Spotty postings

My posting has been exceedingly spotty recently, and I need to apologise for that. The fact is that current temperatures mean that at the end of the day the last thing I wish to do is do the keyboard fandango when the damn thing runs at body temperature.

Still; it's a little cooler today after a storm last night, and so I'm mustering thoughts to fire at you from my last days in this glorious country.

First thought is I will never get used to this heat. To give you an indication: the cream sheets I fitted to my bed on Monday now have a sharp line between the old cream colour and the new, bleached-like-a-bone-in-the-desert white colour they've achieved. The sun did this. The thing is like a billion miles away*. Nothing that powerful should be allowed near children.

My room looks emptier and sadder every day. Much like your skull, it is usually so covered in expressions and emotions that it is very easy to forget that if you take it all away you just have a very generic looking frame. It's like that, sort of. In the same way that it's hard to tell to whom a skull belonged, unless you do that sort of thing for a living, I don't think anyone would know what sort of person lived here if they looked now. And that's sort of sad.

Yesterday, in a segment I'm calling "New ways to disgust myself" I ate an entire roast chicken for dinner with potatoes. In my defense, I had no lunch, and it was really good chicken. You have never seen such a mess, nor seen such a sad, round man in all your life. I can guarantee it.

The reason I had no lunch was because I am absolutely powering through work. It's almost done. I can taste the finish line. It tastes like sweat and rubber, and victory. But the sweat and the rubber were the significant tastes. All the same, at this rate I should actually finish everything. Hooray! Now I just need to pack.

Aïe carumba.

Two more days, a three day weekend to pack and clean everything, two days of frantic finishing up and then home. So excited, so sad. Here comes the end.

*Ninety-three million if you wish to be more precise.

Cricket, allergies, mindless panic

I have 7 days left of my #thirdyearabroad.

This is a deeply upsetting fact for two reasons:

1. I don't want to leave. I like it here, despite this ridiculous, furnace-like heat.
2. I have way, waaaaaay too much work to do.

Reason two is the reason I've not been blogging much. Well, reason two and a whole new onset of allergies. My immune system has taken to treating pollen as the opening of hostilities by some unseen enemy and thus flushes my entire nasal cavity every two minutes, with six to seven enormous sneezes as an accompaniment. To round it off, sleeping is for people who are not under savage attack from pollen and being able to see is reserved for those not subject to ambush by flora.

My kinder colleagues tell me I look tired. I don't have any unkind colleagues, which is just as well because I'd go totally bananas if someone actually pointed out what an utterly unpleasant mess I must look right now.

The allergies were particularly bad last night because I played cricket with some friends from work; all interns, all Indian, and all light years better at cricket than me. I was glad England were playing well against Australia because in this little corner of the world I was letting the side down a lot. Still, it was a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon, if a little (a lot) roastingly hot. It is testament to my lack of sleep and wooly-headedness that for four hours today I couldn't work out why my right arm and side were hurting. Not a proud moment for me.

The work, as I said, is endless. Why people wait until just before they go on holiday to give work to the new guy is beyond me; I suppose they see me as the least important thing on a list but it does make it a touch difficult to get clarification on things I need...well, clarified. Still, I shall muddle through to the best of my prodigious abilities.

My final design for the invitations has been approved, and I got to spend several minutes groping paper. Oh, 350gsm gloss. Mm, 300gsm matt. Oh, Bristol, let me touch you with my fingertips. I used to work in a print shop, and some things never go away. And although it sounds odd, handling paper, looking at the different colours of white, comparing the gloss to the matt and imagining how your image would look...it's amazing fun. Never let me design your wedding invitations. You will lose hours of your life to talk about paper.

With that done it's on to the movies, two translations, and a couple of rearrangements. Six days, five projects. No problem.

Now I think about it...I might go in a little early tomorrow.

And a few more of your least favorite things

My girlfriend's best friend turned me onto a group called +Vitamin String Quartet, who do stringed covers of bands. They are just incredible, so click play below and enjoy this band as you read on.

Today I finished the first cut of the Alumni video, which is turning out to be an absolute headache because the star is uncontactable for the foreseeable future and, regretfully, it's seeming like we might need an extra take. Still, the first cut is certainly watchable, and with a few cuts and some movie magic (I immediately regret writing that phrase) I'm sure I can make this project awesome. All the same, his voice was getting a trifle annoying, so while the film exported I started work on some statistical analysis.

In this particular project I'm looking at how many students said they'd take part in extra-curricular activities, how many actually turned up, and how many of those filled out the evaluation forms at the end. The numbers decrease exponentially.

(Side note, evaluation forms that are not anonymous are, to me, little better than useless. Nobody's going to tell their instructor they're rubbish and put their name to it?)

Still, it's a good opportunity to get grubby in Excel, and some string covers of rock bands (a combination of my two favorite things; their cover of +Panic! At The Disco is especially excellent) helped me power through and create some lovely shiny graphs. A short break from that brought me back to my Alumni colleague, with whom I'm working on some designs for our annual dinner - I'm feeling Gatsby Le Magnifique with an art-deco, monochromatic, angular style (say, do I know any event planners/graphic designers?) and then lunch with five women speaking in rapid French. I understood at least 3/4, which I'm counting as a massive win, because the quarter I didn't understand seemed to be a joke based around me. Not in an unpleasant way, but more in a "isn't-the-foreign-boy-cute-and-clueless" kind of way.

After lunch I got on with a couple of translations and was visited by a few colleagues, who seemed shocked that I had DVDs. I'm leaving in 22 days, and they discover this now.

I'm leaving in 22 days.

That's a really upsetting thought.

I don't want to go. I've got crazy stuff lined up; a holiday in Chicago with my girlfriend, a (paid!) fortnight of work with PRCA, and the chance to write a thesis in French. I'm going to see Derren Brown, and if I'm lucky he'll sign a couple of books that I had to summon demons to acquire. And yet -

and yet, I'm speaking to my replacement, and she's so excited and nervous and I remember being there. And I want to be there again. I want to taste that nervousness, and curse every tiny mistake, and meet again these enormous, wonderful characters that I've known while I've been here.

Nostalgia is cruel and kind in equal measure.

Still, there's nothing else to be done. Life must go on. I've got to take the next step, and fight the feeling that the struggle is Sisyphean.

Also, rediscovering +Spotify is amazing. 

Qu'est ce qui est jaune et attends?

Me, according to a 9-year old who's far smarter than she should be. Jaune-attends is close enough in pronunciation to my real name that I'm unsettled by how long it stumped me. It seems so obvious now, of course.

So I'm sneaking back to the blog. Sorry for the long hiatus. There are a couple of reasons for this, but they're both immensely childish and I'm not willing to dwell on them. Onwards.

My life has been absolutely filled with work recently; two video projects, colleagues with a whole host of things to do that are more important than my repeated requests for information (that sounds bitter, but it's not really - I'm aware that my emails get put into a folder marked "Deal with later" and that "later" means "never" because I am literally the most junior person in the entire organisation.) and a whole host of things to do before the entire company leaves for their summer holidays. I'm not kidding, it's highly likely that come the end of the month I shall be drifting, wraith-like, through the halls that once were thronged with students. My boss, my colleague, and their respective bosses are all leaving, and I'm genuinely a little concerned I shall be left swinging in the wind. We can but wait and see what is revealed.

