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I’ve just bought another French mobile phone. This isn’t because I’m some kind of gadget freak, it’s because I lost the one that Graham kindly gave me to replace the one I lost about four months ago. Yes, that’s right, I’m on my 3rd French mobile. When I’m leaving a place, I have a voice in my head that says “Wallet, Keys, Tobacco, Lighter, Phone… Ready!” and I’ve had real difficulty adding “Other phone” to the mental list. This necessitated a visit to the Orange store. I first tried to fix this problem – AKA buy a phone – on Saturday, when I turned upRead More →

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I’m halfway through my French Adventure now – my work contract tells me that I run out of job on the last day of May, and my flat contract ends on June 6. Paradoxically, time is both speeding and crawling by. In one sense I feel like I’ve been here forever and in another sense like I have only just arrived. My French skills are very much improved; I’m not sure that the people I share an office with would agree wholeheartedly, but I can perceive the difference myself. Every now and then, in conversation, I do something surprising (like use the futur antérieur) andRead More →

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Weightwatchers in France is an interesting thing to do. It’s not as hugely popular here as it is in the UK, and I don’t think there are any competitor diet clubs (I’ve seen no Slimmers World or Rosemary Conley), and it is much more expensive than in the UK (38 Euros/month rather than 18 quid/month !!). However given that my documents were posted in Maidenhead, I guess there are some postal overheads involved here. And it’s still cheaper than French lessons, even if the vocab is somewhat limited. In the UK, as you approach the scales, there’s a kind of scruffy striptease, in which everyoneRead More →

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This view is about 20 mins into my bike to work. I love the way the mountains shift behind the buildings, perspective changing and somehow managing to make the boring boxy foreground stuff look interesting. There’s been snow on those for about four weeks now.

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It was a glorious evening yesterday, but I didn’t make it up the big hill before dark. I thought I’d give the panorama an attempt anyway.

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VITAE (a UK organisation to support researchers) recently advertised for paid blogger positions on their career development blogs. I wasn’t successful in my application, as I couldn’t make it to their training day in London, what with me living in France and all. But they said they’d publish the submission from my application and it’s now up: ranting about powerpoint overview slides. Seriously, I have, in the past, considered adding a slide to my conference presentation which says: Waffle Other people’s stuff What I did How it worked Waffle The other thing I’ve considered doing is photographing every overview slide in a conference and turningRead More →

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I’ve taken up dance lessons – partly because I enjoy dancing, partly because I know I’m not very good at it and lessons will help, and partly because it’s something sociable that gets me out of the flat and doing some exercise. I’ve been to six or seven lessons now and am beginning to be able to string a few moves together, but I’m always counting in my head and trying to remember stuff. There are a few sentences that repeat and I am sure I have a look of absurd concentration on my face – I don’t think it goes as far as stickingRead More →

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My favourite one-and-a-half hour bike ride goes out along the Drac, past the confluence with the Isère, across the dam, then back along the Isère. Here are two panoramas from the barrage – the first in early summer (June, I think), and the second today: Click for bigger versions if you want a bit more detail.

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The last post contained lots of StreetView frames, and it took me a while to work out how to get them to appear properly. WordPress automatically adds <BR /> tags to the line endings, which is kind-of ok for text, but really messes things up if it chooses to do it in the middle of a block of embedded HTML. There’s a plugin which fixes this – it’s called PS disable auto formatting. It doesn’t work quite how you’d expect though. What it does is disable auto-formatting completely, therefore changing the appearance of all your past posts, and means that for all future posts you’llRead More →