Shorthand - a phase?

After our first in-house shorthand assessment this morning, I felt quietly confident that I did pretty well. From the looks of my shorthand, I saw one blinding error that couldn't be fixed unless I knew the short form (which I didn't), and my transcription of the shorthand seemed pretty accurate, so fingers crossed on that one.

The exam was 60 wpm. At the start of the year, attaining a shorthand writing speed seemed as laughable as me growing female organs, yet as the year bore on, my speed was increasing at a pretty good pace.
Back in December, I remember practicing shorthand exercises back at home, and when speaking about the exam to my parents, I remember distinctively saying I couldn't do 40 wpm let alone 60, or 100 as is required of us future journos in our third and final year at university.

What amazes me is how far everyone I know, myself included, has come. Back in early October, we were only just piecing together the alphabet. Train journeys seemed the optimum time to practice writing the alphabet in less than 20 or so seconds, and upon completion a proud text to the nearest and dearest was never far away.
Come March, and we're all doing exam practices at at least 50 wpm. Some people from my seminar group can no doubt do over and beyond 60 wpm no doubt.

The next step (if I pass the exam of course) is 80 wpm. There's an optional test we can take earlier than usual if we feel confident enough to take the test a year early - that's in May. The thing that scared me though about this fact was not the test itself, but the way our lecturer phrased the testing process or, in particular, why May was the best time to take the test in her opinion.

During Christmas-time, if I hadn't had a good kicking up the backside by a few relatives, my shorthand would have seriously suffered. This Easter, now the test is (hopefully) passed, I won't practice the skill half as much as I usually would during university.

The same principle applies for summertime. With no exam to work towards, and no lectures taking place, combined with a hell of a lot of planned sunbathing on the coast of Lanzarote for two weeks, the skill will falter for me.

What scares me is what's next. Will we all come back from the summer rejuvenated in the knowledge that we can continue with the acquired skill that has taken us around 120 hours of writing time to develop to sufficient exam level or, like I'm probably right in thinking, will we come back from our holidays and have to need to restart our ABCs before even considering stringing a sentence together.

Sadly, I think for the majority of us BAMMJs, the second option will apply. Which made me think - what about in the long run? Most professionals I've spoken to said they haven't even used shorthand since their university days, and most found it hard to easily construct a simple sentence. Most lecturers will no doubt say differently, but it's pretty obvious from the things we pick up during our lectures that they too do not use the language. What with dictaphones and ever-increasing technology, it's surely a matter of time until the 'art' of shorthand dies out? After over 100 hours learning the skill, it feels like a huge shame to think that in a few years I may have lost the skill altogether. After all, in my future job, I doubt very much I'll have the time to scribble together a few pieces about John Smith and his dog Sparky whilst at work.

Mephadrone - When will the craze stop?

Whilst tidying the flat on Friday for our flat inspection this coming weekend, I came across a poster our halls’ staff had put under everyone’s door. Like most flyers shoved under our doors, it got ignored for a while until one of our cleaner flatmates decided to pick them all up only for us to, at some point, drop them on the floor again.

This one was different though. It wasn’t advertising the next best wannabe rap/grime superstar to hit Orange Rooms, neither was it advertising cheap snakebites or the like at Walkabout, or cliché fancy dress nights out in Lava. This one, personally written by our halls’ staff (the guys in charge basically), informed us all of the dangers of mephadrone...seemingly because we weren’t aware enough already, thanks to the mass media.

Interestingly, it listed the many positive effects of taking the horse tranquiliser, including giddiness and an immediate sense of happiness for the user. To be honest, whilst reading it, I questioned what the hell the people at my halls were thinking – so far, this advert had only got me interested in taking the stuff, and I’m guessing that, as an authoritive body, this isn’t exactly what they were aiming for.

Underneath this jumble of words lay the gold-dust they were trying to shove down our throats. The list of side-effects to mephadrone was longer than my parent’s shopping list, with nausea, constant dizziness and headaches only being three of the mildest. I’ve heard stories of people whose feet have actually turned purple, with veins in their body prominently throbbing blue – not exactly healthy by any means – yet for some reason these extreme cases were withheld, for now.

