Mi alvenis iomete tro frue, do sidis sur muro ekster la laborejo de Tim dum preskaŭ kvarono de horo. Estis bela tago, la plej suna kiun mi spertis en Anglio dum longa tempo. Kiam Tim estis libera, li decidis ke ni manĝu, ĉar mi povas esti iomete malagrabla kiam mi malsatas Ĉar mi tamen estas tiel bona koramikino, mi permesis al li iri al lia preferata ĉina restoracio Al mi ĉinaj manĝaĵoj ne ege plaĉas. Tio estas, mi ŝatas manĝi rizon, sed al mi ĝi pli plaĉas kiam ĝi estas simple rizo kaj ne enhavas legomojn aŭ similajn malbongustajn aferojn.

Mi sukcesis iom manĝi tamen, kvankam mi faligis ian porkaĵon sur mian blankan T-ĉemison, kiu kompreneble faris teruran makulon Kaj poste venis al Babel la bona ideo ke ni iru al proksima kafejo – li aĉetis por mi ne nur tason de kafo, sed ankaŭ belan ĉokoladan kukon, do mi ne rajtas plendi Kvankam pri ĉokolada kuko tro pensas nuntempe. Antaŭ semajno mi pagis por fari Esperantan ekzamenon pere de la Esperanto-Asocio de Britio. Mi decidis ke la komencanta ekzameno ne estas sufiĉe malfacila, do mi elektis la meznivelan. Tiu alvenis antaŭ kelkaj tagoj, kaj hieraŭ mi kunportis mian vortaron por ke mi komencu verki respondojn trajne. La unua tasko estas ke oni devas traduki anglen recepton por ĉokolada kuko. La vortoj precipe ne estas malfacilaj, sed mi ĉiam malamas tradukojn, eble ĉar mi tro pripensas ĉion. Rilate al ĉi tiu traduko, mi konfuziĝis jam dum la titolo, pri la vorto “kuirrecepto”. Mi ne komprenas kial oni skribis “kuirrecepto” anstataŭ skribi simple “recepto”. Mi kontrolis ĉu recepto fakte havas alian signifon kiu ne temas pri kuirado, sed almenaŭ laŭ mia vortaro ne. Do, mi ne povis decidi, kio estas la plej bona angla traduko. Ĉu mi perdos poenton se mi skribos simple “recipe” ĉar mi ignoris parton de la vorton. Ĉu mi do skribu “cooking recipe” aŭ “cookery recipe”? Ambaŭ frazoj ŝajnas al mi iom strangaj en la angla

Hmmm. Do, mi venis al Leicester ne por manĝi kukon sed por ĉeesti geedziĝfeston de virino kun kiu Tim laboris, kaj mi jam reservis ĉambron en apuda hotelo. Posttagmeze ni do iris al tiu hotelo por ĝui iom da privata tempo, kaj ŝanĝi niajn vestaĵojn. Kvankam miaj kruroj kutime estas pli ĝojaj kiam ili estas kaŝitaj, mi tamen konsentis porti mian solan jupon pro la graveco de la okazo.

Mi ne estas homo kiu vere ĝuas ĉeesti festojn, aparte kiam mi konas neniujn aliajn ĉeestantojn, sed almenaŭ nuntempe mi ne timas tiom, kiom antaŭ kelkaj jaroj. La trinkado da vino ĉiam helpas Verdire mi ne certas ĉu mi sen vino travivus ĉi tiun vesperon, ĉar la muziko estis terurega. Kiam mi aŭdis la kanton “Hej Baby” de DJ Ötzi, mi preskaŭ perdis la volon vivi

