There And Back Again...

I no longer live in Switzerland!

2010-08-03T11:21:00.005+01:00

02/08 - Right, that's it. Six months and two days after moving out, my LTA at CERN is over. Leaving was reasonably stress free - I got up with Kelly at 0515, and intended to do some final cleaning before being checked out at 0930. What I actually did was to eat leftover chilli from last night, pack some stuff and then fall asleep for two hours on the sofa in the sun. I was awoken by a ring on the doorbell, which I assumed to be Aimee coming to get my plants - this was not the case. I think I was fortunate in having Celine conducting my checkout, rather than the feared Mary-Elizabeth. Even so, I had to get back in the bath and give it a hearty scrub before she was convinced that it was not grubby through lack of effort (also a large bathtowel seems to have been misplaced). The broken glasses will be taken out of my deposit, but GenProp (the managers of the building) waived the CHF 8 for a new plate so that I didn't have to go to the cashpoint specially. I think I won't have much of a dent in my CHF 300 deposit, which I am rather glad of, especially after Kelly and I spent so long cleaning the place - probably more time than I have taken in the past to clean much bigger flats.

I was out of my flat by 11, at which point the heavens opened. I dragged my 45+ kg of stuff (as I found out at the airport) to Globus to attempt to get a refund for my Prince ticket, with partial success - the lady has taken my details and will hopefully contact me when they can get a refund, then keep the money for me in the safe until my return in September. I then dragged myself up to the station, where I managed to print out my boarding pass after some cafuffle with the manager of the cafe when I walked in and tried to print directly from my memory stick, for free, as I had last time (when the printer was playing up, I wasn't just being tight). I was at the airport and checked in with an hour to spare, and spent the time pottering about the shops, looking for any last minute duty free bargains (there were none). On the plane, I was disappointed that they did not have the ingredients for a Bloody Mary, but pleased to be heading home - we arrived a little early, I got my luggage incredibly quickly (in fact I had to run across baggage claim to avoid it going back out through the door) and got various forms of public transport back to home, which is now 50 Jedburgh Street. As I remember, I arrived slightly before Kelly. I am very glad to be back here - I came to really enjoy Geneva by the end, and I am fully aware that RHUL will seem pretty awful in comparison, but I think that being back in London with my friends and family around me will more than make up for that.

Last week in Geneva - surprise Kelly, Fêtes and Fireworks

2010-08-01T23:11:00.001+01:00

26/07 - So today was my uncle Peter's funeral, back in England. My day started badly, as the removal company rang me while I was waiting to get the bus to the airport, to inform me that they were coming tomorrow, i.e. when I am still in England. Consequently I had to rush back to the flat, ram some stuff into boxes and finish packing, ring James who very kindly agreed to be there when they came to collect it all, drop off the key and run back to the bus stop. All this was done at top speed, and took about 15 minutes. Other than that, my journey was fine - everything was a little delayed, but I had enough time to meet Kelly and Clare at Victoria station before we went down. I read one of Peter's poems at the service, and there were drinks and food at the rugby club behind his house afterwards - it was a really nice day/evening. I stayed up until 1ish with my cousins, and then ended up sleeping on the floor as we had the wrong pump for our airbed. This was not ideal.

27/07 - Kelly left early in the morning, very kindly given a lift by Mandie. On our way back from the station we stopped off to buy bacon, and I took responsibility for furnishing the remaining Roses/Joneses/Archbold Joneses with bacon butties. I got the train at about 1, and flew back to Geneva, with the intention of going in, but in the end I didn't arrive until about 4 o'clock so there seemed little point.

28/07 - I decided this morning that today was to be my last day at CERN (for the time being at least) - I cleared my desk, did some work and went for lunch with Matilde and Elisa. I had an enormous paella, after which I was incredibly tired, and struggled to keep myself awake. I worked until about half 6, and then went for my leaving meal; due to various people being away this ended up being just myself, James and Sarah going to L'Aviation. It was OK, I thought the steaks were a bit inferior to the other two places which James compared it to (Café De Paris and L'Entrecôte), and the sauce was pretty heavy on the garlic, but it was still pretty good. Enormous, as well.

29/07 - I have a surprise Kelly, on our one and a halfth anniversary! Well, sort of a surprise - I had no idea she was coming out until the other day, when she offered to give me her flights so I could come home for the funeral. I was under strict instructions not to leave the flat, and she arrived at about half 11. We spent ages cleaning the flat, and at one point a pigeon flew into the window, I assume he didn't see it because it was so spotless. In the evening we had a few glasses of wine and went out to Takumi, a place I mentioned a while ago - we went and couldn't justifiably afford the tasting menu. I decided to treat us to that very same menu, as this was probably the last time we'd be in Geneva for a long while. It was delicious, amazing sashimi and nigiri, really light tempura, seafood soup in a teapot, and a few other delicious things which don't spring to mind immediately. Afterwards we toyed with the idea of going to seek out some fun as the Fêtes de Geneve started properly today, but we were so stuffed full of food and wine that we thought we would leave it for another day.

30/07 - So we started off with some cleaning, then headed to Bains des Pâquis for some drinks and a swim. It was significantly cooler than last time I came, but refreshing all the same. It took some persuading to get Kelly into the water, but I think she was glad she conceded in the end. We then sought out some festival stuff - the whole of the bank of the lake has been turned into an enormous fairground, full of crap stalls with crapper prizes, and dodgy looking rides. We found some dinner (mexican wrap things) which we washed down with some of the official fête rosé. We explored for quite a while, and ended up at about midnight watching a band in the scene des clubs. This band had a singer who did a passable Stevie Wonder impression, and one who sang in a style entirely devoid of soul. We watched them belt out covers for a while, then went back home - I was absolutely exhausted.

31/07 - So today was my leaving do, which fortunately coincided with the Fête de la Rade around the lakeshore. Kelly and I went and bought a load of picnic stuff (including, foolishly, a watermelon which we lugged around for the next few hours) and took it up to Parc de la Grange, where people arrived over the next few hours - in attendance by the end were Kelly and myself, James and Sarah, Alex Pinder and Alex Martyniuk, Dan Short, Zoe, Matilde, Aimee, Gemma and a mate of James' and a guy from UCL whose names I have entirely forgotten. At 5 o'clock we went down to the lalke and picked up the three boats I had booked for us - as we were 13 people, Gemma stayed ashore as she was on call, and thought it would be easier to get to CERN were she not on a boat in the middle of the lake. The boats were, as always, awesome - we were told to stay 100 metres from each other, which is a rule we obviously broke as soon as we were away from the shore. We had some races, tied the boats together and made a pontoon of sorts, and had about 5 really close calls when we nearly smashed into each other - on one occasion missing by literally millimetres. Most of us leapt in and had a swim, and after an hour of this we headed back to shore, then walked down to watch the waterskiing competition - this was not too exciting, as they were seeing who could jump furthest, so it all looked the same.

We went back up to the Jet and had a few drinks in the sun (those two mystery men I mentioned earlier were both rather fair skinned and got a bit hot and grumpy, I think) before walking back up to the Baby Plage for another swim. Aimee, Alex P, James and I stayed in the water until the sun set over the Jura. I was really content, and very glad to be watching my penultimate Geneva sunset from here. It was about 2145 by this point, so we headed back into town to find a spot for some dinner and from which to watch the fireworks. We found such a spot in front of a fancy Caipirinha stall (there were loads of these all along the shore), got some thai food and awaited the spectacle. The fireworks were really incredible, they were set to music (which we couldn't hear) and lasted a good half hour, with no crappy filler stuff - the whole thing was massive and incredibly loud, and it made me sad that I would not be out here next weekend, when the real fireworks display will occur. Soon after the fireworks had finished everyone kind of sloped off, leaving Kelly and I to explore.

We went down to Jardin Anglais to seek out some fun, and found that an enormous boat (which I had not previously noticed but claimed to have been there since at least May, and possibly forever) was hosting some kind of Balkan night. We dangled our feet in the water for a while, waiting for the queue to subside and also to finish our bottle of tinto, and then queued up - while we were doing this, a girl marched out of the queue, seemed to stumble as she passed us, and marched on. I noticed a slightly wet feeling on my ankle, and realised to Kelly's utter dismay and my massive amusement that, as she had stumbled, she had vomited on the floor, slightly splashing my feet and those of the guy behind me. I laughed at this for quite a while, and in fact I am chuckling about it now, as I write this up two weeks later on the train. Anyway, the boat was awesome. After I deflected the attention of two large black men who had started chatting Kelly up/offering her drugs while I was in the loo, we went upstairs and found that, although most of the boat was deserted, the upper deck was packed and playing some awesome music. We stayed up there for a couple of hours, had a few rounds of tintos, then went out onto the outside bit for a sit down. Soon after this we were told we had to leave, as it was 3 am and the boat was closing, so we strolled home through the old town, with our final tintos in plastic cups. It was an awesome day, I am really glad so many people came out to bid me farewell (even if they did bugger off a bit early).

01/08 - Kelly and I finished off the packing today, and I knocked up a leftover chilli from the remaining things in my freezer and cupboards before we went out. We went for a stroll down to the river, through Parc des Bastions which was hosting the celebrations for Swiss national day - we walked through the food tent and wetre presented with a bag of wholemeal pasta, as a cadeau for some reason. We walked slowly through town, enjoying the sunshine and hoping that the distant clouds didn't get any closer. We got down to our destination, the pont sous terres, just as the clouds gathered and rain threatened. We were not, however, too concerned about getting wet, as the reason we had come to this bridge was to jump off into the Rhône and float down with the current, hopping out at the end at a bar I have mentioned before.

After much debate, Kelly decided not to jump off the bridge, and hopped in at the side with the bin bag which contained our stuff (flip flops and clothes in airtight bags was all we had - the pasta was hidden under a nearby bush). The jump in was a little alarming, I certainly had more time in mid-air than I expected. Kelly swam over to me in the middle of the river, and we were conveyed very swiftly down the river for a kilometre or so, at which point we clambered out ( I nearly missed the steps, I underestimated the current) and went up to grab a drink at the bar on top of the pumping station. We secured a couple of deckchairs, and within a couple of minutes it started to piss down with rain, somewhat mocking our earlier efforts to keep our clothes dry. We sheltered under a parasol for a while, enjoying the warm rain splashing off the concrete around us, until there was a small abatement in the downpour and we were able to make our escape, walking back home to enjoy our chilli from earlier. We decided to stay in the flat rather than go out and watch the fireworks in the park, as it was raining and getting late, and Kelly has that dreaded 0710 flight in the morning. Once they started going off, however, I changed my mind and ran out to try and catch them, but only succeeded in jogging down to Palais Eynard and then getting confused about where they were coming from - I saw a couple, but I think they were being set off from people's balonies etc., and there wasn't really a big organised display. So that was a waste of a jog.

Writing and lying about birthdays and toilet ducks

2010-07-25T13:33:00.002+01:00

(I am writing this up to three weeks late as I have been on morning shifts most days, and so I have probably forgotten a lot of stuff)

20/07 - Due to commissioning work my shift today (and for the rest of the week) was cancelled, so I spent the day working on my report. It was a scorching day, and I had some awesome ice cream - that is all that happened, really. Oh, and I met James and Dan for a Mike Wong's dinner in the evening, which was (as always) delicious.

21/07 - I think that all I did today was work on my report - sitting in the office with closed blinds while it was a perfect 32º day outside. Eugh.

22/07 - I got into a bit of a working groove today (a rare occurrence) and ended up staying at CERN until 2330, then getting home at half 12. I assumed everyone had gone home, so I had a videochat with Clare and Kelly, to show them the incredible sunset over the mountains, but when I went back into the office (it was after 10 o'clock by this point) Ricardo popped his head in and remarked upon me being there so late. I am wondering what on earth he was still doing there?

23/07 - As I didn't really have any dinner last night I started today with breakfast at Servette, where I discovered a new, revolutionary foodstuff - the brioche croissant. It was enormous, and would have been perfect had it not been for the fact that I could not have it warmed up and smothered in butter. The day was unremarkable, but afterwards I went to La Pignata, a pizzeria on Planpalais, for a guy called Chris' leaving dinner. I don't really know the guy, but I was assured that it would be fine for me to attend. They had already squashed about 25 people onto a table for 18, so I had to get everyone to shuffle down a few inches before I was eventually squashed in between Dan Short and Jay, a new guy from Manchester (maybe). The actual man of the hour, Chris, was as far away from me as he could be, and left early (bit of an odd leaving dinner). There was another new guy with dreadlocks, whose name entirely slips my mind, with whom we had an extensive conversation about piercings (he has many, including the worst one - he recommended it for every bloke. I smiled and nodded) and I had the Pizza Tony, which was topped with an enormous pile of rocket, bresaola and parmesan, drizzled with truffle oil. Decadent and delicious.

We pretended that it was Sarah's birthday and so got free limoncello (it's always free, but I think we got refills by dint of our deception) then went to Café Bizarre for a few drinks. We were bought racks of tequilas by Sarah and Ailsa, and James and I followed these with Canard W.Cs, or toilet ducks - These involve a brandy glass with a load of tequila and blue curaçao in it (along with some other stuff I have now forgotten), into which is upended a bottle of Orangina. A straw is inserted into the (now submerged) neck of the bottle, so that as you drink you are removing Orangina which is replaced by the booze, so you end up with a bright green mixture in the bottle - it was CHF 20, but delicious. We found a hammock out in the garden and lay there chatting for a while - I shall miss James when I go, and I think the feeling's mutual. We remained in the hammock until forced to leave at about half two, whereupon we walked halfway home and hopped on a passing no. 7 bus - the very last bus, as it turned out.

24/07 - I spent today doing some packing with a mild hangover, and went to the supermarket and discovered something I wish I had realised 6 months ago - due to the fact that supermarkets are not open on Sunday, twice as much stuff is reduced in price due to an imminent sell by date. Consequently, I bought a massive slab of rump steak, some fillets, a duck breast and some merguez sausages, all of which were half price. I had a fillet steak lunch, and used the duck and merguez to make an improvised cassoulet thing - it turned out pretty well (although in retrospect I should have removed the skin), and James came round to help me eat it - we drank beers and watched Tron, which was very odd but pretty awesome too.

25/07 - A lazy Sunday, during which I finished my packing and started on a little cleaning, before going to see Inception in the evening with Dan, Zoe and Ailsa. It was a great film, pretty complex with layers upon layers of suspense. I think I need to see it again, as there were a few things I missed and some details I need to work out (I liked the idea of part of Leonardo DiCaprio's subconcious constantly attempting to betray him).

More shift days, and Lovebox!

2010-07-19T14:25:00.002+01:00

(I am writing this up to two weeks late as I have been on morning shifts most days, and so I have probably forgotten a lot of stuff)

13/07 - This morning I turned off two alarms and went back to await the third - which never came! Suddenly it was 0550, and my bus was at 0555 - I got the number of my desk and rang the night shifter to tell him i'd be late. Comedy of errors on the way there - there were no trams but replacement buses instead, taking a different route so I missed the 56, then got on the 57 and forgot I had done so, so I had to get off at hôpital-la-tour and wait for the Y bus, which was also late. I got in at 0712, to find the night shifter was still there.

It was a successful shift, we took about 27 nb-1 of data today - a new record, I believe. I had an awesome merguez and goats' cheese sandwich for lunch, and then went and paid my housing deposit (in spite of only having 3 weeks left), sorted out my removals and also booked my last flight home. Back in Geneva I lay on the wooden bit outside on l'Ile for an hour or so, then bought shorts from diesel and then went to lie in my hammock in the park for a bit - I stayed until about 10 in the end as it was a nice evening, I got lots of smiles from passers-by as I lay there reading Treasure Island.

14/07 - I was especially knackered this morning, and starving by about 0930. I also had and unexpected shadow shifter today, I have nothing to teach him. Nothing whatsoever. This proved somewhat embarrassing. As the forecast said it would be 36º today I went to the park and stayed until sunset.

15/07 - Actually I have to apologise for my tardiness today - I couldn't sleep at all last night, partly due to the heat here. Eventually at about 1 am I got to sleep, having tried on the sofa, and having a shower and going to bed soaking wet, etc. I woke up and turned off my alarms then made the fatal mistake of sitting down, and all of a sudden it was 0645 and I panicked - I rang the desk, rushed in and got there at 0750 or so, oh look nothing went wrong.

Some lady came and told me off, but I have no idea who she was, and so I was slightly disrespectful to her, or at least felt no real shame or remorse. I had, once again, eaten my lunch by about 10am, and had another one at 12, then after my shift I went home and had a little sleep, before going to the park to write my report for a while, I think. Dinner was, umm, I have completely forgotten. Probably not that good.

16/07 - As I have a flight to catch later I worked from home this morning. I then went to Montbrillant park for a while, where I got incredibly hot and sweaty working in the sun. My plane was late, again - to avoid import duty I checked in a big bag of wine (6 bottles, wrapped in coats), which was waiting for me by the time I got though passport control - Kelly met me there and we got home for about 8. Felt a bit odd and 'het up' as kelly put it, and I think I was a bit snappy at Ed, but our BBQ went very well. We had delicious steak, sausages, sardines, pork steaks and some good wine too. Paul and Clare came round, which was great - I feel like I haven't seen Clare in a while. Oh, also I put the Buck's Fizz from Fi's wedding in the freezer and forgot about it - I found it on Sunday, exploded and frozen. Bugger.

17/07 - Well, what to say about Lovebox - We got there about 1, started on the beers/ciders (they had roaming guys with backpacks full of booze) and sat in the sun for a while. I had, of course, made a spreadsheet of people to see - I don't remember the order, but I think we managed to see Man Like Me, The Correspondents, Swaharama (exquisitely dressed Indian rock band), Empire Of The Sun (they had dancers dressed as swordfish), and went into the dark and heat of the NYC Downlow stage to see Tim Westwood. He was pretty good, playing mixes of loads of songs by the same artist - including Will Smith, starting with the Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air theme. We also saw Wild Beasts, who were great but seemed better in the smaller venue of Rock City, and Yeasayer who were great too - wish we had been able to get closer.

18/07 - So today we had a leisurely breakfast at the Pavement Café, and headed back east. Today we saw the Destroyers (15 piece Balkan band), Vid Warren (a beatboxing harmonica & recorder player), a crazy Mexican lady and her band, a bit of Peaches (most notable for the giant naked pre-op transexual pushing her wheelchair) and some of Brass Roots, and then we had to rush over to Cut Copy - they were the real reason I wanted to come to Lovebox, and they were simply awesome. We caught a little of Hot Chip and then Chromeo, who were really good too. We ended with a spot of Grace Jones - we saw maybe 20 minutes of her, during which time she did about 5 costume changes. Incredible, terrifying lady.

19/07 - Oops… I met Ed in the morning, he had overslept by an hour (it was 0630) and then I left just before seven- this may well be the last time that I have to leave the house for Geneva for quite a while. Phew. Now, it was an interesting journey, I got the bus then the tube then the DLR, however as there was a 'suspect package' at Canning Town, my train was delayed and then terminated at Blackwall at 0745. Myself and four other business travellers (I was scruffy in flip flops, shorts and a plaid shirt with a canvas bag and a yellow duffel) squeezed into a cab and headed to the airport, where I was unable to use the automatic check in and so I had to go to a desk, but even after all this I still had time for a sandwich and a sit down. My plane was pretty empty, so I sat in the front row gazing at France as we passed for a while. I think I got in a bit early and headed home to write my report. I got a pizza in the evening and as I settled down to eat it I noticed that, as night had fallen, a few hundred bugs had come in and were clustering around my light - I then spent half an hour jumping about with an oven glove and a rolled up towel, swatting as many as I could. I felt a little silly, but I think I got them all, and I remain bite-free.

Shifts and hot days, and Frau & Nickie's wedding.

2010-07-12T23:00:00.001+01:00

(I am writing this up to three weeks late as I have been on morning shifts most days, and so I have probably forgotten a lot of stuff)

06/07 - My shift was, as always, quite uneventful - it was tough being in the control room when it was brilliantly sunny outside. After my shift I went to Halle de Rive to buy some tasty chinese things and a beer, which I ate before falling asleep on the jetty out by the Jet d'Eau for an hour or so in the sun. Consequently I missed all the supermarkets, from which I was supposed to be getting sushi supplies for Dan and Sudan - Oops.

07/07 - I think I got about 4 hours of sleep, at the absolute maximum. My shift passed without incident, a very quiet one as usual. I headed to Bains Des Pâquis afterwards, where I walked straight into the bit reserved for women by accident. There were at least 50 topless ladies there who probably weren't best pleased by my presence. I went for a swim, had a beer and slept in the sun for a bit. I did this with my beer nestled in my elbow, and when I woke up I stretched and spilt the whole thing all over my side and my towel - pretty smooth. My towel still smells a little boozy, even now.

08/07 - I managed to have a bit of a doze in my shift today, from about 0730 to 0830, after which it proceeded much as usual. I went home and paid CHF 50 for my final month of internet with small change, which confused the lady in the office. I went for a wander down past L'Usine, where I found a dam, after which there was a bridge with a load of kids jumping off it - the current takes you downriver a bit, and there are various places to climb out and have a picnic or a beer - just down where the Rhône meets the Arve there is a cool bar with a couple of kegs and a little BBQ, so I had some drinks and watched the sun go down behind the cliffs on the far bank. After this I went to meet Dan and Sudan for dinner somewhere around Planpalais, so we went to an Eritrean/Ethiopian meal, which was amazingly tasty and also amazingly filling.

09/07 - I got up for a meeting which didn't happen, then packed my stuff and was off to the UK - there was an hour's delay on the way, which was rubbish but allowed me to finish Sherlock Holmes. Kelly and I met here friends Hamish, Emma and Anna at Donna Margherita pizzeria on Lavender hill - the pizza was awesome, but I was massively stuffed again - oops. I heartily recommend the pizza, but the starters are to be avoided.

10/07 - So today was Frau and Nickie's wedding day. Kelly, Ed and I went to Richmond where Rob Child was t pick us up - he got stuck in traffic for ages so we didn't get on the road for a while. It was really easy from Richmond onwards though, we had plenty of time to get ready and to have some drinks before the wedding. They had laid on a coach to the church, where we were ushed by Simon and Nikhil, the ushers. Frau looked remarkably composed, and Nickie looked amazing - it was quite a religious ceremony, which I did not expect. They had Jerusalem as one of the hymns, which was belted out with much enthusiasm. We then walked around the corner to the Underhills' house, where there was a marquee in garden, champagne and canapes and a perfect English countryside day. I managed to splash ketchup down my waistcoat and trousers, both of which were light blue. Dinner was good, we had stuffed chicken (some of which also went on my trousers - the waitress forbade me red wine as a result), pavlova, plenty of delicious wines, and excellent speeches by all - especially Owen (funny, risqué and breathless) and Frau (heartfelt, with good facts).

After the wedding breakfast concluded, the first dance was a barn dance - there was a compere in the middle of the dancefloor, directing us all about. I found the dancing exhausting, I did two dances then nearly died, so I had to take full advantage of the free bar. I had one more dance later, and there were DJs from 11-12ish, then coaches back to hotels. Mathers and Kam came back to our place, even though they were staying elsewhere, as they seemed convinced that that was were the party was. We had a couple of bottles of wine with us, and had a rowdy singalong in the garden without any complaints, probably because most of the guests were out with su. We went to bed at about half past two, after running out of drinks and songs.

11/07 - Kelly and I made it to breakfast at about 0945, where there was a full English buffet, exactly what I needed. I basically had two full plates of meat. We checked out a little late (they rang us at 1101 to inform us that we were late) and waited outside for Rob to pick us up. It was a lovely day and the journey back was quick, so we had a bit of a nap when we got back. Kelly had some work to do so I hung out with the others downstairs, then the two of us went down to Ukai for sushi, and got an ice cream and walked the long way home. When we got back we watched Black Book (good film, all in dutch, bit dark), then went to bed - as always, we didn't get much sleep as the plumbing was going bonkers and some neighbours seemed to be having a Sunday night party and it was too hot to close the window.

12/07 - I was up at 0615 and got the 0653 train, so I was in departures at 0734 for my 0815 flight - which was then delayed by 100 minutes. I used the time to buy some Pimms and a sandwich and some new sunglasses, then dozed on the flight and, as I got in pretty late, went home. I went to the shops and prepared some sandwiches for my shifts this week - I cooked ostrich and sausages and set fire to the hob a bit after a smokey episode. I think that's all I did, I just did washing and minced about the flat until it was time for bed. Oh, speaking of which, I seem to have broken the bed somehow - the bit of it which reclines, anyway. Hopefully they won't see this when I check out.

A brief account of a weekend in Paris with Pat & Reshmi

2010-07-05T21:43:00.001+01:00

(I am writing this up to three weeks late as I have been on morning shifts most days, and so I have probably forgotten a lot of stuff)

30/06 - I can't say I am a big fan of these 0530 starts, but it does mean that I get a huge amount of daylight hours free afterwards - I met James and Dan at Bowling Meyrin as it was Dan's birthday (ish) and we played a quick three games, of which we won one each (I scored 149 in mine, including three strikes in a row, which I was quite proud of).

01/07 - After my shift today I went to the park and basked in the sun for an hour or two with a pizza - It was really nice and hot, I think I am beating Kelly in the tan race.

02/07 - I had a meeting at 1130 after which I got some work done and left at about four thirty to go and get a train to Paris. This occurred with no fuss, the journey was really beautiful - at one point the lady I was sitting next to told me that my wine smelt acrid, and probably had a "goût de vinaigre", which I felt was unfair considering it was wine I had just bought on a train. I thought it was fine, and complemented my burnt croque monsieur quite well. When I got to Paris I went to Pat and Reshmi's amazing top floor flat - it is in the Marais, in a)n awesome old building. They even have a little spare room, where Kelly and I stayed. It was stiflingly hot, so we left pretty soon to go and get some cold drinks. Kelly's plane was delayed, and she somehow ended up getting a cab all the way here with a couple of gay American dudes, who insisted on paying (which was lucky as she had no cash at all). We went out for a little dinner (I think I had steak tartare) at a place on P&R's road, then had some more drinks back in the flat.

03/07 - We had a bit of a lie in, in spite of the heat, and Pat and I went on a shopping trip to get stuff for lunch. Pat and I made fillet steak burgers, which we had in home-made brioche buns and also with slabs of home cooked foie gras - Reshmi made both of these, and they were delicious, athough the foie gras one was the richest thing I have eaten in a long while.

Pat had some work on his potential gold mining venture to do, so had a wander around the area with Reshmi, did some mild shopping then came back to get ready for dinner. We went to a place called L'Agrume, which was great. I had the assiette de charcuterie followed by the côte de veau, both of which were awesome. Kelly had the biggest oysters I have ever seen, and try as I might I was not able to bring myself to eat one - they just look a bit too gross. It was a nice little restaurant, and a great meal. After this we walked down to the Seine and watched the rollerbladers by Notre Dame. They were amazing, doing loads of cool stuff around a little slalom they had built, we watched for ages. Then it was time for tintos in a bar we passed (our lemonade had a superfluous firework in it) on our way to a fancy bar which was possibly called La Magnifique. We had some cocktails in there, which were delicious but unfortunately I have also forgotten which ones they were - it was pretty cool in there, until it started to fill up. We were moved once, as the lady claimed there was a reservation. We were quietly finishing our drinks in our new seats when she came up again, and essentially told us that we were not drinking enough and basically had not earned the right to be seated - the drinks, although delicious, were also pretty pricey, so we were a little hesitant to splash out on more. Also Kelly and I, unused as we were to the Parisian attitude to these things, were a little put out by being budged around, and got a bit annoyed at the place, so we left after finishing our drinks (veeery slowly). Also some greasy midget grabbed at Kelly as we passed, which didn't leave us with the best impression of the place. We walked back, as there was a dearth of cabs on the streets - it was a pretty warm night, and the walk was through some interesting bits of Paris. Kelly did turn me into a billboard for a 'gospel dream' concert, but I did not let that spoil the journey.

04/07 - Reshmi had an enormous hangover, and Pat had some work to do, so Kelly and I went out for a walk. We managed to misunderstand the system in a little deli, which led to the very stressful purchasing of some humous, and I grabbed a merguez kebab and a beer, which we ate and drank sitting down by the Seine. We explored Île St. Louis for a while, and bought some raspberry and rose Berthillon ice cream for Pat and Reshmi.

I took Kelly off to Châtelet Les Halles station on her way to the airport, and after saying goodbye (I hopped the barrier so I could come down to the platform, and then found I could not get out - I had to pretend to be part of a family to get out of the station). I found a Hare Krishna festival outside the station, and had a cheeky meal on my way home. Pat and I went for a drink in Place des Vosges, then met Reshmi in a café before dinner. They took me to one of their favourite bistros, a place called Chez Jalou. We were told we had to wait for half an hour or so, so when we got round the corner I rang them and asked for a table for three, and I was told 15 minutes - by the time we had got back I don't know if we saved any time, but I felt smug. The meal was great, I had baked goat's cheese (I think) for a starter, followed by an amazing pan-fried duck breast - It was a great restaurant, the waitresses were all friendly and helpful, and the wine was great. Pat and Reshmi have been good hosts, as much as work/hangovers have allowed, and I am looking forward to coming back here soon.

05/07 - In the morning Reshmi walked with me as far as the Metro station, as she was going to pick up another friend who was coming to stay (!). I slept most of the way to Geneva, then read Sherlock homes and went to CERN for a few hours, leaving with plenty of time to get to the supermarket and buy supplies for the next three days of shifts.

