PAXWATCH

Ironically, since ending my academic career by handing in a pathetically small pile of footnote-enhanced pages ten days ago, I've been pretty slow on the Bowlface front. In order to mask the pain caused by departing the warm, cosy cradle of education and its red-brick institutions, I've been treating Newcastle like a tourist resort; gallivanting around on my beloved cycle Joan for afternoon rendezvouses and working insane hours as a catering monkey at its 'premier music venue', the SageGateshead.

However, over the last couple of days my life has become considerably more structured and I'm back on the career bandwagon. In the form of an ever-so-slightly nepotism-gained placement in the BBC News Education and Social Affairs unit. I know, grown-up, right? What with the past 48hours also being major movers and shakers of Governmental educational reform, I've been treated to standing as unobtrusively as possible in various terrifyingly-pressured broadcasting environments. Every now and then, like right now, I'm returned to the dark, quiet corner that all interns are supposed to belong in for blog and facebook-update purposes.

Although all the sneaky tagging-along on filming, editing and producing has been awesome, and watching the 1 o'clock news go out from the gallery (so many screens and buttons and countdowns I felt ever caught between an epileptic fit and thinking about what Twitter must look like to my Mum)was the stuff of filmic legend, I've not been cool enough to suppress my excitement about how many media slebs are contained within this very building. I'm literally ten metres away from the Newsnight desk, however, despite being promised Paxman, THERE HAS BEEN NO PAXMAN. Although PAXWATCH is constantly occupying my mind from this particular intern-location, it's not been all bad as I did bump into a couple of glossy female newsreaders when attempting to find the loo.

In the meantime, I'm researching, which occasionally involves talking to the politest of Swedish press reps from a radical, and google-unfriendly, free schools organisation and trying to work out who leaked the Queen's speech at the weekend. Not been tempted to pop across the road to Westfield Shopping centre one bit.