Calling All friends

Posting No. 2. Here goes . . .

I knew it. I just went outside (to finish off my morning cup of tea and gather my thoughts). Ideas come flooding into your head of what you could write. You come back inside to start and, an empty head confronts you!

Well I have to start somewhere so lets perhaps start by saying how I (that's me, Ray) would like to see this thing working.

Like those Union people say, "a Union is only as good as its members make it". Well, it's the same for this community. Truth is you are the community. It's all very well posting information up in your profiles, your career details, your email, your interests etc etc. That's dead information really without the human touch, the communication of that information, and it's interaction with other information, with the lives and expereinces of others in the community.

It is you who must make this thing come alive. You who must interact with each other and with us. You who must create an inherent value for yourselves and for the others.

The University is coming alive again. During the summer there was a strange aura about the place; Just buildings and a feeling (just a feeling) of potential, of possibility. It was like the place was waiting. Every now and then you could see groups of younger school children marching about the place. Testing out it's machinery if you like, keeping it just ticking over. And now? The car park is filling up. The students are beginning to return. The PGCE's returned a couple of weeks back. Already there are the moans and groans about the workload! Next week the flood begins in earnest. All those brains, all those ideas. What a place to be! That's why I came to University, to find that community of learning.

But of course it doesn't end there. When you leave you take that learning out into the world with you and apply it. Pitch it against the machinery of working life. Some of you have been doing this for a long time. I wonder if you ever think back to those days back at Hope, or S. Kath's or Notre Dame. Remember how protected you were back then. Remember those dreams you had about the world outside, and of how you were going to launch yourself into it and, perhaps some of you, change it?

What happened to those dreams. How many came true, how many faded away? Not like in the books you read, or the films you watch but in the reality you found, the reality you lived, are still living?