Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

Another super thing that happened is that I finally heard from the Civil Service. Clearly Gordon used his influence.

I'm through to the next round, the assessment centre one. I'm pleased about this because up til now I haven't had the chance to demonstrate my personality; it's all been aptitude tests.

But I'm starting to get worried that they'll want me to live in London. London isn't a nice place, it's full of people pushing and shoving and getting angry and hot, crowded trains. I'd rather live somewhere nicer if they'll let me.

So many exciting things have happened in the last week that I haven't had a chance to write, I've been too busy being excited.

The main exciting thing is that my brother has come home. He's been unwell for weeks and has been wasting away, losing muscle mass and other nasty things.

He had quite a miserable time getting home though: he was on standby from Thursday evening until Monday, when my new favourite insurance company (good old Endsleigh) managed to get him a flight home. He sounded so miserable and I was quite glad I was home at the weekend so me and Mum and Dad could be worried together.

Thankfully a very nice Quaker Ghanaian we had met at the Triennial last year rescued him on Sunday and brought him to his swanky house with hot showers. This made Ian less miserable, and consequently made us less worried.

And now he's at home and working on what to do for his birthday weekend (which I'm also going home for) and what to do next summer (he needs another adventure now his first one is over). I like my brother.

I feel a little nervous because I'm currently formatting the primary hard drive on my Windows PC. I've unplugged the secondary one just to be certain it doesn't get formatted. The computer was getting rather sluggish, mostly because that 20gb drive was getting pretty full -- Windows XP seems to take up about 10gb and the majority of the programs were installed there too. Oh and for some reason I still had that drive partitioned into 16gb and 4gb, and the 4gb bit was completely empty so I wanted to remove the partition. From what I can tell there is no reliable way to do that without risking losing everything so I thought I might as well bite the bullet and just format the whole thing.

Also I now have a 200gb secondary hard drive (well, I've had it for a few years) which I would rather have all my programs installed on, and it just seems easier to wipe everything and start again than to uninstall and reinstall lots of software.

I've backed up all my settings and the windows folder, and all my personal files were on the bigger hard drive anyway, but I'm still nervous about losing something really important. Or even that it'll just all go wrong. But it's so frustratingly slow that I'm barely using it at the moment, so I might as well try to make it usable, right?

Picture says it all really. Today Sam and I met Gordon Brown. You wouldn't guess it from the picture, but Sam's jealous because me and Gordon had a better chat than him and Gordon. He's sulking because Prince Charles and Gordon both wanted to chat about my music degree.

It was exciting, I got up this morning thinking I was just going to an Open Day. The Open Day was nice, but whilst I was there Sam asked if I wanted to go to the official opening of the Environment Centre, with a mystery senior government official. We had a sneaking suspicion it might be Gordon, but we didn't know for certain until we got there.

As I hadn't expected to be meeting celebrities, just prospective students, I was wearing rather scruffy shoes. Sam said it would be fine, but while we were waiting around I started to feel more and more conscious of them. Thankfully Sam was understanding, so we rushed home to get different shoes, only to find we'd both left our keys behind, so we raced back to the Union whilst Frodo raced downstairs with keys and we span around the carpark with Frodo chucking the keys in the window as we drove past. It was thrilling, Sam's driving style suits that kind of dramatic excursion. Anyway I'm sure Mum would be proud, I even polished my shoes.

Pressure's on, though: I have to get into the Civil Service now because I told Gordon I would.

Yesterday I worked from home. It was very enjoyable actually, I felt like I was getting a bit more daylight and I was able to knuckle down and get some biggish tasks done that had been hanging over me for some time. I like all the face-to-face contact in this job, but when you really have to get something done, the interruptions are quite unwelcome.

But today I feel better, my to-do list has halved and I've just bought myself Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for £38.95 instead of the usual £599.99. I love student offers. I love having a University email address. I've been using Works 97 on my PC at home for years and years because I didn't have anything better; now I've got EVERYTHING, even Access (which I dearly love, if only I could send attachments with emails created using Mail Merge my life would be complete). Oh and it's very sunny, which is a hazard you know (Screen Glare Costs Lives), but it makes me happy so I'm glad my blinds don't work.

