Apparently it snowed

You wouldn't know it from the way every damn person on your various social media collectively lost their minds and ran around taking pictures with their camera phones and exclaiming with glee that actual freaking water was coming out of the sky except colder than normal. 

For me, it was a terrific pain in the arse. Journeys are made continually more difficult by snow in the UK; I have foreign readers so it's quite hard to explain the reaction of the British transport system to snow. I shall try. If you imagine that overnight every single engine in every single vehicle across the entire country suddenly changed into a sugar cube, you have some idea of the confusion and mayhem that reigns across this little island when two centimeters of snow falls from the sky.

In any case, I was journeying up to Loughborough to meet an old friend; a flying visit, but I've been meaning to see her for a long time and the wedding proved to be an ideal opportunity. Those photos will, unfortunately, remain private for the moment (an awkwardness around their bosses' opinions of interdepartmental relationships), but I would really like to share very quickly the cake that my mother made:

 

So that's pretty.

In any case, I arrived at the university last night and we kicked back and caught up; introductions were made and apparently my reputation preceded me - as my friend tapped away at her essay, her flatmate with boyfriend in tow asked for my help with a verbal reasoning test. The test was part of the now-standard battery given to anyone hoping to apply for an internship in any sort of organisation, and while I'm not convinced of their efficacy, it is always a pleasure to pit my mind against the examiners.

We bashed through it with 56 seconds to spare, and I'd like to say that I helped as little as I could - most of the work came from the man himself. A nice guy, built - as all the chaps at Loughborough seem to be - like a brick outhouse, and a bit Welsh. Not too much, but noticeably so - although perhaps I sounded a bit English to him. In any case, I hope he's got it; he seems smart enough but he's basically honest while the questions are designed to be sneaky and catch out normal people.

I wound my way back to my friend's and caught sight of the first few flakes of snow puffing against the window. We stood and watched it fall for a while, and then retired to bed to watch Brave, which I have to roundly recommend to anyone who likes Disney movies, Scottish accents, red hair or any combination thereof. If you are expecting anything other than a 90-minute movie with a solid moral message, a lovely bit of character growth and an extremely well-animated, personality-infused bear then this may not be for you - but as something to chuckle to as snow falls outside and you huddle together for warmth, then it's worth a watch.

We separated to sleep - her flatmate had taken the hit and volunteered to sleep with her boyfriend so that there would be a spare bed, what a trooper - and woke early, so that I could have a chance to look around the campus and partake of the delights of lunch. I have to say that for uni food it was pretty good, and much better priced than my own canteen. She and I ran into a couple of old faces, until we wound up back in her room and watching Africa. 

Now I have no, or hardly any, access to iPlayer from France, so I have missed the most recent glorious example of BBC nature programming. It is, as has been vaunted many times before, filmed at the animals' eye levels, which adds a very odd angle to it - it certainly humanises the animals, although all birds seem to stare at one in the same way that a Glaswegian with eight pints of Tennent's best inside him does. Especially if one uses "one" in everyday speech, even if the context is the correct one.

There was a slightly panicked moment as I turned her room upside down until we realised I'd not had an umbrella when I arrived, and a solid twenty minutes of nervous waiting for me when I arrived and realised that the train I had expected at 2pm did not, in fact, exist. There was a train twenty minutes before, and a train twenty minutes after, but a train on the hour there was not. Considering my Eurostar departed a mere fifteen minutes after the expected arrival time of this train, and French customs had stopped me to go through bags at an agonisingly slow rate before, my nails had been bitten to the quick and I was about to start on the knuckles when we pulled into London.

I made it - obviously - but the sooner the British transport system gets over its fear of snow, the better.

Le Jour J

Le Jour J is a French idiomatic expression which is equivalent to D-Day; however, in French it can also be used to mean "the big day." It is in this sense that I am using it - I do not plan to invade the beaches of France quite yet.

My cousin's wedding approaches; three o'clock is the hour. Incidentally, Jesus Christ was crucified at the third hour. I'm quite sure there are no similarities between the two events.

My father is still working on his speech. He is a very chilled out man; if he were any more laid back he'd fall off the face of the Earth. My mother and I, on the other hand, prefer to plan ahead - to have things at least rehearsed. You can imagine, then, the tension in our house as the hour draws closer and my father insists that the speech needs the bounce and the banter that comes from having bare bones notes. A large part of me has faith that he'll pull it off, and with panache, but that doesn't quite drown out the other part, which is imagining horrible scenarios in which he forgets everything and just stares goofily around the room.

My mother has made a cake for the wedding, and I'd like to share it with you. Perhaps it's because I'm related, but I think this cake looks - well, you tell me.

EDIT: My editor has told me that these photos are not to be made available to the general public until after the event. 

We apologise for this break in the usual programming. A description follows, for those with imagination.

The flowers on the top are individually hand made and edible. The cake itself is a fruit base with two sponge layers on top. The cake is dressed in lace, which is rolled out on a mould and fitted to the cake.

The box and the lace mould came from Cake Craft World in Sevenoaks, but the work is pretty much all down to my mother, with a little help from a friend who came over for a cup of tea and ended up adding icing pearls to this amazing cake.

