Lost Horizons

I’ve decided to practice my written Esperanto with this, my first blog post in the language. If you speak it, please comment with any errors you can see that I’ve made. If you don’t speak it, try reading it and tell me how much you understand – given I’m still at a reasonably basic level, you might follow more than you think!

Mi daŭrigas studi Esperanton, kaj mi ĝuas ĝin.

Lastatempe, mi vizitis Edinburgon por laboro, kaj mi renkontis du esperantistojn, unu kiun mi renkontis en la sabatrondo de la asocio skota, kaj alia kiun mi ne konis. Ni havis ĝoje vesperon de manĝo, trinkado kaj babilado, kaj estis bona praktiki mian paroladon kaj aŭkultadon. Miaj amikoj diris al mi ke mi plibonigas, kaj unu diris, ke mi estas flua en Esperanto! Mi ne estas certa pri tio, ĉar mi skiribas kaj legas plibone ol mi komprenas aŭde.

Eble, ĉi tio estas la sama problemo por multaj Esperantistoj. Ni loĝas trans la mondo, kaj malofte proksime de aliaj parolantoj.

Jen la interreto, vitala por Esperantistoj. Mi trovis multajn Esperantistojn ĉe Google+ kaj babilas kun ili en niaj Esperantorondoj. Ĉi tio helpas por lerni novajn vortojn kaj esprimojn. Mi ankoraŭ lernas per lernu.net kaj mia libro “How To Teach Yourself Esperanto”, ankaŭ. Vivo estas okupitega, kutime, sed iel mi trovis okazojn kelkfoje.

Ekzemplo de mia plibonigo estas, ke mi provis fari vortludoj en Esperanto. Mi amas ilin en la angla, do provas ilin en Esperanto ankaŭ. Mi skribis du en Google+ lastatempe.

1. Mi legis gazeton hodiaŭ, sed estis tro mallonga. Morgaŭ mi trovos gazegon.
2. Kio estas la malfrua lingvo monde? Vesperanto.

Ambaŭ okazoj, la ŝercoj recevis mutajn aŭ konfuzajn respondojn. Eble la legantoj estis komencantoj ankaŭ, Esperanto estas malvortludema, aŭ mi rakontis ilin malprave.

Tamen, estas la sama respondo ke mia ŝercoj ricevas en la angla, do mia Esperanto klare plibonigas al la sama normo.

I blogged last year about Calamateur’s album Each Dirty Letter, and it barely seems like five minutes later that he’s produced another album – The Quiet in the Land.  I mentioned in Each Dirty Letter’s review Calamateur’s vocal versatility, comparing his voice to Thom York.  Such is his versatility, though, that I am going to have to revise that temporarily to somewhere in between Bono and Billy Corgan.

There is comparison with U2 and the Smashing Pumpkins beyond their lead singers though, because those two bands are who The Quiet in the Land reminds me of most.  Calamateur’s sound on this latest offering is rich, deep, dark, and verging at times on the tense and sinister.  As he says himself on his website, this new album, which regularly seems to crosses the line from rock to electronic, is very, very different from his previous album (effectively a collection of sweet but gently catchy ballads).  Time to use that “versatility” epithet again.

The music boasts sharp, dramatic guitars; haunting and evocative background instruments; edgy samples; uncompromising lyrics on Calamateur’s favourite topics of spirituality and humanity; and industrial rhythms that evoke the Smashing Pumpkins’ later electronic phase.  It is such a full, rounded, mostly heavy, and engagingly complex sound that it’s often hard to forget that Calamateur is not a band, but an individual: and an individual making the music in a tiny wee studio at that.

The Quiet in the Land is a thoughtful, engaging and absorbing listen.  I think it’ll take more than the few listens I’ve had to really appreciate it.

You may have read a wee while back about the Scottish Government’s consultation on rail services in Scotland beyond 2014.

When launched, it made a few headlines because of eye-catching questions like whether alcohol should be banned from trains or whether the sleeper service and daytime cross-border journeys between the north of Scotland and England should continue. Instantly, campaigns began to “save” the sleeper services to the three northern destinations of Aberdeen, Inverness and Fort William – those services to Glasgow and Edinburgh remaining safe because, so the suggestion went, as with most daytime services you could easily change trains in the central belt. Which, of course, is an argument for passengers changing at every station on their journey because it’s seemingly so easy, and trains only ever shunting backwards and forwards between two adjacent stops.

