Greetings from sunny... err... Portsmouth. I'm back in the UK and, no, I didn't decide to stay out in Ibiza for ever and ever and ever and... Well, you get the idea. Photos 'n vids coming shortly ;o)

So I'm now faced with something of a dilemma. I finish my term in office in Portsmouth at the end of July and, as things stand at the moment, I don't have any commitments, or a new job to go to... In fact, I've got a pretty clean slate to begin with, so I could do with some ideas on what to do next.

So far, these are the main options...

1. Do the whole Trainspotting thing. No, I don't mean developing a heroin habit and living in a council block in Glasgow - I mean the whole "choose life" thing - move to London, look for whatever job I can get (preferably one where I can pay off my ever-mounting pile of debts). Pros: regular employment, salary, possibly interesting positions related to my degree and experience. Cons: become a wage slave, trade in my freedom of choice and the chance to live somewhere more interesting than London for financial commitment and a career (not necessarily a bad thing though)...
   
   
2. ... Go back to Ibiza, try to get a job - any job - and live below the poverty line. Pros: live in the party capital of the world with several thousand other bods, in a great atmosphere, and have a lot of fun. Cons: being poor, my sketchy knowledge of the Spanish language, the possibility it could all go horribly wrong...
   
   
3. ... Do something else, somewhere else. Start sending my CV all over the world, trying to find a job based around my qualifications. Pros: could end up somewhere really interesting, and could end up being paid very well. Cons: could end up somewhere really rubbish, and could end up having to sell a kidney/limb/my body to be repatriated.

Right now I'm thinking 2 or 3 instead of 1 (which will no doubt upset Ma 'n Pa who are still awaiting the repayment of the £thousands they lent me to get through Uni, not to mention all my other debtors).

I guess the first thing I ought to do is update my CV - it hasn't been updated since 2002...

Answers on the back of a £20 please ;o)  /al 

... taking random photos:

Indian Summer at the Union - woo, sunshine!!

Students enjoy the sunshine with a drink outside in the sun. Colder weather is forecast for tomorrow, though :o(

Ideas and photography

Jacob, news editor, drafts ideas for the reorganisation of our online news content.

On screen you can see Aperture displaying one of yesterday's photos of the CopyShop clothing range.

My desk is a busy place during the day...

New toys!

Ooh, new toys for Pure FM! The student radio station's brand new audio recorder arrives on my desk.

The speakers in the background are my desk set-up, running off a decommissioned 700W PA amp from the nightclub venue across the road  - who says work has to be boring?! :o)

Global domination: step 1 - anti-fees campaign

Andrew 'Jaffa' Machin demonstrates part 1 of his plan for global domination: a Top Up Fees debate at the University.

Lovely weather :o)

More people, also enjoying that sunshine. My office is on the ground floor of the building on the right. 

UPSU.net has been a bit poorly today, being down for almost 6 hours earlier today, and then being taken offline at periodic intervals while we try to work out what broke it in the first place:

Since this is very much my area of responsibility, I'm going to have to put my new book and Christmas home cookin' to one side and work until this is fixed. So much for being on holiday!

A big thank you goes out to Clive, our hosting chap, who's also given up his Sunday relaxation in exchange for many hours chained to a keyboard trying to work out what's been going on. 

I apologise if you've been inconvenienced by these problems we've been experiencing today, and hope you'll bear with us while we work to fix them.

The office is empty and so quiet it feels like everything's fallen asleep - apart from me and my cup of tea - and once I've cleared my desk and finished playing this Paul Van Dyk mix at ASBO volume, I too am going to be packing up and clearing off home until the start of January.

I've been in office now for a smidge under five months, and it's been nothing short of a whirlwind ride - there have been late nights, lots of hard work, dangling from trees, "ideas theft" from other students' unions around the country, awards, tears, new ground broken, relationships made and un-made, shouting, hugging and even the occasional drink.

Scattered around my desk are piles of to-dos scrawled hurriedly on the back of yellow post-it notes. These probably total less than 10% of my overall pile of "things I must do two weeks ago or the world comes to an end", and even if I could clone myself over Christmas and not sleep, I wouldn't be able to complete everything I need to.

Still, this year has been, this far at least, an incredible learning experience. I've been more stressed and grumpy than I've ever been, and spent more money on bills and less on my social life - now a distance memory - than ever before, but I wouldn't change the majority of it for the world.

Last night over a beer, the conversation wandered onto the forthcoming Sabbatical elections, which pretty much kick off as soon as we come back in the New Year. We agreed that one of the hardest things any election candidate has to get their heads around is the fact that, as a Sabb, you're a trustee of the Union charity first - taking on all the responsibilities and duties that go with that role - and a president/sports officer/support officer/meeja whore/etc second.