An entirely free Sunday, starting morning shifts, and ridiculous sandwiches

2010-06-29T17:55:00.005+01:00

27/06 - Today we woke up with nothing whatsoever to do, which was a lovely feeling. We had taken some leftovers home from dinner last night, and with these we cooked up an amazing chorizo and potato frittata which we took to the park around 1 o'clock along with wine, panachées, cheese and leftover dips. We lay in the sun for a good couple of hours, then strolled down to the Festival de Foot at the hockey stadium - this is a free festival which is on for the duration of the world cup, with loads of bars and food stalls surrounding a big screen and a stage. We smuggled in a couple of cans of beer (it was CHF 7 for a can in there, so I think we were justified) and bumped into Alex, Jody, Aimee and a few others just in time for the second half. It was an awful match, England lost 4-1 and we were surrounded by German supporters, outnumbered by a ratio of about twenty to one. After this Kelly and I left the others to their commiseration (I am pretty glad that I early don't care about football) and ended up at La Barje, a bar in a stripy caravan on a little spit of land in the Rhône. We sat for a while, drinking wine with our feet in the water, then came back about 8 o'clock and cooked a sort of chicken katsu/schnitzel for dinner. Suddenly it was 2330 and, considering that we had to be up at 0445 for Kelly's flight in the morning, we decided to call it a night.

28/06 - Well that's it - Kelly has gone home from Geneva for the last time. I walked her to the bus stop then went back to bed, setting an alarm for 0730 which I completely ignored, awaking instead at 1130 - oops. I used more leftovers to cook an enormous nasi goreng which turned out to be all I ate all day. I had a meeting at 3 pm which I prepared for (somewhat insufficiently) on the tram, and I ended up leaving at about 1730 to try and make it to the supermarket to buy supplies for tomorrow's shift. The trams were all terminating at Balexert, about half way home, so I ended up walking for a few stops with Sara (the same one we bumped into on Friday) and going to the supermarket at Servette. On my way out I was approached by a man with a petition - it had the words 'horaires' and 'supermarché' on it, so I assumed someone was trying to extend the ridiculous opening hours here in Geneva. On closer inspection, however, the petition was against extending weekday opening hours to 2000 and Saturdays to 1900 - there may even have been something about opening on a Sunday. I took issue with the man when I read this, exclaiming "Quoi? Pourquoi non? La seule chose que je deteste ici à Genève est les horaires des magasins - on doit quitter le travail une heure tôt si on veut acheter quelque chose pour manger a la maison!" I am pretty sure that is some dodgy French there, but I think he got the point.

I got home and toyed with the idea of going out to lie in the sun before getting an early night, but instead I ended up clearing up the flat and chatting to Clare while I made my sad little packed lunch for tomorrow, setting three different alarms for 0530 and getting to bed about 6 hours before this time.

29/06 - I actually got up on time, contrary to Kelly's expectations/worries. I bumped into Clive waiting for the 0555 bus, and I have now been on shift for 5 hours. It seems to be going a lot quicker than last weeks evening shifts, possibly because I was not really awake for the first couple of hours. It is an incredible day, the sun was just rising over the hills and the lake when I came in on the bus, and it was already about 18º at dawn. I have since devoured two Milky Way filled croissants, and have managed to stave off eating my lunch until noon - I have a massive carton of iced coffee to see me through the afternoon.

Well, I had half the coffee and immediately felt sick. This was my busiest shift so far, during which I had to point various people at various graphs on my screen. My replacement turned up half an hour early, so I got to run away - I have since been sitting at home pottering about, trying not to fall asleep until a decent hour tonight.

I was really disappointed with my sandwiches today - I had two smoked salmon and philadelphia ones on 'toast mediterraneenne', or white bread with herby bits in it. Consequently I have made two exquisite sandwiches for tomorrow, as well as an adequate dinner for tonight - see below.

Not a good start - Rösti from a pack, came out looking like astronaut food (if astronaut food was made of sick)

Improving - four rump steaks from coop (half price!)

Steak in a baguette - Café de Paris butter on one side, a little truffle carpaccio on the other

With the addition of lettuce and a little mayonnaise

Sandwich two was less opulent, just as delicious - that is creamy goat's cheese on the underside, and red pepper pesto on the other - attempting to recreate Kelly's amazing dip from Saturday night.

My actual dinner - after a while the rösti turned into a pleasingly crisp fritter, and the steak was awesome.

Tomorrow I am going to try and make tuna mayonnaise exciting. I am as yet unsure how, but I have high hopes.

Ivan comes to Geneva, L'Usine & cooking for Zack & Masa

2010-06-26T11:04:00.002+01:00

22/06 - I think today was quite unremarkable, as far as I remember. I was running a little behind schedule so I didn't have time for a proper lunch, meaning I had to grab a(nother) McDonalds at Servette in the 6 minutes I had to wait for my tram. I think that pretty much nothing happened on shift, more commissioning stuff and other things that don't affect my desk at all. Oh, also I realised that the disappointing Chicken Satay ready meal I had for dinner was tiny, and only contained '28% RDA' of energy - I feel that a dinner should probably contain at least a third of my energy for the day. The main thing that happened today is that Ivan (who I first met in Thailand somewhere round here, then had the time of my live with in California here and visited in Serbia here) sent me a message saying that he would be in my part of the world on Thursday, and would I like to meet up? On further investigation it turns out that he is in Munich, which is still a long way away, but I guess that by Californian standards it's pretty close.

23/06 - Pretty much the same as yesterday, to be honest. I came in a little early to pick up my new suitcase which had been delivered to CERN (it is incredibly red), and passed yet another uneventful 8 hours waiting for commissioning to finish. It did not do this in the time I was on shift.

24/06 - I headed for CERN at about 1030, picking up a steak sandwich for dinner on the way, as I had a lunch meeting in R1 at noon after which I found a little hill to lie down behind and have a bit of a sleep in the sunshine before my shift at 3. I also picked up some Thai pork pasta to supplement the rather weak looking steak sandwich (actually, the pasta looked awful and I ended up leaving it in the fridge at the end of my shift - it is now Monday, four days later, and I am going to go and check if it is still there). During my shift I got a call from Ivan, who I was supposedly meeting at the station after my shift, to tell me that his train had been delayed by 2 hours, extending what was already an 8 hour journey from Munich. I was a little worried he wouldn't make it at all, but in the end he managed to get the very last train to Geneva, changing trains 6 times en route. He got in at 0105 and I met him at the station, then we headed over to Les Brasseurs for a beer or two, then walked home and had a couple more while we caught up on the last 21 months of each others lives.

25/06 - We went to bed at around half 4, and I had to be up at half 10 as I had a couple of meetings - I ended up calling in to them while Ivan went for an adventure round the old town. We then headed into town when he got back, having a beer on our way to see Janus, the two-headed Tortoise. We borrowed some of the free city bikes and rode down to the lake to hire a boat (we bought four more beers too). Our boat trip was fun, it was a really beautiful day - there were lots of pedalos full of bikini-clad girls out on the lake as well. We parked up over by the fancy houses near the UN and had a swim in our pants - we took it in turns so that the boat didn't float off (which was, in retrospect, entirely unnecessary on such a still day), the water was cool and really clear, but after we got out we noticed a massive dead fish floating in the water. We rang up and extended our hire period as we wanted to adventure a bit more, and then rode around to the other side of the lake. There was a beach volleyball tournament going on which we watched for a few minutes before deciding it was rubbish and leaving. There was a lot of commotion coming from a group of guys on the pavement, and a lot of money was changing hands - we watched for a while, and it seemed to be a version of the pea in a matchbox trick. The guy running it was taking CHF 100 bets, and if you got it right then you doubled your money. As we were unlocking our bikes, Ivan said he wanted to take another look - we went back, and got caught up in it a bit. In fact, I was persuaded to bet - predictably enough, I lost my CHF 100, and stood back for a bit to think about what I had done. Watching from a greater distance, we saw who was in on it and who wasn't - the guy had 4-6 people working with him, a guy who was repeatedly walking up and betting then walking away, someone who was just there to encourage others to play, a couple of lookouts and some other guys who seemed in on it all. There was a bit of a scuffle when they got two Asian guys involved who were none too happy about losing their money, and had to be taken away by one of the co-conspirators to cool off (shortly after this the game disbanded). We returned our bikes and on our walk back down we encountered some police, and I thought I should tell them what had happened - I started to do so and they guessed what had happened before I had finished explaining, handing me a flyer with "Beware of pickpockets and gamblers" on it, along with a picture of the matchbox game. The policeman told me he could not do anything about it, but if we saw the guy then they could get my money back. To be honest, that is all I wanted anyway, so we walked with them until I spotted him. I pointed him out, and as we approached he wordlessly got CHF 100 out of his pocket and handed it over to me - phew. Ivan and I hastened away, relieved but a little nervous that some of his colleagues might choose to get that money back from us.

We went down to check out L'Usine, where we are planning to go tonight - it was pretty grimy and smelt strongly of spilt booze, which we took as a good sign. After some discussion we decided to go for a Mike Wong's dinner, as it is cheap and good Thai food - I originally met Ivan in Thailand, so it seem appropriate. While we were there I got a call from Kelly, telling me that she had been stuck in a tunnel for an hour and might not make her flight - this worried me a little, but she is always so early for flights that she even with this delay she was still at the gate over an hour before the flight left. Relieved, Ivan and I went home for a bit of a nap, then grabbed some beers and a couple of tintos and went to the airport to get her. Ivan and Kelly got on well immediately, and on our arrival in Geneva we headed over to a bar on some pontoons in the lake, just by Jardin Anglais - it wasn't as nice as we had hoped, and when Kelly sat down to wait for us to get drinks she was joined by an Albanian guy who didn't leave when we came over and sat down. He spoke no English, French, Spanish, German or Serbo-Croatian, so we were unable to communicate with him - he kept talking to us anyway, possibly in Italian, occasionally high-fiving us and laughing heartily. We tried to leave him after a while, but he came with Kelly and I to the back of the bar, and just kind of hung around. We basically had to run away in the end, which was a little odd. It was about 0030 by this point, so we started heading towards L'Usine, stopping off at another bar on an Island in the lake where we had some good wine and a plate of Viande Sechée, with tons of bread - before we knew it it was 0145, and we only just made it to L'Usine before 2 am, when the cover charge went up.

Inside it was as grimy as we had hoped - the upstairs bar had black walls and a glass roof, and sold pretty cheap wine. After a couple of rounds I noticed something - all beers and other cans were sold with a CHF 1 surcharge, refundable on return of the can. Hardly anyone was doing this though, with most people discarding their empties on the floor, so we took it upon ourselves to tidy up - within a couple of minutes we had got 11 empties, enough for 3 glasses of red wine and a lemonade, which makes three tintos. We repeated this twice more before we left, so we were able to get three rounds for free! The DJs were OK, the first guy (Daniel Haaksman) was a little boring but the guys who came on at 4 (Tête de Tigre) were really good, they were playing some amazing stuff and were really into it, bouncing all over the booth. We bumped into Portuguese Sara on the stairs, Kelly and her had a long chat and we went back in for a final dance before leaving at about half four, I would estimate. Oh, Kelly broke one of her rules this evening, walking home barefoot as her shoes were hurting. I think that is forgivable, however, in a city as clean as this.

26/06 - Oh dear. We all woke up at 1030 in order to get Ivan to his train at 1145 - we just made it, with about two minutes to spare. he is heading to Vienna today, a 12 hour journey with no certain bed at the end - there is a festival going on which means that all the hostels are fully booked. Starving and hungover, I dropped by Manor and guzzled three pizzettes and a coke on the way home. I started to feel awful when I got in, and had to go back to bed for a bit before I felt ready to face the world. Kelly and I eventually made it out of the house at about 4pm, heading first to Migros and then to Manor in search of ingredients for the dinner that we agreed to cook for Zack and Masa. This ended up costing us about CHF 100 - we decided on horseradish crusted trout (with enough horseradish this time), preceded by some dips Kelly had found recipes for, and followed by cherry trifle. We did a lot of the preparation at home, and got to Zack and Masa's at about half seven, but somehow still had loads to do and ended up eating at about 2130. Bing, Zack's Dad, was there too, and it was a really good dinner - everything worked really well, and it was a pleasure to cook in Masa's tidy, well-equipped big(ger) kitchen after getting used to my tiny one for the last few months. We had some good discussions and some good wine, and ended up staying until about 0030, in spite of the fact that Zack only flew back from Panama today - Masa and Finn went to bed a little before this. I think Masa was pretty pleased to have someone else cooking for them for a change, she was hovering around the kitchen a bit at the beginning, but relaxed and left us to it after a while.

Dad visits Geneva! (and a couple of other days)

2010-06-21T17:29:00.010+01:00

16/06 - I awoke on time, but by the time I had done the washing, tidied up, put a wash on, left the house then come back in to change into more appropriate clothing (it was pissing down) and got to CERN it was 12 o'clock. I had an absolutely massive paella for lunch (it is Spain vs. Switzerland today, so I guess lunch was themed), then came back to the office to try and get some work done.

I was in here for a while, in fact I was still in the office when Switzerland scored against Spain - I heard the commotion from R1 when this happened. I arranged to meet James and Dan for a Mike Wong's dinner after work, and as I was the first there I ended up sitting in Café Rond Point for a while, where I had a couple of glasses of wine and read my Dawkins book. The tiny waitress there took an interest in it and we had a bit of a chat - it turns out she is Quebecois, as Dan very keenly spotted when he arrived. Dinner was good, as always, and I went home to begin the process of readying my flat for Dad. This didn't really involve much, as I mooched about doing some vague tidying, and ended up watching the first half of Yann Arthus-Bertrand's film HOME, during which I fell asleep.

17/06 - Hmm, well today I am not too sure what I got up to - I came to CERN and had a couple of meetings, had a chorizo pizza for lunch (to which I added two extra types of cheese) and then went to Balexert a bit early so that I could pick up some stuff for Dad's visit - I ended up spending about CHF 100 on fancy foods, and then had no time for my own dinner, so I ended up having a Happy Meal as it was quick and cheap - I did get a free leatherback turtle toy though, so I think it was worth it. At French there were once again only 5 people present, although I was the only one who was there last week, which makes me think most people have opted to not attend any more. I am on shift next week, so I will miss the very last class anyway. It was pissing down when I headed home, and the rubbish connections meant I didn't get home for about an hour - when I eventually got home I had to finish the cleanup operation which I failed to do yesterday.

18/06 - I went to bed at about 2, and awoke incredibly hungry as the Happy Meal had been far too small. I quickly guzzled some chocolate croissants, occasionally swearing in pain as I aggravated the holes in my cheek/gum which I made on Tuesday. I struggled into CERN and since my arrival I have been trying to compile some thoroughly recalcitrant code, which has definitely worked before (I know this for a fact as I wrote part of it) but now refuses to do so. I am going to persevere for another half hour or so, but at 6 o'clock I am fleeing home then to Zack's house to watch the England match before going to get Dad. I won't pretend I really care about the match, or indeed football in general, but I would like to hang out at Zack's with his multicultural friends. Well, they will probably be mostly Croatian, but it's still pretty exotic.

It ended up being pretty much all English people at Zack's - two couples, some awesome snacks and some wine. The match was rubbish, a really dull game, even the football fans among us agreed. I spent most of the time playing with Finn on the floor. I went to get Dad, running through the Fête de la Musique which was struggling on in spite of the pouring rain. I arrived at the airport about 10 minutes before he did, then we got the bus back to his hotel via the park, where we had a beer and watched a Peruvian band from above. At the Hotel Adriatica we stayed up for a beer at the bar, so that he could watch some highlights of the earlier match - although he is easily distracted, so we spent most of the time talking about comics. I left him to it at about half past one and went to bed, promising to meet him for breakfast.

19/06 - We got things off to a pretty late start - by the time I had got up and left, returned to change my clothes when it started to piss down and eventually made it to Dad's hotel it must have been about 12 o'clock. We went straight to CERN, where we remained for at least four hours. We had lunch in R1, during which Dad grilled me about various physics matters, quite a few of which I could not properly answer, which was a little embarrassing, I think I managed to blag my way through it though. We wandered around a bit and managed to get in to a tour party to watch the introductory film, which was made in 2004 and is therefore very out of date by now. In fact, it was awful. Really badly produced and dull, Dad fell asleep at least three times during it. We went over to the ATLAS control room, I showed him my desk, and we headed back towards town sometime after 4 o'clock, and after a discussion about piracy I downloaded Iron Man while we made dinner.

Dad at CERN

We had a selection of small treats for a starter, involving lots of cornichons, bruschetta things and some truffle carpaccio, which was amazing. The main course was horseradish crusted salmon with gnocchi & red pepper pesto, and a rocket and radish salad. I mucked up the salmon, choosing the weakest of my three versions of horseradish, so you could hardly taste it at all. Dad said it was great, but only had a pretty small portion. Well, I mean he didn't have seconds. After dinner we had been toying with the idea of going out and finding some of the Fête de la Musique to watch, but the rain had turned torrential so we watched Iron Man instead (which was actually really good, much better than I expected). I walked Dad back to his hotel at around midnight, pleasantly full of food, wine and beer.

Dad, eagerly waiting for his dinner

20/06 - I managed to make an earlier start today, and met Dad while he was still having breakfast. We started the day with a stroll through the old town, climbing the cathedral and stopping off for a beer and a bratwurst (well, I had an amazing empanada and some pan de queso). We wandered for ages with no aim in mind, eventually finding ourselves down by the Mont Blanc pier just before a boat left, so we got some tickets and treated ourselves to an hour long tour of the lake. The leaflet claimed that there was a bar aboard the boat, but this proved not to be so. The trip was somewhat enlightening, at various points on out trip we were given information by a recorded smarmy sounding man. I was getting hungry, but Dad suggested that we find somewhere to catch the end of the New Zealand - Italy match, so we stopped off in Brasserie du Molard for a couple of drinks. We were in there for an hour or so, then popped round the corner and arrived at L'Entrecôte ice minutes before it opened, so we were second in the queue. We had a good meal and some great wine and cheese. The cheese was so good, in fact, that Dad interrupted the neighbouring couple's desserts to give them some of the reblochon to try. We had a bit of a chat with them (or rather Dad did) then we went over to Zack & Masa's to watch the Brazil - Ivory Coast match, via my house to pick up a bottle of wine. They had some friends over from England, and Dad engaged in some odd conversation with their friend Jo (who was heavily pregnant) about chapped nipples etc., from a veterinary(ish) perspective. Sounded pretty odd to me though. We stayed until the end of the match, then Masa announced that dinner was nearly ready so we went back home - it was nearly midnight by this point, so we went our separate ways. I feel a bit bad about letting Dad pay for so much this weekend - in fact when we were getting the boat tickets I expected him to, which was a bit bad. I also think that Dad was a bit worried about me earlier when I went to get the wine - I ran across the road and heard him shout "there's no rush! Just relax!", as if I was a lot drunker than I really was.

Dad in the belltower, investigating

21/06 - I didn't sleep too well, but was up on time and met dad at just after half past 8. We got the bus to the station and then the train for a change (even though we were on a bus to the airport). We arrived in plenty of time, had a cup of tea in departures and I sent him on his way, CERN umbrella in hand. It was a rally good weekend, much easier and more relaxed than I had expected, and I am pretty sure Dad had a good time. Once I got back to the flat I had some leftover salmon for breakfast, then tried to muster energy to tidy up but ended up falling asleep for half an hour instead. On my way to CERN I stopped off at McDonalds to take advantage of an offer I saw in the paper earlier - as Switzerland are playing football today, hamburgers are only CHF 1 each! I had three, and a coke which cost more than all the burgers, and made it into the control room at 1459 - my shift started at 1500. I started in relatively high spirits, as I had been informed that my shift would only be until 2100, but I have recently found out that today they are going back to the regular shift schedule, and I will not finish until 11 0'clock. Bugger.

Frau's Stag do & a couple of days in London

2010-06-15T16:13:00.004+01:00

11/06 - I was still feeling awful when I got up, so I stopped off at the pharmacy on my way in. I have fixed my suitcase so that it (kind-of) works now, with the aid of some hammock rope and a caribener. I had a couple of meetings then headed off to the airport at 3pm, arriving in Brighton by about half 6. I dropped my stuff off at our hostel, then proceeded to the restaurant, bumping into the others en route. There were probably 25 of us there, quite a few for the restaurant to handle - the meal was adequate, although I didn't eat too much of mine as I had an emergency pasty on the train. Also I felt very ill all day, so my ill-advised gorgonzola gnocchi did not sit too well. The next stop was the pub, somehow we all split up very quickly and I ended up in a Wetherspoon's with Pat and Rob, chatting about boats (they were chatting about boats, I have no knowledge in this field). We then went to Oceana, which was really huge and grim - seven interconnected bars in a massive windowless building. Simon and I did some tours of the place, occasionally stopping off for Jägerbombs and the like, leaving at around 3ish. On our way home I managed to lose my wallet (again), and after some optimistic searching Simon found it on the street outside Oceana, still with the money and cards within. My hero.

12/06 - I didn't feel as awful as I could have today, although I completely failed to finish a full English. We got a bus at 1pm to go go-karting. I did not do very well - second to last in fact, and that was probably only because Simon missed a heat. It was really well organised and really nice weather, in fact I was wandering about shirtless in the sun. We had 5 races each (18 heats in total) then a final, in which Mark came 3rd and Nikhil 2nd.

Team Frau!

Having masterfully dealt with a corner, my overalls fly open to give the crowd a treat.

We came back to town and met Birdie, who had just got in. We went and watched the England vs. USA match in the basement of Audio, a club on the seafront - I ditched the last 10 minutes of the 1st half and the 1st 10 of the second half, preferring to get more sun and relaxation instead. Once again we split up sharpish, wandering around the pubs and clubs of Brighton - Ed was going to get the last train back to London at 2338, but I persuaded him (it was not hard) to get the first train instead, at 0350. Even then, he went home a good while before the rest of us.

13/06 - I awoke not hungover, just very tired - I made it down to breakfast at ten, then managed to get the 1140 train back to London. Everyone else stayed and had a day at the beach, I think. At Clapham Junction I got on the 37 bus tofind that Kelly was upstairs - perfect timing. We both had a much needed nap (she had been in Somerset on a tandem with Georgie, riding round cider farms for the weekend), then got some BBQ stuff. We had Clare and Georgie round for dinner, and for once the whole house was in. It was a pretty nice relaxed Sunday summer's evening, after Birdie sorted out my disaster of a BBQ. We had a fair amount of wine, watched some episodes of The Pacific and then went to bed - the whole house had an early night, in fact.

14/06 - I had a good start to today - Kelly went off to Journal Club at around seven, while I stayed in bed. We had leftover BBQ for, well, brunch I suppose, then just hung out in the house - this is something we have not really been able to do here as of yet. I went and met Clare after work, and we walked back to her house (via getting a refund on my broken suitcase and buying some smartish shoes, finally). We met Kelly in a really nice pub on Roupell Street, possibly called the Albert, then Kelly and I got a cab to St. John where I had pig's head and radishes, then roast beef with carrot and aioli. Kelly had brown crabmeat on toast then turbot. It was a really good restaurant, very simple and delicious. We had intended to get an early night as I am on the 0815 flight tomorrow morning, but (as always on our last nights) I couldn't really sleep at all.

Pig's head and radish

Brown crabmeat on toast

Roast beef with carrot

Turbot

15/06 - Eugh - I was up at 6 after no sleep and somehow got distracted while brushing my teeth, which resulted in my jamming the head of the toothbrush down between my gum and my cheek. I did this pretty hard, and it ripped a whole in the flesh down there - well, three holes actually, which I do not expect to heal too quickly. The replacement suitcase I found in the basement is pretty awful (in that the wheels don't work, so it is just an inconvenient sack) and once I was on the plane they informed us that the flight was delayed by 40 minutes AND took 40 minutes extra due to the French air traffic controller's strike. I had lunch on my own at CERN and worked until pretty late, when I had a salad (well, there were no leaves, but it was definitely from the salad bar) for dinner, then went off to French. There were only four of us there this time, which is ridiculous. We just did a load of exercises, then I made it back in half an hour, unpacked, talked to Kelly for a while and ended up staying up until one or so - that's 18 hours or so, that'll do.

Oversleeping, boating, too hot & too ill

2010-06-10T14:06:00.002+01:00

08/06 - I managed to get some little mundane jobs done this morning, and left the house in blazing sunshine at 10 o'clock - it is now 4pm and it is pissing down, I can hear thunder in the distance and I am wearing shorts. I worked until French class, and when I got there I hung out with Efe, Michal and Andrés, all of whom work at CERN, it turns out. Michal hates these classes, and has in fact done the three courses preceding this one, all with Monsieur Barrelet.

09/06 - I failed at today. I had a massive sleep attack, then cleaned up the flat (which was much needed), took in my dry cleaning and arranged a boat trip. At 7pm myself, James, Jody, Dan S and Alex got on a boat with a load of beers and cruised around the lake for an hour. It was really fun, we each had 12 allotted minutes as captain, and we made it pretty far up the lake. After this we went to a pizzeria nearby and had quite a bit of wine then adjourned to Dan H's to watch the original Transformers film with more wine. That film seems odder every time I watch it, for some reason - those of us who hadn't seen it before were throughly confused throughout.

10/06 - I felt pretty awful today. It was 31º in the shade, and my office was quite a bit more than this, I would venture. I had steak and blé for lunch (this is apparently wheat), then I had to go and lie down for a while as I felt really sick. I had a meeting with Veronique and headed to Balexert to try and find some shoes. I failed in this, calling Clare to try and find which shoes were least hideous. Our conclusion was that all men's shoes are awful. I decided to head home, as I did not have the energy for French class, despite seeing three fellow students today, both at CERN and Balexert. On my way home I popped into Manor and got some delicious chorizo focaccia and 12 beers, because they came with a free coolbag. When I got home I fell asleep for an hour, then packed hastily and was asleep by 12 - an early night.

A perfect weekend - bikes, boats and, umm, trams

2010-06-07T23:59:00.006+01:00

05/06 - I had neglected to shut the blinds when we got in last night, and the sun was far too bright at 0535 when it rose. We ended up getting up at about nine, far too early considering when we got in. It was an incredibly hot and beautiful day, so we hurried out and got a free city bike from a place down the road. We cycled down to the lake and booked a boat for 5 o'clock at a place near the Jet, then headed up towards Geneve-plage. It looked nice, but packed in there, so we decided to keep going up the bank a bit in case we found another spot where we could have a sunbathe and a swim. We ended up going all the way up to Vésenaz, a really nice little place atop a hill, where all the residents seemed much more beautiful than average. We grabbed some food from a little Manor they had up there, and walked downhill until we found somewhere where we could be by the lake - it was the campsite at Pointe de la Bise, supposedly only for campers but noone seemed to mind.

Looking back towards La Baby-plage and the city

We rang up and changed our boat booking for 6 o'clock, figuring that we probably didn't want to rush our picnic. I got in the lake for a few seconds, about up to my thighs, but that was it because it was absolutely freezing - I had naïvely assumed that the warm weather would warm the lake, but this was not the case. Kelly managed to get fully submerged, but only for a couple of seconds. On our way back Kelly realised that she had lost the keys for her bike, so she had to go back down to the shore and search for them. Luckily some kids had found them and handed them in, however it took some time to figure this out as Kelly does not speak French. We headed back into town, eventually arriving at the boat place at 1830, an hour and a half after our original conservative estimate. We could only get the boat for half an hour as it was booked up, but it was really awesome - a little four-seater petrol engined boat, with just enough speed to make hitting little waves fun. We took a couple of beers aboard and made it as far as the other side of the lake, near the UN, before we had to return it. We also found what seemed to be a bridal bouquet floating in the water, which is now in a vase in my flat.

On the boat on Lac Leman - clearly overjoyed

We dropped the city bike off four hours late (a quick google showed me that we cucled about 16km today), and it only cost us CHF 8. We had intended to quickly get changed then go out, but we collapsed for a while and eventually managed to make it out of the door with a can of Prosecco we had got at Manor - all class. We ended up going to La Malombre for dinner, a restaurant about 200 metres from my front door. I had not been there before as it had seemed pricey, but in fact it was really good - we had some great smoked salmon roulade things, then scallops with asparagus and an entrecôte with morilles sauce, which was amazing. Two glasses of wine each and it came to a total of CHF 100 (£30 each)- which seemed fine considering that lunch had been a bargain picnic.

06/06 - We were up less early today, as I remembered to shut the blinds last night, but we were still out of the house at a reasonable time. It was another incredible day, blue skies and at least 28º. We did a little shopping for dinner at the market at Planpalais, which we ended up carrying about for the next seven hours. We got the tram down to Carouge, which was really beautiful. It is unlike the rest of Geneva, the buildings are much quainter and smaller and older. We had lunch at a pizzeria, accompanied by some average ice cold rosé, then I went to Gelatomania for dessert - one of my choices was a pineapple and basil sorbet, which turned out to be amazing, really refreshing.

Kelly has a massive salad at a pizzeria

After a wander through the (mostly rubbish) market, we got the tourist tram back, which was pleasant enough, and as we were feeling pretty sapped by the heat we went to the cinema to see Robin Hood. It was OK, not too taxing, but nothing incredible - Kelly was very annoyed by his accent, a wierd kind of Scottish Australian which changed thought the film. We went home and I cooked a chicken Panaeng which worked really well, accompanied by a bottle of Chasselas from on of the vineyards we visited the other week. After dinner we caught an episode of Jonathan Dimbleby's Africa, which was really interesting, and had some more wine as we knew that for once we didn't have to be up at 0500 for Kelly's flight.

This is a photo of Le Tram Touristique, not that lady in the middle

07/06 - Instead of the usual 0700 flight, Kelly was booked on the 1050, which meant we could leave together and I could take her to the airport on the way to CERN. It was probably the nicest Monday morning we've had in ages, as neither of us was in a desperate rush. Even so, we arrived a good 70 minutes before her flight, which was then delayed by 45 minutes anyway, so she had 2 hours in the airport - a compromise. Due to the timing I got a non-optimum bus which took ages and involved a walk at the end (during which James went by in another bus and waved) and I got in for about 1040. I did not manage to get much of my report done, mainly because I was not too sure where to start. I left at about 6, so that I could make it to the supermarket on my way home, intending to do a load of washing/washing up/general tidying when I got in. Instead I awoke to hear my phone ringing at 2255, having passed out on my bed, surrounded by shopping, three hours earlier.

