The Last Six Months

It's well past time for another in the 'lazy man's bullet point' blog, so here it is:

• Studying for exams. Two exams for the Chartered Tax Advisor qualification. One seemed to go ok, the other certainly did not, and that's an understatement. Results towards the end of July.
• Pol's 30th. We went to the Tiroler Hut... and then walked past the door and into Ping Pong instead...
• The 'Jedification'. My favourite two year-old, Jed, was dedicated. Which is similar to a Christening, but without water. And without the implications of having been Baptised either.
• Seeing 'Mima'. My favourite two year-old, Jed, now has a new sister, Jemima. Which is pronounced 'Mima' if you're a two year-old boy.
• Richmond Park. Saw two deer. They weren't inexpensive. Ho ho.
• Big Church Day Out. Saw some good bands, including Delirious? Sat in the car park afterwards trying to leave for two hours.
• Avoided the axe. 19 people at work received the 'Spanish Archer', but fortunately I still have a job. Even a frequently tedious one...
• Florence. Caught Easyjet to Pisa with Andrew Strauss. Does he not get free tickets on BA?! Went to a wedding (no major surprise - see previous post) in the Tuscan hills.
• Twenty20 World Cup. Spent lots of money on tickets, very few of my friends wanted to go. Saw nine matches, mainly sitting next to people I didn't know. Eventually the tournament was won by a team that had already been beaten twice. South Africa should have won. Can I use the word 'choke', Mr Evans?
• Hen Party. Yes, I went to a Hen Party. It was for a close female friend. There were more men than women there. Only just.
• Saw hundreds of people cycling round central London in the nuddy. It looked like some kind of protest. Perhaps protesting for the right to be naked on bicycles. Very disturbing.
  

Coming up in next time's exciting update of 'Life through the square window': Chicago and Toronto with Vanessa; Emma's wedding; more CTA exams, including possible resits.

Weddings and cricket

My 2008 could be summed up in two words, if you believe my work colleagues. See if you can guess what they are from the title of this blog post. I suppose maybeyou could say my 2008 could be summed up in three words if you include 'and' as a word which, in most people's book (including Dr. Johnson's book, for which I offer him my most enthusiastic contrafibularities), it probably is. Those two words are 'weddings' and 'cricket'.


In 2008 I attended a mere (magnificent) seven weddings, and missed out on another as it was on the same day as another of the seven.



And then I went to Test Cricket at Old Trafford,Lords and the Oval, Twenty20 cricket at the Oval, an international one-day match at... you've guessed it... the Oval. I didn't think that was that much cricket really. Especially given that at Lords I saw a total of 57 balls and 21 runs, lots of rain and the FA Cup Final on the cricket scoreboard. And then at the Oval Test I saw about 22 overs, lots of rain, the inside of the pavilion and the Surrey cricket club museum.


I'm sure though that, despite what my colleagues think, I did some other things over the course of last year, like... umm... errr.......

Like Stag Dos for some of the seven weddings, and a trip to Singapore, and lying in bed for two weeks with glandular fever, a handful of 30th birthday parties. I even managed to take some breaks from my busy social life and spend some time with Vanessa. Ahhh sweet.

The Time Traveller

21 years ago, in February 1987, I wrote a letter to my future self. It detailed the people in my class, the subjects we took, my interests, films out at the time, drinks I could think of, sports and games, comics, countries and the latest news about Terry Waite.

10 years later my future self opened that letter, looked at what a strange, immature, unintelligent and scruffy boy my original self had been, and vowed to improve on his work. He decided to write a letter to my future future self, including in it the letter from my original self.

Mainly over the summer of 1997, my future self wrote long and detailed notes on what modules he was doing in his classics degree at university, what A-Levels he had done, which other people were doing his course at university, what teachers and tutors he had had at school and university, what the latest results were at Wimbledon, what the score was in the one-day match between Durham and Kent at Feethams, what the Oxford United squad at the time was, and the fact that he had voluntarily gone to watch 'Fierce Creatures' at the cinema, amongst other things. Unremarkable confessions from my future self were that he liked football and cricket, and liked an occasional curry. More remarkable were the startling revelations that he wasn't too fond of bitter, and never drank tea. My future self proved himself to be rather lazy by taking over a year to finalise the letter and put it in an envelope, finally completing his work in June 1998.

