Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

There was a bold start to the year when I announced that 2010 was to be the year of CWF in January. I spoke at North Yorkshire Humanists, Leeds Skeptics celebrated it’s first birthday as well as holding one of the best attended 10:23 protests in the world and HAG set a new record. Meanwhile CWF launched it’s YouTube channel and I set David Cammeron right on the subject of Humanist soup kitchens.

Stewart Lee provided a great introduction to February where we launched the Humanist Community of Leeds as one of CWF’s big projects of the year. Meanwhile Atheist Society was busy raising money for charity and serving curry to Pagans. Down South the AHS convention took place in Oxford where Rich did a great job as CWF promo girl.

It was a busy month for CWF in March with the launch of Atheist Stock and the announcement of Enquiry 2010 in the first week! Ricky D shut down the RD.net forums while HCoL launched its blog. Comedian Robin Ince spoke to Leeds Skeptics while I spoke to Leeds Atheist Society on the subject of animal consciousness as well as on BBC Radio Leeds on the Catholic Care adoption agency.

Media coverage of HCoL was building by April including coverage by the BBC website and BBC radio. At Leeds Atheist Society we had a Scientology speaker for the first time ever. We had an Easter special at HCoL before myself and Gijsbert went down to London to discuss CWF with the BHA. The month ended with Reason Week 2010 kicked off by at Leeds Skeptics and the Atheist Society AGM at which John was elected president.

In May the Answers course returned while the country elected a new government. Chris Morris released Four Lions while we released big news about Enquiry 2010. Finally, in a surprise result, my car actually passed it’s MOT.

The big news in June was the Enquiry 2010 conference which was a huge success and featured speakers including A C Grayling, Chris French, Evan Harris, Andrew Copson and many others. Gijsbert was elected onto the University of Leeds Equality & Diversity Committee, I got new housemates and Humanist Week took place.

Much like March, the first week of July was one of launches with the first CWF newsletter being released and the Secular Portal Resource Library being launched as well as us opening the CWF office in Leeds city centre. Leeds Skeptics moved to Mr Foley’s and world cup fever even infiltrated HCoL. Meanwhile Leeds Atheist Society partied hard at their End of Year Ball and we hit Bristol for the AHS AGM.

I started August with two radio appearances, the first on UFOs and the second on psychics. HCoL launched their new branding and we partied down at Leeds Pride. CWF became a registered charity and held it’s first AGM as well as launching the Humanist Chaplaincy Network as well as announcing Sunrise 2010. At work we suited up, something the rest of the world would soon copy in the form of International Suite Up day.

I was out of the country for most of September as I toured Europe with my good friends, Norm, George and Kieran. We made our way through Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Munich, Salzburg, Venice, Verona, Milan, Monaco and La Rochelle. But before we headed off I squeezed in a quick radio interview following Stephen Hawking officially declaring there is no god, represent the University of Leeds Humanist Chaplaincy at the staff fair and oversee CWF’s Sunrise Conference and on return managed to finally achieve Pub Week too.

York Rock Church provided a great start to October while Leeds Atheist Society build on freshers’ week with a classic Make Your Own God event. CWF announced Atheist Stock now had over a thousand images, I saw Stewart Lee in Harrogate, turned 24 and spoke at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire while Gijsbert spoke at the One Life course and joined me in London to meet Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University. I also spoke at Leeds Skeptics and Durham University, raised money for WaterAid and launched the new Perspective website while we finally realised our dream of having a wench and had our first poker night.

If October started well, November was full on cracking as we watched Linkin Park from the sky, followed by Paramore a week later and finished off that week with Gorillaz, curtesy of o2, all expenses paid. I was keeping busy with talks at Leeds Atheist Society and Bradford University, meanwhile my sister graduated. LAS held their interfaith panel and I spoke at their debate on the burqa while HAG launched their new website. We saw the first annual Worfolk Lecture and myself speaking at Durham Union alongside BHA vice-president Richard Norman on the motion “this house has no faith in atheism.” Finally we finished off the month with the LAS Weekend in Edinburgh.

Sex was the subject of December with Intimiate Details launching. HCoL moved to the evening and HAG ran their first holiday food drive. We returned to Manchester on two occasions to watch Meat Loaf from the o2 corporate box and to see the amazing Tim Minchin and CWF launched the Humanist Library Project. Finally we rang in the new year with our traditional New Year’s Eve house party.

On Friday, we held a cocktail party to ring in the new year. Having had a lot of fun making spreadsheets of the various cocktails we could make, compiling it into an ingredients matrix and calculating which cocktails we could make with the most efficient subset of ingredients we eventually came up with a menu of twenty different cocktails.

We then made little menus so that people could cross them off as they drank them, which ended up turning into a competition – perhaps a mistake when the average cocktail contained three shots! Congratulations to Oli for winning, drinking his way through nine of them.

Unfortunately my camera ran out of battery half way through the night so I didn’t get chance to see all the photos Sarann took with it – until I opened them all up this morning and found it full of pictures of Kat’s shoes :S.

All in all, I’m going to label this as “best new year’s ever” because everything worked out so well. Of course the real challenge starts here – I’ve drunk 5 of the 2,800 cocktail recipes I have in my book, which means 2,795 to go…

On Tuesday we headed down to Red Hot World Buffet for the Atheist Society’s annual Winter Solstice meal.

Or at least, that is where we thought we were heading. We had decided that we didn’t need to book because only six people had confirmed as coming on Facebook and it was a Tuesday and it was a buffet and it was huge.