Neuchâtel & Sarah's BBQ/Cocktail Party

2010-06-04T23:59:00.005+01:00

02/06 - Today was an odd sort of a day - I started off with a cheeseburger en route to CERN, as I felt in no rush for some reason. I had to give a little presentation on a note which I had to summarise for the rest of the RHUL ATLAS group, which I had worried about unnecessarily - some people had not even read theirs when I got in, 40 minutes before the meeting. I then had a pretty standard day of work, but buggered off at 4 o'clock to get a bus into town, then got the 1714 train to Neuchâtel to visit Marie. We strolled around the town for a bit (Neuchâtel is gorgeous, a really beautiful little town on the bank of the lake) and went home to make pizza. Marie had a potato pizza, which she said she had in Italy and it was delicious, but I remain unconvinced. It was good to see her and have a proper chat, much better than our previous meeting for an hour on the 0815 flight from London a few weeks ago. I got the last train home at 2334, which I think may be the prostitute train, judging by the other passengers. I got in too late for public transport, but I had enough wine in me that I didn't mind the walk home. I was also listening to my iPod on full volume as I wandered down the tram tracks - I may have been dancing a little, but I can't be too sure.

03/06 - When I got in last night (at 0210) I entirely failed to set my alarm. Consequently I worked from home today, only leaving the house for a Mike Wong's on my way to French. We seem to be nearing the end of the course (5 sessions left after tonight) but not really leaning too much. I thought we would have some sort of assessment at the end, maybe a nice little certificate, but I got the impression tonight that this was not the case. On my way home I dropped by Sarah's birthday meal for a couple of Mexican beers, before heading home with James and Dan via 'loot street', where we picked up an oven that someone had thrown out - we figured it was worth trying to get it working, as all the other stuff that the residents of this flash building have thrown out in the past seems to be in working order, if a little shabby.

04/06 - For some reason I was up much earlier than expected, and was in by 0930. I had to read a paper and make some notes on it for a meeting at 1130, which was no problem at all. I had meetings until 1, had lunch and tried to go and hire some bikes for Kelly and I to take out this weekend - it turns out that there are no CERN bikes available at the moment, and there is a lengthy waiting list for them. This evening is Sarah's birthday BBQ/cocktail party in St. Genis - I am a little worried about how we will get home afterwards, as I have no idea how reliable the 'noctambus' night services are, and I am loathe to consider a CHF 60 taxi unless I absolutely have to.

I changed into my cocktail outfit and headed over to Carrefour to buy BBQ supplies - I bumped into Jody and went his place, only to discover that I was the first person there. The BBQ started, before long, and I had two sausages with some of Giulia's hot sauce - this was so hot that I managed about three bites before I had to stop, drink about a pint of Sprite and then a pint of milk to cool down my mouth. It was honestly the hottest hot sauce I have had in ages, at one pint there were at least four other similarly overconfident people standing around swigging milk. The buses seemed to be being delayed or cancelled a lot for some reason, but Ailsa helped me out massively and gave me a lift to the airport as she was on shift and had a CERN car. This took about 15 minutes as opposed to the half an hour the bus would have taken (although she got lost on the way back). I met Kelly and we had some tintos at a bar while we waited for the bus - I had also brought with me a litre of tinto which I had made back at the BBQ, which we drank on the bus - all class.

We got back to the party at about 1040, by which time all the food was gone, so we had some massive slices of cake and made some sketchy cocktails, staying until about 0130. We tried to get a cab as far as Vaudagne, but the operator was the same bitchy woman I mentioned here, so I ended up getting annoyed at her, saying "Fuck you!" down the phone before hanging up. Not my most sophisticated of moments. We decided to walk as far as CERN, and en route we were passed by a taxi heading into St. Genis. This same cab drove back in the other direction about 5 minutes later, so we flagged it down and got him to take us to the tram stop - his GPS was showing Jody's address, so I assume that the taxi lady had sent us a cab anyway, and when we were not there he had turned around, only to be hailed by his original passengers. We drove past the night bus at CERN, but I decided that I could not be bothered stopping and walking back only to change to the tram in 5 minutes anyway. The taxi cost CHF 20, and we hopped aboard the night tram from Vaudagne, which was there and waiting, right on time. We made it home by just after 3, so our epic night-time journey was in fact a little quicker and easier than my normal daily commute.

Also, on our way home I looked out of the window and saw a guy on a bike hanging onto the door of the tram, being pulled along at a pretty terrifying speed. It looked really cool, I was very impressed but also immediately knew I would never have the confidence required to do it myself - not confidence in myself, confidence that another tram would not suddenly be coming the other way.

Dot to Dot and Bank Holiday Weekend!

2010-06-01T23:59:00.001+01:00

28/05 - I came in to get that bloody clock, but that was all I did at CERN today. I left things pretty late, getting the 3pm shuttle and managing to check in (I was too late to do this online, apparently) and make it through security with just enough time for a panachée at the gate. I managed to get all the way from my desk to my front door in 3h50m, a new record! Kelly came home a few minutes after me and we went over to her friends Emily and Sarah's for dinner. They have an awesome place in Kentish town, the dinner was good and there was quite a lot of wine. Quite a civilised evening really, Kelly Sarah and Emily did that wierd girl talking a few times, where all of a sudden they get very loud and high pitched, leaving myself and (Emily's) John to look at each other in bewilderment. We managed to get the tube home, along with crowds of tipsy revellers making their way to somewhere sweaty in Clapham.

29/05 - Ooh, hangover a bit. We had to get BBQ supplies, so we went to ASDA via Subway where I devoured a foot-long in a very short time, which served to soak up some of the remaining red wine. We had the BBQ in spite of the rubbish weather, and Clare really liked the cuckoo clock - it now has pride of place in her living room, and the cuckoo has been named Toblerone.

For some reason I wasn't entirely into the BBQ, in fact I got a bit grumpy and started cleaning around people, all very odd. I am not sure why I felt so against it. I had to have the same Geneva chat many many times, although this is to be expected really. Loads of people turned up, including guys from Uni, Kelly's old friends from home and a few others too. The last guests left at 11pm, and we went to bed soon after - I was exhausted and fell asleep immediately my head hit the pillow, probably best considering the grump I was in.

30/05 - Kelly, Birdie and I were up and set off to King's Cross at 10ish, heading up for Dot To Dot. Birdie and I got a Burger King breakfast which they totally messed up (wrong order, wrong details, wrong drinks). We went to meet Sam in Nottingham - he was working, so he gave us his keys and some VIP wristbands along with some tokens for free drinks. We had a pint (well, a Bloody Mary) by the canal and then met Dan at the station, before heading off to catch some gigs. Both Dan and Ed have buggered up their ankles in the last week, so (with the exception of some fine hop-dancing later in the evening) they were confined to standing pretty still for the whole day. I really enjoyed everyone I saw, starting off with White Hinterland and Small Black, who were especially great and were playing in a tiny little venue. We had a mexican dinner at Chiquitos, then saw Wild Beasts - probably the best of the day, they have amazing voices - and Beach House followed by Los Campesinos (things start getting hazy here). We then returned to Rock City via Stealth, where we caught an hour or so of an awesome silent disco. We saw some of Jakwob before Sam came and whisked us away for some drinks in Resuce Rooms (Kelly is telling me this, I have almost no recollection of this interlude). We returned for Zane Lowe and his 'shouty boy music', as Kelly described it - a really good set, featuring a good mix of heavy stuff from all genres. We had an awful kebab, branded as 'dog meat' by Ed, on the way back to Sam's I had bit of a panic as I thought I had lost my wallet, so Sam and I got a cab back into town for a bit of a search, but with no luck. We gave up and came home at about 4, only to find the wallet out in the yard where we had tried to eat the bad kebabs. Arse.

Birdie at the silent disco

31/05 - Kelly and I ended up sleeping on a tiny sofabed (the same one we have in our house, which I detest) with a tiny duvet, and were up and out of there sharpish as we had a train at 1038. We had first class seats on the way home, which I was very glad of. We went home via Sainsbury's and passed out for a little bit, then got up and cooked loads of leftover sausages for lunch/dinner, which we ate in front of the telly. We watched the first three episodes of The Pacific, and after this it was still only about 8pm. We all had an early night - all in all, it was a really nice bank holiday Monday.

01/06 - Hmm, these early mornings aren't getting any easier. I was up at 6 today, and ended up waiting 15 minutes at Clapham Junction for a train to Gatwick. When I got to CERN I was exhausted as usual, but as I have various deadlines looming I managed to work until 1830 when I did my French homework with a beer and had a (disappointing) courgette and tomato gratin & chips. French class was fine, although I found it tricky to concentrate after I realised that I had left my keys at CERN. I did some under-the-table texting to try and sort this out, but everyone had gone home so I left class half an hour early and went to go and get them. I eventually got home a little after midnight, meaning I had been up and out of the house for about 17 hours.

Evening shifts - mainly boredom and sandwiches. Oh, and a cuckoo clock!

2010-05-27T23:59:00.003+01:00

25/05 - I awoke at about 10 and somehow didn't manage to leave the house until noon. I did all my jobs - went shopping, did laundry, went on a secret mission and made it to CERN at 1450, just in time for my shift. It is as hot today as it was yesterday (33º, according to the Forumeyrin pharmacy), so once again I am not relishing the prospect of 8 hours indoors. There were a couple of ticket inspectors on the bus this morning, larking about and putting ice down each others backs. I don't think I have ever seen such cheery inspectors, making jokes with the passengers and putting us all at ease (although I doubt I would feel the same had I not had a ticket).

My shift was uneventful, I failed to get some stuff working and went a bit mad - I felt really twitchy and unhappy for most of it. This was solved a little when I decided to have my dinner a bit early, as the bagels (coronation chicken and smoked salmon & Philadelphia) made me drowsy and content. I think I am beginning to worry about the service work and my 2nd year report, which I have to finish (and indeed start) in the next 10 days/2½ weeks respectively.

26/05 - I ended up staying up for a few hours by accident, despite being exhausted at midnight. I was mostly reading comics, and before I knew it it was 3am. I got up at 11, made gnocchi for breakfast and more bagels (same fillings) for my dinner. I booked trains to Paris to see Pat & Reshmi in a few weeks (which had gone up €23 in the past week) and I had plans to hoover and go and lie in the sun, but before I knew it it was nearly 2pm and I had to dash in for my shift - I seem incapable of arriving anything but in the nick of time.

Nothing happened on shift at all, as far as I remember. I sat, read articles and attempted some work, and ate my bagels. That is it.

27/05 - Today I finally managed to buy Clare's birthday present, a cuckoo clock which you can see below. I chose it, with Kelly's help, from a plethora of variations on the theme - there are loads of shops in town which sell exactly the same clocks for different prices - I saw variations of about CHF 40 for this particular one.

Clare's birthday present (prices clumsily blurred out)

Today was a better planned day than usual, and I even managed a nice lunch (although I forget what) and made it to shift with plenty of time spare. Shift was, yet again, pretty dull. I don't really have too much to say about it. I had a pretty awesome dinner, which mainly consisted of a home-made caprese salad with some fresh baked bread, and also to supplement this I nipped off to R1 and got some takeaway beef fagotini. I was seen by a few people (Dan, Elisa, Matilde) en route, all of whom shouted "You're on shift! What are you doing away from your desk!" or words to that effect. I managed to make the earlier bus and was in my flat by about 2345, but I inevitably ended up staying up for a couple of hours, in spite of my tiredness.

Worrying too much and a (relatively) crazy Geneva weekend

2010-05-24T23:52:00.004+01:00

18/05 - Eugh. I hardly slept last night, and had to be out of the house by 0600 to get a train to Gatwick. I felt exhausted and a bit ill all day - probably not aided by my ridiculously spicy 0730 duck and hoi sin gyoza soup. I was in the office by 1200, meaning that it took me exactly 5 hours door to door. Had I left a little later (I had to wait ages for a train anyway) and had the CERN shuttle left on time I think I could have made it in 0415. I had lunch in the sun and managed to stay at work until about 6 o'clock, when I headed back home and made a massive bowl of pasta, intending to take some with me for the night shift tomorrow. This backfired, as I ate half and immediately passed out for two hours on my bed. I have a talk to give tomorrow in the Top UK meeting which I am pretty worried about, so much so that I went over to James' flat for a quick tutorial on histograms at about half past 10.

19/05 - I then stayed up making plots until about 0330, fell asleep for 4 hours or so and then got up to finish the talk. I decided that, as I would only be videoconferencing from CERN anyway, I could just as well do it from home. I finished my talk at about 1530, and gave it at 1550 - cutting it a bit fine. It went OK, I nearly froze a couple of times but sort of blagged my way through it. I don't know why I get so worried about talking in public, it really cripples me with fear. I stayed connected until the meeting finished at 6, then fell asleep for another three hours before rousing myself and going, via Mike Wong's, to CERN for my night shift. Yet again there is no physics scheduled for tonight, so I have spent the last two hours or so writing all this up. Phew.

20/05 - So I got home and slept for a long time, then received the following email:

As the LHC has gone in access mode & there will not be beams for 24h,

We cancel the DAQ/HLT shifts for today.

Yes! Apparently I still get the credit for this too, as it is not my fault they are cancelled. I milled about in my house for a bit until it was time to go off to French class. This passed without anything of note happening, apart from the fact that it was a great day outside and only about 6/20 people turned up. I grabbed a kebab on my way home, which was a surprise as it was about 11pm, and nothing is usually open. It was salary and adequate, I suppose.

21/05 - I was on course for getting into CERN just after 9, which would be a new record, but I accidentally knocked a whole pint of Ribena all over my bedside table, so instead of being early I arrived late, with slightly sticky flip flops. I had a long talk about my service work today, and essentially figured out what it is I am meant be actually doing. I hung around until about 7, when I went and got Kelly from the airport.

We headed straight to a restaurant called Takumi, a Japanese place which Zack and Masa recommended to us a week or two ago. It was pretty flash, nice inside and it had a few set menu options ranging from CHF 60-115. These were a little steep for us, so we went for a selection of awesome nigiri and maki, along with some scallops and fish skin chips, followed by red bean mochi. It was awesome and probably set us back about CHF 60 - I have definitely had much worse meals for that much money. We had some great wine with it, and we stopped off at Café Rond Point round the corner for another glass of wine, which tasted oddly milky.

22/05 - So today was the Caves Ouvertes in canton Vaud, where all the vineyards in the canton open up for a day of free tasting. Kelly and I got a train to Morges, where we wandered around the town a little and just missed the first bus. We got to our first vineyard at about 1330, and so we settled down at Domaine de Valmont for a few wines. We tried all the Chardonnays, a Chasselas and some rosés, had some awesome free snacks and I ended up buying a bottle of rosé and a Chasselas.

Kelly trying the wines

We got the bus up to the next place, Vufflens-le-Château, checked out one of the caves and were a bit disappointed - partly because it was indoors and it was an incredibly beautiful day. We walked up the hill to the next place, which had a selection of wines from the region, and also sold Malakoffs, which are kind of deep-fried cheese balls, made somehow with white wine, crispy on the outside and gooey and delicious on the inside. Amazing (on further research, I have learnt that they were incorrectly labelled, and were in fact Beignets de Vinzel).

Malakoff/Beignet de Vinzel (I did not take this picture)

Me, at the last vineyard we stopped at

The wines here were great too, we tried a few and I came away with three bottles (a rosé, a Garanoir and a Pinot Noir, I think). We bumped into Chris and Jim, two guys who work on ATLAS who I vaguely knew of. They had two crates each, and were returning next week to the first (and allegedly best) place to pick up a few more. We got the penultimate bus back down to Morges, found some seats on the train (the first ones we found had a used nappy stuffed in the litter bin) and Kelly promptly fell asleep on my lap.

On our return to Geneva, we went straight to Sushi Train, a place in Molard which has a happy hour from 7-10pm every day, so we had loads of food (10 plates for me, 5 for Kelly) for about £30 total, which soaked up the wine nicely. We went home afterwards, intending to hang out until Matt Fraser called us to let us know when to go to a party he had told us about yesterday - instead of this we fell asleep for about three hours, waking up at half past 11 in a bit of a panic - I rang Matt to see if we had missed our opportunity, but it turned out that he had only just got home and so we went over to meet him and Sara, and walked to La Boisserette - this is a squat on a leafy sidestreet which backs onto a huge fancy house. We were walking through this wooded area when we heard the music, coming from a house with a scruffy garden. We walked around the back, past some alternative looking types and down into the basement. It was incredibly hot down there, they had a bar in a sweaty little bomb shelter and a much cooler room with Mario Cart on an N64. It was packed, and they had a 'pay freely or die' policy, which means you dropped CHF 10 in the jar and then you can have all the drinks you like.

We were there for ages, dancing about, chatting, exploring and generally marvelling at the fact that there is a part of Geneva which has girls with half their heads shaved, guys in vest tops with make-up on, skinheads and punks (who turned up about 3) all coexisting and living rent free in an awesome house in the woods. We stayed until about 5am, when we walked Sara halfway home and got in at about 0530. I texted Matt to see where he had got to and he replied with "I just woke up slightly hypothermic in the garden", but he seemed chipper. We put the blinds down to keep put the encroaching dawn, and went to sleep.

23/05 - Today was a hangover day, that's for sure. We woke up at around half 10, meaning we probably had about 4 hours of sleep. The main reason we got up is that I was starving hungry and in need of pizza - however, I became confused and found that the place I was hoping to go to was closed on Sunday. Today was one of those mornings where a croissant simply would not suffice, so we ended up walking quite a long way - we had intended to have breakfast in Parc Alfred Bertrand, at the end of my road, but instead we walked all the way down to the Arve and ate it sitting on a bench by the river. After this we climbed down a ladder to the actual river, where before too long we came across a beach, where I paddled in the incredibly cold water and skimmed some stones. It was nice, but there was quite a bit of dog poo along the path, and Kelly was convinced that some of it was human. Adventure completed, we headed along the river and through Planpalais up to Parc des Bastions, where we lay in the sun for a while listening to Ukelele players, which was pretty nice.

Searching for stones to skip on L'Arve

After a while I got a message from Zack, asking if I could come over and 'satisfy her Britannic majesty', which meant signing some forms so that his son Finn (currently about a month old) could get a passport. We hung out for a while, looking out over Geneva from their 6th floor balcony, basking in the sun - it really was a beautiful day. We headed home via the food market on Planpalais, where we assembled an amazing picnic from roast chicken, tomatoes, mozzarella, avocados, fresh bread, strawberries and a bottle of wine (Zack advised us to have a 'sharpener' to deal with our hangovers). We ate this in the park we had originally intended to have breakfast in - only about 5 hours and about 5 miles late.

As the sun began to set we headed home and watched The Time Travelers Wife, which I had not expected to like but found myself really drawn into it - there was a moment where we were concerned that they were about to whack in a load of sciencey nonsense to give a medical explanation for time travel, but they refrained. Just before we went to bed I thought I would double check the times for the morning, in case they had randomly changed the bus routes (as the Swiss seem to do often), and I discovered that tomorrow morning is a public holiday so the first bus was a full half hour later than usual. I rang the taxi company (there seems to be only one in Geneva) to find out how much a taxi would be at 0520 in the morning, and how long it would take - the lady on the other end was incredibly unhelpful, she took a booking but refused to speculate on either price or duration. I said (in French) "how much will it roughly be? You have no idea? 10 francs or 50 francs, no idea at all? And will it take 5 minutes or half an hour?" To all of which she replied that she did not know, as if it was not her job. That is precisely her job, to take bookings and maybe know a little about the actual service she is brokering. I did not have the French to explain this, so instead I resolved to look elsewhere and just turn my phone off in the morning if we decided not to use them. What a twat. I ended up finding out how far it was on Google Maps, finding the mandated taxi rates and working it out for myself - under 10 minutes, under CHF 20. That wasn't so hard was it? I would not have bothered, but I did not have much Swiss cash (Kelly had none left either) and I needed to know if we could cover it or whether a late night trip to the cash point was required.

24/05 - It was really warm last night, and coupled with the fact that Kelly had to be up at 5 I don't think we slept too well. After I sent Kelly off in the cab I fell asleep for 6 more hours, waking up just in time to get the bus into CERN before the end of the lunch. Or so I thought. Even though I already knew that all transport was doing a Sunday service, I still waited at the bus stop for 20 minutes before I remembered that it was a public holiday. Consequently I got to Vaudagne (where I change buses for CERN) at about 2 o'clock, so I had missed the chance to get a meal. I went to the big shopping centre down the road, intending to grab lunch and dinner, forgetting that everything would be closed because it was still a public holiday. Idiot. I ended up buying a kebab sandwich and some takeaway pasta for later, and made it into CERN with enough time to have a bit of a sunbathe (I went to the top of the fire escape on the side of the ATLAS building, where noone can see you except from directly below).

My shift was uneventful, as always - there were about 6 trigger experts sitting next to me making loads of noise for the first hour or two, then they left me in peace for the next 6. The pasta was pretty minting, and on my way home I just missed a bus and a tram and a bus so the journey took me absolutely ages. I had a good chat with Dad about what we'll do when he comes out here though, which was good - hopefully he'll get round to actually booking flights soon.

When I arrived home I had a chat with Clare, who reminded me that I should watch the remaining episodes of Lost ASAP so as to avoid any spoilers of the ending - I watched episodes 13 and 14 (of 18) and came out of it elated and heartbroken. Phew. I will try and fit in the next two tomorrow and the final two on Wednesday (if not before).

ATP, curated by Pavement

2010-05-17T23:08:00.005+01:00

14/05 - Now, the reason I am back in the UK - ages ago I bought tickets for Kelly, Simon, Frau and myself to go to All Tomorrow's Parties at Butlins in Minehead. It is a funny sort of a festival, where all the bands are chosen by a guest curator - in this case, Pavement. I don't know much Pavement, and I mainly bought the tickets after Sam Joynes persuaded me it would be awesome. I met Simon at Clapham Junction on our way to Andover, where Frau picked us up and we headed to Tesco to buy a silly amount of alcohol and food. We got to the festival at around half past five and checked into our chalet, which was a bit odd - two bedrooms and a nice little kitchen/living room. We opened some beers and went for an adventure, to see what Butlins had to offer. We watched some bands in the main pavilion, namely the end of Calexico and a bit of Broken Social Scene before Kelly arrived - my Mum and sister had very kindly offered her a lift from Taunton station, a good 40 minute drive, so I offered to show them around the chalet but they balked a little at the walk, so I bid them farewell and Kelly and I went off to see some bands.

Well, for the next couple of hours we just minced about with Si and Frau, before going to see Marble Valley (bonkers and good, the singer is the drummer from Pavement), then popped over to see Wooden Shjips, who were pretty incredible - I am not sure of I necessarily liked them that much, but they made a powerful noise and had amazing beards. I think we then proceeded to wander about and booze a bit, but I am not too sure… there may have been tequila drunk out of empty single-serving milk things. I know we got to bed around 4.

15/05 - I am not too sure what we did today - we had a leisurely breakfast and then went to Splash Waterworld, where I bumped into Joseph Lilley (a guy I know from CERN) who insisted on giving me a big wet semi-naked hug. We went on one ride, the Space bowl, which involves going down a flume and landing in a big bowl which you spin around a few times before dropping into a deep pool - like those things for putting 2p pieces in. Awesome. Kelly and I then left and went for a walk along the beach, got a sandwich and got back to Butlins in time to catch some of Mark Eitzel - a desperate seeming fellow, singing sad and beautiful songs in a scruffy suit. I liked him a lot. We then went over to see Camera Obscura who, apart from the two songs I recognised, we rather a disappointment. Luckily we had smuggled in a bottle of tinto so we didn't mind too much. Next were, supposedly, the main attraction of the weekend - Pavement. They were OK, I think the Pavilion stage is not really a very good venue. I liked some of their stuff, but I think I am just going to have to come out and admit it: I don't like Pavement very much. Or their choice of bands.

Kelly and Simon, enthusiastic

Looking back at the lineup I am having trouble figuring out how we filled so much of the time - although I do know that we went back to the chalet and played two or three drinking games at once and drank a load of tequila. The next thing we saw was Omar Souleyman, who wasn't on until 0045. He was mental too - really fun though. He is a Syrian singer with a band of two, playing insanely fast Syrian folk-pop stuff. Good for a bonkers dance about - Kelly is convinced that he is a gimmick, me not so much. Kelly and I got chatting to the drummer(s) from Pavement in there as well, as one of them is from Hull. I bought the main guy a drink, saying "this is for Marble Valley, not Pavement", which may have been a little rude, in retrospect. We caught some of Still Flyin' as well, and tried to join Sam in Crazy Horse for some disco, but the queue was far too big.

Omar Souleyman

16/05 - I awoke at some ungodly hour to see Kelly sitting bolt upright in bed, clutching a saucepan of vomit. Apparently my reaction was to exclaim "oh God!", leap out of bed, take the saucepan and run to the bathroom to dispose of the contents and return with a washing up bowl (a far more practical receptacle) and some tissues.

We got up pretty late today, partly because of yesterday's Tequila, and headed straight to see Tim Chad & Sherry, a kind of lounge band from the southern US, with a singing drummer who looked entirely incongruous - definitely not a lounge singer. Their last song had an incredible chorus, which went as follows:

When you put your arms around me,

and put me to the test,

you know you've found your hero,

'cause my love is the best!

Stirring stuff. It was pissing down today, which was a bummer as we had planned to do some Adventure Golf, which I think may have been the main reason Simon wanted to come this weekend. Instead we sat about drinking tea/beer and watching Countryfile - a novel thing to be doing at a music festival. We tried to go bowling and were informed that the earliest we could do so was at 5pm. Unfortunately Kelly had to get the 1650 bus to Taunton, as she had something she had to attend at 0800 in the morning, so I bid her farewell and went bowling. Sam and his mate Alex joined us, and we gave a pretty poor showing - I think the highest score was 99. We then went to see Boris performing Feedbacker - a 44 minute single song which blew me away. We then went home to think about what we had seen. Also, as Frau is driving us home tomorrow morning, Simon decided that we had to 'burn bright and early', and he poured the remainder of the tequila into three wine glasses which we had to down. There was probably only about 75 ml left, but it was no easy task.

Mmm, tasty. Note the Burger King salt sachets.

A beautiful sunset over the Skyline Pavilion

We grabbed some beers and made a bottle of tinto, which we drank en route. We were a little slower than we had anticipated at this, and as it was getting cold we ended up drinking it behind a wall by the football pitches. Bob from Pavement stumbled by and kicked a football to far, and then we caught a bit of The Fall and went to watch the Raincoats, who were terrible. I really didn't enjoy a second of their show, in fact we left and sat around in Bar Rosso for a bit instead. The last band of the weekend was Endless Boogie - another one-song band, they played some pretty awesome stuff for 45 minutes, then Steven Malkmus from Pavement came and joined them for the last song. Frau very sensibly went to bed while Simon and I met up with Sam in search of a chalet party. We walked around for ages, found nothing, and Sam ended up hosting one himself, much to his friend Alex's annoyance. It was an odd festival, I felt there weren't really enough bands (only about 41 bands over three days), meaning that on a few occasions there was only one option, and if that sucked, there was nothing else to see. I would go again, but only if the curator was someone who (a) I liked, and (b) whose music taste I trusted. I did really enjoy a few of the unexpected bands (Marble Valley, Boris, Omar Souleyman and Endless Boogie), but four bands out of forty is a pretty poor ratio.

17/05 - Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear. Monday morning was precisely no fun. We were up before 9, checked out and on the road by 10, and parked at the back of Tropiquaria animal park so that Simon could be sick in the bushes by 1015. The journey was OK, but none of us were in the best state - Simon was gently moaning for a lot of the trip, while I fell asleep in the back until Reading, where I was able to get the full English that I had been craving all weekend. Frau dropped me off at home about 1430, and I promptly fell asleep for a couple of hours on the sofa. Kelly rang and I went and met her at the supermarket, we made fajitas and watched Sean Of The Dead with Ed and Bob. This would have been a prefect evening, had it not been for the fact that Kelly hates films with things jumping out on people. Zombie films probably not a good idea then.

Working much harder than usual, and going back to the UK

2010-05-13T23:07:00.001+01:00

10/05 - A lot of work went down today, and the following few days too. Consequently not much fun happened. I did a fair amount of internet shopping after hours - some headphones, memory stick, a book (Cory Doctorow's new one, For The Win). On my way home, I got a call from Kelly telling me that she had just talked to Gordon (head of her course) and he had said that the prospects of her getting onto the mental health PhD she wanted were not good. I tried to reassure her, but with not much success. I panicked a bit, went to the Asian supermarket on Rue De Servette and bought a load of stuff to try and calm me down, then bought a pizza from Pizza Brasil (this only cost CHF 10, and came with a free litre of ice tea!). By the time I made it to Coutance to catch the bus, Kelly had rung me back and told me that she had received an email from Patrick Maxwell, who is the chap who ultimately decides if she gets the new PhD or not, and he said it was all fine. That was a draining few minutes, I arrived home having been both terrified and elated in quick succession. I added some extra anchovies and cheddar to my pizza and grilled it for a bit - it became so greasy that by the time I had eaten half of it it had started to soak through the box. It was still delicious, but made me feel a little guilty.

