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.

Dear Cross Country,

I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the inadequate service provided by your company between the towns of Birmingham and Leicester.

I commute on this route every day, normally catching the 17.52 from Birmingham New Street.

Whilst I recognise that this is a peak time commuter train and that it is therefore likely that I will have to stand, there were two occasions last week when the standing conditions were utterly unacceptable due to the volume of people and luggage that had been allowed onto the train.

For a long time I have failed to understand why your company persists in running two carriages on this particular service, when you must be quite clearly aware that it is a route which would benefit from three carriages during the rush hour. Indeed, I find it quite laughable that the driver is forced to apologise every day for the “cramped conditions” given that I have never known the conditions to be any different. It is equally ridiculous when passengers are required to get off the service at Water Orton or Coleshill Parkway in order to allow other people to leave the train.

I am convinced that there must be a legal limit of passengers per carriage above which it is not safe for your train to operate and I am equally convinced that the 17.52 train regularly exceeds this limit. There was one occasion last week where a member of rail staff at Birmingham was standing in front of the doors to my carriage, trying to prevent additional passengers from boarding for their own safety. Despite his best efforts, in the seconds before boarding another few people managed to push their way one, including a gentleman carrying bulky musical instruments. This was clearly extremely inappropriate in the circumstances.

I would suggest that Cross Country consider implementing a system to better control and manage the number of passengers who board each service. Perhaps restrictions should be introduced on travelling with bicycles/push chairs/excessive baggage at peak times. Perhaps there should be staff at platform entrances to count the number of people onto each service. Perhaps only passengers with specific tickets should be able to board specific services. Perhaps you should stop calling at Water Orton – it is somewhat unfair, after all, if people who live in Water Orton (to which there is a perfectly good bus service from Birmingham) fill up the train so that those travelling to Leicester (who have no bus option available) are not able to board. Or perhaps you should launch a fundraising campaign so that we can all contribute towards the third carriage which you evidently cannot currently afford.

Given my extreme lack of success when complaining to Cross Country about rail replacement buses a few years ago, I was rather astonished to actually receive the following reply:

Thank you for getting in touch. We received your email on 11 October 2010.

I am sorry that you find the 17:52 service between Birmingham New Street and Leicester is regularly overcrowded. As we operate a ‘walk on service’ any passenger can board a train at any time. However, I can assure you that our staff will regularly assess how many passengers are on-board throughout the journey and stop more passengers boarding as appropriate. Many passengers would prefer to stand rather than being made to wait for the next available service and we have to cater for those too. This is why we will sometimes allow passengers to continue to board.

However, I can appreciate that is must be frustrating as the 17:52 service appears to be extremely busy on a regular basis. We are limited somewhat by the amount of trains we have available and all of our trains are currently in service so we don’t have any spare trains to be able to currently make this a three coach service. If we were to take a train from somewhere else on the network then this would most likely result in an overcrowded service elsewhere.

I’m afraid withdrawing stops from some of our services is not an option either. Selected service between Birmingham and Leicester currently stop at Water Orton which has been agreed with the Department for Transport. This service level forms part of our franchise agreement so it’s not possible to make any less stops at Water Orton.

But, we do look closely at the likely numbers of passengers on each train as part of our timetable review. And if we have the opportunity to incorporate a longer train on this service then we will make those changes. I will certainly make sure that the information you provided forms part of this review.

Thank you once again for taking the time to get in touch.

I thought that was actually rather a good response, particularly given that my complaint was a little on the rude side, so I was going to left them off the hook. Unfortunately, to add insult to injury, the very next morning my train to Birmingham was delayed. That was enough to push me over the edge and into writing another complaint.

Thank you for your response to my complaint.

I appreciate that many people would prefer to stand rather than wait for the next service. However, there is a limit to the number of passengers who can comfortably and safely stand in any given train carriage and this limit is regularly exceeded on your Birmingham – Leicester services.

Just this morning I was on the (delayed) 07.50 service from Nuneaton – Birmingham, on which the standing passengers were already jam-packed prior to arrival at Coleshill Parkway. The driver asked us all to “move down the train” to allow passengers to board at Coleshill, and most people were good-humoured enough to squeeze even tighter together as requested. However, when the train then stopped at Water Orton and the driver requested that we “move down” again, the atmosphere in my carriage was close to mutiny, even from the seated passengers. There was quite clearly nothing that anyone could do to create more space, short of sitting on somebody else’s lap. The driver nevertheless refused to move from Water Orton on the grounds that there were “another ten passengers waiting to board the train”.

These conditions were not just extremely unpleasant, but clearly unsafe. What chance would any of us have stood in a crash? What would have happened if a child or elderly person were taken ill, or if a member of the public suffered a panic attack from claustrophobia? Suppose a passenger had become violent or abusive? There was absolutely no way a member of your staff could have walked down the carriages to assist with any type of emergency. The train fare on this route is not insignificant and whilst I’m sure the majority of people are realistic enough not to expect that they will always have access to a seat, I think they nevertheless expect to feel safe. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that many transported cattle have better conditions and more space than on some of Cross Country’s commuter routes.

