Directionless wanderings

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Generally I’m pretty good at planning things, particularly if I’m planning something on someone else’s behalf or I’m planning something where I have to be somewhere at a particular time. In these instances I tend to over-plan, I’ll check and recheck the necessary route to get there, I’ll print maps and write down contact numbers in case the maps are outdated and my phone’s battery suddenly dies.

However, with activities that don’t have specified timings, and particularly with people that I’m not so worried will judge me if I get things wrong, my planning tends to be a little more on the slap-dash side.

For example on Saturday I decided I would take a friend visiting from the UK to the Salève, the nearest mountain to Geneva, that I’d been meaning to visit for a while but needed the motivation of a visitor to put me into toursim mode.

I did check which bus we were meant to get but other than that decided it would be fairly easy to figure out where to go once we arrived at the right stop. We boarded the number eight bus and, thanks to my chum, managed to take it in the right direction all the way to the end of the line at Veyrier-Douane.

As expected, the mountain range was clearly visible and there were a few other Salève sightseers on the bus so we trundled after our fellow mountaineers and towards the mountain range, which seemed pretty hard to miss.

What was easier to miss, it turned out, was the path up to the top of the mountain. Or rather it was easy to miss if you didn’t really pay attention to numerous sign posts along the way. We started following the signs to the Téléphérique, the cable car that can take lazy types up to the top of the mountain without the inconvenience of climbing (I fully planned to take the cable car back down again). The signs we followed were clearly labeled ‘téléphérique’ and had a picture of the cable car and little footsteps. I quickly decided that the little footsteps sign meant this was the footpath to the cable car but not the footpath to climb the mountain.

Capture d’écran 2015-05-26 à 14.19.10As we got nearer to the cable car we discovered another sign pointing in three directions in an upside down ‘T’, the trunk of the ‘T’ pointed to the téléphérique and as I was quite convinced this wasn’t the walking path happily started stomping off in the opposite direction to the way we’d come. Without reading the rest of the sign.

Considering I know I don’t have the best sense of direction, I’m really not sure why I felt quite so confident as we strode away from the town and the other tourists and tramped along an increasingly industrialized path running parallelish to the mountain.

After about 45 minutes and a few false starts of traversing up paths, which were nothing more than throughways to other roads and caused us to upset quite a few local dogs, we thought perhaps we should head back to the cable car and check directions from there. Another 45 minutes back, so that’s 1.5 hours of walking around aimlessly, we found our way back to the cable car.

There was a bit of chaos at the téléphérique embarkment point as it turned out that all cable cars had had to be suspended because of strong winds, so when I found someone to ask him where the walking path was he seemed confused. He probably thought 1) why do they want to climb the mountain and 2) why are they so thick they cant follow the obvious signs? (They really were obvious when you actually read them.)

Proud of myself for not asking in English I checked that my understanding of his directions were correct by backing up our exchange with some general arm waving to be sure he was just saying ‘back and right’. Heading back we encountered the same upside-down ‘T’ sign post we’d seen before and, this time stopping to actually read it properly, it seemed evident that the way we should have gone was in the opposite direction from the path we’d initially taken.

Again we confidently commenced our path and soon found ourselves cutting through a car park and looking at a steep path that seemed to be closed. It said accès interdit (which means access forbidden) but I was still unconvinced that this wasn’t just forbidden access for cars and that people, who could easily squeeze around the barrier, could go that way. Fortunately my friend, with marginally more directional sense than me, wasn’t persuaded so we thought we’d go back to the téléphérique and check again. Walking back we noted a bridge across the main road to what looked decidedly like an open footpath and thought perhaps this was the way we were supposed to go.

As we walked back out of the carpark we noted that in fact there were some quite clear signs pointing us in the direction of the proper path, but it turns out you not only need to look for signs you need to read them too!

steps to climb

 

A mere two hours after getting off the bus we finally reached the beginnings of the mountain path and began our ascent. Luckily the friend who was co-adventuring with me had been as happy to amble about as I’d been. Pretty sure the fiancé would have been somewhat more peeved as I determinedly strode off, refusing to stop and ask for directions until we’d passed the last outpost of humanity…

Fortunately it was pretty hard to go wrong on the actual mountain path, without tumbling over the edge and as I’m not typing this from a hospital bed you can be relieved that we found our way eventually!