Plans for the future are coalescing like a sponge that's been put through a blender. I've got a visit lined up to an actual nuclear research facility, which is making my inner geek (who bears a striking resemblance to my outer geek) leap up and down with glee. I've also organised a visit to a place in Chicago that I know Mary's going to love, and I know I'm going to love, and that I will not permit myself to take money into because it will all be spent. And I need to keep that money for the moment.

Speaking of such things, the flat-hunt is creeping forward. Suitable properties with suitable moving in dates are appearing, so I need to nail the next one I see and sort out contracts while I'm here. I'm hoping that's not going to be an issue, but again, we shall have to see. I'm also a few steps closer to bar work at home, if I need it, and I think I'll do a little - the forced socialising is good for me. Plus, being tipped for being handsome/charming/awesome/all of the above is an ego-boost, which is clearly what I need.

(Yes, the mere fact that I've stated it clearly demonstrates how desperately I crave attention. It's a thing and I'm working on it, but for god's sake I blog, and if that didn't tell you I'm desperate for people to look at me you're more blinkered than I am.)

I've got an interview for some copy-writing and photography with a company that deals in student housing, so I'm really excited for that - 9.45 CET and I'll keep you updated on progress there. It's minimum wage but it's writing and photography, and quite frankly I can do that in my sleep. Scratch that, I can excel at that in my sleep. So next year should be fun.

Oh, and I get to start writing a dissertation in September. I am so totally prepared for that!!

Yea, that's going to go as expected. As always I shall keep you informed.

Getting into the USA step one - done!

Alright, so today started incredibly well because my girlfriend sent me her reaction video from season 3, episode 9 of Game of Thrones this morning. It's brilliant. Like absolutely fantastically brilliant, even if it confirmed that she likes animals more than she likes people. You might not think this is a good thing, but she's dating me, which means she likes me more than animals and most humans. She likes me more than Robb Stark's butt, and I mean look at that thing.

There are two exceedingly good tushes in this picture, and I don't know which I like more.

So that's a good thing.

In addition, I finally got round to confirming my visa, so:

First step complete. 

I can, according to this authorisation (I'm hanging on to that spelling as long as I can), still be turned away at the gates and so I invite you to comment or tweet with the hashtag #whatnottosayatcustoms. I'll start with a couple:

• Can I skip this queue?
• I have nothing to declare...save my genius.
• These are not the droids you're looking for.

Alright, those weren't brilliant. I have faith in you though.

Aside from that, it's been an interesting day. I'm starting to wind things up and do some prep for my replacement, including pitching a social media presence to a line manager (seriously terrifying) and setting up a template for next year. It's got to the stage now where I'm convinced if I touch it anymore it'll break, but it's still a mess. Like how you tidy your room. Starts untidy, so you get sorting, tidying, cleaning. Two hours later you look at your room and it's even untidier than it started. This is not possible. You feel suddenly uncertain and, if you pile stuff up like I do, suddenly lost and alone in a paper labyrinth. 

But of course if you keep at it you decrease entropy and make the system more organised, defying thermodynamics and the Dewey decimal system because nobody's got time for that.

That got away from me a little, but the point is that in setting up a template I'm at the point where my formulae run to nine or ten arguments and I'm really, really nervous that I've missed a letter. This will only become apparent when data are entered, so I've started doing practice runs with members of the families of the Game of Thrones universe. So far Joffrey is failing everything.

One other thing happened to me today - I got told I'm helping out with a graduation dinner on a boat that's going to cruise down the Seine. On Saturday. That means that before Saturday I need to lose about 4 inches off my waist or wear a different suit.

Different suit then. Damn you, France, and your delectable cakes. 

Side tracked

So it's been a little quiet on the blog front. I may have gotten slightly distracted by +Game of Thrones. Not so much the televisual series, which has come out as worryingly a) crap at representing homosexual relationships and b) seriously crap at representing what's on the page and ending the third series with, well.

The season closed with a whole lot of brown-skinned slaves being liberated by the white-skinned girl; the same white-skinned girl who'd been sold into sexual slavery, "civilised" her savage (brown) husband/rapist and, well, how does this image not make you just a little bit uncomfortable?

This isn't a reflection on Martin, by the by. He takes about slaves from all the corners of his imagined world; pale-skinned Westerosi to Summer Islanders with skin like onyx. The point is that anyone could be sold into slavery; it's not a condition that only affects people with brown skin.

Except HBO think it is, and I'm really quite pissed off with that. It's a dick move, playing to the audience who gets a little leery about white slaves because apparently that's more upsetting than - augh. Too much irritation.

So I've been losing myself in the books, which are normally the size of bricks. However, thanks to my mother and technology, I can carry the whole collection around on my kindle and add less than the weight of a strawberry to it. That's not a totally random analogy, by the by - the entire weight of the internet has been reckoned to come to about the same as a strawberry. Science, yo.

I've also been losing myself in translation work and travels in Paris, where I've been investigating things for my parents to do when they visit in two weeks time. Excitement. It was Father's day yesterday, and if you forgot ring your dad up now and tell him he's awesome because if you're anything like me telling your dad you love him would be weird. So tell him he's awesome and hope he understands.

Dad, if you're reading this, you're awesome.

M'colleague and I have almost finished with one of our tasks for next year; all that's left is to think up clues. I'm tempted to think of cryptic clues as well, because I happen to think they're cool. I've also started filling in application forms for internships for next year because being keen seems to be working for me so far. It's a stretch, I know, but I want to be interning somewhere - anywhere - other than Britain next summer. It's going to require a lot of work, I know, but I've got a feeling it'll be worth it. Chicago, D.C, New York or Paris. Or Berlin, if I can scrape together the few particles of German festering in my memory banks and force a sound out of them.

The students are leaving in droves to far off and exotic places, like Aberdeen, and today I got an email through from the Registry at uni - the countdown has begun. Before long I shall need to start sorting out my electives and courses for next year, and while I'm pumped, I'm not looking forward to the return to essays and lectures. We shall see.

I am looking forward to a return to the icy cold. This damp heat (22ºC and raining today folks) has absolutely laid me out, and I don't know whether it's a cold or hay fever but the entire liquid contents of my body are doing their best to escape via my nose. I'm starting to wonder if I'm asleep and dreaming; in real life, I'm hanging upside down, which is why fluid going into my mouth is seeming to exit almost immediately via my nose.

I'm going to try a cup of tea with lemon and honey. If that doesn't work it'll have to be two corks.

Something wicked this way comes

Going to see this in August. Words can't express. Also, there's a link to the title. Points if you know it.

The end of the week, when all my cheerful little students come to me to get practice tests for the exam in five days. I guarantee that flow of nervousness will only surge stronger as the date gets closer. As for me, I had the task of editing the video I shot yesterday. It's not all ships and wiggles, you know - I did some seriously hard graft today, not least trying to get iMovie to do what I want rather than what it thinks would look good.

Ken Burns.

Augh.

In any case, I managed to bash through that in a couple of hours, to be faced with round three of the thesis. I was armed with my red pen, and together Diana and I absolutely savaged that thing. It's almost legible now, but I can't guarantee it'll stay that way. In the course of this edit I've learnt more than I ever though I'd need to about modeling, and not the fun kind. The kind where you crunch a thousand data points and come up with a 3-D model of the way the earth beneath our feet looked 3 million years ago which is pretty cool. She's promised me that she'll come back on Monday to let me read her results chapter. "Only fifty pages."

Oh good. Only fifty pages.

