Babel and I headed off to our favourite Harvester to have a spot of lunch. It was actually rather busy, but the time we had to wait for a table was hardly enough time for me to open all my presents! Babel had not only got me a very pretty card, but a whole bag full of gifts. I started to feel a bit bad that I had been completely unable to think of anything to get for him, instead having to rely on the assistance of his Amazon wishlist I was too busy unwrapping to feel guilty for long though! I was rather perplexed when one of my first presents was a book by John Steinbeck, but it all became clear when I opened my next present and found a copy of the same book.. but in Czech Methinks it will be a very long time indeed before I’m anywhere near good enough to be able to read it, but it will certainly help to give me motivation and I thought it was a really excellent idea. Babel’s right that when I was learning German, one of the things which helped me most reading novels

Not all my presents were so serious. I received the most beautiful set of duck ornaments you ever did see – a bright shiny yellow mommy duck with two cute little baby ducks to swim behind her. There were also two rather enormous, squishy looking packages which when opened revealed two absolutely adorable soft toys. The first was a gigantic duck with a face which instantly reminded me of Orville off the telly. My Orville is yellow rather than green, but nevertheless there’s a distinct likeness there and hence no other name I could give him The other toy was something I have never seen before – a gorgeous white fluffy swan, which is absolutely beautiful to stroke. Never having had a swan toy before, I was initially rather stumped as to what might be an appropriate name, but having given it some thought I have decided upon Cyril. I actually dislike the name Cyril in ordinary circumstances, but in this instance I think it feels quite appropriate. Swans are after all rather posh and aloof

Those weren’t actually my main present! My main present (or at least, what I believed my main present to be at the time!) was the most stunning computer mouse you have ever seen in your life. I have a slightly grotty mouse for my work computer but have been lacking one for my own computer ever since Babel bought it for me at Christmas. I’m not always the best at using the touch keypads, although with practice I have been getting an awful lot better over the past few months, so having a mouse will be a real bonus for those moments were random misclicking is not desired. More than that, this mouse is totally amazing. It’s hard to describe, but it’s sort of transparent and inside it you can see blue water with two little yellow ducks bobbing about. A picture of this and all my other presents will have to follow at some point, but I was out all day today so I’ve forgotten to take one

Things started to take a turn for the worse when the waitress informed me that the tomato pasta I had ordered was coming with mushroom sauce instead, but actually it didn’t taste too bad and any disappointment was more than made up for by the fact that we took the unusual step of treating ourselves to a pudding. I had a highly delicious slice of lemon cake, and it seemed like life couldn’t really get much better Having stolen some spare bread rolls from the salad buffet, we got back into the Moosemobile and set off for Stratford in an attempt to use the remaining hour of daylight to feed the ducks. We just about managed to park and wander to the river before darkness started to fall, although finding some ducks to feed turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated. There were plenty of wildfowl on the water, but a lot of the birds which approached us were Canada Geese, which I have to confess that I utterly detest. In fact I’m a bit scared of them, and there were two in particular which got out of the water and came far closer to me than I was comfortable with Some nice, sweet, harmless sort of ducks did put in an appearance towards the end though, and I had fun throwing them the remnants of my bread

I was just about to suggest we turn back to the town, when Babel announced that he had forgotten one of my presents. After what happened when he said that at Christmas I probably should have twigged that he had a trick up his sleeve, but instead I told him that he’d already given me enough presents and perhaps he should save it for another day. He didn’t seem to want to, and suggested that I close my eyes and he’d give it to me. I wasn’t really very keen on that sort of game, having been highly suspicious of it even as a child, but I just about managed to obey. When I was told I could open my eyes, I initially couldn’t see him… because he appeared to be crouching in the mud Let’s just say I was rather confused! In fact it would be better if Babel wrote this blog post, because to me everything is a blur and I can’t actually remember what happened But the salient point is that he presented me with an absolutely beautiful ring, and we are now engaged

At least, I think we’re engaged; I was so surprised by the proposal that I seemingly forgot to say yes!

But of course I intended to say yes, and I’m so happy now I can’t really describe it! Babel seems to have a very good taste in jewellery, because the ring he’s bought is absolutely perfect for me. I never normally wear any jewellery at all, so he’s managed to find a ring which is really delicate and doesn’t look out of place on my rather small finger. It’s white gold and sparkly, and at some point I promise a picture will follow

My family were if anything even more surprised than me by the news, but all very pleased. My mother was very impressed by the fact that Babel has got himself an engagement ring as well, and my aunt pretty much burst into tears when I told her. The only person who appears not to be thrilled is my little five year old cousin. When my aunt told him the news this morning, he apparently got a bit upset and thought being engaged meant I was going to go away somewhere and would never see him again. He seemed particularly concerned about what was going to happen to my room and all the toys in it!!

So… wow, Babel and I are finally engaged. For me it’s still sinking in, but I’m nevertheless ridiculously happy and I just wish I was going into the office tomorrow to show everyone my ring! Thank you so much Babel – I’m very, very lucky to be with you

I’ve actually had a horrible day of a horrible week. This evening is the closest I’ve ever come to bursting into tears while at work. But despite the fact that I’ve got a tonne of work to be finished before I go to bed, I wanted to write just a short post to mark this momentous occasion. I feel rather proud that no one else has ever managed to put up with going out with Babel for this long Nah, it’s weird because in a way it feels like two years have gone ridiculously fast, and on the other hand, it feels as if I’ve known Babel forever. That is to say, I can’t very easily imagine what it would be like not to have him around. I’ve grown up so much as a person since I first got to know him, and looking back I’m very grateful for all the help and support he’s given me. It would not be a fair assessment to say that the past two years have been plain sailing, and indeed sometimes it seems like rather a miracle that we’re still together at all, but on the whole, and especially the past 12 months, I’ve been very happy.