Ten reasons to watch Eurovision

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For those of you souls unlucky enough to not know what Eurovision is, it’s an annual event where European nations, more or less, commit to send some people who have at least a vague understanding of what a tambourine is to put themselves forward as the musical representatives for their country, other countries then vote for their friends or whichever act they find the most amusing and a Eurovision champion is born…

1. It’s great for geography, not only will you get to learn the names of all the European capitals you’ll also discover lesser known facts, like Australia is in fact in Europe (well they are performing in a contest for European countries so it must be true).

2. It’s a great way to learn about international (well European+) political affairs. You’ll learn which countries are afraid of retribution if they don’t vote for another nation (just you watch all those former soviet-bloc countries break away from old alliances…), which countries like each other (close neighbours, like the Scandinavians, often stick together) and who the least popular countries in Europe are (UK is definitely up there in the ‘other-European-nations-really-don’t-like-you’ stakes).

3. Unlike some more acoustically sophisticated types of music you don’t need to have any musical skills, appreciation or understanding to enjoy (or even represent your country at) Eurovision, in fact the more tone-deaf you are the more you will probably like this.

4. If you are an alcoholic it’s a judgement free way to enjoy your favourite beverage, no-one in their right minds would ever expect you to watch Eurovision sober!

5. As Avenue Q so famously put it ‘everyone’s a little bit racist’…indulge your inner xenophobia in an annually encouraged event by ridiculing, mocking and then bemoaning the intolerable success of that nation you just love to hate (come on you Swiss and English, let’s not pretend we aren’t eager to see France in an epic fail).

6. If you love ridiculously bad poppy music you can scream enthusiastically at this terrible genre without anyone suspecting you aren’t being ironic and that you actually like the music.

7. You can learn the art of maintaining the perfect composure appropriate to the kind of social occasion where they can only be one winner (Oscar nominees take note) by noting the behaviour of the acts that continuously receive ‘nil points’ from every other nation. Note how that happy gleaming grin distracts you from the fact they are now dead behind the eyes.

8. If you don’t actually have any friends, family or interests and wonder what to do with yourself at evenings or weekends, you can kill not just one entire evening watching hours and hours of this seemingly never-ending competition but they even have semi-finals and often competitions to select a country’s acts too. That could account for at least four out of 365 evenings in the year.

9. You can learn about European+ regional economics. Note how some countries deliberately field an atrocious act (but in the ‘wholly-bad’, think Kate Bush, not ‘so-bad-it’s-good’, think Spice Girls, way) to avoid winning the competition and being rewarded with the financially black-hole-inducing prize of having to host the competition next year (Greece’s entry, or Ireland entering Jedward yet again, should give you an idea of what I mean).

10. It’s an annual excuse to get together and throw a little party, bring people together, throw in a little babycham and a peanut or two and use your human guests as a shield to hide the shameful fact that, secretly, you really love this yearly event, even though you know you shouldn’t. Tears of emotion flowing down your face as you are moved by a man continually spinning in a giant hamster wheel can easily be disguised as tears of laugher.

Cat trauma (or how not to meet the neighbours)

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One lovely sunny evening I returned home from work at a reasonable time and thought it would be nice to relax out on the balcony, which truth be told doesn’t get all that much use but is nicely situated overlooking a big common green space.

I swapped sensible work shoes for flip-flops, used my super American fridge to crack some ice into a glass at the touch of a button and poured some orange juice over the frozen water, picked up my book and phone and tootled out to the balcony for a chance to unwind in the fresh air.

The cats soon came out to join me and, happy in my presence, jumped across the balcony to stalk pigeons (Jasper) and happily chew the cud (Buttons) (this isn’t a metaphor, they actually like to eat grass). I thought before I settled into my book, I’d give my mum a quick ring and catch up on the news from Angleterre. Idly chatting away I didn’t realise there was a problem until Jasper came bolting across the balcony and streaked into the living room.

It was then I spotted the two pitbull-terrier type dogs. Sadly Buttons wasn’t as quick on the uptake as her brother so didn’t spot the canines until they were charging towards her. Terrified, she tried to launch herself back across our balcony wall, but in her panic didn’t quite make the jump and bounced off the wall. With no time to try again she went haring off in the other directions trying to outrun the dogs.

I started shouting obscenities whilst still on the phone, before quickly hanging up and hurling the device down. Buttons was zigzagging back and forth across the grass with the wall to her back, she was outnumbered with nowhere to go. The dogs’ owner was trying to call them to heel but they were clearly having too much fun chasing my kitty. I quickly bounded over the balcony, which I’m sure would be a much harder feat if I wasn’t in cat-parental protection role, and ran into the fray.

