English lessons

Yesterday I was picked out of a crowd of literally one to provide English practice to Vera’s goddaughters sister. The theory presumably being that I speak English, therefore am qualified to impart some kind of knowledge on the  subject.

My conversational skills with thirteen year old girls are not, it must be said, entirely brilliant, (even if said conversationalist were to have English as their first language) so suffice to say, the experience was rather like paddling through thick treacle. We discussed all manner of things, none of which I am sure she had the slightest interest in discussing with me. Travel. Music. You know.. the usual.

If this continues, I would hope it would improve, the good news being I fail to see how I could get any worse at it. If anyone out there happened to be a thirteen year old girl at some point in their life, do let me know quite what it was you liked to talk about so I can enhance the whole experience for everyone involved. In good news, i did learn a couple of new German words. So it wasn’t a total disaster.

English lessons aside, life continues to be good. For example, I spent quite a lot of yesterday evening chatting with the cat. She can’t speak English either. Mostly this covered the benefits of her not eating the wax rind off the cheese that had been left in the ash tray. She seemed unconvinced as to my arguments, but restrained herself, presumably out of courtesy to my ramblings.

Vera popped out to see a friend perform some form of stand up / cabaret act recently. i was invited along, but then it turned out that a) there was no space in the car and b) it was all going to be in German, as you would expect. I am all for new experiences, but watching a lot of people laugh at the cunning wordplay of the stand up whilst I peered, confused, into a pint glass didn’t seem like the sort of life affirming experience I was looking for. I stayed at home and conversed at further length with the cat. Talking of beer, I have learnt that there is a beer festival happening this upcoming weekend in Bonn, where something like eighty beers will be represented. I think these will need to be investigated, in the name of science and erm, journalism. For you dear reader. Yes.

In other, site related news, I’ve migrated to a custom domain, so the site is now to be found at findingtheuniverse.com rather than the old blogspot address. Hopefully nothing is broken, and everything should just magically migrate across with no changes noticed (although some of the facebook like history has mysteriously disappeared), but if you do spot anything, just let me know!

And finally, a friend of mine has recently been employed by no less than the swearing chef himself, Monsieur Ramsay, at one his of London restaurants. Hats off to Martin for that. He cooked for Vera and I whilst we were out in Oz, a fine meal of steak and caramelized onion sauce, and a more deserving person to get this job I cannot imagine. Drinks all round.