With respect to the 17.52 service in particular, I noted last night that you have a Nottingham service leaving Birmingham New Street at approximately the same time. This appears to have three carriages, in which there were multiple seats vacant as it pulled out of the station last night. Perhaps your strategists could figure out a way to alternate the third carriage with the Leicester service so that regular passengers on each route had a spread of crowded and not so crowded days in the week.

I appreciate that running a successful train service must not be easy, but I have not experienced such problems on any other train operator I regularly travel with. Virgin are very successful at controlling passenger numbers on their Euston – Birmingham services to ensure overcrowding is not severe, and London Midland seem to have an abundance of empty carriages on all of their local routes. Perhaps they would lend you one if you asked nicely!

.

I must confess that I didn’t expect a response to that one at all, but a response I nevertheless received!

Dear Miss Hunter

Thank you for getting back in touch. We received your email on 13 October 2010.

I can fully understand your concerns about the amount of people travelling on some of our trains. Although there is no legal limit on how many people can board a train, the staff on board will regularly look at how many are boarding and alighting from the train. If they believe health and safety is at risk then they can stop people boarding and also advise station staff (if available) to tell people to catch alternative services. Although some trains can get very busy, your safety would never be put at risk. Manufacturers carry out numerous tests and have to prove that their trains are safe even when they accommodate a large number of standing passengers. Although the Senior Conductor may not be able to get through a busy train, they are trained to deal with any issues regardless of how many people are on board.

Some of our services on this route do get extremely busy and it’s fair to say that we’re aware of the problems this can cause. We have a number of two and three carriage trains which operate on this route and we try to take into account the many demands on our fleet throughout the day and this includes looking at the work schedules of each of our trains. Some trains meet peak demands in both the morning and evening rush hours, while other result in a train running during a period of high morning peak demand but by the time the evening peak comes, it is somewhere completely irrelevant to meeting evening peak demand (and vice versa).

We mainly put a two coach Turbostar train on a service that will have to stop at a short platform (like Whittlesea and Manea) at some point during the day due to its work schedule. As we haven’t got selective door operation fitted to all our fleet, we can’t provide three coach trains on these services. Due to health and safety, we can’t have doors opening on to the side of the track where there is no platform. As well as this, we also have to plan where a train will end the day and how it will be used the following day to meet both demand and restrictions such as stopping at short platforms.

I realise that it must have been frustrating to see a relatively empty three carriage service going to Nottingham – but although this service was quiet on departure from Birmingham New Street, the allocation of a three carriage train will have been done after taking into account passenger numbers late on in this journey and also to meet demand on the other trips that the train will take throughout the day.

However, we are currently carrying out a review of where all our trains are utilised and where it’s possible to provide longer trains where they’re needed then we will do so. In addition to this, each train in turn is returning to the depot for engineering work to install selective door operation fitted which should be completed in the next few months. This will give us a greater freedom of where we can use both our two and three coach trains and will overcome the problem of having to accommodate for stops at shorter platforms.

Thank you once again for taking the time to get in touch.

This employee has obviously been on a training course about how to respond to customer complaints I eventually decided that that was as far as I ought to take the correspondence. I did, however, briefly consider complaining again under a different name. If every single person who catches that train was prepared to make a complaint about it then they might actually be forced to do something. Unfortunately, I suspect most people will do nothing more than grumble quietly to themselves

I thought it was quite a good article because on the face of it, it is indeed quite difficult to understand why so many people are attracted to playing Farmville; it can definitely be repetitive and boring. On the other hand, at least in the early stages, I think more skill is required than the article gives it credit for. You start off with a very limited number of coins which are not at all sufficient for all the exciting things you see in the market and want to buy. Every time you plough a square of land or plant a crop in it, you have to spend precious coins, and you have to ensure that you have enough coins to perform these activities on a regular basis, else you won’t gain enough experience (XP) to progress in the game. There are a wide range of crops available to choose from, and each have different attributes; some take longer to grow than others, some are much more expensive to buy, whilst others will gain you more XP. It is crucial to choose the right mix of crops to ensure that a) they only become fully grown at a time convenient for you to come back and harvest them (otherwise they will wither and die, thereby losing you all the money you invested in them) and b) you make as much money with as little effort as possible. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Soya is the way to go!

As you progress further in the game, these considerations become much less important and you suddenly have a huge pile of coins which you don’t know what to do with. This gives you the freedom to choose different crops which may not make you as much profit but are far more interesting than field after field of soya. I currently have somewhere in the region of £1m unspent coins, and I am currently growing purple peas for no other reason than I think they’re quite pretty

Once you have invested a lot of time and effort in your farm, the thought of abandoning it all and never logging in again seems quite difficult. I’m not very attached to my farmer, but I would be sad to leave behind my new pet dog Snowy, who I’ve just finished training to harvest sheep. Of course, the creators of Farmville are very adept at introducing new features to stages of the game where they correctly calculate that people’s interest will be starting to wane. Beehives are the latest craze to be launched this week. Despite my better judgement, I have become engaged in the frantic sending of nails and wooden boards between friends and neighbours in an attempt to get my own beehive fully built and functional so that I can start acquiring bees…

I understand that Farmville isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and I fully appreciate why many people would view it as a complete waste of time. I (hopefully) have my Facebook settings organised so that only those people who I know play Farmville themselves get to see the Farmville-related updates that I post. I too get bored when I have to scroll past update after update about Cafe World of Mafia Wars in my newsfeed. But honestly, I don’t see that Farmville is any more of a waste of time than watching tv or playing a more conventional video game. Obviously if it were to take over your entire life and you were to start spending real money on it, I could see that that could become a problem, along the same lines as an online gambling addiction. But for me it’s just a mindless way of relaxing in the evening, in the same sort of way that I used to watch soaps when I was younger.

