On Friday I was asked to attend a prizegiving - I won't mention the name of the college, save that it was in East London - to present some of the successful candidates with their certificates. I really was a bit hacked off at first about this, since I've got enough on my plate at the moment, what with two committee meetings and two appeals by colleges to minute, college exam results to collate and analyse, rolling out the new timesheets for everyone in the office, a series of seminars to book/publicize/manage, and umpteen other little tasks that seem to be found for me. The thing is that everyone's a bit stretched at the moment - perhaps that's the way in any organisation that's working hard, and getting ahead, and I do like the thought, in the abstract, of having plenty to do. Goodness knows in my last job there were times when there was often not a lot to do, and I did feel a bit useless. Some of that, of course, was me not being proactive and going out and finding things to do for other people, though due to the internal accounting system, they might not have wanted my time to be billed to their project anyway. That system was positively Byzantine for anyone from QA because we might be working on eight or ten different bits of work for four or five different clients each month. Even with my wrong attitude to work, I might have got two years of an OU degree out of the way while I was there: they were willing to pay for it, and, as I've said, there was quite a bit of spare time to do it in. Shall we just roll our eyes up at further evidence of Tom often having been a bit of a waste of space, and move on?
Anyway, was annoyed at being (pretty much) required to go to the prizegiving, since it would take all afternoon, when I had more important things to do; not least to compile a submission to the Home Office with our suggested charges for educational visas and other bits of paper an international student needs to come here to study. It's an industry worth about £5 billion a year to the UK economy, and obviously we need to keep the UK's international reputation high, and entry costs as low as possible. It's already an expensive place to live in, especially London, where lots of foreign students naturally want to study, and charging them a couple of hundred pounds as an initial charge couldn't help but put people on a tight budget off. Fortunately, I managed to get the thing done about eleven thirty, then spent from twelve to twelve thirty going over changes with the person who'll actually be submitting the document, and then hared off to the college, feeling much happier now that the damn thing had been sent off. And it was sunny, which helps, and it was interesting wandering down the High Street from the station and seeing all the people, buying a poppy for my buttonhole, and then walking into a fantastically Victorian town hall with all the trimmings. The whole event was a bit ramshackle, though evidently heartfelt, and the stories of some of the students showed the value of what the college was doing - there were local businessmen learning accountancy, elderly Asian ladies learning English, young lads getting teaching qualifications, single mums doing computing courses, and a ten-year-old who was obviously on his way to Cambridge at the age of fifteen.
Amusing thing: the ten-year-old kid taking a very art-h0use approach to filming the proceedings using his mum's camcorder. He had it for about a quarter of an hour, and I don't think he stopped walking round the hall the whole time, with the camcorder pointed straight in front of him no matter which direction he was walking in. It probably made for a kind of commemorative video that gives you motion sickness; and I remember an episode of Doctor Who that was filmed in a revolutionary new style of 3D photography that only worked if the camera was constantly rotating round the subjects which probably produced a similar effect.
Uncomfortable thing: the almost unrelieved whiteness of the invited award presentees (apart from the 'civic representative' from Newham Council - it seems that there's three people entitled to wear big chains, and it all rotates round - very PC!), versus the almost unrelieved Asian/blackness of the college staff/award receivers.
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