To be fair, it was only a consultation – and that’s the idea of consultations, to generate debate and get people’s views.  But the recent announcement from George Osborne that he wants to put money towards preserving the sleepers (a clever piece of politics to catch out the Scottish Government, to which we can doubtless attribute the input of his right-hand man, the LibDem MP for Inverness, Danny Alexander) clearly shows up the SNP’s poor handling of the issue. And the fact that I admit the Tories have made the SNP look silly on an issue demonstrates my strength of feeling.

But despite only being a consultation, the document gave out poor messages by asking the questions the wrong way round – frequently it ponders whether things are still justifiable, when really the questions should be about what can be done to improve and expand the rail network in Scotland. And as a regular rail traveller in Scotland, boy is there much that can be done.

To give just one example, it asks whether the sleeper from Fort William should run from Oban instead. Instead? Where’s the ambition? Why not both?

But rather than go through the consultation document with an angry toothcomb, here instead are four broad areas that I reckon they should have asked questions about.

1. Reopening old lines

A quick glance at the effects of the Beeching Report shows that a huge number of lines in Scotland were scrapped. Many communities that were dependent on these lines never really recovered economically. Of course, Beeching was not the only time lines were cut, and many lines closed before and, I think, after. By reopening many of these lines, great cultural and economic benefit will be derived.

The Scottish Government gets this to a degree, as can be seen in the long-running efforts to get the Borders line reopened, but why not other ones too? What were the Moray Coast Railway (which forms the spectacular viaducts at Cullen), the Deeside Line and the Invergarry and Fort Augustus line are all spectacularly beautiful and would probably be as famous and as marketable in tourist terms if reopened as our other beautiful and well-known lines like those to Fort William or Kyle of Lochalsh.  Meanwhile, other closed lines such as the Edinburgh suburban line or some of those lost in Glasgow could revolutionise transport in our two biggest cities.

2. Making better use of existing lines

I’ve blogged before about how Inverness could be better served by its lines, while it is astonishing that the cities of Aberdeen and Dundee only have one station each when both, particularly Aberdeen, are crying out for suburban halts to alleviate serious traffic congestion.

By adding stations, upgrading lines and improving services, the existing rail network can work much better, increasing its patronage and economic benefit.

3. Building new lines

There are plenty parts of the country where lines need building, and in most of the cases I can think of it is about connecting to other transport forms. The airport rail links are well-known: the SNP have ditched (or, to be slightly kinder, been forced to ditch by either parliamentary arithmetic or economic conditions) rail links to Glasgow and Edinburgh airports, but Inverness, Dundee and Aberdeen airports (and for that matter Wick airport) are all a hair’s breadth away from railway lines and just small adjustments could connect them to the rail network. This will increase their use, encourage tourism, and benefit the local and national economies.

But let’s not forget other vital interchanges, such as those between ferries and rail.  The southwest of Scotland has many, such as Gourock or Stranraer, but the north does not. Ullapool, for instance, is the ferry port for Stornoway and is only 30 miles from the Kyle line. Imagine getting off the ferry from Stornoway and being able to hop on a train to Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow or Edinburgh without having to change from a bus. Or take Scrabster – the main port for sailings to Orkney, just a couple of miles or so outside rail-served Thurso.

I could go on, but I’ll not labour the point: integrated transport, where all the different forms connect seamlessly, is what makes a good economy and provides convenience for both locals and tourists. Other countries do it easily. We, for some reason, fail depressingly. The consultation should address this.

4. Starting HSR from the north

We’ve heard a great deal in the high-speed rail debate about how it is important to extend the UK’s tiny network (currently just London to the channel tunnel) northwards. The UK government plans a line north to Birmingham which, it is proposed, will fork there and go on to Manchester and Leeds. Talk – but no more than that – is of the lines continuing to Glasgow and Edinburgh, but for me that’s the barest minimum acceptable for connecting the big cities of this island.

The high-speed network needs to go further than that and the Scottish Government should be consulting on whether it should start building high-speed rail from the north, and if so from what locations. They say Edinburgh would be just two and a half hours from London by high-speed rail, and so on that logic Aberdeen, Scotland’s third city and Europe’s oil capital, might be about an hour and a half to Edinburgh.  Imagine, therefore, a four hour rail journey from Aberdeen to that great transport hub of London, or – with through trains that stop in London – overnight trips from Scotland to mainland European locations like Brussels, Paris or Amsterdam. This is the sort of vision that the Scottish Government should be inspiring us with.

