Film retrospective: Birmingham, 2000-2001

Sadly, very little film from my third year at Birmingham survived the scanning process (one reason not to use Max Spielmann again) and the only photographs I have are from other places. On the left is the slightly-under-construction Eden Project, a series of gigantic geodesic domes near St Austell that house plants from various biomes around the world. Below is Leeds 2001, possibly the first music festival I attended and also the first riot I was caught up in. The stage shot gives you an idea of how difficult it is to get anywhere near a performer (in this case, Iggy Pop) and the night shot shows the aftermath of the riot, when festival-goers decided to burn down the portable toilets.

 

Film retrospective: Birmingham, 1999-2000

Above: A valley near Cadair Idris, Wales.

My second year at Birmingham, the portion of it captured on film at least, was characterised by more trekking around the wet and windy uplands that happened to be a convenient drive away. By this time, I had been upgraded to supervisor status (having completed the hiking section of my own D of E the previous summer) and was largely occupied with making sure that nobody got hypothermia. One particularly resourceful group had everything they were carrying drenched during a surprisingly violent squall except their cannabis supply, which had received top priority in the waterproofing hierarchy.

Above, left to right: The Vale (student residences at Birmingham), The University of Birmingham’s central campus. Below, left to right: Edgbaston cricket ground, Coverack Bay (Cornwall).

Above: British uplands, location unknown. Below:Walking near Cadair Idris, Wales.

Above, left to right: The cwm at Cadair Idris, walking in the Dark Peak.

 

Film retrospective: Ilam, 1999

Just as I was beginning to wonder whether being in the scenic Scottish Highlands was worth such a crappy job, I got an offer to go to Derbyshire and work for the Youth Hostel Association at Ilam Hall. I was off like a rocket, and spent the rest of the summer serving food, cleaning up after hikers and exploring the rainforest-like limestone valleys of the White Peak. This was my first encounter with the YHA’s seasonal assistant programme, and it opened doors to jobs for all the university holidays I happened to be in the UK for.

Above, left to right: Dovedale, a natural arch in the Dovedale valley. Below, left to right: The view back towards Ilam, Thorpe Cloud.

 

A cathedral of nature

With the best part of a day in central London at my disposal (before moving on to Hong Kong), I had initially planned on basing myself in the South Kensington area and visiting both the Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum. As things turned out, the Natural History Museum was just too interesting and I spent several hours exploring it quite thoroughly. The place was overrun with school groups from the minute the doors opened in the morning, giving me valuable insight into what kids are interested in doing in museums (showing off to other kids, followed by finding gruesome or unusual exhibits, followed by whacking all buttons on an interactive display simultaneously).

Left: Charles Darwin. Below, left to right: Thomas Henry Huxley, Joseph Banks, Paracyclotosaurs davidi, giant ground sloth (Glossotherium robustum).

Given lots of time to poke around the less-visited sections of the museum, I was rather hoping to find a forgotten door or access tunnel to a non-public area (cf. Dry Store Room No. 1). However, the staff have been quite vigilant and all forbidden areas are effectively labelled as such (though from the sheer volume of staff going in and out of them, tailgating would be sheer simplicity). Unfortunately, the main stuffed mammals gallery was closed for redevelopment (possibly for the mounting of the Thames Whale skeleton) but the rest of the animal kingdom compensated more than enough. The daily talk (kind of a “meet the scientist” series) was about human evolution in Africa’s Great Rift Valley, complete with pass-around replicas of the most important skulls and gorgeous pictures of Kenya.

Left: Long-horned beetle (Callipogon armilatum). Below, left to right: Sabre-toothed cat, giant golden mole (Chrysospalax trevelyani), leafcutter ants, monkey and giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum).

Finally, I took my third tour of the Darwin Centre‘s wet collections – thousands upon thousands of specimens preserved in spirits (ethanol, methanol or formaldehyde) used as a research resource. Only a few are on public display, the vast majority being sequestered behind fireproof doors in chilled rooms, but they are always impressive. Notable items include most of the samples collected on the second voyage of HMS Beagle (following which Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection), a coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae; a species thought extinct until one was fished up in 1938) and a complete giant squid (Architeuthis spp.; there would also have been a colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, but it broke apart during hauling-in and everything except the head was lost).