11/05 - Today I missed a bus by a few seconds, popped into the shop to buy batteries and missed the next one by about two seconds as well. I started the day somewhat grumpily, worked until about 1415 when I remembered to go and have lunch. R1 stops serving at 1400, so I was left with a terrible chicken curry sandwich (not enough filling, as always), a tiny salami bun thing and a massive doughnut with about half a jar of jam in it. Worst lunch so far. I worked until about 1915, went to my French class intending to find dinner along the way, and spent 20 minutes wandering though the extensive car park before I finally found my way in, only to find most of the routes barricaded off - I ended up inhaling two cheeseburgers and grumpily arriving 20 minutes late for French. Ironically, when I arrived they were doing 'excuses', and I was entirely unable to think of one.

12/05 - Today was just another day of work - I have been rather busy, and my memories of day to day occurrences are fading fast. My main memories are that I ate quite a few pistachio macarons, had a chicken kebab for lunch (it was not very delicious), met James on the bus and we tore into the PhD system (particle physics especially) and all its inefficiencies. I think all I had to eat was noodles - my diet has gone to absolute shit this week, mostly pizza & burgers - certainly nothing one might call a vegetable.

13/05 - Today is Ascension Day, a holiday in Switzerland. I spent the first half of it sitting on the floor of my flat, doing some work in my dressing gown. The second half I spent coming home. I was starving by the time I got to the airport, got a Big King XXL from the Burger King in a bit of the airport I had never seen before. The lady behind the till was incredibly slow - she would take an order then saunter about making it herself, waiting for it all to be ready before giving it to the customer. Usually another employee does the fetching - this meant that every order took a couple of minutes, so I spent 20 minutes queuing for my food, so I ended up arriving at the gate as my flight was already boarding. On the upside, the burger was great.

When I got to Gatwick I headed straight to Farringdon to meet Kelly, as she had a surprise for me - this was an exhibition in the Barbican, featuring a load of zebra finches in a room with a load of guitars and cymbals - as they flew about, landing on the instruments, they created a sort of soundscape. It would have been great, if it weren't for two things: There were not enough finches, so the sounds were sporadic and incohesive, and also we had to queue for about an hour to get in. After this we tried to go for dinner, which proved to be a frustrating task. Firstly we missed our first reservation, then couldn't get into anywhere we wanted, and ended up settling on an Italian restaurant that lured us in with a glass of Prosecco - the staff were pretty short with us, the food was or a pretty low standard, and its only saving grace was that it was only about a tenner each. Add to this the fact that I was exhausted and probably a little grumpy, and one can see that it was not the ideal dining experience.

Mum, Clare and Hannah visit Geneva

2010-05-09T22:55:00.001+01:00

I shall attempt to be brief here as I am writing up two weeks worth of stuff in one go. Brevity is not, however, my strong point…

06/05 - Tonight I did some work and watched endless election coverage, that's about it really. Crap rainy day, again. And a hung parliament, woo! I mean, I think such a situation might be a good shakeup for the UK system, but we'll see how it pans out.

07/05 - I got to bed at 8 this morning, slept for a few hours then got up at one. I filled the afternoon somehow then went over to James and Dan's for a thai curry, cooked by James, which was really good. I then went and got Mum, Clare and Hannah from the airport, I missed the bus so I was late, but so were they. On the way back I made them run for a train, which Hannah did but the others did not, which set the theme for the weekend a bit (I hadn't really realised how much I rely on being able to sprint for stuff, or how I am always just a few seconds late for everything, which is what necessitates the sprinting).

The Eastwest Hôtel, where I had booked a room for Mum and Hannah, was pretty nice, all purple and flash inside. We buggered around with the coffee machine for a bit and Hannah opted for whichever option (staying at the hotel or staying with me) gave her the most sleep. Mum, Clare and I went down to the bar for a (ridiculously expensive) drink, then Clare and I left about half 12 maybe. I forgot that there are no (or relatively few) buses at this time of night, so we had to walk it - we missed a couple of buses en route, meaning that we had a rather inefficient journey, getting home and actually going to sleep by about 0230.

08/05 - Mum rang at 0911, we scrambled about a bit and managed to meet them at about 1030. We had a rubbish breakfast - the croques monsieurs were nice, but we had them in a café with loads of birds around it (and their associated debris on the chairs) on a junction near the bus station. We went for a stroll round the Old Town, to the cathedral etc. then stopped at the créperie that Kelly and I tried to eat in the other day. I had Spinach, roquefort and ham (I did not want the ham and they charged me 4 CHF for it anyway), they forgot Hannah's meal entirely and the salad was awful. Not a good day so far, food wise. We then went to CERN where I showed them about a bit - essentially I showed them the same stuff as I showed Ed and Kelly. We then headed back to town and hung out by the water (started to rain a bit) until dinner time - Fondue at Bains des Pâquis. I went and got it, having told Mum you pay at the end so that I could buy it for us. It turned out that Hannah wasn't a big fan of Fondue, so she got the meat and paté, which she also didn't like. Poor Hannah. We then went home and, after some discussion, watched The Sting, which was excellent - Hannah was fast asleep well before the end. I went over and stayed at James', as there isn't quite room for four people in the flat.

The Rose children atop a Henry Moore, Geneva

Drinking Fountain, Rue des Granges

Chapel of The Maccabees, Cathédral Saint-Pierre

09/05 - Clare and I went to Pain Quotidien to get some croques for breakfast, and ended up with massive toasties (never enough filling in Switzerland) with no cheese sauce on them, for 14 CHF each! That is ridiculous. We came home and racletted them to make them a bit better. We headed up La Salève on the cloudiest day possible, I forgot Mum was scared of heights - oops. It was fine once we were up there, we got about 10 minutes of views then the clouds settled in. We went for a walk, Hannah was not too keen but we persuaded her, then promptly got lost. My fault, I think. We got too hot in spite of the cold, so we grabbed an ice cream and then Clare sent Hannah off in a strop by pretending to put a Calippo down her back - she said it was my idea (true) so I was also on the receiving end. By the end of the ice cream she had calmed down, so we went back home, got their stuff and went to Café De Paris for a late lunch - definitely the most successful meal of the weekend. Everyone loved it, I had trois decis of Gamay to wash it down, then we went to the airport and I said farewell. Clare was really hoping that their flight was cancelled so she didn't have to go to work on Monday, but that was not the case. Easyjet cancelled all theirs, but not so BA. I went home, don't remember dinner, and I assume I fell asleep pretty quickly - going straight from night shift to a packed tourist itinerary has not really allowed me much time for sleep.

Pizza & ice cream, night shift & the election.

2010-05-07T04:33:00.003+01:00

05/05 - I managed to stay in bed until 1500 exactly today, which I reckon is about right for this odd lifestyle that has been forced on me by night shifts. The first email I received invited me to go for Pizza a-gogo with Dan and a few others, and I got it just after I had eaten the rest of my mammoth chicken sandwich from yesterday. Oops. I chatted to Kelly for about two hours, on and off, consulting with her about her grand plans for a Come Dine With Me style dinner she is putting on for her Dad. The plans are very impressive and thoughtful, although when we talked about it I had only just woken up, and so was a bit confused and not as enthusiastic as I maybe should have been.

Dinner was quite a disappointment, Love Me Dos has changed owners recently, and the previously cheery owner has been replaced by a pinch-faced man who is far too stingy for my liking. We used to arrive any time before 1930 and get unlimited pizza served cheerily to us. Instead the surly man seemed to be begrudging us our fair share - he cooked the pizzas from scratch, which was good, but then only gave us about half a pizza each, which was less good. At one point the bloke who wasn't the owner came up and asked us how much more we wanted, to which we replied 'same again' as we were barely getting into our stride. Nothing happened for a while, the owner went outside and had a glass of wine and a fag, and eventually we asked him about our other pizzas. He told us it was now outside happy hour and that he might be able to rustle up two more platters for us, but that that would be it. This is not pizza a-gogo, even I was not yet full and I had an enormous sandwich before I left the house. After our ice cream we left a little disappointed - I doubt that 10 of us will be going along again.

I managed to catch the first 45 minutes of Ghostbusters before I had to run off to my shift. What do I see when I get to my desk? "No physics this night" - bugger.

06/05 - Tonight's shift has passed a lot quicker than last night. I have only just got to the point where I start writing here and it's 0549, only an hour or so to go. I have had a sandwich (philadelphia, merguez sausages, cherry tomatoes, rocket, mustard and probably some mayonnaise too), a coffee and about half a pack of sour glowworms and have just about enough sugar in me to make it to the end of shift. The weather is still awful by the way, 6º and cloudy outside with a maximum temperature of 8º today. A good day to stay in bed.

I ran a couple of errands on my way home - first I went to the hotel where my Mum and sister will be staying to make sure they get twin beds, then I pretty much walked home (Geneva is very busy at 0730 in the morning), stopping off at Zoe's flat to pick up an airbed. I had that horrible feeling while I was walking home that you get when walking home from a club after dawn - the walk of shame. I managed to sleep until about 5 o'clock, waking up feeling lousy and a bit down. This feeling has not really subsided, so I was rather grumpy when I went for dinner (Mike Wong's pad thai, a little too big for one portion, which left me stuffed and sleepy) and then off to my French class. I arrived very early for my shift and decided that I could either sit about and wait for 2300 or I could start my shift half an hour early, relieving the previous shifter - I did the latter, knowing that I would be grateful if someone did the same for me.

07/05 - Well, the screens said we would have some beams and some physics by 0230. This was then changed to 0330, then 0430, then the beam was got rid of by 0500, meaning that, yet again, nothing happened tonight. I have been actually doing some work during this shift, as well as keeping the live coverage of the election running in the corner. As of 0607, the seats stand as follows:

Conservative 230 seats
Labour 175 seats
Liberal Democrats 36 seats

I just did some quick sums though - the current vote split is 37%, 28% & 23% respectively and based on these proportions, under proportional representation 10 of the remaining seats would be Conservative, 7 Labour and 113 would be Lib Dem, according to their vote share. However, this leaves 80 more seats, and the BNP appears to be getting about 1,000 votes in each seat which is a bit of a worry. That's about 3% of the vote, or 20 MPs if proportional representation were introduced - maybe it's not such a great idea after all.

I only have to make it through one more hour of night shifts, then no more for a couple of weeks. Phew. I just hope I cheer up before Mum. Clare and Hannah get here.

Kelly leaves, Clare's Birthday and another night shift.

2010-05-05T08:05:00.001+01:00

04/05 - We didn't sleep too well, as is always the case when Kelly has to fly back in the morning - when one has to be up at 0445 it is all too easy to panic that you have missed an alarm, so we were both wide awake by the time she actually had to get up. I accompanied her down to get the 0514 bus, resplendent in the pre-dawn darkness in my dressing gown and bright red trousers. I sent Clare a birthday message and went back to bed for as long as I could manage, as I am on night shift tonight and so I must attempt to reverse my diurnal rhythm. I managed to remain in bed until about 1300 before I got up, pottered about a bit and went shopping for nighttime supplies. I made a large selection of sandwiches, as my main memory of previous night shifts has been one of hunger. I headed off to French class, which was mostly taken up with the correcting of last week's homework, and headed off to my shift feeling oddly anxious - I don't really know why, and I have been unable to shift the feeling. Maybe it's because I am missing Clare's birthday and my Mum and sister are both staying at my house in London tonight. My mood was not improved when I saw the below message on the LHC status screen:

LHC Status: Bugger All

So, I guess this means that the first four hours or so of my shift will be pretty pointless. Tanya is also on night shift, although her desk is miles away (well, metres, but far enough that we can't really chat) so this doesn't really make too much of a difference. I have already had half of my first sandwich, pictured below. There will probably be a lot of pictures of sandwiches tonight, as that is the most interesting thing going on.

Sandwich 1: Half a rotisserie chicken stuffed inside some Turkish bread, slathered with curry mayonnaise and loads of rocket.

05/05 - Not much going on now either. I have succeeded in doing a bit of work - well, if you count changing stuff until the program no longer functions as a success. I have had to eat another sandwich, and I am halfway through my first litre of ice tea.

Sandwich 2: Saint-Agur, merguez sausages & fried chorizo, cherry tomatoes, rocket and mayonnaise between two slices of toast.

The latest news is that CMS have done something bad which means there will be no beam for a while. It still says, rather poignantly, "no physics tonight".

Well, it is now 0618, and nothing is happening. What a sodding waste of time. To be honest though, my workload is pretty much the same whether there are collisions or not - I have to look at about 8 extra graphs, that's all that's different. The bloke on the Run Control desk has been asleep for about an hour - I think I'll follow his lead tomorrow if it's as busy as tonight. Also, I have just checked the weather for this week, and it is going to be a maximum of 8º tomorrow, which is a 19º drop from this time last week. What the hell? It also seems like this weather pattern (rainy and generally a bit crap) will continue for a week or so - the one redeeming feature of night shifts is that I thought I might be able to spend some time in the sun during the day, but that plan is now scuppered.

Oh, on another rubbish note, that sodding volcano appears to be belching out more guff, closing some airports in the north of the UK. Also James is thinking of having a little election party on Thursday night, but I will be right here at this desk. At the end of my shift I ended up waiting around for a while as my replacement shifter had not turned up, but the guy on the desk next to me said he would cover for me, so I fled and got the 0721 bus. I made it back home by 0802 (a new record), and was fast asleep within minutes. Only two more night shifts to go...

Some grey days filled with good food and wine

2010-05-03T23:55:00.002+01:00

30/04 - So I remained in the office until 2020, a record for me - in spite of this, and in spite of it also being Friday night, I was not the last to leave - Rudi left about 10 minutes before me, and Clive asked to borrow my key as he was planning to stay longer. His girlfriend had come by at about 6pm to borrow his housekeys before she went shopping, rang him a couple of times to see how long he would be, and in spite of this he remained at his desk. What could he possibly be doing which is that important?

I picked Kelly up from the airport and we headed back for some dinner. This was salmon with a horseradish crust, which was incredibly simple and incredibly delicious - I may make it for my Mum and sisters when they come out next weekend, if there is any time in between sumptuous cheese-based meals. Yesterday I bought a selection of local white wines for us to sample over the weekend, and we started with one from Morges - we will be going there for the annual Caves Ouvertes in three weeks time - a day of wine tasting, with a free bus which goes between about 15 vineyards. I doubt we'll make it to all of them.

01/05 - Today turned out to be another grey and rainy day, so after some discussion we decided to have brunch instead of breakfast - the distinction being that it is fine to have wine with brunch. We then headed down to see Zack, Masa and their new son Finn - he is a shade under three weeks old, cannot yet focus his eyes or do very much at all, but still captivated Kelly for the duration of our stay. Zack's dad (Bing) and Masa's mum (umm, Mrs. Kovacevic) were both staying as well, so I had a bit of a chat with Bing about the upcoming election over some strong Croation wine, blagged some knowledge about subjects I know little about, and then we all walked to Parc des Bastions to catch some of the May Day parade. I had been intrigued to see what Swiss anarchy looks like, and it turned out to be a bit of a socialist rally, with a load of Latin American food stalls. Kelly and I had brought some wine and plastic cups along (a nice sweet Muscadet we bought in the south of France), I had some sardines, Bing bought some more awful wine from a stall, and then all of a sudden Finn woke up and they all had to leave.

We opted to remain in the park for a little, until we remembered that I lived really close and my flat was warm and dry. We decided to round a few people up and go for dinner at a tapas bar which Zack had told us about, so we went home and awaited the arrival of the two Dans, James and his girlfriend Claire (they said they would be over after Dr. Who). While we were waiting we opened another bottle of wine, then another etc. and needless to say we didn't go for dinner in the end. Instead we stayed up until 2 or so debating many important points - these ranged from the topic of expenses, more election chat and whether or not the current controversy surrounding Zahia Dehar has helped her career, such as it is (she has been all over the news here since it emerged that a few French football players had paid her for sex when she was under 18 - I have since found out that she was paid €50,000 for a photoshoot in Paris Match, so I can only assume yes).

02/05 - We started today with no plans at all. We dedicated much of the day to exploring, first some hotels for Mum and Hannah/Clare to stay in when they come out next weekend, then we got a boat across to Eaux-Vives and up to Geneve-Plage. We found a lot of beautiful places, it's just a pity that it was such a grey day. isn'tThe purpose (if there was one) of this wander was to investigate Le Buffet de la Gare D'Eaux-Vives, a Michelin starred restaurant at the station - it was closed and had no menu outside. We headed back into the old town for a drink in Café Demi-Lune, then absolutely failed to find anywhere suitable for dinner. After much tramping around, including going all the way down to Planpalais to a restaurant Zack recommended (which was closed), we ended up in Chez Ma Cousine, a cheap place that sells chicken and provençale potatoes for CHF 15. It was pretty good actually, we got a pot of wine to wash it down and then went home and watched Hot Fuzz on the sofa. Lovely.

03/05 - The first thing I had to do today was have a meeting with Ricardo at 3pm. Kelly is still here as it is bank holiday Monday back in the UK, so I left her doing some work while I went in to CERN. I made the mistake of having a massive lunch (steak, ravioli and chips) which made me incredibly sleepy for my meeting - it was just Ricardo and I, going over a load of stuff for two hours, after which I made my excuses and dashed off to meet Kelly in Manor (she had gone to the WHO but, being Geneva it was closed). We looked around the store for a bit, helped ourselves to an unmanned wine-tasting counter and then went to what I call the Shutter Bar - it is a small bar on Rue Lissignol which has a mostly gay clientèle, and also has the cheapest drinks I have yet found in Geneva.

Next stop was L'Entrecôte Couronnée, a restaurant in Pâquis which we have been meaning to go to for a while. Kelly and I shared the menu degustation and the selection of fish (main course). It was pretty awesome, there was an unexpected aperitif and amuse-bouche (something cheesy), followed by a selection of starters including some great gazpacho and asparagus. Next course was some reasonable sea-bass, followed by an incredible tower of two small steaks atop a sauce soaked rosti - the morilles sauce was one of the best things I have tasted, I have not had this particular type of odd little mushroom before, but I definitely will again. Kelly's selection of fish was very well cooked, but not very exciting. Both mains had some boring boiled vegetables added as an afterthought which detracted from the meal as a whole. Dessert was a tasty lemon tart with some strawberries and balsamic something or other. We accompanied this with a bottle of Swiss Sauvignon, and followed it with a quick drink in the Café Arts next door while we waited for the bus. When we got home Kelly packed and promptly passed out, complaining of too much wine. I swiftly followed, although by my reckoning we only had about 3 (Swiss) glasses each and half a bottle - I suppose this adds up to nearly a whole bottle of wine each over the course of 5 hours, which is plenty for a Monday night.

Hot days, frisbee & bowling

2010-04-30T19:40:00.002+01:00

26/04 - Due to the new check-in regulations imposed after the Volcano erupted, I had to be up at 0520 in order to get to my flight on time. There were no queues at any point, so my early rising was all for nothing. When I got onto the plane, who should I encounter but Marie, who I met in Thailand in January of 2008 - I had not seen her in a little over two years, so we made a chap move seats so we could have a chat. It was nice, I thought it might be awkward but it was great to see her again. I made it into CERN just in time for lunch with Matt and Sara, on the most beautiful day so far - the sun is genuinely hot, and consequently I am now knackered and sticky.

I did not achieve much for the rest of the day, to be honest. My concentration span was almost nil, and so I decided the best thing to do was to get a pizza and have a nap - this plan of mine was nearly scuppered when Ricardo came in to have a discussion of our progress just after 6pm, meaning I only made it to the pizza place on my road 10 minutes before it closed. Phew.

27/04 - Today was much more productive - all sorts of good things with graphs happened. I spent a lovely lunch hour in the sun, had dinner in the sun too before doing my French homework in Restaurant 1 - forgetting, of course, that I had missed a lesson and so actually this work was for last Thursday's class. My French class was pretty good, I was able to do the right homework in the few minutes before the lesson, and we had a little comprehension test at the end in which I got full marks. I do, however, feel I may be punching a little below my weight here. The class, while it does remind me of a few useful things, is really easy.

When I got in, at 2245, I received a text saying that James and Dan had just finished making Sushi, and would I like to come over for some. I agreed, expecting them to have saved me a piece or two, but I was greeted by an enormous platter of treats. I devoured these gratefully and hung around for half an hour or so before going home and collapsing into bed where I spent some time researching ways to boost your wireless signal (such a geek) and reading Dawkins' The Greatest Show On Earth, which I am enjoying immensely.

28/04 - Today is James' birthday, and is also even nicer than yesterday. Consequently it is rather hard to stay in the office, so I am writing this sitting in the sun - the weather page says it is 25º, but I assume that that is the temperature in the shade - it is incredibly warm out here. The plan for evening goes thusly:

1730 Inaugural Ultimate Frisbee session, followed by beers.

1900 Head to the bowling alley which also does Pizza au metre.

later On the way home, stop by Brasseurs or anywhere else we can purchase a massive 5l tower of beer.

Well, we nearly achieved our goals. The frisbee happened and was exhausting - it got hotter as the day progressed, and so I managed about 40 minutes of running about in the sun before I became far too hot and had to go for a beer and a sit down. A few of us set off for bowling at around 7, in fact we ended up with 13 people for dinner, which was pizza "au metre a-gogo". The pizza itself was pretty good, although the salad and dessert were pretty unnecessary. We dragged our bloated selves down to the bowling alley, where we split into three lanes. I can't say I bowled very well, scoring an 83 and a 117 over two games, but the spread of ability was so wide (some scored in the 50s, there was one person who got 137 - well done Katy), but it was really fun - Jody had to run off half way through to go and do a night shift, and just before he left he finished the first game with three strikes in a row, kissed his girlfriend, downed a beer and ran off into the night. Quite an exit. Also, we learnt that they also do bowling a-gogo on Tuesday and Sunday nights for CHF20, which sounds pretty awesome. Also it is walking distance from where my French class takes place, so I may start coming along afterwards. Well, if I can find anyone who'll meet me there at 10pm on a Tuesday (we did not get the tower of beer, as we were all stuffed and knackered).

29/04 - Once again, a boring weekday. Nothing to report really, it was incredibly warm in the sun again, I did some poking around in some code I don't understand (which has suddenly stopped working), Dan and I had a coffee break at the top of an 8-storey staircase in the sun, and I spent about CHF 130 on stuff in the supermarket, including 4 bottles of wine from the surrounding areas. French class was fine, getting a little harder now which is good, I feel like I am learning.

30/04 - Today I have been given loads of work with not enough time to do it. I have, I will freely admit, been taking it easy for quite a while, but in the last few hours I have been tasked with presenting a talk on May 19th, getting a draft of a note done my May 15th, and presenting a few slides to Ricardo outlining where I am with everything on Monday. The problem with this is that Kelly is arriving this evening and staying until Tuesday morning, as it is Bank Holiday in the UK. Consequently I had not planned to come in on Monday, but it would appear that I must. I am now working on these slides until 2020, when I must flee to get the bus to the airport to pick up Kelly. Obviously writing this is not helping me to finish the slides, but a change is as good as a rest.

Dad's Party, Treasure hunt and a nice sunny weekend

2010-04-25T16:00:00.007+01:00

I have got quite behind on this. I intended to write a little at the end of each day to document occurrences, but instead I end up writing nothing for ages, then having to spend a whole day writing stuff up, most of which I have forgotten, Consequently I shall attempt to be brief.

23/04 - On Friday morning I had to head straight to the dentist, where moulds were taken and I think I swallowed a fair bit of that rubbery goo they use to take impressions of the teeth. I then proceeded to putney, where I met Kelly on the train and we headed on to Chiswick for Dad and Hattie's party - The venue was a fair way from the station, and repeated references to maps and a couple of guesses were made before we arrived, at precisely the same time as my cousin and aunt. I aimed to find my Mum and greet here, but as she was on the far side of the restaurant this was quite a mission, as I had to run a gauntlet of faintly recognised (and, of course, more familiar) relatives to get to her. I remade some acquaintances I did not realise I had ever made and had a few too many glasses of champagne before lunch - it was tasty and free, so I found it hard to say no. The meal was great, I was positioned between Clare and my Aunt (the birthday girl) and a good way away from Kelly, but she seemed to fare pretty well on her own. There were some speeches and I feel I may have done some mild heckling at one point, when I was sharply shushed by a female voice - unsure whose, but I feel a bit bad about this. I had a great time, there were some good chats and an incident with a bra in a pocket, then all of a sudden it seemed to be time to go - Dad was being chivvied by Mum, most people had left and I had various invitations to stay in Chamonix and Luzerne at the weekend, which I agreed to enthusiastically but doubt I will be able to honour.

Dad and Hattie

My Dad and his Mum

Paul, flanked by Kelly and my uncle Alastair

As we were leaving to walk to the station we encountered my cousin Alex, the only other person who did not seem to have a pressing engagement, and adjourned up the river to a pub (Clare and Paul were keen to join us, but they had rabbits in tow and it was a very sunny day). We had a few more glasses of wine while he awaited his friend, the arrival of whom I have only just remembered. We went home to meet Simon and Ed at our house before going to see LCD Soundsystem in Brixton. We thought we were fine, but looking back I think Kelly and I may have been extremely drunk when we arrived. The gig was incredible, I know I enjoyed it a lot, danced about and sang loudly, and came out with the firm conviction that This Is Happening is my favourite album of 2010 so far. On our way home we persuaded the others to stop for another pint in the rather grimy Brixton Bar & Grill, then we headed home. On our arrival we cooked up some drunken snacks and I cooked a whole pack of sausages to make a point about sell-by dates, I think.

24/04 - Eugh. I did not feel ideal this morning - Ed gave us a shout at 9 am to see if we still needed to get up early to go and get tickets for the treasure hunt we were planning on doing. This we did, so I left to go and get them and left Kelly to catch me up. I was in Brick Lane by about half 11, it took me over an hour to get there as all transport in South London appeared to be closed. Anyway, I got the tickets and waited for the others - Ali was the first to arrive, followed by Clare and Kelly a few minutes before the hunt was due to begin, and Tim joined us en route. I have taken part in murder mysteries/treasure hunts organised by the same guy twice before, and they always prove to be fun and exciting. We did our very best sleuthing all over central London but still failed to solve the mystery - I won't go into detail about any of the clues now, but suffice to say they were all pretty ingenious (once again, pictures are on facebook in the same album). On the downside Kelly and I ruined our feet somehow, to the extent that we got a taxi to and from the restaurant we had chosen for dinner, as walking to the bus was simply not an option.

The restaurant in question is Lola Rojo, a Spanish place on Northcote Road which Kelly has declared to be her favourite in London. It was delicious and great value - we had some incredible octopus, cod and black pudding parcels, massive prawns, chorizo lollipops, fig and serrano ham salad, a course I have forgotten and a cheese selection, all accompanied by some great wines, and followed by massive glasses of strong fino. My only complaint might be that Kelly and the waitress both recommended three courses each, which is ample for tiny ladies such as themselves, but I was definitely not full when I got home and had to have some crumpets to top myself up.

Potato parcels filled with cod and black pudding

25/04 - Today could be best described as pleasant. After a lazy morning I went onto the Common with Henry and Ed to play some frisbee, we ran about a while and got back to the house just as Kelly was ready to come and join us. Instead we decided to go on a bike ride, so Kelly and I got some helmets (at her insistence) and rode down to Battersea Park, around the Thames path a bit and stopped in the Draft House for a third of ale. We then went home and persuaded the others to come and see Acora, a film about the fall of Alexandria - good, and the audience had no choice but to side with Rachel Weisz's atheist Hypathia, but it felt a bit more like a BBC miniseries or a feature length episode of Rome than a film in its own right. Back at home we had a simple but great dinner, a massive sirloin steak cooked rare and cut into strips, topped with roasted vegetables and griddled tomatoes with a load of salad, heavy on the goats cheese.

Dinner at Jody's and getting back to the UK

2010-04-22T23:28:00.006+01:00

20/04 - Well, I screwed today up. Just before I went to bed I decide to play Sim City for a little bit, in an "I'll stop after such-and-such an event" kind of way. Somehow time rapidly passed, and when I finally stopped playing it was 6 am. As I did not wake up until half past 12 I decided to stay at home, had a look at some work and then went to my French class in the evening. This went pretty well, I had a stunted conversation in French with a chap named Emilio then I had a mixed kebab from the guy on the corner on my way home. One thing I did achieve today was picking up my train ticket to Paris from the station, which hopefully I will not need. On my way to French class I noticed a pretty spectacular sunset, much pinker than usual (possibly due to the ash cloud). Also a helicopter flew by, in stark defiance of the closed airspace...

The helicopter at sunset

21/04 - In an attempt to compensate for yesterday's preposterous lethargy I tried to make it in a little earlier today, arriving at exactly 10 o'clock. I stayed in the office until 7, which I feel is respectable, then James, Sarah and I headed over to Jody's flat in St. Genis, where he was cooking us dinner. He made a Thai green curry from scratch, and it was delicious. There was a lot of wine and an amazing dessert too, brought by Tanya and Paul. It was glistening, octagonal and delicious. This was only the second time I have ever ventured over to St. Genis, the first time being when Sarah and I wandered over last June or so. I quite liked the flats, they were a little scruffier than our ones, and Jody's bed situation looked decidedly more temporary than mine (he has two sofa beds, as opposed to my one permanent double), but on the upside they are right next to a river and a big Carrefour which was still open when we went in at 8pm, unlike all the supermarkets in Geneva at that hour. On our way home James, Dan and I stopped off at the airport to see if flights seemed to be going - it was about midnight and the place was absolutely empty and eerily silent - there was noone there apart from a few unfortunate folk who were camping under an escalator, awaiting a morning flight home, I assume.

22/04 - I got up and went straight to the airport, where I queued for ages at the information desk and was informed that my flight should definitely be running this evening. I then managed to get to the train ticket office and cancel my train with two minutes to spare before it left. I enquired about the possibility of changing my evening flight to an afternoon one, but she quoted me a change fee of "Three hundred…" at which point I laughed and left, not requiring either the rest of a the number or a currency to know that I couldn't afford it. I headed back into town, found somewhere to buy a massive merguez sausage sandwich and found a nice park near the Gare Routiere which was pleasantly sunny in which to eat it.