What this boils down to is having to modify your thinking a little... Ok, a lot: when it comes to making important decisions about the future of the Union, as the Sabb team each year is tasked with doing to make sure the Union continues to provide a democratic and student-focused service, you have to have your "trustee hat" on.

For me, this year, this has already brought me a couple of sleepless nights where I've had to make decisions which call into question whether it's more important to put my trustee's responsibilities first, or my media responsibilities. Without going into detail (for I fear I may be taken outside and shot... Ok, maybe not shot...) I hope I made the right calls, but sometimes the only person who can be sure your decision was the right one is you, especially if the rest of the world happens to think you're the devil incarnate for making the choice you made, because they don't understand your reasoning.

I know the other sabbs this year have also faced some tough decisions they never expected to have to make, and possibly the second hardest part of being a Sabb is going from higher education - where you have lecturers and course mates to guide you to making The Right Decision - into a role where the future isn't planned, the decisions aren't clear, and the "right" answer is only right if you believe in it, commit to it, and do the hard work which your particular decision entails to make it happen.

This rambling monologue seems to be circling a potential problem - as a former maths teacher of mine put it, "always show your workings"; it's all too easy to fall into the trap of making decisions which affect students as a Sabb team without explaining to the student body why the decision was made on their behalf, and what factors were taken into account. In fact, it's all too easy to completely miss telling students that a decision has been made by the Sabb Exec which affects them!

This year, we've made some major inroads into further developing regular lines of communication between the Sabbs and students, making it easier and more beneficial for students...

This week I read with interest a letter printed in Nottingham Students' Union's "Impact" magazine by their Students' Union Community Officer, Lou Green. Mr Green wrote how the first issue of the magazine that year had run with the headline "Shottingham", referring to a shooting which had taken place in the city, and how he felt the headline gave a "false negative stereotype" of the city. What I think Mr Green's article boiled down to was that he felt that, given all the positive aspects of student life in Nottingham to shout about, surely the choice of a story about a shooting in the city was a purposefully negative one, given the wealth of positive articles the paper might have run instead.

This issue will no doubt have been debated internally, both before and after publication, and while I'm certain that Impact's editorial took reasonable care to ensure their content was fair and balanced, I can't and won't try to add my tuppence-worth to an issue I know virtually nothing about. That said, a sad fact of any media-led culture seems to be that "bad news sells". Instead, I want to relate Mr Green's letter to an issue which arose on the day of distribution of issue 4 of Pugwash News - Wednesday 14th November - which carried the headline "Student murdered in Hilsea".

On the morning we were due to start handing out the newspaper, I received a completely unexpected request from the University's marketing department requesting that the newspaper not be handed out in the Union until the end of a University open day which was taking place there. Given that the Union building is owned by the University, and after some considerable debate, I agreed to temporarily hold the newspaper.

To the best of my knowledge, the University's reason for asking that the paper not go out in the Union was that they didn't wish to project a negative image of the city to prospective students. While I can appreciate this motivation, and am as keen as the next person to see Portsmouth University's student numbers continue to grow over the next few years, I can't help questioning whether their request was appropriate.

Somewhat ironically, anyone wandering next door into Balfour's on that or any other day could have picked up a copy of the Portsmouth News, complete with stories of good and bad happenings around the city. Although I haven't asked their manager, I doubt a similar request to hide any newspapers which may have suggested anything bad ever happens in Portsmouth was received...

In deciding whether or not to pull the paper, I had a fairly heated discussion with our Chief Exec. In it, I was reminded that I wear "two hats" as Media & Publications Officer; one as an editor figure for the Union's student publications, and the other as a trustee of the charity. Frustratingly for me in this situation, those two hats brought with them diametrically-opposed viewpoints; with one, I felt compelled to fight for the rights of the publication to be distributed freely amongst the student population.

Meanwhile, the other "hat" - as a trustee of the Union's charity and therefore tasked with ensuring the Union continues to provide for its future students - required me to think long-term and ask myself whether it was right to risk scaring off large numbers of potential students for the benefit of one newspaper article. On the balance of this argument, I think the right course of action was the one taken; to hold the paper, and then to whinge to anyone and everyone who'd listen about it afterwards... ;o)

Still, it's important to remain philosophical at times like these: while the principle of embargoing a newspaper which is perfectly within its rights to print what it did makes the blood boil, and results in arguments which include phrases like "freedom of speech", "hypocrisy" and "megalomaniacs"...