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Oxford - Trinity 2000 parts 2 and 3, Michalemas 2000, part 1
The first parts of this tale can be found on my website http://www.wonderfuldreams.me.uk
Because this is so terribly long, I am going to cut it.
Almost immediately after winning that by-election, I was faced with the question of whether to run for an Exec post for the following year - most immediately with the question of whether to run for President. Initially I tried to persuade myself that it would be a silly thing to do - in terms of the time commitment, but as time went on, I realised that I very much wanted to do it, and that I'd be good at it. In addition to that everyone around me seemed to be assuming that I'd run - with at least one person trying to persuade me to do so. These thoughts occupied my mind for several days - interfering with my ability to do anything else; that's the intensity of Oxford, things that aren't especially important can consume you almost completely for days. At the same time as trying to make up my mind about running for President, I was VP and was trying to pick things up as fast as I could. I was very much thrown in at the deep end with minute writing, and the room ballot later took on a life of its own.
I eventually decided that I was going to run - I can't remember my exact logic - probably along the lines of 'why not, I'll never have this chance again, why not take advantage of it?'. I think Matthew's words - about wanting people to stand so that there was a contested election also played a part; if the electorate were stupid enough to want me, then they were welcome to me! I then started in upon manifesto writing. I'd taken the lessons of the VP campaign too much to heart - manifestos aren't all that important, but they do require some thought (specifically - always pick a legible font), and in the case of Presidential manifestos there needs to be some indication that you are aware of the serious issues. My sense of fair play hindered me - there were plenty of things I knew, but didn't know whether I was supposed to know (like the Van-Noorden index), and being fairly shy, didn't want to ask about.
I was very much alone throughout that campaign, and consequently didn't have anyone to give me a sense of perspective on the election as a whole. I made huge mistakes - mainly through a lack of planning (unlike the previous election, where neither Tom or I had done much campaigning), I hadn't thought about posters for a poster campaign, I was being careful not to repeat my previous mistakes by promising things I couldn't deliever, that I didn't promise enough. Not through lack of ability, but through simple lack of thought/planning, I didn't convey my understanding of important issues (things like battels levels, OUSU, book grants etc) to the JCR. To this day, I'd still say I'd have done a good job - but I didn't demonstrate that through my campaign.
That hust was a much more pleasant experience than the previous one; much of the 'heat' had been gone - it'd been used in that first hust. A couple of the more 'nasty' questioners weren't present due to Finals. I'd learnt how to deal with 'nasty/silly' questions extremely well; what I hadn't quite grasped was the need to make the odd serious point inspite of the silly questioning. That said, though it was much nicer, it wasn't without its highlights - I remember whispering 'It's OK, just do it, don't think about it.' to one of the other candidates as she was about to do the 'modern dance' question.
As had happened two weeks previously, Matthew announced the results in Front Quad. I can't recall the exact figures, but the announcement went Kat --, then Chris --, (at which point I suddenly suspected something was seriously wrong - those two figures were *far* too high - I tried to add them together - but by the time my thoughts had got that far, I'd heard...), Karen six, and then RON 34. My first reaction was one of shock/disbelief - I was perfectly prepared for not winning, but I hadn't expected to have lost by *quite* so much. I have absolutely no idea who was standing near me at the time, but there was a definite expectation that I'd start crying. Crying was the last thing I felt like doing - I'd run, lost and was extremely happy that Chris had won (election by the AV system - the numbers above were first preferences), besides which, there *is* something to be said for being gracious in defeat; so I did the only thing I could, I smiled, and I continued to smile - since it seemed to be a good way to demonstrate to everyone that was commiserating with me that I actually was OK. A couple of weeks later Andy told me I'd taken it well.
Despite losing as badly as I did, I've never regretted running - I've regretted the mistakes I made, and that people weren't more honest with me: I discovered afterwards that many of my friends had suspected I was going to lose very badly, and hadn't told me - that hurt. It's always hard to predict election outcomes, but I'd have been grateful for whatever warning they could have given. Worse than that was realising that there were certainly more than six people who had said or given me the very clear impression that they'd vote for me.
Part 3
After the whirlwind that was the 0-3rd Weeks life became a little calmer for me. I was still
JCR Vice-President with the attendent duties that took up a fair amount of my time - ranging from attending meetings with the Fellows to organising the JCR photograph, to advertising General Meetings, publishing motions, taking minutes and publishing the results, and the bane of my life - the room ballot. I enjoyed it enormously and learnt a lot more about College as a result.