I made it back to my flight with plenty of time to kill (which I did by sitting in the sun in the car park), and eventually made it back to London about 11 hours after leaving my house this morning. I got a text from Kelly as I walked through the arrivals gate informing me that she was going to be late. I could already see her when I read this, so the intended surprise didn't really work. We went home and feasted on a huge mound of chicken, couscous, amazing balsamic roasted tomatoes and stuff, accompanied by a nice Rioja. I am very glad to be back in the UK.

The first days of summer, and I'm going to Disneyland...

2010-04-19T15:43:00.006+01:00

18/04 - Well, today was a lovely day in Geneva (apart from the fact that all Kelly's flight options are definitely cancelled). I woke up feeling approximately a billion times better than yesterday, had some leftover pizza for breakfast and went about rallying people for a picnic. This took longer then anticipated as (a) Dan Short was in St. Genis, (b) James was unreachable and (c) I downloaded Sim City 4 this morning and had to give it a try. Eventually we went and woke James up, fetched a load of food from our various flats, bought some cold white wine and a baguette and settled down in the park for a picnic and some Aerobie. Dan S. arrived after a while with a bottle of gin, and went and bought tonic and a pizza (apparently our incredible spread of sandwich ingredients wasn't good enough for him). I should mention where he bought his pizza - there is a shop on our road which is definitely closed on Sundays, but there was a kids party going on inside. Oblivious to the signs, Dan walked straight in and ordered a pizza from a child, who went about making it with the aid of an adult, apparently.

We stayed in the park until the sun sank behind the trees, investigated the garden behind our building and arranged to meet at Dan's for a film at half 9. I went home and promptly fell asleep for an hour and a half, as I was full of wine and sleepy from the sun - I think I even got a little burnt through my (admittedly low quality gig) t-shirt. I was awoken by a phone call from Dan asking when I'd be over - I lied and said I was en route, gave myself a minute to wake up then popped round to watch The Science Of Sleep, a Michel Gondry film about a chap who can't separate his dreams from reality. I really liked it, thought it was innocent and whimsical, but I think some of the others may have been seeking more from it, by their reactions.

19/04 - So today I had to come up with and make a presentation by 3pm, but instead I prioritised sorting out this flight situation - I have to be back by 12 noon on Friday, no matter what, for Dad and Hattie's birthday party. I was on the eurostar website for ages trying to book a seat, but every time I got to the stage where I would actually book a ticket, it told me that the ticket I was looking for had gone in the time it had taken me to get this far. After a while I found their number and rang them instead, and after half an hour of Can't Get You Out Of My Head on repeat I got through, only to be informed that the only way I could get home on Thursday was to buy a ticket from Disneyland Paris to London, as there was room on that branch, and even then only on the 1937 train, getting in at 2112. I took this option, and paid £192 for the privilege. I then booked a much more reasonable TGV from Geneva to Paris for about £70, and now I have a backup plan in place should the flights still be cancelled on Thursday. I made sure that both of these tickets were fully refundable as well, just in case they lift the restrictions and I can get my flight.

I headed to the supermarket on the way home, and the temperature display at the pharmacy informed me that it was 26º today, which is crazy considering that on Friday night it was down to 4º. I think summer is definitely here, which has made me pretty happy in spite of the rather large outlay of cash earlier. I came home, made a delicious steak sandwich with red onions, mustard seeds and Café de Paris butter, and watched some of 'Bang goes the Theory' on BBC2, which was examining why volcanic ash is so dangerous to planes. It is now half 11 and I think I have run out of energy - I am going to try and get up early to go to the train station and pick up my ticket. I tried to do so on the way home, but the queue was out of the door, probably due to people returning from late ski holidays whose flights have been cancelled. Unlucky, at least Kelly and I have both been prevented from going away, not getting home.

Night shift - Fuck volcanoes.

2010-04-17T23:59:00.001+01:00

15/04 - OK, I am at 6am, 7 hours into the shift. I have exhausted all the options facebook, BoingBoing and Make Magazine's Math Monday have to offer. Collisions started about half an hour ago, there was a brief flurry of excitement when I thought something had gone wrong, but then found out it was something that is known about and went away on its own quickly. I am glad I have made it through tonight with only one coffee and no game playing as of yet - however I am now bored of the internet, so tomorrow I may have to bust out the Naruto. I am not quite at Dwarf Fortress boredom levels yet. Also, my prawn salad at 3am was disappointing, but my 6am roast beef and mozzarella baguette is delicious. I posted a picture of me in the control room on facebook, and got an enormous amount of reaction to it - people seem to think it's pretty interesting, or at least pretty cool.

That was an odd night. I made it home by about 0730, having dashed off as soon as my replacement arrived. I remembered to pull the blinds this time, and fell asleep pretty quickly, waking up at about one. I decided this was a silly time and went back to bed until half three, when I got up, had some sugar puffs (thank you Kelly) and somehow faffed around until I had to leave at half 6. I went to balexert on a sandwich mission and ended up with a jambon cru and parmesan focaccia and a chicken satay and rice. I must admit to having a cheeky burger too, as I walked past McDonalds and the smell was too tempting to refuse. My French class was fine, still quite basic stuff but I am learning extra vocab nonetheless. I can tell there are a few people who may mildly annoy me (bossy Italian woman who interrupts all the time, I'm talking about you), and the teacher both praised and criticised my pronunciation. The first time I did it at natural speed and received a "bon", whereas when I had a bit more to read he mildly mocked my accent, saying it was "trop Anglais", especially when pronouncing Beaujolais-Villages. I tried again, and didn't seem to do much better. I am glad of the instruction, just not sure why he's criticising me but ignoring the people who pronounce every single letter in every word, whether it's meant to be heard or not.

I managed to talk to Kelly a little before my shift, and got some bad news - Kelly is supposed to be flying out tomorrow evening, but the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption may have thrown a spanner in the works - all flights in and out of the UK are cancelled until further notice. That further notice is meant to come at 0230 UK time, so I await it with baited breath. Oh, also I reckon that I ate 4 1/2 meals yesterday, and as I spent a large chunk of the day sitting still I don't think night shifts are going to be good for my health.

16/04 - The shift is no more exciting than yesterdays, as it is now 3am and nothing has happened yet. We are awaiting the first physics fill of the night, god knows when it will start. There are an awful lot of people in fleeces in this control room. It seems to be the de rigeur item of clothing for physicists. I am listening to Major Lazer to keep me awake. 'What U Like'? Absolute filth. It's not looking too good from the flight point of view, the Met Office is giving an update at 0600. Fingers crossed.

Shit. Their update was at 0330 my time, and it isn't good. Most flights are closed until 1900 - Kelly's is at 1840. I think I'll suggest trying to change to a flight on Saturday morning, as it's free, and if they cancel that then we'll have to use the flights another weekend. Preferably the most expensive flights on the most expensive weekend ever - obviously none of this is actually easyjet's fault, but it's always nice to get one over on them.

Bugger. No good news, and it's now the end of my shift - 7am. I have devoured my chicken satay (ropey) and my focaccia (bone dry), found a sofabed upstairs near the vending machine, and been refreshing BBC news every few seconds. It's looking like all flights are cancelled until at least Saturday night.

Friday afternoon/evening was pretty fun - I enlisted a few people to come on an adventure around the Planpalais area, led by me on my bike. We went to a couple of bars and a Peruvian restaurant which served enormous portions, I realised that Dakers lived on the road we were on so I invited him to join us, and at 0145 I cycled (slowly) home.

17/04 - I was in my dressing gown about to go to bed when I heard some commotion outside - it was about 10 or so people who I had left in the bar, all of whom were going up to Mike Alexander's flat for a few more drinks. As I was still on night shift time I was the last up - we drank a lot of wine and then moved on to ill-advised whisky, which meant that I stayed up until far too late, got far too drunk and woke up far too late and far too hungover.

Kelly rang to tell me her new flights had been cancelled too, and she had rebooked onto yet another, on Sunday morning - she informed me that I was very lucky this had happened, and rightly so, as I would have been absolutely no fun if she had arrived today. I felt absolutely awful, really weak, sick, hot and angry, and I could do nothing to dispel any of these feelings. I made it as far as the park at the end of my road, where I lay in the foetal position cradling a carton of ice tea until I mustered the energy to go and find food. I had to have a sit down every few hundred metres as I felt faint, and eventually I found somewhere which would sell me a pizza. I took this home, ate half and had to get back into bed until Kelly rang. I was still frustrated and angry at something (probably that volcano), and I felt that my only option was to have a bath, the most relaxing option available to me. This I did, called Kelly back in my more relaxed state, and passed out at around midnight, despite having only been awake for about 8 hours. I am a confused mess, I am not sure about these night shifts...

Goodbye to Ed, and preparing to be nocturnal.

2010-04-14T23:10:00.001+01:00

13/04 - I took Ed to the airport and headed to CERN, where I had meatballs for lunch and worked a bit, until about half 6. I popped along to the control room ro see if anything had changed since my shadow shift, had goat's cheese risotto and some sweet and sour prawns for dinner then I went to the first session of my French course at the École-Club Migros. We started off with restaurant French, which is probably the part I know best. I think I am at the right level, nobody seems to be much better than me. Not much else happened in the evening, to be honest - I came home and had the first proper chat with Kelly for a few days, which was a relief. I have my first night shift tomorrow night in the ATLAS control room, so I decided to see how late I could stay up, sleep all day tomorrow and hopefully get into a rhythm for the next few days. I kind of failed, I managed to watch four episodes of LOST before falling asleep at about half past four. They were pretty awesome, I am glad I have stuck with this for the last 113 episodes - only seven more left, I hope some of my questions are answered here.

14/04 - Well, I woke up at 1 o'clock (I'll close my blinds next time, whoops), spent a chunk of the day messing around with my computer, and went on a mission down to the Arve river to get sandwiches for tonight. I took my bike and found the ice hockey stadium and a load of bars and restaurants which I intend to check out properly at some point. Dan very kindly brought me a pizza for dinner, and I went and joined them for Zombieland, a mental film I saw a while ago which mainly involves Woody Harrelson beating the crap out of a load of the undead. I made it into CERN for 2245, found my card didn't work and had to get someone to let me in, and took over by 2250. I signed in, checked some stuff and waited for the first checklist to turn up - this didn't happen for about half an hour as I had forgotten to press the 'ready' button on the signing in box. Oops. I had a bit of a chat with Clare and Kelly, with them on video and me using gestures as I can't really be having an obvious chat while I'm on shift.

Oh, I was just having a look at facebook and found my mate Jan, who I stayed with on Koh Phi Phi in Thailand, and who now appears to have become a divemaster on the Gili Islands. Bastard. I am not even half way through this shift, bugger.

Birdie's Visit to Geneva

2010-04-12T23:31:00.000+01:00

10/04 - As seems traditional in these visits, Birdie and I had a wander round the old town with some coffee and croissants, frequented some chocolate shops, climbed the cathedral (which was hard, yesterday's margaritas took their toll) and headed down to the Bois de la Bâtie and walked along the Viaduc de la Jonction, from where one can see where the Rhône and the Arve meet. We went back to Parc des Bastions where we hung out with a sandwich and a beer, watching the various punk kids messing around. There were a lot of beers and a surprising amount of hookah pipes, and loads of grubby looking students doing near sports like poi as they wandered about the grass. Next on our packed itinerary was a nap, which was intended to last half an hour but ended up being more like an hour and a half.

Rhône (left) meeting L'Arve (right)

We rushed off to Café de Paris for dinner, which was exactly as delicious as last time, and then went to a little bar near the Manor supermarket, whose name I do not know. I do know it is pretty much a gay bar, which became more obvious later on as the waiters removed their shirts. Not wanting to confine ourselves to one bar, Dan took us towards La Galerie in Grottes, but as this was closed we ended up in the bar next door, a bizarre place which only had three beers for sale. Not three types of beer, but three beers (two Heinekens and a Super Bock) which we shared between us while the chap at the next table rolled a massive joint and swigged from a bottle of wine. We started our walk home but were distracted by Les Brasseurs, where we purchased a three litre giraffe of bière blonde and watched some rugby.

The stroll home went pretty quickly, and I invited Dan and James in for a nightcap, which ended up being a litre of questionable Côtes du Rhône (under CHF 5 from Denner) and lasting until 5 am. A lot of chat about the upcoming election was had, we looked at They Work For You to find out where our MPs stood and what they had voted for, and discussed why not voting is a bad idea. Some of the arguments put forward are a little hazy now, but I remain convinced.

11/04 - For some reason Ed and I were up at 10 am, only 5 short hours after we went to bed. After some milling around we went to Mike Wong's for a spicy wake up breakfast, and then we decide to head up La Salève as it was a very clear day. We had a bit of a slog on our hands, as we decided to walk up to the radio tower at the top - we went up there on the advice of Matt Fraser (who also told us about the bridge over the meeting of the rivers). We were very grateful indeed for the presence of the bar at the top, where I drank an Orangina that was almost immediately absorbed by my tongue, as we had brought no water with us. After a bit of a sit down and a vain attempt to get a better view which involved scaling a shed, we started the walk down - we passed the hanggliding (or paragliding - I'm not sure) school, which is basically an area of green matting laid down on top of the grass running up to the edge of the cliff, and a wooden walkway (or runway, I suppose) which leads straight off the edge, with a yellow line painted on it which I can only assume marks the point of no return.

Path off the edge of the mountain

Ed observes Geneva

We had a nap when we got home, which of course overran (god knows why we got up after 5 hours last night), meaning that we only just got to Bains Des Paquis in time for fondue before they closed. Ed enjoyed it, it was pretty good (as always), and afterwards we went back to the flats and ended up watching Terry Gilliam's Brazil with the Dans (Short and Hayden). It was an absolutely bonkers film, but really good - It had some crazy sets, a very 1984-style storyline (Gilliam has admitted that he was heavily influenced by Orwell) and Robert De Niro is a plumber. It also had that weird unattractive love interest thing that happened in a few films in the early eighties. A couple of glasses of wine and a cup of tea later we went to bed.

12/04 - Todays plan was to go to all the international organisations. First up we headed to CERN for lunch and a tour - calimari steak and roughly the same tour I gave Kelly. I took Ed to the ATLAS control room and we listened in to a tour that a guy from CMS was giving. (Apparently the CMS guys have a different shift system to us, in that they do a normal day shift then switch management of their systems to Fermilab for the next 8 hours, then to somewhere in Beijing, then back to CERN. This avoids the need for night shifts, which is what I am doing right now as I write this on Wednesday night at 2am). We then proceeded to Microcosm where I tried to explain cosmic rays and neutrinos a bit. Not sure how much I succeeded.

We got the tram to the UN, saw the landmine chair (a 12 metre monument dedicated to landmine victims, advocating a worldwide ban) and wandered through the park to the entrance. We got in and nearly had a sleep on the sofas, but we were called for our tour. This was interesting, and had a few good facts thrown in, but was essentially a tour of an enormous grand conference centre.

The, umm, big room at the UN

The landmine chair

We headed back and went to the Lady Godiva pub quiz, where we were in first place at the half way point, but then we dropped down to fifth at the end. We still beat the other CERN team, so we had a small victory. Back at the flat we watched some Black Books, Ed packed and we went to bed. I've enjoyed having Ed here, makes a real difference having someone I've known as long as him, a very different atmosphere to hanging out with people I've only known for the last year or two.

Dan Short's Birthday drinks, and Ed arrives.

2010-04-09T15:08:00.003+01:00

09/04 - I completely forgot to mention the best thing that happened yesterday. Kelly phoned me to let me know that she had been roped into helping with our friend Elise's art show. She made me promise not to tell Clare about this, as she thought that Clare would definitely disapprove, and she wanted to prolong the surprise. While doing this she had to don a tie-dye swimming costume and a hairband, and after helping people choose a costume and song she danced at them to encourage them to dance back, all on film. I wish I could have been there, although I am not sure about enforced dancing. Clare later sent me a picture of Kelly in costume, with a subject which simply said "Ahem". I am in two minds about whether to include the picture here - I feel it would be more polite if I did not, or at least I would get in less trouble.

Anyway, this morning I had to part with CHF 480 (about £300) for my French course, which hurt a bit. Hopefully I can get £250 of this back, as I have some money for language courses in my training budget - I thought about using it for a Spanish course, but I'm not sure if I could justify this when I'm in Switzerland. I had a pretty good meeting this morning, I was able to explain a concept to everyone else and noone interrupted me or told me I was wrong for once. I had a questionable interpretation of nasi goreng for lunch, managed to smash a bowl of salad on the terrace, basked in the sun for a while and came back to try and wrap everything up and make a plan for the next few days' worth of tasks before 6pm today, as I am on night shifts next week and I don't expect that I'll be in the office much during normal working hours. I have also printed off some 'things to do in Geneva' lists, as Birdie will be here tonight until Tuesday and I have no idea what we'll do. I have three New York Times' articles - 36 hours in Geneva, Geneva with the kids and Frugal Geneva, out of which we should be able to find some good stuff to do. I have asked a few people what they would do apart from the normal sightseeing and fondue, and the general response has been "no idea, but if you find anything let me know." Not too encouraging.

So, after work and a few beers in honour of Dan Short's birthday a few of us headed to Mañana, a Mexican restaurant near Cornavin where I had an enormous platter of nachos, a beef burrito and 4 margaritas before going to get Ed from the Airport. We went straight from there to Le Roi Ubu, or King's Arms, for a few more drinks - Matt Fraser was there, and he gave us a load of good advice on what we should do while Ed's here. Dan had become incredibly drunk in the time it took me to go and get Ed, and just before closing time he ordered a couple of drinks and wandered off, so Ed and I cleared them up on Zoe's orders. We stayed until the bar closed at 2, then walked home and possibly had a few glasses of wine before bed.

Back to Geneva, CERN is deserted...

2010-04-08T12:39:00.000+01:00

06/04 - Kelly and I were up at 7, and went downstairs to find an unexpected Jim Byrne in the kitchen, who had apparently turned up about 10 minutes after we went to bed (he may be in town to participate in a trial of an anti-cancer drug, but he is not definitely eligible). We got a taxi to Paddington at 0745, dropping Kelly off on the way. It has been wonderful being at home/in Yorkshire with her for the last 10 days, although a downside is that it makes it much harder to part than if it had just been a weekend. Oh well, less than two weeks until she's out in Geneva next, so it's not so bad. Even with checking in baggage, I had an hour to spare at the airport (I need to get better at this), and got to my desk at 1320 GVA time (4 1/2 hours door to door - I reckon I can get it down to 3:45).

There was nobody about in the office, as everyone else seems to have taken the week off. I hung around until about 6, mainly writing up the last few days on here, then went home, dumped my bags, threw out the more unpleasant items I had left in the fridge and promptly dozed off until Zack rang me to see how I was, and I ended up going over to his house for pizza. I brought them some Kinder eggs as an easter gift, as it was all I had in the house. Masa has not yet had their son, although apparently last Thursday was the expected due date so she is massive and a little impatient to have him. We watched a bit of The West Wing and I had to explain the LHC to a Croation friend of Masa's, during which I think I lied/made things up a bit. I cycled back home, which took about 5 minutes, and had taken about 90 seconds on the way down. I am not walking anywhere ever again.

07/04 - Today was productive but dull, and not worthy of more than a couple of lines (many of my days are like this during the week). I had a productive morning, by which I mean I got my laundry, another month's internet and travelcard before 10am. It was rainy but I had dressed for summer, there is still almost nobody about, and I spent most of the morning moving computers and screens to my new desk (formerly Teresa's), I had lunch alone and popped to the supermarket on my way home where I picked up some exciting things like a sieve and a measuring jug, then cooked a failure of a meal (meant to be pasta with chorizo and basil, but had no pasta left so it ended up as soggy fried rice). The rest of the evening was spent downloading and converting episodes of Lost and Naruto so I could watch them on my iPod. A dull day, as I said.

08/04 - I watched Lost on the tram on the way in, which put me in a bit of an odd mood. I had a meeting with Ricardo during which I completely forgot how to get hold of some plots I needed. I remembered as soon as the meeting was over. I had a massive tuna pizza, covered in tabasco, parmesan and chilli oil, after which I felt extremely dozy. I think that tonight I am not going to get up to much more than yesterday, as Birdie is coming out tomorrow and I need to clean my flat beforehand (although I doubt he'll really care). I tried to get some supplies yesterday, but ended up just getting some cheap red wine in - I have a massive drawer with about 13 bottles of wine in now, plus the bag-in-box from France. I really need to start actually drinking some.

Well I achieved that at least - since I wrote the above Dan, James and I got a Mike Wong's takeaway and came back to mine for dinner and some wine, and also they showed me a game called Dwarf Fortress which they have been playing while on shift. It looks worryingly addictive, so I am going to put off playing it for as long as possible.

A feast, a roast and returning to London.

2010-04-05T23:02:00.004+01:00

03/04 - This morning was productive, in a non-fun sort of way. Kelly had been tasked with sorting through a few boxes of stuff which had been moved out of her Mum's house to her Dad's garage, so I helped out a bit, and we got through about 5 or 6 boxes, and ended up with two boxes less than we started with, although I must confess to being a little confused about some of the stuff Kelly opted to keep (mainly school books/notes, as far as I could see). I had my uneaten emergency pasty for lunch and we headed over to her Mum's house in the early afternoon, said hi and then quickly borrowed her car for so that we could drive into Beverley. Kelly headed off to Tesco to get soem stuff for dinner while I went to get a haircut - quite a massive deal, as it is the first one I have had in well over a year. I was rather nervous about my ability to tell them what I wanted, and I was pretty shocked at how short some of it is, but now I am used to it I quite like it. I reckon they took about 8 inches off, judging by the offcuts on the floor.

We headed over to Kelly's sister's house for a play with Olivia and then to cook them dinner. Kelly had chosen all Amy's favourite foods. We were the first overnight guests in their new house, and the first to cook for them, and Kelly had decided that this was to be a surprise dinner so we had to shut them out for an hour or so while we cooked so Amy couldn't guess what we were making. The reason this took so long is that the main course required us to reduce 2 litres of stock down to an eighth of its original volume. The actual cooking was pretty simple - we made creamy garlic mushrooms, steak a l'échalotte and microwave treacle sponge pudding, all of which went down very well indeed. We also had prosecco (all of us), rosé (Amy and Liam), rioja (Liam and I) and a white wine (Kelly and the garlic mushrooms) to go with it all. We went to bed in the spare room in a den of sofa cushions and duvets, full and happy.

Liam and Amy, wondering what we have cooked for them.

Amy's Birthday sponge

04/04 - Kelly leapt out of bed to go and play with Olivia, while I took the opportunity to doze a bit more. Olivia and I had some good games going, and she was pretty chatty by the time we left. For some reason I was feeling exhausted and a bit cranky, but I had to ignore this and be on my best behaviour as we dropped by Kelly's Aunt's house - the Aunt who let us stay in her house in the south of France the other week. On arrival, Kelly's uncle started telling me about his Open University science course, and I ended up basically checking his homework for him - I didn't really mind though, physics is much easier to do when tired than scintillating conversation.

Olivia says cheese

When we got to Kelly's Mum's, a massive transformation had taken place, the place was almost completely unpacked (yesterday it had been full of sofas and boxes, stacked to the ceiling). There then began another round of visitors, and when the last ones left at about 4 we snuck upstairs for a nap. Unfortunately this took a bit longer than expected, and we woke up 2 hours later to the smell of roast lamb. Dinner was good (Kelly drank about half a pint of gravy, having transferred it from jug to plate to spoon for manners' sake), and we had a much more relaxing evening than the previous three.

05/04 - There isn't too much to say about today - we got up and got our train back to London, met Clare after work for tea (which, due to a lack of tea rooms, turned into a hot chocolate and a millefeuille at Chez Gérard) then went home and cooked a chilli con carne for ourselves, Sophie and Ed. After this I packed (I bought 4 litres of Ribena to take back to Geneva, which means I have to have hold luggage on my return - totally worth the extra hassle), we watched QI and then went to bed. A busy Monday.

Easter in Yorkshire part 1 - Jorvik Viking Centre!

2010-04-02T23:39:00.001+01:00

01/04 - I had a dentist's appointment this morning, which turned out to be completely pointless - all we got done was to reschedule another appointment for the 23rd. I hung around Fulham Road until noon so I could go to Mexicali for enchiladas, then I headed into town to start my many missions of the day. These involved firstly getting a doll for Olivia, Kelly's niece - the previous one was lost in the move. I picked up a tiny Baby Born doll from Argos, which came in a MASSIVE box, which I then had to carry around for the next few hours. Next stop was to try and get some new shoes to replace my ailing Nike Dunks, which my Dad bought me in the autumn of 2002. This mission nearly failed, until I let myself be persuaded of the awesomeness of a (frankly flamboyant) pair of blood red high-tops by the man in Size?. As I was on a bit of a spree, I then went to Oxford street to see if there was anything else I fancies. No.

I was very early for the train, so I had a cheeky double cheeseburger as I knew dinner was a long way away - when I met Kelly I found that she had bought me an "emergency pasty" to make sure I didn't get hungry (which means grumpy) on our 2 hour train ride together. This turned out to be a bit more than 2 hours, as we sat outside Peterborough for an hour due to some unspecified problem. All this meant that by the time we got in, Kelly's Dad had decided it was too late to do anything for dinner, so we popped to Tesco and got some stuff to make a quick one. Howie decided that, rather than just letting us cook for him, he would grab something easy and microwavable, in spite of our protests,

This meant that when we got home, Kelly and I had venison, chilli and merlot sausages on french bread with roasted vine tomatoes, accompanied by a goats cheese, rocket, apple and onion salad. Howie had a sweaty paella. I think we made the better choice. Also I should note that it was only half past 8, so I am not sure why Howie had decided that this counted as 'late', especially as we then sat up and drank a couple of bottles of wine until about midnight, when we went to bed and Kelly's stepsister arrived, who then stayed up drinking more wine with Howie until about 0245.

02/04 - We got off to a late start today, eventually heading into York around 1. We started with lunch at Betty's, a tea-room which is apparently a York institution. Kelly neglected to mention (or indeed notice at all) that Betty's is a Swiss tea-room, with raclette and gruyère all over the menu. I have had quite enough of Switzerland recently, so I went for the Welsh rarebit.

Betty's Welsh Rarebit

Next on the itinerary was the Jorvik Viking Centre, the main reason I was excited about York. Upon entering the first thing one notices is the smell, which I suppose must be authentically Viking (smells rather of middens and unwashed animal skins). The main bit is a ride, somewhat akin to a horizontal chairlift from the future, during which you have commentary from speakers in your seat, which occasionally converses with animatronic vikings. I loved it.

Apparently these three were having an argument about dinner.

This chap was, umm, I can't remember but my chair had a chat with him.

This fellow was on the loo - may I remind you there were smells.

Howie picked us up and took us to dinner, which was in a pub called the Pipe and Glass (the recipient of East Yorkshire's first and only Michelin star). For a reason that I have forgotten, Kelly's dad has little or no sense of taste or smell. I wonder if I would have treated five people to such a delicious dinner if I had lost my sense of taste - would you take people to a gig if you were deaf, or a film if you were blind? Maybe those are fatuous comparisons, but I couldn't help feeling bad that he couldn't taste any of the amazing foods we were enjoying. The meal was amazing, I had the fried rabbit rissoles followed by the fillet steak, which was one of the best I have ever had. Kelly had the monkfish cheeks with kipper veloute & something else fishy, and a side salad about a yard long. More wine was drunk, along with some cider brandy to finish - this had such a strong flavour that it got through Howie's taste barrier and he declared that he liked it.

Kelly's fish dish and yard of salad

My perfect steak

IoP conference dinner and eating Kangaroo & locusts

2010-03-31T23:34:00.001+01:00

30/03 - Incredibly, despite oversleeping by an hour, Kelly and I both made it to UCL by half 9 this morning - it only took 30 minutes door to door, instead of the hour Kelly claims it usually takes. I think that by going earlier, one catches rush hour, which causes a longer delay than just waiting a bit. This was probably a bit of a waste of effort though, as I dozed off on my desk within about 20 minutes of getting in. After the coffee break I stayed in the 'quiet room', sorting some stuff out on my laptop before going for a walk over to meet Kelly for a cup of tea (ended up being a coconut muffin and a pear juice) on Queen Square.

The afternoon's talks were of marginal relevance and interest, which finished just in time for Matt, Tina and I to squeeze in a pint before the conference dinner, which was held in the rather grand Russell Hotel. As far as I remember (I am writing this over a week later), dinner was pretty good, especially the mini rack of lamb we had for the main course - nice and crisp on the outside, pink in the middle. Tegid Wyn Jones, a slightly crazy emeritus Welshman from UCL, gave the after dinner speech, which was rambling but enjoyable, mainly due to his incredible voice. We had four bottles of wine per table, which we soon polished off, and after dessert I popped over to see how Rich was doing. Rich's table had 8 bottles of wine, as there was an empty table next to them which now had no bottles. A waitress came over later and gave them two more as well, so I hung around for a while. It was looking like the UCL people intended to make a night of it, and I was tempted to join them, but I thought better of it and snuck off to meet Kelly in Soho, where we popped to the Evaristo club for a couple of cheeky rums before bed.

31/03 - I was not in as early as yesterday, and while seeking out a better lunch than the somewhat puny sandwiches on offer (they had got a lot worse since Monday) I bumped into Rich in Subway. He had an enormous hangover and I was knackered, so we spent a while in the 'quiet room' munching through our respective enormous meals. We went along to the afternoon talks and struggled through, before going for Rich's birthday drinks. It was here that I discovered something rather amusing/tragic that happened last night. Mark Lancaster, the head of the UCL high energy physics group and Rich's supervisor/my former supervisor had had a bit of a tumble last night, smashing his head on the pavement and gaining a black eye, some fierce bruising and losing a tooth. He has an emergency dentist's appointment tomorrow to reattach/replace the tooth, but nothing can be done about his eye. I tried not to laugh when he came in, and failed completely when he asked me for "a Guiness and a straw."

