I’ll come out and say it now: I am proud to say I am not a geek. I have many friends who are geeks, some friends who were geeks, and some friends who used to geek-bash (only in the verbal sense of the word, of course) and are now well on their way to becoming the biggest geeks of all! Me on the other hand, I think I’d struggle to be a geek, even learn to be a geek. Simply because I am terrible at maths – and I am yet to meet a geek who doesn’t love maths – have decent eyes that don’t require glasses and generally don’t get on too much with computers. Therefore, for all of these reasons and more, I should not think the new ipad is cool…but here’s the thing…I do think it’s cool! Don’t tell anyone but I saw people using one on the train the other day, people who were NOT geeks, and it made me want to go straight out and buy one. Fortunately I stumbled on this here Enigin Geek link before I did! According to the writer of that post, I’ll be paying a lot for my ipad right now, so I think I shall wait. But it got me thinking: perhaps this new cool device that appeals to non-geeks and geekets will invade the world of non-geeks? Or maybe it already has? I for one don’t mind. Yes, I know it’s a gimmick but still, it’s a good gimmick, and I don’t even mind looking like a geek. Apparently the “geek look” is back in now, so I don’t even mind it.

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Pursue all the loans that you are entitled to. All UK students are entitled to a minimum amount of government funding to help manage expensive living costs and costly tuition fees. Some loans will be dependent on your parents’or guardian’s salary, however you should seek as much financial help as you can, whatever your circumstances may be. A maintenance grant is typically £3000 to £4000 for UK university students and tuition fee loans are set to increase as fees are expected to rise over the coming years.

Another important factor to consider is the cost of your social life. Find ways to limit the amount you spend when going to a nightclub by arriving earlier - entrance fees and drinks are typically cheaper before a certain hour and are usually more expensive on certain nights such as Friday and Saturday nights. Purchase an NUS card which will provide you with various discounts at numerous clubs and bars.

Limit your weekly grocery costs by only buying your own food - don’t buy food for your flatmates unless you can guarantee that they will pay you back. In fact, try to avoid loaning money to other students because there is a good chance you will not get it back.

Don’t buy a car unless you have the financial means to pay for a hefty insurance package and substantial fuel costs. Consider purchasing a 16-25 Railcard which entitles all students under the age of 26 with a 33 percent discount on Network Rail train services.

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The quote ’facing up to the hard truths'could not be a more realistic reflection of the reality of what this country is going to have to face up to. It was Labour’s radical overspending which led Britain into this predicament in the first place - their mistakes are now in the hands of the coalition who are now having to figure out a way forward in these very challenging times.

I also agree that the £55 billion cut from building schools is a serious concern. Politicians could easily find the same amount of money by taking away the overly-generous bonuses from those in the City of London who are partly reponsible for the economic crisis in the first place (with Wall St bearing the other responsibility). This is harmful for the future of our schools and for the future of our children - they should never have to suffer for our government’s mistakes.

I am in full agreement that energy efficiency is the way to move forward. In particular, the use of more energy-efficient public transport would also be helpful - however with trains and buses as unreliable as they are, it is no wonder so many Britons still prefer to travel by car.

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The UK has seen a pretty tough approach to junk food, as the government has introduced the famous ’Change4Life’ campaign to introduce healthy eating and exercise in order to make our nation more healther.

However the president of Mexico has decided on a more tougher approach by banning junk food altogether in its public and private schools. According to an article in the Telegraph, and another article in Care2, Mexico will ban all junk food in all of its 220,000 public and private elemantary and middle schools, which serve 25 million students. Felipe Calderon , president of Mexico, on his radical change said “Unfortunately, we are the country with the biggest problem of childhood obesity in the entire world.”However there does seem to be a world of difference between Mexico’s school nutrition with others. Despite the UK also having problems with obesity, our schools often have hot meals prepared in the school kitchens, however Mexican schools didn’t do this. Instead vendors would sell fatty and unhealthy snacks to children, including atole, tamarind candy, soft drinks, fried tacos and other sweets.