Bear in mind that as she did this, she also cooked a lasagne for fix people.

The cake is incredibly heavy and has a seat to itself on the coach we've booked to take us to the wedding. It is the second most important guest of honour and at the moment is dressed a lot better than I am - no lace for me, just a charcoal three-piece.

Yesterday's riddle was a little easy, I suspect, especially for anyone who like Harry Potter. Mundungus is a lovely word that means stinky old tobacco. Interestingly he's also a Fletcher, which is an old word for someone who put the barbs on arrows.

Most of my lawyer student friends spend a lot of time in bars - probably too much. But they're also studying to be a bar-rister. What's the connection?

It looks like it's time to get ready. My darling sister is trying to convince me to have a haircut. I had one less than six months ago, I surely don't need another.

Tampons, and other false friends

I have never needed to ask for a tampon. It is not a source of pride, nor is it something I feel has been particularly missing in my life. It's simply something that I have never had any need to do. Nor, in fact, have I ever been asked for a tampon. My rough cheeks and gentlemanly manner have apparently notified anyone who needed one that I was a tampon-free-zone.

Imagine my surprise, then, when my colleague asked me if I had le tampon. My brain promptly melted out of my ears. Did she mean un tampon? Had my gentlemanly manner deserted me? Had my smoothly shaven cheeks given her the slip?

My mind rebelled at the very thought. I recovered (manfully) and managed to ask for clarification.

"Le tampon," she repeated. She pointed in the direction of my desk, and then made a stamping motion.

This was sufficient for me to realise, in a sudden rush, that un tampon is also a stamp. Not the kind you stick to letters, but the kind with a pad of ink (which was used before we had the one you stick, explaining why we use the same word. English is essentially very lazy.)

I handed it over with relief. She gave me a very strange look.

The rest of the day passed without great incident; I finished typing up the comments from student evaluation forms - I'm getting very good at typing in French on a French keyboard but consequently have a weird five minutes when I get home and q is in a's place and some silly person has swapped the m key with the colon/semi-colon. And a full stop is now easily accessible, whilst on a French keyboard one needs to first apply the shift key. Utter mental confusion reigns.

And of course when I go in tomorrow, the opposite will happen, and I shall seethe for several minutes as I try to work out who put my w on the bottom row and why the @ symbol has been shifted to the other side of the keyboard. Occupying two brain spaces is quite difficult, but we shall overcome.

And, best of all, my private lessons restart this weekend. Really excited to see the students again. Especially because the one I help with homework got an A+ for the projects we were working on. Seriously chuffed. 95%, get in.

It's only half past six, and my mother bought me a crêpe pan for Christmas. Let's hope I don't make a total pig's ear of this...

Pig's ear, by the way, is cockney rhyming slang for beer. Likewise tiddley wink means drink. That's why in England people sometimes get a bit tiddley, meaning drunk.

People in Scotland don't get tiddley. They just get drunk.

So far so good.

End of the world, blah blah blah.

The most boring of boring non-stories is the apocalypse-themed ones that the media keep foisting on us. For reasons utterly unknowable to me, several hundred people have gathered in a small village in the south of France because that region is going to be safe. Bugarach, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, has (or rather, had) 176 residents, no pollution, and lovely orchids. It is now ground zero for crazy people and journalists.

I don't understand.

All the same, it gives a little credence to my theory that stories are far, far more appealing than science. That just means that those in science need to find interesting stories to express their scientific truths, because scientific truths are generally quite boring. This is a great shame - I love science, but it doesn't make for good stories. There are very rarely resolutions, which is why one should be very suspicious of any story in a certain newspaper that says "so-and-so can cure cancer, says Science."

Not that I'm thinking of any Daily Mail particular newspaper. 

Anyway, I should be talking about my year abroad. Today has been a very slow day; I looked over an application for sponsorship that some students had put together and was blown away by the level of English (good) and the level of informality (bad). I've noticed that students here have taken to informal conversation like a cliché to water; and although that means that conversation flows beautifully it also means that they write to banks and companies saying "sponsorship is now up for grabs!"

Perhaps I'm being a bit strict, but one doesn't write to a bank manager talking about things being up for grabs. Or perhaps one does; perhaps the end of the world has come and all that's changed is the death of English. I hope not. Zombies I can deal with, meteors, explosions, viral elephantitis, but please let's keep speaking good English. In any case, I've been added to the committee that's trying to organise sponsorship, and that will be an exciting project to start next year.

I packed everything last night; I will be wearing only suits or joggers at home. Joggers for dog jogging - I cannot wait to see my dog again, though I'm sure he's gotten awfully chubby - and suits for literally everything else. Packing was made a mite difficult by the way half of the available space was filled with champagne. I'm in France, as if I wasn't going to bring back a lot of champagne. Three bottles of rosé champagne and three bottles of brut. Over 9 days. This will be exciting. 

In any case, this time tomorrow I shall be back in England with a bag packed with dress shirts and champagne, blinking owlishly in the British sunshine. I can't wait.