As Forest Gump would say “Regionals are like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get”, praise, a kicking, animosity or a love-in. On the face of it, it looked like with our route; Kingston, Colchester, Nottingham and Newcastle was going to be far more arduous than the Westside who had a much more compact trip; London, Bristol, Coventry and Liverpool. Things would be made worse for me as I would have to take a detour via Coventry on Wednesday night for a meeting about NUS Extra. I always thought I would jump at the chance of meetings in Cov, but not this time, and my request to make sense of it by doing the North West regional the next day instead were met with “You’re on the Eastside, Joe”. Why would it be reasonable for me to be on the side that would given me two nights at home with my family? But apart from that it seemed that this time I drew the long straw, with far more of the positives coming across with the Eastside posse.

The first panicky thing on the way down was making sure that the two things I had been doing over the weekend, an Extra update and the funding survey were done, ready and emailed for going in the mailing. The laptop NUSSL kindly provided me with has Bluetooth, which I rarely use, most of the time I just use it to type stuff on trains, like this blog for instance. I finally, after the best part of an hour worth of trying got a connection as I arrived at Norbiton Station, I was not going to shut down or disconnect, but I had to get off the train, laptop out, while it was pouring down. Finally they sent and I dragged a t-shirt out of my rucksack to dry off the computer with.

I was spared walking all the way to the Kingston Hill campus as Wes Streeting attempted to speed past me in a cab. I waved hopefully and then a hundred yards further on realised he should probably stop and pick me up the person who signs his expenses as Kingston Hill was taking it’s toll.

The first regional of the week is always the most interesting for the NEC. With no disrespect to the North East, you can imagine that after four days of hearing the same stuff, it gets a little dull, especially hearing the same presentations four times. After two years doing these tours, things took a bit of a change. The first and most obvious thing was that the NEC rotated the bits we presented, with everyone getting a go. This was actually the first time in 22 regional conferences I’ll been allowed to say anything besides butting in. It’s normally all factionally stitched up, so that whoever is in charge can just fix it so that their mates can profile. Well the only thing that was factionally stitched up all week was that Julian was the only one allowed to drive (no matter how much I insisted I should!) and Gemma was a control freak sat in the front with the radio! I’ve been told it was so she could turn it up when they needed to talk privately, but I’m not that cynical……

But back to the South East. First off there were two surprises on turnout. Joe Keenan the new RO was delighted with the numbers of delegates, so much so there wasn’t quite room for them, but that was in part down to first-timers Queen Mary College (the one in Herts, not the one in London) bringing over a dozen against a delegate entitlement of two. Joe had been worried that the lack of an RO for so long before he took over would have meant no-one turning up, but it seems that Bubble and the rest of the new SEANUS crew had been filling the gap very well until he had started.

The other amazing thing was a full turnout from the NEC who had been allocated. This was the only day we managed that. When I say a full turnout, of course I mean everyone was there for part of the day at least, with Benson being the worst culprit and setting his theme for the week, both arriving late and leaving early.

The round-up provided the normal list of things that you’d hope and expect some unions had been doing, with of course a fair share of very interesting stuff, be it new projects that haven’t hit the NUS radar, or things that you don’t just expect. Across the region there were unions dealing with and campaigning on; library hours, transport, religious space, governance, who runs sport at their institution, course reps, inclusivity in activities, drink spiking, referenda, academic appeals and standards, parking, voluntary works and accommodation.

I quote the whole list the first time, but I won’t go through them all every time, I think there might be just a little bit of repetition. One thing I hope to repeat in future is the example of Kent, who as part of their campaign on accommodation, managed to get their VC to live in halls for a week. The most annoying part of the day for me was to hear that when the debate came to the subject of messageboards that the official position of NUS it seems is that educationet is both libellous and slanderous!

Julian was persuaded at the end that it would be better to wait in the bar for a while whilst rush hour subsided and we set off for Colchester. The only problem was not being persuaded by the only person in the car (thankfully we got it switched to a minibus the day after) who had ever been to Colchester as to where the hotel was. The RIVERSIDE Hotel on North STATION Road, did I think gave it away a little, but no, after we had gone past once by about 200 yards as I found my bearings, it was then decided I hadn’t a clue and we went four miles in the wrong direction towards and past the wrong station. The one that doesn’t have a river near it……..

I’m sure there will be plenty of stuff about how fun the car then bus was on every night in Wes’ blog, as well as others. And it was fun, reminiscent in many ways of the heady time at the NEC training back at Ribby Hall.

Whilst there was a bit of it in all the regions, East Anglia seemed the most positive in terms of FE development. When we turned up, amazingly actually before any of the delegates we were met with four crates of Coke. Hmmm I thought, does anyone here have anything to do a certain board I sit on? Anyway, the NEC lapped them up, though hopefully the union won’t get charged for the stains on the university’s carpet! Their most interesting idea though was a quasi-NUS Extra card, well union wristbands tied into discounts. It’ll be interesting to see how that one goes.

