Out from the crowd ...and proud!

Odd happenings and encounters

I'm in the mood for ranting about something completely random but cannot think of anything remotely sensible so have decided to tell the world about the randomness that was the weekend and today. I will, hopefully, get back to the political ranting soon but for now here goes.

I've been ill since the middle of last week. Annoyingly for me, it got worse just in time for Saturday. I will take this opportunity to advise anyone not to do anything that involves speaking when you have a sore throat and have therefore lost your voice. I found this out on Saturday afternoon. "Hi, I'm standing for Union Council and would really appreciate it if someone would vote for me" really does not sound good when you've lost your voice. My flatmates were even making fun of this on Saturday night.

Another piece of similar advice that I would give is do not attempt to sing in Church when you've lost your voice even more so than when you were out on campus canvassing the previous day. One of my fellow Church-goers decided to ask me about why I was standing for Council after the service. Thankfully for this person, I am not very computer literate and could not figure out how to copy my manifesto from Word onto the website so decided to write it out and copy it - long winded but at least I managed to publish my manifesto successfully. I handed her a scrap of paper that had been in the bottom of my handbag since Wednesday. She complimented me on what I had written but is not a scientist so cannot vote for me (don't ask, it's something to do with equal representation for all or something like that, but I did not make the rules).

Later on Sunday, I was at a random social with one of my societies - having now got my voice back. I discovered here that I had actually gatecrashed a pool tournament on the previous day and most likely gave everyone there freshers' flu in the process.

Then, on Sunday evening, I decided to go to another social. I now had no problems speaking though decided that I would not be really annoying so hardly mentioned Council. There is, however, always someone who is really interested in how my campaign is going. I was innocently washing my hands and someone who I did not recognise came up to me and asked me. I felt so embarrassed. I'm just hoping that she either read my manifesto on the website (with the very lovely picture of me at my confirmation earlier in the year) or was someone I saw around at the weekend.

Then this morning was my worst morning of any week. I hate Monday mornings. It was even worse today because I spent so long trying to figure out how to vote online (I'm a bit of a traditionalist myself - I like walking to the polling station and ending up in the wrong building. Note to self: church services are normally on Sundays!) that I nearly forgot to eat lunch. There is no way that I would have survived physics foundations and relativity without lunch.

I still have loads of random stuff on in the rest of this week. I have a meeting tomorrow about a protest I'm going on at the end of the month. I then have some random boring kitchen rep's meeting on Thursday, though a few of us are thinking of getting together and having a night out on Thursday night (celebrating or drowning my sorrows). I then have council training all day on Saturday so will have to do all of my weekend work on Sunday. And if this week was busy, next week is not going to be much better - we have our first Council meeting on Tuesday. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end!

posted by Average guy on the street @ 11:41 pm