Babel is someone I feel completely comfortable around, which for me is a big deal because I’m a rather shy and nervous person, and I don’t tend to be open with many people at all. He also has the honour of being the only guy I’ve ever genuinely found attractive, since my tastes normally lie in the opposite direction. I still get excited on days when I know I’m going to be able to see him And the more I’ve got to know him properly, the more I’ve found that we actually do have things in common, whereas originally it seemed like we were complete opposites in every single respect. He does, of course drive me absolutely mad on fairly regular occasions, and there are some areas where we are never going to see eye to eye as long as we live. But I like the fact that we can fall out with each other and then make friends again, and I like the fact that he will tell me when he thinks I’m being out of order. It’s nice to be going out with someone who knows their own mind and is prepared to be forceful, even if that does mean that trying to manipulate them to do what you want is an absolute non-starter

I shan’t sing his praises too highly, because Babel already has quite a big head and if it grows much more it won’t fit in the hat I bought him for Christmas But despite all the difficult family complications I know it’s going to cause me, there’s nothing I want more right now than to be able to move in with him. And to marry him one day too, of course, because I can’t really think of anything else I’d want in a partner. Well, apart from someone who didn’t burp and preferred sex to reading about semi-famous wrestlers, possibly :ninja: Nah, I’m really very happy, and sometimes I still have to pinch myself to remind myself life can seem too good to be true.

There are a lot of things I could compulsively apologise for but time is at a premium tonight, so I just want to say thank you to Babel for being the highlight of the past few years, and for having the pacience to stick around, despite everything. You should already know how much I value our friendship, but I also look up to you a great deal and wish I could be more like you in so many ways. Happy anniversary – if I wasn’t fed up of being called a soppy git I might make the point that I love you

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.

My aunt, uncle and little cousin came round to visit first thing in the morning, which was rather fun. My cousin seemed particularly taken with the hopping bunny rabbit my sister and I had given him, and also the little toy Gromit which my mother had finally managed to track down after an awful lot of searching. My aunt bought me a new photo album which I was very grateful for, because my previous photo album filled up in summer 2006 and I’ve been needing a new one ever since

After a rather hasty lunch, we headed off to visit Nana who lives in a suburb about half a mile’s drive away. My uncle who normally lives in Germany is over for Christmas, so he was there too, which helped with the conversation slightly. Apparently he once lived in Leicester for six years, which I hadn’t realised. I also hadn’t realised that I was related to Elizabeth Gaunt, the last woman to be burned at the stake for treason on account of her involvement in the Rye House Plot. The exact nature of the relationship is uncertain, but she was apparently an ancestor of my father’s paternal grandfather

Babel was coming to bring my presents over in the afternoon, so we were only able to stay an hour before we needed to head back. I was quite intrigued as to what Babel could have bought me, mainly because I couldn’t think of anything I might possibly want, and also because he had been winding me up by pretending to have bought me an ironing board

When he knocked on the door and I opened it, however, I was totally taken aback. He was practically drowning in a sea of neatly wrapped presents; it looked like he was carrying enough for ten different people Rather bemused, I helped him carry them in, and when it later transpired that they were all for me, began to feel mildly embarrassed that I’d only bought him a book and an MP3 player, and not a very expensive MP3 player at that

Babel recommended that I start with a bundle of little presents in a big carrier bag. I opened the first one and was absolutely astonished to find the most beautiful pair of slippers you ever did see. They’re quite hard to describe and one day I will definitely have to take a photo and put it on here, but basically they’re two big bright yellow ducks They’re amazingly cool, though a trifle difficult to walk in, so I think I’m going to designate them as my downstairs slippers so that I don’t have any accidents on the stairs

My second present was also duck-related, and this one will require a photo at a later date too. I’ve never seen anything like it before; an incredibly cute duck hand-puppet which, when you put your hand inside his beak, quacks a verse of Old Macdonald Had A Farm. Totally magical

After that I forget what order most of the presents came in, so I had better just try to list them and hope that I don’t miss anything out. To complete the set I got for my birthday, I got another big collection of Sherlock Holmes dvds which I’m very much looking forward to watching because I’m a big fan of all the stories. I also got a number of very interesting looking books for which I am especially grateful because my parents didn’t buy me any at all. There’s one about the history of imaginary numbers, another about the history of mathematics, and a third which is all about literature. As if all this wasn’t enough, I was given a selection of photo frames with some beautiful pictures in; one gorgeous picture of a duck and her reflection, another delightful photo of tulips (which Babel correctly remembered are one of my favourite flowers!) and an enormous big long photo frame with all kinds of different coloured ducks in it. To top it all off, I got a new memory card for the camera he bought me for my birthday and a rather shiny cycle helmet to stop me killing myself next time I take to a bike.

