Life

car

I got my car back safe and all spruced up. The garage helpfully delivered it to my door and put the key through the letterbox -- I hadn't realised they could do that, the last time I had to have my car repaired I had to get a bus and taxi out to the little village where the car was and it was quite stressful getting there.

The key had a little paper tag with my surname on correctly spelled, with little circles for the 'i's :)

I do want to transition to not having a car (some combination of 'not usually driving' and 'renting a car when it's actually useful' with zipcar for short journeys if needed) but I decided right now in the middle of house-buying and other stress was the bad time to decide. There's some small amount of things I need to work out (best way of renting a car to visit liv without 5 hour train journey, figuring out if zipcar is usable, getting a back-up bike, etc) which are not too complicated, and I think will be all ok, but I didn't want to have to do all at once in the middle of housebuying.

beer

I've been to the beer festival every day this week. My alcohol tolerance has massively reduced, I'm drinking halves and still going easy, and feeling about right.

Each year, I run into more lovely people I've almost lost touch with -- friends from trinity, friends from maths, people from work, etc.

I need to do a proper beer tasting, I drink beer regularly, but I'm still muddled on which sorts of beer I like best.

Work

Work is going fairly well. The project is slowly ramping up, with many more short deadlines, which are satisfying, because you have a clear metric for success, but also has a feel of many-plates-up-in-the-air.

EU citizens in UK unregistered for Euro elections

https://storify.com/sturdyalex/non-british-eu-citizens-denied-a-vote-in-european?utm_source=l.facebook.com&utm_content=storify-pingback&utm_medium=sfy.co-twitter&utm_campaign=&awesm=sfy.co_rWA4

Does anyone know more about this?

Many people report being EU citizens resident in UK who thought they were registered to vote, but weren't given a vote in the European elections. Is this just a case of forms being genuinely accidentally lost? Or some sort of central snafu?

Is the process of registering to vote supposed to be different for non-UK EU citizens? Several people referred to a "second form" which they were supposed to have received, but apparently went astray.

Update 1

EU citizens resident in the UK should be able to vote in the European elections (which is obvious to me). But:

1. Apparently they have to submit some additional form in order to register to vote, which most people were never sent, and never given any instruction about. Is that right? What form? Is that required, or is it a UK-specific extra hurdle?
2. Why did many people not receive it?
3. At least some people manning polling booths apparently thought eu citizens shouldn't be able to vote, or that it didn't matter. Obviously some people do lose their vote through paperwork snafus, but it shouldn't happen systematically! How on earth can "who can vote" and "everyone who's entitled to vote, should be able to vote" not be something you have to learn before running an election?

Footnote

I'm hyper-aware of any systematic disenfranchisement, even at fairly small scales, because it often might just be a miscommunication that doesn't have any effect, but I know how easy it is for it to have been a wider effect than people realised, or for someone to take advantage and deliberately spread it, if disenfranchising people advantages whichever party they support.