Ever since I accidentally discovered this in Leicester with Babel, I have had to keep going back to feed my habit. There is a very nice branch of Caffe Nero between the Bull Ring and the Pallasades in Birmingham. It’s never too busy to get a seat, and there’s the advantage that they have wifi too if you want to sit there for a while. The staff are always pleasant, and for the past month or so it’s become a habit of mine to drop in a couple of times a week for a coffee. Well, it depends how bad the week is, really. I’ve been working in the office for the vast majority of the summer, and the disadvantage of that is the lack of caffeine. I’m not stable enough to carry a tray of drinks through our security door system, and because the people I work with are so petty, I daren’t accept a drink off anyone unless I’m able to make a round myself every day. But sometimes I really do crave caffeine, particularly when I’m depressed and fed up, and so it’s quite nice to pop out at lunch time and get a quick fix. Admittedly this goes against my resolutions of saving money and losing weight, but hey…

On particularly weak days, I even go so far as to be tempted by one of their rather nice sandwiches. There’s a very nice spicy meatball panini, and a gorgeous ham and mozzarella one which is fractionally cheaper. Yesterday I was a bit upset because I was expecting to go home to bad news, so I decided to go treat myself to such a panini at lunch. Caffe Nero was a bit busy when I went in, but nevertheless I was served in reasonable time and returned to the office suitably refreshed

What my excuse was today I’m not sure, but at lunch time I gravitated towards Caffe Nero once again. I was initially just going to have a coffee, but then the sandwiches sort of called out to me, and before I knew it I was standing at the till with panini in hand Anyways, the guy heated it up for me and then when I was getting ready to pay he said, “The drink’s free today because I overcharged you yesterday”.

I was a bit perplexed and had to ask him to repeat, which he duly did. It seems I’d had a ham sandwich yesterday but he’d charged me for a meatball one, which was 20p more. I said I hadn’t noticed, but apparently he’d realised afterwards and so made a mental note to make it up next time I came in.

I was very pleasantly surprised to encounter such honesty As I said, I hadn’t noticed I’d been overcharged at all, and it genuinely was only a question of a few pence, so I was unlikely to have complained about it even if I had. I was kind of amazed that the guy would actually remember and admit that he owed me next time I came in, and of course, the only thing better than drinking a Frappe Latte is drinking a free Frappe Latte

As a result of this experience, and a similar experience of excellent service which Babel blogged about recently, I have come to the conclusion that Caffe Nero must give their staff personality tests before they employ them to make sure they are nice people They are certainly a cut above the other coffee shop staff in Birmingham - the people in Starbucks are downright unpleasant, and last time I went to Costas the staff seemed unwilling to communicate in anything other than Polish. Definitely my coffee shop of choice

Babel didn’t admittedly get off to a great start, by arriving thirty minutes late, reeking of cigarette smoke, and proceeding to tell a story of how he was offered a shag the previous night, but I managed to successfully navigate us to Stratford without getting lost, and by the time I was sitting in a pub by the river with an enormous burger and a glass of red wine, life seemed a lot less stressful I’ve decided I quite like red wine, and the burger was really rather delicious.

The rain was still holding off, so we went for a stroll by the side of the river. Stratford is actually a bit of a mess this year, as they’re doing building work on the theatre and half of the gardens appear to have been dug up, but the far bank of the river is untouched, and there’s a pleasant little footpath which leads from the park through various fields and woodland for miles and miles. We followed it for a little way, pausing for a while to look at a herd of cattle which looked quite cute from behind barbed wire, though would have been less so had we been sharing a field, and when it did temporarily start raining we were able to sit on a bench under a convenient tree Babel took the opportunity to wind me up incredibly, but whilst I may not have appreciated it at the time, I reluctantly admit that I kinda did later on

Once you’ve walked along the river for about a mile, you have two options. You can continue across the fields in the direction of Long Marston, or you can pass through a little gate and climb up a bridge onto a cycle track. We didn’t have time to venture as far as Long Marston because I’d only had enough small change for four hours parking, and so we had a leisurely walk back into Stratford along the cycle track

