Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

I had my Civil Service assessment day on Monday. It was intense. As usual, I slept very badly the night before, waking up every twenty minutes worrying I'd overslept. Eventually I got up at 6am, put on my business-like blouse and skirt, tried to overcome the nerve-induced nausea and headed for Westminster.

On my walk from the tube station to Tufton St I met another person heading the same way (you could tell because he was using the map inside the booklet they sent us), so I had a nice chat with him. That calmed me down a bit because I'd have given him about two out of ten for social skills.

Unfortunately the rest of the people were much better. They'd mostly gone to Oxford, Cambridge or Durham, and the majority already had several years' work under their belts. Out of the five people in my group, there was only one that I didn't think would get through (although the sixth person simply hadn't turned up). They tested us pretty thoroughly over eight hours (some unfortunate souls who lived near London had ten hours), although the second thing that calmed me down was that the first exercise was to come up with as many ideas as possible for increasing voter turnout. Which is something I've thought about quite a lot in the past few months.

I was expecting to hear from Fast Stream today but actually I found out yesterday: I've been offered a place. So that's exciting, but also quite scary: now I have to wait to hear which department I'll be in, where I'll be located, when I'll be starting.

And knowing I have a job when I finish has made me quite impatient and annoyed with aspects of my current job, like nobody buying tickets for the Societies Awards despite it being the best one yet, and people not reading the schedules we presented to them at Council last night before voting. I think I need to go home and read a detective story in the sun, I'm in a bad mood.

Just a quick post to tell Mum that only Saturday Andy and I were admiring the fine quality of the towels in Bangor's new super-modern Debenhams. I'm sure we can fit some towel-shopping into our weekend somehow.

Today's lead story in North West Wales?

Country lane gratings are stolen costing literally TENS of pounds.

Odd, considering they didn't even mention this one.

BBC Bangor just don't have their finger on the pulse.

I've got my new internal hard drive now, and my new external one. But I have to confess: it was all my fault.

When I opened up my computer to pop in the new hard drive (it's so slim, isn't technology coming on in leaps and bounds) I found this ... thing ... on the bottom of the case. I think it might be a capacitor. Anyway, it has definitely fallen off the circuit board on the old hard drive.

Oops.

Looking on the bright side, I now have 2gb of my music back and am enjoying listening to it SO much. There's nothing like nearly losing everything to make you appreciate what you have.

I've been abandoned for the week so am having to fend for myself: foraging for food, cooking and cleaning up all alone. I haven't been allowed to cook for some time because I often burn my hands or cut myself or drop things when I cook, but I do really like food and I really like coming up with things to eat.

So this week, just because I can, I am not going to eat ANY lamb. I'm going to eat nice, nutritious, healthy things. Today I'm having trout with garlicky butter stuffed in it (I have to confess I bought it that way) with cous-cous. I'm going to stir fennel cooked in butter and lemon into the cous-cous when I'm ready to serve, and I've made a side-salad of red pepper, basil, feta and oven-warmed cherry tomatoes covered in deeeeelicious olive oil. I feel so Mediterranean.

Yesterday followed a similar theme: I didn't really have anything planned so I made pasta with a cream-and-pesto sauce into which I mixed some soft goats cheese and (again) oven-warmed cherry tomatoes (they're soooo tasty). I'm feeling so virtuous and healthy and best of all it tastes wonderful.

The other thing I'm working on this evening is defeating the Evil Sony, who won't allow me to transfer music from my mp3 player to my computer EVEN THOUGH I OWN THE MUSIC because it's not already on my computer (see: hard drive issues). I'm going to contact customer support tomorrow but I think I'll probably just have to use some of the many free .OMA to .MP3 converters out there. It's Sony's fault, driving me to hack their security like that.

I didn't want to stir up too much trouble in Seren, and I didn't want to discuss the affiliation/disaffiliation issue there because I'm still not entirely certain what I believe. And probably how I feel is different to how everyone else feels because it's a bit more personal for me.

