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!

I was about to start what will probably turn out to be a very long series of posts about my holiday by announcing that I am now home. This would technically be inaccurate, as to be precise I am currently in the Premier Inn at Euston I successfully returned from Switzerland on Saturday evening, but early this morning I was off again, this time to London where I am working on the audit of one of our solicitor clients. It would be difficult to imagine more of a contrast to where I have been for the last two weeks than London; all the noise, the bustle of the Tube, is a far cry from the small mountain village of Grindelwald in the Bernese Oberland where my parents had rented a chalet for a fortnight. It was a thoroughly enjoyable holiday, admittedly not without it’s frustrations, but nevertheless truly lovely I was totally relaxed when I returned to the UK, but that has been marred slightly this afternoon by the fact that a member of client staff used an F word at me. Back to reality

This time I learnt from my mistake in Hungary and managed to force myself to write a paper diary as I went along. I spent most of the holiday feeling utterly exhausted, and so some days I may have written less than others, but I certainly have enough to go on for my blog without the painful wracking of brains which I had to subject myself to after the IJK (more…)

Yesterday, I went to Primark for the very first time. There’s been a big store in Birmingham city centre for potentially years now, but I’ve never paid very much attention to it. Firstly, because given a choice between a trip to the dentist for an extraction or a shopping expedition for new clothing, I would choose the dental extraction every time. Secondly, because my belief was that it sold fashionable/tacky clothes, and my aim with clothing is to camouflage into the background and not have anyone look twice at me. Thirdly, because I’m sure there have been stories in the news about Primark using child labour or some such to produce their clothes, and that wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to support, even if my boyfriend is about to jump in and tell me in Spanish that child labour is a good thing How did I end up in this infamous store yesterday then and spend in excess of £20? (more…)

With the cancellation of my flight, my weekend got off to a bit of a rocky start. I’d had to get up at four in order to get to the airport on time, and was a little annoyed that my taxi had set me back a whopping twenty five quid Admittedly my mother had warned me about this, explaining that a new change in legislation meant taxis were charging substantially more for fares at antisocial hours, but even so I felt faintly outraged. Nowhere near as outraged, of course, as I felt when I got to check in and became aware of the debacle with my flight. Despite the fact that it wasn’t quite six am, I was so frustrated that I had to go to Costa’s for an iced latte (any excuse), and spent the rest of the time wandering around the poor selection of shops in Birmingham airport’s grubby little terminal two. I was tempted to buy my boyfriend a handheld fan which squirts water on the grounds that he constantly experiences menopausal hot flushes, but in the end I didn’t because I figured he was probably too macho to want to use it in public (more…)

I’m going to Grindelwald Not imminently, like; at the end of August. For the past month or so my family have been debating where to go for their annual walking holiday, and I have finally steered them towards going to Switzerland on the grounds of cheaper flights. I had actually hoped to go fly to Geneva at bargain basement rates, but my mother wasn’t having any of it So, now we are flying via Zurich for £165 return which is more than I wanted to pay, but nevertheless cheap for a return flight to Zurich with Swiss. It isn’t a budget airline, you do get food. (more…)

Last week, I made myself a to-do list. It was a truly magnificent to-do list, which encompassed all of the things which I need to accomplish in all of the different parts of my life. I often make myself to-do lists, but they tend to focus on one specific area only. This one included work and holidays and my private life… literally, everything! I was terribly proud of it, confident that I had achieved an utterly completed list, which when totally ticked off would bring me 100% up to date with everything, and I had a nice relaxing weekend, happily secure in the knowledge that there was no need to worry, everything I needed to do the following week was safely laid down in black and white.

I got to work on Monday morning, opened by bag to extract my list… and, after a prolonged period of frenzied searching, discovered that I had accidentally put it in the shredding bin (more…)

Getting a flight at 7am on a Saturday morning for a quick weekend away in Germany always seems like such a good idea, until the alarm goes off at four. Having not had more than five hours sleep all week, it was somewhat of a struggle to drag myself out of a nice warm bed into the freezing cold and darkness of the house, with the result that I was hardly ready when my taxi banged on the door. The taxi driver seemed friendly enough, apologising profusely for the fact that the temperature in his taxi was sub-zero, but he then proceeded to drive me to the airport via a route which, in my long experience of taking taxis to the airport, no other taxi driver had ever taken me before. I felt a trifle disconcerted. I have a strange phobia that taxi drivers will either wilfully abduct me or misunderstand me and take me somewhere entirely different to where I wanted to go. The former has happily not yet occurred. The latter unfortunately has on at least one occasion. (more…)