My last post was supposed to be the final one before I head off to Germany for the IS, but I’ve had such a lovely Christmas, it would be a sin not to blog about it

In our house we actually pretend to be continental, and have a lot of our festivities on Christmas Eve. It all stems from the fact that we’ve spent every single Christmas Day (except one exceptional circumstance when my mother was ill) by ourselves in our own home, and whilst I realise that it’s kind of traditional to open your presents on Christmas Day, it’s also a lot more fun if you can open them in the presence of the people who gave them to you We tend to see most of our relations on Christmas Eve, hence it kind of makes sense to open our presents then too. (more…)

Today is a very special day indeed. Not only does it happen to be the birthday of my favouritest person Babel, but it marks the day on which he officially ceases to be A Young Person and has instead become a Grown-Up Oh yes, Babel has now reached the ripe old age of (more…)

When I switched my computer on this morning, Lotus Notes informed me that it was my anniversary. For several minutes I was highly perplexed, as I tried to remember what sort of anniversary it could possibly be. I was halfway through my breakfast before I realised it was referring to the anniversary of the day I started going out with the boyfriend I obviously still had when I set a recurring calendar entry to remind me of it. It seems rather shocking to think that it is now six years since the start of that relationship. Were we still together it would have been a long time to be together, but we’re not, which I am as exceptionally glad about as it is possible to be whilst feeling simultaneously guilty. Now all I need to do is figure out how to cancel recurring calendar entries in Lotus Notes! (more…)

Sunday turned out to be a truly amazing day It may not have got off to the best of starts, but after a delicious breakfast at Babel’s house we set off for Rutland Water in the car. Although we’d been there once before for an afternoon, it turned out to be a bit further than Babel had expected, but luckily he had brought along an Esperanto CD to pass the time. There was John Well’s explanation about why people should learn Esperanto, as well as some rather difficult to hear excerpts from radio broadcasts and a version of Clementine which made me laugh (more…)

Yesterday was two years exactly since I met Babel. I hasten to clarify that I am not aware of that fact because I spent my free time counting the days since I have known Babel - I spend quite enough of my work life counting without doing it in my evenings too - but just because it was the day after my father’s birthday, and conveniently my father’s birthday is always the same day each year Of course, when I say that I met Babel, what I mean is that I saw him in reality for the first time, having actually “met” him three months previously in the JEB forums. It is an interesting question as to whether you can “know” someone when you have never met them in real life. My sister asked me about this this morning in fact, because one of her friends has just split up with her boyfriend, and my sister seems to think the failure of the relationship is somehow based on the fact that they bumped into each other on the internet. (more…)

Once upon a time I had a very annoying friend who, whenever we fell out, used to admonish me with the phrase, “Clare, du bist immer so inkonsequent!”. At the time, this used to annoy me considerably, but with the benefit of several years distance I am able to admit that he did have a point. “Inkonsequent” is a very good word to describe me. My dictionary translates it rather inadequately as “inconsistent”, which is a translation I don’t like. In English, inconsistent is a word I would only tend to use in mathematics or logic. A set can be inconsistent if it gives rise to a paradox, and any logical argument I have the misfortune to attempt to forumulate generally ends up being inconsistent too. “Inkonsequent” seems to me to have a much richer meaning than this. It implies that I don’t know my own mind, which is regrettably true. (more…)

My experiences with Valentine’s Day have been somewhat mixed over the years. When I was at school, I loathed and detested it and was overjoyed on the years when it fell during the half term holiday, because I hated feeling like the only person who didn’t actually know any boys and thus wouldn’t be getting a card. When I started university I quickly found a boyfriend, and was terribly excited about my first Valentine’s Day with him. As luck would have it it was on a Friday that year, and so the plan was to skip our afternoon lectures and go to the cinema to watch Leonardo di Caprio in Catch Me If You Can, then back to his flat to eat pizza. The going back to his flat part was highly contentious. As far as my mother was aware, I had never been to his flat at all and when I requested to be picked up from there at 10pm she started having conniptions and asked me why I thought a strange guy would invite me back to a flat full of other strange guys in the middle of the night. To be fair to my slightly hysterical mother, she hadn’t actually met my boyfriend at this point and so had no way of knowing that he didn’t have enough imagination to seduce me (more…)

 It’s only 10am, so nothing special has happened today and nor do I expect it to.  Nothing special has happened for a long time in terms of what I would normally call special, because special things normally make me happy and right now I am more unhappy than I have been for years (no sympathy please, I brought it on myself).  But last night I was talking to my slightly inebriated mother, and she was commenting on how special Tim must be.  She had a fair point.  This post I’m going to write should probably be written next week, which will be the anniversary of me and Tim getting together, but I’m going to be at Ni Festivalu and then in Wantage and it occurred to me that if I didn’t write it now, I might never have time. (more…)

 The time between the end of the Christmas festivities and the start of the new working year is always a weird one for me.  A time for reflection on the year that has past, and speculation on the year which is to come.  I always maintain that if I had any idea what the new year actually held in store for me I would immediately decide that I was unable to cope and refuse to leave my bed on January 1st.  Certainly, I would have refused to get out of bed for 2007 had I had any inkling of the twists and turns it was going to take. (more…)

My Christmas Day featured neither mistletoe nor wine, and there was also a regrettable lack of children singing Christian rhyme. There were no logs on our fire because we haven’t had the chimney cleaned recently, and it wasn’t practical to hang gifts on the tree because it’s an artificial one from Argos and the branches aren’t terribly strong. Finding time to rejoice in the good that we see was also a bit problematic, due to an unexpected electrical failure which temporarily plunged our home into darkness Despite what Cliff Richard may thus have determined as festive shortcomings, it was nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable day, not least because I received so many lovely presents. (more…)