This weekend our cat Barney went for a little trip. It was only his second journey altogether in his whole life, and the first time he would have been away from home since we got him.

Together with my Partner we combined two in one and along a mother’s day visit to his parents we did a trial to find out how well would the cat deals with staying at their place. The reason being our week long upcoming Easter holiday.

It might sound simple, and not a big deal, but the whole thing involves first driving in a car for over half an hour followed by staying at a place that has other cats. Imagine that, meeting strange new animals! Barney definitely was not expecting it…

To begin with we needed to strap our ginger boy in his harness. Putting it on went quite well, however the cat seemed quite surprised afterwards. Funny enough rather than roll around frantically on the floor as my other cat did the first few times he had a harness on, Barney took a few steps and then performed a graceful fall down on his back, followed by a slow motion roll to one side. It was especially amusing considering he is usually quite frisky and runs around. It looked like he has been almost paralysed or thinking that if he does not move long enough the “weird thing” on his back will just fall off.

As a pure bred Maine Coon Barney has not been out much, apart from two visits to a park and vet check-ups. When taken outside the house he usually very quickly backs to the front door - well at least he knows where he lives… Also the only other time he has been in a car was when the breeder has brought him to us.

The journey has gone surprisingly well, even despite the cat punching holes in my legs and arms with his claws. Just a few meows, and a lot of heavy breathing later we arrived at our destination. Now came the challenging part.

My partner’s parents have a resident cat called Cleo, as well as another cat called Burglar that comes (quite often) to visit from the neighbours. The big worry was how the bunch would all get along, especially as Cleo seems to be the kind who is easily bullied around by other cats. This would mean being locked up at home with our Barney might be a very stressful experience, particularly considering he is almost twice her size, despite being only just a bit over a year old.

Fortunately all went well, our gentle giant got a little scared, tiny Cleo growled a lot and the cat from next door just ran off. We even got some extra love from the kitty at night as he spent it all at the bottom of our bed, which is friendlier than he usually is.

The journey back on Sunday was surprising peaceful. It even made us wonder weather Barney knew he was going home (and looking forward to it), or just driving in a car during the day is less scary…

It has been quite a while since the last time I have done something truly silly.

On Friday the final book from my Waterstone’s order arrived. I heard about it years ago, and I was curious to read it myself - Stephen King’s “Pet Cemetary”.

The big surprise was revealed when I took the book out of the envelope. I looked at the title, and something seemed wrong, and then I realized it spelt “Pet Sematary”… Odd, so I turn the book over, and the text on the back cover is not in English.

At first I thought that maybe it was some sort of a mistake. I couldn’t have ordered the book in Italian, could I? Well it turned out I could…

I went to check my order history on the Waterstone’s website, and in the order the title was as I thought - “Pet Cemetary”. OK, let’s check the book description page. And there it was!

You can play spot the language yourself.

The problem seems to be that on a UK website with and English title, I wasn’t really expecting to book to be in any other language than the “default” English. And personally I think it should be a lot more prominent  that is is a foreign edition. Especially considering there is no cover shot available…

At the end of the day it is my fault, and I deserve the Dummy of The year Award fully, but still, I can’t help thinking that the mistake could have been avoided had the language information been clearer.

I don’t fly often, but on the rare occasions that I do unfortunatelly my airline choice is very limited. My quite common route is London (UK) - Poznań (Poland) and to my despair the choice in basically between Wizzair and Ryanair. There used to be a British Airways direct connection, though it seems it isn’t available anymore, and admittedly it was more pricey than the first two.

There are two reasons for this topic today. Firstly Easter is coming so I had to book my flights recently to not end up with some ridiculous rates. Secondly I found an interesting article on the Guardian’s website about one of the two cheap lines. If it wasn’t so outrageous, it might have actually been funny… here is a quote:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”

This was the official response from Ryanair after a small affair has been started online by the airline’s employee’s inappropriate blog pots comments. Admittedly Ryanair as well as its owner are know to be less than polite on many occasions, and not really fussed about customer service, often using their “strive to have the lowest fares” as a facade for rudeness and lack of comforts and amenities.

