Street of Light Edinburgh

The day did not start well when I discovered that the Christmas lunch that I had so carefully planned for my group at work was not to be. Neither party knows how this happened, but I was certain that the catering supervisor with whom I spoke a couple of weeks ago had told me that our canteen would still be serving turkey at lunchtime today. In fact, it was taken off the menu yesterday! I found this out at about 08:45 when I called into the canteen to confirm how I would pay for the meal to which I had invited everyone.

I think that the staff instantly saw the disappointment on my face. They quickly leapt into action to see what they could do to make up for the misunderstanding. By 1pm they had laid out a special table for us, complete with festive table cloth and crackers. We chose our food from the main menu and most of us enjoyed a delicious home-made sausage stew.

The rest of the day was spent in PhD supervisions and at our end of year all-centre meeting. Here we all had a timed 5 minute slot to speak about our research achievements since last June. We had fun with a new giant purple 5-minute egg timer that I bought last week specifically for this kind of meeting to keep everyone to time. It worked: even for me with so much to say!

An advantage of working until 8pm on campus was that I was able to catch the Street of Light on my walk home (blipped).

In other news, poor Mr hazelh has caught the cold that I endured last week.

Exercise today: walk to work and back (20,294 steps).