Busy days

It's been a few days since my last post but a lot of unexpected things have happened since then. The good news is that the visit to the Reindeer Food event in the Hubs hosted by Amy's Retreat (www.amysretreat.org.uk) turned out to be extremely worthwhile. I managed to speak to the person in charge. Gabrielle Latham and in turn she gave me detailed info about the event and the charity itself.
The interview itself is a clear message that bringing a dictaphone with you to a news source is ALWAYS a good idea, seeing as my shorthand isn't a high enough standard (yet) to keep up in a conversation.
Looking back on what I got, I can honestly say that of the 15 minutes of dialogue I recorded, there isn't a single piece of utterly useless information which is a pleasant surprise compared to the vox pox I did last year, where the british public supassed themselves yet again in being "helpful".
It's fair to say that whilst with the vox pox people may of had no clue of how to answer the questions, Gabrielle as a member of the charity, obiviously has background knowledge and is more prepared. What she didn't know however, is that I would be showing up at all to ask her those questions in the first place, so with having to deal with me, I give her credit for.
I'm hoping to write up a draft of this story tomorrow so I can send it to Claire Jenkins for feedback on Monday, unfortunately with good news comes bad news.
Thanks to a scheduling conflict I didn't manage to go to court with Leanne, instead I went to sheffield council with another fellow journalism student, Jack Bertram. My reasoning for going to this instead was that whilst court is open monday to friday, every week, this would be the last full council meeting for a while, and I'm not entirely confident to whether or not the Abbeydale Grange School story will turn out to be interesting or not, so it seemed like a safe bet to go to council instead and see if there's anything else happening that I could use.
Unfortunately, there was about at least 30-40 other students who had the same idea as us, and a lot of public speakers, meaning we couldn't get inside the actual gallery due to lack of space. After waiting for a couple of hours, we eventually had to give up and went to Sue Featherstone for advice on what to do next. Sue told us that it would be an idea to try and get in contact with the usher who had emailed her previously about the council meeting in the hopes of getting information about the council.
Ironically, we actually bumped into the same usher ourselves on the way out so we kicked ourselves for not getting his email address of him, but thankfully Sue herself still has it, so I'll be emailing her in the week to get it off her, so all is not lost. I'm still planning to go to the cabinet meeting in the week to hear the verdict of whether Abbeydale Grange stays open or not as well.
Asides from all this, I'm knee-deep in revision since I've got both my second shorthand exam and preperation for accredation exam on tuesday and thursday respectively this week, leaving me with very little time to do this assignment as well.
Focus will have to shift onto the exams this week, but like mentioned I still plan to write out my first draft on the reindeer food story and go to council cabinet this week, but I'll probably have to save the visit to court for either this Friday or the beginning of the week afterwards. It's turning out to be a small mercy that this blog and reflective report isn't due with the rest of the assignment itself, or i'd be screwed
-J