Whilst Babel discovered no fewer than two branches of The Works, I discovered that Stratford has a branch of my favourite coffee house, Caffe Nero Having fed my caffeine addiction with a Frappe Latte (if you haven’t tried one, you haven’t lived) I felt sufficiently generous to let him feed his book addiction in The Works, and he soon emerged with a very heavy and boring-looking volume on the history of the world, or some such

I got home pretty early, which gave my parents a bit of a surprise, but Babel had to go and visit another friend, and anyway we’d definitely had the best of the day’s weather It was a nice relaxing day - it makes such a difference to weekends Babel both having a car and not having to work Sunday was actually okay too - my little cousin came to visit in the morning, and in the afternoon I interspersed progress with La Lada Tambureto with surfing the net for career ideas. I didn’t find anything terribly interesting for myself, but I did accidentally find that the job Babel was waiting for to come online now has, and hopefully by the time I’ve posted this he’ll have submitted his phd application, and things will be starting to work out

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you love.
4. Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5. Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

So, erm I think I’ve got that right. The one’s I’ve read are bold and total around forty, which I feel is respectable The ones I love are bold and underlined; for the category “love” I used the criteria that I must have read them multiple times and be prepared to sit and read them again today were it not for the fact that I’ve arranged to meet Babel. There are about 15 I love, and this has been an interesting process because having always naively assumed the html for underline would be ul, I have now (after a painful 10 minutes) established that it is style=”text-decoration: underline;”. The ones I have always hoped to read but never got round to are italic, and the ones I never hope to read are crossed out. They’re mainly Harry Potter, Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Wilson. I thought the latter was immature when I was ten, so feel I am unlikely to enjoy her more now. I read one Pratchett as a child and hated it, and as for Harry Potter… well, call me contrary, but I’m of the opinion that something everyone likes can’t be that good

Also, I wanted a distraction because I have mislaid a French death certificate. I cannot for the life of me think what I have done with it If you saw my desk right now, you would actually struggle to see me, because I am being swallowed up by growing mountains of paper. I only have five files on the desk, which is by no means excessive, but my client has sent through printed information which is equivalent to several packets of printer paper and it’s just sort of swamping me. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I swear that yesterday I came across a French death certificate and an Italian death certificate. Now, I know they were there because I looked at them quite particularly to make sure they were death certificates, and because there were a couple of details I was initially unsure of, I contemplated whether it would be unethical to scan them in an send a copy to Babel for him to help me out. I didn’t reference them up and put them on file, however, because at that point in time I wasn’t auditing death benefits. And now that I am auditing death benefits, they have disappeared so completely that I would be tempted to believe they never existed, were it not for the fact that that would mean I had been hallucinating about foreign death certificates… Having been through all the paper on my desk once this morning, I am starting to get a little stressed about it, so the idea is that if I spend ten minutes doing something else I will calm down and then hopefully remember what I’ve done with them. So, erm, how straight am I?!

This was the first quiz, the one which I took before:

Klein Sexual Orientation Grid

I scored an average of 3.62

Meaning

This result can also be related to the Kinsey Scale:


0 = exclusively heterosexual
1 = predominantly heterosexual, incidentally homosexual
2 = predominantly heterosexual, but more
than incidentally homosexual
3 = equally heterosexual and homosexual
4 = predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally
heterosexual
5 = predominantly homosexual, incidentally heterosexual
6 = exclusively homosexual

According the website:

Summary

The idea of this excercise is to understand exactly how dynamic a person’s sexual orientation can be, as well as how fluid it can be over a person’s lifespan. While a person’s number of actual homo/heterosexual encounters may be easy to categorize, their actual orientation may be completely different. Simple labels like “homosexual”, “heterosexual”, and “bisexual” need not be the only three options available to us.

You can take the quiz yourself here

There’s also another quiz available to take on the website:

The Multidimensional Scale of Sexuality

According to my answers, it is likely that I identify as
Homosexual with some heterosexuality.

Complete set of results

According to the website:

Information

The Multidimensional Scale of Sexuality was devised by Larry Kurdek, B. Berkey and T. Perelman-Hall. It is an extension of the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, recognising that sexual identities can change over time, people can identify with more than one sexual identity, and that asexuality is a valid sexual identity. The Multidimensional Scale of Sexuality was published in the “Journal of Homosexuality” in 1990.