So there you go – four areas of questioning that the rail consultation should have been exploring, four key areas of potential development for our rail network, and none hopefully particularly difficult to envisage or see the benefits in. That nobody – least of all our government – seems to be talking about them particularly loudly is depressing when connectivity within our country and with the rest of Europe is ever more important.

Of course, there’s the issue of money.  All of the above would be several billions of pounds the Scottish Government simply does not have.  Other spending priorities exist.  But I’m not proposing that all of these are committed to – just perhaps some of then.  A consultation doesn’t need to present fixed ideas (that’s the whole idea, isn’t it?) but to put ideas out for debate and consideration so that priorities can be shaped.

For all the SNP’s admirable talk – and action – of raising Scotland’s aspirations, of imagining the best for our country, they never quite seem to extend this vision to the railways.

But then again, no party does.

Nicole and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary this past weekend (it’s a great fortitude that our anniversaries are on the same day, really).  We’ve set a pattern of taking it in turns to organise a surprise for each other, and last year I took us to Austria.  This year was Nicole’s turn and she chose one of the prettiest parts of Scotland, the dramatic Applecross peninsula.

Before getting there, though, we spent a night in a hotel north of Inverness.  It was lovely, but I’ll keep them anonymous as I’d like to have a dig at one aspect.  In their luxurious lounge were some bookshelves filled with a curious and entirely unrelated collection of books, seemingly acquired in an entirely random way over time.

The oddest were the Usborne Guide to Hamsters (“with internet links”) and a book that looked out of the 1970s and featured Terry Wogan on the cover.  I only wish I’d gone back to my room for my camera.

There was also a 19th century book titled “Why I Am A Christian” written with all the colour, verve and cheer you could imagine emanating from a dour, hardback Victorian-era epistle.  Besides all that, there was, for some inexplicable reason, a large number of novels translated into German, including a Dan Brown I’d never heard of and a science fiction novel or two.  It was quite the oddest collection of books I’ve seen for a long time and perhaps leaves some clues as to the sorts of people who have stayed at the hotel over the years.

When we got to Applecross, we stayed in a beautiful and snug wee cottage for a few nights, enjoying the occasional breaks in the rain to go for walks, drives and expeditions to the (justifiably) famous Applecross Inn.  But the cottage rivalled the hotel for its curious reading material, principally in the form of entries in its guestbook.  Among the numerous glowing comments were some that led me to really fear for this country’s city dwellers.

One guest complained about the steep gradient to the cottage, saying it was “not good for people with disabilities (heart condition)”.  Another objected to the fact that the cottage’s view was of a “farmyard” (when it was actually of a modern house on a croft – a bit of education about the differences between farms and crofts needed there I think); though someone from the same town as that writer thoughtfully though unnecessarily followed up a few comments later with an apology for his brethren.  Someone else complained that their two year old had been caught trying to escape through a skylight.  Another person even thought it fair to criticise a bed in a particularly cosy and snug bedroom for being too small: despite the fact that if the bed had been any bigger the room would have been less of a bedroom and more of a dojo.

Quite how these stupid people survive outside the limits of the city they come from (and why they bother venturing furth) is a mystery to me.  Much as, I imagine, the “countryside” (as everyone except those living there seems to call it) is a mystery to them.  One of the strengths of Inverness as a place to live is that you’re always able to appreciate and understand both rural and urban Scotland.  This beautiful part of the world was barely a couple of hours’ drive from home, and a gorgeous drive at that.

Enough of the rantings. Beyond all that, it was a lovely weekend.  I’d been to Applecross before, but really enjoyed taking the time to relax, explore with the camera, and see a lot more of the peninsula than I had before.  Here are the photos.

It’s a couple of months or so since I first started to teach myself Esperanto.  Just as I reported in my earlier post on the topic, progress remains steady despite the fact I don’t always have much time to devote to it.  Through a book, online learning tools and interaction with people by email or social networking, I’ve managed to get some real practice and I have continued to expand my grasp.  There are difficulties and challenges, of course, but nothing that simply putting in the hours can’t solve.

On reflection, there are so many things I like about the language, all – as I’d blogged previously – connected to simplicity and uniformity.  I’d also add to that its beauty and poetry – while the regular use of the letters j and k may seem strange and unattractive to an English speaker, it is a beautiful language to listen to and the sounds trip delightfully off the tongue like a new and unusual flavour of ice cream.

