The week of the 18th has been rather heavy on the travelling! Monday I ended up in bed ill (one of the NEC passed their Freshers Flu germs on to me!) which wasn't nice, but the lemsip seemed to do the trick in knocking me out sufficiently.

Tuesday I had to go into the office, to polish up my Alcohol presentation and then get myself over to Brussels (eurostar was v exciting!). I managed to arrive half way through the welcoming dinner as they had forgotten to tell me about it until after I'd booked travel, and I was pretty much the only person there representing young people, which was slightly ironic as it was a conference about young people and alcohol. The conference the next day was really interesting, and my presentation went well, but I think they could have made more effort to talk about the importance of communicating with young people rather than patronising them...

Thursday I was back in the UK, and attended a little bit of Mental Health Day to show my support. Sian's video is excellent. There was quite a lot of press coverage about the issue of students and the community and a lot of it was quite negative, so I had to spend quite some time making sure my speech was right for the conference in Leeds on the Thursday.

The speech went really well, and it was good to see officers from Leeds Uni, Leeds Met, Notts Trent and Notts Uni sticking up for the positive role students play in the community. Hopefully the message will get through - yes there are problems, but a lot of them are down to dodgy landlords and prejudice against students. Students are here to stay in cities and towns across the country, and if local residents aren't prepared to accept that, engage in dialogue and welcome the contribution students make, in terms of the economy and the volunteering projects they undertake, then it's difficult to bring down the barriers.

Immediately after my speech, I had to head back on the train to Edinburgh for the Scottish Training Forum, the NUS Scotland FE Training Event, where I ran a session on running a welfare service and got dressed up as a witch for the halloween party. All good fun and a very successful weekend all round! When I got home I had to go straight out again to go on BBC 5 Live at midnight on Sunday to talk about students and the community. I think it went well but I'm not convinced anyone was listening apart from my mum!

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