Should we be happy?

As a politically aware (but not politically active) student, this week has been an interesting one to watch. Due to government legislation, our Guild of Students has had to get 10% of the student population to vote to save the Guild as it is in its current form. I was very pessimistic about this being achieved. Given the low turnout in other Guild elections, I wasn’t holding my breath that roughly 3000 votes would be achieved in five days.

Yet it was. Not just that, they apparently managed to gain almost 1000 more votes than they required.

I don’t know whether I’m happy or not about this news. Yes, it is a good thing that the Guild managed to gather so many votes, it is a sign that student apathy does not completely rule(despite my thoughts). And yet surely it is a bad thing that people are delighted that they managed to convince just over 10% of the student body to vote, leaving the other apathetic 80-odd% wallowing in their own self ignorance.

I am glad that the Guild has managed to survive, and am aware that it must change its ways to encourage more participation with the student body as a whole. This whole incident should serve as a warning sign to those in the Guild, they should take note of the situation and the rather tense nature of the election.

Equally importantly though, this should act as an encouragement to them. They have managed to convince people to vote in numbers which I was not alone in thinking were beyond them at the start of the week. If one weeks work can yield such results, surely a more concerted effort can be made to attract more people to use the guild as a student government, rather than seeing it in its current guise.

The only way is up it seems. Watch this space…

Two Look at Two

Since A-Level I have harboured a love for the poetry of Robert Frost. Every now and then I feel urged to share one of his poems with those who read my writing. Here is one about chance meetings, and how to look at things from the other side:

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. ‘This is all,’ they sighed,
Good-night to woods.’ But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.
Then, as if they were something that, though strange,
She could not trouble her mind with too long,
She sighed and passed unscared along the wall.
‘This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?’
But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait.
A buck from round the spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall as near the wall as they.
This was an antlered buck of lusty nostril,
Not the same doe come back into her place.
He viewed them quizzically with jerks of head,
As if to ask, ‘Why don’t you make some motion?
Or give some sign of life? Because you can’t.
I doubt if you’re as living as you look.’
Thus till he had them almost feeling dared
To stretch a proffering hand — and a spell-breaking.
Then he too passed unscared along the wall.
Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.
‘This must be all.’ It was all. Still they stood,
A great wave from it going over them,
As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour
Had made them certain earth returned their love.

Welcome to the field…

Coming, as I do, from another blog, this step into the individual blogging sphere, is, from my point of view, a little overdue. The creative freedom that having my own blog allows is something liberating, as I felt a degree of staleness about the blog I used to share with a friend.

My blogs have tended to be controversial, they have tended to be (I think) strong minded, and they have tended to be topical. Nothing will change here.  I will continue to write in the same rash, unconsidered manner I always have, and then attempt to justify my opinions later on. It is my hope to update this as frequently as I can, and I shall try to keep the posts either depressingly critical of everything, or comical, with a touch of sarcastic wit thrown in for good measure.

To quote the much loved Blackadder, “this is, as they say, it”.