Vote for me. Please.
Apr. 22nd, 2005 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenYesterday, I had an interview at the Guy's, King's and St. Thomas's Medical School. It went really, really well - they were terribly nice and friendly, started having a proper conversation with me instead of an interview, and finished off by saying time was up, but they'd like to spend more time talking with me, I was obviously a talented young woman. I came out with a big stupid grin. Even if they don't give me an offer, I didn't make a mess of the interview. And if they do give me an offer, it'll be my insurance choice. Roll on UCAS deadlines (sixth of June, in my case - twenty-eighth of April for everyone else).
As for today - if I ever volunteer to be candidate for anything ever again, shootmeplease. I am Labour candidate for the mock election, as said before (and I've just noticed Lucy Kinsella is down on the website as Library Democrat candidate!) and up until now, we'd had a few problems but not too many. Some posters had gone missing here and there, nothing serious. Today it got personal. Our campaign material was being pulled off the walls mere seconds after we'd put it up (out of my hands on one or two occasions) and while I was in the Derby Wing standing on a chair with a poster, some Upper Fours came along to tell me they weren't voting for me. The thing is, they have such short attention spans that you can't argue with them.
It was worse with the thirds. When my team and I entered their classroom, they started yelling and screaming and jumping and throwing stuff and threatening actual violence. I was in the process of putting up a poster, knowing it would be yanked down and destroyed, when I finally snapped. Miranda said later that I looked somewhat psychotic; anyway, the net result was my finding Mr Evans at lunch and confessing, "I did a bad thing..."
Oh, not that bad. Miranda later reasoned that if we couldn't have a poster but everyone else could, it clearly wasn't fair and really my pulling down all the other parties' posters and storming out with the intention to shred them wasn't that unjustified after all.
Still, we were all three furious, Sam, Miranda and me. We work hard on those posters, make them ourselves, visit the local party ourselves, use our own money and printers' ink, and our work gets destroyed. Yes, I appreciate it's a middle-class independent school environment. Still, we're the only party that faces outright hostility and stuff getting thrown at us. Anyway, Miranda and I went out to see the local party for stickers. Unfortunately they're not the standard ones - they're either trade unions or Welsh language and sadly I cannot tell which - but I wore mine anyway. Sigh.
There are certain bright spots. Cath was able to give us the names of some of the saboteurs, for example, and apparently their form-teacher had a right go at them, at least according to what I've heard from the team since the end of school. Mrs Colvin sent me a message - "your posters are the only ones with any actual wit!" - and Mrs Custard saved the day by interrupting someone in mid-rant (directed at me) to tell me she liked the posters.
For reference, there are several types of posters. There are the simple Vote Labour ones, edited to put my name on, then the "2+2=5" ones that Sam did, and the billboard ones I did. They're basically the Tories' infuriating campaign slogans (like "I mean, how hard is to keep a hospital clean?") that I downloaded and graffitied with Photoshop. There are also the ones I had a lovely time with, grafting Michael Howard's head onto the head of a Dalek. One person didn't believe I'd done those myself, which was unexpected salve for my ego.
After all this, I went to Biology, and began pouring out my tale of woe. It started with Rice-Oxley saying, "Iona, you're having strokes."
"What?" I said, quite understandably, I felt.
"They were supposed to tell you," she began, and Fidan nudged my foot ever-so gently and said:
"She's had such a stressful day, she's having memory loss."
And then Rice-Oxley wanted to know about all the stress, so I complained about posters and chairs being thrown and the sabotage and relentless threats.
"And," I said, in full flow now, "the lower school are going around saying, 'Do you know the Labour candidate is,' whisper, giggle, shuffle, 'did you know she's a...lesbian?"
At which point Rice-Oxley, Sarah and Fidan all exchanged glances and burst into identical peals of laughter. And Rice-Oxley said it was all quite out of order and she'd be going to have a word with the thirds' form-teachers. I thanked her profusively. It's so wonderful to just have someone on my side. On that note, I love my campaign team with a love that transcends decency. They are on my side. And, amazingly, a girl named Zara asked her teacher how to join my campaign team. I arranged to meet her in the library and she turned out to be shy but lovely.
