A · diary · of · nothing · happening

Just for fun, I've calculated the Banzhof power index for all of the political parties in the UK parliament. This gives their relative power in terms of being able to swing votes.
Conservative 63.7%
Labour 36.3%
LibDem 36.3%
DUP 11.3%
SNP 9.0%
Sinn Féin 5.9%
Plaid Cymru 4.3%
SDLP 4.3%
Alliance 2.0%
Green 2.0%

Sinn Féin don't take up their seats, so with them excluded the figures are:

Conservative 62.5%
Labour 37.5%
LibDem 37.5%
DUP 12.5%
SNP 9.4%
Plaid Cymru 3.1%
SDLP 3.1%
Alliance 1.4%
Green 1.4%

Not sure what it shows, except that without the coalition the actual voting power of Labour and the Liberal Democrats would have been absolutely identical, despite the very different number of seats.

Well, we've arrived safely in Brisbane. Our first holiday without the kids for about 20 years (we expect the house to be perfect when we get back, kids!) so we've decided it's a second honeymoon. At the moment we're hanging around the airport terminal, , probably smelling worse than a dingo's dunny after the 29 hour journey from home, waiting for the car hire desks open in about 3 hours time. No point checking into a local motel for just three or four hours, so Antitig is sleeping on a sofa in the arrivals lounge, and I will be occupting another one when I've finished typing this. How romantic!

I have to hand it to Emirates, their in-flight entertainment is great! Thousands of films, TV programmes and CD's to choose from -- as well as listening to Florence and The Machine, and Leonard Cohen, I was able to work my way through the Pink Floyd back-catalog -- I got from Piper at the Gates of Dawn all the way up to Wish You Were Here, as well as catching up on the film Prince Caspian, three episodes of Outnumbered, Death Note 2 (a rather well-plotted and visually great live-action manga adaptation) and a whole pile of other stuff. I think that will do for videos for a while.

Voice: Hello, could I speak to Eva please?
Me: She's in Hong Kong at the moment. Can I help or take a message?
Voice: Could she do a night shift tonight? Even if she has to be a bit late...
Me: ???

Even when my wife is away (Hong Kong, since you ask) I can still end up sleeping on the sofa!

I repainted the stairs. The paint tin said "touch dry in one hour". The paint tin lied. So I was trapped downstairs.

At least it's a comfy sofa.

Hurrah! We are back to having a poet laureate whose work I like. I loved Ted Hughes' poetry, but could never find anything to like in Andrew Motion's.

The snowfall today has made everything so picturesque that I want to put up a tree and Christmas decorations! Maybe we should celebrate Candlemas instead of Christmas -- the weather is usually so much more Christmassy then!

Well, Bob the Rescue Rabbit came to live with us just over a week ago. We put him in the run, right up against Jessica's hutch. They sniffed at each other through the bars, then Bob went on to explore the rest of the run. Jess, though, did a perfect reproduction of the mirror scene from the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup", running up and down the hutch keeping exactly in line with Bob (even when Jess went into the closed-off part of the hutch).

Jess has never been entirely comfortable around humans, although she's getting better. Bob, on the other hand, seems to have been a house-rabbit (he's a rescued stray). He's toilet-trained and more than happy to be picked up and fussed. He turns out to be a very licky rabbit, licking our hands and feet whenever he gets the chance. We've given him a mineral lick in the hutch, but he prefers our hands and feet.

For a week we swapped them around between the run, the indoor hutch and the outdoor hutch, so they got used to each others' smell, then introduced them to each other in our lounge. Bob
is only half Jessica's size, but seems to be solid muscle (and as a rescued stray can clearly look after himself), whereas Jess is more floppy. He kept sniffing at Jess, who would then chase him away. Eventually, fed up with being chased he settled on my lap (so he sees humans as safe havens -- his previous owners must have been really good with him). They didn't actually fight, so we put them in the indoor hutch overnight. After some aggressive posturing from Jess and a certain amount of running around they settled at opposite ends of the hutch. By yesterday, though, Jess had started grooming Bob, and they were sleeping snuggled against each other, so they seem to have made friends.

Then, disaster. Yesterday evening, Jane went to bring them in from the run, and found that she'd left the latch open on the door, and they'd both escaped. Jess was found quickly enough, but no sign of Bob. After an age of hunting around the garden with flashlights and going around all our neighbours, we eventually gave Bob up for lost and came in. I left the garden light on, in the hope of deterring the many cats and foxes we have here.

This morning I was up at first light to start the search, only to find that Jane had already been searching before dawn, and had come in and fallen asleep on the sofa. But when I went out to the back of the house, there was Bob, trying to work out how to open the French windows to get back into the indoor hutch! When we opened the windows he ran away, but only to the outdoor hutch, which he happily hopped into. So the rabbit family is complete again.

I suspect Jess thinks we're daft, though. Earlier today we saw him trying to bully Bob, but when Eva went out with some food he switched instantly to grooming. Not that Jess completely gets away with the bullying. Jess used to push Thumper off the water bottle when she wanted a drink, and Thumper would put up with it. Bob doesn't: he pushes back. Proper hard case is our Bob, when he needs to be!

Well, that's the E303 exam out of the way. Three parts with roughly equal weighting. Part A easier than I expected, part B as I expected and part C harder than I expected, so it looks as if I'll be getting the grade I deserve, although that's probably not the grade I would like. On the way home I started reading Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" because I wanted to, not because it was set as part of a course!

Meanwhile, what am I to do with all this beer? The CAMRA beer club sent me two beers -- eight bottles -- in the last batch that it turns out don't meet the club's strict criteria, so they've sent me another eight bottles than do meet the criteria plus two more as an apology, and I get to keep the original eight. And I've still got a few cans of ordinary stuff left over from a party ages ago. At the moment it's hard to get into the kitchen for beer. Anybody fancy popping over for a drink?