Left: Lesser spotted dogfish (Scyliorhinus canicula). Below, left to right: Red fox (Vulpes vulpes), Pencil-spine urchin (Cidaris cidaris), starfish (Astropecten aurautiacus).

 

Testing the flat cap

Having discovered quite late on in my stay in Yorkshire that I look pretty good in a flat cap (the traditional local headgear), I walked up to Emley Moor to test it out. I was mentally reviewing its performance in various categories, the most important being warmth (quite), stability (a little on the small side; I have since received a new one) and aesthetics. While I was up there, I took advantage of the spectacular view of farmland dropping down into Huddersfield to rig up the tripod and look like some country squire following gentlemanly pursuits.

 

Countdown to the Big Thaw

Although there were no more major snowfalls, temperatures remained decidedly frosty and the fields were therefore still a uniform white as far as the eye could see (about four miles, due to the hilly terrain). I took a few short walks to reacquaint myself with the local scenery, disturbing a couple of hares (Lepus europaeus) and a rather fat common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), and watched enterprising collared doves (Streptopelia decaocto) eat sprouts by perching on the top of a plant and leaning over to attack the stems. Apart from a small wind turbine at a nearby farm and the ever-expanding distribution centre at the main road, the old homestead looked exactly as it did years ago (a marked contrast to the continuous demolition and construction in Korea).

The poor weather meant that I was housebound for quite a lot of the week, but this did allow me to finish going through all of my stored possessions and take approximately half a ton of books and bric-a-brac to our local Oxfam. I now have the onerous tasks of estimating how much volume everything else takes up in order to get a shipping quote for the move to Canada, and of listing the more interesting things on eBay.

As the time of typing, temperatures are steadily edging up and we should have rolling green hills again by the end of the weekend. Run-off is filling the streams (flooding will be the next annual unforeseen transport chaos-causing disaster), and the hedgerow birds will be able to find their own food instead of relying on the fat-and-insect pellets I requisitioned from the supermarket. If there isn’t another big freeze, this will have been one of the shortest and most intense winters in living memory.

 

Extreme weather warning

My flight back to the UK from Japan went by in better-than-expected speed and comfort, partly due to the surprisingly good selection of films (including The Last King of Scotland, Gorillas in the Mist and Cry Freedom – I didn’t have time to watch Goodbye Bafana). We touched down ahead of schedule in light snow (perhaps 2″; heavy snow by British standards), and then had to sit on the runway for three hours wile a parking space was cleared for us. Of course, I missed my train back North and had to jump on a (much) later bus, eventually getting back about 27 hours after I’d left the hostel.

I woke up very late to find an unusually-thick blanket of snow covering the landscape as far as the eye could see. Over the next few days, more fell and little melted and most of the evening news was given over to the annual chaos on the roads, panic buying, salt shortages and doom-laden weather forecasts. I wasted little time in getting outdoors (having heaved my cold-weather gear all the way from Korea), and took a short ramble over on Marsden Moor with activist extraordinaire Matt (who you may remember from other UK posts) and Emma. The scenery was stark and blinding, with a biting wind blowing all the way across the Pennines, and we admired it for as long as we could stand the cold before retreating back into the valley.

 

Home and hearth

In the absence of any reasonably-priced direct flights to the UK, Amy and I opted to go to Amsterdam and avoid taking a slightly-more-environmentally-damaging-per-passenger-kilometre short-haul flight by making our way through Europe overland. We touched down in the evening, and discovered almost immediately that our hostel (despite excellent reviews) was situated in the middle of the main red light district. We rubbed shoulders with the loutish punters as little as possible, and took the first convenient train to Hoek van Holland the following morning. We were expecting a fairly rough crossing to Harwich, but were mercifully becalmed and arrived in London none the worse for wear.

With the best part of the day to spend in the region of either our hostel or Victoria Station, we took a short walk through Hyde Park and paid a visit to the incomparable Natural History Museum. Sadly the Darwin Centre tours weren’t running, so we couldn’t see the giant squid but did manage to test our knowledge of other areas of interest and attend both a puppet show (Christmas-themed) and lunchtime lecture (about the red and blue crabs of Christmas Island, including some live specimens). We then made our way to Victoria by an unintentionally circuitous route (having been given three different sets of directions), but arrived just in time to refuel and board the bus north to Wakefield. After a year away, little had changed and I suspect the fields and houses will be much the same the next time I go home, and probably for the next few decades after that.