So, yes. Campaigning is not of the fun. I may dare to canvass people next week, but for the rest of the afternoon I put it out of my head and enjoyed the Biology lesson. There was plenty of food (Cadbury's buttons, Haribo and strawberry laces) and I ate it happily while writing about vaccination. All fun. (It turns out she meant I have to write a side about strokes and present it next week, in the name of kearning about disease.)
And when I went out into the park to go home, a girl I'd never met before stopped me and said, "I'm voting for you."
"Really?" I said emotionally.
"Definitely. I wouldn't vote Conservative." She smiled happily and said, "It's funny 'cause my best mate is Beth Rogers."
I agreed that was funny - Beth is Tory candidate - and went home feeling rather better about the universe. Of course I got home to find anarchist stickers on the lampposts ("Anarchists don't give a fuck about the election!") and a letter from Balliol College to say where is my student finance, and a letter from the student finance people to say where is my birth certificate.
Ah, well, you can't have everything in life. And I'm sure that a whole pack of ickle firsties are going to be in so much fucking trouble on Monday. Heh.
As for today - if I ever volunteer to be candidate for anything ever again, shootmeplease. I am Labour candidate for the mock election, as said before (and I've just noticed Lucy Kinsella is down on the website as Library Democrat candidate!) and up until now, we'd had a few problems but not too many. Some posters had gone missing here and there, nothing serious. Today it got personal. Our campaign material was being pulled off the walls mere seconds after we'd put it up (out of my hands on one or two occasions) and while I was in the Derby Wing standing on a chair with a poster, some Upper Fours came along to tell me they weren't voting for me. The thing is, they have such short attention spans that you can't argue with them.
It was worse with the thirds. When my team and I entered their classroom, they started yelling and screaming and jumping and throwing stuff and threatening actual violence. I was in the process of putting up a poster, knowing it would be yanked down and destroyed, when I finally snapped. Miranda said later that I looked somewhat psychotic; anyway, the net result was my finding Mr Evans at lunch and confessing, "I did a bad thing..."
Oh, not that bad. Miranda later reasoned that if we couldn't have a poster but everyone else could, it clearly wasn't fair and really my pulling down all the other parties' posters and storming out with the intention to shred them wasn't that unjustified after all.
Still, we were all three furious, Sam, Miranda and me. We work hard on those posters, make them ourselves, visit the local party ourselves, use our own money and printers' ink, and our work gets destroyed. Yes, I appreciate it's a middle-class independent school environment. Still, we're the only party that faces outright hostility and stuff getting thrown at us. Anyway, Miranda and I went out to see the local party for stickers. Unfortunately they're not the standard ones - they're either trade unions or Welsh language and sadly I cannot tell which - but I wore mine anyway. Sigh.
There are certain bright spots. Cath was able to give us the names of some of the saboteurs, for example, and apparently their form-teacher had a right go at them, at least according to what I've heard from the team since the end of school. Mrs Colvin sent me a message - "your posters are the only ones with any actual wit!" - and Mrs Custard saved the day by interrupting someone in mid-rant (directed at me) to tell me she liked the posters.
For reference, there are several types of posters. There are the simple Vote Labour ones, edited to put my name on, then the "2+2=5" ones that Sam did, and the billboard ones I did. They're basically the Tories' infuriating campaign slogans (like "I mean, how hard is to keep a hospital clean?") that I downloaded and graffitied with Photoshop. There are also the ones I had a lovely time with, grafting Michael Howard's head onto the head of a Dalek. One person didn't believe I'd done those myself, which was unexpected salve for my ego.
After all this, I went to Biology, and began pouring out my tale of woe. It started with Rice-Oxley saying, "Iona, you're having strokes."
"What?" I said, quite understandably, I felt.
"They were supposed to tell you," she began, and Fidan nudged my foot ever-so gently and said:
"She's had such a stressful day, she's having memory loss."
And then Rice-Oxley wanted to know about all the stress, so I complained about posters and chairs being thrown and the sabotage and relentless threats.
