The Telegraph alone lives up to my expectations (!)

Guess what, I missed my lecture today too. This time it wasn't even like I overslept accidentally- I didn't get to bed too early and when the alarm went off I decided I felt too tired to get up, and went back to sleep. Big slapped wrist. There are two weeks left of term, and I am really going to try and pull my socks up and attend every single lecture, arriving on time and not dropping off accidentally halfway through. I am very ashamed.

I thought there would be no point my going in to college given I had just that one lecture, but then I remembered I had to give in £5 for the Statistics and Risk and Stochastics Postgraduate Christmas Party (which will be in the last week of term)- today was the last day to do that, and, I suddenly remembered, wasn't it before noon that it had to be in? (It was 1.30 at this point). I turned on my computer and looked at my inbox. Yes, it was before noon- but maybe if I went now they wouldn't mind too much that it was late? I also saw that I had an email from the Students' Union Communications Officer. Usually an individual email from one of the Sabbaticals would be an unheard of offer and my reaction would be 'What can they possibly have to email me about?!', but in this case I thought I knew what it was, and I was right. On Tuesday I entered the competition at the bottom of the email that gets sent out by the Communications Officer each week giving details of what's going on. It was five questions such as 'Where does the free bus to halls leave from after every CRUSH?' and 'Who will be Chair of Council from 2008?' (!). I got all the answers except one ('How much does a Southern Fried Chicken Platter cost in the Three Tuns Kitchen?') from the LSE website, and got the remaining one when I was down there for the meeting about the sit-in. And the email was to tell me I had won, and should come to the Students' Union reception to get my prize (tickets to CRUSH; I've never been but always vaguely meant to, though I was entering the competition more for the sake of it, and because after my experience of 0 entrants to my Climate Change Awareness Week Quiz, I felt disposed to enter other people's competitions, rather than for the prize).

The first thing I did once on campus, though, was to go to the SU shop and get not only the Guardian, but also the Independent, the Times and the Telegraph (once again, something I would normally never do- bargepoles figure largely in my normal equipment for dealing with the last two, though not as long as the ones I use for the Daily Mail... which I couldn't bring myself to buy this time). Today was the day that the nationals would have the story about the sit-in, if they ever did. Then I went to the SU reception, and got my tickets from the Communications Officer- a whole four of them, and valid for any CRUSH*. I asked if anyone else had actually entered- not in a your-competition-is-rubbish-and-I'd-be-amazed-if-anyone-had kind of way but in a well-I-won-and-there's-obviously-a-far-higher-chance-of-that-if-not-many-people-entered,-right? kind of way. Apparently there was one other entrant, but she'd put down funny answers rather than the right ones. So I guess it really wasn't that surprising that I emerged victorious... I think they're going to have more competitions in the future, and I hope more people enter- there's a serious purpose behind it, which is to encourage people to find out more about the services on offer, which I certainly did.

Fortunately, it wasn't too late to give in my £5, and I will be able to go to the party!

I had a look through the papers on the way back on the bus. I knew there would be a bit in the Daily Telegraph, in the Diary section- it had been sent round the group in an email earlier in the day. Disappointingly though that was all there was. The coverage was of course unsympathetic, it being the Telegraph, and called us anti-capitalist activists, though I think only a few were actually anti-capitalist and the protest as a whole certainly wasn't, though we were against the mixing of business and education. But at least it mentioned clearly that our protest was about his appointment to Chair of Council and not just a general protest about BP's record. It's rather ironic that the only one of the four with anything about it was the Telegraph- I would have expected better of the Guardian and Independent. I wonder, are people apathetic because things like this aren't covered in the media, or does the media fail to cover them because people are apathetic?

I went out again to have a look for a pub- next week I'm going for a meal again with L, Flatmates 3 & 7, and L's friends, and the latter had apparently expressed a desire to try traditional British food- I thought a pub would be most likely to combine that with a vegetarian option and not be too expensive, but I didn't actually know of any that were good. So I took a bus to Bethnal Green, and walked from there down Cambridge Heath Road (popping into Sainsbury's at the end of it), then into Whitechapel. I found a couple of places there, and then a couple more when I got back, right by halls, which turned out to be no more expensive than the ones in Whitechapel though I'd feared they would be. I had four options in the end, all of which had dishes for mostly £5 to £7 which I think is as good as you're going to get in London (though I may be wrong).

I found a couple more blogs about the sit-in by audience members. The first is unfortunately in Simplified Chinese, which is fine if you happen to be able to read that, but I can't, and the Google translation is obscure to the point of my not being able to tell if the writer is for or against us. But I think Flatmate 7 is going to tell me what it says if she has time- she's from Taiwan, so can read it no problem. The other is a case of Spot the Errors- here's my list:

1. (A linguistic mistake)- 'brandishing' not 'branding' boards
2. It's Chair of Council, not Chancellor- we actually don't have a Chancellor, but a Director, but I shudder to imagine if we did have a Chancellor and it was going to be him...
   
3. The Students' Union wasn't protesting purely because of BP's environmental record but also because of its human rights record, because of Sutherland's non-BP record, and because students weren't properly consulted about the appointment
   
4. We were't happy about his failure to engage, but it wasn't the main reason behind the protest (that being the appointment itself)
   
5. He offered us 15 minutes for questions
   
6. True, we didn't mention Sutherland's non-BP record in the leaflet given out at the protest- but BP's record had already had to be cut drastically to fit on the page, and there wasn't really space to go into Sutherland's own past as well- though perhaps we should have focussed on that instead, maybe that would have been more effective than attacking him as the chairman of a company with a bad record. However, one of the strongest things against him, which a lot of us thought was very bad, we decided not to mention as it's a controversial subject and could end up losing us support from people who agree with him on this: as Attorney General of Ireland he was instrumental in making abortion illegal.
   
7. Once again, the info we had on BP focussed more on human rights abuses than environmental problems- yes, members of the audience addressed us as environmentalists but they presumably hadn't read the leaflet properly
   
8. LSE couldn't settle the matter prior to the lecture (apart from by never appointing him in the first place)- we deliberately kept it quiet from them that we were going to protest so that they wouldn't put too much security in the Old Theatre for us to be able to, as telling them wouldn't have made them unappoint him (why would it, when it was allowing them to avoid the protest and they had no other reason to do so?), but would have removed our chance to protest against it. Similarly, they couldn't cancel the lecture
   
9. I think the writer means 'parties'...
   

The Simplified Chinese blog (for those who can read it)

Google's translation

The Spot the Errors blog (you have to scroll down through quite a lot of blank space to get to the text)

*CRUSH is the main LSE Students' Union weekly event, held in the Quad every Friday- basically it's like a club, only on university premises. Every university has something similar- UCL's was Cocktails on a Thursday (with real cocktails, though in order to make the cocktails fit the student budget, they had to cut down on the quality- for example, it was milk, not cream, in the pina coladas). CRUSH has various themes. though, which Cocktails didn't- for example I think the other week it was school disco themed, and one time before that they had a Baywatch themed one (with rumours that David Hasselhof would put in an appearance, though I'm not sure if he ever did). Universities tend to have other nights as well as their big, open-to-all one though- UCL had postgrad night on Tuesdays, and most places have a sports night on Wednesdays (UCL's was, rather unimaginatively, actually called Sports Night (or possibly Nite)), since Wednesday afternoon is usually set aside for people to play sport, if they want, with no lectures- of course it mostly tends to be people who belong to one of the teams at sports nights, and from what I hear there is a lot more consumption of alcohol and promiscuity there than at the general nights like CRUSH or Cocktails (despite the name). Rugby players are the worst- I lived with one for a year :-)