Kelly turned up after a while, we stayed until all the others started looking for somewhere to watch the football, then borrowed Rich's iPhone to look up anywhere close we could use Kelly's taste card for half price food. Incredibly, the closest option was Archipelago, a place Kelly had talked about in the past which has a reputation for serving exotic meats, such as zebra and scorpion. When we arrived we found that both of these were off the menu, so we had Sarawaki Seafood followed by pink gin, lychee and mango palate cleansers, then Hot Marsupial (marinated kangaroo), Menelik's Catch (Berber spiced tilapia fish), Love Bug Salad (deep fried crickets & locusts)and Mouse In The House to finish (cheeses). With our discount card all this only came to £52, including two glasses of wine each (admittedly they forgot to charge us for the second one).

Feeling at home & the first day of the IOP

2010-03-29T15:17:00.005+01:00

29/03 - I feel I have missed an essential element out of the last few entries. This is to point out just how glad I am to be back in London, actually living in my house rather than just visiting. The best thing about last night was that I knew I wouldn't have to get up early and dash off to the airport. After Kelly left this morning I spent some time making some shelves for our room, washing a load of clothes, doing some washing up and generally doing house stuff, which I really enjoyed, it made the place feel a little more like home.

I left the house at 11 and made it to UCL with plenty of time left for registration for the IOP meeting, which is ostensibly my reason for being here. I saw a few people I wanted to talk to, more who I knew and loads who I recognised. I ended up mostly chatting to Rich over the sandwiches (blue cheese and apple, crayfish, chorizo, and other surprisingly tasty options). The first session today is the STFC town meeting, which is mainly some folk from the research council outlining and defending their funding choices for the next year. In summary: there's not much money and everyone's unhappy about it.

Well, the rest of the day continued in much the same manner. There were many talks, some more interesting than others, and at 6 we had a drinks reception with some awesome canapés, and a large selection of real ales for us. Kelly joined us for a while, we had some slightly awkward chats with some physicists, and then left to go and meet Simon and Clare in the Norfolk Arms, a pub near King's Cross which does pretty good Spanish food. Simon told us stories about his recent trip to New Orleans (he got back yesterday), especially focussing on the food - deep-fried oyster po-boy sandwich anyone? The meal was really good, but a couple of things went wrong - firstly our desserts took nearly 40 minutes to arrive, as the waiter had clearly just forgotten all about them and made some rubbish excuse. When I ordered my second glass of wine, they brought me a large glass when I had specified small - this wouldn't have really mattered, but the difference was at least a couple of quid and I was already quite full enough of booze. For the above reasons we ignored their 12.5% service charge and left about £4 instead (I am never any good at this, saying no when the tip is already on the bill, but to be honest the service was pretty crap).

Westfield, Bowling, FLC, Imperial War Museum, a curry and Tigerland

2010-03-28T22:20:00.000+01:00

27/03 - I woke up before 9, feeling a little woozy. I was confused as I thought I hadn't had that much, but then I remembered the glass of wine at the airport, the complimentary bottle on the plane, the cava with dinner and the few pints in the merchant - as they had all occurred in different places with little gaps between them, I had not considered the possibility that they would have a combined effect. They did.

I had a delicious but unusual breakfast of leftover salad, coronation chicken and a cup of tea, and Kelly and I pottered around the house for a while before heading off to Westfield - we had jokingly proposed it last night, but in the cold light of day it seemed much less tempting. My intent was to go and get some shoes and a few items, but in the end I didn't find anything I wanted. Upon walking in I could smell a combination of floor polish, air conditioning and an odd citrus scent which, combined, gave me a headache and reminded me of all the big malls in Singapore and Bangkok. It wasn't a very pleasant place, and although it is on a grand scale architecturally I found it to be pretty oppressive and grim. When the time came to leave, we headed to the exit and found that it was pouring down with rain, so stayed inside, weaving between the throngs, and dashed across the road to the station, accidentally stomping in a number of puddles along the way.

Next on our agenda we went to meet Gordon, the head of Kelly's MBPhD course, in The Lamb. He has helped her enormously during the last year or so, and was a very smart and interesting guy. I wasn't sure what we would talk about, but luckily I had some random knowledge of the pay structure of Somalian pirates which I was able to pull out, as well as knowing some stuff about positrons, which popped up in conversation too. At half six we met Clare, Frau, Ed, Joe & Adam and went for Ed's birthday dinner next door at Ciao Bella (without Gordon), where I had a rather disappointing meal (again - the gnocchi last time was slimy, the penne putanesca was pretty bland. Everyone else's looked delicious, I am going to let other people decide for me next time).

Our next stop was Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes, for the main event of the evening - bowling and a Fun Lovin' Criminals gig. This turned out to be fraught with more disappointment. Firstly they had no cocktails, which meant no white russians. Then all the draught beers were off, so we were confined to bottles of everything. Then we found out that our lane had been cancelled, as Fun Lovin' Criminals wanted to film the gig and didn't want any sound feedback from bowling. Our lane was therefore moved from 2130 to midnight, which was a bit unsatisfactory. We were given a round of drinks, which was scant compensation. When the band came on we realised that this was maybe the least appropriate gig venue possible, as it has a low ceiling and is in a basement. It was rammed and boiling, and we couldn't see a thing. Clare decided to leave, as it was too hot and she hadn't heard of the band anyway. Kelly and I snuck round the side, and ended up standing on top of the ball return of one of the lanes, the only place from which one could actually see the band. After a shaky start (of new material) they broke into the songs that everyone know (Scooby Snacks, King Of New York, Fun Lovin' Criminals etc.) which were pretty awesome. The actual bowling was fun, I opened with a strike and a spare and followed it by two frames of gutterballs. We entered into a row with a massive bloke on the next lane about 'ownership' of the 12 lb ball. In the end a security guard stepped in and told us to ask him, and he would get any ball we wanted. We did pretty awfully actually, Frau won with 92, not a particularly impressive score. We left at one, intending to head to the Evaristo for a drink, but as it was closed we ended up having expensive sandwiches from Valentino's and getting the bus home.

28/03 - Kelly and I woke up at 1245, which wasn't unreasonable as we had gone to bed at 0345, but this was still pretty late. Too late for lunch, in fact, as I immediately received texts telling me that Ed, Bob and Joe were going for lunch, had gone for lunch, and were heading back from lunch. They were already back by the time we had sorted ourselves out with showers and tea, so we said goodbye to Joe and went off for our Sunday activity - the Imperial War Museum. On our way there we walked past a hostel of some description outside which there was an unconscious man on the pavement, next to whom someone was having a wee. Outside the museum there were a huge number of drunken, possibly homeless, people sitting and lying about on the grass. Kelly said she thought there was a Polish holiday going on (all the beers I saw were Polish brands, and most people were speaking Polish, but a quick Google has yielded no results).

The museum itself was really good - I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. There was a Terry Deary based exhibition called Terrible Trenches, which was designed for children but during which I improved my rather insufficient knowledge of the first world war. Our next stop was the WWI history section, including 'The Trench Experience'. We didn't have time to go through to WWII (and 'The Blitz Experience'), as the museum closed and we had to leave. We had a pretty good curry for dinner and, after a rather long debate, watched Tigerland, a film about Colin Farrell's character going through training before the Vietnam war, pretty much entirely unwillingly. I really enjoyed it, mainly because the protagonist hated everything about the army and refused to bend to the will of various drill sergeants etc. Bob thought it was rubbish, maybe for exactly the same reason.

A Chinese, a very long trip back to London and Kelly's feast

2010-03-26T22:32:00.001Z

25/03 - I struggle to recall the events of Thursday. Nothing much happened during the day, I had lunch with Ben and Ricardo during which we discussed what I should do for the note we are working on, then I went back to the office and failed to get some code working for a while. I went to beers with Tina, Lawrence and Dan, sitting just near all the LTA lot who were having a farewell drink with Gemma. I don't know Gemma very well, and consequently felt a little bad about what happened next - I was walking to the bus stop, saw the bus leave and so got a lift with Matilde to Planpalais, where Gemma et al were going for dinner. My plan was to go home, but I was persuaded to go to Fouille de Banane, a Chinese restaurant which has a three course all-duck option on the menu (it didn't take much persuading, to be honest). This turned out to be much pricier than my choice, a chicken in dry chili sauce dish which I would describe as adequate. I tried some of the duck things, and I was particularly impressed by the duck skin pancakes (fried duck skin wrapped in pancakes, not pancakes made of duck skin as I had hoped).

26/03 - Hmm. I write this sitting at Geneva airport, awaiting a delayed flight. I managed to get a reasonable amount of work done this morning, produced a plot I was happy with, and, due to Kelly's worrying, got the 3pm shuttle to the airport. I was through security and waiting at the gate by 1515, for my flight at 1650. I have sat here messing around on the internet since then, and have just been informed that my flight has been delayed by an hour for some reason. Bugger. I could have got the shuttle at 4, or even later, and been fine.

Well, my journey from desk to front door took me 6 1/4 hours, compared to 4 1/2 hours last time. I eventually got back to Clapham at 8, to find that Kelly had taken my suggestion of a chicken salad for dinner and gone a little crazy. We had roasted squash with pecorino and prosciutto, a mango, pepper and rocket salad with orange-marinated chicken, ciabatta with prosciutto and goat's cheese and with a tasty cheese and chilli topping. We also had Joe Hawkins for dinner (as a guest, not a course), as I was a lot later than anticipated. We had planned to go to Kelly's friend Olly's birthday drinks and then on to Dalston for some gypsy balkan music, but after dinner we decided that it would take too long to get there (over an hour each way, according to TFL) and it was a bit late anyway. As we were getting ready Kelly suddenly felt awful, and sent Joe and I off to the pub on our own. We played some table football and drank some pints, and after a few tries I got through to Kelly and found she had fallen asleep, soon after which she came and joined us for a couple of drinks before we were asked to leave at midnight. The bouncer was a bit odd - he advised us that we couldn't take our drinks out, then that we could in bottles, but had to pour them in inside the pub, and Kelly's had to be drunk. Consequently Joe and I made a huge mess decanting our beers back into the bottle, and we reluctantly helped Kelly get rid of her remaining cider.

Summer comes to Geneva

2010-03-24T21:22:00.001Z

23/03 - Today wasn't very eventful, as it was taken up mostly with reading and going through code to try and figure out how the hell to do what I am meant to have already done. The most interesting thing about the day was the weather - it was a steady 16º with not a cloud in the sky all day, so I made use of this by doing some reading out in the sun after lunch and by taking the long route home. I picked up a Mike Wong curry on my way home, threw open all my windows, poured myself a glass or two of bag in box, listened to Off The Wall pretty loudly and wrote up the last week on here. Quite a nice evening really.

Oh, I nearly forgot, something else happened today - I had a missed call from a Geneva number earlier, rang them back, encountered a language barrier and thought no more about it. When I got home I was trying to input the advanced passenger information for my flight back on Friday, and couldn't find my passport. I then remembered the phone call, and thought I may have heard the word 'Fust' somewhere in amongst all the French. I bought my replacement phone from there on Monday morning, so I ended up going through the Swiss yellow pages and finding the contact number for the store I had gone to, and found it matched my missed call.

24/03 - I went to Fust in the morning, asked around and got my passport back, which was a big relief. I did some more reading today, had a cured ham pizza for lunch, sat in the sun for a while and then went to the b-tagging meeting at 2 o'clock. This meeting was interminably long, and was still going when I eventually gave up and left at 1810. Ridiculous, what's the point of a 4 1/2 hour meeting? I only made it through because I decided to use my lunch break to lie in the sun and call Clare. It was an incredible day, the place is covered in daffodils, daisies, bluebells and a few wasps, all of which definitely weren't here on Friday.

All the supermarkets had closed by the time I got to them, so I decided to make the best I could out of what I had in the house - I should also mention that an email was sent out today to all the LTA students asking if anyone wanted to buy an oven for CHF 45, which I replied to immediately and very enthusiastically - I am now the proud owner of a big silver electric oven, which is sitting in the corner of my room as there is no space in the kitchen. I was going to just knock up some pasta & pesto but Kelly and Clare are throwing a dinner party in our house in London tonight, making a chorizo stew, so while I was on Skype to them all I made a chorizo and bean mix-up. On their advice I then topped it with loads of gruyère and grilled in the new oven. It is delicious, I will probably eat the whole thing (3 servings, according to the internet) in one go. I am halfway through already...

The Chorizo and Haricot Mélange (with pasta as I had already cooked it).

Greasy close-up.

Leaving France, La Salève, Alice & Fondue

2010-03-22T19:49:00.002Z

20/03 - We crawled out of bed slightly the worse for wear, probably due to the aforementioned 'bit if rough' that I had last night. We had a tiny breakfast of leftovers and were faced with the task of clearing up the house, washing all the bedding and stuff and generally making it nice. This wasn't too arduous, and by lunchtime we were on our way back to Geneva. It was a very long very dull drive back. On more than one occasion the satnav told us something like "in 303 km, bear right." I was impressed Kelly managed to maintain concentration for the required 5 1/2 hours. The most interesting part was when, on the motorway in the middle of nowhere, the fuel light went on and we were informed that we had only 50km of petrol left. We carried on on our way, hoping to encounter a garage before too long, but this didn't work out too well so we had to take a detour to the nearest small town. By the time we arrived, the estimated km remaining was showing "---", so I assume we made it just in time. We ran out of Euros on the way back as well, and ended up trying four different cards at the péage before one worked and we could actually get on the final stretch.

When we arrived back at the rental office we found that someone had parked in their single parking spot, and as there was nothing else about we ended up nuzzling in behind them, with the back metre or so of our Micra sticking out onto the pavement. Kelly asked a passing policeman if this was fine, and I think the response was "Oui, c'est bon. No billet", but I can't be sure as I was off looking for a parking space and Kelly doesn't speak any French. We went for dinner at La Trattoria, as it was nearby and not too pricey, during which we discussed whether or not we would go skiing on Sunday. We started off with me proposing it and Kelly being unsure, and ended up with Kelly insisting she should go, and me questioning whether she would actually enjoy it at all after her horrible time last week. Confusing. We went home and I sewed up the leg of her salopettes, which took much longer than I expected, then we set alarms for 0645 and went to bed.

21/03 - As it turned out we needn't have worried. We woke up at the allotted time, I checked the forecast for all the places we might have gone on the bus, found them all to be rainy and rubbish, and we went back to sleep for another four hours. Definitely the right decision. With our newfound extra time and money we got the bus to La Salève, a massive table of rock that sticks out just over the French border east of Geneva. Cloudy as it was, the views were still pretty impressive.

Geneva from atop La Salève

Mont Blanc & some alps, obscured by cloud

We came back and went to see Alice in Wonderland, during which Kelly went to get popcorn, and found she only had enough for a small. However, she then found the CHF 2 required to get a medium, and the lady behind the counter refused to sell her one, claiming "I have already made this one." What the hell? Since when does one 'make' popcorn by putting it into a box? I'm sure it's fairly easy to move this popcorn into another box and add more. Anyway, after the film Kelly grumbled about the 'snacks bitch' for a while and we decided she should have probably lobbed the popcorn or 2 franc piece at her head. We now know for next time. We went on a bit of a restaurant search and ended up in Café La Demi Lune for two big tapas platters, and a few glasses of wine each, all of which were delicious. Back at the flat we packed, had some of the bag in box wine I got the other day and watched Wonders Of The Solar System on BBC2 Northern Ireland before bed. Perfect.

22/03 - Less perfect was the next morning, when Kelly awoke at 0345, dozed fitfully until getting up at 0445 and actually leaving at at 5. For some reason I chose 5 am as a good time to go and pick up my laundry from downstairs, hang it up and then fall asleep for another three hours. On my way in I bought a new phone to replace the one I dropped in the lake the other day, had lunch with James and read papers (scientific, not news) all afternoon. At 7ish I got a lift with Ricardo and some others to Bains des Pâquis, where we were having a leaving meal for Teresa. Unfortunately she was chairing a meeting which overran massively, so by the time she arrived we had already eaten our share, and left her some - this may seem impatient, but they were closing at 9 so we left ordering as late as we could. we had a drink somewhere up the road afterwards, which Teresa insisted on paying for - we had covered her fondue and wine, but actually the round of drinks came to more than our individual contributions. Simon mildly berated us PhD students, asking how much actual work we had done today. I think I avoided the question quite well.

Narbonne, Pissevaches and Ken & John

2010-03-19T22:54:00.000Z

19/03 - I had the remains of last night's enormous pizza for breakfast (classy), and we set off on another vineyard mission, this time to Camplong d'Aude, which supposedly is home to a vineyard cooperative with great wines. However, every single place in the town was closed, so after we drove about for a while we gave up and drive on to Narbonne-Plage, near which was another vineyard we wanted to visit. As it was about lunchtime we thought we would explore the town a little and seek out the vineyard later. This turned out to be a mistake, in my view. Narbonne-Plage is one of the most depressing places I have ever been. It is clearly a holiday resort in summer, and in winter it is just a collection of empty identical orange buildings, ugly and desolate. Nothing whatsoever was open, there were no people on the streets, and there were zebra crossings roughly every 20 metres so the elderly people living in the awful houses could toddle over to the promenade/carpark. We didn't stay any longer than we could help, fleeing north immediately. The problem was that Narbonne-Plage became St. Pierre sur la Mer, before petering out and turning into the Etang de Pissevaches, a somewhat grim lake/swamp/marsh which we had our lunch by the side of.

L'Etang de Pissevaches. This translates as Lake of Cow Urine, I believe.

Well, we stayed in the car and I angrily threw an unripe pear into the water as an act of protest. During our meal I managed to get a reasonable amount of cornichon water and roquefort on the seats, but hopefully managed to do a good enough job of clearing it up. On the upside, when I packed the picnic I had included the Limoux and some orange juice, so we were able to make buck's fizz to brighten up our grim surroundings.

Kelly enjoys making some buck's fizz.

I grumpily do the same.

We soon decided we had had enough of Pissevaches, so we drove off in search of the vineyard we had bee told about, but had forgotten to bring any details of. In the end we stopped at the Caveau de Sarrat de Goundy, mainly because there were clearly people going in and out. It was pretty impressive, they had huge vats with what looked like petrol pumps attached, with the variety and price chalked on the side - the cheapest was only €1 a litre, ranging up to €6 for the rosé - we asked to try a few of the bottles, and the lady was very obliging. We tried maybe 3 reds, 2 rosés and 3 whites, a few of which I bought - three of the sweetest white, and one of the middle-priced red. Also I made what I see as a very important and frugal purchase (in the long run) - a gallon 'bag in box' of the cheapest red we tried (but by no means the cheapest in the shop), 5 litres for €10.30, which I definitely view as a bargain. I am drinking some now as I wrote this a few days later, it's pretty damn good. We headed home via Intermarché, where we picked up a few things for dinner. We intended to have a cheap, simple meal, but ended up buying scallops, langoustines, steak, rocket and 6 kinder eggs. This may be my fault as I had not been spitting out any of the wines we had tried, unlike sensible Kelly. Consequently I had probably ingested about 600ml on top of my earlier buck's fizz, so I had probably had the equivalent of about a bottle of wine. And it was four o'clock. Consequently I was rather sleepy in the car on the way home, and had a mild hangover by the time it came to cook dinner, which I combatted by opening one of the whites.

Our 'cheap and simple' dinner.

After our delicious and sumptuous dinner we had to go over to see Ken and John, a couple who live in the village and look after the house in Kelly's aunt's absence. They are an odd couple, who Kelly described as having "rejected Britain because it had rejected them". They are two gentlemen of 60-odd, who live in part of a fantastic house up the road. When we got there they mildly berated us for being late (we were 20 minutes late and had phoned earlier to let them know), gently mocked our choice of wine to bring (to be fair it was the remains of the one we had with dinner, and the one I bought yesterday more out of politeness than choice. We ended up staying for a couple of hours, discussing topics as wide-ranging as the location of prostitutes in London to Ken's PhD in Scottish literature at Stanford and John's brand new tooth (he had one more today than when he had popped over on Wednesday). Eventually we said our goodbyes and went home, drunker than we had expected - 'the boys', as they seem to be known, had provided us with a very nice bottle of white and then kept us topped up with "a bit of rough" from their unmarked bottles - possibly the same stuff we had seen in the vats earlier.

Driving to Ribaute, Carcasonne and quite a lot of wine

2010-03-18T22:00:00.001Z

17/03 - For some reason I chose to pick up the car at 0800, so we had to call them and inform them that this would very definitely not be the case. After a leisurely breakfast Kelly and I drove to CERN, where I showed her the control room, my office, had a chat with Teresa, and bumped into a few people along the way. While sitting in the cafeteria in building 40 we had an in depth discussion about the nature of electric charge, and what it actually was. Short of repeating the fact that an electron could be thought of as a unit of charge I was unable to explain it, and when Ricardo happened to wander by he did no better, which reassured me.

At about half past one Kelly and I began our drive to Ribaute - the satnav initially reckoned that we would arrive at 2338, but after some fiddling around I managed to set it to not ignore toll roads, and our ETA improved by 5 hours. The route we were taking before we allowed ourselves to use the autoroute was much nicer though, as the drive itself was rather dull. Also we managed to get lost near Lyon and ended up doing a lap of the city, which was pretty unpleasant. In the end we arrived at Kelly's aunt's house around 8pm, which we reasoned was far too late to find any supermarkets to sell us food, so we went to the little shop in the village for tapas-ish (lots of fried things) and a bottle of wine each. By the end of the meal we had been invited to visit a vineyard and maybe go on a tour tomorrow. We took the remainders of our wine back and finished them in front of a roaring log fire. Perfect.

The River Aude from our bedroom window

18/03 - We awoke rather heavy headed after last night, and I struggled up to the shop to buy supplies. We had a breakfast consisting of fruit and the last croissant in the shop on the chilly balcony overlooking the river, before setting off to the local vineyard, Pech-latt. We found it to be closed so we continued to Carcassonne, which was incredibly windy and a bit odd - the second you enter the walled city you are greeted by a huge selection of tacky shops and restaurants, none of which look very tempting. In the end, more out of necessity than choice, we stopped in one and had some traditional French food - a really hot and rather average duck and sausage cassoulet for me, and a sub-par onion soup for Kelly, which tasted like bovril. She did have a glass of Limoux first, which almost made up for it, but pretty disappointing really. We attempted to see the sights for a little longer (I scaled a wall and got a little lost on the castle battlements) before the wind became a little too much and we fled to the shelter of a local Géant hypermarket, where we stocked up on Limoux, cheese, bread and other essentials.

Kelly enjoys Carcassonne

On our way home we stopped off at Chateau Ardolou, where we saw a woman working in a field. I asked her "Le Caveau, c'est ouvert?" to which she replied "Oui, Je suis la", so she went over and opened up. Kelly said she recognised some of the wine from supermarkets back home, but she only had one which we could try. We were a little unsure of the etiquette, and the lady was very friendly - at one point she tried to get her son to come from the house to talk to us, but with no success. Due to our lack of knowledge of protocol I ended up buying two bottles - one 2006, one 2007, for €4.50 each, and she threw in a free bottle of apple juice too,. The wines weren't amazing, but probably a lot better than any I could have found for £4 back home.

Pech-Latt, which was closed. Went to Ardolou instead.

We went to nearby Fabrezan for dinner, where we checked out Le Café du Theatre on the recommendation of a friend of Kelly's aunt. We found it to be pretty unpleasant, just a bar full of men smoking at the bar, not really somewhere I fancied having dinner. We went to Le Grand Café for a drink (somewhere we had been specifically warned against by the same man) and found it to be pretty cool - I mean, there was a dog wandering about the kitchen, along with a baby and a small parakeet who emerged from the coffee pot and flew over and landed on my head for a but, but we were there for a drink not a meal, so it was fine. We went to the pizzeria for a pretty great dinner, then headed back and had some Limoux and a white Rioja I brought from Geneva, curled up in front of a film - the film in question was the cheapest we could find at the Géant, Divine Mais Dangereuse, also known as One Night At McCool's (€3). It was pretty bizarre, but I enjoyed it quite a lot, especially for Michael Douglas's hair.

Kelly is en route...and in Geneva.

2010-03-16T15:24:00.005Z

16/03 - I cleaned up the residue of last night's bloody marys before heading out to CERN, which was slightly unpleasant. I met Teresa on the tram, and the basic theme of our chat was that she wants me to do more talks and presentations, ideally one every two weeks or so. My mild hangover and I were alarmed at this, as I have successfully dodged the public speaking bullet on all but two occasions so far.

Paul has very kindly lent Kelly and I his GPS for our trip down to Carcassonne, meaning we save quite a lot on maps and also we have something else to blame if we get lost. I have just left a very long ATLAS weekly meeting, in which I typed up the last few days and occasionally paid attention to what was being discussed. Kelly is en route already but her train is delayed, meaning that she now has 6 minutes instead of 12 to make her connection at Zurich, which may be a bit tight...

...well she made it. She missed her connection and got one half an hour later, so I used the extra half an hour to pick up a Chinese from Boky, a place by the station. It does 'Fondue Chinoise a gogo', which either looks delicious or a bit grimy, I can't quite decide. Thank God she's here now, no more horrible Austria - she seems to have had a terrible four days, doing things she doesn't want to do in a grim mountaintop hotel with a load of pricks she doesn't want to be with. No more of that thank you very much.

Skiing, Café de Paris and the Pub Quiz

2010-03-15T23:14:00.001Z

14/03 - I was up before seven, and I was ready early enough to pop over the road to the Boulangerie to pick up croissants, pain au chocolat, coffee and water for our journey. We managed to get two seats each on the bus to Avoriaz, so we dozed most of the way up, and by the time we actually hired our skis and got the cable car up to Avoriaz it was about 11 o'clock. Avoriaz is a bonkers place, a load of wood-shingled building sitting on the edge of the cliffs, with little pistes running between them instead of roads. We met James, who was on holiday with his family, and the three of us went off to do some blue runs to warm up. Rich was a little haphazard to begin with, nearly falling off the mountain within the first half hour - he was going a bit fast and couldn't stop in time, so he crashed through the danger sign and fell into a ditch off the edge of the piste. A Frenchman was alarmed by this, and proceeded to admonish me for his lack of control, telling me he was a danger to himself as well as others.

He took it a bit easier after that, and we had a great day of skiing, my confidence rose enormously, I was leading little adventures into the woods and even jumping (well, hopping a foot or two in the air) over the edges of the piste. After a hearty steak lunch I started to get concerned about time, knowing that the drivers tend not to hang around if you are late. We did a couple of runs which I wasn't sure we had time for, but we actually got to the bottom with nearly an hour to spare, so Rich and I had a beer in the sun while we waited. The bus ended up taking ages due to the ridiculous traffic on the way down to the autoroute. We managed to have a bit of nap, getting into town pretty late (after 7), after which we had no energy for anything more than a shower and a takeaway pizza (calabrese from La Pignata for only CHF 10!), followed by a beer and Bill Bailey's Part Troll at Dan's flat.

15/03 - I met Ailsa on the way in, and had a chat about Ponyo, anime and our shared hatred of gory films. I arrived at CERN at a reasonable time, doing a bit of work before having a guilty kebab for lunch (I was told off for taking more than two napkins, which was odd). I had meetings from 3-5, which were pretty dull, and then got a worrying text from Kelly, so I called her and she told me about her hike which went wrong, ending with a 5 hour uphill struggle through chest deep snow, which sounded terrifying. I forbade her from hiking ever again (this does not include walks between vineyards, we decided) and left at half five to meet Rich for dinner at Café de Paris. It was awesome, and we both enjoyed it immensely as you can see from the picture below.

Rich anticipates the steak

Unfortunately we couldn't help but compare it to L'Entrecôte. We came up with a few pros and cons for both which, as a geeky physicist, I have tabulated below:

...so you can see that L'Entrecôte wins, just. The staff question is not necessarily a dealbreaker, in fact we discussed whether all-female or all-male staff were best, without much of a conclusion. If you discount that point it becomes a dead heat, and I think we both decided to let L'Entrecôte win as it just seemed preferable in some way - probably due to "The surprise". If you don't know what that is, I recommend you go (there's one in London as well as Geneva and a few other places).

We met Dan and Will for the pub quiz at Lady Godiva Pub, where we achieved a respectable 6th place out of 13. I was in the running for the CHF 130 jackpot, but my question was "which E.M. Forster novel something something?" I don't know any E.M. Forster books at all, so I had to pass - the other 12 teams all passed or got their questions wrong, so the jackpot will roll over to next week, when I will be sure to attend (the answer was Room With A View). We came home and had a bloody mary with the duty free vodka that Rich brought with him, and which we had not yet had a chance to drink. Neither Dan or Will had ever had them before, and left quite a bit in their glasses - they were made using the Tabasco branded mix that Birdie gave me for Christmas, and were delicious, although maybe not the best idea as it was already midnight and Rich had a 0930 flight to catch.

Hangover, getting Rich's stuff and a late start.

2010-03-13T22:54:00.002Z

13/03 - Eugh. I was warned yesterday that Cardinal lager was notorious for giving you a hangover before you have finished drinking it, and the wine we drank yesterday had a cap like a beer bottle, which is never a good sign. Thank god for the metal blinds in my room, keeping the painful sunlight at bay. Rich and I managed to sleep until 11 or so - apparently if I happened to be awake when he woke up in the night, I would greet him with a sleepy "bonjour" and roll over and go back to sleep. We got up and dashed to CERN to try and get Rich's bag back, aiming to get to the locks and keys office before 1230. We arrived at precisely 1229, found the office to be closed, rang the number on the door and were informed that it would be shut until Monday morning. We decided the best thing to do was to go to the locker and see if we could find a way in - we brought tools with us.