However, there are two particularly attractive features of Esperanto that I find most helpful in using it, and I’d like to briefly mention them.

Firstly, regular verbs.  Once you know that infinitives end in i, the past tense in is, present in as and future in os, then you can apply these rules without exception to any verb root.  For instance, take the verb “to be” in just about any language and you’ll find it’s ridiculously irregular.  In Esperanto, however, it’s different.  The root is est, and it is always estis for the past tense, estas for the present tense and estos for the future.  And by the way, the verb never changes for the person, so you also know that it’s mi estas (I am), vi estas (you are), li/ŝi/ĝi estas (he/she/it is; ŝi pronounced “shee” and ĝi pronounced “jee”) and so on.  Given any verb root, you can then conjugate it for all persons and in all tenses, without fear of irregularity or exceptions.

The second thing I like develops this idea of roots a little further.  In essence you can, technically, do anything you like with any root.  Take patro, for instance, which means “father”.  All nouns end in o, so even before knowing what it means, you are assured that patro is a noun.  Meanwhile, all adjectives end in a and all adverbs end in e, so we know that patra will mean fatherly and patre will mean… fatherlyly?  Fatherishly?  Well, there’s not really an equivalent English word and I suppose we’d write “like a father” instead.  So already Esperanto’s flexibility with roots gives a breadth of expression that doesn’t always necessarily exist in English.

For instance:

• La patro parolas = the father speaks
• Li estas patra = he is fatherly (or fatherlike)
• Li parolis patre = he spoke fatherishly (or more properly, he spoke like a father)

The rules of the language even allow us to make it a verb: patri, to father.  Now I’ve never seen, learned or used the verb patri, and so by introducing it to you I am making a bit of an assumption.  However, the wonderfully consistent way that you can use the roots means that armed with just a single root you can confidently create fully conjugated verbs plus a noun, adjective and adverb – all without having to spend time learning each of those words individually.

Of course, not all roots will make sense if turned into everyone of those types of words.  For instance, you could turn kato (cat) into an adjective (vi trinkas kate – you drink like a cat) but the verb kati might be an odd and untranslatable concept.  However, if you were given, say, just ten roots you would immediately be able unlock a vocabulary of perhaps around a hundred or more words and phrases, none of which you need to learn or check independently because you just know from the rules that the root will behave logically and consistently in every single case.  This is why progress in Esperanto can be both swift and satisfying.

Mia studoj kontinuas (my studies continue)…

The (self-imposed) deadline looms.

As is all too depressingly obvious, it’s not long until Christmas and that is my deadline for finishing off my second book.  This will, as I may have mentioned before, run on from UTCWAM, chart my adventures in England, Canada, New Zealand and the western USA, and effectively bring the mission up to the present day in terms of trips.  The working title for the book is “Mullet 2″, but that too easily lends itself to various secondary titles, like “Mullet 2: Mullet Harder” and suchlike, the realm of which I am more than inclined to avoid.

Such titular considerations have been at the back of my mind, however, given the pressing need to get the actual content finished.  It had been looking a bit touch and go of late, and indeed I actually planned to finish it this time last year, and then this summer, but I am confident that aiming for this Christmas will be the last delay.  Obstacles have basically revolved around lots going on in real life and the day job, so finding time to sit down and write – even with my free Mondays – has been hard.  But increasingly as I’ve found the time, I’ve been more effective at using it, and I’m now more confident than ever that I will hit the target.

The easiest bit – for the most part – has been writing about the trips themselves, which were of course great fun.  A little trickier have been the intervening bits, trying to remember what was happening in life, what mullets I discovered when and how, what things are entertaining or relevant enough to write, and how all fits in the right order.

I’ve got the bulk of the book finished, and I am now in the process of finishing up the “in between trips” sections, and then follows the numerous rounds of redrafting and editing.  I’m definitely in the final straights now, which is a relief after a frustratingly long time in getting this second book near to completion.

If it is to be published, we should be looking at some time later on in 2012.  I will of course keep you posted.

You may remember me raving some time back about the self-titled debut album by Liverpool post-rock outfit MinionTV.  The album was my favourite listen of last year, I think, and its opening track, We Are Ghosts, a magnificent piece of music that remains one of my most-listened tracks of late.  You can listen to it via the magical widget gizmo below.

