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So that interview process with the firm in Edinburgh went well right enough - they've offered me a job! I start in 2020, so I'll be a fully qualified solicitor in 2022. They do have an office in Glasgow, but their corporate law team is in Edinburgh, which I'd be more interested in. I have a spare year in 2019-20 to work/travel which is also nice. Right now I'm just absolutely buzzing that I don't need to spend hours and hours out of my week making applications and prepping for interviews anymore.

Those as well obviously..... without them I may never have pulled through, I of course always tell it as though it was about how determined I was not to let it get the better of me I am because it's the only way to get any sympathy and pity from the women in the office.. Didn't get any pity at home obviously but at work you get that gentle hand on the arm as they lean in to ask "are you ok??" " would you like me to get you anything"

Thanks to the meds I posted you surely!

Surely with lemon and honey too?

Probably the most complex structure ever built by humans which is slowly approaching its retirement... I wonder if we'll replace it with another constantly manned outpost in space. Bigelow Commercial Space Station seems to be the closest replacement for ISS; after all they have been testing an experimental module for over two years now and it's expected to stay attached to ISS for two more years at least. Axiom Space are also working on a similar autonomous space station. Once viable and affordable launch vehicles are readily available (SpaceX and Blue Origin are developing reusable rocket ships), there will be a big breakthrough especially when it comes to commercial space flight and commercial space stations. However, there are by far more interesting concepts and ideas being developed as the potential "next step". There are plans for a Deep Space Gateway, a lunar orbit space station which is intended to be used a jumping point to the exploration of the solar system. Going to the Moon itself is another big one, with various governments and private agencies and corporations planning to do that in the near future, and it's possible that we'll have a permanent Moon base relatively soon. Asteroid mining. Manned missions to Mars. I think we're entering the new golden age of Space Exploration at last; along with the usual suspects (i.e. USA, Europe, Russia), other countries have high ambitions and plans in development too, especially China and India. So exciting.

International Space Station: Twenty facts about the ISS as it celebrates its 20th birthday Joe Sommerlad 9 hrs ago © Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited The International Space Station (ISS) is celebrating its 20th birthday. Russian space agency Roscosmos kicked off the project to build a successor to the Mir and Skylab stations on 20 November 1998 when it launched its Zarya module from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Two weeks later, Nasa followed suit with its own component, Unity. The pair were joined in low-earth orbit and started a 13-year construction effort that would see a vast artificial satellite produced, serving as an observatory, laboratory and staging post from which mankind could advance its understanding of our own world and those beyond. The ISS was also a landmark act of co-operation between the United States and Russia, the old Cold War foes definitively laying to rest decades of nuclear tensions to share the expertise both sides had accumulated during and after the Space Race of the 1960s to further the common good. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of this extraordinary project, intended to last another 10 years at least, here are 20 facts you might not know about the ISS:

You were right @nudge , they picked Jezero Science & Environment Nasa 2020 robot rover to target Jezero 'lake' crater By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent 19 November 2018 The American space agency (Nasa) says it will send its 2020 Mars rover to a location known as Jezero Crater. Nasa believes the rocks in this nearly 50km-wide bowl could conceivably hold a record of ancient life on the planet. Satellite images of Jezero point to river water having once cut through its rim and flowed via a delta system into a big lake. It is the kind of environment that might just have supported microbes some 3.5-3.9 billion years ago. This was a period when Mars was much warmer and wetter than it is today. Evidence for the past presence of a lake is obviously a draw, but Ken Farley, the Nasa project scientist on the mission, said the delta traces were also a major attraction. "A delta is extremely good at preserving bio-signatures - any evidence of life that might have existed in the lake water, or at the interface of the sediment and the lake water, or possibly things that lived in the headwaters region that were swept in by the river and deposited in the delta," he told reporters. Jezero's multiple rock types, including clays and carbonates, have high potential to preserve the organic molecules that would hint at life's bygone existence. UK industry to make new 'Hotbirds' Mars robot to be sent to Oxia Planum The jeopardy of landing on Mars