When we got to the lockers, we found them all to be open and empty - the one in which Rich had left his stuff now contained just an empty travelex envelope. Rich panicked and looked terrified - all his money and his passport were in the locker. I rang the CERN fire brigade (they are in charge of all emergency services stuff here), who didn't know that the lockers existed, and told us to come over and file a police report with them. We shuffled out of the door, going past the lockers one last time, which is when I noticed a sign on the wall, in four languages, informing us that the lockers were emptied every night and anything left in there could be claimed by phoning security. This sign was right next to the lockers, and in fact they had made use of it yesterday night to find the French word for locker, but had not thought to read the rest of the sign. I rang security and said "Bonjour, parlez-vous Anglais?"

"Non" came the reply. Rich readopted his look of fear, but I ploughed ahead and managed to have a conversation in French, explaining the situation, describing the bag, finding out where it might be, and informing them that we'd be right over. I realised that it was the first time that speaking French was actually important since my AS level oral exam in 2001. We went to the office at Entrance B, and found the bag (all money still present) on a table, I signed for it and we got the hell out of CERN.

We headed back via Mike Wong's, where we had a well-deserved and delicious hangover meal. We went home and had much-needed showers, eventually starting our day in Geneva at 4pm with a walk through the old town down to Eaux-vives, walking out to the Jet D'Eau and getting the boat over to Pâquis. On our way, I stopped to take a picture of a swan and forgot that I had my phone in my hand, and dropped it off a ledge into the lake. A kind gentleman scooped it out immediately, treading in a huge pile of swan crap for his trouble. It worked for a little while, but after about 10 minutes it just showed a white screen. Bugger. As we were feeling fancy,we headed up to the bar atop the Grand Hotel Kempinski, which ended up costing CHF 12 apiece for a coffee and a corona, which hurt a bit. We had a while before dinner, so we took a little walk through the red light district (sleazy but polite would be a good synopsis of that area of Geneva) on our way to Bains des Pâquis for fondue with Dan and his friend Will, which was delicious, and featured a much nicer Chasselas than last night. We headed back home for a sleep before tomorrow's skiing, with a quick stop at Café des Arts for another glass of wine along the way.

Playground on a train, mugged by Teenage Gypsy Mutes, and the beginning of Rich's saga

2010-03-12T23:59:00.001Z

12/03 - This morning I had the last of the cosmology lectures, and consequently missed half of my meeting (which I can't say I minded). The discussion was mainly about the note we are planning to write, and which bit of it I should do. That decided, I had an awesome Chinese something-or-other for lunch, and went to the Top Reconstruction meeting with Matilde and Jody. I left after an hour or so to await Rich's arrival - he got a bit lost but eventually managed to hop on a CERN shuttle back here. We went for a brief walk about, during which I realised how little I knew about the place, then popped our stuff in a locker and had some beers with Dan, James, Sarah etc. I had to leave at 7 to go to Lausanne, where I was meeting my cousins, Caitlin and Siân - my train was really expensive (CHF 40!) but amazing. It had two floors, lounge areas, a restaurant with table service, a casual bistro area, and really comfortable seats.

Once in Lausanne, I met the twins and got the Metro one stop to Flon - it was a 30 second journey, but seemed worth it considering the incline. I realised quickly that I had gleaned insufficient information from the internet about where to go, as we seemed to be in a massive shopping precinct, and the only available place to go was called 'King Size Pub'. That said, it was decent enough, and had two chaps playing piano who were pretty good. We talked about their time so far in Switzerland; apparently they have had every moment planned out by Romi, a friend of my aunt's, and they had been instructed to be on the 2245 train at the latest. They are 32 years old and quite capable of looking ater themselves, but they weren't even trusted to have a key to the apartment building.

On the way back I was sitting between some rowdy blokes and a load of Chinese teenagers. One of the former begged a cigarette from one of the latter, which he proceeded to smoke on the train in the seat behind me. He clearly enjoyed it, as he was later heard to shout "Hey! Hey China! This cigarette is delicious!" I moved down the train in search of beer, and instead came upon a playground. A sodding playground, with a slide and a climbing frame, all decorated to look like dinosaurs!

Playground on a train!

I was going down the slide when I was approached by two gypsy-looking girls, who couldn't have been more than 13. They presented a form on a clipboard to me, the jist of which was that they were deaf and mute, and I should give them some money. As I was a little merry by this point, I reached into my wallet, expecting to find a CHF 10 note, but could only find a twenty. I decided to give it to them anyway, but after I did so they shook their heads and pointed at all the other alleged donations on the form, writing "CHF 30 MINIMUM" on the side of the page. I showed them that I hadn't got a ten, whereupon they gave me back the twenty and whipped a fifty out of my wallet! I was not best pleased, and ended up snatching the fifty back, leaving the twenty and getting up to leave. I got downstairs as we pulled into Genève, and couldn't find the button to open the door, so the girls reached up and opened it for me. Embarrassing, to be mildly mugged by teenage gypsy mutes and then need their help to get off the train.

While I was in Lausanne, I had received a few phone calls and messages from Rich and co., telling me that he had forgotten the combination to the locker and was there anything I could suggest. I called them to find that they had not opened the locker, containing all Rich's ski gear, money, clothes and passport, and so had left CERN, had pizza and were heading home. Rich and I had been undecided about whether to ski on Saturday or Sunday, but this made the decision for us. I had bought beer and wine in preparation for Rich's visit, so I invited them round to drown his sorrows. We did this quite effectively - Dan Short, Dan Hayden, James, Rich and I made our way through a couple of litres of Chasselas (one of which had a fizziness to it which is not meant to be there) and some beers, before retiring at about 2, Rich and I sleeping in my bed.

Cosmology, Kel's retreat and 'boy girl sex'

2010-03-11T19:40:00.003Z

10/03 - Another cosmology lecture this morning. I was about 15 minutes late, by which point I had missed the intro and was greeted by 30 minutes of graphs. I understood a lot of it, and it was still good, but not as good as yesterday. Due to lack of choice (honest) I had steak and chips for lunch - way too many chips, no vegetables, overcooked steak. Yum. I feel I started some good work today, at one point having a Skype chat with Ben while having James on iChat, all talking about work stuff. I got the bus at 6 with Dan, but I skipped the all you can eat pizza in favour of an enormous salad, containing goat's cheese, chorizo, avocado, parmesan, sun dried tomato and rocket. All the good things.

Kelly rang and packed at me, as she is going to Austria on her lab retreat tomorrow - this may be great, but will probably be awful. We discussed plans for next weekend, and realised that we can just hire a car here (hopefully taking advantage of Zack's UN discount), and drive pretty much wherever we want in four days. So, this leaves us with some tough decisions to make - to stay with her stepsister in Slovenia? In her aunt's house near Carcassonne? Just drive to Venice/Bologna/Milan and hang out? I am looking forward to this adventure.

11/03 - Well, seems like I was right. Kelly texted me this morning to let me know a few things; firstly that the skilift leading to her accommodation shuts at 3 pm every day, meaning that she is trapped there from then until it opens at 9 in the morning. Secondly, easyjet lost her luggage, meaning she only has the clothes she wore on the plane, which is not much help as it is currently -1º in Innsbruck, which is 1500m below Kelly's mountaintop hideaway. Which is to say, I bet she's really cold. The lecture this morning was good, somehow he managed to fit the terms "boy girl sex" and "foreplay" into his account of the history of the Hubble constant.

The afternoon was odd - I started a few things and almost immediately dropped them, having massive problems concentrating on anything for any period of time. I drank large amounts of citron tea from the machine in my hall, and tried to learn some stuff about statistical analysis, but ended up reading loads of posts by Brian Cox about this ridiculous story. And informing people of the fact that this is actually fine, has been planned for ages, and amounts to no less physics time than if the accelerator ran on its old schedule, with summer and winter shutdowns.

I managed to get the 1801 bus again, and on my way back I realised it was Thursday, i.e. late opening day in Geneva, so I went along the fancy shopping street looking for stuff. However, it then started to snow quite heavily, so I took refuge in Globus and came out with a nice looking bottle of wine, before getting the tram to Planpalais so I could pick up a Mike Wong takeaway on my way home. After I tried to request a beef noodle soup with no coriander and extra chili in French, and just about succeeded, she then said "eat here or to go?" I felt silly. It was delicious though, I am slurping my way through the last dregs as I write this.

Rich is coming out tomorrow, until Tuesday - I am not 100% sure what to do with him. The main problem is tomorrow night, when I am meeting my cousins in Lausanne for the evening (they have been let off their strict Swiss reins for the night), and I could probably bring him along but no other people (he has met them before after all), but he may wish to stay in Geneva with the other people we know - I think the best way to deal with this may be just to ask him.

Making a start & a horrible meal.

2010-03-09T22:27:00.001Z

08/03 - After the last post, I succeeded in staying at CERN until about 6, when I fled and moped about at home - the most interesting thing that happened was that I managed to eat three thin steaks for dinner, two sliced up in a bowl of noodles, and one just fried, topped with comté and grilled. Delicious.

09/03 - Yesterday I started off with a lecture on dark matter. This has nothing to do with anything I have ever studied, but Teresa recommended it as being an interesting course, so I went along and she was proved right. The speaker, Michael S. Turner, was really animated and almost managed to make me care about cosmology. After a very short lunch I had a pretty good meeting with Teresa in which we figured out what I don't know (loads) and what I need to know (almost as much). I got in contact with Ben, a senior guy in my group, and I was assigned some work to do for a note he's writing - could even get my name on the author list, which would be good. I left just in time to get to Migros, where I bought bananas, beef & socks, and a few bits and pieces which somehow came to CHF 48 - I honestly have no idea what I bought. I also got some cheap wine and beer from Denner, as I figured it's always good to have in the house.

The beef became part of a disastrous beef satay, as I couldn't be arsed to marinate I just kind of tossed everything in, which resulted in me feeling rather ill. Oddly, even though this is only the second day I haven't gone out or seen anyone, I already feel like I am becoming a recluse.

An abridged account of the weekend

2010-03-08T13:14:00.004Z

05/03 - This was a bit of a nonsense day. I got in early to prepare some questions in time for my meeting at half 11. at 10 I got a message postponing the meeting to early afternoon, by which point I would already be en route to England. I composed the questions and sent them anyway, hoping to persuade them to talk about me in my absence and maybe even come up with something for me to actually do as part of the group. In light of my early departure I skipped lunch, a decision I cam to regret soon after - I got the Y bus at half one, and as always made it through to my gate very quickly and was waiting in the departure lounge for an hour - I am going to begin cutting these things finer. My lunch ended up being an extortionate & tiny delice de Gruyère followed by an identical one on the plane - it's just a cheese roll.

I arrived at Heathrow and rushed through arrivals, aiming to meet Kelly at Clapham Junction, to find her waiting at the door for me - she surprised me at Gatwick last time and had claimed she was going to the hairdresser today, but came all the way out here instead. Wonderful.

Le Weekend - I am going to simply write a very brief account of the weekend here, as this blog was intended to be an account of time spent away, not time at home. We went to my cousin's leaving do (she is moving to Nepal for a few months) in The Horse at Lambeth North, and had a great time there before Kelly and I went on to someone's (Guy's?) birthday in an ex-embassy near Hyde Park Corner - a bizarre venue for an awesome party. We are not sure what time we left, but I think it was a lot later than we thought (we both forgot that we had taken a taxi home until late the next day).

I had to get up to go to Kent for my Grandmother' 93rd birthday lunch, which was lovely. She liked the (unoriginal) Swiss chocolates I had brought her, and ended up with a huge bag of presents from her daughters and various grandchildren. I came back to London for a dinner party Kelly was throwing at our house, which consisted of amazing smoked salmon with horseradish and vodka cream, perfect beef bourgignon with a delicious salad and then cheese or Vienetta (yes!) for dessert. The last guests left around 2am, whereupon we cleared everything up - we have a dishwasher now, it's incredible - and went to bed. I counted in the morning, and the 10 of us got through a ridiculous amount of wine - at least 10 bottles, not including the 3 1/2 which went into the bourgignon.

Sunday was spent wandering the streets of Clapham South before settling down in a pub called the Draft Room for a 'pint of thirds' - three 1/3 pint glasses, each with a different interesting beer. In the evening we went to my friend Tom's house for a dumpling dinner - all three courses were dumpling based, and incredible dense and filling. I managed 8, Kelly three and a half. Come Monday morning I still felt like I was full of delicious boulders.

08/03 - This morning I was out of the house by half 6, starting a 5 hour journey back to CERN. There were no seats on the tube so I stood and tried not to fall asleep on my way to Bank. Once I got there I got on the DLR, which I still find a bit exciting - on the way out to London City Airport you go past so much interesting stuff, parts of London I would never usually encounter - it was dawn when I left the house, and everything was bathed in a very clear, crisp light which made it look amazing. London City is an odd place, I was told it was small but it seemed more like a train station than an airport. There were no queues, and when I was made to take my hat off before going through the metal detectors, my hair tumbled out and I was taken aside for a search. A brief rummage later, the lady shouted "yep, there is a cake in there!" to her colleague, and I was let through. I bumped into Anna, a girl from UCL who I did physics with, who was going to Zermatt for a conference on cantilevers (?), during which they had from 0930 to 1700 free for skiing. Sounds like a good conference. On the plane I was asleep before takeoff, missing the free food and coffee for which I had paid the extra money to fly Swiss instead of Easyjet. Bugger. I think it was still worth it though, the chairs in our little 100 seat plane were really comfortable, the plane was half empty, and there were no screaming children either.

When I arrived in Geneva I found I had just missed the half hourly direct bus to CERN, so I had to get bus-tram-bus which probably took me half an hour longer than it otherwise would, but it was too cold to wait outside. Never mind, when I got in I went straight to lunch and had a massive seafood risotto - in spite of the subsequent ristretto, I am now on the verge of falling asleep at my desk. I think today will be a long day.

A brief account of Tuesday to Thursday - masterclasses, steak and rice.

2010-03-04T22:40:00.000Z

02/03 - There are two reasons to keep this brief - firstly not much happened, and secondly I have forgotten most of it anyway. I am unsure what happened during the day on Tuesday, all I wrote down was "work, lunch, false alarm on work", whatever that might mean. In the afternoon I moderated another International Physics Masterclass with a chap called Marco. They were a lot less responsive than the groups we had last week, and I found myself leaving him to do a lot of the talking. There were some excruciating silences, which he didn't seem to mind, and afterwards I met james and Dan for dinner - James had never been to L'Entrecôte, the first place I ever went for dinner in Geneva. We treated ourselves to wine and dessert, and each of us came out CHF 65 poorer but it was delicious, as always. The wine was great even though it was the cheapest, and the cheese platter was amazing. Afterwards we came back to my flat, as I had beer, and watched a couple of episodes of Black Books on youtube before I kicked them out.

03/03 - Oops, today I slept through/turned off and ignored all of my alarms (multiple alarms on each of two phones and my iPod, placed all over the flat) and slept for two hours longer than I had intended. This was not a massive disaster, as I had no meetings and nothing in particular to go in for, so I worked from home. Also I built the other set of IKEA shelves I got the other week, which are standing proud next to me as I type this, in all their low quality plain wood glory. In the evening I received a few emails from Dan and James - some fellow named Lee has returned to CVERN after an absence god-knows-where, and consequently most of the normal takers for Dan's pizza and film combo are out welcoming him back, so instead we cooked dinner (well, they shared, I didn't know what was going on so I made Nasi Goreng) and watched Terminator 2 just the three of us. It was awesome. After watching Terminator last week I was already looking forward to it, and it was even better than I remembered. I mean, the effects have come on such a long way from T1, Robert Patrick is a pretty menacing bad guy, and the soundtrack? There are only three songs in the entire film - bad to the bone, you could be mine (G 'n' R) and guitars, cadillacs. Awesome.

04/03 - I made it in fairly early today, having solved yesterday's problem - if I put one of my phones in the bath, I am far more likely to have a shower and actually get up. Hopefully this will be a key weapon in my battle against my morning self. I had a pretty productive day, mainly because I went for a coffee with Teresa, my designated stand-in supervisor. I mean, it's been a month and I am not too sure what I am meant to be doing, just heading in various directions without a clear goal. I told her this and she was rather surprised, assuming I had been studious and organised all this time, but she was also very sympathetic and said she'd help me to direct my efforts towards something that might one day become a thesis. Phew.

I had another masterclass this evening, with Marco again. It was much better, mainly because the schools connected were much chattier and asked much better questions than last time, especially the American one - for example will we destroy anything (no), are there any ill effects to the surroundings from the LHC (no), what is our average work day (officially 40 hours a week but really just however much time it takes to get the work done - I let Marco answer that one), and what is the proportion of females to males at CERN (15%, and that's being generous).

I ended up staying until half 7 this evening (that's a 9.5 hour day, hopefully that makes up for yesterday a bit) before coming home and cooking a leftover special, which was mainly tomato, garlic, onions, some kind of spicy French sausage (not in the slightest bit spicy) with the rest of yesterday's rice. Also I just listened to the entirety of NOW 13, the finest songs 1988 had to offer. Wonderful. I am going back to England tomorrow, in just 15 hours I will be packing up and sneaking off, and I am looking forward to it immensely.

Sunday with Kelly and a sleepy Monday

2010-03-01T23:01:00.007Z

28/02 - Kelly and I were up pretty late today, as we had nothing planned whatsoever. We walked down to the old town and went up the cathedral, which gave us some awesome views of the (somewhat overcast) city.

Lac Leman from the top of the cathedral

Our aim for the day was to find some lunch and take a boat across the lake, both of which we achieved - I was quite keen on fondue, Kelly less so - I took us out to Bains Des Pâquis anyway, where I had my best fondue so far, on the pretence that they would have other things and I could have a fondue for one. As it turned out, this was half true - they only serve fondue in the evenings, so we ended up sharing pumpkin soup with some cheeses, some viande sechée with pickles and some delicious terrine, all washed down with some casselas wine. I'm not entirely sure if that's what it was called, but it was a Swiss white, it was the cheapest and it was good. All this set us back €18 (I had forgotten to get any francs earlier) which is a bargain for Geneva. On our walk back there was a crazy rainstorm, so the walk quickly became a bus ride.

Cheap and delicious lunch

In the evening we hung out at the flat and got hold of a couple of films to watch. Kelly had cereal for dinner (her choice) and immediately felt rather ill again, so after I fussed over her a bit we settled down on the sofa and put on her choice, The Road. This was a terrible idea - incredibly bleak, full of death and dark flashbacks - we got as far as the point where they find a basement and are attacked by emaciated naked apocalypse survivors (who were being farmed for meat by cannibals) before Kelly shouted "goldfish princess!" from under the duvet. This slightly odd exclamation referred to my choice of film, the studio Ghibli film Ponyo, an animated film which is vaguely based on The Little Mermaid, but cuter and set in Japan. This film is, as far as I can tell, the opposite of The Road, and went some way to undoing the damage caused by the previous film, although we both had to make a conscious effort not to think about the last image we saw before I turned the latter off.

01/03 - Kelly had to be up at 0445 to make her 7 o'clock flight, so I walked her downstairs in spite of her protests, but then went back to bed for a long time. A little too long in fact, in that I overslept enormously, but somehow I managed to blag my way through my meetings - the first of which I was the only person to connect from CERN, so I had to take notes and that made me feel productive. I left just in time to get the bus to Forumeyrin in order to make the supermarket before it closed at 7. The fruits of this were a steak sandwich (sunflower seed bread, café de paris butter, rare entrecôte, grated comté, another steak layer, another cheese layer, more butter and bread) which was amazing, and finished off my day. I miss Kelly a lot more today than I did last time we parted, probably because now she's been in the flat it feels empty without her.

CTF3, Fondue, my worst Swiss hangover and Kelly's arrival

2010-02-28T11:06:00.004Z

25/02 - Oops, I nearly missed this day out. I took a tour of the Clic Test Facility (CTF3) with Tina, Rob & Tim, guided by Max. It was pretty cool, good to see inside some actual machinery rather than just messing around on computers. I took a load of photos which may or may not turn out to be any good - they were mostly of massive 2 ton magnets, so I think they may be of limited interest to the viewing public. In the evening we (most of the Royal Holloway and Sussex people) went out to Café De Soleil for dinner. Much like last night, 9/11 people had the fondue, along with a bit much white wine. I was sitting at one end of the table with Max, John & Matt Tamsett, definitely the biggest (or at least hungriest) four people. We wolfed down our fondue, stole some of Dan and Tim's, had more than our share of wine and generally did rather well out of the whole thing. One downside to Café De Soleil over Bains Des Paquis is that it's a lot pricier - twice as much in fact, as it cost us a whopping CHF50 (£31), nearly twice what we paid last time.

After dinner a few of us (i.e. all except Ricardo) went on to Pickwick's pub, a massive British pub which was hosting the CERN and ERASMUS mixer. We cornered a table and very definitely did no mixing. Matt got me involved in a 4 person round, so I was compelled to stay for 4 pints, which is about 3 more than I had planned - consequently Dan and I didn't leave until about half 12, walked to Gare Cornavin in the pouring rain, waited ages in the aforementioned rain for a bus that never came (our fault, misread the timetable) and then walked home (a total of 3 km) in the same sodding rain, arriving home around 2.

26/02 - Eugh. what an awful morning. My hangover knew no bounds, and I just about made it in before 11, having a meeting at half past. During this meeting I was the only one present from CERN and everyone seemed to be having a go at me. I was somehow responsible for the poor AV setup (I was using the mic built into my laptop, which has been perfectly adequate in the past) and criticised for not having decent videoconferencing equipment. It did not seem to matter that I do not have access to the contents of the cupboard, did not know what to get even if I did, and was struggling to hold my brain inside my head with the heels of my hands. At one point I got so furious at the chap telling me off that I very nearly told him to fuck off and slammed my computer shut, but thought better of it and just got my headphones out, which seemed to shut him up.

Still rather spaced out, I made the odd choice of salmon tartare and chips for lunch, and after drinking all the coffee I could manage and trying to work for a while I came to the conclusion that my mind was utterly incapable of useful thought so I left a little early to get stuff for mine and Kelly's dinner. As I was not capable of planning ahead I ended up going to the Coop at Forumeyrin for some things, Manor in the centre of Geneva for a specific wine and some things I had forgotten, and then to the Coop near my house for all the other things I remembered after that. There is currently an air traffic controllers' strike in France, which led to the cancellation of various flights back to the UK, and caused Kelly's plane to be delayed by an hour or so - this gave me plenty of time to cook our dinner and get to the airport, where I saw that Kelly had met Sam's girlfriend Verity on the way. She saw her in the airport and called out to her, but then realised that she only recognised her because she had seen loads of pictures of her on facebook, rather than because they had met in real life. In a clear misuse of CERN resources I had printed out "KELLY!!" in size 200 font, one letter per A4 page, and held this up as they came through the gates - Sam did not have a banner, I apologised for making him look bad.

When we got home I managed to finish off dinner in about 2 minutes - it was merguez sausages and grilled vine tomatoes on olive & sunflower toast with café de paris butter, with a rocket, grape, goats' cheese and avocado salad. Awesome.

A thoroughly pleasant Saturday

2010-02-27T22:38:00.000Z

27/02 - This morning I popped down to the tea-room/boulangerie opposite my flat and got a selection of tasty treats for us. After breakfast we were picked up by Zack and Masa, who asked us for dinner last night but asked us to come to Annecy with them instead when we said we couldn't make it. We wandered around the (beautiful) town for a while, looking at antiques and avoiding the carnival folk - there were richly costumed and decidedly dour people wandering around the town posing for photos, generally creating the least carnival atmosphere I have ever encountered. After much searching we found somewhere for lunch, a little place by the old jail which sold sausages (all Masa wanted - she is 8 months pregnant, so she can demand whatever she wishes). These sausages were later thrown at me as the waitress tripped over, throwing a dish of diot and onion gravy over the table, the floor, my camera bag but not over me, incredibly. Annecy is famed for its antiques and curios market, but we returned with mainly wine and meat. Oh, I also discovered the most exciting vegetable I have ever seen, the Romanesco Broccoli. I stood and looked at it for ages, long after everyone else had lost interest.

Romanesco Broccoli

We stopped by a Carrefour on our way back to take advantage of the half price goods (compared to Switzerland), where I discovered that skidding along on the back of the trolley is just as fun for UN employees in their 30s & CERN physicists in their 20s as it is for children. I mean, I never doubted this, but it was good to have it confirmed.

We got back at 6 o'clock, and after hanging out, having a dinner of various delicious things (mainly cheeses and dried meats) and generally relaxing we realised it was 10 o'clock all of a sudden, so we walked to Café Bizarre where Ailsa was having a birthday celebration. We got there, planted ourselves at the bar and occasionally grabbed a passer by to chat to. when we grabbed Dan he seemed slightly distant - I put this down to his having just finished an 8 hour shift in the control room, but Kelly decided he was 'on the prowl'. Hmm. We walked back home through the old town, which impressed Kelly quite a bit - I suppose this city is pretty beautiful if you look at it in the right way.

Imaginary insult, crap pizza and good ravioli

2010-02-25T14:47:00.003Z

24/02 - I am struggling a little to recall the events of yesterday. I know I went to a couple of talks in the morning, and I went for lunch with Matt Tamsett and a few other RHUL people and had a soggy and disappointing pizza. The afternoon trundled along, and I discovered that Tanya was having a birthday meal at La Trattoria in town. At first I felt a little insulted that I hadn't been invited, but then I saw the email which was sent to about 30 people, and realised that as I am new here noone knows my email address yet. At 6 I went down to R1 to have a drink and see if there was anyone I knew down there, and soon after my arrival Tanya and Paul arrived with a massive home made Tiramisu (courtesy of Paul) and a big tarte au citron, both of which were delicious. Dinner was a bit of a faff, as she had booked a table for 20 and more than 25 people turned up, so a lot of squashing and rearranging was done, but we all fitted in.

Out of our table of 15 people, 11 rather predictably had the penne siciliana - fast becoming the national dish of Geneva in my mind. I had gorgonzola ravioli, which was delicious and rich but rather full of spinach. Tanya seemed to have a great time, they were all going on to La Galerie (a student-run/squat bar round the corner which I have been informed does very cheap drinks, as all the staff are volunteers) but I instead opted to pop home - it was 10pm, and I had a few dull things to do (again). I opted to do it tonight as I have fondue tomorrow with a few people, and I have no idea when it will finish - also I am getting even worse at getting up in the morning after drinking.

When I got back I talked to Kelly and found that she was still ill - she and Ed had been to some of our friends' house for dinner, and Kelly had to have a lie down then get a taxi home, which sucks. I hope she's better by the weekend. I don't mind looking after her or anything, it just seems a pity to get a flight in order to be internationally unwell. I'll try to take it easy on the rich foods while she's here, but I'm not sure how feasible that is, as I don't have an oven and everywhere seems to either serve massive italian dishes, fondue, tartiflette or steak. Oh, I looked up the ingredients of tartiflette and they are as follows: Vacherin cheese, Gruyère cheese, single cream, bacon and sliced potatoes. Why aren't more Swiss people enormously fat?

ATLAS Shadow Shift & A frustrating day

2010-02-23T18:49:00.002Z

22/02 - I got in today about 11, which I felt was justified as I have to stay until 11 as well. I write this sitting in the ATLAS control room, 5 hours into my first shadow shift. This involves sitting with the normal shifter and watching what he does, occasionally doing it myself. It mainly consists of checklists which tell you what to look for and what to do if it looks a bit wrong. The problem is, 'a bit wrong' is quite a vague criterion on which to judge various complex histograms. There is a webcam, ~~which I think is public, which one can view here~~ which is only available to CERN members. It's not very exciting anyway, but you can see where I sit - in the closest set of desks, at the furthest one away. I think we are doing OK, I have done some checklists and been a bit bewildered by how involved the guys next to me are in their shift (a different desk, I might add). I popped over to the office earlier and went via the fire escape on the side of the building (not really via as such, as the control room is on the ground floor). I wanted to get some better views of the mountains, it was particularly clear today and they looked amazing, however the problem with CERN is that wherever you are there are always power lines in the way, somewhat marring all the nice scenery that surrounds you.

Well, 6 hours in and not much has changed. I had the rest of that penne siciliana from Friday for breakfast, the one which I was very ill soon after eating the first time. Call it an experiment. I ate my beef, parmesan & rocket focaccia, supposedly my dinner, at about 4pm and I am now trying to put off eating my bagel for as long as possible, but I don't think I can hold out much longer. In fact, writing about the other foods has made me far hungrier, so I'm giving in now. Delicious. Snacking, blogging and househunting are the main activities at my desk at the moment, not much physics afoot.

7 hours down, I have devoured everything I brought with me and I am all out of stuff to do. I have helped my sister fix her sink, given sympathy to a poorly Kelly, downloaded games for my iPod, figured out how much I am spending out here (less than in London and decreasing week by week, amazingly - even with £100 shopping and skiing trips - goes to show how much I spend on going out back home, I suppose) and taken a few pictures. Short of actually doing some work, I am all out of ideas.

Well, nothing much else happened for the last hour. I packed up and ran for the 2310 bus, made it, and then proceeded to miss various connections and got home at about half past midnight. I called Kelly (who was still very ill), made come slightly unpleasant spicy noodles and went to bed.

23/02 - Well today just feels like it's been a bit of a waste. This morning some alarms went off, some alarms were ignored, and by the time I was up and about it was so late I decided I might as well have lunch en route to CERN to avoid wasting any more time. I headed down to Planpalais (about a 15 minute walk from my flat), figuring that I would drop off the IKEA money at Zack's house, grab a sandwich and hop on the number 14 tram, thereby saving myself the hassle of getting the bus then changing. This didn't quite work out - I did drop off the money, but as all the sandwiches I saw looked really unappetising I went to Mike Wong's for lunch - it's an Asian fast food restaurant right next to McDonalds. See the logo below for the reason why this proximity is important.