With only a few days until Christmas and shopping still to do (Korea slightly lacking in the ethical/tasteful gift department), Amy and I absorbed the local delights of Halifax and Huddersfield and finished all our wrapping with plenty of time to spare. Amy quickly made herself an indispensable part of the household by baking hundreds of cookies, and we home-and-hearth-ed it up by decorating the tree, persuading Boris (the cat) that we were a legitimate addition to his territory and feeding old apples to Bert, a Shetland pony that had appeared in the field opposite. When not coming over hopefully when people appeared, he spent most of his time hobnobbing with the horse in the field behind and sending up small clouds of dust from his coat.

The traditional Christmas Eve service at the local churches in my area (and possibly all over the UK) is called the Christingle – it’s the usual Nativity and carols, but participants are given an orange (representing the world) wrapped with a red ribbon (the blood of Christ) with a candle (Jesus, a.k.a. the Light of the World) and four cocktail sticks with sweets and raisins (the four seasons and the fruits of the Earth) stuck in it. The address was on the significance of the aluminium foil (Christians). This was followed by a nativity production, put on (and almost certainly part-written) by the local primary school children and full of Yorkshire dialect and entertaining modern-day references.

Christmas day was one of the larger family gatherings in recent years, as it was the first time I’d been home in December since leaving to travel over two years ago. As expected, we were overloaded with gifts and everyone remarked how (dumb?) lucky I’d been to meet Amy. We spent Boxing Day digesting, walking in the local valleys and trying some of the gifts out (i.e. my new lens, which I’d bought in Korea due to it being vastly cheaper and brought over without so much as opening the wrapping). Some thought was given to the practicalities of getting around ten kilograms of gifts back to Korea, but the final decision was put off (a mistake, as we later discovered that a single parcel would be astronomically expensive and it’s cheaper to send five packages, each weighing less than 2 kg).

As we were just next to the Peak District, we decided to see some of it and took the train over the Pennines to Greenfield, from where we could access the Dove Stone area with relative ease. There are three reservoirs, the oldest dating back to Victorian times, with miles of walking trails and lots of archaic machinery and unfathomable water-directing structures. We had planned on following a clough up to the moorland proper, but ice made the path too dangerous and we had to mingle with the crowds of low-level daytrippers for the majority of our walk. It was bright and blustery, and surely the King of Tonga would have been just as enthusiastic about the place had he visited in winter.

By a stroke of good fortune, P&P graduate and activist extraordinaire Matt was back in Huddersfield and so we went along to just-reopened Bar 1:22 to check out his latest project. Despite one of the worst possible locations in town, a small co-operative had succeeded in getting a decent live music, drinking and meeting venue together and was well on the way to making it a going concern. We quickly caught up with the activist network (as always, wonderfully factious, fractious and plagued by public apathy), checked off one of Amy’s goals for the trip (an English curry) and got members’ rates for the draught cider. We didn’t have time to stay for the open mic (being reliant on buses), but squeezed as much debate and reminiscence into the meeting as we could.

Our plans for New Year’s Eve had initially consisted of making our way up to Edinburgh for Hogmanay, but other engagements in England plus rough seas near Ireland (possibly preventing one of our friends from making it over) ruled it out. We also had an invitation to the festivities at 1:22, but the lack of public transport on New Year’s Day versus the cost of coming back late at night contributed significantly to us being at home with a good supply of cider and an excellent DVD (another Christmas present). Consultation with friends over the next few days revealed that this, or something like it, had been a popular activity all round.

In keeping with years of tradition, we drove over to my grandparents’ house in North Yorkshire for a visit on New Year’s Day. As usual, the garden was full of birds and I hit upon the excellent idea of going over to the local animal sanctuary to say hello – the notice was too short, however, and we walked out to the woods instead for an afternoon constitutional.

Back in London with only a couple of days to spare, we made a beeline for the National Gallery and stumbled upon a free tour explaining things about the paintings that you would normally need higher degrees in art history to know. We returned for the second tour of the day, quite captivated by the depth of history represented (e.g. Rembrandt couldn’t paint hands) and the entertaining style of the guide (e.g. entirely from sales of their second most popular postcard – possibly Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, but don’t quote me on that – they were able to buy a new work, Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter Landscape – valued at around £7 million).

