Today is my third day back at work after one of the longest holidays I have ever been on. It’s not been a terribly good second day back at work, as I’ve been required to commute to London, and it feels very strange going back to accounting after over two weeks abroad!

Tim and I set off on our travels on Friday 17th July, and I finally returned home to Birmingham on Sunday afternoon, the 2nd August. The holiday got off to a less-than-smooth start for me, due to the fact that it was my sister’s graduation ceremony the day before we were due to leave. Now I don’t know what you’re like the day before you embark on a holiday, but I’m generally a bit frantic. I need to spend a couple of hours packing and repacking my case; desperately trying to fit everything in, making sure I haven’t forgotten anything, swapping things between my suitcase and my hand luggage… Then I like to spend an hour messing about with the tickets and making sure I haven’t accidentally mislaid any of them and that my complicated itinerary is imprinted on my brain. And then I like to wash my hair and have a last minute drive to answer all the email correspondence I’ve been putting off for weeks, but know I don’t want to come back home to.

Unfortunately none of this was possible this time around, which made me decidedly out of sorts. My sister graduated on the Thursday afternoon, and unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the actual ceremony because I was stuck at work desperately trying to finish my audit. I had, however, arranged to meet up with my family in the city centre afterwards and go for an evening meal. I envisaged meeting them at half six and being home again for eight, but just in case something went wrong, I decided to pack my case on Wednesday night instead.

It was just as well, because a complication with taking the departmental photograph meant that they didn’t arrive until quarter past eight. I was a litle fed up and stressed by this stage, having finished work at five. I was also a little bit wet, having had to walk from my office to Pizza Express in the pouring rain, on account of prematurely having packed my umbrella Nevertheless we had a very pleasant meal and it was all a lot of fun but it meant I didn’t get home until round about 11, having had no chance to sort out any of the things I wished to sort Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t already seen it, I was in my local paper last week

Here

There is also a very good article about Esperanto in The Times.

Here

I am currently in an internet cafe in Bialystok, Poland. Up until about an hour ago, I had not been having a very good day at all

Babel and I arrived here on Monday afternoon, following a long and unpleasant journey across most of Poland, utterly fed up and exhausted. We were fast asleep by 7pm on Monday, but yesterday felt better and decided to explore the town. With the help of some tourist brochures translated into Esperanto, we duly did so, a procedure which lasted approximately three hours. That is to say, within three hours we appeared to have seen every single sight which Bialystok possesses, and were thus rather at a loss for something else to do.

In the absence of any better ideas, we spent Tuesday afternoon getting drunk. Eight glasses of wine later it was time for bed, after a brief stop off at a nearby pizza place to grab an evening meal. We committed the grave mistake of sitting outside to eat with some friends… The result is that this morning I have woken up with in excess of twenty fly bites on my legs alone, with the upper half of my body being even worse off. I can’t count all the bites on my back because I can’t see them all, but I would hazard a guess that I must be the proud owner of about 50 bites in total. And yes, they itch like hell. All 50 of them, at the same time. It was pretty difficult to sleep last night Read the rest of this entry »

No time or expense has been spared in producing this exceptionally cool map which shows where I am going to over the next two weeks. Please don’t tell Babel it’s here – my attempts at graphic design are prone to upset him

There will be no posts on this blog for the next two or three weeks, as I am going on holiday

I shall be flying to Prague on Friday morning, from where I will travel to the town of Liberec to attend the IJK, the world Esperanto youth congress, which runs between Saturday 18th and Saturday 25th July. Babel and I are heading to Prague for a spot of sightseeing that weekend, before catching a bus to Warsaw on the Sunday night and from there heading on to Bialystok by train. Bialystok is the location for the UK, the World Esperanto Congress 2009, and we will be there until Saturday 1st August, at which point we have a rather complex journey home via Wroclaw. If you can’t figure out why this is complex, try looking at a map of Poland If all goes to plan, I will be home again on Sunday 2nd August… home for a very brief interval, I hasten to add, as I am going to Austria on August 8th

I’ve been planning this for so long that I’m starting to feel rather excited now, but this week I’ve also started feeling scared. Having organised it all myself, I’m worried that something will go terribly wrong and we’ll get stranded somewhere random, unable to speak a word of Polish…

Wish me luck!

