On the Collective

I went home for the weekend and discovered when I got back that I'd left my mobile there. Since it serves me not only as a phone, but as my watch (since I lost mine in the summer) and, crucially, as an alarm clock (I can't believe that didn't strike me till hours after I realised I hadn't got it), and since I'm not a natural early riser, this is going to provide me with quite a handicap for the week.

I've just found out that I'm now a member of The Beaver Collective. I'm quite surprised by this actually- as I said, I was 99% sure that three of my photos were published in the last issue (looking again, I revised that to 50% sure that a fourth one was mine too), but only one of those were credited and I thought the others probably didn't count therefore. Also I wasn't quite sure if you could have your three pieces (the membership qualification) in the same issue. And then I wasn't sure if anyone was really keeping count of photographers, even though photos count, since I do get the impression that for most people the words are the important thing. But I got an email from the photography editor saying that he'd asked for me to be added. I'm quite thrilled, as it's been an aspiration of mine for quite a while (and not just because they kept saying at Green Party meetings last term that we should write for The Beaver and try to get on the Collective, so there would be more left-wing votes). I have to say I can't see my participation being hugely earth-shatteringly dramatic, but even if I say nary a word it will be interesting to go along and listen to the meetings. That is if they haven't scheduled them on Monday (computer class), Tuesday (computer class) or Thursday (People and Planet) evening.

Though it's taken several weeks of submitting photos to no effect, and though I spent quite a while taking and then weeding through and sending those photos, I have to say that this route was almost certainly easier and less effort-involving by quite a bit than writing three pieces. For me, anyway!
I actually spent quite a bit of Friday on photos- actually it was generally busy. It being the day when I have no lectures, I actually didn't get up till around noon, but the pace hotted up after that. Two or three hours on Oxford St searching for a hula-hoop* for the Global Dinner, with a detour in John Lewis to the fabric department (where I got a couple of really nice printed silk remnants for £11 in total, which will make a gorgeous summer dress), then to LSE to hunt for recycling no-nos to take pictures of for the People and Planet guy's article. Though I knew what he wanted most was a photo of the paper recycling bins in the library being tipped in with the stuff from the ordinary bins, I thought it prudent to get some other stuff in case that didn't come off. So I began the long trek round. Unfortunately when I started at 4 ish a lot of the classrooms were in use so I couldn't go and inspect the contents of their paper recycling bins. But although the Old Building didn't seem to have them anywhere else, I arrived on the fourth floor of St Clements via the sky bridge and sure enough just as I remembered they had paper recycling bins in the corridors (though seemingly only at one end of the building). Unfortunately though** they were mostly exemplary samples of How to Recycle, the worst you could say being that most of them were empty (though even that didn't necessarily mean much: it was possible they'd already been emptied that day) and that in some cases people had stuck paper in a normal bin metres or even centimetres from a paper recycling box. I got some pictures of cases of that, working my way back and forth between St Clements and Clare Market, making use of the multilevel bridges, and rising a floor each time, and then descending a floor each time missing out the ones I'd done and starting again at the fourth. I had to stop and check my email in a computer room on the first floor because it was just too embarrassing, having spent some time studying the timetable on the noticeboard beside it to check it was free, and having entered and discovered there weren't any problems with the paper recycling bins, to turn around and walk right out again, especially given there were only two people in there (having a conversation about Spain that sounded wierdly like an interview)

Cases of rubbish bins right next to recycling boxes used for paper- except for
bottom right: the bin was not next to the box but at the other end of the same
room. As the box was shoved under a table and pretty inaccessible it's not
surprising that it hadn't been used

Coming out of St Clements with the aim of doing Connaught House next, I bumped into the boy himself. I told him I hadn't got much so far, and he told me not to bother getting any more but to make sure to be there to get the library pictures, and we arranged to be in the library at 6. But I didn't stop- the whole reason I'd volunteered to do these photos was because the idea of going round the whole of LSE looking for recycling faux pas to snap was strangely appealing, and certainly not to do him a favour. It'd have been appealing even without the photography element- it's a quirk of my personality that a complete tour of a university on a sort of I-spy sounds like great fun***- which was really just the icing on the cake. I drew a blank in Connaught House, but my next stop, Aldwych House, where there were a couple of free classrooms, turned up gold dust: a Sprite can and a drinks bottle (and no paper) in one of the paper recycling boxes. That was pretty much the best thing I found in all LSE- though in the Towers I did get some more photos of paper in normal bins next to empty recycling boxes and (after a fruitless trip to St Phillips) quite a few more cases of things that shouldn't be there in paper recycling bins in the Library- some of them more blatantly wrong like a piece of orange peel, and a plastic propelling pencil lead case (at least I think that's what it was) but all of them less visually effective due to the presence of a lot of paper in the bins as well (making the wrong stuff harder to spot).