One day earlier this week my future future self realised that it must have been over 10 years since my future self had completed his letter, so he searched for the said letter, safely tucked away in a 'safe place', which meant he couldn't find it anywhere for a few days. He opened the letter earlier this very day, and had the excitement of being amazed again at the work of my original self back in 1987, and checking out for the first time the work of my future self back in 1997 and 1998. My future future self was not too surprised on reading the letter that my future self didn't have a girlfriend. What a loser!

So now my future future self is trying to decide if he'll have any time to write a letter to my future future future self to let him know what an intelligent, witty, smart and generally amazing person he is.

Regular-ish update

Some people have complained that I don't update this blog often enough, and that they have nothing to do on the internet without my hilarious updates.

Well, tough. Find something better to do that doesn't involve the internet. It's sunny outside (although not now, admittedly, as it's dark).

The most important update over the last few months is that I can now eat cheese again.

More updates will follow after some undisclosed interval.

The Healing Properties of Cheese

I eat a lot of cheese. So much so that I decided to give up eating cheese for Lent. I haven't had a single pizza for three weeks. (I haven't had a double pizza either, so that's definitely an innovative idea to bear in mind for Easter Monday!)

I have just been off work for the last two weeks with some kind of non-specific viral thing. Is this coincidence?! Pah, I think not.

Clearly cheese is good for you.

It turns out that cheese is far better for you than I ever imagined. The non-specific viral thing was actually rather specific. It was glandular fever (aka 'Epstein-Barr', aka 'Mono') and it wasn't very pleasant.

Birthdays

For all you regular readers of my blog (you strange people!), I should probably introduce Vanessa to you. She's my lovely girlfriend. We've been seeing each other since the end of July. Before that point, we used to walk around with our eyes closed.

November and December is a busy time for me with birthdays - my sister, me, and my Dad all have birthdays around this time.

Amanda's - my sister - birthday is first, and we spent a fun day in London. In the morning, we went to Borough Market. I'd never been there before, but spent an enjoyable few hours wandering around. It sells all kinds of unusual (and some usual) foods. As I love my foods, I was happy. Especially as there are plenty of free samples to be picked up. I left with some ostrich sausages and some exotic mushrooms.

We then looked at a large crack in the Tate Modern. It's a big hole in the floor which is no doubt meant to represent something particularly deep. By which I mean profound.

Then we saw the First Emperor Exhibition in the British Museum, which included some small number of the Chinese Terracotta Army. I found it particularly interesting, as I know very little about ancient China. Vanessa has some Chinese heritage, so she was fascinated.

And then we finished off the day with some pancakes. Amanda loves pancakes and when she found there was a restaurant where she could manage to have one for a main course as well as for a dessert, she booked it immediately! Unfortunately, because the day was so long, and everyone was tired, and the main course pancake was quite big, she could not manage to follow through with the pre-meal plan. She had to miss out on the dessert pancake!


And then it was my birthday a few weeks later. I was celebrating a significant number and so I spent the day itself at home with family, then had a large party in an old man's pub on the Saturday. I like old men's pubs! It was a really good evening, and my friends had all signed embarrassing photos of me (sadly there aren't many other sorts of photos of me!) for a montage Pol had prepared. It was a very touching gift - and really professionally done too! Sadly, Vanessa was sick at this time, so I couldn't introduce her to all my friends. I think she's met most of them now though!



And then it was my Dad's birthday, which meant a mid-week trip home in December for some more family time.

And while I'm talking about birthdays - Matt, I'm sorry.

Hamster Jam

Way way back in October, I went with some friends to Amsterdam. A lot of them had signed up to do a half marathon, but I had not got round to it. Which was lucky, because I was ill that weekend too - I spent the few days wandering around the city dressed in hat and gloves and thick coat.

This was the weekend of the Rugby World Cup Final, so we managed to find ourselves a good pub in the centre of Amsterdam to watch the match. Unfortunately, some of the friends who came with me on that trip were of the South African persuasion (in fact, I believe they still are), so they were rather happier than I was at the end of the night.

The following day was the day of the race, so while the four crazy people were preparing, Simon, Jolanda (who are both of the afore-mentioned South African persuasion) and I went on a boat trip around the canals of the city. Then we went to a cafe for some traditional uitsmijters , which is a healthy meal consisting of toast, with three fried eggs on top, then ham, cheese and tomatoes. It's a bit like an omelette that nobody bothered to mix, on some toast.