Buttons isn’t the brightest spark in the box, or perhaps didn’t trust me enough to provide adequate protection from what she probably assumed were the beasts of hell, so didn’t run to the safety of me. But my entry into the chaotic scene afforded her enough of a distraction to squeeze through a narrow gap into the shelter of one of the underground caves. Not an actual cave, in case you think I live in a remote mountain wilderness, but a communal storage area for bikes and whatnot.

elegant balcony climb - bp image

The dog-owner had got one dog under control at this point and had just about rounded up the second. Relieved that Buttons had made it to safety my next concern was to go and rescue her from her hiding place. Getting back over the balcony into the flat was a lot harder than the other direction, as there’s a bigger drop on the garden side of the balcony and I was no longer operating on adrenaline. Bear in mind I’m wearing flip-flops and now trying to scale a vertical wall, which although not massive is too high to simply swing a leg-up. It’s mid-climb with feet up, bum sticking out and desperately trying to use my feeble arm muscles to help pull me up, that the dog-owner tries to talk to me.

This is not the best way to try and meet the neighbours but I manage to huff out ‘it’s okay, she’s okay’ in response to her apologies, but then promptly ignore her as I continue to try to swing myself up, and I’m still preoccupied with the cat now stuck in the cave.

She seemed mortified, I seemed rude, this was unlikely to be the beginnings of a beautiful friendship. The situation wasn’t her fault, the dogs were off the lead in a communal space and I don’t think they actually wanted to kill Buttons, they probably could have done her some damage if they tried, they probably just thought it was a hell of a lot of fun to chase her, sadly my little cat wasn’t to know that and I lacked the language skills or immediate concern to try to communicate this to the dog lady.

Finally back in the flat, I darted out to the cave, accessed from the other side of our building, and managed to locate the cat. However, she’d firmly wedged herself into a small gap between a pipe and I couldn’t reach her or coax her out so that I could easily rescue her. After fifteen minutes or so, she calmed down enough to consider her next move, carefully checked the way she’d come in, to ensure the dogs had gone, and darted back out of the cave, over the balcony and into the flat.

I feared she’d be traumatised for days, but she seemed to recover fairly quickly. In fifteen minutes she was happily eating snacks again but she didn’t cross the balcony again that evening and followed me around the flat a bit more closely than usual. She must still have been sending out sad vibes though as her brother even came across to nicely lick her on the head (normally he chases her around the flat and pulls out her hair, which he started doing again about an hour after the incident).

I thought now would be a good time to call my mum back, thinking she might be slightly anxious to know what was going on after the alarming way I’d terminated our previous call. But I made the call from inside the flat as the balcony hadn’t proved to be the relaxing spot I’d had in mind.

Happy Bloggaversary to me!

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Apparently I’ve been at this blogging game for a whole year now, so it’s time for a little reflection. Please imagine a suitably reminiscingy tune (doo de doo doo, doo de doo do…) and maybe a hazy wavering of blog imagery back in time, one whole year ago…

I started all this with the idea that one day I might want to write a book but that probably wouldn’t happen if I didn’t practice writing on a more regular basis and, so, this blog was born. What I hadn’t expected was how much I’d enjoy blogging for blogging’s sake. At first I found it pretty scary to put myself out there thinking why would anyone be interested? What if people hate what I have to say? What if I get laughed out of the blogosphere, blocked from using the internet and ridiculed in person by those who happen to know me in the flesh?

Fortunately my fears were unfounded and people responded pretty well to this, not only friends and family, who probably feel a bit obliged to be kind, but so many other great people I’ve met throught blogging, that this time a year ago I had no idea existed. Because of this initial support I think I now to be able to keep going in the face of any hostility I might attrat in the future (should this thing ever become popular enough, or I ever become controversial enough, to attract trolly types).

I set myself the challenge of blogging once a week, which I pretty much stuck to, and a few months ago tried to up this to twice a week. At times I’ve found it hard to meet my self-imposed blogging deadlines and on more than one occasion I’ve forced myself to sit at the PC and write with absolutely no idea of what I’m going to blog about. Often, even when I’ve an idea of what I want to post, I’ve no idea how it’s going to finish and sometimes the results have surprised myself.

I’ve tried a bit of fiction and a bit of poetry here and there and I’ve uncovered a previously unrealised talent for computer art (just need to skim a few of my posts to see what I’m talking about!.