You can take the quiz yourself
here. It’s fairly straightforward, you just have to read through a list of (rather similar but subtly different) statements, and tick any of those which apply to you. I have to say that I did it twice, because the first time I forgot to copy the code for my blog, and I think both times I got slightly different scores, but on the whole, I’d say it’s fairly accurate

Ah, there’s nothing like pointless quizzes to de-stress! And I’ve just had a brainwave about where my death certificates might be…

**Pause whilst rummages in paper**

…yep, I’ve got them :) Only one slight problem, now that I look at them more closely; the French certificate is in the wrong name. It’s obviously going to be one of those days

Of course, it didn’t The novel tells the story of an elderly Australian lady, who on her 21st birthday discovers that the people she has thought of as her parents are not, in fact, her parents. At the age of 5, she was taken from her English home and placed on a ship to Australia by a mysterious lady who she knew only as “The Authoress”. The Authoress told her to hide in a dark part of the ship and indicated that she would be back later to fetch her, but she never reappeared and the little girl arrived in Australia several weeks later with nothing except a small suitcase containing a book of illustrated fairy tales. She was found by a kindly worker at the port whose wife was having problems conceiving, and he took her home with him and brought her up as his own daughter.

This happened at the turn of the century, and many years later the now elderly Nell decides to travel to Britain to try to uncover her past. She traces her ancestors to a particular stately home in Cornwall and is so taken with the area that she purchases a cottage on the estate with the intention of moving there permanently. When she returns to Australia on a brief visit to sort out her affairs, however, she is confronted by her wayward daughter who dumps her grandchild Cassandra in her care and runs off with her latest lover.

Nell decides to do her duty and be a parent to Cassandra, and the first the girl knows of her grandmother’s past is in 2005 when the old lady dies and Cassandra is left the cottage in her will. Having lived through some fairly troubled times of her own recently, Cassandra travels to England also and attempts to decipher her grandmother’s past. She knows that there is some sort of dreadful secret associated with the cottage, but no one seems prepared to tell her what. She is fairly confident that she has found out the identity of Nell’s parents, even if she cannot understand why the Authoress, a family friend, would have kidnapped her. But all is not as it seems, and when Cassandra finally uncovers the true identity of Nell’s mother, the whole mystery begins to unravel.

This was a pleasant book, which was fun to read It didn’t grab me quite as much as ‘The House at Riverton’ did, though I’m not sure I can explain why. I didn’t identify with the characters as much, I guess, and despite the fact that parts of this book are undoubtedly sad, it failed to reduce me to tears so I can’t categorise it as being quite in the same league. It was easy to read though, and I certainly finished it in record time; it took the entire week, but given that I read for at most an hour a day and that there were well over 400 pages, that seems pretty quick At times it was a little confusing, because the action kept switching between different periods and locations, but on the whole I managed to keep up and it all contributed to building the suspense. Unfortunately I think I saw the final twist a couple of chapters before I was supposed to have seen it, which probably ruined the effect slightly, but all in all I would say that it is an excellent book which I would thoroughly recommend

I’m not talking about insults. Rather, people who through either personality defects or sheer laziness insist on firing off a dozen one-line emails to you every day, despite the fact you are actually sitting in the same room.

There is one manager in my office who completely lacks communication skills of any sort. Unfortunately I end up working for her on pension scheme audits reasonably often, and instead of coming to speak to me and tell me what she would like me to do, she emails me with instructions, regardless of the fact that I may even be sitting next to her at the time. This creates a problem for me, because I have been told off in my appraisal for communicating with managers via email, but I feel I have to cover my own back by responding in an email also. If I don’t, I leave myself in a dangerous situation where she has a written record that she asked me to do something and I have no written record of the fact that I told her I’d done it, or hadn’t done it because there was some sort of problem.

After my annual appraisal, I decided to be brave and approached her at the end of the day to give her an update on my progress. I was ever so polite, apologised for interrupting her and said I just wanted to tell her where I was up to as I was going to be out of the office for three weeks now. How did she respond?!

Can’t you see I’m busy at the moment? Go away and come back later.

I’m fairly used to receiving one-line emails from this woman. “Have you finished the X Pension Scheme accounts? eom”. “Can you call Mr Y and Z&Co about the investment letter eom”, “I can’t find the XYZ file on my desk - can you go and look for it in the tax department” - those are a handful of the 26 emails she sent me last week. Bear in mind that I wasn’t working for her last week, I was working for an entirely different manager, and I was only helping her out to be polite.