I was just sitting in a sea of wrapping paper and presents, completely overwhelmed with how many beautiful gifts I’d been given, when Babel started mumbling about having forgotten something and dragged a big box over from the other side of the room. I was surprised that there was yet something else for me to unwrap, and regretful that he’s losing his memory so soon after turning 30 The box seemed rather heavy, and when I eventually succeeded in tearing the paper off, I noticed that whatever my present was Babel had put it inside a laptop box. I couldn’t figure out what it could be at all. I mean, he’d wrapped my cycle helmet up inside the box his wii came in, so I didn’t regard the external appearance as giving any sort of clue at all. I asked him what it was and he just gave me a funny sort of look and didn’t say anything, so I fumbled about with the packaging and inside found a lot of polystyrene and something black and vaguely laptop-shaped. At this point I went from vaguely confused to utterly bewildered, because I couldn’t figure out what on earth it could be. Yes I know what you’re thinking – it was in a laptop box and it looked a bit like a laptop, but it’s very easy to see that with the benefit of hindsight At the time, I had no idea at all. I couldn’t entertain the idea of it being a laptop, because, well, it just couldn’t be a laptop!

Only, it was! That was what later transpired once Babel started taking it out of the box and plugging it in. And it appears to be mine, which is all rather shocking. As Babel proceeded to install antivirus software, I went from utter bewilderment to extreme shellshock and was so completely overwhelmed that I really just wanted to cry. I could still cry now, really. For a start, because Babel has been far too generous; just one or two of the presents he bought me would have been more than enough and even without the laptop, he must have spent much more money than I spent on him and certainly more than any of my relatives spent on me. And as for a laptop, that really is far too generous a present for anyone to give anyone. I honestly wasn’t hinting when I said it was my New Year’s Resolution to buy one, I genuinely intended to get one out of my own money. So it’s actually quite naughty of Babel to have done that, because now I will have to be nice to him forever

The other reason I want to cry is just that it is so utterly breathtaking to think that I now possess a laptop. You probably can’t imagine how totally it is going to revolutionise my life. I mean, since April 2004 I’ve been writing 95% of my email from a mobile phone. I’ve got through several mobile phones since then, and the technology has come a long way, so that I can now do cool things like copy and paste and install a semi-decent web browser, but it’s still nowhere near as fast or convenient as using an actual computer. Over the last couple of months I’ve cheated a bit and circumvented my company’s VPN to use my work laptop a bit, but that’s something I have to be really careful with. There’s a limit to the sites I can go on and I’m not allowed to install a single thing, not so much as an updated version of flash player, never mind the software for my new camera. Having my own computer is something I’ve always dreamed of, but sort of in the same way you dream you’re going to marry someone tall, dark and handsome who likes reading poetry. You know it’s never actually going to happen, and that ultimately you’ll end up living with someone short, fat and ugly who likes watching wrestling and that you’ll just have to make the best of it :ninja: Nah seriously, for so many years I’ve craved the freedom which my own computer would give me without ever seriously believing I’d one day possess such a thing, and now to be presented with one…well, it just seems crazy!

A very big thank you is obviously due to Babel at this point for making my dream a reality. I don’t actually know what to say, but I defy you to find anyone else whose boyfriend is going to have made them happier this Christmas. I love you very much indeed Actually I think you can go to the IS on your own now Babel, because I just want to stay here and play with my new toy. It’s quite frustrating in a way because there is *so* much I want to do with it but we’re going on holiday on Saturday, and then I’m working away for the best part of a month almost certainly without internet access. Grrr!

Christmas Day itself pales in comparison to the excitement of Christmas Eve, but it is only fair to mention that I did get some other presents. My Great Aunt bought me so pyjamas, my sister bought me a prettier photo album than the one my aunt bought me, and my parents bought me a selection of things including a new Craghopper walking fleece, a very nice purple zip-up jumper which I will certainly be bringing on holiday, a 2009 calendar and a pen with my name on it

All in all it was a very pleasant and relaxing day, startling only by the fact that for the first time in living memory the Queen’s speech was broadcast in our home I can’t say how it compares to any of her prior speeches with it being the first one I’ve seen, but I thought the video footage of Charles was quite cute Right now I am a very contented little Radio. Albeit one who still fails to see the point of Christmas pudding.

For various reasons I met up with him last night rather than today, and was able to give him his present(s). His main present, which I had spent an entire blog post agonising about earlier in the year, was a Nintendo Wii. I know as little about Nintendo wiis as I do about carburettors, but it comes in a nice-looking box, and despite the fact that Babel had apparently more or less guessed that that was what he was getting, I think he quite liked it I gave him a few books as well, just in case he didn’t. Two of them he’d bought himself for me to give to him, two were things he’d mentioned that he might be interested in reading, and another two were books I chose at random on the basis that I’d read them from the library years ago and enjoyed them. And of course there was his Economist subscription, which is his official present if my mother asks you

Last night I was trying to work out how much he had changed since when I first got to know him. That shouldn’t actually be too difficult to figure out, but it was complicated by the fact that when I initially got to know him I had an impression of him which as I later got to know him better, I found out wasn’t actually terribly accurate. He’s a lot nicer than I had originally thought But I think he has genuinely changed quite a bit over the past few years, become more mature, which is a good thing. In any case, I love him rather a lot and although we didn’t ultimately achieve our aim of having our own place by his birthday, I hope that’s something which will still happen in the near future