In the afternoon I drafted a condolences email for a colleague (yea, that's a weird thing, writing condolences having been given a précis of the deceased's life and personality) as her English is not yet good enough to do it herself, which I found challenging. It's the first time I've ever needed to write one, and novelty is to be cherished even if it is rather morbid.

I also gave a presentation of a translation I'd done to the security guys, all of whom spoke no English and were each built like a small tank. When one shifted in their seat, I could hear the seat protesting. Seats were not made for tanks, the metal seemed to groan. However, I seem to have just about pulled it off - there were questions, which I managed to answer to their satisfaction, and there was some ribbing on the member of their crew who'd been volunteered for the video. That done, and only sweating a small river down my spine (it was the heat, alright, I don't get nervous) I made my way back to the office. A few more students, a commiseration with a friend about the exam she and I took together (French, don't ask. A need to vomit, a blinding headache and a buzzing about the ears do not make for a well-examined exam paper) and then it was time for lessons with C and B. C is making strides, and I suspect she's being the kind of student I despised when I was a student and revising between lessons. Swot.

(I was not a good student, but I've improved some, and it seems I'm not a terrible teacher.)

With B I've started on modals, which have thrown him a little - he's gotten used to "I want + infinitive, I like + infinitive," etc. So as a result I can almost see him furiously trying not to say "I can to get some water?" Modal verbs. Because nothing passive-aggressively says "I hate you" like making your language an arse to learn.

And that concludes my day, aside from one small thing. Well, two small things. +Lizzie Fane, editor, founder and all-round supremo over at +Third Year Abroad has asked me to write something for her fantastic website and I am so excited for that. If you're have gone/are going to go on a year abroad, get yourself over to that site. It is literally a one-stop shop for all you need.

Secondly, by this time next week I suspect I'll have passed 30,000 views, which is quite frankly mind-boggling. So here's the deal. If you've been reading but never commented, here is your chance. If you comment on the blog post that pushes me past 30,000 I'll write something for you. Whatever you want; a cover letter for the job you want, a poem to entrap the heart of the person you've had your eye on forever, or a blog post detailing just what a fantastically awesome person you are.

Up to you, but you've got to be in it to win it. Have a great weekend.

Got up this morning and felt crêpe-y

I made crêpe batter last night, and if there is anything that can pull a chap out of bed 45 minutes earlier than is his custom it's the thought of making wafer thin, lemon-juice-and-and-sugar crêpes. They are best when devoured quickly, and to ensure the rapidity of my breakfast I made like the professionals and ladled in my juice and sugar while the crêpe cooked. Folded, folded and folded again, my breakfast was three of these beauties in quick succession:

I tell you, when I have my flat in Aberdeen, and my coffee machine installed, every morning will be crêpes or eggs and toast or something glorious and hot and filling, because Aberdeen is where the Winter lives. Paris at the moment, it seems, has been gripped by solid, stultifying heat - when a step outside means an assault on the eyes, the nose, and the skin. It is as powerful a blast of heat as you might experience upon opening an oven door.

And so I, in a dark suit and a dark shirt with dark hair and dark shoes, near melted into the ground. Mary assures me it will be hotter still in Chicago. Splendid. It will be nice to have melted on both sides of the Atlantic.

This morning, as you can tell, started well. Yesterday ended well as well; I finally sat down and watched much ado about nothing via a wicked site called +Digital Theatre. There are plays on there that you can rent or buy, and my choice (since there's another version coming out soon, whose trailer is below) was Much Ado About Nothing, featuring David Tennant and Catherine Tate as Beatrice and Benedick. It's absolutely fantastic, with the laughs coming thick and fast courtesy of the brilliant leads and supports. My favourite is still this version, though, because Emma Thompson is beautiful and lovely and speaks Shakespearean English as though she were the lost sister of Elizabeth herself. Please, I implore you to watch it. It's how Shakespeare should be done.

This trailer is for the upcoming Joss Whedon (Avengers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) version of the same, and it's out in the UK on the 14th - hopefully not much longer after that in France. I'm really excited for it, because a new look at the best Shakespeare play - and yes, I said it - is always welcomed.

But I've been massively sidetracked, and I suspect I've lost some readers in Youtube's labyrinthine corridors. Onwards.

This morning I was faced with an extensive translation and a couple of articles to check, one of which the author had written in English. Though it seems cynical I suspect he had done so with the aim of sneaking past the committee the fact that it was essentially an extended advert for his professional services, since they do not speak a lot of English. I passed it up with a note attached to that effect. With a little spare time I lent a hand to a friend of mine, who'd written a cover letter to a very prestigious company without mentioning the prestigious company once.

Cover-letter-writing should be a class. Ditch an afternoon's PE or geometry and teach kids how to write a decent cover letter. Please.

At about half past ten I was cornered by a PhD student who wanted me to take a look over her thesis, which is "only" a third finished and "only" 120 pages so far. There are times when I wonder what happens in the polished corridors of Academia, where 120 pages can be graced with an adjective like "only". In any case, we set to it and cracked through 80 pages before lunch, which I ate in half an hour. This will seem normal - nay, luxurious - when I work at a desk,  but in France it is a sin. No, worse than a sin, because sins are forgiven. It is almost high treason.

The reason for my hurry was that I had an appointment with the head of security to do some filming. I spent about an hour and a half with him and his colleagues, directing a brief bit of film entirely in French. And then we went off to secure a filming slot with the nurses. I went away almost skipping; some days I only speak English due to teaching or reading. And then there are days like these, when I can feel the rhythm of the words and look back at how abysmal I used to be and see the progress - these are the best days.

After that it was time for round two of the thesis, as well as instructions from my supervisor and a call to update the project leader on what progress I'd made with the filming. It felt great to be able to say how much progress I'd made, and also to tell him what I'd organised for next week. Great day.

Finally, I had a French lesson, where I spoke more French and tried not to tear my hair out as a classmate tried to convince me that the soul exists because we can be moved by Art. Having emotions does not signify a soul. Still, it was a useful practice, and I managed to give the teacher a minor heart attack by demonstrating "soudain". I did this by sharply banging both palms on the table at once, without warning, demonstrating the rapidity with which attraction can strike. And apparently how swiftly heart attacks can come on, as I looked up to see him collapsed in a chair. I also managed to bring a little Wilde into the room, explaining that it is important to get engaged several times in order to be perfectly practiced when one does it for real.

Jack.  Gwendolen, will you marry me?  [Goes on his knees.]

Gwendolen.  Of course I will, darling.  How long you have been about it!  I am afraid you have had very little experience in how to propose.

Jack.  My own one, I have never loved any one in the world but you.

Gwendolen.  Yes, but men often propose for practice.  I know my brother Gerald does.  All my girl-friends tell me so. 

Well now. I think that's quite clear, don't you? No lady wants a man who is unpracticed in getting down on one knee and doing what it is necessary for a man to do.

A long day. I grabbed a bag of cherries on the way home and got them for free because of loyalty points. Today has been just a gigantic win. I hope tomorrow is the same.

Presentation is key

Well, I got reminded this morning of something I'd agreed to after three cups of champagne, and that something was a ten minute presentation that I will be giving tomorrow. The moral of this cautionary tale is, of course, don't promise to do something having drunk three cups of champagne, because your opinion of your own French will be considerably higher than it really merits.

I got a haircut. Want to give me your opinion? Try me on G+ or Twitter

Nonetheless I am a man of my word, and so this evening I offer an early blog and a picture to make up for the normal wordiness while I write my presentation about a piece of software that may well help teachers to better connect with their students.

