There's something wonderful about snow

Yesterday, as I strolled home and spoke to my smallest sister, it started to snow. Great big clumps. This morning when I awoke it was to find that the snow had not, and everywhere was covered in a thin blanket of sparkling snow. I say sparkling because, despite its whiteness, there was a sparkle that lay just below the powder. In any case, as I scurried across the car park (I can run from my bedroom to my office in thirty seconds) those thoughts were the ones that struck me with the greatest force. Snow adds an ethereal beauty to anything, and anything already beautiful merely has its beauty magnified - be it a town or a person.

Enough proselytizing. You love snow, and I'm sure I need not convince you of how wonderful it is.

This morning was spent completing the task I started yesterday, a task for which I was rewarded with a bottle of something novel and exciting. It's an apéritif, and not one I'm familiar with. Normally I'd put a picture of it here but, in the dash to get home and do shopping, it's still in the office. However, I promise if you check back after 11am GMT there'll be a photo of the gift in place of my grinning face.

See? Looks exciting, non?


Having delivered the goods, completed the assignment, and been incredibly surprised by the kind gesture of my colleague - perhaps I'm cynical, but every time a colleague gives me a thank-you gift for some work I've done I'm completely bowled over and stammer thanks in two different languages.

That's how you know you're getting better at second languages. You use it to thank people because it provides useful filler while you try to get your brain back in gear.

The only other thing that happened today was that I called up my interviewer to fix a time and date for the aforementioned interview, time being a bit weird between here and London. She answered the phone with the distinctive "'Allo?" of almost all French people. My resolution, which had been to speak exclusively in English, went swiftly out the window. Hearing that "Allo?" at work has become a signal, for me, to speak in French rather than English. Like a Pavlovian dog, I switched into French. (The following has been translated:)

- 'Allo?
- Ah hello, am I speaking to --
- Yes, speaking.
- Hi, we spoke yesterday via email, I'm just calling to confirm the interview time and date.

And so on, as you would expect that call to go. Except it was totally in French, and at no point did either of us suggest switching to English. It just seemed completely natural, and that pretty much made my day. A genuine French person who's never met me felt more at east speaking French than English. Joy.

The afternoon was absolutely full of work, which was also really pleasing. After lunch my colleague and I did a coaching session with the same colleague who'd gifted me the scrumptious looking bottle above, and ten minutes from the end my supervisor rang me on my mobile.

-Tu es où, Jonathan? Where are you, Jonathan?
-Je suis à l'école, Madame. I'm in school, Miss. Bear in mind that the coaching session we were conducting took place not more than 100 meters from my supervisor's office.
- But why aren't you picking up your phone?
I walked into her office.

It was a good moment. She looked completely nonplussed, stared at her own phone for a good ten seconds, and then looked at me. I apologised and explained why I'd (apparently) spontaneously materialised outside her office. She told me that the marketing and press department were looking for me, hoping to utilise my knowledge of English. A press release was ready to go out, following an interview with a CEO and alumnus of the School. All that remained was for me to okay it.

You can imagine how my ego swelled. Coming on the heels of the interview that I confirmed this morning this fresh massage of my ego (well recovered from its bruising descent yesterday) and so I stormed up to the department and spent a comfortable hour discussing very tiny variations in language. English is so rich but also so very sensitive to change; anyone who has looked up the difference between get on and get off knows what I mean.

Now, at this point I'd love to talk about how my evening was interesting, how the French lesson was brilliant, and how I trudged through snow that crunched underfoot.

Instead, I'm somewhere between elation and terror, so I'm going to close this blog here, take a dram, and prepare for my interview.

If you're slightly perturbed by the abruptness with which this blog has finished, permit me to recommend you a blog by a schoolmate, Sophy - who's in Vienna - and another German assistant +Joanna Ford, who I don't know personally but writes with the elegance and easy wit that is so often lacking from this blog.

I'll see you all tomorrow.

EDIT: Sophy, not Sophie. I'm an awful person.

The return plan

Another week over. I've got a week to decide whether or not to re-apply to the British Council and find myself journeying off to some other corner of France to teach more English. I'm finding it very tricky to decide; I'm really too old as it is - at this rate I'll be graduating in 2015 with around £30 000 of debt, which is such a large number I might need to go and lie down for a bit.

If I wasn't so confident that this time abroad and the skills I'm learning will ensure me a decent job, I'd be a hell of a lot more nervous. I'm still on the old fees, back in the days when Scotland was cheaper than England and the education of an equal level. Now - I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone reading this - it's £9 000 a year, in bonnie Scotland or green and pleasant England. A three year degree, like the one my sister is doing, is going to land her with approximately the same amount of debt as me. Incredible. Utterly incredible.

In any case, I'm really struggling because, as I said, I am way too old to be thinking about spending another year abroad and putting off graduation, but on the other hand - looking at my finances for next year is a deeply unpleasant prospect. Flat prices are higher than ever, and the only downside to this year abroad is that my ex-flatmates now have new flatmates. Such is life; I can hardly expect them to turf out someone who's been a close friend for a year just for me. So I repeat my plea; if you know of anyone moving out then I implore you to get in contact.

I did some more work with Sketchup today, and at one point managed to accidentally turn my model inside out. Obviously the first reaction is fear and surprise, but after realising it could be undone with a simple command-z, I spent fifteen minutes trying to recreate the effect. My curiosity will one day be my downfall, but perhaps it illustrates my scientific bent. A comic by XKCD illustrates what I'm trying to say:

The mouseover text, which unfortunately you can't see here, says "How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?" I wholeheartedly concur.

I've spent quite a happy little day messing with Excel and making graphs in the morning before clambering around my soon-to-be-moved office trying to find the electric sockets for the room plan I'm making. I found a tool that measures things and fear I may have gone slightly overboard; my latest draft is a mess of numbers that are only understandable if you zoom in to about 2 000%. 

I've got the weekend off this week, and it's come as a bit of a shock. My student is out in Abu Dhabi (I know, poor guy) so I have two days off, and I'm really not sure what to do with them. This is where I hope my readers will come in. Amy has suggested a tearoom just outside Paris, which I'm quite excited about, but what else can you suggest? I have a whole weekend, so if you can recommend a little corner of Paris that you've stumbled upon let me know - comment below or tweet me; @jonodrew.

A Friday tune, because I suspect there's snow billowing outside your window. Have a wee bedroom dance. You can't help it.

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.