But, best of all I’ve realised that this blog isn’t actually as much about me as I’ve thought it would be. I’ve discovered countless awesome bloggers and blogs that I’ve really enjoyed reading and engaging with. I’ve had 181 bloggers (not related to me) deliberately sign up to follow my blog. I’ve had friends and family telling me they enjoy my ramblings and encouraging me to keep at it.

So I’d like to take the opportunity to thank each and everyone of you who have decided to follow me, like a post, make a comment, respond to comments I’ve left on other blogs, reblog me and recommend me to others in one way or another. Every interaction has motivated me to keep going even when there may have been times when I just wanted to give up on this demanding monster I’d created. But because of all of you I’ve kept at this for a year and hope to continue for many more years to come.

To borrow a line from ‘Lock, stock & two smoking barrels’…(to be read in gravelly Vinnie Jones voice)…it’s been emotional!

Ten reasons to be impulsive

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1. Thinking things through gets in the way of actually doing stuff, avoid the problem and skip the thinking part!

2. The sooner you impulsively commit to something the more likely you are to follow your instincts and go through with this. For example you could think I’d like to travel more so randomly apply to an internship in Cambodia and then when the email offer comes through immediately respond that you are in and tell everyone. Its so much harder to back out when you force others to become collaborators of your impulsive ways!

3. You can be impulsive in some areas of life but still remain resolutely steadfast in others. I like to be impulsive about the small things such as committing to take up a new sport by buying all the equipment before even trying the game, which career to pursue or whether to move country. However, I remain wholly restrained when it comes to more serious things like deciding not to go out for a spontaneous afterwork drink when I’ve been looking forward to an evening of some sort of Netflix fix and binge eating with the cats for company and judgment.

4. Being impulsive makes for much more interesting and also more succinct story telling process. Guess which is the impulsive version from below?

  • ‘I applied for a job in Switzerland without thinking about it, was offered the job and then decided to move’
  • ‘I carefully considered whether or not to apply for a job in Switzerland, I weighed up all the pros and cons and sensibly thought through all potential ramifications of undertaking such a step, eventually I concluded that such a notion was ridiculously ill-thought out and I therefore decided to stay here in a predictable job I ceased to enjoy some time ago.’

5. Being impulsive gives you an air of mystery, where people are never too sure what you are going to commit to next. Maybe you’ll simply buy a life-size elephant soap dispenser on your next Ikea trip, maybe you’ll have moved to Timbuktu before you got round to telling anyone, maybe you’ll do nothing impulsive for long enough people will think you’ve got over these crazy tendencies then BANG! You can surprise them with the next adventure!

6. Impulsive behaviour is just another way of following your gut-instincts. These aren’t the instincts your gut has to avoid cheese wrapped around butter encased in clotted cream but that inner feeling within you that tells you if a particular course of action is right or wrong. All too often we suppress our gut instinct and agree to things like attending a seminar on how to optimise seminar attendance when we really should have listened to that inner voice telling us we don’t want to do that.

7. Being impulsive is a characteristic often associated with children, this doesn’t mean it’s bad for adults but means it will help you access your inner, and frankly much more fun, child. It means you can enjoy running through the rain, cartwheeling across the park/in the office and climbing trees without worrying about getting wet, making a fool out of yourself or how you’ll get down again.

8. Being impulsive means you can face your fears and learn to overcome these. I was pretty terrified of teenagers, particularly en masse, so when I saw a volunteering opportunity (whilst studying part-time and working full-time) to work with groups of 16 and 17 year olds in the spare time I really didn’t have I signed up without thinking it through AT ALL. Having impusively committed myself to something where others were relying on me, I was compelled to continue and actually quite enjoyed the experience, learning that young adults aren’t nearly so terrifying as I had initially expected!

9. Whilst being impulsive may occasionally get you into some foolhardy situations, the stories that occur as a result are usually worth any traumatic experiences at the time. For example an impulsive desire might lead to your clambouring on top of the fridge (so you can stare down at others) and then realising that the washing machine you used as a staging pad has since been turned on (and is now whirring so much it’s truly terrifying) that now you can’t get down without some serious help you desperately need but are really reluctant to accept. Traumatic? Yes. But probably worth it for the stories you can later share with friends of how great it was to be able to stare down at that mean cat you don’t like and leave them guessing abut how you got to be so high up (this may have been an example of my cat’s behaviour rather than mine).