So, it's not too clear...- but if you look hard you can see orange peel, a carrier

bag, drinks bottles, a can, a propelling pencil lead case,,, and one case of
the thing being used purely as a rubbish bin (centre)

I was in position at one of the first floor computers at 6 (with no sign of the guy). I almost missed the photo when the cleaner turned up an hour or so later, so absorbed was I in what I was doing, and then I thought she wasn't going to do anything photo-worthy anyway because she emptied the stuff from the recycling bin into a new bag and walked off with two separate bags, the other clearly with stuff from normal bins in it. I texted as much to the guy (still not there), but before sending followed her on an impulse. And I saw her emptying a normal bin into the same bag she'd just put the paper recycling in. She proceded to fill up that bag from recycling and normal bins alike, and I got some fairly good pictures (along with plenty of bad ones: in spite of it being blatantly obvious that I was following her around and taking pictures- I felt quite bad and awkward about it actually- I was still trying to preserve some vestiges of subtlety by not using a flash (making some pictures blurry due to long exposure times) and standing not to close nor too directly in view where there was the option not to be (so I didn't always get the clearest view of the bin she was emptying). In fact, there were some quite long periods where I was waiting for her to move on and trying to look like I wasn't waiting to follow her which must have been fairly Clouseau-esque in their ineptitude for camouflage of purpose). But I think it's important to point out that the recycling bin by the computers for certain, and given how many of the basement recycling bins had stuff they shouldn't have in (all of them), quite possibly all the others she emptied, had stuff other than paper in- the one by the computers had a plastic bottle in. For all I know, cleaning staff are instructed not to keep paper recycling bin stuff separate if there's other stuff in there: it would make sense as they presumably can't send it to be recycled without removing the extraneous matter and probably can't spare the labour to do that. In other words, it could be us and not the cleaning contractors who are mucking up the recycling. In support of this, there was one recycling bin that the cleaner looked into but I believe didn't empty or take anything out of- maybe it was just paper and she came back after I was seated at my computer again (having followed her to the ground floor where she went through the turnstiles with her rubbish- I imagined she wasn't going to be emptying any more bins and in any case my ID card was upstairs along with my bag so I'd have been unable to get back in) and emptied that recycling bin into a separate bag which went for recycling.

I didn't actually see they guy there at all. During a lull in the middle of the photographing, not long after it began (the cleaner was tying up bin bags or something and it seemed to be taking a while), I got a text from him saying he'd talked to a cleaner or someone and they'd said the collection would be at 8.30. I texted him back to say I was watching (and photographing) it now. He acknowledged that but still seemed to be aiming to come in at 8.30. This seemed bizarre to me since it was definitely happening now and I couldn't see it happening again- and especially not at 8.30 since I'd been there at that time on my previous unsuccessful visit on Thursday (at which I'd concluded that I'd arrived too late). But I refrained from commenting. If he was there at 8.30 then he was on a different floor because I didn't see him.

LHS: ordinary bins and RHS: paper recycling bins being
emptied into the same rubbish bag

At the risk of sounding grouchy (but in fact I did enjoy it and it was worth it anyway), when I got home at about 9.30 (having spent some time in the Library after the photos working), before I even made some supper, I sat down and downloaded the photos, and picked out the good ones, and made some montages of for example all the paper recycling bins with other stuff in, and sent them off to the guy as I'd said I would, in case he had a midnight deadline for the piece (I believe Beaver content has to be in on Friday though for pictures (those chosen by the photography editor rather than the individual writers which I believe is uncommon outside of Part B anyway) it seems to be ok to send them in by Sunday afternoon). I didn't hear from him again that night- ok, so maybe the deadline wasn't then (maybe he wasn't even planning it for this issue). But it's now Sunday evening and I still haven't heard from him- not even a 'Thanks a lot- I'll look over these later'. It's possible I got the wrong address, or that he had a freak accident or something. But if not, and if he's been able to check his email, then that's just ungrateful. Just as well I was doing it for my own enjoyment, really!

I just realised that I actually omitted to attach the most important photo (the montage of the cleaner doing her stuff) when I sent them to the guy (because I only looked at the end of the folder since all the ones I wanted to send had ben renamed as I'd done stuff to them like shrink and montage them, and I was working from what was there rather than having a list of what needed to be included, and I failed to appreciate that the new name beginning with A for those ones put them before all the originals). So now I feel pretty bad- let's hope he was planning on submitting it next week!

*the plastic excercise kind, not the potato snack kind
**for this context, of course- from a broader perspective I'm delighted they were being used properly
***Something I once proposed to Ginger while we were both at UCL, but which we never got round to trying, was to play a kind of game which would be effectively tag over the whole campus, with of course the proviso that, given that we were mature and responsible university students, it couldn't look to any passers by like it was a game of tag- so no running for starters. It's something we used to play at school (not disguised) when I was at the more suitable age of 10, and I loved being able to go round loops in different directions and take different paths to shake off the approaching pursuit- and somehow the idea of having a whole university campus to range over... especially with the interesting multi-level arrangement that is UCL's main building... but sadly it was not to be.