We then made our way to the Heineken Brewery, in order to undertake the tour of the Brewery. On our way there, our path crossed the route of the half marathon. During this short stretch, we actually saw one of our friends, but our plan to claim we had been waiting there all that time failed as he didn't see or hear us cheering him on as he went past.

The Heineken Brewery tour is pretty good. It is very similar to the Guinness Brewery tour, in that there are lots of interactive things to do, and it tries to be informative, but with one major drawback in comparison - you get Heineken at the end rather than Guinness. I think you might get more free drinks at the Heineken one though, so it depends on your preferences...

We met up later with the successful runners, who were tired and sore, but happy, and accidentally took them into an extraordinarily classy and expensive restaurant. It happened to have a name similar to a reasonably priced restaurant in the guide book, but turned out to be very different. We only found this out when they came round with the bread basket and the menus.

We managed to avoid, on the whole, 'coffee' shops and prostitutes. There's actually a lot more to Amsterdam than what it appears to be famous for!

Being Ill

I've been off work all week so far. I appear to have some kind of virus which has made me very tired, and very achy, and hot, and headachy, and given me various other symptoms. I've been sleeping for most of the time, and then lying on the couch for another large proportion of the time. But now I fancy a change of scene, so I'm going to sit here by the computer for a while and try to catch up with some blogging....

Chypre douze points

My friend from Durham, Stu, and I went on a week's holiday to Cyprus at the start of October. It seemed like a good idea to extend the summer that we didn't have by an extra week and get some autumn sunshine. This idea seemed even better when the fact that Stu's parents had recently purchased a villa in Pegeia, near Paphos, and so we wouldn't have any accommodation costs. The only costs would be the air fares and the food and drink we would consume, so we made sure that the air fare part of that was as cheap as possible by flying at ridiculous times. But more of that later...

The plan for the week we made in advance consisted of three main parts: seeing classical ruins; sitting in the sunshine; eating and drinking. And looking back on the trip, we did quite well on all three counts.

The classical sightseeing took in the mosaics and theatre of ancient Paphos, and the rather impressive agora and temples in Kourion, especially the temple of Apollo Hylates. Then we did some sightseeing of a more modern sort - we went to Nicosia, or is it actually called Lefkosia? We saw the Green Line separating the two halves of the world's only divided capital city (so it said on the sign next to it). The Green Line was less of a wall, and more of a pile of sandbags with some barbed wire on them. And we also saw the Tombs of the Kings, and saw the very important sight of a local crazy golf course.

Then we got our share of sun, sitting on the beach at Coral Bay, or relaxing in the pool near our villa.

Drinks - we had one or two pints of Keo during our week. Keo is the Cypriot local lager, and it's actually not bad. Very tasty.

Food, yes, we had some of that too. On our first night we went for traditional Cypriot mezedes, which basically means you get some of everything on the menu - the Greek salad came out, accompanied by tzatziki, humous, taramosalata, some couscous, some chips(?), some pitta bread etc. Then the meat started to arrive - the spicy sausage, the meatballs, the pork chops, the lamb chops, the beef stew. We were rather full, and could barely finish our dessert. On one night we went for an Indian, which was extremely good, and wasn't only there for the ex-pats, oh no. Stu and I however spent our time there laughing at the British retired gentlemen at the next table. They came over to us later and told us that they used to be in the RAF at Abingdon, as they'd overheard us talking about the town. The best thing they'd done during the course of the evening was to get the chef out so that they could congratulate him on his fine culinary performance. On another night, we barbequed some burgers on a proper non-Australian charcoal-style barbie.

So all in all it was a good week, until we got to Paphos airport just as England vs France in the Rugby World Cup semi-final was starting. The facilities in the airport didn't allow for two hundred Brits to watch the game live. This meant that three-quarters of the people waiting by the gate were texting someone at home to find out the score. Matt very kindly gave me occasional updates. And somehow apparently it emerged that we won!

The flight was due to leave at 0030 Cypriot time, but was delayed a bit, then it was a four hour flight. Eventually I got to bed at 0530, and Stu got into his bed at 0600 apparently. Was it worth the cheap fare? Actually, I don't think there were too many other options.

Hopefully, I'll get the chance to visit the villa again some day, as it was a cracking and cheap trip!