I’m currently on a train from Oxford to Bradford (via Leeds) for LBT Women’s Day and I’ve got a lot of time to kill, so thought I’d do an update about last week’s Regional Conferences.

This time around I was allocated to the East stream with Hannah, Lloydie, Martin, Darren, and Ben (and Dan and Peter for some of it) and from February 7th-10th we did a tour of Hull, Loughborough, Norwich and Brighton.

In terms of content, it all seemed to go quite well - hope the delegates were equally satisfied! For the first time ever, the Liberation Campaigns did a briefing on our campaigns and priorities, and this seemed to be really well received. I started off the week saying how new and exciting it was to be introducing that session - apologies to the South East as it was slightly less new and exciting for me by the Thursday…

That’s the problem with Regional Conferences - the NEC have to listen to and deliver exactly the same presentations for 4 consecutive days, so it’s hard to summon any enthusiasm by the end of the week! I guess that’s where poker faces come in handy - I never was any good at bluffing.

As I said, it all seemed to go quite well. There were loads of questions about NUS Extra - some Unions had taken the issue to AGMs and I think this is a great idea as it gives students a chance to debate the issue. I hope more SUs do this before National Conference.

However, with all due respect to the regions and the delegations, the real excitement took place out of hours. Before I begin our sorry tale, I’d like to point out that I wasn’t driving and that anyone who appoints me as navigator really does like a challenge…

On the Sunday night, Hannah, Lloydie and me drove up to Hull from London, which took us 6 hours - a ridiculously long time to be in a car with anyone, particularly when you’re cringing in the front seat having caused a detour because you thought you’d left your mobile in the last service station but found it again after you’ve turned round and are heading back down the M1… Not that it was me or anything…

Monday night’s drive to Loughborough was fairly quiet (apart from the inevitable “has everyone got their mobile” jokes) until we got there. We stopped off for dinner at a pub - the food was amazing - and as we got into town, it all went slightly wrong. We had a few problems finding our B&B - actually, scrap that - it was a bloody nightmare.

We somehow managed to drive past it several times without ever managing to find the parking - this was bad enough but what drove me to hysterical laughter were the minor incidents we had with things like taking a right turn and then, on our second tour round the block, discovering the “no right turn” sign, or when we took a right turn further along the road only to discover that the right turn didn’t actually exist (good thing Hannah’s got quick reactions)

We eventually parked - unfortunately, we were in a funeral home car park - but we finally managed to get to the B&B and collapse in the bar in a vague attempt to get rid of the giggles and work how we’d managed to lose Ben and Darren… For some reason, we had two cars this time around instead of the one people carrier, so Ben and Darren were in one, while we’d added Martin to our ever-so glamorous Skoda…

Jones and Miskell never did turn up, so we all headed off to bed - and there the excitement ends for everyone but me. I’d drank far too much caffeine throughout the day (actually, that might have been the cause of the giggles, not Hannah’s driving) so it took me ages to go to sleep, but I was rudely awakened at about 2 when someone unlocked and opened my door…

As you can imagine, I wasn’t best pleased and have a vague memory of yelling at them to get out, and then a shocked voice saying “but there’s not meant to be anyone in there”.

It turned out that something went wrong when I picked up my key and they didn’t ticked the box next to my room number to say “someone will be sleeping in here tonight” so when Jones and Miskell eventually turned up, they tried to give my room to one of them. That was a week ago and it’s still not funny.

Tuesday night’s drive from Loughborough to Norwich was horrendous as the entire of East Anglia was covered in really thick fog which made things like seeing the road damn near impossible. Luckily, I’ve won the World Rally Championship on the GameCube so was able to direct Hannah by watching the white line on the left of the road and saying things like “left a bit… right a bit… no, not that much...” while Darren and Ben cheated by following us while we did all the hard work!

It really was awful - especially as I wasn’t driving. The only thing that’s worse than attempting to navigate a car through bad weather is sitting there trusting someone else to do it. Fair play to Hannah, she got us there in one piece and didn’t switch off the engine and refuse to go another inch until daylight, but it took teambuilding to a new level!

And what can I say about the accommodation? For once we at an FE college for Regional Conference and we’d been booked into halls. On reflection, it was a good reminder about how crap it can be as a student and how badly they get treated, but at the time it was a huge shock to system, especially as we were in mixed corridors and after the previous night’s experiences, I wasn’t relishing the thought of wandering through the corridor to get to the communal shower. It just makes you wonder - if an institution has so little respect for its students that they are prepared to charge students for the privilege of living in sub-standard accommodation, what hope have students got when it comes to things like academic appeals?

Apart from that, CCN was a great venue for the conference, and it’s a bit shocking that of the 8 regional conferences I have now been to, only 1 has been at an FE.

We ended up at Sussex Uni in Brighton - the drive down was pretty quiet, though we did a bit of a change around with drivers, so I went in Ben’s car for a bit - the others nearly drove off with the only set of directions and the only map, but we managed stop them before they headed off onto the M25. Not that the map was much use - we were so busy debating the pros and cons of speed cameras (ironically, I’ve been converted in favour since getting caught a few years ago. Go figure.) that we nearly missed our turning off the M25 and it was only a well-timed text message from Hannah that saved us. Left to me, I wouldn’t have noticed until we started seeing signs for Oxford…

And that was Regional Conferences. At the time most of the above seemed really funny, though on reflection it’s most probably as dull as my A-Level history lessons, but it’s allowed me to waste two hours on this wretched train, so tough!

Jo xx

jo.salmon@nus.org.uk

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