Strrrrrressssss

I arrived in London on Monday night, checked into a hotel, woke up at 6 the next day, spent the entirety of that following day assessing and being assessed by Civil Servants, and then had an extremely robust Lebanese red in a wine bar where “measure” is considered a filthy word. 

Romantic + absurdly huge measures
= my kind of wine bar

For afters I went home, enjoyed a bath. You have no idea how glorious a bath is until you’ve not had one in months. I thought my skin was melting until I realised it was muscles unknotting. 

Then I stayed up far too late watching Bones. I was going to stop at 9 and go to bed, but then one of the characters started hallucinating Stewie from Family Guy and that’s the sort of thing you need an explanation for.

The explanation was "brain tumour," if you were wondering.

Today I got up at 6.30, made my way back into London, and spent the day talking up democratic procedures, Skills Awards (like our very own STAR) and how to encourage students to take up placements. That last one is something I’m particularly interested in, if only because there’s such a huge capacity for students in Aberdeen to take part in internships and placements over the summer. It can’t be denied that a lot of those are in the oil and gas industry – it’s an industry that hardly needs more help in damaging the planet, and most certainly one that we shouldn’t be encouraging students towards.

(With that being said, we can’t avoid the truth that many of our students will end up there, and so we – as an Association – need to ask ourselves how we can be both a lobby group for positive social change and a representative body for students who will work in environmentally damaging industries.)

Ah well. Maybe there are answers in sleep, which is exactly where I'm heading. My week so far has been exhausting. Tomorrow will be peaceful.