So: today was made of sorting data in Excel, writing storyboards, seeing students, checking CVs, and translating an email. My storyboards are coming along, insofarasmuch as storyboards made of stick figures with speech bubbles of too much text constitute a storyboard. (Do they? I have literally no experience in this field.)

That's been about my day. The coffee machine is not working any more, and I need way more caffeine than I'm currently getting. I've said it about a hundred and one times, but the only thing I'm looking forward to in Aberdeen is getting myself a coffee machine and having at least three coffees a day for pennies.

Addict? Where?

Update: just before posting I looked into the mirror and grinned, and my dad grinned back at me out of it. Genuinely unsettled. For comparison my dad is below.

Apologies

I have not blogged for four days. This is the longest I've not blogged for since I started, and it feels weird not to be able to fill up what I am certain you are hoping will be hours of your life with words, but the fact is that of these past few days, half have been exceedingly boring and the other half I've spent with my girlfriend, and that's about as much detail as you're going to get regarding that.

I have been writing essays and storyboards, which are slowly coming together, and reading a book I picked up  on impulse in Relay and finding to my enormous gratification that I can actually read it. It's entitled Prisoners' dilemmas and dominant strategies: Game theory, and it's a pretty brilliant read. If you're interested in game theory (and why wouldn't you be?), read the following explanation and then watch the video. You may well learn something.

The video below shows the final round of a UK TV show called Goldenballs, in which contestants do their best to lie to each other to get to this point. At this point, a sum of money is up for grabs, but there's a catch - the players must decide how to split it. Sort of.







Each player has a choice of two balls; Steal or Split. The scenarios play out in the following way:

1. Both players choose Split. The money is split between the players fifty-fifty. Everyone goes home happy.
2. One player chooses Split and one chooses Steal. The player who chose steal walks away with everything; the player who didn't doesn't get anything.
3. Both players choose Steal. Nobody gets anything.

The players, as you'll see below, are given 1 minute to convince the other to choose Split, because that's obviously the most beneficial choice for your opponent to make. Once you've convinced him/her to choose Split, you can then choose Steal and walk away with all the cash.

Of course they're trying to do the same to you. So the pair of you are doing your best to manoeuvre around each other, convincing the other with weasel words and trying not to give away the fact that you're definitely going to choose Steal. This happened a lot, and a lot of people walked away with nothing.

In essence, the question is this: How do you force someone to choose Split, even when they know it's in their best interests to choose Steal?

Like this: (zoom to 2:19 for the start of the tactic)

If you're not impressed with that, game theory's not for you, but in my opinion that's some seriously clever strategy.

Not much else is new; I'm actually starting to pack things away again, but books are hard to keep in boxes - they should be on shelves or, as they are with me, in stacks on the desk. I'm confident about getting a job next year, having spoken to some old pals in the bar trade at home, and decent looking flats roll into my inbox every week or so - so again, some of the stress has gone from there. 

My essay, too, is done and dusted, so I'm suddenly without stress and, without any sense of irony, it's stressing me out. I'm sure I'll come up with something to do before long.

The flea market, where Kate got monkeys (but not fleas)

If anyone knows the root of the phrase "flea market" (and honestly, Sheila, I would be amazed if it's not you) please let me know, because I've never seen a flea in a flea market. Just tons, literally tons, of antique crap. Crap that people once valued highly and is now being sold alongside corkscrews and miscellaneous forks, 4€ for as much as you can fit in a bag.

The flea market was after class with A, who was a little unfocussed today. I've found that if I wait until he thinks he's finished the question, rather than correcting his errors as he makes them, he checks his answers himself and spots the mistakes himself - a far more fruitful learning process. I can imagine those wonderful teachers who read this blog - Hannah, for example - rolling their eyes at the fact that they learnt this years ago, but hey. I'm relatively new to this game.

After work I caught the tiniest bus in the world (seats: 20) to the station, and from the station a speedy little train to Paris where I met the girls at La Madeleine, a gloriously imposing church in the 8th. Mary had just thrown down 240€ on perfume for a friend of her mother's while wearing skinny jeans and the most broken down converse you've ever seen. I would have paid good money to see the shop assistant's face when this girl asked for a frighteningly expensive perfume. I would have laughed and laughed, if flies could laugh. As it was, we made our introductions, and at one point Kate put the bag on my head. It smelt of roses and paper, if you were interested, but if that's what 240€ smells like I'll just take the cash and sniff it.

On arrival all three of us were feeling a little hunger and we set off in search of some grub. As we were walking, I spotted an interesting storefront: Chick-can. Intriguing. On closer inspection, the food sounded great - a quarter roast chicken plus two hot sides for 12€. Bargain, but we weren't expecting much - this close to Concorde and the Champs d'Elysées, a bottle of water will set you back 2€ - but upon entering we found beautifully clean premises and a host who was enthusiastic and charming in equal measure - and both of those measures were enormous. He asked first if we spoke French or English, and when we proposed French he rattled off the menu and the way it was prepared slowly enough for us to understand but fast enough to make us feel as though we were absolutely winning at French. In essence, for your 12€ you get a quarter of a roast chicken - and you can see these chickens roasting behind the counter - in a sauce of your choice. In addition, we could choose two hot sides from between roasted baby new potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, mashed potato, ratatouille or quinoa. Every single sauce sounded delicious, every side looked exquisite. Our host ladled our plates high with the food, instructed us to help ourselves to glasses of water that he'd placed in the fridge so that they'd be cool, and moved quickly on to explaining this marvelous prospect to a new set of customers.

The food - oh, gods, the food. The chicken was amazing. The sides were amazing. The water was, well, water, but it was chilled and therefore amazing. Never underestimate chilled water. Knowing how my mother loves a roast chicken, I'm planning on taking my parents there when they come to see me in July. There'll be high class meals too, but sometimes you need to get down and greasy and rip into some chicken with your hands. Do not, like me, wear a classy shirt, because that delicious sauce will make a break for freedom all over your shirt, and then you'll have to fight the urge to then eat your shirt. And that will endear you to absolutely no-one. So that's my Paris meal tip: Chick Can, 12 rue Vignon, 75009. Wear a t-shirt. Or a bib.

The afternoon was given over to a flea market in the northernmost reaches of Paris, where we had to walk a veritable gauntlet of shifty looking people offering us glasses, belts, shirts and phones. They had probably fallen off the back of a lorry (an English euphemism which means stolen), and so the chances of me buying any of the goods was slim. All the same, it's a trifle intimidating, and made me realise I should start asking to be paid by cheque. At the market, Kate haggled down a fellow from 40 to 30€, displaying a mastery of the girlish pout that has toppled nations and brought low the mighty. And saved her 10€, so that's pretty good. She bought the three monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. I myself spotted several julep cups (a julep is a kind of cocktail; you can see I'm already planning my return to the Aberdeen scene) and a beautiful shaker which knocked in at 220€. Temptation tried to slip her hand in my back pocket, but for the moment I resisted.

Once we quit the market we made our way to Chatelet, where there are plenty of bars and cafés where one can sit and watch the world pass by. So we grabbed a table and did so. There is no greater pleasure, in any city, than to sit and be surrounded by the hurrying people, to watch them and make no move at all to join their hustle and bustle. A couple of drinks later we made our lazy way to St Lazare where I said goodbye to Kate (by pulling a bizarre face and banging my face against hers) and goodbye to Mary (she's my girlfriend. If I need to tell you how I said goodbye to my girlfriend you need to step away from the Internet).