I'm quite jealous that my ickle brother got to go to the final of the African Cup of Nations. Very good idea taking the opportunity to go to that: I'm not a big football fan but I enjoyed the experience of going to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United lose to Chelsea, and I'd imagine a big match like that in Africa would be really exciting.

Still haven't heard anything from the Civil Service Fast Stream people. They haven't sent any bulletins about when we might expect to hear from them since the start of January, and all it said was 'mid-February'. Which is now. I'm going to be annoyed if I get ruled out based on multiple-choice tests, I want to get to meet them and show my team-player skills and efficient-organised-likes-to-file traits and I want them to read my excellent answer to the essay question. Damn these meaningless filtering rounds.

I've lost my brother, where are you Ian? Are you okay?

In other news we got surveyed by Ipsos MORI today as part of the Living in Wales survey. It was quite fun really, although a lot of the questions were about our plumbing. Turns out we're a high-income household: although individually we don't earn a lot, collectively we're rich because we've got three earners in the house. So why am I always broke?

Our boiler is now fixed: there was this switch, you see, that said 'immersion' on it, and Frodo and I thought 'but we don't have an immersion heater thingy' so he switched it off. And then we forgot that we'd done that, and didn't think of it until the second plumber came out and said it seemed like there was some kind of switch cutting off power to the boiler somewhere between the main fuse board and the boiler itself ... now we feel a bit stupid, and our landlord isn't all that delighted at having to call out two repair-people for no reason.

From The Twang's rider:

"Small Bowl of Seasonal Fruit must include bananas"

In what part of Britain are bananas currently in season?

I'm feeling a bit grumpy this morning having been woken up by people drilling the road outside my window, the start of three weeks' resurfacing works.

We only realised this was going to happen when we received a letter on Monday asking us to find alternate parking arrangements while they resurfaced the road. In fairness, the man in the Council was quite helpful when I rang up and asked for a permit for a nearby car park, but I did have to ring up and ask, it wasn't offered. And the letter said the works would start 'on or around' Thursday, not at 8:00am on Thursday, so our cars were still parked on the street. I had to get dressed very quickly and move the car off the street; by the time I got back to the house, they'd taken up the road up to about two metres behind Sam's car.

So I feel hassled, and it's really really noisy in our house with all that work outside. I'm sitting here in work having some comforting earl grey tea (while a loud thing cleans the street outside) and wishing I could start the day again.

If you're an avid reader of Sam's blog, you'll already know that last Friday was Serendipity 2 day.

Serendipity 2 has always been a good idea that didn't really work in practise. The Christmas before last I spent my whole Christmas holiday daydreaming about what I could do to make it better. I hired a rodeo sheep and a candyfloss machine and publicised it an awful lot, and people came along and had a nice time.

So the pressure was on for this year to keep it up. But the Governance Review and running the elections has taken up an awful lot of time lately, and I really didn't put as much time and effort into publicising it. The day before Serendipity I started getting a bit panicky because there just didn't seem to be much of a vibe about the place. Nobody was talking about it, the media room wasn't full of clubs and societies preparing their wares, and I had a horrible feeling nobody was going to come along.

On the morning I didn't feel much better, especially when the majority of stallholders hadn't turned up by 10:45, 15 minutes before it opened to the public.

But around 11:30 it all started to come together. Academi started to fill up, people started getting competitive about the bungee run, and the ice-cream van belatedly turned up and started serving up deliciousness.

What's nice about Serendipity 2 is that people aren't stressing about roping in loads of members. Sure, you might get a few, but it's more about raising your profile generally. So we got the Art Society face-painting, the Indian Society doing henna drawing thingies on people's hands, the Fencing Club fencing, BUGS sitting outside in a tent, and Circus Skills juggling to their hearts content.

I think I'm going to recommend to my successor that they push this angle even more next year, getting everyone to add to the party-like atmosphere, so it's almost a carnival, not a recruitment ground.

It wasn't until it was all over that I realised that was my last shot at Serendipity. Very sad, it's like leaving school or putting your favourite toy or dress or something away in the attic.

Oh, and it didn't snow in the end.