The land of fairytales

There was no blog yesterday due to a migraine that sat right behind my left eye and threatened to pop it clean out of its socket. That may not actually be how migraines work - I'm no Dr House - but that's certainly how it felt, and I went to bed with a heavy heart. The next day I was due to go to Disney, but with pain that severe I knew I'd have to cancel - and bringing two friends down from Le Havre and then abandoning them would have been awfully rude. Thankfully, with my alarm (summer storm today, completely surreal but very pleasant to wake to) came clarity and renewed vigour; energy, not agony, coursed through my brain. I had breakfast, I got dressed, and I checked the weather.

"Ressentie" means "feels like". "-10ºC" means "You ought to wear a coat, dumbass"

I confess a small problem of mine is that I sometimes overestimate my tolerance for things. These things include, but are not limited to, alcohol, cheese and the cold. As a result, I put an undershirt on, buttoned another over the top, threw on a suit jacket and attached a gift to it and made my way into the cold. The bus arrive quickly, and although it felt nippy, I assumed it would warm up - the sun would shine, the cloud would burn off, and Disneyland would twinkle and sparkle in the light.

Being wrong once is bad luck. Being wrong twice is indicative, but being wrong three times is a good sign that you are not as smart a cookie as you'd like to think. The short version, for those who believe that brevity is the soul of wit, it was exceedingly cold and, despite having got back 90 minutes ago, I have only just regained sufficient fine motor ability to tap this out.

I've also taken on another two students because their father called me when I was tired and freezing, and it was easier to just agree than to turn him down and then explain why. So my week now looks like this:

Not pictured: free time

So that's my week ahead. Frightening. But exciting! New students are younger still, 7 and 9 (I think, the connection was abysmal, if it turns out they're 70 and 90 it'll be interesting for a different set of reasons) so I can foresee this being a real challenge. I'm going to aim for 50-50 English-French teaching and will need to start looking at more detailed lesson plans to really hold small children's attention. If anyone has any advice, I'd really appreciate it.

So: my friends, it seems, slept incredibly badly - no more than five hours sleep between the pair of them. We had to make an emergency stop at Starbuck's before a brisk walk to the RER station Auber. The RER A goes pretty much directly through Paris East-West, and although it's faster than the Metro, it still took us around 45 minutes to get out to Marne-la-Valée and DisneyLand Resort Paris.

It started snowing on the way, big, thick, perfect flakes of snow. This was to become a recurrent theme.

We arrived and were at once struck by how cold it was. At no point did we swear, because Disney never has swearing. Even when lions are being thrown to their deaths by Jeremy Irons (warning: all the sads), and you'd think that at least merits an f-word. Minimum. So there was no swearing at all, all day, even when mentioning how extraordinarily, finger-blackening, blood-freezingly cold it was. We made a game effort and went around every part of the park, tagging the Teacups and Indiana Jones on the way round. We were hampered in our efforts to get onto the more exciting rides because other people were willing to stand in line for 80 minutes to get on them, and we don't have that sort of determination. We were all far too cold.

We broke for lunch in a gigantic theatre and half-watched several of the incredible shorts Disney/Pixar have made. If you've not seen them yet, then here's a lovely little one from Wall-E to get you started.

We all know that feeling.

In any case, by five in the afternoon we were just about ready to crash - trotting around on no sleep in the freezing cold had ground us steadily down, and we made for the train station. Before long we were zooming back through the snow, falling even heavier now, and dragging our weary selves into the station. I said goodbye to my friends, who looked as dead on their feet as me, and made my way by metro and then by bus back home.

The bus, being a bus sent by Satan, stopped half a mile from my flat. That's not far, but in the state of mind where all one wants to do is sit in the warm and drink tea that half mile stretched far, far ahead of me. And blew snow in my face.

In any case, I've made it home. My laundry is on, my alarm is set, and my 7-day week starts again in 10 hours, so if anyone needs me, I'll be the one passed out in bed and not snoring. 

I hope.

Rules for happy cohabitation

That's the title of the French homework I'm writing at the moment, and I feel like it's got a little out of hand. So far we have:

1. When you leave the apartment, remember that you are representing the apartment and everyone in it. So suit up.
2. We salute all officer ranks. Anyone who does not salute pays a forfeit. 
3. If we want to go out and your girlfriend makes you stay in, you will be mocked.
4. On April 1st all bets are off. Seriously. Watch your back. 
5. If there's a tie on the door, come back in half an hour.
6. If there's still a tie on the door, go back to 5.