A journey home and a careful avoidance of my takeaway heaven - with a liter of excellent Belgian beer coating my insides, and despite my enormous lunch, a kebab was looking exceedingly delicious - brings me to here, finishing up the second of two gigantic blogs.

Thank you always for reading. And Fiona, if you've got this far, you may now rest.

For everyone else, here's a Youtube entertainer that my girlfriend (a concept that is apparently utterly alien to my sister) has got me hooked on. She's fantastic, but this video did make me question a lot of things.

No, don't ask what things. Just watch the video.

Really. Don't ask.

Midweek madness

Having a Wednesday off is weird. Having a Wednesday off with no sign of work until Monday is quite frankly bizarre, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. However, it has allowed me to do plenty of work around the flat, a few more paragraphs of the year abroad project, and some campaigning. Campaigning from behind a desk, several thousand miles from the electorate - it's tricky.

However. Progress has been made, and I've even started planning what my parents are going to be taking home when they arrive in July - it's a long way off, but there's no harm in being prepared. I think my marble chess set, 500-page cocktail bible and cast-iron griddle can probably go. (Please take my advice: look at what you've packed for your year abroad and then get rid of everything that you know you're not going to use more than once a week.)

The afternoon was given over tutoring once more; I keep forgetting C is very young and only a beginner because she's rocking the present tense like a natural while B is struggling a little with the present perfect and the past perfect, because they're kind of hard to explain and it seems his teacher's not done the greatest of jobs. Still; me to the rescue - appropriate, since the current topic is superheroes. We managed a debate on why Superman is, in fact, the worst superhero and unique in terms of "secret identities." For more on this train of thought, see David Carradine in Kill Bill Vol.2. Or just see below.

With a few more pennies added to my pocket and some homework meted out - I am a very mean tutor -  I decided to skip the bus and walk home. The weather was warm and close, and the dark clouds overhead hinted at rain. They managed to pass without pouring on me, and the stroll home was fantastic - I bought the soundtrack to The Great Gatsby (here: Gatsby le Magnifique, which I like far better as a title) as I was walking and streamed it direct to my earholes from the internet via my phone, because technology has made magic completely obsolete. 

I (still) cannot get over how completely off-the-wall mad it is that we can actually do that.

Since I got home, it's been pootling, reading, and cleaning. With all this free time to procrastinate, it would be a crime to waste it...

High Tea, High Hat, Cymbal, Scat

Today I am more glad than ever I am not making a video blog, because I sound as husky as a husky who smokes a forty-pack a day. This is because I have been getting very excited about English, services we offer in the mediatheque, and switching from French to English with only the occasional missed step.

Today was inauguration day for my new mediatheque (which won't be mine in a mere two months time) and so we cracked out about 400 scones, 8 kilos of jam and enough clotted cream to fill a fridge. We also brought forth tea in 4 varieties; Darjeeling, Ceylon, Breakfast and, of course, Earl Grey. I also managed to find a site where the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was hosted, and so the beautiful words of Jerusalem, Danny Boy and Flow'r of Scotland floated over the heads of my cheerfully babbling students; babbling, from Babel; the many different languages weaving a fabric of community.

All shared over scones and tea. My job gets better every day.

It was all over too soon, in fact, and before long I was back in my French class, where we had great fun with French text language. It's a mess, and I can't stand it, but I confess I over-reacted a little when a fellow student said it would mean that kids wouldn't be learning "proper language skills".

I don't agree. Some very smart people I know use text language, and it's representative of a fascinating look into the way a mind works. The spelling is literal, brief, saving space and time. It requires thinking in a certain way, and when you think the way another mind thinks, you're a little closer to them as a person. There are no "proper language skills," language is a continually evolving hydra. If you try squashing one part of it, it'll simply spring up again somewhere else. Teach "proper language skills", sure, but then realise that people will break them. From Shakespeare to Dizzy Rascal, the "rules" can be broken. Let's be jazz musicians, and learn the rules just to break them.

Ella Fitzgerald, ladies and gentlemen:

Mayday! Mayday!

Days off in the middle of the week are weird. I am struggling to reconcile my day, which was spent tutoring, with the fact that tomorrow is not Sunday but in fact Thursday. This is weird and I don't like it.

Still, on the other hand, tomorrow is High Tea day! I'm very excited; I'm going to be spending the morning spreading jam and cream and cutting scones, and the afternoon just giving them away. In addition,  my colleague from the Association went on holiday this morning so I shall be swinging in the breeze, with no work to do. Apart from the cutting and spreading obviously.

Quick question, British brethren - cream then jam, or jam then cream?

This morning was a lovely start; stayed in bed until 9am and then pootled about, trying to put off the moment when I would have to face up to the fact that I had not a scrap of food in the flat. Today is - was, for you future people - the 1st May, the first of many public holidays during the month of May. Everything was shut; everything except McDonalds, which was where I had dinner. French haut cuisine at its finest; even the chips looked offended, as if they'd never wish to be seen dead in such an establishment.

I ate them anyway. McDonalds is to food what cement is to interior design. It'll do the job, but you wouldn't want to see it every day.

Dinner, such as it was, came after a surprise four hours of tutoring. It was only supposed to be two, taking advantage of the day off, but A started to struggle with some of the biology so two hours turned to three, which turned to four, and before long it was 6pm and I finally left.

Just as a notice for students on their year abroad - tutor. Tutor a mere ten hours a week, and you'll find that cash flows from your fingertips. You will wonder why you study. You'll seriously wonder why you ever worked in a bar. You'll question why you worked on a shop floor. You'll start doing it more and more until every hour of your life becomes a race from one house to the next, drinking two coffees per house and vibrating from the caffeine all night in your money-bed.

Tutoring. It's like heroin, only you make money.

So now it's late, and I've booked tickets to the States, because sometimes when a river crashes into you you have to go with the flow. My parents have booked their hotel, and they'll be here in July. My T.F.I test is in June, my project is (weirdly) coming along quite nicely, and my girlfriend is paying me a surprise visit in a week.

Oh. And my student's mother gave me three whisky cakes she had been given as a present and couldn't imagine ever eating.

Year abroad is just a metaphor for awesome.

So British!

"So British" is a catchphrase, used by the French, to encapsulate all that is glorious about my fellow countrymen and me. Our accents, our stiff upper lips, our sartorial excellence and the furtive, shifty way we speak French.

I like it. It makes me feel as though I am the keeper of secret knowledge, a wielder of the flame of Britannia, a member of a secret club - a club I was apparently born into it. I rather imagine it's how Prince Harry feels every day of his charmed life. "So British" has followed me since I arrived, and only recently have I realised what a strange people we must seem to our brothers and sisters from foreign lands.

Tea, for a start. Trying to convince the French catering department at the school to provide me with kettles to boil water is turning into a Escher-themed tennis match. They simply do not understand why the water has to be boiling. Why can they not simply boil it at 9am and leave it in the huge urns? It'll still be hot by 3pm.

Tea has to be made with boiling water, I explain. Not tepid, warm, or even hot water. Boiling. A sigh, a shrug, and a rueful look at colleagues. "So British!"

Second: scones. We've bought a lot, and both students and staff are going to enjoy them. However, they're having serious trouble deciphering what they are. Are they biscuits? Cakes? What's this on top? Jam? And this? Cream? English cream? Crème anglaise? What do you mean, they're not the same thing? A sigh, a shrug, and a rueful look at colleagues. "So British!"