Mexican schools are already adapting to these new changes, as water, fruit juice and low fat milk are to replace the unhealthy soft drinks. But there are problems with regards to exercise, as three quarters of Mexican schools don’t have a playground or gym, that must be something for them to figure out.

I think it’s great that Mexico are implementing tough guidelines to deal with the health of their children, and I’m sure parents will try and change too, taking their children to the park for a game or two or even to the beach to make sandcastles sitting on a blue beach towel.

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A friend of mine recently sent me a letter (It began “Hey Mate, working for botox london is wicked, I get loads of free time at work to write letters like this…). I shall repeat that, for all those who rarely hear the word “letter”: a friend of mine recently sent me a letter. Yes, written by my friend’s own fair hands. A real letter, with real love and attention to detail.

Being in London, I don’t have time to write letters. I just don’t. That’s not me being a letter snob, that’s just life here in The Big Smoke. So anyway, this letter got me thinking: I wonder if I could write something as beautiful as this?

The short answer is–I couldn’t. And my friend is one of those annoying people with a real flair for hand-writing anyway, so the competition was stiff to say the least–

As I said, my first attempt was terrible. I hadn’t written a bone-fide letter for many years, so I was rusty and barely knew how to hold a pen. It got much more complicated than that, though. When I got to a letter G I started to doubt myself about how it was written–I even had to look at my friend’s to make sure I hadn’t spelt it the wrong way around!

So my point is this: don’t get yourself in to an illegible state like me. Combat it, because you might have children one day (if you can find a woman who doesn’t mind that you have the hand-writing skills of a clumsy pre-schooler), and you might need to pass this ancient tradition on.

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“If you’re going to live on planet earth,” my granddad recently said, shaking his fist at me in that way that meant ’Where’s the tea? Your Grandmother’s late, again!'“the best advice I can give is don’t use those rubbish barbecues, them ones that aren’t gas, the gas ones are much better and more thoroughly cook the meat—“

“Yes Granddad,” I said, “but get to the point, yeah?”

“—Hold your horses my son!”

“Horses held…”

“And don’t build your village at the bottom of a volcano. Have you heard about this ash debacle?”

I said I had, and that it was just something that happened, couldn’t be helped. Then, Granddad went in to a huge rant about how it could be helped, how volcanoes have it in for mankind, and how much money it was costing the economy.

Granddad, as you can see, is the voice of the Nation.

Personally, call me old-fashioned, but I still maintain the view-point that it couldn’t be helped–I mean, it’s not as if you can ask a volcano to behave nicely, is it?

The country is in a state because of the volcano (the world is not exactly running smoothly because of it either…) so who do you blame? See another person’s take on this at the following link.

Money, eh? Money and volcanoes just don’t like each other very much. And the Enigin guys are concerned about this, because it all ties in to their energy-saving ethos. Over at their many blogs you can read about all this stuff and more, and from the perspective of real, living, breathing workers of Enigin, too.

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The trains used to be miserable. As miserable as mole removal. Do you remember? The only thing worse than getting the train by foot was getting the train with a bike. It was a debacle that I used to endure every single week. Every week on the way to London, the same old battle…

If you were a pedestrian then you were treated like a human being. If you had a bicycle with you, however, you were treated as though you were carrying a dangerous disease which had to be treated with the up-most care. The only thing missing were nuclear suits.

The routine was rubbish and it went like this, without fail, every single time. I would arrive at the station with my bike and make it to the platform without any problems. Then a guard (or two) would look at me oddly, like in a horror film. At that point a guard would approach me silently from my blind-spot, scaring the hell out of me, and say something like “you taking a bike on the train?”

I’d say, “what does it look like?” or some such variation.

The train would then arrive. I’d be shepherded towards the bicycle enclosure (always miles away from where I was and with a door that only a wrestler could find easy to open) and put my bike in. Then I would inevitably get trapped, as the door had a habit of locking when shut and couldn’t be opened from the inside–

Every. Single. Week.

