A fairly uneventful week. Had to wash my hair under the kitchen mixer tap this morning because the low water pressure mean the (crappy anyway) shower wouldn't work. We hope to get a plumber to install a better shower when we do the kitchen, but we haven't made much progress on that. Apart from seeing the R4 thing with Picul and Jim - which was quite funny with mostly good people, but pretty slow, as it was a new programme - most of the weekend was spent getting a fourth Billy bookcase (the one with the doors) for the study and rearranging all the books. I intended to do a bit of weeding out of books for the Oxfam shop, but somehow that didn't get done. Perhaps I'll feel a bit more dynamic next weekend...

Met Sarah for dinner tonight, a chance to catch up, return Caroline's Buffy DVDs and pass on the terrifying copy of TeenProm that Mhairi posted me from Boston for her entertainment. We had fishy treats in the Loch Fyne, wandered about Covent Garden for a bit, had a drink the Salisbury on St Martins Lane, meeting Eleanor from work and this crowd, then finished up at First Out, where Marc met up with us.

So, the proofs for our pronunciation book go back to the publishers on Monday. Of course we're not really supposed to be checking them, there's an OUP lady doing that, just making some cuts and spotting where the typesetters have screwed up the special characters (diacritics and IPA), but if course if you see a mistake you mark it up... also we can't help worrying that it's too much to expect a general proofreader to spot IPA problems that only phoneticians would recognise. Oh well, it's really out of our hands now.

Must plan some pleasant diversions for the weekend - Marc and I are meeting Rob and his new ladyfriend Olivia for dinner in London on Friday night. And on Sunday I've got some free audience tickets for a recording of a new Radio 4 quiz show hosted by David Mitchell (the one out of Peep Show). I might also go on the Ealing Cycling Campaign's Sunday ride to mark the end of Bike Week. Or alternatively, we may spend the weekend peeling bits of paper off the kitchen walls. It's all good.

Some photos from Lausanne. Breakfast on the Eurostar.
And the ones below are of a fabulous lunch that Didier and Carine treated me to at this restaurant. Quail and morels were also involved. That dessert there had ginger chantilly and pomegranate seeds in. Wow.

One more picture. These are Swiss scouts selling cake in the street to raise money for a camping trip (and that's Carine and Didier on the left). What dudes. Can't quite imagine British scouts (a) baking cakes, (b) selling them in public, or (c) posing so blithely for a photo. It must be the mountain air.

Am in Lausanne at a stand-up internet terminal in the universty library. My paper about the Pronunciation Unit was well received I think, and most of the other presentations so far have been very interesting. Not much chance to see the city yet, although I'm glad I travelled in by train, because it was a good journey with great views from the windows. Also, i got to spend a little time in Paris between the Eurostar and the TGV, although all i did in the end was eat a delicious galette and wander round the big department stores. Hotel is weird (the bathroom is in an ultra-modern glass capsule inside the room, with no door, so if M was with me neither of us could get up to go to the loo in the night without the light and the noise waking the other up. Not a problem though as I'm on my own. Watched SpongeBob SquarePants in German last night. The TV in the hotel supplies Italian, French and German TV along with (I discovered while flipping through) some alarming porn - the screen is obscured by the sign that tells you how to pay for it, but only the central 50% is covered up, so the determined but penniless viewer could easily work out the plot complexities and see the odd flailing body part around the periphery. Not that I was determined, natch - SpongeBob was considerably more alluring.

Had my hair cut, by quite a lot. Going to the hairdressers when it's hot is like supermarket shopping when you're really hungry, you have a tendency to overestimate what you need. Still, I like it, and I think I managed to communicate to him quite how little time or interest I have in blowdrying, "product" etc which, combined with the twin coiffure-enemies of bike helmet and headphones, mean we're talking low maintenance. Here is the least awful photo of it anyway:

Scorching day yesterday. We went out to visit my parents and to help mum on the book stall at the village fete. Here's Picul, Mum, and Dad counting the loot.

In honour of June, season of hay fever and GCSEs, I thought I'd post this exam question (just sent to me by James):.
As well as making me laugh, it reminded me that this was the sort of question I too would probably get zero marks for, because you know it's 5 straight away, just like you know your multiplication tables, so you just put that down and move on, without showing the dreaded working.... nul points.

On Saturday, which was gorgeously sunny, we took the bikes on the tube out towards the Chilterns for a fairly big cycle.
It was more-or-less this route, but we didn't start from Berkhamsted but Chesham, about 5 miles to the south, so there was a bit more riding. About 17 miles, we reckoned. Getting from North Ealing to Chesham took about 90 minutes on the Piccadilly and Metropolitan Lines and involved lots of changing tubes and schlepping bikes up and down steps, but only cost a bargain £2 each way.
We saw Berkhamsted Castle and sat in the shade for a bit. Ashridge was lovely, lots of woods and shady spots. A large deer sprinted across our path at one point - it was quite dark in colour so I think it was a fallow deer, which this article seems to confirm. Marc's gear cable went ping on the way back to Chesham, but he managed to make it home in low gear. His bike really needs a new transmission, I think, the jockey wheels were worn flat. We undid all the healthiness by buying pork and apple burgers and oven chips from Waitrose in Chesham on the way home.

I'm getting excited about my forthcoming trip to Lausanne. I'm speaking at a conference on Broadcast English, and I've decided to travel by Eurostar and TGV rather than flying, partly for eco-reasons and partly because I thought it would be more fun and more scenic - the cost is much the same, though the British Council are paying my travel expenses anyway. I'm staying an extra day after the end of the conference to visit Didier and Carine.

Here is an old picture from 1999, of us M.Phil. linguists having just submitted our theses, sitting on the grass outside the Jowett Walk Merton grad accommodation (where I lived at the time) - that's Didier on the far right. On the left is Britta, now off to Sydney, and second from right is Bambos. I've lost touch with Diana and Rukmini, and would love to hear from them - post a comment if you're out there!