The alarm actually shouldn’t have gone off at six am, but more aptly at twenty past two in the afternoon, which is the time at which we started going out, and shook hands upon the business to officialise it. It never fails to make me laugh, looking back, that we managed to make the proceedings so utterly unromantic, but neither of us actually wanted to go out with the other, both fancying ourselves in love with someone unobtainable, and so I suppose there was a limit to how romantic it was going to get. It would be another fortnight before we attempted to hold hands, three weeks before we went on a date, and over a month before we managed to kiss

Actually, in the interests of strict accuracy, we did try to go on a date two days later, but we failed. That is to say, we made it to outside the cinema, tentatively peered inside, couldn’t see anywhere to buy a ticket, so went home again. With the benefit of hindsight, even I have to admit that that sounds a little ridiculous I can’t quite remember what the thought process was behind not actually *entering* the cinema and having a more thorough look for the box office, which surely can’t have been so completely concealed. All I recall is that my new boyfriend announced the need to do some shopping, at which point I accompanied him to the nearest branch of Tesco and helped carry heavy bags back to his flat, some three miles away. When we eventually got there, he didn’t so much as offer me a glass of water and I was too polite to ask so, being fed up and thirsty, I quickly made an excuse to leave. This kind of set the tone for the relationship

It’s late and I’m tired, so I’m unsure what the moral of this story is supposed to be. Perhaps simply that it is not a good idea to prolong relationships with people you do not love. That may sound rather obvious, but it took me somewhere between three and four years to realise it. At least I did realise it eventually however, otherwise life could be an awful lot more miserable than it is now. Or perhaps the moral is more that everyone would be happier if they were going out with Babel… only you can’t, because I found him first

In other news, I am a little concerned about how much work I may inadvertently have taken on when I offered to correct postal courses for people in Ghana. I’ve just found out there is a class of seventy, who are all intending to send me postal course lesson one in the near future Everybody please pray the guy I was talking to got a little confused with his numbers and actually just meant seventeen…

There are so many different carparks at Rutland Water that it took us a while to find the right one. We were after the one which rents out bicycles, because we were planning on experimenting with a tandem. This is the point at which I have to make a confession: I can’t cycle.

Rutland water

Since then, I have never been on a bicycle and absolutely certain that if I were to sit on one, my only reaction would be to fall off. Whilst Babel does not exactly look like the athletic type, and when I got home my mother later expressed surprise that he was able to cycle, he actually seems quite good at it. Anyway luckily the place at Rutland Water does hire tandems, although I hasten to add not at what one would describe as a cheap price, so we rented one for a couple of hours and Babel figured out an eight mile route which we could do.

When I got onto the tandem my first instinct was in fact to scream! I seemed very high up, and Babel immediately started pedalling rather furiously so that we sped off down a road at a remarkable pace. I tried very hard not to scream out loud, but I felt very unstable like I was going to fall off, and I didn’t think I was going to like this cycling business at all

After about fifteen minutes, however, when we had managed to find the correct cycle track, I was starting to get a bit more used to the fact that I was sitting on something which was moving beyond my control and in a direction I couldn’t see. You kind of have to trust the person who is doing the steering, because the size of Babel’s head meant I couldn’t see whether we were about to hit any pedestrians on the horizon, just notice them to the sides as we whooshed past, seemingly having missed them. I was fortunate in that I knew, however, that Babel was much better at steering than I was likely to be, and so it was that I don’t think we ran anyone over

Rutland Water

Or perhaps it was just Babel doing all the pedalling Nah, I was pedalling except for the times when Babel unexpectedly changed gear and then my feet came off the pedals because they were moving at speeds I didn’t anticipate and it took at while to get them back on again. At one point my shoe laces became caught in a chain sort of thing with the result that one of them is now shredded beyond repair That causes a slight problem because I’m going on holiday tomorrow and the chance of finding a shop which sells shoelaces open on a bank holiday is probably minimal. Luckily not a huge problem though, because at a pinch I can just about still tie the laces up, and I’ll hopefully be spending most of the holiday in walking boots anyway

I must just say what a beautiful place Rutland Water actually is. There are a couple of photos included here which Babel miraculously managed to take whilst riding the bike, and they hopefully give some indication of what a gorgeous location it is. It doesn’t look like it ought to be in England, it’s so attractive, and it really is a very large lake. We sat and contemplated it for a while whilst we ate lunch and Babel drank a very strange sort of pear cider, and then later as we were cycling we had a very scenic view as we went across a sort of dam.

Having cycled so far, we stopped for a rest and Babel was generous enough to treat me to an icecream. In what was meant to be a helpful move, he removed the wrapper from my Feast and put it in the bin, but with retrospect this turned out to have been a mistake as he had erroneously attributed the same icecream-eating skill to me as he himself possesses I was doing fine until I got to the halfway mark, at which point I became confused about the best manner in which to proceed without making a terrible mess. Before long more of my icecream was dripping itself over the table than was actually making its way into my mouth, so I was going to call it a day and put it in the bin, except Babel kindly volunteered to finish it for me, and somehow managed to eat the entire second half in about three mouthfuls and without spilling anything on the picnic bench at all!

