Posts Tagged ‘Leeds Atheist Soc’

Yesterday saw the third run of our One Life course begin with the traditional first topic, the meaning of life.

The session saw a very good turn out of about 20-25 people which is great for a One Life and something I hope we can sustain throughout the course. The food was also excellent so it was an all round winner of an evening. The post-event social was a bit shakey but we eventually ended up settling down at the Cuthbert Brodrick for the evening and didn’t leave until kick out.

Tuesday night saw A-Soc hold it’s Introduction to Atheism talk. This year is was presented by three different speakers – Money Bags did a philosophical look at atheism, Norm did a look at the various terms atheists use to describe themselves and I did applied atheism – atheism in the real world or as I like to put it…

Taking your bucket of atheism and throwing it at the wall of life.

The talk overran a little but was overall very warmly received. We finished off with a social at The Old Bar which featured a surprise visit from Brett who is up in Leeds for a few days!

All in all it was a good night, although attendance was sorely lacking. This is something we can hopefully sort out in the coming weeks.

Tuesday saw A-Soc hold our 2009/2010 intro meeting. The meeting itself went well if a little poorly attended – well, I saw poorly attended, there were plenty of people there but a lot of them were old faces, it would have been nice to get some more new faces. We seemed to do an excellent job on the conversion rate however so it was far from a loss.

Afterwards we headed down to karaoke. It would seem a fair comment to say I got rather drunk. Rich was threatening not to sing It’s A Sin due to the price of beer required to get him intoxicated, which resulted in me having to buy a bottle of wine between us and that resulted in Rich having to buy one back, and after that I was buying drinks and after that someone else was buying me drinks long after I had convinced Nicola my archers and lemonade was in fact water so by the time I left I couldn’t really see too much and it was 2am.

Then I had to grab some food of course, which was delayed while I chatted to a very attractive randomer about A-Soc and then I had to get home and sober up before I could actually go to sleep as it always ends badily if you don’t. So it was well into the early hours of the morning and even with flexi I still had to be in work for 9:30 the next morning so by the time I made it in I was shattered. I ended up leaving shortly after 4:45 and headed home for a power nap before I could get anything else done.

Of course we managed to get the obligatory group photo and myself and George performed The Eagles’ Hotel California, not that I remember much about doing it, except of course that we completely rocked and for some reason look like we were doing a love duet in the photos.

In any case, a fitting start to the 2009/2010 academic year I think.

I finally made it over to the A-Soc picnic on Woodhouse Moor to find a rather nice turnout and, amusingly, A-Soc members trying to participate in sporting activities 😉 . We spent a while longer in the park chatting before heading over to The Old Bar for what we expected would be a few drinks – 10:30 in the evening, several drinks and a jazz band later and I finally left. Crazy times.

Friday night saw us to take the street outside the union for all night debate in an attempt to talk to even more students and had out some free hot drinks to people in need of one. It wasn’t as fast moving as it is during Rationalist Week but we got some quite long quality conversations and chatted to some great people so it was well worth it.

Friday saw A-Soc hit Leeds City Museum to take a look round the exhibit, notably the first edition of Origin of Species. We spent a good hour or two looking round the museum before they kicked us out, which is enough time to get round most of the stuff anyway. Unfortunately we forgot to get a group photo on the steps but there will be plenty of other opportunities no doubt.

With the new academic year kicking off, A-Soc spent the week outside the union telling people about the society and trying to drum up new members. While we had some problems with being moved around, staff shortages and the usual problems you have to deal with, the week was overall rather successful and we signed up plenty of new members.

This Tuesday saw the long awaited return of Atheist Society Tuesdays at the union. We kicked things off with an EGM to sort out some administration issues and then headed down to The Old Bar for the social, at which we had a suprisingly good turn out of new people. I also tried the new Old Bar food menu which was very nice, though it isn’t budget so you would expect it to be decent quality.

Monday saw the start of freshers’ week as we began the recruitment drive for members this year. The first days days of the fair have been reasonably successful, especially with myself and Zoltan speaking on the welcome stage on Tuesday lunch time.

Friday saw international freshers’ fair, a special societies fair put on for international students before the hordes of regular students arrive. While there weren’t a great deal of students there and we still had a lot of prep work to do it never the less served as quite a good practice run for next week.