I have packed (just about) and am almost ready to go.

This is unprecedented, it's over 12 hours to my flight!

* posted by nat 5:58 PM

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Despite the best efforts of my job - "Hello, it is 3pm on Friday afternoon. Here are 327 French articles that we would like you to filter" - I have got away from work, and on Tuesday I am off to Japan, as long as I get slightly more organised than I currently am.

Ian and I went out on Thursday night, because next week is our one year anniversary (or the date we have picked as being so) and I will heartlessly have abandoned him by that point. The rest of the week has consisted of me being tired. I need to go home and pack, but have failed so far to do anything much.

Yesterday I bought a new camera which is terribly pretty. We went up to see El and company and Soren was sick all over me, so I changed my top, and then I threw wine all over myself, but by that point there wasn't much point in changing again. As I had already thrown beer on El's carpet earlier in the evening, that made three things so I stopped worrying and Ian managed to get me home before I did anything else stupid.

* posted by nat 2:52 PM

Sunday, October 22, 2006

One thing led to another, and Ian got some time off and we (I) decided that really, enough was enough, as one cannot make a proper commitment to a man until he has taken you on holiday, and we have been together almost a year, and I have been asking for a holiday since March.

So we thought about Spain, but the planes did not leave at a good time, so we expanded our seach a little, and booked flights to Toulouse. Ian's driving licence was somewhere in Coleraine, and my passport was in the Vietnamese consulate, but we managed to recover one of these documents by Wednesday morning, and went to Gatwick. Ian does not believe in spending spare time at airports, but luckily our flight was delayed slightly so I had time to buy some food.

In the queue for the plane there was an excitable businessman saying that all the hotels in Toulouse were full. Hmm, we thought, since our rationale had been that on a Wednesday night in the middle of October rooms should really not be an issue, he is being excitable. As we were getting off the plane we heard a less excitable businessman saying the same thing. Oh dear, we thought.

We arrived in Toulouse to find there was a large business conference and a jazz festival all at the same time, so we sidled up to the car hire people, as we had been going to get a car for Friday anyway, and asked if we could possibly have the car now, and they said yes and gave us a little silver Ka, which left me out on the Toulouse peripherique at 10pm on a Friday night, trying to remember how to drive, whilst simultaneously dealing with the discovery that Ian's French geography skills were slightly lacking, although he had never seen a French road map before and this did throw him a bit. So we went all the way round the peripherique arguing about where Montpellier was, and then I drove down some small roads past hotels that were either closed or full, and in the end Ian got annoyed and directed me onto the péage motorway, and we drove another 50km down that before finding a service station with a hotel - which was full - and then drove another 70km to Carcassonne, got off the motorway and found a hotel that I think was constructed entirely out of plastic, but at that point it was 1am and we did not care.

On Thursday morning we went up to the cité which is all fairy-tale towers and castles the way you draw them when you are a kid. Ian was rather surprised to find that it contained streets and houses and was not just a mass of grass and tumbledown stone. It is probably awful in summer but on a Thursday in the middle of October it was fine. We walked past a group of Ulstermen and Ian said it reminded him of Carrickfergus. We sat outside a brasserie in a leafy square and had breakfast, then we retraced a trail of people carrying bread and found the boulangerie and segued into elevenses. We walked round the outer walls and Ian expressed surprise that places you could fall down were not barricaded off (he has not really been out enough), and I went and leaned over large drops and Ian panicked on my behalf. On one side of the walls was the way down to the new city and on the other side were lots of vineyards, just beginning to all turn red. The walls were a whole mish-mash of styles and building material, and some of the towers leaned a little precariously - as did some parts of the walls, and pigeons clung to small ledges, and Ian could not believe they could land on them without smashing their beaks into the walls. I think Ian believes that birds work the same way as aeroplanes.