In any case, Farmville is currently the nearest I am able to get to looking after my own ducks Need I say more?!

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

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.

Having had a glass of wine with dinner I was none too confident about my ability to navigate with Google Maps, but luckily Babel somehow managed to transport us to the correct location without any sensible input from either me or Google. We arrived a little early, not having got as lost as I’d anticipated, but the area surrounding the club looked a little dubious to say the least, so we drove round in a random circle to kill time. Not having met R before, we’d agreed to come bearing an Esperanto flag in order to identify ourselves. It was a shock to me that we even possessed such an item, as I can think of few Esperantists less likely to own such a thing, but we managed to attach it to my handbag in as subtle a way as it is possible to attach a bright green flag to one’s person

There were no problems anyway. We recognised R with little trouble and managed to locate a reasonable pub a five minute walk away. It remained reasonable for the length of time it took to drink a glass of wine, and then started playing a very grating sort of dance music unreasonably loudly. We tried to relocate to the pub next door but were rejected because of our trainers, so with the sad inevitability of every JEB meeting I have ever participated in, I ended up getting drunk in the local Wetherspoons

Joking apart, the Wetherspoons was perfectly pleasant and quiet enough to have a decent chat, although rather embarrassingly on the eve of my 26th birthday, I was required to show my ID to gain admission We certainly had a fun evening, and hopefully R did too I feel slightly guilty about the fact that we didn’t stop long enough to see the show, but it was already midnight by the time we got home, and I had to be up at eight this morning. Somehow I managed to drink one more glass of wine than I had previously intended to, so I am actually rather impressed that I subsequently achieved this feat.

It is, of course, easier to get up on a birthday than most other days of the year. I was curious to see what Babel had bought me, not having been able to make sense of any dropped hints. I would actually never have guessed in a million years that he would manage to choose me a jumper more stylish than I would have succeeded in choosing for myself, and I was also pleasantly surprised to receive a Blackmore’s Night DVD, not having previously expected that such a thing would exist. As if that wasn’t enough, Babel’s parents had been kind enough to buy me a SnugRug, something which I’d wanted ever since I first saw it in the Argos catalogue a few months previously, and Babel announced that I still had one present left. The final one wasn’t wrapped due to it’s excessive side, but hidden behind the sofas under a blanket…. my very own beanbag!!! I’ve wanted a bean bag for at least 22 of my 26 years and never been fortunate enough to own one, so I was inordinately excited and intend to sit on it for the rest of the evening

After a quick trip to church, where I have to confess that I passed on taking the wine because I really couldn’t face the thought of alcohol at that time of the morning, Babel and I headed off to visit my parents who had invited us round for a birthday lunch. We ended up with roast beef and yorkshire pudding which was a real treat for me, beef being probably my favourite food ever They’d bought me some pretty cool presents too – my parents had bought me a teapot, something which I’ve really missed since I moved out of home, and my sister had got me a German DVD – the film of Herr Lehmann, a book which I read last summer when Carolin kindly donated me a copy at during the Internacia Junularo Kongreso en Liberec. My parents also bought me the next translation in Boris Akunin’s Erast Fandorin series which I’m a bit addicted to, so all in all not a bad haul

Later in the afternoon the rest of my relatives popped by and I accumulated a few more pressies. My great aunt bought me a scarf and gloves, a pattern which seems to have repeated itself every birthday for the last few years, so that I now rather ridiculously have an entire drawer dedicated to scarves and gloves. She also gave me £20 of M&S vouchers which was very kind of her but made my heart sink, on the grounds that I’ve just spent 9 months trying to spend the £50 of M&S vouchers work gave me last Christmas and am 100% certain that there is nothing left in Marks and Spencers which I wish to buy My aunt bought me a poetry anthology, which was a surprising choice but a thoughtful one

Of course, no birthday would be complete without ducks and today I not only got a beautiful duck card, I also received the tiniest, cutest rubber duck you ever did see, which flashes different colours when you hold it in the palm of your hand And I had a very big chocolatey cake, the remains of which my parents happily let us take back home to Nuneaton. I’m waaaay too full to attack it tonight, but the thought of cake will help sustain me through a day of tedious accounting tomorrow.

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!

When I got back from Bialystok I had a week of commuting to London, during which I accomplished very little except to catch a cold, and then I headed off on holiday again, this time to the little village of Sankt Johann in Tirol. SJIT, as I shall call it for the sake of brevity, is a very picturesque sort of place and indeed the nicest Austrian resort I have ever stayed in, far surpassing my previous experiences in Seefeld and Mayrhofen. It was a holiday not entirely without incident (we missed the last connecting bus of the day on a trip back from Salzburg and had to take a taxi for about 30 miles!), but pleasant nonetheless.

