It all started a few days ago when an impromptue meeting with Margaret McDonnagh (Sister of my MP Godmother and Baroness in her own right) led to me and my mum filling out a couple forms so that we could go to the Labour Party conference for the Prime Ministers speach. And it was as simple as that despite the fact you are meant to apply months in advance for the priviledge but as I have said before it is not what you know but who you know.

So on Tuesday morning I had to awake at the rediculous time of 6:30 in order to get a train up to Manchester from Euston. A nice shiny virgin train, very nice it was but still took bloody two and a half hours but there we go. What was worse was that half way through the journey we get a phone call telling us that there were complications with our passes, so at Manchester station we had to go and get some photos done. On the plus side we did see Jamie from Corronation Street on the train. after getting off the train we taxied off to a building where we were to collect our passes.. lots of waiting around ensued until that beautiful image you can see before you, clearly a rush job as my head is clearly falling out of the bottom and the only information on it is my name whereas everyone else got where they were from aswell but then I am not really that fussed about that, I was allowed to get in.

When in the G-Mex center we were ushered into a little office area where we found Margaret who then led us off with the VIPs.. not only were we late entrants, we were made VIPs, brilliant. This meant that we got to sit down the front. Unfortunately though despite being down the front it was away from the TV cameras so unfortunately no publicity for me. The Speach went very well as I am sure most of you will have seen from the news papers, leaving the whole of the conference asking the question is it really a good idea to get rid of him but it looks like it is too late for that. Then we waited around in some lobby for a while and had a drink and then we were taken up to a suite in the Midland hotel (very posh I am told) for a photo-shoot which we were to find out would contain Tony Blair. It was a bit strange seeing people I know well just talking to the PM. After the photos we scooted off to a room where we scavenged the cakes that were left by Tony and his 'Cronies'.

And so too the part of the day that I wasn't really expecting, the virtual 'pub crawl' of an evening, going from one reception to another eating nibbles and drinking free alcohol all night, brilliant. Who said politics is boring. It started off with the Irish Embassy where of course they served Guiness which despite me not liking I had a glass of. We then moved onto the CWU party where we saw all that is good about the Labour party, a chubby northern man made a speach about how a family who was on the dole in the 80s how now sent their children to University because of Labour and then he went on to state that 'we can't let those posh boys get back into power' the icing on the cake though was their nibbles. They served lager and pork pies.. i mean can you get more brilliant than that. Unfortunately though we did get to see the otherside of the new Labour party at the News International reception where Champagne was served amongst posh people from the press including half of the news presenters who have ever existed and for some reason mick hucknall. I felt quite uncomfortable there and when they brought out the next days pressings of the Sun and the Times you know that they weren't good socialist people in that room. There were a few other receptions that we went to which I cant remember and I managed to squeeze in the watching of the last 20 minutes or so of the football before we went to bed at about 1:30. On the way home we were regretting that we hadn't been able to stay for the speaches of Bill Clinton or Bob Geldoff but luckily we saw the latter at the train station so I was happy. We took the train home and here we are now.

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Not only the name of a fantastic daytime channel 4 show but it also is a good word to represent me nearing the end of my time here, before i move on to pastures new in the shape of University. It seems to have all come round very quickly.. I can remember my 1st day of 6th form like it was yesterday and yet here i am on the eve of my university life.

Last weekend saw a number of people including Dave and Matt, leave for university and so as we do with most Occasions we went to the pub to celebrate. and celebrate we did. I Got to the pub quite late at around nineish to see that a few people were already there and from what happened next I assume they had been there a while because Harvey managed to drop his pint on the floor and smash his glass into itty bitty pieces, thats the 2nd time hes done that on a night out with us.. poor show. The night went on the drinks... trickled rather than flowed because the bar queue was so bloody long. Then by the end of the night no one was really drunk, Tate was the most but then hey whats new and we all said our goodbyes to Dave and Matt. Matt actually walked back to my house where we watched some footy highlights for a bit before he walked off home at 2:30ish despite my generous offer for him to crash the night. (for close followers of the blog I also got the £10 owed to me by Phoebe that night which was nice)

It hit me soon after that night that my life was indeed changing - don't grown that I am getting all emotional, you dont have to read this - it wasnt that I was just living away for 3 years but also that after those 3 years I would have to be in work and so I started thinking this is really an end of an era. That thought stayed for a while and then I realised SHIT its the end of an era and i havn't got a clue what I'm doing and Im not gonna make any friends at uni and im gonna fail all my exams and my life will be hell from now until the day I die. Luckily these thoughts soon passed aswell largely through the help of miss Laura's kind words, she having lived through the 1st year of university managed to calm me down a bit and now I find myself quite looking forward to the prospect of going.

