Thursday 28 April 2011

Interlude

So I have a couple of weeks before I head off to Frankfurt, but thought I'd share a few thoughts in the meantime:

Firstly, I have extraordinarily mixed feelings about this whole wedding shenanigens thing happening tomorrow. A large chunk of me wishes everyone (by which I mainly mean the press) would just shut up about it - it's banal, completely irrelevant and and wholly unnecessary. However, given the nature of the world we live in at the moment, with pockets of violence erupting throughout the Middle East and Africa and a West that can't seem to sort its ideals out, this event seems to have brought people together somewhat. Apparently over 2 billion people are going to be watching this union of 2 people as part of an outdated institution in a ex-colonial backwater, thus proving that people of all nations, shapes, sizes, races and creeds appear to quite like our Royal Family. The thing is, I have no idea why.

There have been increasingly loud mutterings and rumours that Donald Trump is planning to run for President of the USA; while this is by no means a bad thing for the Left, given that they can present themselves (once again) as the voice of sanity, it does present a not-so-slight problem for the world. This is the USA - they're actually quite powerful. Admittedly Trump isn't as bad as someone like Ron Paul, he's still anti-abortion, anti-vac, thinks Obama wasn't born in the USA and is generally just a few sausages short. While it would be vaguely amusing and patronising to look at a country like Tuvalu if they elected a cartoon character to the highest office, America is actually rather powerful. We don't need another 4-8 years of craziness, please. No no no.

No.

Peace x

Monday 18 April 2011

Return

So I appear to be finished in France - the Caen-Portsmouth ferry dropped me off at some unpleasant hour this morning and I arrived home bleary-eyed at about 8am.

I'm not going to do a massive spiel about what an amazing, eye-opening experience it was, and how I'll treasure the memory of everything I did and everyone I met. It's boring - no-one wants to hear it, and I'm not prone to hyperbole anyway. France was fine, the people were pretty friendly on the whole, and I didn't die or anything, so I'll consider the whole experience as a success.

Some final thoughts on France then, in no particular order:

- The majority of French boys have no shame whatsoever and will attempt to fuck anything with a pulse.      Quite how this is an attractive quality is beyond me, but such is life.

- The notion of being "fashionably late" is taken to the extreme. Indeed, if anyone I'm supposed to be meeting turns up in the same week me, I consider that to be a relative success.

- There is nothing to do on Sundays. Anywhere.

- People drink considerably less over here, though pretend they drink just as much. Machismo?

- French keyboards are confusing; returning to a QWERTY keyboard is a rather strange experience.

Next stop: Frankfurt.

See you all then, folks.

Charlie x

Wednesday 6 April 2011

Cake - The True Way To A Man's Heart

I was considering putting "If he likes cake" in brackets at the end of the title, but that would have been unnecessary to say the least.

So yes, one of my BTS classes this morning baked me a cake for our final ever lesson, which was a rather wonderful surprise. It had chocolatey bits in and was generally pretty wonderful, even at 9am. There was also a note attached, written by the strongest student in the class, describing the sequence of events that led to the chocolatey bits being added to the cake (spoiler: it involved a rabbit...). So yeah, they're high on my good list at the moment. To quote Dylan Moran:

- "I love you, I love you, I love y-"
- "BAKE ME A CAKE OR GO AWAY."

'Nuff said.

Less than two weeks now before I have to head back to Blighty, and it appears that time has passed rather more quickly than I had expected; indeed, this is probably fortunate as I'm definitely starting to run out of ideas for what to teach people, especially the brats that I have once a week instead of once a fortnight. My solution to this problem this week has been to show the classes I like (by which I mean the older ones) an episode of Peep Show of my choosing, while hoping it's not too inappopriate. Happy days.

Peace x