Once back in Birmingham things got really crazy, as Babel and I struggled to complete our house purchase. Things which I could never even have imagined might go wrong did go wrong, with the result that right up until the day before we got the keys, we weren’t entirely sure whether the transaction was going to go through or not. Ultimately it did, and just when Tim had got the keys in his hand and it seemed like there could be no more setbacks, I spent over an hour stuck on a train a few miles outside Nuneaton, due to a series of points and signal failures

Owning a house seemed rather overwhelming at first and I couldn’t quite take it all in. We ended up moving in sooner than I anticipated, which felt strange at first but was ultimately probably a Good Thing. We had a few weekends of frantic trips to IKEA to get the place furnished, but we were fortunate that relatives donated or bought a multitude of useful items, and two months later there are really very few things which we are lacking. There was a surprisingly long wait for the sofas we had ordered to be delivered, but they arrived on Wednesday and were successfully installed in the living room.

You can see pictures of the house on my Facebook page, or on Tim’s website if you prefer

What else have we been up to? Last weekend was spent in London because (for some reason!) we had volunteered to help man the EAB stall at the Language Show. It would be nice to say that this was an enjoyable experience but in all honesty it was anything but, and I’m heartily glad it’s over! It sounds silly to say this, but standing up all day is actually incredibly tiring. My shoes are normally quite comfortable shoes but by the end of each day, they’d somehow become quite the opposite. We had positive responses about Esperanto from a surprising number of people and no one quite as weird as the fascist I met last year.

The weekend before that we were at Esperanto House in Barlaston for the October Drondo (diskutrondo). That was a much more enjoyable weekend, not least because we spent it sitting down We’re already looking forward to going back to Barlaston for the next Drondo in January.

I had two weeks off work at the end of September which was very pleasant, although now I feel like I could do with another two weeks. I was able to buy some essential things like bedding for the house and a new suit for work, and had some much needed time to unpack all my hastily packed belongings, ruthlessly discarding things which I haven’t used in years.

Meanwhile work continues to be…. well, work. Some weeks haven’t been so bad, some weeks have been very bad indeed. Next week looks set to be truly appalling and I anticipate drinking quite a lot of wine in the evenings to get through it.

In terms of books, Babel and I have watched the entire collection of Sharpe DVDs since we moved in, and I have now started reading the novels too. They’re surprisingly exciting, although I don’t have Babel’s memory for names of characters and battles!

So far living together seems to be going remarkably smoothly, and we haven’t had any serious fallings out. Or at least if we have, I don’t remember them, which is probably a good sign

I shall try to update my blog more regularly from now on!

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.

And so it was that in the end we hit upon the idea of living in Nuneaton. Nuneaton isn’t a place which either of us know much about – I had only ever been there once before we started looking at houses – but on paper it seems like the perfect location, situated directly between our two different home towns and with two trains an hour in either direction We spent a Saturday afternoon there one week before Easter and were able to ascertain that the town centre itself is very pleasant, albeit in a small sort of way, and if you’re not averse to gravel pits there isn’t really anything to object to.

That established, we started looking at places online and instantly discovered that our tastes in houses are somewhat different. I would be perfectly happy living in a two-up two-down terrace, which is what I grew up in, whereas Babel seems to require vast quantities of space I was, however, pleasantly surprised by the property prices in Nuneaton, which recession or not appear to be significantly lower than in Birmingham, with the result that we can actually hope to afford something more along the lines of what Babel wants.

Having got a feel for the area, we narrowed down the properties we were interested in, and Babel made appointments for us to go and see them. We saw three the weekend before last, but failed to agree on which one we thought was best. We saw another three last weekend, one of which was absolutely amazing, far in excess of the sort of house I ever thought we would be able to afford.

We spent most of last weekend reflecting on it and discussing it, trying to come up with some sort of negative points about it, but ultimately failed to find anything more significant than the fact that it has electric storage heaters rather than central heating. The result was that we made an appointment to go back to see it on Tuesday evening, following which we decided to make an offer. At £140k, the house is on the market for £10k more than we had originally intended to spend, the implication being that we need to increase our deposit by an extra £3k to ensure that we have 20% of the property value up front. After a bit of thought which was helped by the fact that Babel received an unexpected bonus from work, we decided that we could indeed manage it, and so it was all systems go

Babel rang the agent the next day to make the offer. After some unsuccessful attempts at negotiation the night before, we decided to offer the asking price, which was unsurprisingly accepted Our next step is to go and see the mortgage advisor and sort out an application for a real mortgage. As far as I understand at this point in time, Babel has managed to arrange that for Monday evening. It’s complicated somewhat by the fact that I will be working in Banbury It’s perfectly possible for me to leave the client at 5pm which means I can arrive in Birmingham at 18.18. Unfortunately the next train to Leicester leaves at 18.22 so it’s highly improbable I would be able to catch it. The following train doesn’t depart until 18.52, however, which is a bit of a pain and means I’ve got a lot of time to waste hanging around in New Street station and won’t get to Leicester until 19.50. But things could be worse, it could be an away job…

As to the house itself, I don’t want to say too much until I know whether or not we’re going to be able to get the mortgage. On the one hand, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be eligible for a mortgage but I’ve heard so many horror stories from colleagues recently about people getting turned down for the smallest reasons that I feel slightly worried about it. I was talking to someone yesterday who said she’d had to wait four weeks between making her mortgage application and getting confirmation that she would receive the loan, so it may be a long time until we know for sure what’s happening.