The band have just released an EP called Arecibo, and I was delighted to be sent a free download for review purposes.  So here goes.

A slow, dreamy opening blurs into the first substantive track, also called Arecibo.  Reverberated guitars set out an enticing melody, evocative of a journey into the unknown, and the song compels you to listen as you find out where.  The early melody soon is joined by soft keyboard music and moody bass, as if a cathedral had sacked their organist and got Sigur Rós in to do the job instead.  A light drumbeat soon coming along to add to what is a tense, expectant song just waiting to boom into life, that does eventually do so with a wave of spaced-out guitaring that would make Hawkwind proud.

A great opener though the title track is, I’m not convinced it’s the best on the EP.  That, in my view, is the subsequent track There Will Be Bulldozers.  A soft and mournful intro evokes a dreamy sadness, and then a floaty keyboard tone takes us on a gently psychadelic journey, a light pulse provided by drums that draw you deep into the track and build up slowly to present a wonderful change of tempo where lovely guitar riffs send the track soaring.  It’s a curious mix of the cautiously energetic and warmly downbeat, and reminds me of Explosions in the Sky‘s excellent latest album.

Track three, Keep The Negatives, is something of a change of feel.  Though still soft, warm and as mournfully nostalgic in feel as the first two tracks, the echoey piano and lilting guitar invite comparison with Dire Straits, the track occupying a curious isthmus between 80s soft rock and shoegaze.  The final track, Vi, opens with sharp, echoey guitars calling out like a searchlight in the mist, and this gives way to more lilting, floating sounds to round off the EP. Though like many short releases, it all ends too quickly, and I can’t help thinking the band have a sound that lingers, haunts and stretches, and therefore better suits the wide canvass of a full-length album than the comparative snapshot of an EP.

Though MinionTV’s debut album was moody and atmospheric, this EP Arecibo sometimes feels somewhat darker, with four dreamy songs that draw you in and create evocative soundscapes that evokes both a science fiction other-worldliness and a deep draw into the emotions of the world in which we are. I’ve listened to it several times, and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Many of the songs’ riffs linger long as earworms, and there is a depth and richness to the sound that suggests the band will come up with plenty more great music in time to come.

If you’ve been in Aberdeen recently, you won’t have escaped the furore over the plans to turn Union Terrace Gardens (right) into a big square.

The idea came from Sir Iain Wood, one of the city’s richest oil industrialists, who has wanted to give £50million of his own money back to the city that helped generate his wealth.

On the face of it, it’s a striking and thoroughly altruistic gesture.  However it’s proved to be a hugely divisive one because the plan involves building over Union Terrace Gardens and raising the ground to the level of the buildings around it.

There are six options, and a consultation has recently been running to gauge public views about them.  I noticed it when I was in Aberdeen on Wednesday, and given that I had a spare hour I decided to pop in to have a look.  I discovered the next day that it closed just a couple of hours after I’d visited, so my being in the area with a little free time was a lucky coincidence.

Let me explain the basic idea of the plans.

The night-time photo above is, I’m afraid, the best one I have on Flickr of the area in question.  To set the scene, Aberdeen was, a little like the Old Town in Edinburgh, a medieval city built on a number of hills.  Later developments such as bridges and new streets effectively raised the city, leaving parts like the Denburn Valley, pictured, a little below the new street level.

If you explore the side streets around Aberdeen city centre you get a real sense of that historic heart  lurking beside (and often below) the city centre’s main artery, Union Street, and such explorations will show you how the city was raised to a higher level (1|2|3).

And this is all, by the way, entirely separate from the beautiful atmosphere of Old Aberdeen proper, lying about twenty minutes’ walk north, the main features of which include Aberdeen University (Scotland’s only medieval campus university, founded in 1495) and the gorgeous St Machar’s Cathedral (left).

Belmont Street, at the heart of Aberdeen’s nightlife and cultural scene, is just out of the big photograph above, running along the other side of the buildings which back onto the left of the picture.  Union Street, the main shopping thoroughfare, is at the far end above the arched bridge.  The three gorgeous Victorian icons of “education, salvation and damnation” are behind where this photo was taken from.  The road and railway run through the centre of the picture, and Union Terrace Gardens are to the right.

You can see from the bridge in the background, plus where the gardens meet the street on the right, the level to which it is proposed the ground is raised.  The road and railway would be covered, but so would Union Terrace Gardens.

There has been substantial opposition to the plans in the city, with protesters claiming that the beauty of the gardens and an important green space at the heart of the city would be lost forever.

