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I passed my driving test yesterday! I'm now licensed to drive manual transmission vehicles with up to 8 passenger spaces. Despite attempting to do a substantial chunk of the turn-in-the-road - aka the 3-point turn - with the handbrake on, I only got 3 minor faults (you're allowed up to 15 in total, although if you get more than 3 or 4 in the same ( Read more... ) -
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I spent a good part of last weekend at the now infamous Camp for Climate Action in Edinburgh, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It wasn't a perfect utopia, but neither was it the hooligan jamboree that has been reported in the media. Some of the criticism of the camp has come from journalists' misunderstanding of the principles and methods involved, ( Read more... ) -
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I turned 27 today. It's a bit of an odd feeling because, as a kid, I got it into my head that 27 was the age when you were supposed to start being a proper, serious grown-up. So it's always been this semi-mythical time in the future when I would be getting married, having kids, and all that kind of stuff; it didn't seem like a particularly young ( Read more... ) -
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I ended up going to see the wanky play on Leith Links because it was included in my £2.50 day ticket for the Mela Festival - the play normally costs £10 so I figured I might as well go since I'll have to hear it every evening for the rest of the month. It's staged in a really impressive way, with the audience milling around performance space ( Read more... ) -
Clean *all* the things?
Today in a burst of ill-considered responsibility, I decided that rather than go out on a bicycle expedition, I was going to stay in the flat and Get Stuff Done. The recycling was spilling out of its designated cubby-hole on to the kitchen floor, so I took it out to the special bins down the road (not the glass though, because that needs to go in ( Read more... ) -
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One of the most hideous new words that has come out of recent political and media discourse is "non-job". Having scapegoated supposedly wasteful public sector practices, and got the general public riled up about that, they moved on to calling it "bureaucracy" - because we can all hate the idea of forms in triplicate and so on - then final arrived ( Read more... ) -
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Sunday was the big day for the 80 mile cycle, and fucking hell that was a bit of a trek. What my mother had neglected to tell us was that 20 of the 80 miles were along a badly maintained landrover track, and the first 9 miles of it was a single gradual ascent. Or that we were going to start at 8am in a location 45 minutes from the house. ( Read more... ) -
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Last night's episode of Doctor Who was fantastic. I want it to be Christmas now to see what happens next. Unlike the Rusty-era efforts, this one didn't make me cringe with the overblown sentimentality and metaphors that are about as subtle as a brick through the window. ( spoilers ) -
What I did at the weekend
Yesterday I went to a protest against Israel's attack on the aid flotilla heading for Gaza. Some of my thoughts are on the new blog, but I wanted to record some of my personal feelings about it here. As a protester, I've never heard so many insults from the general public as I did this Saturday. We were accused of protesting against our own ( Read more... ) -
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For all of the Eurovision-sceptics, I would like to present the amazing Lithuanian entry 'Eastern European Funk', which sadly didn't make it through to the Saturday night final (and they was robbed - robbed! - I tell you). It's dryly satirical, riffing on so many of the classic Eurovision tropes that you'd be at risk of alcohol poisoning if you ( Read more... )