Reveninte al la hotelĉambro mi rapide ekdormis, kvankam efektive mi ne dormis bone, kaj vekiĝis ĉirkaŭ la kvara pro la deziro trinki multon akvon. Kiam mi vekiĝis denove je la oka, videblis ke estas bela tago, kaj ni decidis viziti allogan parkon kiu troviĝas ekster Leicester. Ni intencis nutri la anasojn, kaj pro tio unue vizitis la domon de Tim por forŝteli iom da pano. Al la parko ni poste elektis ne veturi per la plej rekta vojo, ĉar ni volis rigardi la urbojn Hinckley kaj Nuneaton. Tiuj urboj troviĝas proksimume inter Leicester kaj Birmingham, kaj tial ni pripensas, ĉu ni baldaŭ translokiĝu al unu el ili. Pri labora vizito al Nuneaton antaŭ du jaroj mi havis malbonan opinion de la regiono, kaj mi do miris kaj ĝojis ke ĝi fakte aspektas pli bone ol mi memoras

Kiam ni finfine atingis la parkon la anasoj ŝajne ne interesiĝis pri nia pano. Tamen ni ĝuis promeni en la belaj ĉirkaŭaĵoj, kaj Tim eĉ aĉetis glaciaĵon por mi, kiun mi sukcesis manĝi sen tro da problemoj. Tro baldaŭ venis la dua, kaj ni devis foriri – Tim denove laboris, kaj mi devis reveni hejmen Estis plaĉa semajnfino kaj mi ĝuis havi la eblecon pasigi pli da tempo kun Tim ĉar ŝajnas ke mi ne multe vidis lin dum la pasintaj semajnoj, kaj de tempo al tempo mi sentas lian mankon. Ĉefe kiam mi volas bati iun Cetere mi iomete fieras ke ni nun povas ĉeesti tiajn eventojn sen ke mi senĉese ruĝiĝas kaj ŝanceliĝas.

We also headed to the nearby branch of WH Smith in an attempt to use up some of my vouchers, seeing as I am getting a little low on reading matter at the moment. I spent years of my childhood hoarding up WH Smith vouchers which I never seemed to get chance to utilise, and several months ago I decided to donate them to Babel on the grounds that he buys books all the time, whereas I never do. Rather generously, however, he decided to use them to buy books for me, the only slight problem being that our tastes in books aren’t always the same and so he’s never quite sure what to buy. Some of the things he has bought me have been incredibly good, others (most notably a history of the Spanish Inquisition) I haven’t quite managed to get to the end of But yeah, today I was able to choose for myself which was rather fun, and Smith’s actually have a buy one get one free offer on any books in the top 50 chart, which was definitely an added bonus. I therefore managed to get two books for only 8 pounds worth of vouchers. One is the Sebastian Faulks book ‘Engleby’. I’m not sure what it’s about and haven’t even read a review of it, but I fail to believe that anything written by the author of ‘Birdsong’ can be bad. The second is called ‘The Forgotten Garden’ and is the second book by Kate Morton who wrote the excellent novel ‘The House at Riverton’ which I read earlier in the year. I feel quite excited about both of them and would like to start one of them tonight, however probably won’t because once I get home I have managers to email and hotels to book/unbook

Anyhow, books bought and coffee drunk, our final errand was to pick up some photos my boyfriend had ordered from Jessops. He also needed a new passport photo taken, which provided the most amusing moment of the day I won’t embarrass him by publishing the photo here, but honestly you have never seen anything like it in your life The current photo on his passport is pretty bad and makes him look like a rather greasy dago, if you excuse me using such a word. But this one is even worse! It’s the sort of picture the police publish on Crimewatch when they are tracking down a dangerous serial killer In fact, if I worked in the passport control office of any self respecting country, I wouldn’t permit him to cross my border on the grounds that he looks very much like a terrorist. Not in real life, in real life he is actually quite attractive, but in the photo… Anyway, I have never had a passport photo of him to keep in my purse, and I felt that after nearly a year and a half together this was something which needed to me remedied, so I requested one of the spares. It now joins the rather motley collection in my purse, comprising a photo of my boyfriend’s nephew, a photo of my previous boyfriend, and a photo of a German I have never met.