While Amy went to immerse herself in the Renaissance Faces special exhibition, I took to the streets with the intention of walking down to the river in case there was anything interesting to photograph. Instead, I ran straight into a huge demonstration to do with the invasion of Gaza (plus the usual Socialist Worker/Respect flycatchers) and casually walked into the press photography areas to take a look at people throwing shoes at Downing Street. I suspect that this will become a regular feature of demonstrations from now on, and hope that Oxfam (or a similar organisation) are ready for extended pairing-and-donating operations. I suspect that I stood out a mile in the midst of full-frame bodies and L-series lenses, but stood my ground before allowing the press of people to sweep me back into Trafalgar Square. From there it was a few short steps back to the gallery, safe from a possible George Galloway appearance.

As my parents had insisted upon it, we walked down to the V&A the next day for lunch, stopping by the Serpentine Gallery on the way and arriving in time to have a look round. The sheer scale of the cast galleries was quite a surprise, as was the size of the permanent collection given the existence of the National Gallery and the British Museum just up the road. We ate lunch as instructed in the William Morris Room, tiled to perfection and a feast for most of the senses (the noise didn’t encourage lingering). A brief look at the National Portrait Gallery concluded our flying (but surely not final) visit to London, and England as well.

 

The Great White North

With jet-lag a distant memory and my stomach full of delicious Western food, I took the train up to Edinburgh (noting that trips of five or ten hours seem easy after places like India and Australia), briefly caught up with my aunt, boarded a bus going further north and stepped off in Aberdeen for a rendezvous with a campaigning and aikido buddy from my(not-so-distant) university days. I only had a little time, so we caught up over lots of food, wanderings around the city and hanging out in his rather swish flat. I left for England less than 24 hours later, and somehow got caught up in a police manhunt at Newcastle – they locked the train doors so we couldn’t leave, then swept the carriages with stun guns out while dog and armed units waited outside. The station had also been locked, but we were allowed to leave after ten minutes or so and just made our connecting bus heading south.

With the majority of my holiday (that is, time spent doing things not directly productive or relevant to my upcoming job) time in the UK over, I settled down to make an effort at planning my curriculum for the coming semester. My university had kindly supplied me with the names of some relevant textbooks, though they were nowhere to be found in Huddersfield Central Library and I turned to the local institute of higher education for help. It turns out that one can get a guest user pass for Huddersfield University Library, and so I was soon rubbing shoulders with busy students for the first time in many months. I managed to bash out reasonable course outlines, and will tidy them up in consultation with the rest of the faculty once back in Korea.

Despite some not-quite-unexpected flooding (I had to totter long the top of a wall when walking home one evening to avoid the waters), I made the trip out to North Yorkshire to see my grandparents and spent a thoroughly pleasant day catching up and hanging out. That weekend, we drove up to York to do a bit of shopping and meet my brother, which concluded my sojourn in the North.

All packed, I wrestled my unreasonably heavy suitcase (borrowed from Amy for the specific purpose of moving to Korea) down to Birmingham and looked up some old friends still there (through further study, work or general inertia). Sarah was kind enough to offer me her floor (covered in comfortable cushions) to crash on, and I saw university perennials 360 (finally with some new material) the night I arrived. The following day, we mixed up some crumble topping and strode over to see the inestimable Matt. The day, and most of the night, was then spent seriously hanging out, cooking delicious food, musing over the state of the garden and compost bin, walking in the park, putting the world to rights, meeting other campaigners from my P&P days and generally enjoying ourselves.

I left for London shortly afterwards, having stopped off at Gloucester to see my other grandparents, discovered that my sister had acquired a tufty guinea pig, did some shopping (including, finally, shoes that don’t leak through the soles) and prepared my luggage for the trans-Atlantic trip. On arriving at Gatwick airport, I was unceremoniously hit with a $120 excess baggage fee (undoubtedly due to three enormous chemistry textbooks I had included at the last minute) and fell foul of the 100 ml liquids limit by trying to take an empty bottle on board. Apparently it’s not the actual liquid that is a security risk, but the containers themselves. The flight was tolerably short, if rather bumpy, and I arrived in Toronto in good shape despite the on-board staff continually trying to give me meaty meals. On landing, the temperature was a balmy -8 C, setting the scene for a Canadian holiday in winter.