10. Impulsive behaviour led me to writing this blog, I bought a domain name before I knew if or what I was going to write and then before I knew it I was happily blogging away like a trooper and connecting with all sorts of cool other bloggers.

Liebster Award

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So  a week or two back, I’m not so great of keeping track of time these days (must be the old age kicking in). Niina, over at Northern Chapters, was wonderfully kind enough to nominate me for the Liebster Award (sorry it took me a bit longer to respond than planned).

I know that some people like these awards and some don’t but as I’m far from the point of Award saturation, I feel pretty darn chuffed at the idea that someone likes my blog enough to want to recognise that. Plus, most of the new blogs I discover are through recommendations/links from other blogs so I think it’s a good way to broaden the old blogging horizons.

Also Niina came up with some really cool questions that I’d like to answer. I do so love a quiz, particularly those buzzfeed type know-thyself kind where they try to guess what kind of Disney Princess you are (would love to think of myself as a Mulan but I’m clearly more of a Belle, bit of a geek, do love a good book and have a tendency to take pity on sad lonely creatures; which is why I feel no love for ants, they have way too many chums for me to feel bad for them). I digress anywhere here goes:

Anyway here are dem rules:

  • Once you are nominated, make a post thanking and linking the person who nominated you.
  • Include the Liebster Award sticker in the post too.
  • Nominate some other bloggers who you feel are worthy of this award. Let them know they have been nominated by commenting on one of their posts. You can also nominate the person who nominated you.
  • Answer the ten questions asked to you by the person who nominated you
  • Make ten questions of your own for your nominees.
  • Lastly, COPY these rules in the post.
  • ALL THE NOMINEES ARE FREE TO ACCEPT OR REJECT THE NOMINATION

1. How many books have you read so far this year?

I can actually answer this one to the letter, whilst I am not cool enough for a Goodreads style online recording of my literary adventures, I am gloriously old-fashioned and delight in keeping a proper, would-burn-in-a-fire-paper-kind of book journal. This is primarily so I can recall what I’ve read, memory, goldfish, what? It’s also so I can smugly flick through and count up how many books I’ve read. Wow, what a long-winded way of answering: 20.

2. What’s your favorite holiday?

Has to be Christmas. I’ve been lucky enough the past few years to work places where pretty much the entire operation shuts down between Christmas Eve and the New Year and I really love having so much time off at a time when other people also take lots of time off so you don’t have that mad rush you get with holiday taken during the rest of the year, where you work your pants off before you go on holidays and then you work little buns off (pants already lost in pre-holiday work) when you come back catching up on everything. Last Christmas was also the most relaxed I’ve been in a long time, as the fella and I stayed in Geneva had a couple of days with chums and then the rest of the time doing diddly-squat, without feeling remotely guilty. Wouldn’t want to do that every year but was pretty nice this.

3. If you could only recommend one book, what would it be?

This is a tough question, I have books I adore but am quite reluctant to recommend to others, because if they don’t like them I’ll take it really personally so I tend to only recommend things I quite like, but won’t be devastated if not everyone feels the same way. So I’ll cheat and just answer with the last book I recommended to someone, which was ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Moshin Hamid. I liked how the book was written as a one-sided conversation with a shadowy stranger, the throw away comments that leave you wondering what’s really going on and just the really interesting approach of how a Pakistani in America fell out of love with the country he had longed to be a part of. I won’t say any more but it’s well worth a read and if you find the narrative style annoying at first (I did) keep going, it’ll completely draw you in eventually.

4. Congratulations, you just won the jackpot in a lottery! First thing you do?

Book a holiday somewhere beautiful by a beach and enjoy looking out at the sea whiling away my time as I calculate, to the digit, exactly how to spend the rest of it!

5. Would you rather go 200 years into the past or into the future and why?

Well the future scares me and I think going into the future and finding out how the world and your destiny ends up is probably going to be pretty unhealthy. If you go back in time, you can really connect with history and look super clued up, with loads of smart ideas you could pass of as you’re own. Having said all that, I’d go into the future, at a run, so as not to really think about it, the danger factor of the unknown would be too exciting to miss.

6. If you could choose one person (alive or dead), who would you want to meet?

I want to cheat again. If someone dead, I’d pick Siegfried Sassoon (First World War poet, novelist and king of the pointless rebellions), he undertook a protest against the war, which resulted in his being sent away to a mental hospital and taken about as seriously as the ribbon of the medal he tried to throw in the river and sadly just bobbed about on the surface. I like the standing-up-for-what’s-right-even-if-you-get-dismissed-as-a-nutter attitude and I’m currently reading a great biography about him. If someone alive, I’d pick Simon Pegg, have been a fan since Spaced and love the cornetto trilogy movies. I just think he’d be a great person to have a pint with.