It is an odd thing to insist on, but I'm also certain that High Tea is going to go over a storm. It'll be bally marvelous, what what. I might even break out the tuxedo.

So: this morning was mostly calm. A few bits and pieces to do in Excel, including a formula I worked out to separate names into two columns rather than one. I could have looked it up on Google, of course, but there's a great pleasure to figuring it out by oneself.

The afternoon was crazytown central. I got the certificates for students who'd taken the TOEIC and they descended, not en masse but in dribs and drabs, to collect them. This wouldn't have been so bad were it not for the other students whom I was trying to help with an article on an explosion that killed three people. Tough to dart between light banter and "So, here we need to stress what killed these people."

Lunch was a rapid, half-hour job, as translations needed to be finished and I had a meeting about another presentation I had to do. My colleague showed me the software and how to use it; it seems very simple and I should be able to rip through it in about thirty minutes on Thursday. After that was big-brained Alexander, whose nationality my friend Adeline could not figure out (Alexander speaks like a villain from a Bond movie; his Russian accent is so beautifully clichéd that I want to record him saying things like "You have a message, Mr Kerr" for my phone alerts.).

Finally, Alexander's article was finished, my door was closed, I was reaching for my keys when -

"Can we have our diplomas?"

"Certificates," I hissed between gritted teeth, and turned, smiled, and opened my door again.

That brought me to my French lesson, where we did negation.

I'm not going to say anything else there because I'll be either sarcastic or mean, and neither is appropriate.

Instead we shall skip ahead to tonight, where I find my privacy invaded by a colleague who desperately needs work done now because she didn't do it earlier.

I caved and did it. It only took thirty seconds, and it made her happy.

I'm a flake.

Tomorrow is a day off! And I'm probably still going to get up at 7! Hoorah for body clocks!

Not.

[Manic laughter]

Stage directions in my life are pretty much the above right now. I have time for manic laughter and half an hour for lunch. Half an hour! I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure there are laws against that kind of cruel and unusual punishment.

To recap: this morning started with me discovering that whoever had set up our google+ account had done it assuming you could just set up a personal page as an organisation. Google, however, has spotted that there aren't many (indeed any) folks in the world with a name that is entirely initialisations (not acronyms; acronyms are initialisations that you say as a word, like RADAR or COBRA). Consequently our account has been closed and we've got a stern email from Google, which none of my colleagues read because they don't monitor the social media accounts.

Hum.

So that was a new and exciting spanner that was thrown into the engine of my life. All the same; I thrive on challenge, and before long I had a new page up, in the right place this time, but unfortunately currently administered by me. I need to shift that on to someone else quickly, because I won't be here for much longer and it needs to be dynamically managed.

Speaking of dynamic managing, and dragging the conversation away from me for just a second, can I point out that my little sister is running an entire store's social media strategy, has been elected the local Carnival Queen, and is also doing a degree?

I've already mentioned my brother. Seems like my gene pool is for awesome only.

Anyway, enough about her, back to me. Aside from redoing our G+ page I've also put together several montages for perusal by the upper echelons and rattled off a translation for my secret project. All I need now is willing volunteers and actors. It's going to be so, so much fun. Apply within.

My "English High Tea" project moved forward today too, with posters going up around the school with enigmatic images of scones, jam and clotted cream. Not enigmatic to those born on the shores of Blighty, of course, but to those of foreign birth they seem to represent a perfect mystery.

I played a game of chess with Adeline today, which I almost lost at several points, in part because I was distracted by several students and in part because she turned out to be better than expected. This is always an unsettling turn of events, akin to seeing a tortoise outpace a hare. In any case, she saw her doom approaching and resigned, but not before an exciting battle in which I first lost and then regained my queen. Thrilling.

The afternoon was given over to my friend Alexander, who has such a giant brain, so filled with electric thoughts rushing about, that he has become quite bald. It's a sign of his marvelous brain that I could only understand a third of what he'd written, but I corrected what I could and helped him break forty-word sentences into more manageable, human-sized chunks. I was torn away from that task - I say task, but it's so much more fun that the word implies - by more work from this morning. The upper echelons had sent a messenger to ask me to redo something in the photographs.

A task that would take me but a moment, and yet the messenger - because she, too, does not quite understand how I do what I do with photo manipulation and as a result is not as confident as I am in my pronouncements - insisted it be done there and then. Lucky I've managed to reschedule that meeting for tomorrow, so here's hoping everything else goes well.

(Yea, right. "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength" or, to put it another way, "No plan survives first contact")

So: tomorrow will be another fantastically busy day, Wednesday I have off which, for the first time since I can remember I am furious about (there is way, way too much to do to just take a day off in the middle of the week!) and the rest of the week I'm without one of my colleagues.

Then next week we've got another three days off ("work ethic" are both hideous, foreign words to the French, and have no place in their vocabulary) and then we're in the middle of May and I've got my year abroad project due, a serious of videos to be ready for two weeks after that and just -

I feel this fortnight is going to stress me out.

Blogs may be a little curter (from French court, meaning short or brief.).

The belles of Notre Dame

So I saw this poster on the way home from today's travels:

"The number 1 site for extramarital affairs thought up by women."

And after uploading it to Facebook I decided that this was what I should write my year abroad project on - the fact that the French apparently invented the word "blasé" to describe how they feel about extramarital affairs. It should be interesting, and hopefully suitably culturally-centered. We can but hope.

To get to that point, let's go back to this morning. I though I was meeting Kate and Mary at 11, and not 10, which is why I was stepping out of the shower when my phone rang this morning. Kate wanted to know if I wouldn't mind meeting them at a different location - one that would be easier for me since I was already on the train.

(I definitely was not already on the train.)

I got dressed, grabbed my camera, and bolted out the door. A speed-walk to the station and a mere three-minute wait and I was on the train and on my way into town. Once again I'm stunned with glee that a ticket for all public transport in Paris on the weekend for young people is 3.75€. It's incredibly good value and stands in stark contrast to, say, First Aberdeen, who charge a little under that for a student day ticket. First Aberdeen are thieving whatnots, and it's an ongoing struggle to make them lower their prices even a smidgeon.

But that's Aberdeen's problem, and not yours. Onwards.

I arrived a mere five minutes after I was supposed to and snatched a moment with Mary before greeting Kate. Greeting is really too small a word for the huge bosie I gave her and she in return gave me. I felt ribs creak. They'd stowed their luggage at Gare de Lyon - the luggage storage at St. Lazare is now closed, for reasons currently outside the wit of man - so that's where we met, and from there we headed to Chatelet-les-Halles. A short hop on and then off the train again and we found ourselves strolling through the warm morning with blossom showering around us. To get from where we were - Chatelet - to where we wanted to be - Jardin du Luxembourg - we could have caught a train and sunk once again into the stinking underground. The system of trains in Paris is wonderful; the smell of sulphur, however, would make even a Satanist baulk. Instead we strolled across the river and took the opportunity to sit outside the cathedral and take some snaps.

I say we. I gave Kate the camera, since the last time I did so she got some cracking photos - and I got it back before she left with another 200 snaps to work through. They're almost all golden. Kate sings like an angel and takes photos like a pro. Being around her is jealousy-inducing to the highest order. All of the photos that follow are credited to her.

It also means that rather than being behind the camera all the time, I got to be in front of it. Very much in front of it, on one occasion.

A little too close for comfort perhaps.