It’s all very exciting though. Very exciting indeed

The British Esperanto Congress is the last happening which I appear to have blogged about properly. The weekend after that, Tim and I went up to Halifax to visit our friend Rolf for an informal Esperanto get-together. Rolf’s girlfriend who’s from Belgium and her friend who’s from Croatia were over in the UK for a short holiday, and so it was a good excuse to head up north and have a weekend away. The Saturday evening was spent playing games and eating pizza in a rather chaotic manner. I sat out several rounds of Jenga, it not being an ideal game for those who are inclined to shake, but there was plenty of hilarity to be enjoyed from Babel’s performance. Poor Babel seemed to struggle slightly to understand the rules of the game, and lost spectacularly on at least one occasion After that we moved on to the card game Uno, a game about which I had previously heard a lot from my sister but never actually played. It was me who struggled with the rules on this one as they seemed to change at the speed of light I spent several rounds trying to work out what all the cards I held actually meant, and then the rest of the rounds waiting for people to explain to me when it was my go so that I could use them

It was a fun evening though, and after a MacDonalds breakfast the next morning we all drove out into the Yorkshire Dales National Park and went for a little walk. I don’t know the area at all, but the place we ended up at was called Malham Cove and it was very impressive, an enormous pavement made from broken limestone. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to do quite the same walk as everybody else, on account of the fact that it involved scaling a waterfall and I realised pretty early on in the proceedings that that was beyond me, especially as I was only wearing my trainers. I was quite prepared to wander back to the car and sit on my own for a few hours while everyone else carried on, but in the end Babel was kind enough to come back with me and with the aid of some helpful directions we managed to make it to the same end point as everybody else, just on a different route. The walk over, we headed to a carvery for food but I wasn’t terribly impressed because the vegetables were unlimited whilst it was only possible to go up once for the meat

The weekend after that, Babel and I stayed local, passing a pleasant few hours in Stratford-upon-Avon. We went rowing in a boat on the river and later played a game of mini golf, which I made the mistake of betting Babel in advance that I was going to win. Needless to say I ultimately didn’t and was then put to the expense of having to buy him a book. Actually we sort of fell out that day, although not over that, so perhaps it wasn’t the happiest… The following Monday was a bank holiday weekend but the weather was forecast to be truly appalling. It did indeed dawn grey and overcast, but we decided to be brave and head to Rutland Water anyway where we hired a tandem for a couple of hours so that I could get some use out of the new cycle helmet which Babel bought me for Christmas. It did pour with rain at some points, but when you were on the bike you didn’t actually notice it that much, and the effect was rather cooling. It was fun, although I ended up with a sore bottom for days afterwards

The weekend after that was Preston, and an event which I had been somewhat dreading. At some point in the distant past I was invited as the guest speaker to the Spring meeting of the Northwestern Esperanto Federation. It was the sort of invitation which it seems a really good idea to accept at the time, but which afterwards just made me think “aaaargggh! help!”. I am not someone who is good at public speaking and I am not someone who enjoys public speaking. It’s my idea of hell to be the centre of attention in so far as a room of people is looking at me, and I involuntarily shake like a leaf when I have to speak in front of two or more people at a time. I thus spent quite a long time beforehand writing my speech down on paper so that I could at least read it from the page if my mind had a complete blackout at the crucial moment and I was suddenly incapable of speaking Esperanto. As it happens, that didn’t occur and the whole business actually went a lot better than I was anticipating. The meeting in itself was rather good fun; we all got a cream cake, and Babel and Rolf both managed to win a prize on the raffle

After a night spent eating pizza and watching Youtube clips whilst drinking red wine out of a vaze, the next day we all decided to go to York. It was Rolf’s idea and a particularly welcome one because I had recently spent a couple of weeks working in York and been quite frustrated that I hadn’t had chance to see the sights. Rolf proposed that we walk along the city walls and indeed we did. I had had no idea that the walls were so extensive, and it pretty much took us the entire day, give or take an hour stop for lunch. It was thoroughly enjoyable though, despite the damp and drizzly weather, and we had some lovely views across the city centre

Last weekend was rather a quiet one in comparison. Tim and I went into Birmingham city centre, had a nice meal and then a few games of bowling, which I lost at the expense of another book I was a bit gutted as I genuinely consider myself to have a superior bowling technique to Tim The good thing was that it wasn’t an activity which took a terribly long time and I was thus able to get home on time for the Eurovision, which I must say I thought was a terribly good show this year, albeit marred by the terrible violence towards the Gay Rights protesters in Moscow earlier in the day.