Anyway, the food was pretty good. They had beef panang, probably my favourite Thai dish, which I wolfed down pretty quickly. My journey to CERN didn't quite work out as quickly and efficiently as I had planned, as I ended up taking two trams and having to run through the pouring rain in between them. It is ATLAS week at CERN, which means there are lots of meetings going on in the rather grand main auditorium. I met someone to discuss what I should do in the masterclass I am moderating tomorrow, before realising I am actually doing it with Dan, not her, after we had already discussed a strategy. What a waste of time. I attended a couple of talks I didn't follow, pressed the wrong button on the coffee machine which meant that it tried to fit a big coffee into an espresso cup, minced around in the afternoon trying to sort out my shifts and some dull admin stuff, before meeting some people in R1 for a drink. I was persuaded to go and play pool with them, but for some reason just before we were about to leave I suddenly felt like it was a terrible idea and I fled to the bus, making it home in 45 minutes exactly, the fastest so far. Tonight my plan is to build some shelves and wash my hair. I am well rock 'n' roll.

Training, Snowsports, Dinner, Exhaustion & Chicken

2010-02-21T15:02:00.007Z

19/02 - I had my second and third shift training sessions today, an hour earlier than I thought. I was happily pottering about the flat in my dressing gown when my laptop, phone and iPod all beeped in synchrony to inform me that I had precisely an hour before my training started. I dressed hurriedly and dashed for the bus, but had to make a stop along the way to buy a Swiss phone - I knew I wouldn't have another chance to get it before Monday, so I decided I would prefer to be 10 minutes late than spend another three days spending loads on every phone call. Incredibly, I think I only missed a couple of minutes, despite heading to the wrong room (again). The training was about as fun as the first session, the basic message that was communicated was that if anything untoward happened, we should just call the experts. That seems pretty easy. I had two training sessions as I have not yet decided which desk I want to work on, and I wanted to see which one seemed like the better choice - one desk involves just monitoring stuff and calling experts, the other requires the shifter to attempt to mitigate problems before calling in the experts. Sounds like more opportunities to make things worse to me, so I think I'll choose the former.

At beers the main chat was ski/snowboarding this weekend. I arranged to meet Jody and Ailsa at the bus stop at half 7 in the morning, and headed off to meet Dan and Clare (a friend of his from Canterbury) for dinner. I had decided a couple of days ago that I would switch from beer to wine after work, as it seemed like a much healthier, less bloaty option. Consequently after three glasses I fell off the bus on the way to meet Dan - luckily noone really saw and I was able to run to my tram with some dignity intact (or so I told myself). We went to L'Incontro, which Dan claimed had the best pasta he had ever tasted. It was good, and also enormous (penne siciliana for three gave us second helpings and a doggy bag), but I wasn't too blown away, for reasons which will become clear in a moment.

20/12 - I got an early night in preparation for my early start, and was awoken at 0310 by some loud noise from dowstairs. After this I found it impossible to get back to sleep, I was sick at about 4, and lay in bed wide awake for the 3 1/2 hours until my alarm went off. Still feeling pretty ill, I met the others at the bus stop and declared that I would use the bus ride to gauge my suitability for the day's activities. Thinking back now I am amazed that I bought the ticket and got on the coach to Flaine - I was exhausted, nauseous and having massive stomach cramps, but for some reason I thought I would be fine to chuck myself around in the snow, with a toilet nowhere in sight. On the coach I managed to get a window seat and the only spare seat on the entire coach - I refused to move for a lady who wanted to sit next to her friend, which I would usually have done in an instant, but my need was far greater than here at that moment.

On arrival in Flaine (fantastically ugly town, by the way) I went to hire a snowboard and sent Jody off to the pharmacy to buy me some Immodium, which he very kindly did. I scoffed them and told he and Ailsa to go ahead of me, do a couple of runs then I'd meet them back at the top. Unfortunately Flaine has a very different layout from the last place I went, as there is one big ski lift which goes up to 2420 m, then various long runs coming back down, making meeting up pretty tricky. As a result I was on my own for the entire morning, a little weak and even more uncoordinated than usual, falling all over the place and rapidly running out of energy. I was very grateful when I got a text from Ailsa at noon telling me she was having lunch at the bottom. On the upside, the Immodium seemed to work, so I assaulted my stomach with a croissant, ice tea, beef bourgignon and coke before heading back to the ski shop to swap my board for some skis - definitely the best decision of the day, even though I haven't been skiing since 1998 within 5 minutes I was on the phone while skiing, dealing with lifts, and heading down the mountain in zero visibility with none of the fear I would have felt on a board.

Flaine from above

I managed some turns, kept up with the experienced skiers on my second run, went a little off-piste and even did a couple of (accidental) moguls without any disaster. As much as it may disappoint Jody and the other snowboarders I think I'm going to stick to skis for a while. The bus ride back to Geneva wasn't ideal, as we were delayed by about half an hour stuck behind all the other buses trying to make it out of the mountains. I managed to get a little sleep in on the way, using my jacket as my pillow while Jody used my shoulder as his.

I had barely enough time for a shower before I had to rush off to Zack and Masa's for dinner, which was brilliant. They have an amazing flat just opposite La Comedie theatre, on the 6th floor with amazing views over the city. Dinner was a delicious salad of melon, mint, goats cheese and cucumber (maybe) with a freshly made sardine pâté, followed by a green pea and mint soup, then scallops with a jerusalem artichoke risotto and balsamic sauce, then a really dense cheesecake with raspberries. All this was accompanied by some great wines too - I have completely forgotten the names of the other dinner guests, two Croatians who have recently relocated from Zagreb to Lausanne, the husband works for Philip Morris and the wife is pregnant (as is Masa, by the way). I was called upon to explain the purpose of the LHC at one point, which I think went OK, although I'm not 100% sure of the factual accuracy of my description. After dinner Zack very kindly gave me (and the IKEA stuff they bought me on Tuesday) a lift back to my flat, a distance of about 900 metres. When I got in I had a chat with Simon back home, during which we worked out that I had been up for 37 out of the last 40 hours. I eventually got to sleep at about half past two, it was a very long day.

21/02 - I awoke to find a cloudless sky and a beautiful day, so I set out with two things in mind - try to take some good pictures, and buy a whole chicken from the food market down on Planpalais. I wandered down through the park and through all the stalls selling tat and shoddy kitchenware, before buying a small chicken with potatoes roasted underneath the rôtisserie in all the chicken fat. I was told last night that it was the best value lunch to be had in Geneva, and I think I agree - it came to CHF 13 (about £7.80) which is a bit less than my average lunch at CERN. I picked up a few low quality kitchen goods before going home, deboning the chicken and eating about half of it in one go with some curry mayonnaise - I am currently having a bit of a lie down after this effort. I am supposedly meeting Sam and Alex (two guys from home who moved out here around the same time as me) this afternoon for a drink, but I'm not too sure if I've got the energy...

Parc des Bastions

OK, turns out I did have the energy. I met Alex at Sam's , which is a ridiculous CHF 6000 a month flat in the old town, paid for by his company - we met Sam in Le Clemence, a bar just near where I met Zack and Masa on Monday night. It was nice seeing them, I'm glad they're here too - we were discussing the series of coincidences that have led us from leaving Wellington in 2002 to all ending up living within 10 minutes walk of each other in Geneva, all arriving in the space of three weeks. Oh, and I finished the whole chicken.

Meeting Zack, Short Films & iChat

2010-02-18T14:02:00.002Z

16/02 - My journey to CERN was made far more pleasant than usual by the presence of some Gypsy buskers on my Tram, playing violin and accordion and generally making a dull grey day seem more exciting. My actual day passed largely without incident, consisting of two long meetings and a lunchbreak, whereas my evening was really good. I met Zack Taylor and his wife Masa for a drink - Zack is the son of a friend of my grandparents, and works out here for the UN development program. He's a very interesting guy, having done fieldwork in many countries, focussing on the Balkans especially Croatia (where he met Masa). We had some good in depth chats about a wide array of topics, generally ending in one or other of us vainly trying to link our two fields - international disarmament policy and particle physics have few areas in common. I am going for dinner with them on Saturday, and I'm looking forward to it immensely - I must admit to not really being myself at first, attempting to make a good impression and probably coming across a little twitchy and overeager. The wine was very good though, so I think I relaxed pretty quickly.

17/02 - I made it in rather earlier than usual today, intending to do a full day of work. However, about 11 o'clock Zack texted me asking what I wanted from IKEA, as he and Masa had very kindly offered to pick up some stuff for me while they were there. Consequently I spent rather a long time browsing the online catalogue for stuff rather than doing anything useful. Lunch was a delicious but bony Peking duck (as it is Chinese new year there is a different Chinese dish in R1 this week), and in the evening I had intended to go for a curry with Jody and a few others, but due to some confusion about leaving times I ended up going to Love Me Do's for pizza a gogo again, followed by The Terminator at Dan's flat.

18/02 - I had the first session of my shift training this morning, from 9-1030. I was 15 minutes late as I couldn't find the venue, and once I got there it was pretty dull. It was mostly an overview of what does what inside the ATLAS computing structure, and which bit we'd be dealing with. The rest of the day was pretty standard (satay beef for lunch, delicious), and in the evening I went over to The Globe with James to watch a few short films - we had missed the documentary session which was what I really wanted to see, so we made do with one of the fiction sessions. The films were interesting enough, I'm not going to bother going into detail about them now but my favourites were one about some Bedouins running out of sugar for their tea, and a Serbian film called L'age de la virginity which was about a future in which virginity was recognised as a (potentially fatal) disease, following one chap with a serious case during his visit to a Serbian virginity clinic, staffed by hot nurses of course.

When I got home I persuaded Hannah to get online with the google account I made her, purely so we could chat with Clare and Kelly at the same time. Not much important was said, but a lot of fun was had.

Valentine's weekend, my first return trip TO London.

2010-02-15T12:42:00.000Z

12/02 - I got in early for my meeting, (having scoffed the last of Wednesday's chilli for breakfast) managed to fix my code and got it all working before I remembered that last week we decided not to bother with it, as too many people couldn't make it. Oh well, my mild panic made me do a bit more work, so no bad came of it. I went for lunch at restaurant 2 with Max, Kostye and Dan, where I ended up having a lamb kebab and couscous - the kebab was just a doner eaten with cutlery, not that delicious but very moreish. The afternoon dragged as I was waiting for 3 o'clock to arrive, when I fled to get the shuttle bus to the airport. My flight was at 1620, and I was already at the airport and waiting at the gate by 1540, incredibly fast really. The flight was unremarkable, and as I was speeding through the gates at Gatwick I was accosted by Kelly, who had lied to me and dashed off to Gatwick while I was waiting to board - it takes the same time to get to Gatwick from East Acton as it does from Geneva, it would appear. It felt great to be back in the UK, it was 10 degrees warmer than when I got on the plane, and I felt back at home immediately.

I will keep the account of the weekend brief, but suffice to say I enjoyed being back, I really like the new house (although it's not that new as Bob has lived there for 2 years and I've been round quite a lot), although there are a few things about it that need fixing.

When I got to our new house, I was allowed to do one job, which was fixing the bed - we have inherited Bob's single-and-a-half size bed, which he had been using like a cot since the slats fell through. This ended up taking ages, as a bracket or two were missing, and so I had to add some new ones, improvise a lot of bits and rely on nails and cable ties rather more heavily than I would have liked. Eventually it was fixed and sturdy, just in time for dinner. Kelly had bought Prosecco & smoked salmon, which we had before cooking the steaks - we had some amazing ones from Moen's, some prizewinning Scottish fillets that we rubbed in olive oil and peppercorns before serving with home-made garlicky chips. I was very pleased with all this, especially when the strawberry jelly dessert was served.

13/02 - Had a great day with Kelly, starting with a trip down to Northcote Road for breakfast en route to Portobello Road market, to see if there was anything we could get for the house. As it turns out there wasn't, we just had a good wander, ended up in a pub then went home for a nap before dinner. Dinner was at a place called Terroirs, a wine bar/restaurant just off the Strand. We had various delicious little courses, including duck rillettes, snails on garlic toast with parsley, massive prawns and tiny clams. The main reason to be there was the wine - they specialise in so-called 'natural' wines, of which I have heard mixed reviews. The one we had was nice, but had a slight aftertaste of cheap cider. The normal ones (a Jurançon, a Chenin Blanc and three others I can't remember the details of) were all great, and reasonable too - we ended up paying £2 less for the wine than we did on food.

14/02 - Having had our Valentine's day yesterday, today we spent most of the day eating or preparing to eat. Pancakes for breakfast were followed by a trip to ASDA to get stuff for dinner - a pork, beef and butternut squash lasagne. Clare and Simon came over for dinner, which was delicious with a ton of salad & followed by Vienetta, courtesy of Simon. During the cooking and eating process we must have got through 5 or 6 bottles of wine, after which we settled down to watch a film - due to some technical problems we couldn't get either the PS3 or DVD player to work, so we settled for X-men on TV, which none of us made it all the way through. I packed and we were in bed quite early, although I couldn't really sleep due to the rubbish heating - I could either swelter under two duvets or lie out in the cold and shiver.

15/02 - I had to be up at half five anyway, and I was at Clapham junction by 6, and at Gatwick by 0705. I was a little blasé about time, and after titting around on the internet for a bit I realised I wasn't quite so early as I thought, and I made it to the gates just as they opened for my flight. It was incredibly uncomfortable and I was in the aisle and unable to recline, so I only got about 10 minutes sleep on my way back to Geneva. I had some leftover lasagne which I ate with an inadequate fork, which was probably the only reason I had the energy to make it through the day. By the time I got to my desk it was 1145, meaning it took me 5 hours door-to-door this time, whereas it only took 4 and a half on the way out. I reckon that with slightly better planning and more confidence in my ability to sprint through airports I can cut that down to 4 hours - less if I didn't have to change terminals on that crappy bus at Gatwick. Also I am taking a pillow next time, easyjet hand baggage regulations be damned.

I did some mild coding in the morning, and I had a meeting at 3 which lasted until half four, but I spent most of the day blearily wandering round CERN either on my way to, or returning from, coffee. I left at half five, stunned that I made it until then, and had a chat about wind chill on the bus back with Arlo and Alex - I had heard them talking about "increased rate" and "cooling below ambient temperature" and I had assumed that they were talking about physics, but when I heard Arlo saying "try getting a wet towel..." I realised this wasn't the case. Dinner was a decidely less hearty affair than the past four nights (fondue, steak, lasagne) consisting as it did of a Gruyére toastie and some terrine de foie on brioche. OK, maybe it was quite fancy, but it was just what I had in the fridge/cupboard. I watched some winter olympics and had a chat with my Dad & I was wiped out and in bed by about half 9 (although, of course, I was messing around on the internet playing games until about 11).

Two slow days and Fondue

2010-02-11T21:59:00.003Z

09/02 - Well today was rather a waste. I overslept, yet again, made little progress in doing any useful work, and adjourned myself to the Hypermarché/shopping centre at Balexert in another instalment of my fruitless quest for decent footwear to deal with all this snow & cold. Once again all the boots were horrible, but the giant Migros had loads of interesting european stuff, such as vacuum packed veal tongue and unidentifiable things in cans. I steered away from the tongue and ended up accidentally buying another CHF 150 worth of food, including lots of freezer stuff, a massive steak and some Café de Paris butter. As is the way with supermarkets here, I was ejected at 7pm and made my way home where I had the aforementioned steak and butter in a massive sandwich.

10/02 - Hmm - today was again rather uneventful, which is why I'm including 3 days in one post here. I had lunch with the Imperial guys (Paul, Arlo, Alex, Ravi & Mike) and spent the afternoon half working, half looking up flights. In the evening I got the bus with Dan, James and a few others who were going for the Pizza a gogo night, but I left them at Gare Cornavin and went on a little adventure with my camera, as it was just getting dark and the river/lake looked amazing. I ended up walking home, linking together a few places in my head along the way - this city really is rather small. Well, the centre is, I'm sure there's lots more to explore a little further afield, but I haven't got there yet. I went home and cooked myself a chilli, which was enormous and delicious, before going over to Dan's to watch a film. I arrived to find 10 people already watching No Country For Old Men, not The Godfather as was previously suggested, but a welcome substitution as it is a good hour shorter.

11/02 - Kelly rang me nice and early to ensure I would get up too, so I did so and made myself an enormous sandwich out of the leftover chilli before leaving the house. The weather forecast on the radio predicted that today it would be between -4 and -15 degrees, and even though I was wrapped up in 4 layers (including thermals) and my hat and gloves I was still freezing by the time I got to CERN. I had a late lunch of soup today, and I believe this may be the only way one can eat cheaply in Switzerland. The vegetable soup isn't too exciting on its own, but add the free parmesan, bread and tabasco and it's actually pretty good. More importantly, it is only CHF 1.20, making it cheaper than a cup of tea!

Unfortunately it is not that filling, as I discovered around 4 o'clock when my stomach started grumbling about its emptiness. I fended it off with fruit but this did not seem too effective, so I distracted myself with looking up French courses instead. At 5 I had my training course to be a moderator at the International Physics Masterclasses next week - this was essentially a run-through of a sample program, giving us some simple tips about how best to engage with the students, but it became an exercise in semantics, as the physicists around me picked apart the most petty and irrelevant aspects of the presentation instead of seeing the genuinely useful information we were being given. What an annoying bunch, I have been paired with a couple of them next week and I dread to think who I may have been paired with.

We caught a serendipitous lift with Max to the Royal Holloway dinner, which consisted of the six of us going for fondue at Bains de Paquis, a little place temporarily built over the changing rooms on a pier into the middle of the lake. As we were walking out over the exposed jetty, skidding on ice, the wind whipping down the lake & whistling through the masts, it dawned on me that this was probably the coldest I have ever been. I mean, most of me was warm, but my exposed face and fingers were incredibly cold - I was unable to breathe through my nose due to the stinging cold which felt like my brain was frosting up, and my fingers were numb within 200 metres. Once we reached the restaurant things improved, as Ricardo and Dan braved the cold once more to order our food from the little shack outside, and returned bearing wine. The fondue was awesome, we had tons of bread, dried meat, onions and a few cornichons to dip in it, and it went fast. I mean that the 6 of us demolished an enormous vat of cheese in a shade under 20 minutes, down to the last scraping. As we were so quick we went to Café des Arts for a drink and a chat before we went home - as is always the case with these things, there were some awkward moments in conversation where one could tell that we were, for the most part, colleagues rather than friends. I have certainly attended much less pleasant dinners though, and it went better than I expected, even if we were all done and on our way home by 10. Oh, while we were in Café des Arts Dan somehow managed to drink CHF 30 worth of whisky in the time it took me to drink one very small glass of wine - impressive, but not very frugal.

I came home and packed rather excitedly - I am looking forward to going home tomorrow enormously, Kelly has planned dinner already and limited the number of jobs I'm allowed to do - I can fix the bed and the internet and that's it (I'm going to try and fix the toilet flush while she's not looking). I am also looking forward to it not being so incredibly cold - I like the snow and ice, but not the biting wind that seems to come from all directions at once, making shelter impossible to find. I am not, however, looking forward to my meeting in 9 1/2 hours - I have been trying all week to rewrite a piece of code and make it simpler, but now it won't run and I can't get the results I said I would send last Monday. All this means that at my meeting in the morning I will have not proceeded in any way since last week, which is a bit frustrating. Also I will have to admit to this, which is rather more embarrassing.

Snowboarding & Bob's birthday dinner

2010-02-09T11:55:00.005Z

07/02 - I was up at 7 and just about ready to leave when Paul and Tanya arrived to pick us up. Having hurriedly changed my trousers in the lobby, we were off to Les Contamines, a ski resort near Chamonix. The journey only took an hour, during which I was persuaded that I should snowboard with Tanya and the other people in her car, instead of skiing with the others. I hired some stuff when we got there and set off up the mountain in my turquoise trousers and entirely inappropriate jacket. Up at the top Arvinder and Jody offered to teach me for a bit, so I strapped in and we set off - first I was instructed how to do the 'falling leaf', gliding across the slope facing down it, then gliding back the other way. This went pretty well until I was instructed to try toe edge, which involved facing the other way - the problem was not moving like this but turning into it, which I simply could not do. I found it much easier to just go down switch, i.e. change which foot was my front foot. Consequently, after about 20 minutes my right foot was killing me, as it had been angled slightly the wrong way and so I was twisting the ankle every time I changed sides - after a lengthy descent (in which time the skiers had time to go down and up and down again) I adjusted the bindings and all was well. Jody and Arvinder very kindly accompanied me all morning apart from one run I did on my own just before lunch.

When I eventually found the others at the restaurant, I examined my hoody and found that the bottom foot of it was frozen solid, with an inch of hard packed snow on both the inside and the outside as I had been falling over so much. Lunch was a good hearty steak and chips with cheese sauce, which along with a beer made me realise quite how exhausted I was. Afterwards I smashed the snow off my hoody on the wall of the restaurant, stuffed it in a binbag and made my way down to the next lift, freezing cold. We had to get a button lift up for the next one, apparently the enemy of snowboarders as they are designed for people who go uphill facing forwards - I managed to get about 80% up before hitting a bump and crashing down in front of a small child who laughed at me. I couldn't get up the hill to try and get back on the the lift, and so my only option, given that we were short on time by this point, seemed to be to go through the powder onto the red run that the skiers/better snowboarders were taking. The effort of falling and getting back up again constantly soon warmed me up, and due to the layout of the resort I ended up doing a couple of red runs back down the mountain without any major incidents - not bad for my first day, I reckon. I had to be hurried along by Jody in order to get the last lift at half four - I got it at 16:28. I must admit to taking the lazy cablecar option back down to the car, along with the girls, while the others sped off and arrived about the same time as us. I got a lift with Paul this time, stuffed in the back with all the snowboards and skis. Within 2 minutes I realised quite how knackered and broken I was, as various aches and pains surfaced (which have not gone away as I write this on Tuesday).

When I got in I had a meal with my new housemates and my sister - or rather, I was connected via a Skype video link to Bob (and Georgie)'s Sunday dinner back in Clapham. I was given a party hat, like the one Bob is modelling below, and seated at one end of the table while Bob sat at the other. I had a rather sad bowl of pasta & pesto while at the other end they tucked into slow roasted pork belly, tiny birthday cakes and port - I could join in on the cheese course though. I am not sure if this will be happening every Sunday I'm away, but it was nice to see everyone (albeit grainily) and to sort-of-meet Sophie, the new girl in the house.

My first videoconference dinner.

08/02 - I awoke on Monday barely able to move, switched off seven alarms and still arrived late. I learnt some more about what I will actually be doing out here, and ended up staying far later than I intended because our 5pm meeting was delayed by an hour, meaning I didn't make it down to R1 until 7. My various supermarket and quiz plans were therefore in jeopardy, but this wasn't too much of a problem, as I decided to sack off the pub quiz and instead go for dinner with James, Paul & Mike (from yesterday) and Arlo and Alex (from Friday night). We went to La Trattoria, a restaurant which I assume is a popular choice as its number is inscribed on the wall of my office. I had an enormous platter of penne which I barely finished, and stumbled off to the bus, where James and I had a somewhat depressing discussion about reasons why the government should fund continue to fund particle physics, and our own personal motivations for what we're doing. I should add that James had been part of a group showing the provost of UCL around today - he is a vice-chancellor of the UK funding council or something, and was out here to see what the money the UK pays actually produces at CERN. Consequently he had had quite a few beers with UCL academics before coming for dinner, and was in a rather more reflective mood than usual.

An undeserved hangover

2010-02-06T15:56:00.000Z

05/02 - At 6 I went down to R1 to meet some people for beers, only to find that there was noone I knew there at all. Eventually some other people joined me, and a plan was hashed out - Jody was to lead us to a falafel place near Gare Cornavin, and then we would join two Irish guys (Dermot and Steve, I think) on a little pub crawl round Planpalais. I nipped home to drop my stuff off and avoided the falafel, picking up Dan on the way to meet Jody again - on our arrival we were led around the block by the Irish guys who, it transpired, had no idea where we were going. We eventually settled on a pub called L'Elephant Dans La Cannette, a studenty place which sold Delirium Tremens, a 10% Belgian beer which is named after an "acute episode of delirium that is usually caused by withdrawal from alcohol". I had a normal pint and one of those before deciding grumpily that I was tired and wasn't having much fun, so I ditched and headed home.

On my arrival back at the flat I heard some commotion coming from one of the windows - I recognised Arlo, a chap I met at summer school, and shouted to him. He told me to come up to studio 13, where I found a load of people I knew getting ready for a night out at Club Platinum, some swanky expensive place. I was given a vodka and coke and Tanya regaled her friend Mike with the tale of how the girls at summer school had decided that I was one of the most attractive people there - quite what he was meant to make of this I don't know, it was rather embarrassing and she eventually stopped when I pointed this out. I learnt that they were all planning to go skiing on Sunday at Les Contamines, which is perfect for a beginner like me, so I asked one of them to let me know when they were going and I'd get the bus. They dashed off to the club, while I went to bed despite their best efforts to get me to come along.

06/02 - Now, when I got upstairs the incredibly strong vodka kicked in, and I found myself getting increasingly drunk while in bed, meaning I ended up not sleeping until about 5, and waking up at 8 with an enormous headache and no painkillers in the house. I hid under the duvet until 1, when I felt ready to face the world - after searching in vain for my laundry card for half an hour, I walked to Rive to buy some boots, which was ultimately a fruitless mission. Instead I walked along the lake and ended up in Manor, the massive department store, where I blew CHF 50 on wines and treats (and loo roll, less glamourous).

When I got home I talked to Jody and found that Paul and co. had saved me a place in their car, and would be coming to pick me up at 0740 in the morning! Very generous of them, I'm very pleased I don't have to get the bus up there, this'll be much better (as long as they can put up with me being a total beginner). I should probably eat and go to bed soon, as it's 10 and I have to be up at half 6 or so.

Is there anybody here? & accidental horse

2010-02-05T15:39:00.006Z

04/02 - I met Dan and some of the other UK people for a beer at 6, informed James of this and he promptly hopped off the bus (he was already on his way home), walked back and joined us. In retrospect this was a little pointless, as we then had one drink and went and got the bus anyway - Dan stayed behind to do some work, but within 15 minutes had sent us both the following text message:

I quickly realised I can't be fucked with all this. Give me a text when you guys have finished dinner and I'll come meet you for a walk.

James and I had planned to while away the evening exploring the Old Town (left). After dinner (nasi goreng with all the leftover rice from Tuesday, yum) we set out as far as the cathedral and at each turning we would spin a bottle to choose which direction to go. Unfortunately, due to the fact we didn't want to (a) leave the Old Town and (b) didn't want to go down any obviously empty streets, we mostly overruled the bottle's decision. It wasn't long before it dawned on me that Geneva's Old Town is a very small region, made up mostly of the Cathedral and roads that lead to the Cathedral. In the end we stopped at a place called Le Roi Ubu, which looked cool enough until we saw the prices - my 100ml of red wine was £3, which in retrospect wasn't actually that bad. James' beer was nearly £6, although it was also 9% so at least he got his money's worth. By the time we had had a couple it was almost 11 and I was (unjustifiably) knackered, so we walked back home via a few nice viewpoints and the like. I am convinced that this city must hold some exciting and interesting bars, hidden away somewhere, I am just not altogether sure how to find them.

05/02 - A rushed and exceedingly rainy morning got me in for my morning meeting, where I was quizzed about plans and progress. By emphasising the former and asking questions instead of speaking about the latter, I think I came out of it pretty well, albeit with a full (and slightly intimidating) to do list. At lunch I hurried to the steak frites section of Restaurant 1, as my morning banana had been woefully ineffective at staving off hunger until now (2pm). However, I made a mistake - due to a stack of plates in front of the sign, what I read as steak de choix (steak how you like it) was actually steak de cheval (slab of rare horse). I realised this after I had added mayonnaise to my chips and chilli to my meat, so I was in no position to exchange my meal for another and found a seat. I was on my own again initially, but I was swiftly joined my Matilde and Elisa, two friends from London. This would have made me happy if it weren't for the fact that Matilde had a beef steak - I can only assume there was a rush on horse and they had to make do. It wasn't actually that bad, as long as I concentrated on the sauces and not the somewhat sinewy texture.

I attended my first on-site meeting today, the meeting of the Top X-section group. I followed a little of what they said, but quickly snuck out after my relevant talks to go and meet Joe (a chap I met ages ago in Oxford and have seen a few times since) in R1. After my bout of sadness yesterday lunchtime I got chatting to a few people about what I needed for winter sports this weekend, and Joe offered to lend me some snowboarding trousers while James said I could have his goggles. Joe wasn't there, but I chatted to some people who are going skiing tomorrow and they advised me that the resort they have chosen (Argentière) really isn't good for beginners, so I may not need all the gear anyway (very kind of them though - the trousers are a rather fetching turquoise). Whether or not I go tomorrow is an important decision for a few reasons:

If I don't go I will be able to go out tonight (if there's anywhere to go out to)
I need to do some skiing before Kelly gets here in March, as she will have just spent a week skiing and I don't want to be shown up
If I go then I will only have Sunday to look round Geneva (if you remember from my previous post, almost everything in Geneva is shut on Sunday and I really need to buy some stuff - my 7 year old Nike Hi-tops aren't holding up too well in the snow and rain)

Oh, one more thing - I wrote most of this entry sitting on a broken office chair amongst a pile of rubbish outside the lift in my building. This is because I left my keys in my coat pocket when I went to my meeting and then everyone left and locked the office.