All that now remained was to cycle back the way we had come, and second time around it seemed much less scary. It was really quite exhilarating to be on a bike and going so fast, and it’s certainly inspired me to want to learn to cycle for myself, although I’m still not sure I’d be terribly good at it. By the end my legs did temporarily feel a little wobbly but they were fine within a few minutes and the only thing which feels slightly sore this morning is my bottom I hope Babel is okay as he then had to drive all the way from Rutland Water to Birmingham and back to Leicester again, which must have been kind of exhausting in itself.

Soppy picture

Personally, I think that unless one person is deliberately trying to conceal their personality, you can get to know someone online just as well, if not better, than you can elsewhere. Of course there are personality traits which can only be conveyed in real life, and it is undoubtedly easier to fall out with a person on the internet because it is so much easier to read offence into a throwaway comment when you can’t see the expression on the other person’s face. But the flipside of the coin is that, at least for chronically shy people like me, it is far easier to tell express your thoughts and secrets in writing to someone who is not trying to look you in the eye. Everything is less embarrassing on paper.

I know that there is no way Babel and I would ever have become friends, never mind getting together, if we hadn’t gotten to know each other online. He’s not the sort of person I would ever have had the courage to approach, and I’m the sort of person who would have passed entirely under his radar. Had we randomly bumped into one another and started speaking, I don’t think that we would have hit it off, I think I would just have been scared and run away.

For shy people, the internet is a great invention. But the internet can of course only go so far, and if you do meet nice people online, it’s perhaps a good idea to try to meet them in real life too. That can be slightly traumatic, admittedly. Two years ago yesterday I was absolutely petrified about meeting Babel, so much so that I nearly stayed on the train as far as Melton Mowbray so that I could avoid him standing on the platform at Leicester.

That was back in the old days, when August was hot and sunny and Babel wasn’t so old he’d grown a moustache I’d been sent to Leicester for a day with work, and he volunteered to meet me at the station and help me find the client. Pretty much as soon as I met him, he was a bastard, saying something to embarrass me and make me drop my file case I don’t think he was any different in real life to how I had expected from the internet though, except that he was better looking. I hadn’t had him down as attractive before we met, having seen only a couple of appalling photographs on the net, but later that evening when we met up for a drink after work, it occurred to me that he might indeed have the potential to be attractive, in a masculine sort of way

Sadly, the fact that I got off the train in Leicester that day means not only that my life has been blighted forever, but also that I have never been to Melton Mowbray. I think that Babel will have to take me there sometime to compensate Someone asked me the other day whether the pair of us had got together because of JEB/Esperanto. The comment surprised me in a way, because I don’t tend to think about it like that. We did technically meet each other through JEB and hence Esperanto, yes. But nice as Esperanto is and all that, it seems so totally irrelevant to our relationship that it would never even occur to me to think about it like that. We got together as a result of a bizarre chain of events, most of which I wouldn’t, however, like to publish on my blog. So perhaps going forward, I will actually answer the question, “How did you guys get together?” by saying, “We were both members of an Esperanto club”, thus avoiding the strange social stigma which seems to be attached to meeting a partner online. Whenever I say I met my boyfriend on the internet, I kind of feel like people take two steps back from me and narrowly surpress an urge to cross themselves. My overreactive imagination, perhaps, but it does seem to be regarded as a generally negative thing, which is a shame. Because to answer my sister’s question, there is no reason why a relationship between two people who met on the internet will not work out simply because they met on the internet

As it happened, I woke up on Valentine’s Day with a cold. I was gutted, totally unable to believe the tragic misfortune which had befallen me. We still went to the cinema and ate pizza but my boyfriend requested that I not kiss him so that he didn’t contract it to, and so the day didn’t turn out quite how I had hoped. As it happened, at this point I believed I was in love with someone who wasn’t my boyfriend at all. But he lived in a different country which complicated matters somewhat, and my actual boyfriend wrote such a nice message in my card that I decided perhaps it was time to start wanting what I had rather than having what I wanted, and give up the other guy.

Two days after Valentine’s Day I thus told my illicit love interest that it was over, I had found someone else. That was quite a momentous day in my life. I still remember it now, sitting in the physics computer laboratory on a wet Monday afternoon, typing and retyping this email, hesitating over to whether to press send, knowing there was no way back if I did. I took a deep breath, submitted it, then spent several hours walking briskly round the university ring road in the pouring rain, trying to walk the emotions out of my system.

The response I got was peculiarly heartbroken and incoherent. I hadn’t known he’d cared. He informed me that he had written a letter to me and put it in the post, and that when it arrived I should instantly put the first six pages in the wastepaper basket. Two days after that it arrived and I couldn’t help but read the first six pages. He had announced he was coming to England for a year so we could be together.

The irony was really quite amusing, in a black sort of way. I had spent months and months trying to get some sort of commitment out of this guy, some sort of admission that he cared about me enough for it to be worth me messing up my life for his sake, and I finally got it a week after I had given up on him. I was tempted to tell everyone it had all been a mistake, to dump my English boyfriend and live happily ever after with my foreign one. I didn’t, because I had given the English guy my word and I felt it would be morally wrong to go back on that. I’m glad now that that was the decision I took; I think I had a lucky escape. But for years and years afterwards, I bitterly regretted it

Foreign Guy didn’t speak to me for the next four months. When he finally made contact we had a bizarre argument which started with our interpretation of the sentence “Die Frauen begehen ihre Dummheiten, wenn sie sehr ungluecklich sind” and ended with a quotation from Goethe, “Meine Ruh’ ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer. Ich find’ sie nimmer und nimmer mehr. Mein armer Sinn ist mir verrueckt, mein armer Kopf ist mir zerstueckt”. An argument which, in essence, was about everything except the actual issue between us. The issue hung between us in a threatening manner and occasionally toyed with exploding, but neither of us dared to touch on it.

