Poor Gardening

Another week another issue. This week has been absolutely shattering. In fact, I am so tired that when I came into work today (Thursday) I put on my scarf, went to the door, then turned around and looked for my scarf as I thought I had lost it. It’s just been one of those weeks. Work, sleep, eat: barely time for relaxing at all. This is actually being written on a bus into College, just to prove that point.

Garden Hall

Think it’s clear what the viewpoint is from me. Just keep Garden open. Renovate it and keep it here. It’s very close and very cheap. Everything else is going towards the expensive side in terms of accommodation and, let’s face it, London is hardly going to become a cheaper city to live in. It’s once more incredible to see Imperial students stand up and denounce a terrible idea. I was very pleased to see the enthusiasm and boldness of the students organising the protests and getting their arts skills out with some pro level bubble letter making.

One thing that we absolutely don’t want is for people from less well-off backgrounds being put off coming to Imperial. If this is because of the accommodation offers that are available, then that is such a shame. Garden Hall (and Weeks of course, as well as the halls in Evelyn Gardens) is an amazing asset. It is cheap and just by campus. This means people that can’t afford expensive halls still get to live near campus. Having halls such as Garden means that you don’t price out students from being in a great location. Would that space really be used well if it were to be office space? Wouldn’t it cost money to redevelop the space into office space? Surely just renovating the halls is a much better use of the money that it would cost? The campaign to save Garden Hall should be fully supported by all students. For those from College, all you need to do is to look at the comments from students on page 9. Just to show you how passionate students that have lived/known someone who has lived in the halls are about Garden Hall being saved: many of them have put their names to their comments. Also, these are not all of the comments that could have been put in. Many were excluded due to space restrictions.

Elections

Elections are well and truly here. Let’s hope that it is all done fairly with no funny business. It was a rather bold move to have a Results Party planned and advertised. The complaints system this year is a bit odd and definitely made to discourage people from complaining. To be fair the idea is to stop people constantly getting in touch with trivial matters. However, it’s a barrier to those who are currently Union outsiders: they have to wade through the dull information to find a code for their complaint. Why not just let them email in and just reply to them all? You would get a lot, but loads of people get a lot of emails, you just suck it up. It’s needless bureaucracy. I guess you can say you don’t want someone in a position if they aren’t willing to do that, but it just seems like a bad system. Plus it’s lame as hell coming from a students’ union to have alphanumeric coding systems rather than a less formal emailing system.

Anyway, over the next seven days you’ll be accosted time after time by people wanting you to vote for them. Try to resist the temptation to just impulse vote for whoever you think looks nicest or gives you the best sweets etc. Think really hard about it and pick whichever candidate you think is the best for the role.