Fourth Week saw the elections for the other positions on the Executive Committee for the next academic year; I loved watching the husts, as opposed to participating in them. I felt justified in asking the odd silly question - having been subjected to them myself. From my point of view the most notable incident occurred during the IRO hust - Matthew had decided to ask the candidates for his job to run mock husts, so David and I ended up husting for the post of 'Kleenex Rep'. Scott asked 'Can you think of any uses for Kleenex outside the bathroom?', and I replied 'Well, *I* can't think of any, but I'm sure you could show me some.'. Scott then said something that made me blush, along the lines of 'Can't we let her stand for anything else?'. That was so kind. Despite people urging me to run for an exec post, I'd decided losing once was quite enough, besides, all of the posts were going to be contested and all had competent candidates, so I didn't see the need to run again. That week was very frustrating for me, since, by convention, exec members are impartial regarding the election (unless they're candidates, as I was), so I couldn't talk to any of my friends about the people standing for the various posts. There are good reasons for that convention, as became clear when we had to reballot the VP election for the following year, following the discovery that the interpretation of one ballot paper altered who won that election.
Academic work was as difficult as ever that term, for we were doing half of contract law and all of administrative law. Contract law is something far easier to comprehend as a non specialist - we all know what contracts are. Every time you buy your weekly shopping, you're entering a contract. It's an agreement between two (or more) parties for something (goods/services) in exchange for consideration (something else, considered to be legally valuable consideration eg. a peppercorn). The prevalence of contracts in normal life makes them much easier to comprehend. Administrative law isn't like that at all - there's a lot of very complex case law as well as important academic articles. We didn't enjoy that at all.
Charlotte and I who share birthdays had a joint celebration - we went for a pizza, and then came back, with Benedict singing Jerusalem along the streets to have cake in Charlotte's room. It was so funny as Charlotte and I blew out our candles the room filled with smoke, and then our furious efforts to disperse it before it reached the smoke alarm and had the whole building evacuated! My sister came to stay with me for the first time, and got to meet the people I'd been telling her about for months, as well as finally making me relax a bit - I couldn't do much work while she was there, so we explored - we went down to the river for Saturday of VIIIs week, ate in hall, sat in the bar, played pool and bought Ben's Cookies. We played croquet - I guess that to non-Oxonians, croquet sounds very upper class and boring, but it's not. I don't profess to know the rules (I'm sure Google will be your friend if you care), but it's a relaxing way to spend an afternoon on the lawn. As are garden parties - the end of Trinity is characterised by garden parties organised by subject societies and the college drinking societies. Sitting on the lawn, drinking Pimms and wine is another excellent way to spend sunny afternoons.
Michalemas 2000
I was excited about going back to Oxford - the summer apart from my friends was long, and what was more, I had a kitchen! There were eleven of us living in 4/5 Holywell Street (houses joined together many years ago) - a house owned by College, that had a reputation for not being very nice, due to previous occupiers. We soon changed that - by offering to paint the kitchen ourselves, we had College come and do it for us, by putting up posters/signs (showing where each room was - 4/5 has quite accurately been described as a rabbit warren), we covered up the worst of the walls and by fitting light bulbs in all the corridors we brightened the house.
Since we'd taken Law Mods at the end of Hilary we had collections at the beginning of Michalemas (unlike the rest of our year, who had taken Mods/Prelims at the end of Trinity). This made it very difficult to enjoy Freshers' Week, because we were revising, while everyone else was enjoying getting to know the Freshers. I seem to remember volunteering to sit in the JCR to talk to the Freshers on the Tuesday morning, and I was a good 'mother' and went round to find my 'children' to check they were settling in.
I was persuaded to stand for Charities' Rep in the second JCR meeting of term: I was the only candidate, which was both a blessing - I didn't want to take the job away from someone who really wanted it, and also quite scary. Losing to RON, while being the only candidate standing would have hurt - husting by myself scared me too. It was fine in the end - I'd already 'proved myself' a suitable person to hold a JCR post with my previous husts, so everyone was very gentle with me. As I recall, I won with an absolutely overwhelming majority vs. two votes for RON.
My admin collection went very badly, my contract one wasn't quite so bad, but not particularly good, and this term was the true beginning of academic worries that stayed with me throughout my degree. Was I actually capable of a 2.1? We did the second half of contract, with an absolutely adorable tutor from Wadham, and we did trusts that term. Neither of these were particularly easy: the second half of contract had a lot of reading and touches on bits of tort (in order to understand misrepresentation you need to know how it works in both contract and tort, and trusts, very much like admin, is an extremely difficult subject to get a real world handle on. For instance ask the question 'What is a trust?' and no one can give you a particularly straight answer (essentially, it's when you separate the beneficial ownership of an item from the ability to chose what to do with the item) - so, I might create a trust of a sum of money in favour of myself: I retain the right to the beneficial interest in the money (and can chose to end the trust at any time), but control of the money is placed in the hands of my trustees. What? Why would anyone bother doing that? I hear you ask - the answer to *that* is simple - tax avoidance (not that that particular scheme would necessarily allow you to avoid much tax - that's just a simple example). I found trusts extremely difficult that first time round - when I came to revise for finals I found that I'd understood much more than I'd thought and the whole subject finally began to make sense.