24 April

Its been a busy old month this month, so busy that I have neglected you completely. I am home sick today with pharyngitis so am taking advantage of the time to give you an update.

On the first weekend of April I went to the CERN open day, but as I understand pretty much nothing of particle physics didn't find it as interesting as I had hoped. Lots of big buildings, lots of big machines. For those who find this stuff fascinating here are a few photos I took. Don't ask me of what.

The visit to CERN followed brunch with my friend Kate. I had a great time with that, rising some lovely pain paillase overnight in the fridge. For our fruit fix, I had fresh strawberries and a strawberry and apple crumble. I then made pancakes, and cooked up bacon and eggs and squeezed blood oranges for juice. What a morning feast!

Doesn't my paillasse look professional?

Then, during the week I ran another sushi making workshop. This time, in a new space... a culinary squat. "What?!" I hear you exclaim. "What on earth is a culinary squat?".

This is a squat in a part of Geneva known as "Les Grottes". The building is owned by the Genevan government apparently, but is being squatted in and renovated by the squatter to make a sort of community culinary space. The idea is that once it is finished anyone can use the space to hold parties, or run classes or do whatever. The renovation is a slow process as there isn't really any money to be had, but Austin (head squatter?) works with restaurants, so is able to get bits and pieces and take advantage of buying power to get things at good prices. The floor is literally collapsing, so that is an early priority. At the moment it doesn't have any hot water, but that is easily gotten around by boiling a pot on the stove, or heating a kettle of water on the woodstove. Here is a photo of the space as it is at the moment:

Hopefully me running further workshops in the space will help fund further improvements. It allowed me to have 10 students, which was great. The minus was having to heft all my stuff over there, but Austin says that in the future I could potentially have a storage space there, which'd be great. The class was fun, and when I asked them whether they had a good time, my students simply demanded to know what workshop I would run next.

The next weekend, I popped over to London for the weekend to visit mates (As ya do). I stayed with my friend Terry, but met up on Saturday with Alaric and Nerissa. I am helping Alaric to cook a feast later on in the year to celebrate the anniversary of the Kingdom, so this was an opportunity to see the venue. Venues here seem to be a bit of a challenge, and this place is apparently about the only place around that is affordable. So, classy it may not be, but it could be worse.

On the way home we went to the beach. A typical English spring day, it was miserably windy and cold. I had fun though. I offered to race the others, but they were slack, so I ran ahead, and laughed at them for being slackers, and they laughed at me for being nuts. I attempted to skip rocks and settled for admiring Alaric skipping rocks. Mind you, his claims of how many skips he got on ones we didn't see was amusing. ;-)

The weather has been equally ghastly in Geneva of late, however, on one of those spectacularly clear post-rain days we had, I took this photo from the roof of my work:

This is actually three photos stitched together, but that really is the view. Amazing eh?