Anyhow, a few weeks ago I compiled a set of accounts for one of her clients. Two days later she texts me during my evening and asks if they’re finished. When I text back to say they are, she tells me to mail them to the client tomorrow. I point out that she might like to review them before I send them to the client, in case I’ve made any mistakes. She obviously can’t be arsed to review them, and tells me to send them unchecked. Okay, well that’s against Firm policy, but whatever. I send them to the client, but both he and I are about to go on holiday so nothing happens about it until yesterday, when he calls me with an adjustment he’d like putting through.

Now this adjustment relates to a debtor for unpaid share capital which I’ve put in his balance sheet. I know nothing about it at all, but it was a debtor in his balance sheet last year, and having compiled the financial statements directly from his bank statements myself, I’m perfectly certain that it hasn’t been paid during the last twelve months. It turns out, however, that the debt was actually paid in March 2005, and showing it as a debtor in last year’s financial statements was utterly wrong. Oh dear. Luckily those accounts were nothing to do with me…

The point is, now we know that it’s wrong, it needs to be corrected, but I’m not entirely sure how. I could credit the debtor and make a random debit to this year’s profit and loss account, but I’m not entirely sure what to call it. Does this qualify as a prior year adjustment under UK GAAP, and if so do I actually need to go back and restate the prior year figures instead? If I do that, I need to insert a prior year adjustment note in the accounting policies, but the wording of that is not something I can compose on my own. In other words, I need the advice of the manager on how to proceed. It isn’t my role to take that kind of decision.

The manager wasn’t in the office on Monday, so I tried calling her. She didn’t pick up, so I emailed her the query. Two hours later I received the following.

I’m too busy to deal with this at the moment. Tell the client he’ll have to wait.

And when I say I received that, I mean it was the whole email. There was no “Hi Clare” at the start or “regards” at the end. Just two sentences requesting that I tell a client whose accounts she had got wrong that she was too busy to sort it out for him. Right.

I was a little annoyed about it because the client is a really nice guy, but the email I received from this woman this morning takes the biscuit.

I’ve been trying to chase an insurance company for nearly two months now to obtain a valuation of some policies one of our schemes holds with them. Every time they send me a valuation I end up with a totally different figure, and it’s all very frustrating. It’s an incredibly difficult company to deal with, because their policy means they won’t give you a name or a direct dial, and to speak to anyone at all, you have to answer a whole raft on security questions. Progress on resolving the query has thus been slow, and I feel like I’m hitting my head against a brick wall every time I speak to them.

So. The manager has been emailing me a couple of times a week to ask how it’s going, and I’ve been giving her an update report. Generally the emails are pretty terse, but I was fairly stunned by the one I got this morning. It was a blank message with the subject line:

Pension Scheme Name??

Not: “Hi Clare, how are you getting on with chasing that info for Pension Scheme Name”.

It’s just so, soooooo rude. It takes so little time to be civil in an email, but she just can’t be bothered. It frustrates me almost to tears that I get into trouble for having poor communication, and yet she behaves like this and no one blinks an eye lid

It was actually a bit of a risk going, because the weather seemed to be so appalling bad all Saturday. Sunday dawned a bit brighter, and I managed not to get rained on when I went to Mass in the morning, but there was a high potential for showers. As we drove towards Twycross on the M42 we were engulfed by a particularly vicious shower, and I don’t know how my boyfriend managed to keep the car on the road, because I could barely see it. Luckily it was just about lunchtime, and so we stopped at a fairly pleasant pub in Appleby Magna and I had lasagne and some rather tasty chips.

By the time we’d finished stuffing ourselves the shower had passed, so we tootled down the road to the zoo. It was a little expensive - about £9 each for adults - but it must be over ten years since I last went to a zoo, so I was excited enough to pay My experience of zoos is a little limited; when I was a small child I used to go to Dudley Zoo once a year, but then I think that they were losing so much money that they had to sell all the exciting animals like the polar bears, and it was never so much fun after that. I went to Chester Zoo when I was in the Girl Guides, and I thought that was utterly amazing, and I have a vague memory of going to Twycross once, when I was about six.