Errands completed, we were free to enjoy the rest of our day, the aim of which was to go for a walk in a place called Bradgate Park. This park was supposed to be within walking distance of a small town whose name I was sure was imprinted on my brain but which is now eluding me. It was something like Antsey or Anstey… In any case, I was a little sceptical about the idea of going to a park. From a young age I was brought up with the impression that a park was a dangerous place that could only be visited in the company of a man. Not that my father is a particularly imposing sort of man, and my mother is not at all a timid type, but nevertheless we virtually never went to a park without him when I was a kid. When we did go to a park, it was most often to a private park where we paid a subscription for a key. This was the only park where I was really allowed on the play equipment because it was the fashion in Birmingham at the time to superglue razor blades to the kiddy slides.

You might think my mother was slightly neurotic. I did, until in my first year at uni I went to one of the most popular parks in Birmingham on a sunny May afternoon, and in the middle of feeding the ducks happened to witness a man getting stabbed to death. For a while after that I was on the verge of experiencing a panic attack every time I had to go near that park, and was highly uncomfortable with the idea of parks in general. There is a beautiful park in my suburb for example, which used to be part of the estate of the famous Chamberlain family, but it is unfortunately advertised on the internet as a good place to go if you wish to meet a willing stranger with whom to indulge in homosexual relations behind a tree. Over the past year or so the police, to be fair to them, have made an effort to clean things up by installing cctv, but even so it is not a place which I would suggest for a day trip.

So, parks and me don’t generally mix but my boyfriend assured me that this was Leicester, and Leicester is a place where the bus drivers give change We got to Antsey and it wasn’t entirely obvious where the park was, so my cowerind stopped a promising looking woman to ask for directions. She seemed a little surprised that we were planning to walk so far and suggested that we take a shortcut by walking through a jitty. Having pronounced such a bizarre word, she clarified whether or not we’d understood her, and whilst I wondered in perplexity where on earth she expected us to find a jetty in Leicester, my boyfriend assured her that he was a Leicester lad and started striding off up the road. Once I caught him up, he clarified that a jitty is a Leicester word for an alleyway path sort of thing. I’m not sure, but I think it might be a bit like what normal people call a gully.

Anyhow, we continued walking up the road in search of this peculiar feature, and after not very long at all we came across a footpath leading out into fields. We followed this for fifteen minutes or so and it was really quite beautiful, although there was a slightly hairy moment when we had to squeeze through the bars of a gate. Unfortunately, our progress was thwarted at every turn by the fact that the ground under the stiles etc was at best boggy and at worst totally waterlogged During one particular attempt to move between fields, I stood on a piece of mud which looked perfectly dry and stable, only to find my leg disappearing down to my calf in horrible slime. I emitted a surprised sort of squeal, to which my boyfriend was singularly unsympathetic, and managed to jump to dry land but it was rather unpleasant and I had to walk around caked in dry mud for the rest of the day

Eventually we turned back and walked a little further up the road, whereupon we stumbled across the correct jitty which was helpfully signposted Bradgate Park This time we fared much better and after a walk across fields plus a bit of a stroll down a pleasant road, we had reached the park itself.

Wow It wasn’t quite what I expected from a park! For a start it was huge, being the former grounds of some sort of stately home, and secondly it was absolutely beautiful. Parts of it were kind of hilly, and there was a lovely little rivery thing running through it where in the afternoon we were able to feed some really cute ducks. The ruin of the stately home is visible, though we didn’t have time to investigate it, and there’s also some sort of castle, although we didn’t have time to climb the hill to that either. The most spectacular thing about the entire park, however, was the deer.

Deer in Bradgate park

I’ve really never seen anything like the deer There were literally hundreds of them, seemingly almost tame, roaming freely all over the parkland. Most of them were quite small and only had little horny stumps, although there were a few with proper antlers, and lots of them were all speckledy and looked just like Bambi, only perhaps cuter. I’ve never seen so many deer, or been so close to them. I’ve tried to take a photo which I may insert next time I get to use a computer, but it probably won’t capture how magical it was

We sat on the grass for a bit and had a lovely packed lunch which my boyfriend had brought for me, and I thought soppy thoughts which were periodically interrupted by my boyfriend burping, and all too soon it was over and we had to head back so that my boyfriend wasn’t late for work. The walk back seemed a little longer than the walk there but it was still fun and I think it did me so much good to have some exercise and get out in the countryside with some fresh air. A day like that soothes the soul