"And," I said, in full flow now, "the lower school are going around saying, 'Do you know the Labour candidate is,' whisper, giggle, shuffle, 'did you know she's a...lesbian?"
At which point Rice-Oxley, Sarah and Fidan all exchanged glances and burst into identical peals of laughter. And Rice-Oxley said it was all quite out of order and she'd be going to have a word with the thirds' form-teachers. I thanked her profusively. It's so wonderful to just have someone on my side. On that note, I love my campaign team with a love that transcends decency. They are on my side. And, amazingly, a girl named Zara asked her teacher how to join my campaign team. I arranged to meet her in the library and she turned out to be shy but lovely.
So, yes. Campaigning is not of the fun. I may dare to canvass people next week, but for the rest of the afternoon I put it out of my head and enjoyed the Biology lesson. There was plenty of food (Cadbury's buttons, Haribo and strawberry laces) and I ate it happily while writing about vaccination. All fun. (It turns out she meant I have to write a side about strokes and present it next week, in the name of kearning about disease.)
And when I went out into the park to go home, a girl I'd never met before stopped me and said, "I'm voting for you."
"Really?" I said emotionally.
"Definitely. I wouldn't vote Conservative." She smiled happily and said, "It's funny 'cause my best mate is Beth Rogers."
I agreed that was funny - Beth is Tory candidate - and went home feeling rather better about the universe. Of course I got home to find anarchist stickers on the lampposts ("Anarchists don't give a fuck about the election!") and a letter from Balliol College to say where is my student finance, and a letter from the student finance people to say where is my birth certificate.
Ah, well, you can't have everything in life. And I'm sure that a whole pack of ickle firsties are going to be in so much fucking trouble on Monday. Heh.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2005-04-22 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-22 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-22 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-22 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-22 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-22 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-22 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-22 05:47 pm (UTC)This is sam btw but changing accounts would be far too tiresome. I'm getting weird looks on msn as im listening to aqualung, then Konstantine by something corperate.
Damn stupid *insert angry mutterings here* I'd complain on my lj but I'll do that later!
no subject
on 2005-04-22 06:02 pm (UTC)Not everyone gets to be an 'erm'.
no subject
on 2005-04-22 06:55 pm (UTC)FUCK! I knew I'd forgotten something... argh!!
no subject
on 2005-04-23 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-22 07:19 pm (UTC)When I was in L5th in 2001, Mr Cox ran a mock election with us because everyone else was on exams. The amount of voter apathy we encountered, god, you could bottle it. The predictable results ensued- Conservatives winning by an hilariously large margin, followed by me (the Lib Dem candidate), then trailing in the gutter with the rest of the working-class-scum-omg was the Labour Candidate (who, ironically enough, is the poshest girl I know).
I didn't get the whisper, giggle, shuffle treatment. People just tended to run away. Actually, no, I did have a group of 3rds for the drama festival who kept trying to ask me if I was a lesbian but ended up giggling every time, and so didnt manage the full question.
Good luck with all the campaigning, and remember, as Henry Adams said, 'Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds'. And on that note, I hope those firsties get whats coming to them.
Alison.
x
no subject
on 2005-04-23 08:09 pm (UTC)I don't mind them thinking I'm a lesbian; at least it gives them something else to think about. Thanks for the advice! I'll let you know how it goes.
no subject
on 2005-04-22 07:35 pm (UTC)I had thought our elections over here were bad, but this just sounds brutal. At least your people care something about the election. In any given school in the US (at least in my experience, both as teacher and as student), it's a populartity contest and most of the campaigning is all in fun, more about collecting friends and coming up with neat and expensive gimmicks than real issues. Everyone knew student council and the associated committees were jokes.
The medical school interview sounds like it went fairly well. You really ought to have more confidence in yourself.
no subject
on 2005-04-23 08:13 pm (UTC)Thanks. :)
no subject
on 2005-04-22 10:24 pm (UTC)We are actually using the term, 'back in my day' & so on. It's appalling.
no subject
on 2005-04-23 08:20 pm (UTC)