The next Valentine’s Day, which I believe was 2004, surpassed even that one in weirdness. My attempts to fall out of love with Foreign Guy had been somewhat unsuccessful and I was going through an unhealthy period of hankering over what might have been. Goodness knows how I came upon such a bizarre idea, but I decided to send him an anonymous card. I guess I figured that there was no harm done, that it wasn’t a betrayal of my boyfriend if it was anonymous. The practical difficulties involved in this were, however, immense. I was pretty sure I was the only acquaintance he possessed in the UK, and so a British postmark on the envelope was going to give the game away. So, I decided it would have to be an e-card and set about constructing myself an anonymous email address.

The day came and the card was sent. I logged into my new account to see if I had received the automatic notification which would indicate that it had been received, and discovered that I had not only that, but also an email from the guy himself.

Wer bist du?

A normal, sane and rational person would not have answered that question. I am not a normal, sane or rational person.

Ich bin jemand, der dir eine Karte senden wollte, dir aber keine Karte senden sollte

I thought that was quite a clever response. But he replied to that, and I couldn’t resist replying again in a mysterious sort of way, and so it was that a couple of days later I was sitting in a Java lesson, anonymously flirting with him in cyberspace. What can I say? It was exhilaratingly fun, those were a few of the most enjoyable days of my life. He had no idea who I was, in fact he believed I was a German girl, and the experience was quite liberating. We were laughing and joking with each other in a way which we had never been able to before; he treated me quite differently when he didn’t know who I was.

And then… he found out Things started to a get a bit out of control when he suggested I call him. Obviously I had to decline. He had actually decided that I was an Esperantist and asked me to speak to him in Esperanto. That was a bit of a problem for me. I managed a feeble, “Ne, la germana lingvo estas pli bela”, but that was as far as it went. I had been concerned that my German language skills were going to let me down. I had only been learning for a couple of years after all, and so it was a bit of a tall order to try and imitate a native. In the end it wasn’t my grammar which did for me though, not even my vocab. It was my umlauts or, more precisely, my lack thereof

Things could have been quite different had I had a proper grasp of Character Map. At this stage in my life, however, I was yet to make its acquaintance, and seeing as the only computers at university to which I had access belonged to the Physics department and thus did not possess Microsoft Word or any similar word-processing package, I was incapable of inserting special characters. I was therefore reduced to writing my umlauts thus: ae, oe, ue. No self-respecting German in possession of a German computer keyboard would do such a thing, and so it was that I was sprung :cry:

Much to my surprise, however, Foreign Guy was not particular horrified and did something which he had never successfully managed before; admitted that he was in love with me We were both so surprised by this situation that the implications took a while to sink in, but once it had we came to the conclusion that the way forward was to elope. I explained this to my boyfriend, who took it much better than a boyfriend should, and asked if there was any way he could help. Things went well for a week or so but by mid-March the cracks in the idea were beginning to show. Foreign Guy was trying to push me too fast in directions I wasn’t comfortable with going in. This led to a massive argument about my family and what he always termed my “way of life” which was in some indefinable way inferior to his way of life, and the upshot was that he went to an Esperanto meeting in Italy over Easter and came back with a girlfriend.

That was the end of me

Actually it was the best possible thing that could have happened. Whilst I may not have the moral scruples necessary to prevent myself cheating on my own boyfriend, I at least have sufficient not to cheat with anybody else’s and so it was that at long last I managed to get over somebody who I didn’t know properly in the first place and who would have been a complete disaster for me

Deciding to continue trying to work things out with my actual boyfriend (with whom, before you say anything, I had gotten together on the understanding that we were both in love with other people and it was a temporary arrangement for the sake of convenience), I made it to my third Valentine’s Day which has definitely gone down in history as my happiest of all time. I went back to his flat for a meal and some free internet access, and then we exchanged cards. I’d written him a poem, which I know longer have a copy of so I can’t pass judgment as to how sick-making it was, and then suddenly he left the room and reappeared with a bunch of red roses. Wow

They were the most beautiful red rose you can imagine. I mean, my Dad buys them for my Mom every year, but when we put our vases side by side, mine were far superior. They were an amazingly dark shade of red; just perfect. And they lasted for over a week I was deliriously happy that day! I got my sister to take some photographs of them before they died and I’ve still got the resulting pictures, in a notebook which lives next to my bed. I take them out and look at them to cheer me up when I’m depressed I figured I’d better keep a memento because that was only the second time I’d ever been bought flowers, the first being when I was ten, and no one might ever buy me flowers again. Or at least, not until I was dead, at which point I might not be in a proper state to appreciate them fully. It always strikes me as rather pointless to buy flowers for the dead. It is so much nicer to receive flowers when you are still alive