We found a gorgeous hotel next to the basilica, but it was 325 euro a night, and round the corner there was a little B&B run by a Scottish lady who had had a cancellation, so we had an en-suite room there with a view of the basilica, lots of cushions and a king-size bed for 75 euro including breakfast, which was more like it.

We had a late lunch in a little cafe in the middle of the town which only had a menu in French, and their onion soup was delicious. At that point Ian decided he was sick of sharing France with other tourists, so we went down to the lower town and shared it with the French. I went clothes shopping until Ian couldn't take it any more, then we sat in a cafe in the town square and I watched them setting up for a wine festival in the evening, and Ian read a rugby magazine and discovered that rugby was big in the area, and would I perhaps like to move to the South of France?

They light up Carcassonne at night, and it is beautiful. We popped down to the wine festival, but we were far too tired to enjoy it. On the way back there was a little scorpion on the wall, which Ian thought wanted to kill me, and hundreds of bats low-flying noisily round the walls, which he seemed unconvinced were not trying to brain him. We wandered round lit-up towers, and stood in front of the lights, but they weren't any good for making shadow puppets. I rather liked the king size bed, as it was so large that Ian could sleep in the middle of it and there was actually still plenty of room for me for a change.

The weather on Friday morning seemed to suggest that it was better to go south than north, so we went south, stopping at the Géant just outside Narbonne for picnic buying purposes (I'll have the piece of cheese down the front here, I said the the lady on the cheese counter, and Ian said helpfully that I had meant to say that I wanted only half of it, and I told him to shut up and so did the lady, and I had all of it) and we went and ate lunch in a little turning off the road right next to the Etang de Bages. Far out there were flamingoes, and plenty of little diving ducks, and all around us were enormous dragonflies and little butterflies, and I ate all my gooey chevre and a few too many tomatoes and got very hot in the sun.

A couple of kilometres later the road disappeared into the lagoon and I stopped and squeaked, but a man came driving through it the other way in a little van and wound down his window and harangued me in French about how it could be done, and a lady on her bike went ahead of me to show it could as well, and lots of spray came up and the whole car got covered in salt, and Ian said it was fun and I said it wasn't, and we drove round and found more flamingoes feeding, and flapping their black-tipped wings ineffectually fom time to time.

Ian had never seen the Mediterrannean so we went down to the shore at Port-la-Nouvelle. It was incredibly windy and rather grey, but we wrote in the sand and took pictures, as couples on a beach with sand for the first time ought, and walked out to the lighthouse and watched the pilot boat go tearing out to bring a ship in. We drove alongside as it came in - the Maestro Niyazi from Baku - and then headed inland through rolling landscapes of russet vineyards bounded by craggier and more dubious hills. After a while the tops of these crags had romantic ruined castles perched on top of them, at which point it thoughtfully began to rain a little, so mostly we settled on viewing them from the edges of vineyards. At Peypertreuse, a larger crag with a correspondingly larger castle, that looked as if they might have well just sculpted it out of the top of the steep rock it crowned, were two paragliders, so we watched them for a while.

There were only a couple of places to stay around there, and they were full, so we decided we would come back some other time and headed on, and the road got twistier and narrower and the rocks got cliffier and I was thinking I could just about handle it when the road dwindled down to not wide enough for more than one car, the road was just about carved into the cliff, nearly all the corners were blind and there was a little stone wall built along the side of the road to stop you falling down into the gorge on the other side. At this point I decided it was perfectly reasonable to burst into tears, decide we were going to die, and say a lot of very uncomplimentary things about French roads. Ian stopped videoing the progress to ask if he could drive, and I said no, because if we were going to get killed I wanted to be the one driving at the time. Luckily no cars came the other way and there was a parking spot at the other end where I could take deep breaths and drink grape juice, which was depressingly non-alcoholic. Ian had spent the whole progress (it was one and a half kilometres) bouncing around and saying how cool it was and asking to drive, so he bounced out of the car to take more photos and continue in the same vein. I ate four bars of chocolate and got out of the car. Halfway up the cliff face, just under the road, someone had built a small hermitage. I whimpered a bit.