So, thank you very much to Babel for thinking of something which was such fun I’d definitely like to go back and explore more sometime soon. I headed back to Birmingham on the train after that and spent a very long time in public toilets attempting to rid myself of mud. After that I went to Starbucks in the hope of getting a sandwich, but that was an experience so frustrating it deserves a post of it’s own. I am currently sitting on a rather cold stone outside the Bull Ring, and bizarre as it sounds, it is actually rather beautiful here. I’ve taken some photos which I may insert here also. I feel almost peaceful again, and able to head home to deal with the confounded mess which is next week.

Sunset over Birmingham

Selfridges

For the past THREE weekends in a row Network Rail have seen fit to carry out engineering works on the line between Birmingham and Leicester. Now I appreciate that engineering works occasionally have to be done, but this is at least the third or fourth time they have cancelled a couple of week’s worth of trains in the last six months.

They do, of course, provide rail replacement buses instead. And don’t we all love a good rail replacement bus! Just in case you weren’t aware, Birmingham and Leicester are only about forty miles apart and joined by a convenient invention commonly known as a motorway. This means that it should theoretically be highly possible to travel between the two places in a comparatively short space of time. An hour seems like a reasonable amount of time to me.

I got on this particular bus at 17.05. It is now 19.05 and I am still over ten miles from Birmingham city centre :cry:

My geography of Leicester is not terribly good but I know for a fact that there is more than one route by which it is possible to get out of the city centre and onto the motorway. Unfortunate then that this driver chose to go down the road which passes the rugby ground, at the exact time at which the rugby crowds were coming out. That, combined with the added complication of the Saturday football traffic, meant that the first half hour of the journey was spent trying to exit a retail park which Tim and I have previously walked to in around 15 minutes

It was gone six o clock by the time we actually got out of Leicester. Unbelievable. We were in Nuneaton by half six, which the driver decided was an excellent chance for him to go and buy a sandwich and have a chat with his mates. What does an extra ten minute delay matter after all when your bus is already running 45 minutes late?!

To add insult to injury, when he finally deigned to pull off it became apparent that he wasn’t going to drive us to Birmingham via the motorway. No, because that would be something approaching common sense and that is something no train operator appears to possess. See, there’s a tiny station called Coleshill Parkway between Birmingham and Nuneaton at which no one ever gets on and no one ever gets off. So the most logical thing to do is clearly to make a massive great big coach full of people who want to go to Birmingham waste an extra half hour by driving at 20mph down B roads in order to get to it.

It took half an hour to cover the negligible distance between Nuneaton and Coleshill. As predicted, no one got on and off but we sat there for ten minutes just to make sure. We’ve just departed now and Birmingham city centre is probably another half hour away

I am so angry that I am actually struggling not to use F words. There is nothing more frustrating than being trapped on a crowded and claustrophobic coach which is travelling at a snail’s pace and driven by an idiot for hours on end, whilst the said idiot blasts an R&B station out of the speakers. There is nothing more frustrating than a journey which should take less than an hour taking in excess of two and a half whilst costing exactly the same amount. I have paid £8.50 for the dubious pleasure of four and a half hours on rail replacement buses today, and no one has had the courtesy to apologise for the not inconsiderable inconvenience this has caused me.

Anyone who has anything to do with rail replacement buses,   Preferably slowly and painfully. And when you do, please go to Hell. My Facebook status currently reads, “Clare has decided that Hell must be a rail replacement bus which is always 15 miles away from Leicester”.