I am not convinced I ever had much sympathy for the opponents of the plan.  I never thought that Union Terrace Gardens were particularly well-used or promoted enough, and while they were certainly pretty they seemed to be more of a spot for sleeping rough than enjoying the serenity of a public park.  Having lived in Aberdeen for over five years and still being a regular visitor, I can say that I’ve probably been in the gardens no more than a handful of times, barely for more than a few minutes, and never to spend any prolonged time in.  The lack of footfall through the park is surely in the main due to the lack of sunlight that come from it being at a sunken level.  Yes they are nice gardens but they are just not sunny enough compared to the city’s other lovely public spaces such as Seaton Park or Duthie Park.

Moreover, building over the dual carriageway and railway line will be of great benefit to the aesthetics of the scene, and the idea of connecting Union Terrace (the road to the right of the gardens in the picture), Belmont Street, Union Street and Rosemount Viaduct (behind the photographer’s vantage point) seems quit sensible on paper.

Not that I am unequivocally in favour of the proposed new city gardens, however.

It was with a mixture of lazy ambivalence and only mild curiosity that I ventured into the exhibition to see the six options, and having considered them briefly I am somewhat underwhelmed by them all and unpersuaded that any  would truly add something to the city that couldn’t be done in other ways.  They all represent sledgehammers lining up to crack a nut that nobody can agree requires cracking in the first place.  So that’s my main reason for being concerned about the plans.

Secondly, I passionately believe there are better ways of thanking or cheering up Aberdeen than by giving it a square it’s not sure it wants.  If I had fifty million spare, I’d give it to Aberdeen Football Club.  Nothing would enthuse the city’s overoptimistic football fans, not to mention wider population, more than its perennially underachieving and underfunded football team returning to former glory.

And sadly it is down the highway of massive investment that you achieve things in football these days.  So what better way of using your wealth to restore morale, profile and exposure to the city of Aberdeen than through rebuilding a European-class football team?  Plus, you’d never have to put your hands in your pocket in a city pub for the rest of your life.

But my third reason for being sceptical of the city square plans is that I think they’re picking the wrong spot.

I reckon that the true heart of the city is further east, at the Castlegate – the historic connection between King Street (the road north), Union Street (heading west) and the roads down to the harbour and beach.

Castlegate – so called because it was the site of the city’s castle, destroyed in the Wars of Independence in the 1300s and never rebuilt – is perhaps a tired spot, and no doubt it lost some of its purpose when the city’s trams were removed along with the Castlegate’s role as its interchange.

And incidentally, I think Aberdeen would really suit and benefit from having trams back and it’s a tragedy that Edinburgh has given the mode of transport a bad name.

But anyway.  Surrounded by a mixture of the imposing and the ornate, the medieval and Victorian, and across from the Town House and the magnificent pub designed by and named after Archibald Simpson, Castlegate is an impressive spot and could easily be more so.  The neglect it has experienced over the years could easily be repaired, and if the beautiful Citadel and other buildings fronting the square could be used for a more inclusive civic or cultural purpose then you could have a magnificent setting in the making.

Restoring life to the Castlegate would be much cheaper than trying to create it from scratch over Union Terrace Gardens, more effective, and – as it would draw more obviously upon the city’s historic layout and architectural heritage – significantly more in keeping with the character and soul of the city.

But maybe, just as I found with the exhibition and consultation I browsed round in its final few hours, my not being an Aberdeen resident perhaps negates the validity of my views.

For what they’re worth, though, you’ve just read them.

I’ve always been interested in languages. It’s probably the single thing that most powerfully demonstrates human diversity and represents the gateway to understanding the world better.  If there is one free skill I’d love to have for no effort in return, it would be fluency in one or more other languages.  I am not fluent in anything other than English, sadly, though at school I studied Gaelic until second year (which was compulsory), German to Standard Grade and French to Higher, and narrowly chose not to do languages at university alongside Politics.

That said, I’ve always practised my French and German wherever possible, be it when travelling, hosting couchsurfers, or meeting or visiting French- or German-speaking friends. I’ve been complemented a number of times on my enthusiastic but faltering grasp of both, and I have been told that I’d be just a few months’ immersion away from fluency in either.