Amy had trekked out to the airport to meet me, and we hugged our three-week separation away before making our way downtown on the 50s-style subway system, complete with period tiles, typefaces and trains. We went out for Ethiopian food (at one of the hundreds of Ethiopian restaurants in the area) with Amy’s sister, then slept off the worst of the rigours of travel (Amy had just arrived from Korea) at a local hotel run by a cheery Rwandan guy. We awoke to bagels and a warm (by Canadian standards) day, met Maria for lunch, then hung out with her in the bustling Chinatown and Kensington Markets before heading out to a different suburb. We were going to meet Amy’s friend Jaclyn, but were sidetracked by a comic-and-board-game shop and ended up arriving with a new game in tow. After much fussing over the house rabbits and an indescribably spicy Indian meal, we broke out The Dungeon of Dorukan (a The Order of the Stick-inspired board game that I’d picked up in Leeds) and battled monsters in a comical fashion until the wee hours.

In a not-entirely-unpredictable turn of events, a giant snowstorm had swept in overnight and dumped several inches of snow on most of Ontario. We battled our way through the slush to the bus terminal, found the bus going to London (that’s London, Ontario), waited around an hour for it to show up and then got stuck behind three snowploughs clearing the road ahead. While this was undoubtedly the safest way to travel on a dark and snowy night, we arrived late and tired, and were heartened to see Julie (one of Amy’s friends who’d previously worked in Korea). Over the next couple of days, we saw two bands (including Twilight Hotel, from Winnipeg), slept on satin sheets, made a brilliant lasagne, tired out (and were tired out by) Julie’s hyperactive kitten Bernadette and, you’ve guessed it, did a lot of hanging out.

The next stage of our trans-Canada trip was the bus journey to Winnipeg – two hours from London to Toronto, and then a further thirty-two to the Prairies. We had puzzles, books and snack food aplenty, but hadn’t reckoned on the back of the bus being populated with hosers who chatted loudly about stealing skidoos, punching people in the nose and how Tim Horton’s (a popular national chain of coffee shops) doesn’t take debit cards and is therefore the worst thing since being mistaken for an American. Also thrown together with us were a Cameroonian who had a habit of taking photos on his digital camera at night and then reviewing them (sending loud electronic beeps echoing around the bus), a guy with some kind of phlegm problem and a nineteen-year-old comic and computer game fan on his way to Saskatoon. We were grateful to disembark in Winnipeg, having driven through the rock- and tree-filled Canadian Shield for what felt like an eternity. We were immediately asked for cigarettes by a young man just out of jail (he eventually got them from another guy just out of jail), and were whisked away by Amy’s parents a short while later.

After thoroughly settling in, our attention turned to activities during our short time in Manitoba. We went out for a brief walk in the park, which, the outside temperature being -15 C with wind chill taking it down to -25 C, necessitated all kind of precautionary measures like wearing pyjama bottoms underneath our trousers and wrapping up in a thick Saskatchewan RoughRiders jacket. Humid exhaled air tended to hit my scarf, rise up and condense on my glasses, so I had to alternate between being able to see and having a cold nose, and being warm yet vision-impaired. The park was snowy and bright, with sparkly ice particles suspended in the air, and I began to appreciate just how cold the winters are.

The next few days were a blur of activity, with lots of indoor time spent playing board games (including Candamir, the one we picked up in Toronto), testing out the Wii (fun), reading (Amy’s father has a copy of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes) and eating delicious home cooking (including perogies, a Canadian staple of Ukranian origin). We went out for blueberry pancakes with Amy’s friend Sean, and took a look round parts of Winnipeg preparing for the Festival du Voyageur (which we’ll miss as we’ll be in Vancouver). Huge cubes of compacted snow were lined up ready to be turned into sculptures, an ice tower was in the process of being frozen and a gigantic mound of snow had been shovelled onto the University of Manitoba campus ready to be dug into a bowl so students can play “Ditchball”, a rough sport where a giant ball has to be moved around and other players beaten up.

One place we’d both been eager to visit was Fort Whyte, a nature centre just to the west of the city proper. The whole place is extremely frozen during the winter, but this made for a fun experience walking round the trails trying to identify animal tracks in the snow and spotting squirrels and deer between the leafless branches. There is a herd of bison on site, but they were (understandably) huddled far away from the viewing area with not very much to do until spring. We took a second walk over the frozen marshes, tried out a sledge run which launches you onto the (frozen) lake and visited a room full of migratory birds who, due to injury or laziness (really), winter at the centre as they’re unable to migrate. In an interesting parallel with British swans (owned by the Queen), the wintering swans at the centre were owned by the Richardsons, one of Winnipeg’s super-rich families (the airport is also named after them).