However, on the night, 12 people turned up and when Norm, who had gone on ahead of us, asked how long the wait would be on an appropriated sized table – he was told, two weeks! I mean seriously, who holds their Christmas party on a Tuesday and goes to a buffet? Standards these days.

Luckily Spice Quarter were kind enough to fit us in so we enjoyed a high quality buffer after all.

Just a quick post to say congratulations to my sister Katie who graduated with her bachelor’s degree in theatre costume design on Monday.

The degree is accredited by Teesside University which I’m told is currently University of the Year being the first new university to win the award. This to me seems somewhat analogous to Stewart Lee’s “world’s tallest dwarf” (very impressive in relation, but still never the less a dwarf, and therefore restricted by law from holding positions with a minimum height requirement such as a firefighter, or owner slash operator of an enchanted beanstalk).

Never the less, I’m sure most of us are all too aware of just how much work there is to earn a degree in any subject that doesn’t contain the word “media” in the title, so congratulations are certainly in order.

With Norm having a spare ticket to the Gorillaz gig at MEN last night, I decided to take him up on the offer and head over. The train journey over there was a nightmare – pretty much every train in or out of Leeds was running late and so we started off fifteen minutes late only to find we could only crawl to Pudsey.

So an hour into this journey we hadn’t even made it out of Leeds yet with the official reason for the problems being a combination of a gearbox problem and “the track being wet.” So we spent another twenty minutes or so waiting for the Blackpool train which was only a few minutes behind us apparently so turn up so it could push us into Bradford at which point they gave up on our train and cancelled it.

Once we had found another train the journey finally got going and I ended up reaching Manchester about quarter past nine – over three hours after having set off but just in time for the set – Gorillaz had just taken to the stage and were onto their third song by the time I got to my seat.

Some, who regularly go to bland and unpopular bands who can’t fill a large audience, would wonder whether they were looking at musicians or ants at stadium gigs but luckily we had no such problems – the seats themselves were really good – it was as far forward as you can get (I was in seat 3) on the left side, about half way up the lower tier.

There were a huge number of people involved in the performance. The regular act consisted of Damon Albarn, three guitarists, two drummers, four vocalists, a five piece string orchestra and two or three other people meaning just as standard there were nearly 20 people on stage, plus on top of that they had a brass band and another orchestra that did some sets and maybe 8-10 guest vocalists as well resulting in there being probably 40 people on stage at various points throughout the gig!

Despite not being that familiar with a lot of Gorillaz’ music I really enjoyed the gig, well worth the wait.

On Thursday, we headed down to Sheffield to see Paramore. The wind and the rain made for an interesting journey, but never the less we made it down in good time and after grabbing some food we headed in just to see the final few songs of B.o.B.

Paramore themselves hit the stage at around 9:15 and played an almost identical set list to the one they had played in Nottingham a few days earlier, which was great, because those were the songs I had been listening to non-stop since 😀 .

I really enjoyed the gig, probably more than Linkin Park, mainly due to us having standing tickets which was well worth the premium cost as you get so much more atmosphere on the floor – not to mention more room to get into the rhythm.

Last Sunday we held our first poker night.

It went very well over all, despite the fact I had only started playing poker a week before I managed to win the first game, though in reality, it was almost certainly because I am simply too new to the game rather than because of any skill on my part – once I actually learn what hands beat what and therefore actually understand what I’m doing myself, people will actually get a read on me.

Until then, let the good times roll!

On Saturday we headed over to Kate’s party for a Halloween celebration (I saw Halloween celebration rather than Halloween because Halloween is of course actually on today).

We decided pretty early on it was the worst party ever. We all drank quite a bit so I’m not quite sure what the reasons were but I know we made that decision. Once you accept this though it somewhat lowers the expectations so you can only really go up from there, so in the end it made a half decent recovery.

The company was on the whole good as it was mostly the A-Soc crowd though Nicola’s had some interesting friends. Sometimes, running in the circles you do, you forget that there are a lot of stupid people in the world. Like really stupid people. Embarrassingly stupid. Myself and James had to spend a lot of time desperately trying to hold ourselves back from calling them in an angry manner on the stream of nonsense they asserted; it was like being trapped in a conversation with Storm from the so-named Tim Minchin song.

Still, we made it until the end of the party and so can walk away with a knowledge that we can still keep up with the kids and some highly amusing anecdotes that while I have no plans to share on such a public forum will be happy to elaborate on next time we’re down the pub.

On Friday night we headed down to Alea Casino for my birthday celebration.

We almost ran out of space as I had only booked the table for 15 people and 16 people ended up turning up, not that the restaurant could cope anyway – it took them 50 minutes to bring us our starters, of which they then forgotten one, they manged to forget one of the desserts and to top it all off they even got arsey when I told them I didn’t want to pay the service change because the service was rubbish. Food was nice though.

Afterward we hit the casino floor and effectively ended up with our own private table – there was blackjack table down the end that nobody else seemed to know about so we had it to ourselves, even if it was £5 minimum bet. I put down £50 and managed to walk out even but somewhat trailed James’ returns after he hit three blackjacks in a row!

Thank you to everyone who came down, it was a good night.

After many weeks of waiting after Viki agreed to wench on us if we got her an appropriate costume, the night finally arrived last night.

So we spent yesterday evening sitting around and drinking, all of which were fetched for us. The problem is now of course that you very quickly become accustomed to such a lifestyle and as such it’s going to be a pain every time we have to make our own drinks now.

Luckily, while discussing what we would do with an increase of money in our pay packets, Viki suggested “if you had all that money you could hire a wench full time, rather than just having one every few weeks when I’m here” which I’m pretty sure is an agreement for regular wenching – and really the least she could do having ripped the wench outfit we got for her 😀 .