The fact that the nutty hard-left hijacked the governance review so successfully has upset me. How on earth did they manage to persuade people that this was some kind of New Labour plot? Certainly the new constitution contains some big reforms, and yes those reforms are probably loosely connected with New Labour in that they have presided over national governance changes: British constitutional reform, the new Charities Act, that kind of thing. New Labour have forced a shift in culture because they are in government: yes, NUS could ignore the way the government operates, but it wouldn't get very far.

So if that's what they mean by the governance review being very New Labour then yes, it is. But if they mean that New Labour somehow had some actual say in the governance review and that it was designed to benefit NOLS, then that's not true at all.

I can't speak for other members of the review group, but I was solely driven by a desire to make NUS more accessible to normal students. I think Zone Conferences would be great for students who otherwise wouldn't make it to Annual Conference because it's too big and scary and deals with lots of topics that individual student might not be interested in. With Zone Conferences you can send along people who are actually interested in that zone, so people from our Welfare Committee could go to the Welfare Zone Conference. What's wrong with that idea? It would mean we'd actually get to discuss more than a couple of hours' worth of motions.

I also think a Board is a really good idea. NUS is filled with activists, and activists are just not good at or interested in finances, in staffing, in anything to do with legal obligations. It disgusts me how people throw around suggestions with absolutely no thought whatsoever about their implementation, their cost, the implications of their suggestions. That's why there needs to be a board separate from the political structures. And maybe I'm naive but I actually don't think that being on a board automatically makes people evil-doers hell-bent on the destruction of NUS and all that it stands for.

So I'm very disappointed the reforms didn't go through. Very disappointed because I gave up fighting against NUS affiliation because I was convinced that I should try to effect change from the inside, and I really really did try, and NUS really let me get involved.

But it didn't work. It didn't work because 1/3 of the people who turn up to Conference fundamentally disagree with what I think NUS should be like. That 1/3 can stop ANY major change, because you need a 2/3 majority for constitutional changes to be passed. I just can't really see a way out of that situation and I wonder whether we need two national unions: one for the hard-left fight-them-on-the-streets (that's an infamous Sofie Buckland quote) posse who are into students activism, not student politics. Then one for the 2/3rds who want NUS to campaign on stuff that affects students, perhaps encouraging students to engage with wider issues but not trying to lead on that because that's not their remit. That's the one I want to be part of.

But realistically, who's going to start that union? Cos I'm not. I'm leaving student politics in three months and I'm going to leave this problem to others. I don't really like student politics all that much: there's some things I feel quite passionately about but I'm not prepared to attack those who oppose me, I'm not prepared to just make passionate speeches and ignore the actual questions people have about what I'm proposing, and I'm not prepared to shout down anyone who disagrees with the accepted wisdom on topics such as abortion and the BNP.

So good luck to the new officers, both in Bangor and on the NEC. I hope we don't leave NUS, I hope NUS can improve, but I don't feel very confident that that's going to happen. Here's to being proven wrong.

I've been putting off writing about Conference because I didn't know where to start. But I've just found a place because I've written an article on Conference for the Seren News Editor. Here it is (cheesy headline and all):

UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL
New NUS Constitution falls at bitterly divided Annual Conference

It’s hard to put NUS Annual Conference into words. It’s chaotic, exhilarating, comical and divisive. It’s three days of impassioned debating on subjects ranging from tuition fees to military recruitment in schools, from accreditation for extra-curricular activities to ending child poverty.

It’s also full of nutters. There was the guy who claimed that One Water (charity bottled water whose profits go to building merry-go-round-powered water pumps in Africa) was a capitalist plot, the people who claimed all sabbaticals were right-wing fascists who sat around sipping Bollinger champagne (we get ours from Aldi ...) and the people who wrote to the Guardian before Conference claiming that NUS was linked to the CIA.

