Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

I had my Civil Service assessment day on Monday. It was intense. As usual, I slept very badly the night before, waking up every twenty minutes worrying I'd overslept. Eventually I got up at 6am, put on my business-like blouse and skirt, tried to overcome the nerve-induced nausea and headed for Westminster.

On my walk from the tube station to Tufton St I met another person heading the same way (you could tell because he was using the map inside the booklet they sent us), so I had a nice chat with him. That calmed me down a bit because I'd have given him about two out of ten for social skills.

Unfortunately the rest of the people were much better. They'd mostly gone to Oxford, Cambridge or Durham, and the majority already had several years' work under their belts. Out of the five people in my group, there was only one that I didn't think would get through (although the sixth person simply hadn't turned up). They tested us pretty thoroughly over eight hours (some unfortunate souls who lived near London had ten hours), although the second thing that calmed me down was that the first exercise was to come up with as many ideas as possible for increasing voter turnout. Which is something I've thought about quite a lot in the past few months.

I was expecting to hear from Fast Stream today but actually I found out yesterday: I've been offered a place. So that's exciting, but also quite scary: now I have to wait to hear which department I'll be in, where I'll be located, when I'll be starting.

And knowing I have a job when I finish has made me quite impatient and annoyed with aspects of my current job, like nobody buying tickets for the Societies Awards despite it being the best one yet, and people not reading the schedules we presented to them at Council last night before voting. I think I need to go home and read a detective story in the sun, I'm in a bad mood.