There was another thin bit going through rocks a bit after, but by that point I was a professional.

We stopped for the night in Quillan, a quiet little place but sweet enough. We found a couple with a tiny wood-fired oven in the back of their boulangerie selling take-away pizza by night and we ate it in the square near the river, with its little old bridge and low, backlit keep on the rise on the opposite bank.

We bought breakfast from there the next morning - enormous croissants for 55c, and I bought unpasteurised homemade chevre from the tiny saturday market in the car park. Ian was convinced that it was unsafe and would poison me, but I pointed out I had eaten unpasteurised homemade goats cheese for months in Turkey and he let me have the money for it. It was properly sunny and hot for the first time, and I let Ian put the radio on in the car and we drove through the hills and up a stack of hair-pin corners to Rennes-le-Chateau, because there had been some information on it in the hotel and it sounded pretty. The hotel was right - we picnicked at the top of the hill with gorgeous views, and wandered in to see the little church in the village. this is the major drawing point, it was done up all garishly by the Abbe Sauniere who got his money from a mystery source. Apparently it is mentioned in the Da Vinci Code. He built himself a pretty little house and a tower at the bottom of the garden for a library. Ian expressed amazement that we could go in and it was not all behind glass. (I need to take him out more). The rosemary was all in flower, and there was a carpet of blue down the side of the hill that was hum-ful of bees and butterflies. We spent far too long ogling the view.

We drove in the sun up over some hills, and I wrenched the car into stopping points at every available opportunity so I could enjoy the view too. Ian had filled up the camera with gorge video, so we were lacking on photos by this point. After one false start (I looked up at the steep turning and the cars coming down it, squeaked I'm not going up there! - and then realised that I was Super Gorge Driver Survivor, so I turned round and went back and bumped up it - unsurfaced roads, tick!) we got up to Puivert - just a brief walk up, and I got to clamber over some tumbledown castle, and Ian went down stairs and I went up them. We sunbathed briefly on the top of the keep, chased butterflies and lizards, and had lunch outside the castle, sat in the grass with the butterflies all around us.

Onwards to the intermittent spring of somewhere-or-other, which was not doing its intermittent thing when we got to it, although we had a look in the cave it came out of anyway, so on through the winding autumn-coloured valleys towards another castle - Montsegur, perched up on an impossible crag. I was tired and the footpath was steep, so we abandoned the toil up the slope for frolicking a-la the Sound of Music in the meadows, eating more baguette-with-killer-cheese, and watching noisy communicative cows wander across our field of vision.

Dinner for Ian in Foix, and then we drove back to Toulouse. I had minor issues with the red petrol light coming on, the traffic getting annoying, and not wanting to go home, but we managed to find a petrol station, managed to get round the Toulouse peripherique without getting crashed into (I don't think my habit of yelling Get out of the Way you stupid French motorist! really had much effect, but it made me feel better) and gave the keys back to the Europcar person and went and had a beer. Also realised we were both a little sunburnt.

564km. And three days is not long enough to evaluate a man on holiday. We will have to do it again. For longer. And with more games of Trivial Pursuit.

* posted by nat 10:01 PM

Thursday, October 12, 2006

My idea of a good time on Saturday was to attempt to knock myself out on the bathroom sink. Ow. I have a suspicion this has led to mild concussion as I spent the rest of the evening being dizzy, although I managed - by clinging on to Ian - to get down to Vanessa's, which was a good thing as she had made a massive stew in a pumpkin which was utterly delicious, and then we went on to the pub to see Omid Djalili and a couple of other stand-ups, which was more fun than I had expected, stand-up comedy not being my favourite thing in the world.

Sunday I mostly spent asleep, and then we went up to the Dog and Bell to meet Vicky and Christian and Vanessa for the pub quiz. The Dog and Bell is a Fabulous Pub, fortunately it is just that little bit too far away that I won't be wanting to spend every night down there.