In fact those remain the only flowers I have ever had, with the exception of another bunch from the same guy the subsequent year. We had, however, already split up at this point, and so they didn’t have quite the same impact. 2006 – that was a Valentine’s Day I tried to ignore on the grounds of being pretty much single again. And then, 2007 and I’d managed to ensnare another boyfriend He came to have lunch with me which was rather nice, or at least would have been had we not gone for a Chinese I struggle to see the attraction to Chinese food. I was hoping I could just get away with eating a bowl of dry rice, but they put lettuce through it which substantially spoiled the experience. Still, I was so in love at this point that I don’t think I actually cared

I had Valentine’s Day two days early this year, because my now no longer quite so new boyfriend is working on Thursday evening, hence this post. We went to Walkabout in Birmingham which is quite nice bar where we used to go when we first started going out. Or possibly, before we first started going out :unsure: They do terribly nice burgers there; my boyfriend is rather partial to Springbok and I’ve discovered that the chicken schnitzel is highly tasty, but unfortunately they seem to have altered their chip supplier over the past few months and the new product is scarcely edible

I got several lovely presents; a device for recharging batteries via a USB socket, some tiny rubber ducks and a bookmark with useful phrases of French on it, all very nicely wrapped in shiny gold paper. I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t bothered to wrap his presents I did write a big long message in his card, however, to compensate for last year when I apparently wrote a joke. I refuse to believe that I would possibly have written a joke in someone’s Valentine’s card, but cannot actually remember and my boyfriend has so far declined to present the offending item as evidence, so I am only taking his word for it!

Not the most dramatic of Valentine’s Days in comparison to some of my prior year escapades, but certainly a nice one Hopefully next year’s will not involve going out anywhere at all, as by then we will (fingers crossed!) have our own place. It seems a strange thought, trying to imagine that, but a very happy one; there can be few things happier than acquiring a house with someone you love Whatever love means; that is, of course, the famous quote from Prince Charles, which personally I think was quite profound and didn’t at all deserve all the hoo-hah people have made about it. Tis a difficult question, but perhaps love just means wanting to be in the same place as someone who actually drives you mad

And what a year it has been!  Some days I feel it has been the best year of my life, other days I feel it has been the worst, and perhaps ultimately all I can conclude with surety is that it has been the strangest.  It has been a year of firsts for me.  The first time I have been abroad on my own, the first time I have called in sick to work for dubious reasons, the first time I have drunk five glasses of wine in one evening.  It was the first time I have been in charge of a company audit, and the first time I have ever eaten a kebab.  It has been a year when I have done the craziest things, and there have been points throughout it, perhaps whilst wandering round the back streets of Düsseldorf in the dead of night without anybody knowing where I was, or sitting in a pub in Essex and maintaining a conversation about wedding planners with a colleague whilst pretending the guy sitting a few tables away was a complete stranger as opposed to someone I had secreted in my room, when I have stopped for a moment and thought, “How the bloody hell did I end up doing this?!”.

It has been a year which has in some ways been dominated by the start of a new relationship.  A relationship so special to me that every morning I wake up and am amazed that it exists.  Even eleven months on, I haven’t quite succeeded in believing that this isn’t all some life-like dream which could burst at any minute if I pinch myself too hard.  It is very far removed from a fairytale romance, and perhaps to other people it would not make a terribly impressive story at all, but to me it still seems too good to be true.  Despite all the superficial wrongness which might seem apparent to the casual observer, to me it feels incredibly right.  With my previous boyfriend, the idea of settling down was something which made me feel sick and trapped, an ordeal which I was constantly steeling myself to go through with.  With this boyfriend, however, it feels so unexpectedly natural that I can almost begin to understand why people want to buy houses, get married, have children.

It has been a year in which I have learnt a lot, both about myself and about the world.  I have learnt that to be more positive about my own capabilities.  I have learnt that if you want something badly enough, you should never let dignity prevent you from fighting for it as hard as you can, and not give up unless you are certain that there is nothing else you can physically do.  Less profoundly, I have learnt how to decline French regular verbs in the present tense

It has been a year in which I have become far more confident than I could ever have imagined.  I still lag far behind other people in the confidence stakes, of course, but by my own personal standards I have improved tremendously, and it is really quite a rare thing now for me to be visibly shaking through fear.  I have learnt to defend myself just a little bit more when people are criticising me for things I don’t consider myself to be guilty of.  Learning to believe in myself is something which it will take more than twelve months to accomplish, but I think I have made significant progress recently.  I have learnt to accept that even if I can’t quite believe something is real, can’t fathom why someone as wonderful as my boyfriend would want to be going out with me or something similar, if that thing appears real then it is real until there is substantial evidence to the contrary.  I have learnt not to assume the worse, that people do not necessarily have to be drunk to say the things they mean or mean the things they say and, more importantly, that refusing to believe in reality is the surest way to bring about the cessation in the existence of the said reality.  I have learnt that life does not have to be regarded as a mathematical proposition, in which it is not possible to trust without a comprehensive proof, and that it is perhaps better to approach life like a physicist, who bases his decisions on circumstances which he does not understand the reasons for, without finding that fact concerning.

These are not things which I have learned as quickly as I probably should have done, but I am getting there in the end, and hopefully that is the main thing.  Some of it, in fact, only came to me relatively recently.  Looking through conversations which had taken place pretty much this time last year, it struck me with some force quite how much has changed in twelve months and suddenly I felt rather silly, nay incredibly silly, for some of the things I had been thinking and worrying about, and for the shadowy doubts, both expressed and unexpressed, which I had been harbouring somewhere in my hidden depths.

