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 »

Tre ofte kiam mi ĉeestas Esperanto-aranĝojn, oni demandas al mi, kial mi parolas Esperanton. Multaj homoj kiujn mi konas havas tre bonajn respondojn al tiu demando. Ili ege interesiĝas pri lingvistikaj aferoj, ili volas malmultekoste vojaĝi al diversaj landoj, ili kredas ke lingva egaleco tre gravas… Ĉiuj tre bonaj kialoj, sed por mi neniuj el tiuj taŭgas.

Se iuj el vi fariĝos miaj amikoj ĉe Facebook, vi rimarkos ke en la skatolo sub mia profilbildo, kie oni rajtas skribi kelkajn vortojn pri si mem, mi skribis „Mi neniam intencis paroli Esperanton“. Fakte mi memoras iun tagon.. verŝajne estis en du mil kvar… kiam mi sidis en aŭtobuso en Birmingham, kaj parolis al amiko mia per poŝtelefono. En la mezo de la konversacio mi iomete koleriĝis, kaj mi memoras tute bone ke mi subite ekkriis, tre laŭte, „Mi neniam lernos Esperanton!“. Kio, do, okazis inter tiam kaj nun, por ke mi ne nur eklernu la lingvon, sed ankaŭ fariĝu membro de la estraro de la landa asocio. Estas bona demando, kaj por respondi al ĝi, necesas pensi pri kelkaj jaroj en la pasinteco kaj klarigi, kiamaniere mi lernis pri Esperanto. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day. Please visit Diary of A Goldfish for links to some more profound posts on the theme than mine

Disablism seems to me slightly different to other -isms (eg. racism, chauvenism) because many people still don’t seem to recognise it as a set of negative prejudices which they should be ashamed of possessing. Most people in their right mind at least realise that other people are liable to be offended by their racist/chauvenistic views, and are thus prone to preface their exceptionally racist and chauvenistic comments with the phrase “I don’t mean to sound like a racist (etc), but…”. This doesn’t, of course, ultimately mitigate the offence of what they are saying, but it does at least serve to prove that they *realise* that what they are saying could be construed as not the sort of thing which is said by a nice person. For reasons I don’t understand, disablism still seems to be lagging behind somewhat in these stakes so that people who are otherwise perfectly lovely genuinely don’t seem to twig that there is anything potentially wrong with their somewhat warped and misguided points of view Read the rest of this entry »

I have just returned from a really lovely weekend at the British Esperanto Congress in Salisbury. This was only the second BK which I have attended, and I was a little apprehensive, both about some of the things I had volunteered to help out with during the weekend, and the fact that it was our first camping tent in Babel’s new tent. My anxieties about whether or not camping in Britain in April would prove to be a good idea were not helped by the horrible rainy weather which preceded the weekend, but luckily I was so busy with work that I didn’t have too much free time to dwell on it.

By a stroke of bad luck, I was working in London on Friday but needed to come back to Birmingham to take some files back to the office. The result was that Babel and I entirely missed the Friday of the congress. He drove down from Leicester to collect me on Friday evening, but it was gone 9pm by the time we left my house, and we had agreed in advance that we weren’t going to go all the way, so I had prebooked a hotel for us. Not just any hotel. Oh no, there was no expense spared on this weekend, and so I had reserved a room at the Travelodge Newbury Chieveley Read the rest of this entry »