I am not a snob when it comes to hotels, but my feelings about Travelodges are mixed. I love Premier Travel Inns, and would happily stay in one any time, anywhere; their breakfast is of the highest quality and their rooms are always clean and comfortable. Travelodges, on the other hand, seem considerably more basic although they aren’t always considerably cheaper, and so many little niceties like soap in the bathroom are missing. The first time I ever stayed in one I was most put out to discover it didn’t serve breakfast and that instead my £5 a day would earn me a brown paper bag placed outside my room each morning, with a dubious looking apple and a yoghurt pot of cornflakes The one I’ve been staying in in Leicester isn’t bad in some respects. The room was actually quite spacious and had a long sofa in it, which I liked. The bathroom, however, had a rather unpleasant smell and to me the bath looked none too clean. Plus one night there was a school trip of rather obnoxious children staying there, which had I wanted to go to sleep before half one in the morning, might have been a bit of a annoyance.

It was worth it though to get to see my boyfriend, although he was mostly working until ten so we only got between about half past and whatever time we manage to keep our eyes open til. I’ve been trying to complete my Star Wars education during the week which has been rather fun, although I have to confess it’s an awful lot more complicated than I expected and I don’t always understand who everyone is! Until last November, I’d never seen an episode of Star Wars in my life. In fact, I had a habit of getting confused as to the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek, and sometimes even Doctor Who Then in November my boyfriend introduced me to it; I was a bit sceptical at first but it ended up being miles better than I’d expected and now I’m quite a fan.

Aside from that, I’ve been trying to make some progress with an Esperanto course called ‘Paŝoj al plena posedo’. I bought the book quite some time ago, and my boyfriend promised that if I did the exercises he’d correct them for me. There’s a little course booklet which comes with it and gives you instructions on what to translate. Each chapter of the textbook has an extract from some sort of story in it, and one of the exercises is invariably to translate it into English. The course booklet then has another text, which has to be translated into Esperanto.

On the face of it, this sounds like rather a good idea and a worthwhile thing to do. When I purchased it, it was with the idea of forcing myself to do some more practice, and I got through the first three chapters in reasonable time. By the time I for to the fourth, however, I seemed to come unstuck. It wasn’t exactly that the exercises were increasingly difficult, but the things they were suggesting I translate began to increasingly annoy me. It just felt like whoever had written the texts had gone out of their way to choose pointless passages full of untranslatable concepts. One particular example which springs to mind was the phrase “light tea-time music”. What on earth is light tea-time music when it’s at home?! In the end I went for “leĝera vespermanĝa musiko” which may or may not be complete gibberish depending on whether “tea-time” relates to the time at which the music is played or is a random musical genre in it’s own right.

The exercises which I virtuously attempted last night included similar gems, including one sentence which seemed to go on for half a page and included a ridiculous number of instances of the phrase “one another”. When I got to chapter six I was forced to give up on the grounds that not only was I unable to translate “door-scraper”, I was unable to foresee an occasion on which I would ever want to!

It is good though to have time to do things by myself and not to be trapped in Wantage where every minute of my life seemed to belong to work. I had a certain feeling of elation when I left Wantage last Friday. I think everyone did, not least the client financial accountant who pretty much hugged the entire audit team she was so glad to see the back of us. She did, however, express the desire that the team for next year’s audit be the same, saying how nice it was now we’d all got to know each other. I’m not entirely sure if I share her sentiments Don’t get me wrong; the staff in Wantage are all really pleasant, but the job is so stressful and the site itself is kind of spooky. I don’t much like being there late at night when all the office workers have gone home and you have to walk in and out the maze of factory blocks which all seem to emit sinister noises and threatening bursts of steam.

Talking about threatening things, by virtue of spending the weekend with my boyfriend I have managed to avoid any further zombie-related nightmares I have slept uncharacteristically well all week actually, although I woke up somewhat shocked at half five this morning because I had no recollection of having fallen asleep. I ended up being slightly drunk last night, and I remember getting back to the hotel room, getting in to bed and my boyfriend setting my laptop up because we were going to watch some wrestling. I remember us listening to some sort of theme tune, and I remember him fast forwarding through a bit of it trying to get to something else, and I remember thinking that this was going to be interesting… and after that I remember nothing more! Apparently my boyfriend asked me if I was watching it, only I had my eyes closed, and I claimed I was, but I have no recollection of anything else until I woke up at five thirty wondering where my laptop was and who had switched the lights off.