Last weekend was the annual JEB Summer meet-up which this year took place in Felixstowe. Previous JEB summer meet-ups have been in Buxton and Stratford. Previous meetings have been various degrees of fun but this year was probably my favourite; firstly because it was so relaxed and secondly because we were at the seaside

The day kicked off with a rather early start for me, leaving home at 9am to ensure I got to Leicester for 11. Babel and I were planning to be in Felixstowe by three, something which he assured me was going to be possible with the inclusion of an hour for lunch, despite my protestations that it would take five hours to get there. Babel turned out to be nearer the mark than I was and we did indeed arrive in the early afternoon after a very pleasant, if slightly warm, drive down to Suffolk and an enjoyable stop-off in a little pub somewhere called Stowmarket. I was impressed that we managed not to get lost during the entire journey until right at the end when we were looking for our campsite and Google Maps played its favourite trick of insisting our destination was somewhere where it couldn’t possibly be; this time, off the fifth exit of a roundabout which only had four exits Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, or May 1998 if you want to be more precise, I took a flight with Ryanair from Birmingham to Dublin. It was, in fact, the first flight I had ever taken in my entire life and hence a rather exciting experience. A week later, I attempted to take my second ever flight from Dublin back to Birmingham, and it was here that the fun and games started.

My family and I arrived at Dublin airport in good time and searched for our flight on the departure boards. For some strange reason, it didn’t appear to be showing at the time at which we had expected it. Curious. Eventually, a bit unnerved, my mother went over the a customer information desk and enquired. Customer Services proceeded to deny point blank that our flight existed. My mother duly produced the tickets. Customer Services then clarified that our flight had indeed once existed, but had since been cancelled. These were the good old days when you had proper paper tickets and had to go to a travel agent to purchase them. The travel agent had not informed us that our flight had been cancelled, or perhaps more accurately, Ryanair had not informed the travel agent. The time/day of the flight had been randomly moved without us knowing, and thus we had missed it.

The prospect of being stranded in Dublin airport was not one that appealed, and after various arguments between my mother and Ryanair staff, we were booked onto a new flight. There followed a mad dash across the airport to try and make it, which culminated in us actually running out onto the runway, so lax was airport security in those days But ultimately we missed that flight too and had to sit around in the airport for many boring hours before Ryanair condescended to fly us home.

Over the past ten years, Ryanair has metamorphosed from a slightly dodgy airline which sold flights to Ireland slightly cheaper than Aer Lingus, to the incredibly dodgy European budget airline that it is today. A lot of things have changed, from the online check-in system to the staff’s desire to sell you scratch cards during the flight. It appears that some things, however, remain the same. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the very exciting things to happen during my blogging drought was the development of the plans Babel and I have for our summer holiday. I had originally managed to get the week from 18th to 25th July booked off work, and ever since January when we booked our flights from East Midlands to Prague, we have been intending to attend the Internacia Junulara Kongreso, a week-long event for young speakers of Esperanto which this year is being held in the Czech town of Liberec. Babel very uncharacteristically offered to arrange the flights, and got us a really good price with Ryanair. The only downside was that they don’t run a flight on the Saturday we wanted to fly back, so we booked a return ticket for the Sunday instead. I certainly didn’t regard this as being much of downside, because it gave us the opportunity to spend a weekend in Prague, a place I have wanted to go to for years Read the rest of this entry »

The most exciting thing to happen recently is that Babel and I are in the process of trying to buy a house

We’ve been thinking about moving in together for quite a long time, but it’s only over the course of the past few weeks that the discussions have really started to come to fruition.

The problem has always been where we are going to live, because I am from Birmingham and Tim is from Leicester. We have toyed with the idea of living in one place or the other at various points, but essentially I need to be near Birmingham for my job, and Tim needs to be near Leicester because he will hopefully be starting a PhD at the university there with effect from September. We thought about living in Hinckley, which is rather a pleasant place, but in the end dismissed it because the train connections aren’t good enough. Train connections are especially important to me because I don’t drive. Read the rest of this entry »

My blogging truly has been woeful of late So far I have only managed to come up with two excuses for this. Firstly, that I have been rather busy recently, both in terms of the hours I’ve been putting in at work and the amount of activities I’ve had organised at weekends. Secondly, that I feel under a bit of a cloud and there’s been lots of days when I’ve thought about writing, but anything I said would have sounded terribly depressed. As one of my elderly relatives always used to tell me as a small child, if you can’t say anything nice it’s better to say nothing at all Read the rest of this entry »