Since I have been living in Nuneaton for the past year, I have been commuting to Birmingham almost every day. One of the major factors which influenced our decision to buy a house in Nuneaton were the good rail links to Birmingham and Leicester, and it is true that on paper at least, the train service looks quite impressive with two trains in each direction every hour.

Unfortunately, the reality is somewhat less impressive. The evening services in particular are frequently so crowded that there isn’t even standing space for all the people who want to get on, and if I had been given a pound for every time I was wedged into the vestibule area unable to move and with a businessman’s armpit in my face – well, I wouldn’t quite have enough cash to give up work yet, but I would certainly be able to order Tim’s Christmas present

It was influenced by these experiences that I wrote the following complaint to Cross Country trains a couple of weeks ago. (more…)

On the theme of Farmville, I read this interesting article about it the other day, courtesy of Vlad Dolezal. As an avid player of Farmville, I was intrigued to read it. (more…)

Hello.

I haven’t blogged very much recently. There isn’t a very good reason for this, apart from the fact that I have now reached Level 56 of Farmville.

Twelve months ago, we were busy agonizing over whether or not we were going to get the mortgage on our house. Now it seems hard to remember a time when we didn’t live here. We have installed a lot of ducks.

So many things have changed over the past year. I’ve learnt to ride a bike. I’ve even suffered my first puncture, and currently bear the scars from falling off it for the first time. I’ve become slightly addicted to wrestling, developed a strong aversion to milk in my coffee and discovered the purpose of deep fat fryers. I’ve survived a business trip to Germany, drunk enough wine to go up entire dress size and come to terms with the fact that I am incapable of makin my own sandwiches. I could go on…

Of course, some things still haven’t changed a bit. Don’t ask me whether I have started learning to drive yet. It’s good to still have one or two unachieved goals on life’s to-do list

Auditing continues to slowly gnaw away at my will to live. April and May disappeared in a blur of mediocre hotels with lumpy mattresses and over-priced breakfasts. The low point came when I found myself eating porridge in Victoria station at 7am, despite the fact that I neither like porridge nor had a train to catch. Crazy times! All hopes of a payrise may still be in vain, but my annual appraisal passed off without incident a couple of weeks ago, which was nice Apparently I am “reliable and capable” which, for an accountant, is high praise indeed; on a level with Simon Cowell telling a wannabe popstar that they have the X-factor. People in general have commented that I seem a lot more confident these days. Confidence is a difficult thing to measure, but I reckon that the frequency with which I turn red and shake is reducing.

Esperanto continues to be, well, Esperanto. My right hand is thinking, “Why the hell did I volunteer for that?!” whilst my left hand is already signing me up for something else I don’t actually want to do ;) We’ve been to some fun renkontiĝoj this year though; a bizarrely successful JEB meeting in Cardiff, a sunny British Congress in Llandudno and more recently, a very civilised seminar with John Wells in York. In August, Babel and I are going to Toulouse for a fortnight; partly to visit some friends of his and partly to attend FESTO. In preparation, I am halfheartedly failing to learn French.

I won’t promise that I will blog more regularly from now, but I may try

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…)