This week has mostly been work, with a headache that hasn't quite gone away. On Tuesday afternoon Ian said he would come shopping with me. I didn't quite appreciate before the event that this meant we would spend more time looking at men's clothing than women's clothing. (And buying more... I found him a gorgeous jacket though. He then accused me of spending his money - what else does he expect me to do?!)

Ian also, usefully, took my passport down to the Vietnamese embassy yesterday morning. He handed it in, explaining that it belonged to his girlfriend. The lady apparently looked at him, and then wrote "received from Mr Baker" on the receipt.

I think the journalists have all had the day off, as there is utterly no work today.
This means I'm getting out of work and it's only midday. Whee!

* posted by nat 11:34 AM

Friday, October 06, 2006

I'm having a slow day, because I need one. I keep trying to have them and failing. I spent Wednesday rushing around town, booking my plane ticket in a very bizarre way - I handed over my credit card, told the man my address, he handed it back, and said it was an e-ticket so that would be all. I signed nothing and was given nothing. I find this slightly scary. I am off on October 31st!

I then went up to Stoke Newington to have birthday cake, as Ella turned two, and has grown tremendously and is speaking fluent rubbish, but very cutely. She very properly admired the toy I gave her, played with it for a few minutes, then went back to what she was doing before, which is fair enough. Afterwards, El and Mo and I went out for Turkish food: ordered too much and ate too much. So no change there!

Ian had his final internal check yesterday and I spent the day, and then the evening, getting increasingly frantic about it. Walked down to Waterloo in the rain and went for dinner with Jess, which involved eating too much, flirting with the waiters (who were fabulously obliging), and talking non-stop - slightly more fluent rubbish, but not by much.

I was almost home before Ian called me, by which point I had convinced myself that something was dreadfully wrong, except it wasn't and he'd passed, just had to do an emergency practice thing which involved getting the fire engine to come out and bomb around the place on top of doing everything else, so he'd had to wait until later to do that, because practice emergencies at rush hour in the rain aren't really a good idea.

So we went for a drink, and now he just has one external check for me to panic over and then insallah he will be qualified and I can stop attempting to give myself stomach ulcers. I have no idea why I get more worked up on other people's behalf than on my own. Perhaps it is some kind of internal control-freakery.

Today we had a late breakfast at the organic cafe - I have been living on halloumi lately - and then sat and drank coffee and read the paper and got utterly stuck on one corner of the crossword. The rain was so appalling there wasn't any point trying to go outside. I am now trying to work up the energy to go swimming, but I think I will just continue to sit here with a book. It has been a long time since I just sat down and read without feeling guilty about it, so I am indulging myself.

* posted by nat 4:52 PM

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

The whole idea of me finishing my dissertation was to have more time, not less, on my hands, but it doesn't seem to be working out that way! More time spent at work, more time spent out, far too much time spent on buses, the odd bit of time spent being creaky and overtired and annoyed at the weather...

...which really won't do. Thus I have reserved flights to Warm Places (and some not quite so warm but nevertheless interesting places), and tomorrow I shall be praying my Visa card has a large enough limit, although I'm fairly sure it does, so I can pay up. Then it's just visas and insurance to sort out. And probably lots of other things I'm not really thinking of yet.

This last weekend Ian and I went up to meet Liz and Tim down from Oxford and we did crepes and museums - very cultural. Afterwards Ian and I made a quick detour into Hyde Park and also went down to Harrods. On Sunday I refused to move, or even to be particularly coherent (see rationale for Leaving The Country, above). On Friday I went to drink free wine and meet the new intake at Uni, where we all scared them with tales of how much work we all did. It was very satisfying. Naturally, this year the course has Turks and Turkic people on it (I spent a lot of time talking to a guy from Turkmenistan, for instance). I am sure there is more gatecrashing to be had, anyhow.

* posted by nat 6:50 PM