In the original there were things like no pets and no children, and silence after 10. These are boring. In fact, in my rules you get extra points for short-term baby-napping and any exotic pets.

Spiders, by the way, are not pets. Things that people normally try to avoid living with are not pets. This bracket includes spiders, ants, and Piers Morgan - although, America, you're looking after him so well that you can keep him.

If you have any other ideas for rules, please let me know.

I've also just discovered this and, best of all, it's almost silent - just an amazing score. No speech, so this is brilliant for anyone with any level of English. Share this with your foreign family, friends, anyone.



Honestly. If you don't love this I strongly suspect you're not even human, and I so hope you are. Proving David Icke right would be the low point of anyone's career.

My day today has been pretty good; I'm in charge of the website for the next week so here's hoping nothing goes so wrong that I can't fix it. My old office is in the final stages of being packed up and, much like the books I've been backing, looks very odd with nothing inside. It's also meant I've had to check over DVDs that have have come back with complaints, and strangely I've found no problems - which means either they're wrong, or I've got a magic laptop.

I hate to assume anyone else is wrong, so looks like I've got a magic laptop.

Arthur C. Clarke, you were right!

(Arthur C. Clarke was a science-fiction writer who used his powers for good, unlike Mr Hubbard. He coined the phrase "Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and, at a time when I can speak to a friend in Australia instantaneously, I think he's right.)

So my afternoon consisted of watching films at high speed, checking to see if there were any issues. I went straight out and bought trainers after that, as my former ones have given up the ghost. I will take care of these ones. Maybe. I did a two-mile gentle jog tonight; hardly marathon winning but the area in which I live is gorgeous, so when I fall to the ground feeling like my legs are solid and rubbery I can stare at a gorgeous panorama of stars with my rapidly tunneling vision.

This keeping fit is going to kill me.

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.

You know you're in trouble when your nose runs and your feet smell

I am leaking brain lubricant.

Exactly like that, but on a sort of continuous flow. Quite vile. On the other hand, my voice has dropped a good octave and has turned into a 20-a-day, sexy, roguish sort of tone. Clouds and their silver linings. Aches are gone, cough is almost gone. Just a little hoarse now. And, as previously stated, leaky.

I have started packing, a phrase which here means "I've thrown everything in a suitcase and sat on it. It hasn't helped that I ordered six bottles of rather good champagne and then completely forgot about it until it got delivered today, although it was rather a delicious surprise. I'm just not sure how I'm going to get them back home. I certainly don't plan on drinking them all in one go.

I say, I've just had a thought. I was talking about champagne only yesterday. How peculiar. It seems that my subconscious has a better memory than I do. I hope it remembers my pin code, because I certainly don't.

A minor detail, though. I shall shortly get back on with packing - any recommendations on how exactly to fit six bottles into my relatively small suitcase would be most welcome - and then perhaps do something with the meager ingredients left in my fridge and cupboards. I was invited to dinner, but considering my distinct lack of voice I suspect I would be poor company. And I can't stand being poor company, it's a terrible thing to inflict on one's friends.

My sister has cooked a gigantic meal for her friends - and gigantic here is not an overstatement; look at the size of the animal that she's essentially clothed in bacon :

That is, to me, what little pigs want to be when they're grown up. She also made the crackers you can see there herself and is probably going to work shortly afterwards. 

My sister is clearly some sort of meta-human from a parallel dimension. I mean that's ridiculous. To have an entire Christmas lunch ready and then go to work? I could barely move after that much food. My entire plan for Christmas Day is get up - install myself in a chair - eat until I can be rolled around like a beach ball. At some point I might go and play darts with the other chaps in my family, because that's what we chaps do, but just...

Massive kudos to my sister.

I have about two hours of work to do tomorrow, and then I'm essentially free. Hopefully nothing more will be sprung on me, but I doubt it - colleagues are leaving left and right, all eagerly heading to their homes and their families. I can't wait to make that journey.

I just need to work out how to fit the champers in.

Postscript - I acquired some tickets to Disney for some friends and they came with free infant tickets. If you have an under-17 brother/sister/niece/nephew/cousin you'd like to take, then I should be happy to dole out the tickets. Worms, birds, you know the drill.