For those, if Babel is reading this (and I suspect he will because he’s a nosy bugger  ) and various other episodes of the last twelve months which can be read between these lines, I apologise.  My hope for the next twelve months is that they will run a bit smoother.  To a certain extent that depends on circumstances outside of my control, but as far as the circumstances inside my control go, there are a lot of failings which I have been guilty of during 2007 which I hope not to be so guilty of in 2008.  I am a much more secure, independent and confident person than I was twelve months ago, and I don’t think there is much doubt what I have to thank for that.

It might be overambitious to say this was the year in which I grew up, but I hope it is the year in which I have started.

I now have no fewer than nine new books to read (none of which, I rejoice to say, are by Thomas Mann!) and two new DVDs to watch (one in Esperanto, one in German). I also have a new handbag (well, when I say new I confess that it will be the first handbag-type-accessory I have owned in my life), a much-needed new pair of slippers, and a whole host of things I didn’t need at all but which are nevertheless incredibly welcome, especially when of the edible variety.

For me, the present which made me happiest was one which I actually received prior to the official day itself, in the Christmas card my boyfriend gave to me. Despite the fact that we have now been going out for just over eleven months, the only photos I had either of him or of us together were ones I had saved on my phone, and so he got a couple printed out for me.

One is probably my favourite photo ever; the pair of us sitting by the side of the river in Toulouse when we were on holiday there in September. We had actually split up a fortnight or so prior to the holiday and at the point the photo was taken the future was still very much hanging in the balance, so in some ways for me it is a very poignant photo, reminding me as it does of how I was feeling inside at the time. It is, however, overwhelmingly a photo of great happiness. I confess that I have it permanently set as the wallpaper on one of my phones so that I can sit and think soppy thoughts over it whenever I feel depressed or in pain My boyfriend’s amputated head looks soooo terribly cute in it, and sometimes thinking about him can give me more strength to get through the day than just a couple of painkillers.

I would love nothing more than to frame it and put it in a prominent place in my room, so as to increase the chances of me randomly catching glimpses of it and getting filled with warm gooey feelings, but there is a slight technical hitch. Namely, that for reasons I don’t care to explain, it is terribly important that certain other people think I was in Düsseldorf that week. Since the photo was thoughtfully left undated by my boyfriend this would not cause a problem, were it not for the fact that on those slightly crazed occasions when I am leading a double life, I make a habit of packing clothes I don’t normally wear as part of my complex suspicion-deflecting procedures. It so happens that the photo depicts me wearing a T-shirt which the crucial people in question might know I have not left the house wearing over the entire course of the summer. This is a rather minor problem and one which a bit of ingenuity will easily be able to explain away; I do indeed intend to explain it away and frame it in the very near future, but right now I’m not feeling well and on head-muddling medication which means I don’t feel equal to much ingenuity, and am loathe to suddenly produce the photo for fear of somehow messing up my explanation and a whole lot more besides. For now then, I’m just keeping it in a drawer next to my bed, where it is still easily accessible for me to turn to mush over should the urge to do so become particularly strong.

If, incidentally, that small example of the unnecessary complications which I have somehow accidentally introduced into my life shocks and confuses you, I would steer well clear of this blog When I coined the tagline “with a life that’s stranger than fiction”, that was really only a fraction of what was meant…

Luckily, my boyfriend was kind enough to give me a second photo, which shows him looking wonderfully attractive and moody at the World Scout Jamboree in July. I’ve framed this one immediately in a silver frame which my great aunt gave me for my twenty-first birthday, and now have it sitting in pride of place on my window ledge where I can drool over it to my heart’s content. Also, where it can make my mother jump when she comes into my room to close the curtains

Interestingly, this is the first year ever that no one has bought me a diary. I am normally an enthusiastic diary-keeper, albeit one who lacks a certain discipline, so that I have certainly started keeping a daily diary every year since I was ten, but sometimes tailed off by the time I got to summer. Last year my diary keeping was shamefully spasmodic, which is quite regrettable considering it was arguably the most incident-filled year of my life. The problem, I suppose, with diaries is that when you don’t have a life you have plenty of time to write them, just nothing of interest to say. Then as soon as you start to acquire a life, you begin to have fascinating occurrences to populate it with, but a distinct lack of time to commit them to paper.

I am in two minds as to whether to go out shopping and pick up a diary in the January sales. On the one hand, there is a certain amount of excitement to be had from purchasing a brand new diary and sitting flicking through the empty pages, speculating on what you will fill them with. On the other hand, do I need a paper diary when I have at my disposal such a wonderful website on which to keep a blog? There are some things, perhaps many things, which are not suitable for discussion online and I certainly have no intention of letting this blog degenerate to the level of depression and self-indulgence which my other attempts appear to have done. But perhaps there is an argument for the case that if a thought is not suitable for inclusion here, it is a thought which should not be recorded anywhere at all.

In any case, Christmas 2007 was greatly enjoyable and marred only by a lower than anticipated turnout at ten thirty Mass on Christmas morning. Do the rows of empty benches in a church which in my own lifetime it has had standing room only for late arrivals herald the decline of the Catholic Church in England? Perhaps, but I console myself with the knowledge that it is quality not quantity, and since the esteemed Tony Blair finally outed himself as a Catholic last week, we are most certainly no longer lacking in the former :ninja: