As I mentioned earlier, my course finished on the 10th, jane’s on the 17th and then the remaining week just vanished.

Packing boxes, personal admin, seeing realtives, sorting shipping out all seemed to move along at a steady pace and then..whoosh! The boxes are being collected and we move out tomorrow.

We had 8 boxes to ship but thanks to Tan, Jane’s sister, and Grant, her brother-in-law, we weighed them all prior to pickup and three of the boxes were too heavy.

A frantic repack, re-weigh and all was done.

Then it was clean the flat for handover, grab some dinner and sleep.

The handover went well – the flat was immaculate with no damage (just like handing over a yacht ) – and we were clear of Cardiff by10.45 am.

A pleasant drive across to Coventry, some lunch near there and then it was driving through thunder, lightning and torrential rain for the remainder of the journey.

A relatively lazy day to get over the jet-lag and then off around Trev & Lisa’s tomorrow night for a BBQ

According to their terms and conditions, you have to give 10-days notice to quit so I phoned them this morning – three times. Twice I was disconnected and the third time was told there was a 20-minute average wait to get to talk to someone.

“I know”, thought I, “I’ll cancel via email…”

“Oh no!”, says they, “…you can’t cancel via email. It’s either wait on the phone to eventually speak to a human or write us a letter.”

“But you’re an ISP, Internet is your business and you’re telling me I can’t cancel via email?”

“Sorry, you can’t”

Off goes the letter then. What a crock of s… I think you can guess the rest.

We don’t get out grades until close to the end of the month apparently but that doesn’t matter as it’s the pass that counts. Everyone has different plans and it looks like I’m the only one heading for Thailand at the moment.

We had a very enjoyable end-of–course drinkies on Friday and a great meal at Mezze-Luna on City Road afterwards: a big thanks to Rach for organising that.

Jane has one more week to go on her Uni course and then it’s pack the boxes time…joy .

Anyway, good luck to my fellow trainees/newly [CELTA] qualified teachers:

• Sue Moss
• Sue Goodfriend
• Jacquie Macqiure
• Natalia Bianco
• Joss Spittle
• Daniel Hare
• Russ Collier
• Rebekah Jack
• Rachel Glanville
• Pam Evans, and of course to
• Annie Mitchell, all the best for the future and best wishes from us all.

You do need to know the alphabet though before you start learning to read (strange that) otherwise a lot of it will be lost on you.

If you want to learn the language, the alphabet, etc., I can probably recommend a book…ummm, what was it…oh yeah

After a highly embarassing phone call with HostPapa where I was a little bit snotty as I’d left a message with them 6 hours previously and no-one had bothered to call me back, “But sir, we’re a hosting company, not an ISP!”
“Whoops!” (still should’ve called me back though).

Anyway, Plusnet have done really well. I managed to talk to a person very quickly on Sunday afternoon and, after attempting to resolve the problem, he said they’d put a new router in the post that afternoon. Lo-and-behold, it was delivered earlier and is working as I type this…

Will it last three more weeks until we depart these shores….it better do!

Nope, that’s it for now.

No more college until next week and then only two more sessions: Monday night when Sue, Joss and Nat teach, and Friday which is the last day of the course – then it’s end of course celebrations!!!!

Now I’ve re-designed it, hopefully it’ll start moving up and, with a video or two, will start to rank ‘up there’.

“Hope springs eternal Baldrick…”