As I had been warned, Twycross Zoo has an awful lot of monkeys. I am not averse to monkeys, indeed I used to very much enjoy going to the West Midlands Safari Park and watching their attempts to break the windscreen wipers off my parents’ cars, but all the same, I think I have a monkey saturation point. Some of them were quite cool - the orang utans and the chimps were particularly interesting - but a lot of the smaller monkeys were much of a muchness and you really did begin to feel that once you’d seen one endangered spider monkey scratching its bottom, you’d seen them all.

Happily, Twycross also had some much more exciting animals. There were at least four Asian elephants for a start. Babel claims that he only saw two, but he wasn’t looking properly I have always thought that elephants are really cool, and when I was very small my Dad used to tell be bedtime stories about the couple, Jumbo and Flossie, who used to live at Twycross Zoo. Jumbo and Flossie used to get up to ever such exciting things - they ate a lot of cream buns, and ever so often they would try to escape

There were two lions, who must have been dosed up on something because they looked rather calm. There was a leopard, which was very spotty and looked much more active. There were dozens of flamingos which were as pink of flamingos are supposed to be, and also a rather cool pool full of penguins which I could have stood and looked at all day were I not in the company of a rather impatient Babel There were some things which looked like pigs but weren’t, an incredibly unattractive camel which appeared to be a strange shade of black, and three of the most goregous giraffes you ever did see

The rain held off until right at the end when we were ready to leave anyway, but even then it was only a brief shower and as we made our way back to Leicester, we decided to stop off in Market Bosworth. Obviously I knew that this was the location of the Battle of Bosworth, although I had forgotten until Babel hazarded a guess which I saw confirmed on the side of a litter bin that the battle had taken place in 1485, but I knew nothing whatsoever about the town itself. It turned out to be a charming little place We parked the car and had a little wander, hoping to find a tea room but unfortunately half four on a Sunday afternoon is not the optimum time to find an open tea room, and so we settled for a cup of coffee in one of the local pubs. It wasn’t a bad cup of coffee actually.

After that, we headed back to Leicester because we were scheduled to visit my boyfriend’s sister and her family. His sister has a little boy who is just over a year old, and whilst I do not like children by any stretch of the imagination, he is a very good-natured and well-behaved sort of child, with a very attractive head of curly hair I don’t know why I don’t like children - I was speculating recently whether it could be a result of me being gay, that I might be missing some sort of hormone straight people have which makes them want to reproduce, but I’m not sure whether that is the explanation or whether I would just like it to be the explanation so that I had a socially acceptable excuse for being a child-hater… At any rate, it is always a stressful experience interacting with other people’s relations, but I got through yesterday without incident and we’re supposed to be going to Rutland Water with them in the near future, so perhaps that will make me feel a bit more comfortable.

Rather to the horror of my boyfriend’s sister, we then proceeded to go to a petrol station and eat chocolate for tea, before my boyfriend gave me a lift home which was really very kind of him given that it was already quite late at night and he had to be up early for work the next morning. It was a nice day overall, and a distraction from real life for a few hours. I don’t know what had been going on at home during the afternoon, but when I got home my mother most definitely had red eyes from crying.

It tells the story of a very unlikeable and shallow young woman called Kitty, who decides to marry a rather socially inept bacteriologist to appease her parents. This is the 1920s, and he is based in Shanghai, so after the marriage she moves out to China with him. Life there bores her, however, as does he, and fairly soon she is having an affair with a much more attractive gentleman who unhappily is already someone else’s husband. Unbeknownst to Kitty, however, he is actually rather a cad, and when her husband catches them in bed together he feels he has nothing to lose by issuing the following, chilling, ultimatum.

Either she travels with him into central China to a town which is suffering a severe epidemic of cholera, or else he will divorce her for adultery. She pleads with him not to publicly disgrace her, and in the end he relents and agrees he will let her divorce him if her lover also divorces his wife and marries her. The lover, of course, had no such intentions - a fact which the husband knew full well, and before long Kitty is accompanying her husband on a long and arduous journey into the seat of the infection.