7. When was the last time you were excited about something?

I get excited pretty easily about a lot of things, but most recent was riding my new (second-hand) bike to work last Wednesday. My old bike’s saddle couldn’t be adjusted and was far too low so riding had ceased to become pleasurable and was taking it’s toll on my knees. Being able to whizz down that hill on the way to work again, and manage to get back up without too much trouble on the way home, was awesome!

8. Describe yourself in three words!

Normally I’d be lost but did a whole blog post on this recently. I aspirationally went for ‘Counselor, Polymath and Humanist’, you can check out why I came up with those here.

9. At what time of day are you usually most creative?

Regrettably between the hours of 10pm and 2am. This is not conducive to a 9-6 Monday-Friday job. I really wish I was a morning person.

10. What’s your next blogging related goal?

To plan more. My posts are usually a bit slapdash, inspired by an occurrence of the day before in order to meet my self-imposed, if loosely interpreted deadlines. Would be great if I could produce a little stockpile of pieces I could wheel out for rainy days.

 

Blogs I nominate are all ones I’ve discovered relatively recently, don’t think I’ve nominated before, and really enjoy for one reason or another so I’d recommend you check out:

  • Would you rather be a zombie or vampire?
  • Do you prefer cats or dogs and if you pick dogs do you think that’s because you just don’t really get cats?
  • Why did you decide to write a blog?
  • Which Disney Princess would you be?
  • How early in the day would you a drink a mojito/screwdriver/other cocktail of your choice?
  • If you were helping to tidy out a colleague’s desk and you spotted a winning lottery ticket they had clearly forgotten about would you tell them or keep it and pretend it was yours?
  • Would you rather go to jail for a crime you didn’t commit or have someone else go to jail for a crime you committed but they were blamed for?
  • If you could go any place in the world right now, where would you go?
  • Who is your favourite author?
  • If you could change history, would you do it and what would you change?

Well that’s a really long blog post (so many words…) so thanks to everyone who managed to read the end of it!

Shaded memory

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Bleak, black, blocks of wood, writhing limbs
Pinned against the blue-grey, sea-shades of the sky
Where honey flavoured fingers of the sun
Unfurl their stiffened joints
To caress the ground beneath
And pour out affection on luminous blades of jade

A solitary figure, knock-kneed and balanced by a stick
Pulling a zipperless coat tight, with the one spare hand
Thrusts himself forward
Wading through the tempest
Into a bullion beam
Where dust mites dance around his head in lazy jubilation

Gnarled hand, grips tight, around gnarled wood
Whitewashed, waxen hair, molded to his head by rain
Gleams radiant in the beam’s glare
Rheumy eyes determinedly focus
On the aged oak tree ahead
Standing as it has since before his grandfather’s grandfather’s days.

Wood, darkened by the rain and scarred by the decades
Yields to the old man’s touch, tracing the time long-past, where
Now ancient, heart and letters
Were once painstakingly etched
Into the timber’s flesh
And bittersweet memories further blur already clouded eyes.

 

Ten reasons to vote

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1. You only get a chance to vote in the national elections every few years so might as well as not. Imagine if something amazing happened at your local polling station, like one of the counting officers did magic tricks and you weren’t there to see. You’d feel like a right chump!

2. It’s a chance to vote out/vote in again* the government you loathe/love* (*delete as appropriate). If you don’t vote then you can’t later whinge with legitimacy about how the government you voted in have let you down or how everything would be champagne and roses if the other lot, that you voted for but didn’t get in, had won.

3. You won’t be able to keep up with workplace banter round the kettle about who’s waltzing into the lead or tripping the light fantastic if you don’t plan to vote. It’d be like trying to keep up with Strictly Come Dancing conversations when you don’t know any of the finalists, except everyone will be paying attention to this political dance show.

4. Even if you think everyone standing is a right bunch of numpties (and everyone knows only egotistical lunatics want to be in politics) and you’d rather be ‘governed’ by a wet tea towel, which at least used to have a purpose in life, it’s better to go and deliberately spoil your vote (scratch through all names and write none of the above) than just not bother. Better to be counted as a pissed off voter than apathetic unengaged person who doesn’t care one way or the other.

