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In response to the very sad news of the deteriorating health of the Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, I would like to express my hope that this great leader makes a recovery.

I would like to offer this prayer:

Almighty, Master of the Universe,
my G-d and the G-d of my forefathers:

May it be Your Will that You speedily send
a complete recovery from Heaven,
a healing of the body and a
healing of the spirit to:

Ariel Sharon
the son of
The State of Israel

amongst all of the sick of
the Children of Israel.

As many people may know, I am a big fan of quotes and proverbs. I wish I had the memory to remember them all!!

What I am planning on doing from now on, is to have a quote or proverb that reflects what I am thinking about when I am writing my latest post. I don’t know how it will pan out, but it’s certainly something different.

So, let’s start off this with the following:

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; its when you had everything to do, and you’ve done it.
- Margaret Thatcher

I was thinking today “I’m always bloody busy!!” I’m working on a project at the minute, for my Student Representative role. Last term there were severe issues with the group work that we had to do in up to four out of the six modules that we had. Both students and teaching staff have realised that there is were major short-falls in the modules that required us to work in groups. The plan is that the teachers are meeting to discuss what they think should be done to enhance the group work and they have asked me to gather student opinion and feed it back to them. I have done this in the form of a questionairre and, can honestly say that I am really happy with the reply ratio that I am getting so far. To be honest, I really didn’t have much faith that I would get many replies, but I have been proved wrong, which is great. Now, I have to collate all of the responses from a potential 60 or so students and present those results, with ideas on how everything can be improved. On the back of this, I am also organising a surgery that I will be holding to gather more opinion on group work and to offer advice to those that are struggling with it.

On top of all of this, I am also revising for my upcoming exams, organising a multi-cultural event for the Students’ Union, sorting out my publicity for the upcoming Students’ Union elections, still trying to find a job, have a social life, sleep, eat and start getting more active (going for walks, going to the gym).

My life is always jam packed and I couldn’t be happier, because at the end of each day, when I lay my head down for bed, I can say to myself “Martyn, today you’ve achieved everything that you needed to”.

So, yesterday I promised you an insight into the goings on surrounding my housemates over the Winter Vacation.

To say that I am expecting World War 3 when they all return is an understatement!!

To give a little background, on the night of Friday 9th December, my housemates put up their Chrismas decorations around the house. Now, as most of you are probablt aware, I do not celebrate Christmas, but owing to the fact that I have the utmost respect for other peoples’ religions and beliefs, I was happy to see the decorations go up and for my housemates to enjoy themselves. There was one slight problem, were the decorations going to stay up whilst everybody (bar Jon and I) had gone home? I got my answer from a certain housemate:

hi…..me, jo, ‘lots, jon n sean talked about the decorations tonight, and have decided to take down the xmas tree in the corner, the stars hanging from the ceiling, the snowflakes and clean the fake snow off the windows, but we want the paper chains and lights left up at least until zoes party when everyone gets back…..does that sound reasonable?

Yes, that sounded reasonable, so that was the end to it……or so I thought.

Everybody then left to go home for Christmas, they went to places afar. There was one slight problem, nothing had been done that was promised. Not one thing. Now, seeing as it would upset many people and we all wanted to give Zoe a nice party, I decided to not take anything down even if, in my opinion, I was well within my rights to. So off I toddled to be with my Dad for a couple of days (see last post) and, on my return found that all of the decorations had been taken down. “Damn”, I thought “they’ll all think that it was me.” I promptly got to the bottom of it and found out that it was Jon that had done the deed. You can read about the whole escapade in Jon’s blog where you will also see a few more issues that have arrisen such as bottles being taken away by the two of us. Also, not mentioned is that some chalk grafitti has been cleaned off of a notice board by another housemate.

Silly situation, I know. It has now culminated in a certain housemate getting all angry over it and acting like a murder has been commited. She spoke with me briefly on MSN and was far too impatient to await a response so just blocked me. I sent her an e-mail, breaking down all her comments and giving her a feasible argument for each one, but finished the e-mail defemating her character and asking her to reflect on everything that had been said. The e-mail was sent to five other members of the house.

Last I heard, she had been crying all day after reading it and has not replied to me. I look forward to her replying so that we can get this silly situation behind us.

On a closing note, I went to the gym this evening with another housemate. I had a great time and it felt really good to get my body moving again after years of being stagnant.

Okay, so I know it’s been……hmmmmm, well not enough fingers!! But it’s been ages since my last post and so much has happened. Where do I start?

Well, the last post was before Christmas, so I’ll start with that. As most of you will know, I don’t celebrate Christmas, so I wasn’t intending on doing anything special and I lived up to that!! I spent a good few days with my Dad and had a great laugh, ate loads, drank a bit. It’s a shame really, because my Dad really can’t handle that much drink (glad I wasn’t cursed with that particular ‘Redstone curse’ so it was funny seeing him falling all over the place after two pints, or a couple of glasses of wine. It was nice to be able to give my dad the company that he deserves, but the lack of Internet (or at least a fast connection) was driving me crazy. Therefore, I returned to Castle Irwell on the 27th.

An interesting develpment had occured at my student digs whilst I was away. Now, I haven’t gone into this before but some of you may be aware of the situation: The House 11 Christmas Decorations. This whole episode is worthy of another post, so I’ll leave this till later. But, suffice to say that this was the beginning of a very long, drawn out and quite pointless argument that I could see brewing in yonder.

I’ll skip a few days now and move onto New Year. My plans for this were to go over to Leeds, stay at my mate Steve and his lovely girlfriend Rachels house and then the three of us were going to another mate Phillis (a bloke, who’s real name is Paul) for a good and proper knees up of a party. So, off I trotted to Leeds, traffic was great and the snow had finally stopped over there.

Right, the party!! I would like to say that it will be a party that I will remember forever, but there is one slight problem. I was that drunk that I still have no recolection of anything past about 23:30. I remember that me, Rachel and Phillis’ girlfriend Shelly were having a dance to some cheesy music and were already quite drunk, then the suggestion was made that we should go and make some cocktales. Now, I’m not talking about your average pink or blue delights with umbrellas and straws. What these were, were a bastard mix of all the different alcohol that we had in the house. I think that this is where my memory starts to fade, I remember that there was some drunken “I love you shooooo much” going on and then some vomiting, but after that……..just blank.

I woke up at 10:00 at Steve and Rachels, in my bed, undressed thinking “how the hell did I get here and who the hell undressed me?”…………very scary. Anyway, I stayed over at their place for two days and had a great time, which was capped with a lovely meal, care of Rachel (Lemon chicken with roast potatoes, yorkshire pudding and veg). She will make a lovely wife one day, please God.

Anyway, for now, I’ll leave you with that and tomorrow, I will update you on exactly what has been going on in House 11.

Goodnight!!