It’s bloody cold in England, LOOK!

Satellite photo of Britain in the snow - Winter 2009Every time I return to England, it seems almost immediately there is a weather-related superlative issued for the month I choose to return. We all know the Brits are obsessed with weather, but in June 2007 it was the wettest/worst June since records began (hundreds of years ago), this winter, it has already been the coldest Winter for 30 or 40 years. And counting.

With temperatures as low as -22 Celsius, and a decent covering of snow: 10,000 schools are shut, the economy is losing 600 million pounds a day, old people are burning cheap second hand books to warm their houses (it’s cheaper than coal!) and the RSPB is regularly publishing warnings about imminent irrecoverable bird deaths.

So what did I do (apart from feeding the birds)? I tried to get back to Spain, on Easyjet, from Gatwick. Not a very sound plan. I ended up wasting the day in queues of people whilst waiting for the inevitable “Flight cancelled” confirmation. In the end it came, and I headed back to Oxford, only to try again another day…

You’ll perhaps be pleased to know (I was) that I made it back to Spain having rescheduled my flight for 3 days later. I got to Barcelona, wasn’t as pleasantly surprised as I’d hoped by the ‘warm climes’ here, and have promptly set about sorting out my crap Sony Vaio (sounds like it has chronic wind) so that I can get on with my IVOZI audio work soon.

On that note, I finally got my hands on the Zoom H2 Recorder and will be starting recording again in a couple of days.

I’ll leave you with a photo of my mother’s back garden in Eynsham, England where I stayed during my weather related incarceration. I tried to feed the birds, but my nuts promptly froze.

Snow in Eynsham, England - Winter 2009/2010

15 months on – a return to England

15 months after leaving the UK for Spain and Latin America, I’m now back in England. It’s been a quiet period for me on the Earthoria front for far too long. Part of the reason for this is the work I have been putting into our IVOZI English teaching business in Spain, and partly because I just needed some ‘anonymous’ time.

Since returning from Vejer de La Frontera at the end of September, I have been based continuously in Barcelona, or rather in Castelldefels – 24KM to the South of Barcelona on the coast.


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During the last few months we’ve been working on setting up the IVOZI website and have most of the main systems working and in place. We’ve started to sell a couple of books, our audios en inglés podcasts have quickly entered the iTunes directory, and we’ve launched the Weekend Club – a live event for English conversation practice in Barcelona.

In the new year, I’ll be returning to Barcelona and the aim will be to get a team of people together to hugely increase our productivity – especially in the area of new product development, and with a focus on audio and multi-media products. We’ve already been advertising and have had a promising response.

I promise to try and keep Earthoria more up-to-date in the future, and I’ll leave you with a photo of where I am now in a small freezing village called Eynsham, 10km West of Oxford in England.

Merry Christmas!

Eynsham square