This weekend was the birthday party of Babel’s little nephew Alfie, who is now two. Children’s birthday parties rank after public speaking as my idea of hell, but if I were a child it would have been a truly amazing birthday party complete with bouncy castle, trampoline and lots of cake. There was a very nice barbecue, plenty of jelly and icecream, and the birthday cake in the shape of a tractor worked out well with the tractor cake mould I’d found in Lakeland Plastics I spent a lot of the time sitting drinking wine in the shade and intermittantly making conversation with Tim’s relatives. Saturday night we relaxed with a few drinks in Leicester, and then on Sunday after a brief diversion to take Alfie to feed the ducks, Tim and I headed out to Rutland Water again to take advantage of the glorious sunshine. I had it in my head that I would like to cycle around the entire reservoir, although I had no idea until Babel told me afterwards that it was going to be 17 miles! 17 miles it nevertheless was, and I am rather proud of the fact that we managed it, even if we are somewhat sore afterwards

I regret to say that it wasn’t an entirely peaceful day, as I lost my temper and actually shouted for the first time in at least four years, perhaps even five years. For me that’s a big deal, because I very strongly believe that people should always stay control of their anger, and with a few exceptions, I would generally despise the sort of people who can’t control their tempers. It happened because I felt very provoked by the way in which someone had spoken to me, which is a way in which that person does speak to me from time to time and which does always make me incredibly angry. But normally when I get angry about such things, I am perfectly capable of not letting it show in the interests of maintaining as much harmony as possible, so I have absolutely no idea what happened yesterday, and all I can say is I hope it doesn’t happen again

There are a lot of other things I could blog about but they mostly involve work and aren’t very interesting. Weekends are often the only times worth living

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

I was talking to a relative of mine, whom I shall refrain from naming and shaming, a few weeks ago for example, and she was expressing complete consternation about the fact that the BBC children’s channel CBeebies was employing a disabled TV presenter. I have a little cousin who is about five and very much enjoys watching CBeebies, as often as his parents will allow him to. My relative was expressing abject horror at the thought that he could be forced to look at images of a disabled person on the grounds that he is “a sensitive little boy” and the sight of a disabled person was likely to traumatise him for the rest of his life. My relative was quite outraged that the BBC was allowing such a thing to take place, and declared that it was political correctness gone mad.

I was slightly surprised by the venom of her reaction, and asked why she was so convinced that my cousin was about to be traumatised. My relative explained, in a condescending sort of way, that children are very fragile creatures and can very easily be disturbed by “distressing” images. I queried quite how distressing the appearance of this TV presenter was (imagining all sorts of unspeakable horrors) and was assured that my relative had felt quite unwell when she’d turned the tv on to investigate. I didn’t have time to sit and watch children’s tv but I later googled it and discovered that the girl in question is a very pretty blonde who just happens to be missing half of one arm.

Hmmm. Okay, so it’s a little unusual to only have half of one arm, but is this something which is really going to upset a small child? It’s hard to tell because children can be upset by all sorts of random things. When I was a small child I went through a phase of being scared of men with glasses. This was quickly followed by a phase during which I was terrified of men with beards. Does this mean that all children’s tv presenters should be clean-shaven with contact lenses?

The idea is ridiculous. Yes, children can be frightened by things which are strange and unusual, but so long as adults behave rationally and demonstrate that the things they fear are actually harmless (as opposed to feeding their fear by proclaiming that all people with beards are evil and we should run away from them), children will outgrow the fear with time and grow to accept the feared characteristic as within the bounds of normality. I am now engaged to a person who has both glasses and a beard (it is a beard, Babel ) and I don’t (often) wake up during the night with an urge to run away from him. Principally only when he snores.

I had to discontinue the conversation with my relative at this point because it was clear they just weren’t getting it and I didn’t want to have a row. I hope that maybe with time they will come to see that my cousin has not been traumatised, and that he will perhaps develop a more positive attitude towards disability as a result of positive exposure to the concept at a young age. I really hope that he and his generation will do so, and I think there’s a good chance; personally, I think “In the Night Garden” is far more disturbing than an entire army of one-armed tv presenters… seriously, what is with that programme?!

It may also be worth noting today that Archbishop Vincent Nichols, soon to become Archbishop of Westminster, missed an excellent opportunity to say something interesting on the theme of disablism when he wrote a pastoral letter on the theme last month. His main concern appeared to be that vast quantities of disabled people were dying to come to Catholic churches but unable to do so because we have too many steps, followed only by his concern that there might be Catholic disabled children who the Church is failing to properly indoctrinate on account of them not being able to attend mainstream Catholic schools, and that steps should be taken to rectify this in the said children’s best interests.

Talking about disablism and religion, which we briefly appear to be, I was rather shocked on Easter Sunday by the behaviour of my parish priest during the habitual renewal of baptismal vows. For those who are not familiar with the concept, the priest processes around the church, sprinkling water on the congregation to symbolise the renewal of the promises made for them by their godparents during baptism. Needless to say, the opportunity to flick water in people’s faces is one of the few perks of being a Catholic priest these days! My priest was doing the rounds as usual until he reached a pew with one of our blind parishoners. He sprinkled the parishoner, hesitated for a moment, then grinned and applied a liberal sprinkling to his guide dog also. The poor dog looked most bemused, and I couldn’t help thinking that that was a bit of a cheek, all the more so because the owner clearly had no idea what he had done or why the surrounding pews were trying not to collapse with laughter. It wasn’t a deliberately malicious act, but like so many acts of disablism stupid and thoughtless.