From the rest with the roundup there were several interesting things. City College Norwich gave everyone the heads up that ‘Aim Higher’ seem to be giving money away like there is no tomorrow, even apparently sponsoring the cheerleaders at West Ham United! There were tales that one college (not at the conference I add) had just banned all religion on campus. Not quite how that works, or indeed how it fits with the 1986(2) education act, but hey, look out everyone else!

But the true story of woe was that of Middlesex. They’d had their commercial services taken over by the institution over the summer, which had introduced the bane of union venues, private security. One of the reasons behind my bald patch (sadly increasing by the day since I got this job) is being dragged down a set of stairs by the hair by the security firm the Uni imposed on us at Cov for two months. Mind you, I did better a lot better than the person who lost the end of her finger when they shut the door on it. And of course since then, Middlesex have had president Keith Shilson suspended and reinstated by the Uni. All that and a truly divided executive committee that seems to do nothing but row all the time. Everybody said ‘Ahh’!

My big cock-up for the day, and indeed the week was doing the NUS Democracy presentation. The day before I had done MORI, and been quite happy doing it, but had had some chance to prepare. I had sat through Ellie doing the democracy stuff and asked Kat Louis ‘Who wrote this bollocks?’, and decided that I should have a bash the next day. The only problem was that unlike MORI I hadn’t had a chance to read it properly beforehand. The problem I had that Ellie and Gemma the next day didn’t was the whole “this is bollocks” subroutine that was triggered in my head. They might not have believed much of it either, but as true professionals, they skipped over that little sticking point and just read it out. Me though, I had problems right from the start. Ok, yes I can read, and I have reached the more advanced level of being able to read out loud too now, but how on earth could I read out something which says “Only 15% of people at NUS Conference are from factions” at all, let alone with a straight face? Even if there were as many as 1000 people at conference, that would mean just 150 people in factions. Just who was I trying to kid? I couldn’t even kid myself! I know I’m meant to be on the other side of the fence these days, but a line is one thing, a lie is another.*

Anyway, everything else seemed to go fine, even though it might not have seemed it. Of all the east side regionals, East Anglia (so where exactly is West Anglia??) was the ‘worst’, I say worst, it was still good, but the collective ‘we’ got the biggest bashing here, mostly down to the fact from the SU officer point of view, it was the ‘second year sabb show’. From my point of view, demands were made to make our finances more publicly available, but there are only so many times I can say our finances and procedures are shit, we’re working on them (finally), but it will take time to get them right. It’s a bit like trying to turn an oil tanker at full speed.

So that was it and off to Nottingham we went. On the way, the camaraderie that had been so strong before led us to ring the west side posse to sing at them

“We are the Eastside, my friend, and we’ll keep on driving to the end, we are the Eastside, we are the Eastside, no time for losers, cos they’re on the Westside, with no friends”, we dropped into a service station that has as an omen maybe ‘EXTRA’ over the door in big letters, and even this time the fact that I had lived in Nottingham for a year was heeded and my directions were followed to find the Holiday Inn, spookily enough the Riverside Hotel again!

By the time we got to the East Mids though, and into the third regional, we’d heard most of the roundups that had come so far. As is always intimated in NUS, plagiarism is a big no-no for students, for students’ unions, it’s our lifeblood and we’d be sunk without it. That is one of the big benefits of having a national union, without it, you wouldn’t have NSLP (I know that cos I was there at the start when it was just four unions), you wouldn’t have Sshh (if you don’t and you have a bar, email VK to talk about it!), you wouldn’t have RAG or SHAG or many other things we just take for granted now. Most of these are things that one union has thought of because of necessity and then NUS has championed as something which everyone should be doing.

I can’t say much else, as I had to leave Nottingham early to get to Coventry (As I said, I never thought a meeting in Coventry would cause me so much trouble) for an NUS Extra meeting. The worst thing with that of course was that by the time it finished, it was too late for me to get to Newcastle for the next day, unless of course I wanted to kip on a platform at Leeds Station. Surprisingly I chose the ‘lets go home’ option. Trouble was, a 4 hour train journey awaited, and when you threw in the oh so predictable delays, I just missed about half of the conference, and definitely all the interesting stuff.

It did seem that the North East was the most skint region though, with four unions talking to me about the hardship requests they were submitting for the Finance Committee meeting the week after. Only three managed to get them in though.

Meanwhile of course in the North West, where NUS Extra was being trialled, I apparently got a kicking for not being there. Well North West, it would have made sense to me too to be there, especially as I was going away with Lorna that weekend and had to be in Liverpool the next day, but sometimes other things are more important than sense in NUS.

*© Joe Rukin 2005

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