5. If you can’t be bothered and don’t vote then you run the risk of those militant crazy types full of misplaced political fervour and zeal voting for the random ‘everyone must wear purple every other day’ parties and before you know it you are having to buy a whole new violet wardrobe and trying to remember if it’s a purple day or not.

6. Apparently there are some areas where who you vote for makes a difference. I’m not 100% sure how this works, having always lived I’m safe seats, but I think there’s a chance that your vote might actually change the party representing you, which must make the whole thing much more exciting.

7. If you live somewhere where it’s pretty much a given who will be your next politician it’s still good to vote to either let that politician know how much everyone likes them or to let one of the little guys (with snowball’s chance in hell kind of odds of winning) feel like someone liked them. It’s like taking the time to cheer for a support band at a concert when no-one else is paying attention them just waiting for the main act. Giving someone a bit of validation is a nice thing to do. 

8. It is possible that some politicians actually do care more about the possible people they will represent than the thought of wielding metaphorical swords of power, so it doesn’t hurt to skim the literature they send through (or whatever the modern day online equivalent is) and pick your champion.

9. It’s good to remember that there was a time when all women and most men couldn’t vote and that actually people worked pretty hard to change that, some of them even died (Emily Davison threw herself under the King’s horse to raise awareness of the fact women in the UK couldn’t vote; and, to make men feel less threatened by the prospect of women voters, she even took herself off the prospective voters list). These people would probably be pretty peeved if the right to vote they worked so hard for, no-one actually bothers to use.

10. The topic of politics might sound dull but who governs the country isn’ t just about old men droning on and on for hours on a dedicated channel no-one wants to watch. I mean that does happen but the things they drone on about impacts a lot of other things, like the kind of education your kids get, whether or not your streetlights stay on, if you have to pay for healthcare or not, whether wearing purple can ever be made mandatory and so on.

Flying into a rage

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I am not a good flyer. By that, I don’t mean that I have a fear of flying, the thought of whizzing through the air in small metal container with the potential to crash, explode or just disappear has never bothered me. Not because these aren’t genuinely serious things to worry about, but more because I’ve always assumed I’m more likely to get hit by a car than go down with a plane.

What makes me a bad traveller is that airports tend to make me really angry. I am not a patient person so the interminable hanging around that takes place both before and after the actual flying tends to set me on edge.

On Wednesday evening we arrived at the airport about an hour before the flight, plenty of time when you’ve no luggage to check in and the security process is usually pretty good. It was a bit annoying to discover that our flight had been delayed for 15/20 minutes but I had a good book to read, we hadn’t got to the airport super early so a little longer waiting to board wasn’t the worst scenario even though I was pretty tired after a hectic day.

A chap came round and asked to check our boarding passes with our passports whilst we sat in the waiting area, so that when we were finally able to board we wouldn’t have to show passports again and I thought that’s a smart move, I appreciated their trying to minimise further delays when the plane was finally ready.

Finally it was time to board and we accidentally pick the slowest of the two queues, soon I spotted why, but it was almost impossible to switch into the other queue at this point. The easyjet employee on the left was employing a scrupulous bag checking standard that the easyjet employee on the right wasn’t (or maybe there were less attention-worthy bags on that side).

Easyjet has a ridiculous policy where they insist that you can only have one bag regardless of any common sense application. Fair enough you can’t have a cabin bag and a massive tote filled to the brim with the kind of belongings you should have just checked in as hold luggage. I understand their taking issue with that. What gets my goat is that they won’t let you pass the boarding checkpoint, unless a small handbag is unceremoniously crammed into your larger cabin bag.

Normally I don’t say anything but I was tired, we’d already been waiting an additional 20 minutes because boarding was late, we got stuck in the slow moving queue of a thousand deaths and now I was being delayed further by this ridiculous policy.

I started off by asking why I had to do this, as I was only going to take my small bag out of my big bag as soon as I boarded the plane, which would delay passengers trying to board the plane? We were already late, why did they want to slow the process up even more?

Then I pointed out that the policy was discriminatory. I got the expected response of ‘we apply this to women and men equally’. I pointed out that it was discriminatory regardless of whether it was theoretically applied equally because it disproportionately affects women more than men. Women’s coats tend not to be like men’s coats, with secure zipped or inside pockets where you can safely stow your passport and other valuables you don’t want to trust to the overhead locker of some passenger fourteen rows ahead of you. I didn’t have to ask how many men she’d told to put their bags away, the five other women trying to stuff handbags into their carry-on immediately in front of me proved my point.