As I said at the start, please visit Diary of a Goldfish for a full catalogue of today’s posts.

Learning to type is progressing rather well. Babel lent me his CDROM, and while the tone of the instructor is still upsetting me (there’s a little man who keeps popping up on screen and telling me to examine my hands because I look like I have ten thumbs!), I seem to be making quite good progress. I have learnt all the letters now and can type them with what I consider to be a reasonable level of accuracy, albeit nur at a rate of around 35 words per minute. The numbers and symbols are another matter entirely and I’m not getting on very well with those at all at the moment, but for the most part, if I want to type at high speed, it’s unlikely to be something which involves a lot of letters and numbers, so I’m not getting too hung up on those.

Czech is very difficult indeed, and some days I’m started to wonder if I’m sufficiently intelligent to learn it, but I think that’s more because I’ve felt a little depressed of late than the fact that I’ve encountered anything conceptually difficult. I haven’t actually encountered any grammatical ideas I can’t get my head around yet, but the sheer ‘foreignness’ of even the simplest words sometimes makes me wonder if I’m ever going to have the time and energy to master it. Even a basic words like dog, tea, room… seem to take an age to master because they bear no relation at all to any words I know from other languages. And just when you congratulate yourself on correctly mastering a new noun and the correct gender to go with it, you encounter a new case in which it unexpectedly changes it’s key vowel and adds an increasingly bizarre ending, rendering it utterly unrecognisable from the nominative form you thought you’d done so well to remember. I guess it’s always like this when you start learning a new language, until the magical day when it clicks

I have made some progress over the last few weeks at any rate, and I’ve set up some really cool spreadsheets to help me learn words. I’ve got one for nouns with a tab for each letter of the obscenely long Czech alphabet, and then I’ve got a funky colour-codin system going on which indicates gender at a glance. I’m quite proud of it And Windows Vista is actually growing on me, now I’ve had a chance to use it. It’s still a little bit cumbersome to insert accented characters into Microsoft Excel, but in Word it’s actually a piece of cake

I’m going to be away from home for most of the next month, and I’ve just been packing my Czech stuff in my bag because I’m hoping to have time to look at it in the evenings. I’ve also packed my highway code and a driving theory book which Babel bought for me a while ago, because once I get the next month behind me I am most definitely going to book a lesson.

Tomorrow morning I’m off to London at a horribly early hour, and will be working there for the next two weeks, excluding Easter. I’m actually rather scared about it, which is utterly irrational, but it seems late in life to start making a habit of being rational I did these same two audits this time last year, and I think the issue stems from the fact that last year they were terribly important to me. In February last year, I made an unforgivably bad judgement on an audit I was a part of, and essentially these two weeks in London had been given to me as my chance to prove to my line manager that I wasn’t a waste of space. I succeeded, and since then things have fortunately gone very dramatically uphill, but they were two such difficult and traumatic weeks that they’ve left a very deep impression on my subconscious.

Personally, I feel like I’ve learnt an awful lot about auditing over the course of the past year, and I feel like I’m a much more confident person. When I was facing these audits this time last year, I essentially didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be doing. That is to say, the clients operate in a service-based industry as opposed to a manufacturing-based one, and I had no prior experience of auditing that kind of company. Service-based businesses are obliged to recognise their revenue in line with a mysterious accounting standard called UITF40, and my main role in the audit was to ascertain whether they were complying with this correctly. I arrived, however, on day one, with absolutely no idea what UITF required let alone any idea how to test whether the companies were complying with it, and so there was rather a steep learning curve (and a stupid amount of overtime!) between that point and submitting adequately completed audit files to the manager!

These days, happily, I understand the gist of UITF 40 and I know what sort of evidence I need to obtain and how I need to set out my spreadsheets, and really, these audits should be pretty straightforward. There are a few complications of the nature that the client in week one hates my guts because last year I actually (correctly!) concluded that he *wasn’t* complying with UITF40 over one particular invoice and this upset him deeply. Also that I’m working with the world’s worst junior, who I don’t trust as far as I could throw him. And the fact that an inconvenient timing of the moon means that Easter falls in the middle of the audits and means I only have four days for each one.

These are problems which shouldn’t be insurmountable, so long as I work hard and am focussed. So why am I so stressed that my jaw has started clicking and locking? I don’t 100% know, but I think it’s some sort of fear that I’ll get there and it *won’t* be significantly easier than it was last year, and I’ll still be really stressed and short of time and having to work all the hours that God sends in order to get it even halfways done, with a last minute mad dash to write the client-facing report on the train home on the final day. I think it’s a fear of (for an inexplicable reason) not coping with something which I should be perfectly well able to cope with. I don’t know. I want to be able to go to London and think “Wow, I feel like I’ve advanced so much in the last 12 months” and instead I’m scared I’ll get there and thinK “Here I am 12 months on doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same place, and not doing it significantly better. What a waste of 12 months!”

