use it I got my computer at Christmas, and for the first six weeks or so, everything seemed to be going swimmingly well. But when we hit February, problems started to develop. Quite often I’d be using my computer bt night when suddenly the internet connection would cut out. Initially I assumed this was just some sort of random network problem and the signal was temporarily too weak for me to connect to, but it seemed different to any kind of connectivity issue which I had experienced elsewhere before. My computer was still able to detect the network, was proclaiming it to have an excellent signal in fact, but whenever I tried to connect to it it would say it was unable to, and Windows was unable to diagnose and repair the problem. What’s more, I soon discovered that leaving my computer switched off for twenty four hours and hoping it would cure itself was not successful. The only way to get the internet connection back was seemingly to turn the wireless hub off at the power and switch it back on again. This admittedly worked every time, but doesn’t seem an ideal solution to the problem. (more…)