Friday evening I helped Joanna run her egal service. It went really well, perhaps the best we've had yet, and we had some great discussion going about whether liturgy needs to be "theologically correct". We are normally completely finished and packed up by 9, so I hadn't worried about missing a 10 pm bus, but the discussion got so heated that eventually I had to excuse myself and leave early. The problem with that is that I am the only person who both knows how to use the alarm system and is willing to do that on Shabbat (grr shul installing a security system which not only breaks all the time, but requires people to break Shabbat!), so my needing to leave forced us to break up the whole event. I felt bad about doing that, but equally didn't want to leave
So in the event
Then we flew to Edinburgh on Monday evening (yay for
Tuesday morning I set off for Middlesbrough and the first job interview. The journey along the east coast line is stunningly pretty, and I managed to mostly ignore being surrounded by a posh Edinburgh family with some irritating children. The children were being very good, and I could just see the parents gritting their teeth and trying to encourage them, but they were doing that endless running commentary thing, really shrill and repetitive. I did manage to get some reading done for the following day's interview, though. I ended up being five minutes late, which isn't a great start, but the train was a few minutes late, and the taxi ride took a few minutes longer than I'd predicted based on the website instructions, and the previous train was a whole hour earlier which would just have been annoying. My new shoes turned out not to be even as comfortable as I'd hoped when I tried them on; they rubbed my ankles and pinched my toes, and I was in agony by the end of the day. That was a really bad purchase, which shows you should never go shoe-shopping in a hurry.
Then we went looking to see if Anna Purna, the lovely veggie Indian restaurant in the Southside, was still around, and indeed it is. It's not quite as cheap as I remembered it, but still very affordable, and very much satisfying to my craving for Indian food. It's not your standard Anglo-Indian Balti place, the food is Gujerati and a bit regional, with novel dishes and flavours. I mentioned to the waiters that I used to come there regularly when I lived in the area a few years ago, and they were so charmed that they insisted on giving us free drinks! They also said that they were the nephews of the previous owner, who had now retired but kept the business in the family. Ever so sweet, and it lived up to my memory of being one of the nicest mid-range restaurants ever.
Wednesday I had to make an early start to get to Glasgow for a 9 am interview, but managed to get myself out of bed in good time. The interview was both intense and informal, if that makes sense; I was pretty exhausted after three hours, anyway.
I feel really good about the whole trip; two interviews in two days is exhausting, but having