If authoritive bodies such as our halls’ staff, club reps, hell even national newspaper editors desperately trying to prove that mephadrone can be directly linked with death, actually want students to stop taking the drug, then don’t sugar coat it. If you want something done, you do it the easy way. Shove your message forcefully down every student’s alcohol-induced throat until it gets through, because right now all the messages we’re hearing of the drug only raises the appeal of the powder to us naive lot.

After listing all these side-effects to the drug, the letter then had the liberty to say how a student could get away with possessing the stuff. The preferred reading of the letter probably would have been along the lines of ‘this drug is illegal, and if the police find that you’re possessing the stuff, you will live to regret it’. But instead, I read ‘if I tell the police it’s for my horse, and not for human consumption, then I can legally carry it. Go me’.

There needs to be a serious crackdown on the use and possession of mephadrone quickly, else the craze is only going to increase even more. Sure, a few people have died from over-dosing severely on the drug (by this, meaning constant consumption over more than 12 hour periods in which time two to three grams of the white stuff has been snorted), but with three out of the thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of students taking the stuff dead from taking the drug, many students will happily take such a risk.

Secrecy is only human nature?

Sex, money, politics - three of the easiest subjects to cause offence to almost anyone. How much do you earn? How’s the sex life? Who are you voting for in the next election? Ask five strangers this question, and if you manage to get one answer out of any of them, I applaud you. Heck, ask a friend these three questions and you will still come away none the wiser.

In reality, it’s peculiar to say the least just why such subjects are shrouded in an immovable mist. If you ask someone what their favourite football team is, or make of car, or brand name, they’d happily tell you at the drop of a coin. Yet, if you ask someone what their favourite political party is, they’ll go off you faster than Sol Campbell*, but why?
It seems that most people can only confide in one person: themselves. For some reason, I share the same mentality to most. I haven’t revealed who I’m voting for this May to anyone besides a select few, whilst I only openly speak about my sex life with a small handful of people – why should anyone really care what I get up to in the bedroom?

It’s with this mentality that most people adopt the same attitude. If, in another world, sex was openly talked about, people would be more than happy to tell anyone who’ll listen what they got up to the night before. The same goes with politics and money. If I were to walk into university right now and create a spot poll to find out which political party they’ll put their faith in for the next five years, I’ll be hard pushed to find more than ten people willing to answer my question in a day.

I remember one of our first assignments for our course, where we had to interview a professional journalist to find out what made a good reporter. Along with this, any additional information such as marital status, age and wage would provide extra marks. I remember asking Hugh Muir (the Guardian’s diary editor) these three questions, and the answers I got were, well, obscure to say the least. The first two answers escape me now, but I vividly remember Hugh chuckling down the phone when I asked for his wage. It’s almost like revealing your wage is as bad as shouting out your pin number in public.

An article earlier this week on Buzz (our University-ran website where us trainee hacks can publish our news pieces, like an online portfolio en-masse) revealed that one of the big dogs at Bournemouth University was to leave for a life in the smoke, taking a lead role at City University, London. The female journalist writing the article managed to get hold of his wage, and it was this that formed the foundations of her article. It seems as if acquiring somebody else’s wage is cause for celebration. It shouldn’t be – it’s just a number, right?

In the same way, so what if you’re a Tory. So what if you think Brown is the man to take us out of this prolonged recession. At the end of the day, we’re all entitled to our own opinions – freedom of speech and all that – so why should it matter what people think? Go ahead, be bold, reveal all. I dare you.

*Tests published by The Sun revealed that the 30-something beast of a defender is the second fastest player in the Premier League. Seriously.

Climb every mountain...

I fear I won't be able to complete it. Not as much because I've never enjoyed climbing, nor have gone out of my way to go forward in any other incline than 0%, but because I feel I have lost my fitness levels. The days of half-marathons feel like a distant memory to me now, and it will take some serious commitment for me to regain the physical fitness I once possessed.

To you, you may as well have read hieroglyphics than that babbling mess. However, hopefully by the end of this blog it will make sense.

Rewind your minds back around 6 months if you can. For me, this meant the end of summer, and the end of living in London as far as I was concerned as University was just around the corner. The only unfinished business I had was stickign out like a sore thumb. Stuck bang-right in the middle of my Fresher's Fortnight at University was my half-marathon I signed up to earlier last Summer (Fresher's Fortnight, in a nutshell, is a chance to acceptably get completely rat-arsed along with a ton of fellow first-years, with most friends made whilst hammered. A huge reliance on your mobile phone is required to then remember who your new friends are).