The next day, we had a huge brunch at The Forks (a meeting point and shopping centre where Winnipeg’s two principal rivers meet) consisting of potato pancakes, apple pancakes, vegetable pancakes and blueberry pancakes and then toured the Manitoba Museum. There were nature dioramas aplenty depicting Canada’s multitude of fauna, including humans, and hundreds of artifacts from pioneer days (including a replica of the Nonsuch, the trading vessel of the Hudson’s Bay Company). We also took in a very hands-on temporary exhibition of ice age animals, with a mammoth tusk and nearest-equivalent hide (muskox) to feel. That night, the temperature dropped to -32 C (-42 C with wind chill), and so I went outside to experience it and thus get perspective on what I had previously considered to be “cold” temperatures. The first thing I noticed was that my nostril hairs froze on breathing in, with a kind of crackling feeling. Other than that, it just felt extremely cold – I went back inside after a little while as frostbite onset time is around eleven minutes.

On Sunday, Amy and I went out to visit her friend Sean again – he was hosting his back-to-basics church (dubbed “Sunday morning Bible party”), which has at its core fellowship (hanging out) and breaking bread (food) as well as teaching and prayer. It was very laid-back and welcoming, and his cats provided continual light entertainment. Afterwards, we did a little shopping, picked up a board game based on building the Paris metro system, played it, ate pizza and cookies and finally had a brief tour through part of Winnipeg’s seedy underbelly. Today we’re relaxing a bit – we have an overnight bus journey to Moose Jaw and the next leg of our trans-Canada trip.

 

In the game

The recent trend of no communication for a while followed by a brief update continues, and will most likely not abate until mid-March when I’m settled in Korea, stop travelling and go back to making unoriginal observations on the news and the things happening around me. Until then, my commiserations on a less-than-awe-inspiring read.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, little of note happened during my last few weeks in Yongin. Both Amy and I were on holiday, and had no major projects to keep us distracted – if we hadn’t had books, games and wireless internet we may well have gone insane. We joined a small volunteer group to go clean up the oil spill on Padori Beach, but were beaten back by heavy snow and ended up drinking soju in a meat restaurant somewhere in Icheon. On New Year’s Eve we trooped out to Hongdae with Anne and Dan, had a lot of buffet salad food and ended up being given free champagne in a cosy lounge bar. I got an e-mail on New Year’s Day to tell my that I’d got the job I was going for, and so much of my remaining time was spent thinking about how best to organise myself for the coming year.

2008 was only just underway when we received an invitation from a fellow forgotten place enthusiast to go and have a look round an abandoned university in the centre of Seoul. The university closed down a few years ago and moved to a different campus, but the site is only being cleared and renovated for re-use now (and extremely slowly at that). We wandered up to the main gates and quietly ducked into the science faculty, treading broken flasks and chalk underfoot. It wasn’t as eerie as the theme park at Okpo, but the corridors and general neglect lent it more of a computer game atmosphere – almost as if we should have been heavily armed and on the lookout for zombies or aliens. After a quick exploration, we walked up a neighbouring hill and down (past a relocated grave site) into the music, drama and art departments. The art department was a little disturbing in places due to graffiti and murals of schoolchildren, but we didn’t have any major freak-outs. Workmen started clearing out the main building just as we were leaving, so the site might not be there for much longer.

A week or so into January, I came back to the UK for the first time in over eighteen months and marvelled anew at the unique and beautiful landscape. Incessant rain has kept me indoors for much of my time here so far, but that gives me time to sort through my various possessions and decide what will be required in Seoul. I’m essentially sitting on my hands regarding a work visa, as my employer will simply e-mail me when it’s ready and I then have to scramble to the nearest Korean embassy (possibly in Canada, as I’m heading over there at the end of the month). I also have to design an entire curriculum for my students, and will most likely raid Huddersfield University for relevant texts.

Having been out to Sheffield to see some friends, my current plans are to go up to Scotland this weekend, and to hit Birmingham on my way back to London at the end of the month. I’ll than have just under three weeks to make my way across Canada, and after that it’s back to the world of work (until my first holiday, at least).