We strolled in the direction of the Garden and along the way ducked into my favourite Parisian haunt. I'm pretty sure this is the third time in a week and is now bordering on an obsession, but Shakespeare and Company is the greatest English-language bookstore in Paris.

There's barely enough room to squeeze past books upon books, all ordered but not only on shelves but tables too. Books spilling out and words, just words, everywhere.

I love this shop.

We grabbed a quick bite to eat in a pizza and pasta place run by genuine Italians, which meant they understood English better than they understood French - don't know how to feel about that - and which made Mary roll her eyes just a little.

The reason Mary rolled her eyes is because she is essentially sensible, and if she were to have a food intolerance then she would avoid that food in particular. Since Kate has an intolerance to gluten and I have an intolerance to lactose, a pizza/pasta parlour is literally the worst place for us to be. Everything is made with dough and cheese. Everything.

Did we listen? Am I a sensible person?

Hello...friend

What do you think?

In any case, after our grub stop, we made it to the Garden. They looked incredible, with flowers in full bloom and small children setting boats free on the central pond. One of the children had a pirate boat, and I suspect I was not the only person feeling just a pang of jealousy. I mean look at it, it's a pirate boat. I wanted a pirate boat.

How much did I want a pirate boat? Enough to make me pull a very ugly face. How ugly? I can't say. It would make your eyes pop out, one-two, and then you'd never read this blog again.

We did a tour around the Garden, encountering a Giant Sequoia (that "only" reaches around 40m in Europe, according to the delightfully understated sign) and a woman doing sprint yoga.

By this I meant she would do a yoga stretch in the middle of the path and then carry on walking and then, as if she had received instructions from some other place, promptly did another one. She hopped, skipped, jumped and stretched around the circumference of the park, and by the time we parted ways we all felt absolutely exhausted. The girls had only an hour before their train, and so we wound our way back to Gare de Lyon, and stood outside it for a second.

Oooh...moody.

I have very strong memories of this place, and they all seem to center around this particular girl:

Pictured: Demon-spawn. And a blueberry muffin.

Your year abroad - I make a huge assumption in saying this, but I think many of you will be going on a year abroad - will expose you to new cultures in ways you could not possibly imagine. It will change the course of your life, and sometimes that course will collide with someone with whom you will click in every way. And sometimes these relationships won't last; you've only got a year, and so do they. Even with Skype, and aeroplanes, and Facebook, some things can't survive the distance.

So seize the opportunities that I know you'll get.

Pictured: Opportunity being seized.

Also: blueberry muffin.

And blog about it, so I can read your adventures.

Anyway, before the nostalgia set in, I was talking about Gare de Lyon and the girls. We had a quick drink and retrieved their luggage. Kate rushed in and assured us we needn't come in with her, which was transparently both untrue and crafted to give Mary and I another moment. She is a great friend, and I can't wait to get back to studying with her next year. I owe her a lot, and it may well be repaid in dinners.

We seized the moment, as if you need to be told.

On the way down to the Metro, the escalator was out of order and the train was at the platform. Kate dragged her suitcase down the stairs at some speed and she had almost managed the whole lot when we heard an awful crack. We leapt onto the train, manhandling the suitcase, and took stock of the damage. The handle had snapped right off the bag and so had a white tube that was previously hidden inside the handle. It seemed to be made of fibres, so I grabbed it to try to twist it and snap it completely. It was, indeed, made of fibres - fibres of glass.

Nasty, nasty little fibres of glass that were now stuck in my fingers and next to impossible to see because glass, of course, is transparent. Hilarious when this property results in children and small animals running into it, less fun when microscopic fibres of it are jammed in your fingertips.

In any case, with the judicious application of gloves we got the suitcase on the train, said our goodbyes, and parted. 

I hate parting.

So that's been my Saturday. It's only six now, but I don't foresee anything interesting coming up before midnight. A massive thank-you to thirdyearabroad.com whom I am sure are responsible for the vast majority of my readers, as well as running a site that got me really prepared for my own third year abroad.

That's all for today folks. I read something lovely the other day that I'd like to share with you:

"The evening news is the only television programme that opens with 'Good Evening' and the goes on to tell you why it's not."

It amused me, and I hope it's amused you too. Thanks for reading.

Back to normal

Normal here means my normal style; less "blue". My girlfriend assigns colours to my blog, but she also leaves out the u in colour so we'll take what she says with a pinch of salt. (She's coming back tomorrow, and I react to the reappearance in my life of those I've missed by being sarcastic and mean.) In any case, today began with a bang as I had an hour-long meeting five minutes after I got in. It was a great meeting, with lots of positive actions coming out of it, but all the same - that much French a mere 90 minutes after I'd woken up and blearily switched on +France24 is too much, even for someone with my staggering intellect and endless reserves of modesty.

In any case, I understood everything, and have now been commissioned to record myself giving one presentation about mind maps as well as film a series of clips for a secret project. Secret for the moment, in any case. There'll be more about it once I have more details for sharing. In any case, that brought me to 10, when I went to work for the Association, sorting out figures from last year. The accounts seem to be a bit of a mess, but I was reassured by my colleague that the figures I'd worked with last year were all wrong, and the ones I know held in my hands were the "good" ones.

(To all French students of English:  le bon is "the right one", and not "the good one. We can't make moral judgements about numbers.)

I had to fortify myself with coffee to bite back the quick response, which was why on earth was I not given the right figures in the first place, and as I waited for the dark nectar to fill my cup I realised that they probably thought they were the right figures in the first place. It is far too easy to leap to the conclusion that everyone had the information then that they do now, and it's simply untrue. I took a deep breath, a deep draught of coffee, squared my shoulders, and wrote lovely formulas to make numbers jump across pages and add up in neat little columns.

I darted back and forth between the Association and the mediatheque for the rest of the morning as students dropped in for books and DVDs. I have been dong that a lot recently, as I'm yet to work out how to automatically transfer calls. It seems that whenever I am in the Association nobody calls but the world wants to get in touch with the mediatheque, while when I'm in the mediatheque the world and his brother are both calling my Association phone. Sometimes, just for fun, they'll ring together, and I'll get so confused I run into a wall.

I have a fitness machine disguised as a pair of phones and it is a sadistic son of a gun.

I am also only now discovering the joys of endless e-mail threads, where you read something and then write your reply and send to all, because your opinion is so damn important that everyone must read it. Not just the project leader. Everyone on the project. This guy, who did a little picture montage and then nothing else this morning came into an inbox full of e-mail tennis about the correct wording of the French text in the e-mail that accompanied the montage.

And right at the bottom, after scrolling through for twenty minutes and trying to decipher the semantic battle waging, I find: "The montage is fine."

Road rage is a picnic with Winne the Pooh compared to the sensation coursing through a fellow's bloodstream on having read every line of this silliness in hope of any sort of feedback on one's work and finding it consists of four words.

No matter. I quit the business at midday, and threw myself into mediatheque work. The first part of the dual projects I have going on require a translation in which I have - and gods, I love my colleague for saying this - I have white card.

You've never seen anyone look so blank in your life. He repeated.

"Tu as white card pour faire ce que tu veux"

Understanding crept over me like moss creeps over a boulder. Slowly.

"Carte blanche?" I asked.

He beamed. "Oui!"

I almost bit through my lip trying not to laugh. What are the odds that he would pick that exact phrase to translate? Marvelous. A moment of pure comedy.

