Psychoblog

we have just got back from another trip to bruges, where we spent the first week of our honeymoon. we loved it just as much this time as we did last time. i feel bad though when we are there that i don’t try and speak the language. you are allowed to be linguistically lazy because they speak english so perfectly and i (apparently) look very british. my “aston villa, pride of brum” woolly hat may have given it away slightly.

if bruges was in the french speaking part of belgium i would be reasonably okay, if on slightly dodgy ground with my brummie french accent. flemish is a really interesting and fun looking language though and it seems relatively easy to pick up. last time we were in bruges i learnt that bolleck = little ball and straat = street. not that practical for everyday things, but it amused me for the week. this time my favourite word for the week was aardbeien (strawberry).

in other news, i gave my first thesis chapter draft to my supervisor before we went away. tomorrow i get the verdict on it. please don’t let him say it’s poo. i welcome any additions/alterations he thinks i should make, but i think i would cry if he said it’s not of a phd standard. i have washed my “love me” socks ready for the meeting so they can work their magic.

had one of those dreams last night that wasn’t nightmarish, but still leaves you with a slightly disturbed feeling. dreamt that i had left the scanner on after one of my experiments, the scanner in this instance being a dentist chair with the big lamp over it. the lamp was humming and turning the chair black and smouldery, whilst every now and then a beam of light (representing the pulses i suppose) would shoot out and bore a hole in the floor below the lamp. i remember feeling vaguely surprised in the dream that the lamp didn’t develop a mind of its own and start trying to shoot me with its rays, like more normal dream situations.

today we went geocaching for the first time since our honeymoon. it was a good day really, visiting countryside and a ruined abbey (not newstead). the first cache we did was called halifax bomber memorial, so called because it was the crash site of a 2nd world war halifax bomber plane that didn’t quite make it home again. all 7 crew members were killed. there are memorials to war time people everywhere and it is easy not to pay much attention to them, but i read the little information there was about the bomber and i noticed that i am older than every one of the crew members that died. that was a very sobering thought.