Students: always classy

Believe it or not, this is one of the tamer images that's just passed through my scanner. This is, I believe, the QMW Students Union Rag Orgy in 1994. So, it was all in a good cause, if not in good taste…

This is rather good, and I have no memory of taking it:

City Poly? Before the removal of the University/Polytechnic divide, then.

And a band on a truck - all demos should have a band on a truck…

I'm busy scanning and editing some photos I took on a student demo back in 1989, inspired by this weeks' events. I remember this photo vividly:

I am, however, slightly shocked at how dated it looks. Students look rather different these days…

I'm aiming to have the full set up on One Man & His Blog at some point tomorrow.

Update: Now up.

Back in my final year of school, a group of friends invited me on an Easter holiday with them. It wasn't expensive; we took the train from central Scotland, where we lived, up to Aviemore, and then stayed in a youth hostel for the week. We cooked ourselves dinner, and entertained ourselves by spending our days walking through the Cairngorms, stunning mountains in the Highlands.

I was 17, and this was my first real holiday with friends, and I loved it. After a small accident, involving ice, gloves, my face and a swinging frame in a children's adventure park, I had a blast. I had experiences that week I have never repeated since:

• being caught in a whiteout, and then finding our way to a nearby bothy to shelter, by holding on to each other's backpacks. 
• going from snowy winter to glorious spring simply by heading down from the mountains to the valleys between
• being so tired at the end of the day that sleeping in the communal bunkrooms was easy

It would be four years before I would go away on holiday with friends like that again, but this really felt like the first big step towards independent adulthood that would continue six months later when I left for university in London. Sadly, I'm no longer in contact with the four other people who were on the trip with me - Daniel, Phylida, Claire and Katy - but scanning my way through the transparencies I shot that week reminded me of what a great, life-shaping week that was. 

The whole set's below:

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

An image shot for a student magazine project, back in the early 90s. That's me on the left, oppressing the heroic potato revolutionary, and against the bleak East European vistas of… Hyde Park.

Student journalism was a lot of fun.

I did a little scanning last night of random photos I had lying around, so I could shred the originals and keep the digital copy.

Here's me and an old girlfriend of mine around 1993:

At the Valentine's Ball

Here's one of a series of pics shot of me for my student union election campaign:

Scan-090913-0002