Time will tell I guess. After two weeks I’m off to York, but it’s anybody’s guess what I’m actually supposed to be doing there. In between, Babel and I are going to the British Esperanto Congress in Salisbury which on the one hand should be really good, because I could majorly do with a holiday, and on the other hand appears to be becoming stressful in itself, because I made a list of all the things we needed to organise beforehand this morning and it seemed remarkably long.

This hasn’t been a very happy week because there was potentially bad news about Babel’s job midweek and absolutely no progress at all with respect to the university, but I guess those things aren’t really my business to talk about in public. I got very upset about it all the other day, which was partly because I am very depressed about it and partly because I was feeling hormonal. Babel and I are also thinking about starting to look at houses, which should be something positive to get excited about, but I kind of feel like my life is on hold until May when all this working away will be over, and it’s hard to concentrate on other things, so I’m not being as proactive in helping Babel look for things as I probably should be

Other than that, now news apart from the fact that I’ve read two very good books recently and will blog about them in due course if I have the time/energy/internet connection Babel and I went to Evesham yesterday, which was very pleasant and much nicer than the week before, when we’d ended up watching The Haunting in Connecticut by mistake. I categorically refuse to blog about that, because it was so disturbing that I’m still having nightmares :cry:

Here goes…

1. Coffee. Coffee not only makes my life bearable, coffee makes my life possible. Without coffee I could not get up at 6am in the morning, travel for two hours, do a day’s work, go back to a hotel for dinner and polite conversation with colleagues I dislike, then do several more hours overtime. I run on coffee the same way a car runs on petrol. If I don’t get enough at regular intervals, I will simply cease functioning and go to sleep. The more stressed I am, the more coffee I need and the stronger it has to be. Recently I have taken to drinking it black because sometimes my insides randomly decide they don’t like milk, and I think it tastes significantly stronger like that which can only be good. I know that coffee is bad for me, and it actually doesn’t take many cups a day to make me feel quite ill (irregular heartbeat, faster breathing), but nevertheless coffee is *necessary* and I would never consider not drinking it on a day when I’m under pressure, I just try to offset it with copious amounts of water. I don’t, however, regard myself as having a caffeine addiction, for the simple reason that if I’m not working, I don’t get much urge to drink it, and it’s rare for me to surpass one or two cups a day for recreational purposes

2. Following closely behind coffee, I couldn’t live without my mobile phone. This, I confess, is an absolutely obsessive addiction, which I think stems from the fact that I’ve suffered so many computerless years where my phone was my only means of electronic interaction. I have never accidentally left my phone at home, but if I did I think I might cry. I have genuinely had nightmares which involve me packing the wrong charger when I’m working away for a week and condemned to pass days without checking my email. This is a completely irrational obsession, since I get very few interesting emails these days, but somehow I can’t quite shake it off

3. Brisk walks. One of the things I’ve noticed over the past few years is that the times when I’m most unhappy are often the times when I’m cooped up somewhere and unable to go for a decent walk. For me there are few things worse than a day in which I cannot go outside; at work this certainly depresses me, but an entire day cooped up in my own home would be equally bad. Even when I’ve been on holiday with Babel, spending more than an hour in the room when we could be outside gets me down, and I spent half the daylight hours of the IS going for walks. Don’t get me wrong, I despise exercise for exercise’s sake. But I dread the day when I become so old and frail that I can’t go out and walk to the shops every day. I think I shall go stark staring mad! Walking helps me let off steam and aids me in ordering my thoughts, it cheers me up and it gives me a sense of perspective. Life without brisk walks would be substantially less bearable.

4. Writing. I don’t write anything sensible these days, but I still can’t go very long without spilling words onto pages. Woe betide anyone who tries to correspond with me – you will never keep up, I will always out-write you and have the last word. Ever since I was five, writing has been my preferred method of passing time (as opposed to watching tv, playing games, even reading) and I still have some of my exercise books from that time with the (utterly incomprehensible and punctuationless) stories I used to write. These days life is a little more hi-tech and I can write blogs and what-not rather than endless paper diaries, but the most exciting present you could buy me in the whole world is a blank notebook. I aspire to nothing more in life than a constant stream of blank notebooks in which to scribble.

5. Pasta. If I tell you I eat pasta five days a week, hopefully you’ll get the picture. I would actually eat it seven days a week if I were left to my own devices. Pasta is the most amazing food substance known to mankind, and I have chosen it ahead of chocolate and pizza for this list because of it’s extreme versatility. There are so many wildly different meals you can base on pasta and why anyone would choose potatoes over it is a source of eternal mystery to me.

6. Duck. Actually duck should perhaps have come higher up the list. Unless I’m with Babel, I genuinely think I would struggle tremenduously to sleep without duck. Especially when I’m away from home – I spend a lot of time in hotels feeling nervous or on edge, but duck makes me feel safe

7. I’m struggling to think of something concrete for number 7, so I’m going to go with a sense of humour. I think the day you stop being able to stand back and laugh at yourself is the day you’re truly lost!