Yet something always niggled at the back of my mind regarding French and, especially, German: a dissatisfaction with unnecessary complexities. Such as rules that were broken so often as to be meaningless, complex rules of grammar that seemed to erect more barriers to effective communication than bridges, and the realisation that French and German suffered from geographical “weak spots” meaning their value as international languages was questionable.

And don’t get me started on gender and cases. I never understood quite why a noun needed to be masculine or feminine, or why adjectives or the word for “the” should change according to their place in the sentence. That’s one great thing about English, where we’ve more or less done away with these grammatical quirks that have their root – so to speak – in Latin.

Of course, English is not free of criticism on this front.  It’s a widely-spoken and beautifully expressive language, yet one full of inconsistencies and absurd rules. Everything from the multiple ways of pronouncing “ough” to our odd plural rules (mice and men, but not hice and cen, for instance) presents a language that must seem immensely complicated to new learners.

And it’s not even as if English is the truly international language many claim it to be. Languages are a key tool for international travel and exploring other cultures, yet if you spoke only English I reckon you’d struggle somewhat across vast swathes of Russia, China, Latin America and the Arab-speaking world, four parts of the globe that will only become more important to us as they develop economically.

Of course, if you are a polyglot then you’re sorted. For instance, fluency in the six official languages of the United Nations – English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic – will probably see you cover most of the planet with ease. But I daresay such an achievement would require a true gift for languages that few of us possess. And that’s the point that bugged me with French and German – why should you have to be “good at languages” to be good at languages?

This is where Esperanto comes in.

Created by a Polish doctor as an international auxiliary language in the late nineteenth century, Esperanto was designed to be a simple, easy and effective means of communication between different peoples, and I have been aware of its exstence for years. I possess a “Teach Yourself Esperanto” book I bought many years ago, but cannot remember where or when, and to be honest it has been virtually untouched as long as I have had it, largely due to a lack of motivation.

But the basic principle of the language – simplicity – has always appealed. I have been thinking a lot recently about languages, contemplating improving my French or German or else starting to learn a new one. Last month we went to France on holiday and on a whim I dusted down “Teach Yourself Esperanto” and took it with me.

Thanks to the freedom of a relatively lazy holiday, I made swift and satisfying progress. I then reinforced my knowledge upon my return with the multilingual Esperanto learning website lernu.net. I also made contact with other speakers, and this past Saturday I went to Glasgow for a study day organised by the Scottish Esperanto Association.

Meeting other speakers was always going to be a key litmus test for me. It would move the language from the page or computer screen into real live face to face interaction, and transform it from an abstract and solitary interest into a potentially living, dynamic means of communication. Would using Esperanto with other speakers for the very first time turn me from a fleeting enquirer to committed enthusiast?

The answer was an emphatic yes. Why? Why was I interested to start with, why did I enjoy getting stuck into it, and why am I going to stick at it?

The main answer to all those questions is that basic principle, simplicity. On a two week holiday I’d probably spent an average of an hour a day on the language, yet I’d managed in that time to learn the basic rules and concepts plus a modest, functional amount of vocabulary. In fact, doing some rough sums in my head I reckon I gained as much Esperanto in those dozen or so hours as the amount of French I knew after a year of secondary school. This echoes with some figures I’d read previously, that it takes a native English speaker ten times longer to learn another European language than Esperanto, and many more times longer to learn an unrelated language like Chinese.

This simplicity is based on the logical way in which the language was designed. There are no irregular verbs or exceptions to any grammatical rule, phonetics and spelling are simple, word order doesn’t matter that much, and patterns and consistency abound in every feature of the language. That makes for an incredibly satisfying learning experience, because when you learn a rule you know you’ll never be tripped up later by exceptions or quirks, and can apply the rules without limits, rapidly expanding your vocabulary and capability.

It helps, furthermore, that Esperanto’s vocabulary draws very heavily on that of Romance and Germanic languages, not least Latin, meaning that on first glance the language already feels somewhat familiar. You don’t need much language talent to be able to guess what “la hundo estas en la aŭto” means.

One obvious flaw of Esperanto is that there are not many speakers – the estimated two or three million speakers are scattered thinly and evenly throughout the world. But that’s not a barrier in an age of global travel and internet communication, and in any case it makes existing speakers all the more welcoming and supportive to new speakers, as I found to my delight at the study day on Saturday.  Thanks to them, I already feel a part of a community.

In a relatively short space of time, Esperanto is, unlike any other language I’ve encountered, already proving a fun adventure. I might just blog about it – and perhaps even in it – as I go.