Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

This is shaping up to be a bad week.

For a start, my idealistic world view took another blow. Turns out that good doesn't triumph over evil and that in a position of responsibility you have to make big choices between principles and pragmatism. Very frustrating.

There's far too much to do: tomorrow I'm busy in meetings all day when I should be out campaigning for the referendum.

But worst of all, I burnt an oven glove onto my finger last night. Again.

My driving licence has arrived, so British road users beware. I will shortly be unleashing my driving mayhem onto the streets of Bangor.

I was rather relieved to get my passport back from the DVLA though: the day after I sent it to DVLA Swansea (special delivery so it would definitely have arrived in one day) they got a letter bomb. I was a little worried that either my passport would blow up or they'd blame me because I'm an Irish terrorist.

I've spent about half an hour today standing on a chair with a fan blowing up my skirt. What a varied job this is.

Council went very smoothly last night. I expected the various electoral factions to make more of a display of the whole thing in true Prime Minister's Question Time style, so was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not the case.

It was also Friday's first shot at chairing, and a damn good job he did too. I was particularly impressed with his skill at silencing an entire room with one fearsome whistle. What a talent!

See? It's not that messy.

Went to the comedy night in Academi for the first time last night. There were three performers: the warm-up lady, the headliner and the compere/MC guy.

The warm-up lady wasn't great. She had a few good jokes, but it was all very "I'm a girl and so all my jokes must be about being single and having sex". It was somewhat unfortunate, too, that she (against all the odds) managed to choose the same girl as the MC to ask "do you have a boyfriend? Is he romantic?"

The headliner started strongly with some witty limericks and a rather risque dialogue about disabled parking spaces. But it all felt pretty monotonous after a while; there's only so many times I want to hear "fuck" and "cunt" in one evening. And his accent was annoying.

But the MC was wonderful. He really was. He managed to choose the most excellent audience members to pick on: a (non-student) guy who had four children with four different women, a guy studying environmental forensics, and the gaggle of women at the back who kept screaming every time he said anything.

Pancakes for lunch, I think.

I've had quite a lovely weekend. It started with a walk up Holyhead Mountain; nice to get out in the fresh air once in a while, particularly on a nice bright sunny day.

South Stack lighthouse was looking pretty. Must go visit it properly sometime.



It got pretty cloudy as we approached the top, though, so no stunning views.



Today I went to Treborth to join in the BIFSA walking tour of the ancient woodlands. It was really lovely -- very sunny again, good company and gorgeous woodlands, and it's always nice listening to Nigel.

As we got back to Bangor we bumped into this:



Surprising, to say the least. This is Bangor's version of Chinatown.

My desk is now tidy. Ha!

Well, this is it, first candidates' briefing in twenty minutes. The Elections start here.

Mmmm, Ann just saved my evening. I was feeling tired and hungry and suddenly she presented me with a packet of Duchy Original lemon biscuits, i.e. THE BEST BISCUITS IN THE WORLD.

I shouldn't really go out the night before I have to get up early to finish proof-reading Seren. Four hours is not enough sleep. But it IS just about ready and it's looking pretty damn good.

How nice it is to see the SU media engines whirring away.

Storm is broadcasting wonderful things from the shiny new studio. I was invited on last night to talk about the infernal RAG strippers and why the Exec has decided to ban them. I went down there armed with my trusty constitution; I like having a document people can't argue with.

I am, however, being forced to do all the legal and health and safety bits, even the damned presentation about what Storm is, before I can have my own show. Apparently I'm not allowed to just do the legal test on my computer (where the main copy is stored) in case I look the answers up on Google. Google seems like a silly place to look for them when they're in the Storm folder right beside me.

Seren is due to go to print on Thursday so I'm proofreading away and providing our poor stressed editor with photos and paracetamol. I even wrote my very first article for Seren.

And we've got lots of press releases whirring around Bangor, so hopefully the Mail will have an article about Storm and Serendipity this week, and the University web marketing team have put articles about both Storm FM and SVB online in the past few days.

Serendipity 2 is over and my workload will now (hopefully) return to normal.

I was quite startled at how smoothly everything went, actually. Frodo and I were shifting tables from 7:30am (not out of choice but because that's when the tables arrived), but when everyone else arrived all the preparation got done very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I had a relaxing 20 minutes just before ten when I had time to sit down and have a cooked breakfast.

The only really stressful bit was phoning the rodeo sheep guys at 10:25 only to be told they were still 40 minutes away. It seems that The Wife hadn't passed on the TWO phonecalls we'd had changing the time I wanted them to arrive to ten o'clock. But not only did they have the wrong time, they also turned up in the wrong place, Bangor-on-Dee. You'd think they'd have checked the postcode in a route planner, or maybe checked if there was actually a university in Bangor-on-Dee. So no rodeo sheep until after 12.

Anyway, it didn't seem to mar the event too much: there were still lots of cheery-looking people wandering around with candyfloss and (half-price) pints. I suppose that's the problem with having a big-name headliner like that on all your posters -- they're almost guaranteed to turn up fashionably late.

I think the highlight of the day for me was holding a snake at the Herpetology Society stall. It was really quite something. Snakes are the most scary thing I can think of but I held it and it didn't bite me, just wrapped itself around my arms in a reassuring sort of way. I'm still scared of snakes, but I quite enjoyed holding one. Maybe I should get one.