What fun!

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Best-sellers, as anyone who actively reads knows, are a law unto themselves. One would think that a studying of the yearly list would bequeath some profound secrets. Wrong. The lists appear to be meaningless–Or are they?

No, of course they are not meaningless, that’s the simple answer, although it’s certainly true that every list seems about as mysterious as can be. All of these books, generally speaking, deserve to be where they are. I’m not talking about just the books, of course, I’m talking about the authors themselves. People who just magically seem to end up where they are.

But here’s the thing: it isn’t magic, it’s simply lots and lots of hard work. If the average person who walked in to a book store had even the faintest idea of how hard a bestselling writer had to work to be where they are, they’d probably faint.

What they don’t tell you on the blurb on the back of the book is that most writer’s spend years battling away to even get noticed. Half work a Secondary education job and the other half struggle, their spouses under pressure to earn enough for them both. This may sound obvious, but bear in mind that a rejection letter (the staple of the writer’s life, really) can also be exceedingly harsh. What it’s saying is that all those months / years of hard work you put in might be for nothing. It’s saying that you may just have wasted all that time–

So next time you walk in to a book store have a look around. What you are looking at is not just books. What you are looking at is honour, pride, and a thousand years of grit and determination.

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This is an argument about NHS hospitals, but not as you know it. And no, I’m not talking about debates over the future of abdominoplasty or how much doctors get paid. My attack goes something like this: leave the people who clean the hospitals alone for a minute, will you?

I’m talking about the people whose job it is to clean every square inch of the hospital, of course. The unsung heroes of the hospital: those who do all the work and get very little praise. It doesn’t matter where you go or who you ask, people on the street say more or less the same thing: “Hospitals need to be kept cleaner, they should do a better job!”

But here is the grisly fact, which you may or may not like to know: dust is largely made up of shed human skin–and in a place which houses hundreds if not thousands of human beings (not to mention all the people working there and the numerous visitors) it’s quite a tricky thing to keep it at bay…To say the least. If you wanted to completely eradicate dust, there is no doubt in my mind that you wouldn’t actually be able to visit hospital in the first place…there would simply be too many cleaners!

All that said, I am sure there are some hospitals where more could be done. But don’t forget all the good hospitals. As with anything, there is a good and bad sign to the coin, but let’s not tar everyone with the same brush.

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Over the last few years we have seen the popularity of a boy with a scar on his forehead shoot through the roof. With every new novel and now with every new movie, the popularity and craze surrounding the Harry Potter series gets bigger and bigger. The money that the franchise is worth is phenomenal and it is safe to say that JK Rowling could run a country by herself with the money she has made.

I tried reading the Harry Potter books a while back but I couldn’t get into them. I am not a fan of teenage heroes. There is something so…unrealistic about it that puts me off. Call me stupid, but I would rather put my faith in the experienced veteran than the child who is learning everything for the first time. Now, I realise the irony that I am talking in terms of realism about a fantasy novel, but I think you can understand what I mean.

One of the other things that bothers me about the Harry Potter books is that the majority of the fans say that they have either never read the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, or dislike them! That astounds me. It is widely regarded that the Harry Potter books are poorly written. Rowling has the ability to imagine a great story, but not the ability to put it into words. Tolkien on the other hand, was a master.

Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are the books that created the fantasy genre. In how many other novels have we heard of Elves, Dwarves and Goblins? If it wasn’t for Middle-Earth, we wouldn’t have those terms. I am not flustered because Potter fans dislike Lord of the Rings, I am flustered because they don’t appreciate it. I am not the biggest Beatles fan, but I am aware of what they did for music. This is the same situation. As the title says, if there was no Bilbo Baggins, there would be no Harry Potter.

I have just been told what my cousin was looking for for her her graduation gift She asked for a new large beach towel for her next summer holiday, I just need to figure out where to pick it up now. Any suggestions are welcome, because I really don’t know what girls like.

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