So what do you do when you realise its all going to be ok?? you go out to the pub again of course, a week later, this night wasn't as successful with very few people turning up but ah well saw Leander for the 1st time in a while with his, dare i say it, stylish new hair do... what he paid for it to look like that need not be mentioned (lots). But the night wasnt all bad oh no, in parts it was quite interesting, especially the bar maid who when serving me said hey Anthony despite me not having the faintest idea who she was, she did look vaguely familiar to me but no matter how hard i try and can not put a name or a reason for knowing with that face. Also as the night progressed I saw some others that i probably wont see again before uni starts. The night did end rather early though as I was home by about eleven and speant the rest of the night talking on msn, which was nice.

I am looking forward to this going to uni malarky, its all very exciting with my accomodation being finalised and my loan going through and my shiny shiny new laptop coming through the post. But it is not all fun and games, there are still a lot of things that need doing such as major shopping trips and of course sorting out my bloody bank account which those fine people at Lloyds TSB managed to muck up for me. Nevertheless, with only a week to go before uni starts I am looking forward rather than back.

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Ok so I didnt fulfil my promise of 3 blogs in 4 days but the last one is here now so you should all just rejoice and be merry. My excuse for lateness may seem a little odd, no it wasn't that my week was too busy to fit the writing of the blog in it was actually quite the opposite, the end of my week turned out to be a lot less busy than I was expecting and hence I didnt have anything to write about and so I decided to wait a little longer until I had enough information to write a suitable blog about.

Right so I left you on Friday morning just after Laura had left.. and that was pretty much it for friday apart from an appointment with the bank to get my student account sorted out, we didnt go out on Friday night as it was previously suggested and so I stayed home and did very little.

Saturday too saw cancellations on what I thought was going to happen. I thought I was going to be dragged along to this birthday party in Clapham because Tate wanted to go and we couldnt let him go on his own but in the end he text us saying he couldnt actually go in the end.. he didnt tell us why this was but we didnt ask. Instead I went to the Labour Party quiz in Sutton which is always a bit of fun. In the past it has had some strange themes including Ireland and the number 7, this time the quiz was loosely based around Trade Unions which you would think is quite sensible for a Labour Party Quiz. Unfortunately trade unions arent one of my strong knowledge areas but I did manage to get a few answers such as correctly guessing the tune Union City Blue by Blondie. Overall we managed to come a good second after 10 rounds.

 Then to Sunday and doing something that was actually planned. Going to my Auntie's house to celebrate her 60th birthday.. it was a nice little occasion with a barbeque and as you have to when there is lotd of food and not much else to do I ate. I think I had 3 burgers, 2 hot dogs and 2 baked potatoes which I thought was pretty impressive, I also managed two bowls full of various puddings and this was before the cake had even been cut, lovely. I did obviously feel quite sick for a while. And that was it for sunday

Now I think you can see why I couldnt write a blog just about that, a bit boring really so I will add on the events of Monday aswell, not that this was particularly interesting it just adds a bit more.

First I went to play a bit of Tennis with matt, blondie and Tony, In the 1st match a doubles encounter, the pairing of me and blodie won 6-1 which was largely due to me beautiful service action, I was the only player not to double fault in the match. In the singles tournament I didnt fair quite aswell only winning one match against Matt but I blame that largely on fatigue, I even resorted to serving left hand for a bit because my right arm was dead, it wasnt all bad either as my left hand did serve up two unreturnables.

Then in the evening I was supposed to see something in a record shop with John but it turned out that we turned up too late and we ended up going to the Queens head pub up in piccadilly where we had a pint and me and Dave had nice meals before John dragged us to this place called Shisha bar where people do this thing which looks like smoking but isnt or something. Of course me being very moral I wouldn't try the stuff mainly because it looked like smoking also I didnt believe John saying that it was just flavoured steam. Something that you smoke and it relaxes you sounds like it must be some sort of drug to me. Anyway so I ended up watching others puff on this 'steam' whilst I sat there and let what had started as a little headache develop into an extremely painful thing. I left the place at about 9:30 and made my way home straight down the northern line and was in bed shortly afterwards.

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