I won't bore with the details, but I successfully ran the half-marathon with a friend in just over two hours. I fear though that my fitness levels since then have dropped severely. As mentioned previously in an older post, I ran along the beach today, clocking up around 5 miles in the process. Down in Bournemouth, I go for beach runs realistically around once a month, clocking up 5 miles to my ever-increasing tally each time. I come back physically drained and starving, beads of sweat lining my top meaning another £2.20 lost to my awful washing machines where I live to clean my kit.

In my seemingly-parellel 'former life', I consistently ran 6 miles every few days, meaning I could easily manage to eat up a total of 20-30 miles of road every week. Back then, I still came home tired, though the hunger pains and unattractive sweat patches never struck me.

I need to get in shape, fast. Plagued with illness over the winter, alongside the typical Christmas-time binge, my body has suffered pretty badly. I've put on weight in the wrong places, whilst losing muscle in others that didn't want to be changed. It's safe to say, this need for change has become increasingly important progressively.

A friend of mine mentioned the 'Three Peaks Challenge' recently, and I looked into it for a bit today. For those that don't know, the Three Peaks Challenge is an event whereupon participants climb up three mountains (Ben Nevis, Skagness and Snowdon if my memory serves me correctly) in the space of a measly 24 hours. This includes driving time, and time to sleep in between. I know of a few students from a different University doing it for charity, with one slight change - they're giving themselves three days to complete this challenge.

Not one to shy away from a challenge, this blog will act as written (well, typed) proof that I WILL complete the Three Peaks Challenge in 24 hours. As of yet, there is no date set for the challenge, since participants can choose when they do it - it's not a formal race as such. What I do know however, is that I will undertake the challenge in September - after my exam resits and before University recommences.

To accomplish this feat, I realise the amount of work I need to put in will be by no means small. In fact, getting an elephant to run faster than Mr. Usain Bolt* is probably an easier mission than getting me up and down these molehills in a day.

Regular gym visits, with resistance and cardio-vascular exercise in mind, is just the start. My diet will need to drastically change too. Hopefully I will use this blog as a diary of some sort to keep my training up, a bit like my running logs around this time last year (which, I know, failed after a while).

All that remains now is to polish off the Jaffa Cakes I'm devouring at an alarming pace, so I can replace these with apples, bananas and the such during my next Asda visit. I'm hitting the gym tomorrow for the fourth time this week, and with a little perseverance I can make it up these mountains and back with ease. Provided I can get over my fear, I'll have no problems.

*Usain Bolt, Olympic gold medallist and 100m World-Record holder for (quite possibly) the next century at least, can run just over 24mph. So good luck training your elephants.

Britain: "It's Summer!"

It's officially no longer Winter. As March arrives, us excitable Brits don our coats and cups of hot cocoa for beach balls and sunglasses. Most of the time, we'll freeze half to death just to catch a ray a sun before the wind takes over and sends shivers down our spines. But we don't care - we're British, and as far as we're concerned, it's Spring Summer!

The definition of working on a tan for us stands somewhere along the lines of taking our shoes and tops off for a few golden moments to bathe in glorious, yet still incredibly cold sunlight before putting them all quickly back on as we realise we're going to catch frostbite before a speck of our pale, white bodies turn a little chargrilled.

Hypocritically, today I went for a beach run down by Bournemouth beach for around an hour. Most of the time, I ran in a vest. Inevitably, after half an hour or so, I put a jumper back on to finish my run back to my halls, and although (for a short while) a run in the sun felt fantastic, I won't be doing it again in a hurry.

However much we will deny it, us Brits just love to get out in the sun.
For us, there is no such thing as Spring. Spring is simply the turnover period between Winter and Summer. Us Brits hate Spring; as soon as Winter has come and gone, it is safe to say we only have one thing to look forward to - the Almighty Sun.

It is only a matter of time before holidays are booked, vests are fashioned and the gym becomes a haven for sweat and fat blokes trying for that iconic beach body (which, even if obtained, will soon be destroyed with a shed load of beer and ice-cream in the sun anyway).

For now, let's not ruin the dream. The sun is shining, the beach is only a stones throw away, and as far as I'm concerned, Summer has arrived.