What is it about the best New Year’s Resolutions falling by the wayside so easily? After being in London for the New Year period I came home with every intention of giving blogging a serious go, as I did when I had little else to do in my last days in Passau on Erasmus. But yet here I am at the end of a working week - my first of 2008 with an internet connection, the family PC in Meath having conked out - and I’m writing an entry on a newly replaced BlackBerry.

Today I had nothing major planned for work so I nipped into town with Ciara to do a few errands (’messages’ as they’d be to my grandparents), stuff like paying my rent for the second Semester and picking up the BackBerry post-repair and forms to renew my provisional driving licence. Because of how expensive London had turned out to be, I was a little short on my savings and had to take out some funds from my Henry Hippo savings account that I’ve had in Ulster Bank since I was 3. Having examined the balance afterwards it seems that the money included that of my communion, my confirmation, and most of the summers I’d ever worked.

I’m a little heartbroken that I’ve had to spend it on something so non-descript and of such bankrupt sentimentality. If ever I needed an incentive to save, surely a moral obligation to save up the same sum again would be it.

After doing all of them we took the 150 out to Crumlin Village to visit the new HQ of the Union of Students in Ireland - a name that’ll ring any bells with regular readers of Politics.ie - and to meet Hamidreza Khodabakhshi, President since November, and Paul Lynam, a UCD student on leave and as Eastern Area Officer, the only full-time officer of the year to still be in the job he was first elected to. We had a good chat with the lads about a few different internal things, including some that myself and Ci will have some input in ourselves. I must admit, getting off the 150 and not knowing where we were - wandering down bleak. isolated, quiet streets - we wondered about the merit of Crumlin as a HQ, until we remembered that the alternative was to have Ceann Aras in Ennis. Once we got inside - and past the gypsy woman sitting at the door, Hamid swears they’re “on rotation” - the inside office space is actually perfect for the Union, and once the builders are finished and they get a chance to move everything in, likely in good time for next year’s Officer Board, it’ll be a very solid place from which to launch new operations. The lads brought us for lunch afterwards and we’re very positive about the stuff we’re going to be involved in, and very much looking forward to Congress at the end of March.

When we got back to the office we did our little bits and bobs for the day, and went back to the apartments to get packed up and ready for off.

On the bus into town to head home before we headed our seperate ways, Ciara said to me, “You’ve changed.” I wondered how. “I dunno. You’ve gotten more apathetic. You don’t care as much about the internet and stuff as you used to.”

I told her it was because I didn’t have the buckets of time I used to in Passau. I’m resolved now to making that time.