Since the whole luggage fees thing started I usually opted for Wizzair over Ryanair even if it meant spending a few more pounds. Because at the end of the day I got a higher baggage limit and their “extra fees” on top of the ticket price have been more reasonable. However as we have found out last Christmas there is one flaw on the route I take - the return flights all depart at 6am…

This means leaving my parents house at 3am, which maybe wouldn’t be such a big thing for my partner and I, if it wasn’t for the fact that this is only possible if my parents drive us there… In the end it means everyone gets no sleep.

So in order to make the journey slightly more reasonable this time we went with Ryanair. And it quickly reminded me why I was choosing Wizzair before. Just to start with the hideous booking process which seems to do everything to discourage you from choosing an optimum date and time. With all the hyped claims of doing everything to lower the prices and cut costs “for the customer” the booking does quite the opposite.

You need quite some willpower and determination to click through the dates one by one to compare prices. In our case we take holiday according to our flights, so we have some flexibility when it comes to what day we will be departing. And very often a day sooner or later can mean significant savings. I always liked Wizzair’s weekly preview, it definitely helps you judge prices easily, no need to memorise all your possible departure and arrival combinations just to make a choice. Not to mention that if you click next or previous day to many times in a row the website will just happily throw an error at you, that most of the time means starting the whole booking process all over again.

However in the end this time with a difference in prices and convenient flight times, I crawled through the booking process on Ryanair’s website. Just to be shocked by the luggage prices! Both cheap lines had these extra costs before, but it was just a couple of quid. This time Ryanair was asking  £14 per bag per passenger. Well, with this surcharge, the tickets would no longer be that cheap especially considering there’s also a Visa charge…

In the end we decided to fly with just hand luggage, however ever since I have been wondering about loads of things, whether we can take them in the bag or not. I might actually need to send Easter presents in the post - not a big deal considering the package cost will be less than the baggage charge…

I didn’t like Ryanair before reading the article, but I think that little bit of unnecessary rudeness is too much for me. Looks like we will be joining the “say no to Ryanair” bunch after our farewell flight during Easter.

Walking down the high street, while doing my lunch time shopping, I realized something. Standing in a queue at a store I looked at the person working there and in a way admired them.

The thought that every single day I come to work, I would have exactly the same routine ahead of me. Same mundane tasks repeated over and over again. Maybe you do get a bit of variation, but a day of cleaning, followed by a day of shelf stacking, followed by a day of cashier work, and then back to cleaning, still doesn’t sound too appealing, if it even works this way.

Admittedly the closest I have ever came to such work was helping at my parents music store when I was a kid. I honestly disliked those days - dusting shelves and stacking cds and casettes. Mostly cleaning this and cleaning that, and you didn’t even get to play your music as due to my taste it might scare away the customers (and admittedly it probably would have).

Later on in life during a Christmas visit to England, just before I moved permanently, I have worked at some kind of post sorting, magazine packing warehouse. In many ways it was a sad experience, not because of the manual labour, but more due to the painful lack of efficiency and organisation. I guess I am the kind of person who cannot look at an obviously inefficient process and not even try to better it.

The packaging process involved the following steps: preparing the envelope, putting the magazine inside, inserting some other papers, lacking the envelope, and finally placing the address sticker. I was in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and the company was massively behind, which was how me and my sister got the job along side quite a few other temps. Even with all the extra hands they still had over 12 hour shifts, and gave extra hours to any temp that would take it.

Already during the first half a day me and my sister have quickly realized that considering we were grouped into 5 people tables, we could process the magazines a lot quicker if one person did only one action rather than try to do all the steps from start to finish. A the end of the day our table processed a lot more and a lot quicker than some of he other ones.

What surprised us though, was that instead of this being noticed we were not asked to come back after the third day. What it came down to was that the supervisors had people sign their name when they took batches of address stickers. Considering neither me nor my sister did the stickers at our table, not for most of the day at least, we were not considered efficient enough!

I could understand the motivation for everyone doing every step - it probably would ease the monotony of the work. When you’re just sliding magazines into the envelopes it does verge on a state of hypnotic automation. However we were not full time employees, we were temps to supposedly clear out the backlog of deliveries as quickly as possible.

That was just one example of their disorganisation, just to mention one more, one of the days we spent over four hours doing nothing - just sitting at empty tables, because they were waiting for the address stickers to arrive. Not that we might have been doing everything up to the point of stickers - racks of envelopes and magazines were sitting there and just waiting.