I didn’t actually feel entirely sober this morning either :blush2: I’m sure I should have been, since I’d been asleep for hours, but I had walking-in-a-straight-line issues en route to the office which made me decide not to do any important work for the first few hours of the day until I was feeling more normal. I would absolutely kill for a cup of coffee right now but I’m waaaaay too shaky to perform delicate balancing acts with trays through doors, so I’m trying really hard to hold out until 1 pm when I can go out and buy one. It’s just occurred to me that it is about 40 hours since I last had an injection of caffeine and I don’t actually know how much longer I can survive

I was hoping to buy a cup at the station in Leicester actually but I encountered an unforeseen obstacle to this plan upon arriving at the platform; my train was actually on time and so I didn’t have a spare ten minutes to kill in a café A train running on time is not an eventuality which I have to contend with very often, and it quite upset my world view for about thirty seconds, after which time I realised that the train may have been on time but it was on platform one when it was scheduled to be on platform three and thus all was in fact right with the world.

Now I really don’t have a problem with travelling by public transport; I love trains in fact, and I use them all the time seeing as I haven’t yet taken the momentous step of booking myself a driving lesson, but this week the service between Leicester and Birmingham has been severely testing my patience. For a start, this week all the electronic signs in the main hall of Leicester station which normally display the departure times of the next ten or so trains have not been functioning. Quite what is wrong with them I’m not sure; I’m still harbouring suspicions that someone may just have forgotten to flick the on switch, because curiously all the electronic signs on the platforms are working perfectly. This means the only way of telling where your train is departing from is to choose a platform at random and walk halfway down it until you find the display. Happily, being the small northern town which it is, Leicester only has four platforms to choose from, but you can be sure that whichever staircase you go down first will turn out to be the wrong choice

The displays at Birmingham have yet to give up the ghost, but the announcements leave a lot to be desired. I was innocently standing on platform 10a on Wednesday night, alongside the hordes of other people who try to catch the Leicester train from that platform every night, when the sickly synthesised voice which insincerely tells people how deeply sorry it is for the severe delay to their service, announced that there was a platform alteration and the 17.59 to Leicester would now be departing from platform 12b. Since it was now 17.57 there was a moment of mad panic as people dashed for the staircases. I was lucky in that last time this happened to me, a nice elderly gentleman showed me a secret passage by which it is possible to get between platforms underground, without climbing up the enormous staircase back to the main station again. Several other people and I hurried down this passage and were just arranging ourselves in strategic positions on platform 12b which we believed best calculated to enable us to gain seats, when there came another announcement from Mr Electronic Insincerity.

“This is a platform alteration. The 17.59 service from this station to Leicester will now depart from Platform 10a. Platform 10a for the 17.59 service to Leicester”.

I confess to have a severe “I don’t believe it!” Victor Meldrew moment

We all proceeded to dash back through the passage, except somehow I got a bit lost and emerged on platform 11a where I very nearly boarded a train to Hereford and was never seen again.

I could overlook this as a minor inconvenience which hasn’t destroyed my life, but as the week progressed I got increasingly irritated with Cross Country, who I think are providing a much worse service than good old Central Trains used to. I swear the trains they are running have less carriages. One night this week they sent a specimen which consisted of a mere two coaches. The number of people who appear to commute between Birmingham and the environs of Leicester each day is really quite considerable and the effect of cramming them all into such a small space was not pleasant. There was standing place only by the time I arrived (10 minutes prior to departure) and so I settled myself into a nice corner by one of the doors within easy reach of the handrail. I had the presence of mind to remove my backpack from my back and was just about to remove my coat when a sudden influx into the vestibule area resulted in me being wedged in such a manner as made it impossible to sufficiently move my arms. I was therefore condemned to stand in this corner for the 55 minutes it took our delayed service to reach Leicester in severe danger of either overheating or passing out from the smell of a banana a person standing next to me saw fit to eat. Considering I was paying £16.70 a day for the privilege, I was more than a little annoyed :cry:

Moral of the story? I really need to learn to drive…