General Election today. And local council election here as well. Double the fun.
Today is the first time I've voted 'properly' - the last election (2005) I was deep in final year exam hell at Keele, and had a postal vote. Weirdly I seem to have a fairly vivid memory of walking from the house to the postbox with it.
But yes. I've ticked some boxes. And got odd looks from the polling station people. Possibly because I was asking them really stupid obvious questions (such as "where's the box?" and "do they both go in the same place?"), possibly because I was wearing my freakshoes. Maybe both.
Thankfully the election hype will all be over soon (well, until it ends up hung and we have another in a couple of month's time...). This means no more huge piles of political junk mail to throw in the bin without reading, and more importantly, no more huge obnoxious billboards all over the place. They were making me very angry - purely because all they were doing is slagging the others off. This is not productive, and I hate how much they all do it.
It's all very well wanting to tell people that your opponents are rubbish and you disagree with them, but it's also sort of a given. Make adverts/leaflets/etc about some actual policies, and positive things, and I might pay more attention.
As for staying up and watching results come in... it's a bit tempting. But my telly has decided it doesn't want to make any noise, and I've had half an hour of bbc news website refreshing - but it's all far too boring and I'm tired. Zzzz.
Last year, I spent Easter weekend up in Scotland. This year, we were more sensible and went for an entire week.
(Yeah, I could/should have posted this weeks ago. But I've been somewhat busy with work, business trips and hours and hours of photo editing...)
Awesome week! Plenty of rivers, mountains, gorgeous scenery, lovely people, drinking, cakes, faff, etc etc.
And one not so lovely stomach bug that went round throughout the week, knocking most of us out for a day. grr
We travelled up on Good Friday, stopping in the Lake District to run the River Kent on the way. Camping on the Friday night, but proper accomodation in Fort William for the rest of the week. And a drying room, which was most handy.
Both Saturdays were spent in Glen Etive, which is now quite high up on my list of beautiful places. The second in glorious sunshine - I'm going to use a photo to show this, rather than a thousand words!
Barely a cloud in the sky, and still some snow on the peaks. Wow.
As ever, I didn't do nearly as much kayaking as I could/should have - and my waterproof camera did more than me! This is fine though, as I also went walking, climbing (at the Ice Factor in Kinlochleven, where I was happily climbing 6As, wooo), read books, took a lot of photos, and generally relaxed 
Still a bit too much of this though:
That's me upside down on the Garry, and was shortly followed by a swim. Excuse: my legs were dead and fell out of the boat. yeah...
Other points of note:
- I somehow stayed awake the entire journey up
- but was quite old-mannish and slept in the evenings when others were socialising...
- 3 swims, 2 rolls. hmm
- also lots of swimming/rolling for people other than me, hah!
- my new dry trousers are brilliant
- seeing the improvement in people's skills by the end of the week
- marbles!
- I'm still not that keen on haggis (had a haggis panini, which was interesting)
- Wine and me and ovens should not mix. Burn scar on my arm...
- swim beers being replaced with swim easter eggs
Bring on next easter. Or, indeed, my next holiday - which is now only a month away...
Part of my job involves occasional trips out of the office, to work at conferencey type things for a couple of days.
Last Wednesday I flew to Berlin. El cheapo Easyjet from Bristol - so two hours of getting mildly annoyed by small children running up and down the plane.
Thursday morning I get told that a volcano has erupted in Iceland, and flights were probably going to be grounded all day.... My return flight was Saturday at 9pm.
So there followed two days of obsessive refreshing of BBC news and easyjet's status webpages.
By Saturday morning my flight had officially been cancelled. 'Luckily' I'm generally pessimistic, so had already assumed that would be the case and formed a backup plan 
(greatly helped by knowing that I wasn't the one paying for it....)
An extra night in Berlin on Saturday, then on Sunday a train to Cologne. That bit was fine, but when it came to changing there (for a train to Brussels) it all got a bit mad - the train was massively overbooked, so after a lot of confusion we ended up on replacement buses. The first two(!) filled up and left, and I ended up on the third, which was only about 1/4 full. So we had quite a sociable journey, swapping stories of our travels.
I'd originally managed to book a Eurostar for Tuesday morning, along with two nights in a grotty hotel in Brussels.
But by some massive stroke of luck on Sunday evening, I managed to move that booking forwards - obviously I'd checked the website very soon after an extra train had been added. Phew.
Bruxelles-Midi station on Monday lunchtime was very hectic. And the signposts are rubbish so it took me a while to actually find the eurostar place. But once I'd got there, it wasn't so bad. Just waiting around until it was time for boarding, then through border control and onto the train.
We were 45mins late leaving due to it taking a long time to get all the passengers on, but who cares! Arrived in St Pancras at half 4, then a train to Bristol, where my dad very kindly picked me up and took me to the airport so I could collect my car
Eventually got home at 9pm. Zzzzz.
On the plus side, I had a lot more time for sightseeing than I'd originally planned!
As well as an evening walk to the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag, on Saturday afternoon I took a tour of Berlin by boat. It was mostly rubbish, and a nice reminder why touristy sightseeing trips should be avoided like the plague.
"On your left is an old building. On your right is another building,"
"Where this park is used to be some fancy old building, but it got damaged in the war and the GDR demolished it *explosion sound effect*."
"Now we have a new building, built by some person to symbolise something or other. This building has a nickname, as does everything else in Berlin, blah blah blah"
Oh, and I saw the continue reading »
tags: politics 
