Busy, Busy, Busy …

As a few people will be aware with how long it’s taking me to reply to their emails at the moment, I’m chasing my tail trying to keep up with things.

Miracle DBF
I’m usually quite anal about deadlines so it’s very rare indeed for me to miss one. Well, I have now. I was supposed to have my presentation slides handed in by 9am this morning for handouts to be printed, but I was so far from making the deadline I’ve set a new deadline for myself of being finished before the conference start. To be honest, I was originally only going as semi-official conference blogger (I can think of at least four other bloggers who’ll be in attendance, though) but Mogens got a little mixed up and decided I’d be presenting. In the end I just agreed to help out anyway but I’m not sure what the end results are going to be like. 

I thought I’d make it, but I’ve been a little caught up over the past three or four days with …

Wedding

My mate Ken’s wedding was in Innishannon, County Cork, Ireland on Saturday. We travelled over on Friday and stayed in Cork for the night. I have to say I was very taken with the place and particularly it’s relaxed but boisterous atmosphere. I realise that sounds like a contradiction, but Mads and I spent most of the weekend trying to describe to each other what it was that we liked about the place and the more we drank, the harder it seemed to get 😉 Unpretentious cropped up a couple of times. (Actually, at one point I asked a barman for a ‘large beer’ rather than a pint. In retrospect it was because the atmosphere felt more European than anything remotely British – which is a compliment.)

We both really enjoyed the wedding which was relaxed even though all the traditions were present and correct. Just between you and me, though, it was the day of the first Old Firm match of the season! Kick-off at 12:30, wedding kick-off at 14:30, so I knew I was going to miss it. By a stroke of luck, our taxi arrived in Innishannon far too early so we had to fill some time (honestly!). At the bottom of the hill from the church was a pub which was showing the match on TV 😉 As we watched, who should sneak into the back of the pub for several minutes quiet viewing but a man with a dog collar! Yes, we saw him conducting the service later on 😉 (Oh, and the result wasn’t too distressing for me and neither was the local company in the pub.)

After the wedding, we all adjourned to the Trident Hotel in Kinsale for the reception where the food was grand, the drink endless and the company relaxed and fun. Mads and I were incapable of carrying on beyond about 11:30 so we headed back to Cork for the night. When we bumped into several guests the next day at Cork Airport (flying back to Edinburgh), it turned out that many of them had been drinking until 5am! I’m far too old to cope with that kind of thing.

Which sort of brings me back to the Miracle DBF, doesn’t it? Sleeping on floors, shared rooms, endless drinking? That’s not very fair because at least most other attendees would have been students at one time or another so they’ve had more practice than me 🙁

Expect silence whilst I rush around a little more for the next couple of days but then hopefully there’ll be constant blogging from DBF to make up for it. Of course, it looks like you’ll need to be able to decipher drunken rubbish, but I have such faith in regular readers 😉