Yesterday was without doubt not only the best Valentine’s Day I have ever had, but simply one of the best days I have ever had, and this smiley face looks nowhere near happy enough to represent how I feel now It all got off to a rather exciting start when Babel arrived at my house with a beautiful bunch of flowers for me. That was certainly rather unexpected, as he isn’t exactly the romantic type, and if that had been my only present of the day I would have been more than content! I’ve just been downstairs admiring them and trying to take a decent photo, because the very tragic thing is that I’m going to Wigan tomorrow and much as I would like to take them with me, I don’t think I can By the time I come home they’ll almost certainly be dead, so I needed a pictures to commemorate them!

Babel and I headed off to our favourite Harvester to have a spot of lunch. It was actually rather busy, but the time we had to wait for a table was hardly enough time for me to open all my presents! Babel had not only got me a very pretty card, but a whole bag full of gifts. I started to feel a bit bad that I had been completely unable to think of anything to get for him, instead having to rely on the assistance of his Amazon wishlist I was too busy unwrapping to feel guilty for long though! I was rather perplexed when one of my first presents was a book by John Steinbeck, but it all became clear when I opened my next present and found a copy of the same book.. but in Czech Methinks it will be a very long time indeed before I’m anywhere near good enough to be able to read it, but it will certainly help to give me motivation and I thought it was a really excellent idea. Babel’s right that when I was learning German, one of the things which helped me most reading novels (more…)

My experiences with Valentine’s Day have been somewhat mixed over the years. When I was at school, I loathed and detested it and was overjoyed on the years when it fell during the half term holiday, because I hated feeling like the only person who didn’t actually know any boys and thus wouldn’t be getting a card. When I started university I quickly found a boyfriend, and was terribly excited about my first Valentine’s Day with him. As luck would have it it was on a Friday that year, and so the plan was to skip our afternoon lectures and go to the cinema to watch Leonardo di Caprio in Catch Me If You Can, then back to his flat to eat pizza. The going back to his flat part was highly contentious. As far as my mother was aware, I had never been to his flat at all and when I requested to be picked up from there at 10pm she started having conniptions and asked me why I thought a strange guy would invite me back to a flat full of other strange guys in the middle of the night. To be fair to my slightly hysterical mother, she hadn’t actually met my boyfriend at this point and so had no way of knowing that he didn’t have enough imagination to seduce me (more…)