So I've broken down some of the heavier phrases and pages into more manageable chunks, like a bar of 95% chocolate recommended by the mother of an ex-girlfriend. I've played with the phrasing but, reading back what I've written, I'm realising that I may need to tone down the "me-ness" in it for those who don't speak my particular brand of English.

All of this, by the way, and it wasn't even lunchtime. I love working this hard, the time absolutely flows. I also love Fridays, because I get served this after lunch:

Pictured: why you want to work in France.

Second coffee of the day and this time with chocolate. There's just too much dark deliciousness there.

Straight after lunch I had a meeting with M, who's in charge of social media at the School. She's also charming, smart, and my co-collaborator on my third current project. She'll be interviewing a senior member of staff about an exciting new relationship that the School is developing, and she wants me to help her film and then subsequently edit the footage. We'll be adding in watermarks and doing our best to make the whole thing look as professional as possible.

Exciting times!

The rest of the afternoon was then given over to Chapter 4 of the book, which I didn't even realise I'd not seen yet. While I'll be losing marks for, you know, noticing stuff, I think it should be well noted that I then promptly busted my ass for another 90 minutes before throwing everything in a bag and running off to teach my private students.

Their lessons went well, though it's interesting to see that B, while more confident, is still a lot shakier on grammar than C - but C would rather carve her own arms off than say more than a sentence at a time. I need some way to meld them into one super-student and then divide them in two.

Crashed home, bought a kebab on the way - immigration is amazing for so many reasons, but the spread of spectacular food is the one I love best - and now, at twenty past ten, I'm considering going to bed. I had a lucky escape today; I was offered the last ticket to a party happening tonight in the Tour Montparnasse, the 2nd highest point in Paris. I was more than tempted; despite the long day, this was one of those occasions that will never come again.

But when I dug into my pockets I found nothing; not even a bit of fluff. Not even a moth to comically flutter out to denote my total lack of cash. The opportunity passed me by.

Let's be honest - after last time, that's probably just as well.

Up-and-down-day

My day started badly. The internet still didn't work - more on that later - and I spent too long trying to fix it by unplugging it, staring hard at it, and then plugging it back in. That didn't work. It never works, but one day it will, and that will be the day I become "The Man With Laser Eyes."

It actually picked up once I got to work; it's roasting hot and I'm in a nice cool office by the window, which means I never overheat and simultaneously have absolutely no chance of seeing the screen as I am blinded by the glare. Today I was working on a mini-guide to help computer illiterate alumni connect to the network. I had done a French and an English version when my colleague mentioned that there were a couple of German people on the list, and would I mind rattling off a version in German quickly?

Give her her dues, she held a straight face remarkably well while I spluttered and reached for the words in French to convey how touched I was that she'd asked me and how utterly awful that same idea was. I must have been a ridiculous figure, and she finally relented and admitted she was joking. The rest of the day passed as always; another chapter to re-read (I keep thinking I've finished with that, and I keep getting more chapters. It's bizarre.) and more students coming and borrowing things. Hurrah! I'm going to work on a survey for other students as well and offer a prize to bribe them into doing it. I love bribes. I love anonymity too, anonymous surveys are absolutely the best. Anonymous everything: job applications, exam papers, feedback forms.

I think a 50€ Amazon voucher would be in the theme of things.

I also corrected a blog post by a student who was writing about an explosion (and who'd tried to make it light-hearted but instead had made it scarier, like a gorilla with an Uzi) that occurred in a petrochemicals plant in Carling, France. The students have to write in English, and I was struck once more by the curiously narrow band of errors all French students make. Missing articles and prepositions  and having real trouble with the third person singular ending -s. Is this common to all students, or only those for whom French is the langue maternelle? 

My afternoon was given over to T.F.I practice, which is getting fractionally better week-on-week. There's one other student who's leaping ahead of me, and being naturally competitive I keep having to remind myself that I'm not trying to beat her, I'm just trying to get a good score.

(I am definitely trying to beat her.)

Following the lesson I headed back to my little mediatheque, saved lots of little pochettes from the bin - I have big plans for those bad boys - and then went to La Défense, to recover my shoes, which I'd worn a hole in from tramping around Versailles. I should have gone to a concert tonight, but I discovered before leaving work that my ticket had fallen out of my pocket at some point during the day and, despite tearing the room apart, I couldn't find the thing. I can guarantee that when I go in tomorrow one of the cleaners will have found it and put it on my desk. You'll be able to hear the cry of anguish wherever you are.

There's a silver lining, though. I've got my room tidier, my washing up done, and my laundry freshly...laundered, I suppose. And, even better, I've got the window open and the sounds of a little town on the outskirts of Paris are drifting in like smoke.

Let's not let this ever end.

Dissonance

I'm writing even as updates appear in the left hand corner of my screen about some explosions that have occurred near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. It's really quite weird to even consider writing about my day when these events are happening, but happening they are, and they are happening half a world away from me. I can't change that, though I'd like to, so rather than sitting here twiddling my thumbs I'm going to say only this:

1. Donating blood is easy. You can do it anywhere. I recently did it here in France and was only a little afraid I'd be misunderstood and have my entire body accidentally drained.
2. Donating a little cash is even easier and even less painful. Consider giving a couple of quid/dollars/huge rocks with holes in (delete as applicable) a month and feeling smug for saving someone's life.

Easy peasy. Please do one of those two things before reading on, or at least do it simultaneously. If you're giving blood then with any luck my prose will cause you more pain than the needle and thus distract you. Onwards.

My morning was beautiful. The sun is shining, the air is warm, and rather than leaving my skin behind when I arose I was instead a rather nice light tan colour. The wonders of my Spanish heritage, which turn up only when I'm under attack from ultraviolet rays sent through space. Or sunlight, if you prefer. I installed myself in my new office, brought my computer down, and plugged everything in. There is a curious satisfaction to currently connecting all the bits and pieces of a computer; everything fits together perfectly.

My morning was taken up with a thirteen-page read through of the third chapter from the book I'm proofreading. No sign of chapter two, as I'm sure you noticed. Where that is nobody knows, but we're certain it exists somewhere. This chapter was a lot easier, and finding out the history of the place in which I live is really very interesting.

My afternoon was all about unpacking. At this point the sneaking suspicion grew on me that books multiply in ways we cannot be certain of; while I cannot prove it, I am sure that we now have more books than we did when I boxed them away. I stood looking at shelves heaving with books, and then the pile of books still to be unpacked, and could not work out how to recombine the two in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

Several hours later, and with filthy hands, one of my students turned up to tell me that nobody would be coming to class today, as they all had project work or were on vacation. While a warning of more than ten minutes would have been more useful, and would have better allowed me to plan my free hour, these kids are really busy and the mere fact they sent an envoy was very good of them.

So I upped and I left and managed to read a little more Machiavelli before supping on soup and going off to my private student, who is as charming as ever. The evening was so barmy we sat outside in the heat and sipped beer and talked. I keep saying this, but there is nothing as brilliant as looking back at how a student used to be, and how they are now, and realising the leaps and bounds they've made. Fantastic.

Home; no greasy take-away meal for me today (though my stomach, being naught but a dumb animal, protests at the indignity). The awful events in Boston are still unfolding so I'm going to stop here and just restate that giving a pint of blood will impact your life only so far as some of your lifetime will not be spent doing precisely what you want. Please, please do it. If you can spare a little wonga too then fantastic, but blood is absolutely more important. 

I can't say it without saying cheesy, but if you save a life with your own damn blood, that makes you a superhero. 

Go forth and be a superhero.