So after the dust, quite literally had started to settle from the bombings, we would have the first ‘proper’ NEC meeting of the year. The first thing that struck me getting in to Euston was how quiet things were, and of course the massive barricade that had been erected across the street where the bus bomb had gone off was a massive sign of what had happened.

So too were the mass of posters that had been put all around the area by relatives desperately asking if anyone had seen their lost loved ones and the media tents, well more like gazebos actually, which had been set up outside Kings Cross.

The most thought provoking example was a bus shelter with photos on one side and “Wake up, war comes home” on the other.

We arrived at the rather salubrious venue of Camden Council Chamber, only to be told we would have to shift into another room. The Council were to convene an emergency meeting following for some reason, maybe the bombs that had gone off the week before, we couldn’t have the chamber as they wanted and emergency meeting. Fair enough I suppose.

The main part of the meeting of course was to decide what the priority campaigns would be. That was an interesting one. You see there had obviously been an understanding that there would be two priority campaigns. One on Education from Kat and Julian and one of student activities from Gemma and Sian. The problem was, there were three submissions. Veronica had already been persuaded that her campaign was just a normal campaign and didn’t need to be a ‘priority’. So that left mine as the odd one out.

I tried in the most diplomatic way I could to point out that I was actually the only person in the room with a direct mandate from conference to run a priority campaign. Hey I don’t know who wrote that policy, and I’m sure whoever did was probably expecting to end up with a different National Treasurer, but that’s not the point. I did have three strands to Money, Money, Money, to look at funding for Unions & NUS, then students and finally institutions. In the end I ended up with the reasonable compromise that the first part would be merged into the activities campaign. Reasonable in that it was better than nothing I suppose.

There would still be a lot of arguing though, as some people weren’t too happy that my campaign had just been bolted on to theirs, but the conflict that that caused, which seemed to be endless for a couple of weeks, meant that the campaign ended up stronger and ended up making more sense. The reasonable levels of consensus which there had been throughout the education campaign were not helping it progress quite so quickly.

The rest of the first month I spent in a bit of a daze. We had a staff meeting, and now as part of the management team once more, I got to go to the staff meeting. Well at least hang around for parts of it. You know, I’m not sure I ever left the management team, but am still waiting for us to meet- I’m not sure drinks in the Quays count. That was about the only other thing of note that had happened at the NEC meeting, a bust up about who the block members on the Management Team would be. Well Dan Chilcott and Flick Cox had been picked for no other reason than their randomness it seems, and there was a kick off that Pav should go on. Whether that was to put him in a better position for standing for President or not, I don’t know, but those who didn’t want him on the team saw it that way.

Anyway, Kat took it away to ‘look at the possibility of re-jigging things’ as she’d have to move Pav off something else, most likely internationalism, which I doubt he’d be happy about. But anyway for whatever reason, the staff meeting and preparing for it is the nearest we have come to having a management team meeting. The staff meeting was good though. Funny in some ways, watching for once them split into groups and have someone else stand at the front with a flipchart. You could see several of them rocking as they fought against the instinct to grab the marker pens and take over.

The best thing about the meeting was of course the chance to meet the staff. My first thought when I got there was “Who are all these people?” OK, no-one would expect me to know the staff from NUS Scotland, and I’ve been to the HQ in Wales once for about twenty minutes, but the thing that amazed me the most was just how many people from Holloway Road I had never met before.

So it was quite a switch for the weekend, where I met loads of people I hadn’t seen in years and very much saw how things are from the point of view of the ‘other’ side of my job. Ian King was having a garden party at his house. I say house, he lives not in, but next to Stoneleigh Abbey, which yes is as good as it sounds. It’s also 2 miles from my front door. Some of trhe assembled masses had been around the student movement so long that even Lorna recognised them. The best thing was to see Cheryl Turner, who had left NUS as WMRO in 1998, but more importantly had delivered the training course to me as a course rep which, became SORTS then NSLP which gave me the NUS bug.

It was during July that I found out that there were no budgets for the oncoming financial year. This was something of a worry. The estimates, which were too late, and too crap for NUS Conference to accept them were dead in the water. But despite the fact that back in March Martin had been told to go away and redo them, well no-one had. Seeming as they had been totally made up as far as I could see, and there was very little to go on, I decided that, as we were now so late anyway, that there would be no point in doing them until we actually had the year end figures.

And with that, another bomb scare and some more priority campaign meetings, July was over.

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