The world which awaits her there is very different from 1920s London. Whilst her husband deals with the cholera outbreak, she is left alone with nothing to do. Tensions with the British and the local population mean that she is practically a prisoner in her own home, and when she does venture out it is to witness scenes of death all around her. The doctor at best ignores her, at worst is rude, and in the end she is so bored and frustrated that she begins to help out at the local orphanage, assisting the nuns from the local convent.

This is really her turning point, as she starts to do something slightly worthwhile and becomes a bit more likeable. Her husband thaws out a bit too and they begin, unexpectedly, to fall in love with each other for the first time. When Kitty unexpectedly faints, the viewers’ first thought is that she has succumbed to cholera, but it turns out that she is in fact pregnant. There’s a slight problem in so far as it probably isn’t her husband’s child, but he generously agrees to overlook that and they seem fully reconciled.

All too good to be true, of course. Within no time, he is called away to treat an outbreak in a refugee camp outside the town and soon news is brought to Kitty that he is ill. She sits by his side while he dies a nasty and painful death, which is rather sad and not terribly tastefully done, I must say.

The ending flashes forward five years, showing Kitty back in London with a small boy. She randomly bumps into her former lover on the street - he looks at the boy and must have suspicions that he is the father - but Kitty blows him out and walks on. The End.

Hmm. Initially I hated it because the characters were entirely unlikeable, but halfway through I began to warm up to them a bit, at which point the whole thing just became tragic, because it seemed horribly inevitable that the storyline required the doctor to die. I thought the film was well done though; there were enough nasty shots to convey the full horror of cholera, but not so many as to make me need to leave the room or look away. There were some beautiful views of the Chinese scenery too, and the soundtrack was very atmospheric. I would recommend it, so long as you’re not looking for a laugh.

I spent the whole film trying to work out the origin of the title by the way, and at the end I even temporarily forgot Kitty was pregnant and thought she might become a nun, hence the “veil”. But I googled it just and apparently it comes from Shelley:

Lift Not The Painted Veil Which Those Who Live/Call Life

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

The novel tells the story of a German policeman called Xavier March who accidentally ends up investigating the death of a high-ranking Nazi official. As it appears that things are happening to thwart his investigation, he begins to realise all is not as it seems and the victim appears to be one of a long line of Party officials who are being liquidated by members of the establishment. Increasingly working against the rules and the orders of his own officials, March (and a female American journalist he picks up halfway through) attempt to solve the mystery. What links these men and why is it so important to the Gestapo that they cease to exist?

The answer is eventually found among the historical archives of the Reich. All those concerned were present at a conference where the Final Solution was initially discussed, and thus among the select few who knew the truth about what happened to the Jews. It is worth pointing out that in this imagined world, no one at all does know the truth; Hitler’s victory in the war means that the Allies have never uncovered concentration camps such as Auschwitz.

Once he is in possession of this knowledge, March is shocked and sickened. His only aim in life is now to get the documents out of the country so that they can be published in America. He gives them to the American girl and she sets off in an attempt to cross the Swiss border. March attempts to follow her, but he is now a hunted man. His own son betrays him to the Gestapo, and it soon transpires that traitors have been everywhere as he is carted off the Gestapo headquarters and subjected to horrific acts of torture.

Suddenly it seems as if he is thrown a lifeline to escape. Put in a car with a colleague he once thought of as a friend, he is led to believe there is a rescue attempt and he can be driven to meet up with the American. Luckily he realises just on time that this is a trick to make him reveal her location, so instead he leads the Gestapo a merry dance, all the way to the site of Auschwitz. As the police agents close in around him, he receives confirmation that Auschwitz was not just a figment of the imagination and, having a strong feeling that the girl and the documents are now safely across the border, my interpretation of the ending is that he shoots himself. It’s not spelled out in black and white, but he walks off into a forest with a gun.

Hmmm. I don’t really know what to say. The ambition of the book is impressive, the Europe it creates is fascinating, but somehow I just felt there was something missing. There was no “X factor”, nothing which stopped me wanting to put it down. In fact I put it down for weeks at a time, read a chapter, and put it down for the next seven days. I’ve read better thrillers, better historical thrillers set in Germany even, and I’m left just feeling vaguely disappointed that a book which could have been amazing turned out to be, well, just sort of okayish. I think it’s unlikely that I’ll go out of my way to read any more books by the same author. Babel, however, thinks it was really cool and has reviewed it here.