Somehow, in between all the bickering and tub-thumping, we did manage to discuss some pretty important issues. So now your national union believes, amongst other things, that we should oppose Special Branch attempts to spy on Muslim students in universities (something we’ve already opposed here in Bangor), that the Government should raise the education leaving age to 18 and that there should be an NUS Nursing Students’ Campaign to address widespread problems with nursing courses.

But the biggest issue was the ratification of NUS’s new constitution, a project I personally was heavily involved in as a member of the Governance Review Steering Group. To everyone’s surprise, the constitutional ratification did not get the majority it required, getting 692 votes in favour, just 25 votes short of two-thirds. This was quite a blow for Bangor and the other unions whose disaffiliation campaigns had been defeated on the promise of far-reaching reform.

In fairness to the newly elected National Executive Committee, they have bounced right back and are insisting that a new constitution can and will be passed within a year. But there is a fundamental split within NUS between the hard-left factions who want their national union to campaign on international issues, to “fight them on the streets”, and those who favour lobbying ministers and other key decision-makers directly, focusing solely on educational issues. This split has left the Union locked in a stalemate where a majority wants change but the minority is blocking it.

This year’s leadership have had all the right ideas, and it is a real shame that the positive initiatives they put forward have been hijacked by factions who have put a halt to the changes NUS needs so much without offering any real alternatives. Next year’s sabbatical officers will have to think long and hard about our involvement with NUS, whether we continue to fight for change or whether we cut our losses now and leave NUS to the factional in-fighting that dominates all NUS “democratic” events.

That bit that slopes up to the right was the bit that nearly killed me, it was so difficult. Here's a picture of it without snow on it.

It looks much easier there. But look how steep the drop to either side is! I slid much of the way down on my bum, it was much easier.

And when we got to the top we didn't even have a stunning view, just an occasional teensy gap in the clouds, like this one.

I was so distraught at this point, I thought that thing in the middle of the photo was the top but it was just another small thing, possibly called Ill Crag, taunting me. What a cruel, cruel mountain.

I said I'd blog about the last week but I haven't made a lot of progress. At least now I've uploaded my photos from the Lake District to Flickr and set up the blog-from-Flickr feature so we're getting there.

So I wanted to tell you about climbing Scafell Pike, the hardest thing in the world EVER. I don't want to bore you with endless photos of beautiful mountains so I'm going to try select just a few photos that epitomise the climb.

I think this one is taken near Esk Hause and it sums up just how snowy and cloudy/foggy it was trying to climb up that damn mountain. And how steep it was: you can't even see the hill it's so steep, Karen looks like she's emerging from nowhere. I deserve a medal for getting to the top.

I've had an exhilarating, exhausting, emotionally draining week. I've got so much to say I'm going to have to say it over several days.

I'll start with my hard drive. Turns out the Head Disk Assembly Unit has failed, and that it will cost £392 + VAT to fix. I bartered it down 20% but it's still far, far too expensive.

So I'm slowly coming to terms with my loss. I've lost all my photos, all my music, all my degree work. But at least they have managed to extract a list of all the files that used to be on it, so now I'm going to busy myself seeing how many of them I have in other locations.

I think it might be quite a lot actually: I have formatted drives before and saved all the important files to CD so I'll probably still have many of the older files. And Ian has most of my music on his mp3 player (I love my little brother). And I have all my degree work printed out (I'm so glad I file things so anally). And in the past two years I have put most of my photos on my work computer, not my home computer. I'm looking forward to going through the list and discovering how much I actually still have.

I feel like that man who had all his belongings destroyed as part of an art exhibition. It's healthy not to become too dependent on tangible things, right?

Nonetheless I'm going to try not to make that mistake again. I'm currently shopping for an internal hard drive (200gb, not Samsung because I hate them now) and an external hard drive so I can back my stuff up. And I've asked the company to return my hard drive so that when I'm very rich I can get all my files back and it'll be like opening a box in the attic and finding lots of old toys and pictures and stuff. Just think how happy I'll be.