Bonfire night / Guy Fawkes Night / fireworks night this evening – though I have seen little evidence of any. There were a couple of large fires the week before last, in Eastleigh and Smalltown respectively, but I don’t think they were either intentional or related to Guy Fawkes. In Eastleigh a Indian restaurant caught fire (coincidentally, the one we had intended to get a takeaway from the following evening), and in Smalltown a car ignited – the fire spread to two other cars in the car park before the fire brigade arrived.

I went to two fireworks displays last weekend. I’m sure I’m not the only one who dislikes the growing amalgamation of Guy Fawkes and Halloween. Having said that, one of the displays had a good spooky grotto set out in the 100-yard walk through the woods from the car park to the display area. Though at the end of the evening several of the lights had faded so I couldn’t see where I was going. I should have taken up the offer of a lift back to the car.

Fireworks displays are strange events to go to, when you think about it. You stand around in a cold, wet field for 90 minutes to get fifteen minutes of entertainment.

I was listening to Radio 4 Extra on some of my car journeys last week. Because of the cyclical nature of the schedule, I found that on one journey I heard the last half of one show and the first half of another; on the second journey I heard the first half of the first show; and on the third journey I heard the last half of the second show.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks at work trying to get a project finished. We gave a release date for the week after next, which seemed a long way in the future at the time. But by the time you’ve factored in testing and preparing the release and absences (using up leave means few people are in for any full weeks between now and Christmas), and getting all the ducks in a row, you realise that actually we’ve got to have the changes completed by, er, yesterday. Which we just about did – depending on how you define “complete”.

My workload wasn’t helped one morning when I got in to find an email from a colleague saying “we need xxx and yyy”. Well what do you expect me to do about it? You know whom I need to ask for this stuff, so why didn’t you ask him directly? And then I did a bit of looking and found we did already have xxx and yyy.

I’ve booked the rest of my leave entitlement for the year, and it’s resulted in six days, which I am taking as three lots of two days. Well, it was five and a half days, plus three-quarters of an hour but I thought “hey let’s be reckless, let’s make it up to six days”. It’s not as if I’ll be short of leave next year – we’ve got two extra days on account of bank holidays anyway. [we get hours added to our leave entitlement to cover bank holidays, but as two bank holidays next year are on non-working Fridays, we get to use those hours for normal days off]