The easyjet employee responded well by agreeing that she didn’t understand the policy. Anyone who works in customer service or has ever had to deal with an angry person in the role of their job, knows that nothing is more effective at deflating a person’s righteous (or not as the case may be) rage by agreeing with them. However it does highlight the absurdity of the policy when even the staff don’t agree with it.

But when she asked what I expected her to do about it, I realised I was railing at the wrong person so I grumbled and moved past. I made an elaborate show (imagine theatrical arm gestures and extra loud huffing and puffing) of putting it in my bigger case.

I boarded the plane and, as anticipated, held a few people up as I had to stop in the aisle to set my cabin bag down to release my handbag before taking my seat. The rage within me continued to seethe.

I know that the woman checking us in was in no way responsible for the policy and she was just doing her job but I still don’t regret acting the way I did, although granted had I been less angry I might have looked a tad less ridiculous and embarrassed my fiancé a little less, at least I got to register my protest. And I know that I was not wrong in pointing out the unfairness of the policy.

Maybe what I said will stick with that employee or get some other passengers thinking. Maybe it won’t. But sometimes just asking the questions, calling into consideration something which you consider to be unjust can be enough to get the ball rolling. Or maybe I’m just a really angry traveller and should start taking the train instead.

Ten reasons my 30s will be better than my 20s

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1. I’m turning 30 tomorrow, whether I like it or not (unless I don’t, which would be a whole lot worse than the alternative), so no point in clinging on to those rose-tinted memories of my twenties, when I indulged myself in feeling mightily superior to teenage me, but still young enough to be called ‘youth’ by my brother.

2. Compared to a volcano I’m still super young!

3. I might not be quite so youthful anymore in human years but I’m not actually any closer to getting old, in fact the more years I have, the further ‘old’ moves away. I can prove it too: when I was 10 – 30 seemed old, when I was 20 – 60 seemed pretty old, but now I’m 30 – 90 seems old. Clearly old is just 3 times as far away as your actual age so, by that logic, although I might not be so young anymore, I’ll also never be old.

4. In my 30s, people will assume I am mature and experienced so I expect I will be able to bluff my way through challenging scenarios more competently and can pass myself off as an expert on certain subjects on the basis of age, rather than actual experience (if this isn’t true please don’t disillusion me now).

5. I had a surprise birthday party at work today and one of the girls, for the first time in her life, made Apple Crumble in honour of my Britishness (she is predominantly Belgian). I never had anyone make me nationality-themed desserts in honour of any of my 20 something birthdays so this is already an improvement.

6. In my 20s I did lots of interesting ‘experience-gaining’ type things (like studying Human Rights and then the law conversion course, interning in Cambodia and moving to Switzerland). Whilst I regret none of these things I hope that now I’m older, and therefore must be wiser, I’ll be able to just know stuff without the challenges of having to acquire information. So for the time being we’ll ignore any evidence to the contrary, like the fact I’m itching to start studying again and that the world doesn’t actually work like that.

7. In my 20s I never had much money (see point 6 above for various reasons why) but now all that crazy stuff is behind me, I’m confident my 30s will be the decade I actually start to enjoy having money. In a couple of years my student loan will finally be paid off. Hopefully I won’t have to accept any more loans from my parents and may even be able to pay them back at some point in the coming ten years! I might finally become a real grown-up (said with a tear in my eye)!

8. In my 20s, I spent a surprising amount of time caring what other’s thought about me, worrying about how I was spending my time and wasting my youth. Well now that youth is wasted I actually no longer care if people think I’m ‘cool’ or not, which I just as well as I’m definitely not cool. Unless we are talking in some sort of ironic, British in a land of expats, uncool-cool sort of way, but we probably aren’t.

9. In my 20s, I worried about how I would achieve so many life goals before I was thirty, like establishing myself as an expert to be revered in my chosen career, getting married and having kids, exploring every continent and mastering at least one other language (apparently being able to talk with my mouth full doesn’t count). Now that I’ve missed the deadline for these things, the pressure’s off.

10. I’ve come a long way since I turned 20, I’ve done some things I’m pretty proud of, met some awesome people and had some great experiences and although there have been some not-so-good moments too, these are far outweighed by the positives. So I’m pretty confident that I’ll go a long way in the next ten years, in ways I haven’t even considered yet. Cool, eh?