My department Christmas Lunch will this year be at Bon Viveur, a relatively new restaurant in Bristol. For reasons of ‘equality for lunch non-attendees’ (more like ‘budgetary pressure’, I reckon), The Company will not be subsidising employees’ departmental Christmas lunches this year (last year we received £10 towards the cost). This makes the minimum £21.50 (two courses) or £26.50 (three courses) a little steep, especially considering the ongoing debt situation (when they say that debt ‘cripples’, they’re right) and the fact that, if I’m going to spend £20+ on a meal, I normally do it with people I really like to hang around with. Read more...

I stayed up until 1am, printing some of our holiday photos for Kathy to take into college on the last day of her course, and proof-reading her last essay. I just happened to be following the early election results progress, m’kay? I am a little tired.

In order to not have to give sweets to kids in Halloween costumes (how American; how ghastly!), Kathy & I went out to Bath’s new Odeon cinema last night. Yeah, I know — I ranted about their woefully inadequate web site back in July and their response to Matthew Somerville, who was …uh … doing them a favour. Five months on, and the site still blows, except they’ve added a "text-only film times" facility. Read more...

Jonathan told me to: Copy the list on to your blog, put in bold the ones you have listened to (completely from begining to end) and then add three more albums that you think people should have heard before they turn into their parents — remember, it isn’t necessarily your most favourite albums but the ones you think people should listen to… and when we say listen we mean from track one through to the end. Read more...

One of the things that I noticed during our recent tour was that urinals in European toilets are, on the whole, so much more technologically advanced than our own British ones. Mind you, I’ve never had to manually flush urinals in the UK, which happened a few times on the continent. Ours tend to be flushed, en masse, on a timed basis, whereas ones in continental Europe (even the recent EU-joiners like Slovakia) tend to operate using the automatic sensor, per-urinal-flushing method. Read more...

Tim writes: OK, so we’ve been back for 10 days or so, and the blog still hasn’t caught up with the paper diary we kept during the trip. That will change, hopefully quite soon. There has been quite a lot of catching-up to do since we got back, plus Kathy caught a flu-like bug after only two days back at work! To whet your appetite, there are some more photos in the photo gallery. Read more...

Arrived in Graz around 7pm and checked into the campsite that had a HUGE swimming pool which had closed the day before!! 14.09.04. Got up early and got the bus into Graz. Kathy’s bites were no better, very angry and red, so finding a doctor was the priority. Went to the tourist information for help and then had to visit the health insurance office in the hospital to show an E111 and get a voucher. Read more...

It had started raining during the night so we packed up the van and parked it next to the laundry room so we could do some washing. It felt wonderful to get clothes clean and pillowcases, everything smelt so fresh and lovely, especially after it had been tumble-dried. We did a grocery shop while the washing was on: yoghurts, mustard, fleisch salat for Tim, muesli, oranges and nectarines. We were glad to leave the campsite as it was a bit depressing although hard to put your finger on why. Read more...

A well deserved sleep saw us getting up at 10:30am and rushing to pack and leave by 11am. It was a fantastically beautiful day, clear blue sky. Shortly after leaving we got a right shock when the roof of the van flew up, Tim had forgotten to close the catches that keep it down! Well it was his job! So we stopped speedily and did them. The land was very flat and the views were beautiful. Read more...

We got up early and prepared for our day trip to Bratislava. We had originally planned to camp there but had read that the campsites were ‘grim’. As it is not far from Vienna we changed our plans and took the train there instead. We got to travel on a double-decker train into Vienna centre! The journey took about an hour and a quarter, including a fifteen minute stop for border control / passport checks. Read more...