A colleague at work has decided to try out the Toastmasters club in Windsor. Being the very social person he is the whole office got an invitation as well. Obviously not everybody went, however we still ended up being quite a sizeable group.

Toastmasters International in short is a club for people who want to develop and practice their public speaking skills. The idea is to provide a safe environment for people to train as well as a place where they can obtain relevant and constructive feedback. As we all know we are judged by our audience every time we speak, however rarely in such situations do we get honest evaluation of how we actually came across.

Except for the colleague who has invited us in the first place, I don’t think anyone else had been to Toastmasters before. Thus although we more or less had an idea how the thing might look, we were pretty much virgins in the world of public speaking.

The club seemed highly concentrated on timing the speeches, as well as of the meeting itself. Unfortunately, to start with we have introduced some chaos, not only because of our group size, but also because of being slightly late - the club was way further from  Windsor Castle than we had anticipated.

The meeting itself abides by many rules and is very structured. It is split up into the following main segments:

• Welcome speech and Toastmaster of the evening introduction
• Table Topics
• Prepared Speeches
• Evaluations

Welcoming Speech

Once the meeting has started we have all been greeted by the club’s president who then proceeded with a quick explanation about Toastmasters finished off with the introduction to the Toastmaster for the evening.

I am not sure how much time is usually given to explanations at the beginning, however considering the amount of guests in the club that evening it was possible quite atypical. This is when the meeting’s structure was outlined and all the important people were introduced.

We were also informed about the benefits of joining the club. These include the Toastmaster’s magazine, and the first course book with 10 public speaking assignments and articles explaining the main focus of each of them in-depth. Also when you join you get a chance to take part in the international public speaking Toastmasters competition.

Once the Toastmaster for the evening was up it was her role to introduce this evening’s theme which was “relax”.

Table Topics

This part of the evening consists of impromptu speeches aimed to be 1-2 minutes in length. The Table Topics Master had prepared topics relating to the theme of the evening, and would ask a random member to come up to the front and give a short speech on that subject.

Very important information for anyone willing to try out Toastmasters is that unless a guest volunteers beforehand only full time club members are considered for the speaking exercise. Had we been explicitly told this in the beginning, we might have stressed a bit less.

As it happened one of the guests did actually volunteer, which in turn made us think that we might be called out any minute too!

In all honesty I think I could have dealt with some of the Table Topics questions, others not so much. However the worst part is, that you get to know the question only once you agree to take part or not. It made me think about would I try and do it, or would I say no. It was quite funny to realize, that in some way I found that I might struggle with saying “no”. It kind of implies that you are unable to even try the task at hand, and in that sense, I’d probably bare the horror of public speaking, just not to be labelled as “unable” of doing something…

Prepared Speeches

Prepared speeches are longer and are timed at 5-7 minutes.The topics of these were quite varied: from the Internet, through fish stories, to etymology related to God names.

Contrary to the Table Topics speeches these are fully evaluated, with each having an assigned evaluator. They also have certain areas the speaker should especially focus on, like for example: body language or speech structure. These are taken from one of the Toastmasters manuals depending on the speaker’s level.

The manuals are a sort of course book for public speaking in general to start with, and later once the first one is completed you can choose from different areas of speaking and focus specifically on these, like for example stand up comedy acts, or inspirational speaking, etc.

Evaluations

During the meeting everyone in the room evaluates each of the speakers anonymously on a piece of paper. We also voted for best speaker, best impromptu speaker and best evaluator. On top of that, as mentioned before, each of the prepared speeches gets a commentary from their assigned evaluator.

I found the later to be surprisingly gentle and positive in their opinions. Admittedly there were no first timers in this meeting, but I was expecting to see more criticism. This was quite reassuring to see.

After the evaluators came something I was not expecting at all. The Grammarian! Well, that would be one person I would be definitely scared of… With all my clumsy pronunciation, and all the ahs, and ums I’d probably get shot.

Is Toastmasters For Me?

After the meeting I did feel positively encouraged to join. For now I decided to go again as a guest and experience a bit more before I make a proper decision.

Although it might seem counter-intuitive, I think that the more you are scared of public speaking, the more you should actually be inclined to give Toastmaster a try. In the spirit of overcoming our fears, practising in front of a small group with similar problems and goals can be a great way to train you speaking skills.