Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

On Saturday night I attended the annual BBQ of the North Yorkshire Humanist Society (so don’t get confused – it wasn’t a BBQ where we cooked North Yorkshire Humanists 😉 ).

The BBQ itself was good although I feel I was mis-sold when told it was in York as it was in a village just outside named Haxby – not a problem when you’re coming from York but on the far side when driving up from Leeds.

It was interesting to see the demographics in North Yorkshire, the age range is much better than West Yorkshire although this could have been disorted by the fact it was a bit more of a social event than a regular meeting.

They seem an active enough society though, they hold 11 meetings a year (just missing out August) which is more frequent than a lot of societies which take extensive summer breaks and they seem to have quite a bit of committee rotation going on.

Yesterday saw the July meeting of Skeptics in the Pub with a talk by myself entitled “Swine flu – will anyone survive?”

The basic conclusion of the talk was no, unfortunately not. We are all almost certainly going to die. The good news though is that most of us probably won’t die from swine flu, which is a bit more of a positive outlook.

After a bit of a shakey start were Carpe had forgotten to reserve us the room we got going with quite a few new faces which was good to see.

Headed down to London for the AHS meeting on Thursday.

The station car park was full which resulted in me parking literally a mile away. Still cost me £3 as well because the parking ticket machine ate half of my money. I scribbed on the ticket though “I have this machine £3!” and didn’t get a ticket despite it expiring so one way or another I got an almost fair amount of parking (I should have only paid £2 really). Interestingly, if you phone the help number on the parking machine, you get a modem on the other end.

Got the train down fine and found my way to 1 Gower Street which was very irritating as I came from King’s Cross so I started at something like 137 Gower Street. That is one of the very annoying things about London – just because you’ve found the right road doesn’t mean you’re anywhere near where you want to be!

The BHA offices were nice enough, they were very much old converted houses with many small floors over about four different levels. We finished up there and headed round to the College Arms for a pint which again was small but nice enough.

Myself and Andrew were both getting the train back from King’s Cross so we headed off not long after though unfortunately by this point it had started raining. Having already got a coat I offered my umbrella to Andrew who hadn’t brought anything. This turned out to be somewhat of a mistake as the heavens properly opened and it began pelting it down, I was not impressed by the time we finally reached the station. Especially because earlier I had thought to myself “should I switch to my walking boots in case it rains?” and decided against it in the end.

It was also rather irritating how many people were on the train back to Leeds at 9:30 at night though it gradually thinned out as we headed northwards from an almost full carriage to an almost empty one.

It wasn’t the most pleasant journey back, I hadn’t brought a jumper because I was trying to travel light and I thought I could just put my coat on if I was cold but it having been soaked right through that wasn’t really an option so it was rather cold, especially with me not being overly dry. I did manage to get a discounted hot chocolate from the snack cart though which was most welcome.

By the time we reached Leeds I was ready to give up for the night (though I still had to drive to Halifax and back, but that is a whole different story – coming soon) so I gave in and jumped in a taxi back to my car. Well worth not freezing to death on the talk back to my car and more importantly, my beautifully warm Wikipedia hoodie.

Today saw HAG expand in a new direction as we headed out to remove some of the graffiti in Hyde Park. It turned out to be really succesful, snowballing when a bunch of random kids from the block turned up and decided to help out – crazy times!

Last weekend saw Atheist Society’s annual summer camping weekend, this week hosted by Dalesbridge at the far end of the Yorkshire Dales near Austwick and Ingleton.

Despite it throwing it down with rain for days beforehand the sun came out once we got there and beyond the odd shower it was generally good weather which made for an excellent time all around.

It was a mix of walking and drinking which is what you want on any camping holiday. There is something brilliant about starting the day at 8:30am with a bacon sandwich and a beer.

In between drinking on the site and checking out the local pubs we also made it round the waterfall trail, white scar caves and even a rather large mountain climb all the way up to the base of Penyghent 😉 .

The first of our weekly summer socials for Atheist Society rolled round last Tuesday and with many of the undergraduates having left for the summer it felt just look old times. It was a really good night in the end and The Library were still serving food when we got there which is always a good thing.

Last weekend was the AHS national conference 2009 hosted by Warwick Atheists. It is an interesting setup they have down there, it is a campus university based in the middle of nowhere as most of them are – but most of the students don’t live on campus. That seemed the point of a remote campus university to me but there you go. It’s also not in Warwick, nor in Leamington Spa were we were all staying lol.

We did however get the pleasure of spending some time in Leamington Spa as well as visiting my first 24/7 McDonald’s (though I’m sure most of you can’t really appreciate how exciting that is for me :p ), it’s good to know what where ever you are you can always really on Wetherspoon’s for a cheap pint.

Warwick’s campus was quite nice, they have a great bar there called the Dirty Duck which serves what I can only describe as duck steak – it’s like a full size big steak rather than the breast fillet you get from chickens and was absolutely delicious. They also do a fine carvery which we sampled on the Sunday.

In terms of AHS stuff we now have an exciting new committee with Jenna as president, Adrian as secretary and Stuart as treasurer. A number of other appointments were also made, congratulations to all who got positions! I am stepping down as webmaster as I believe I can better serve the AHS as a trustee so Michael will be taking on the web duties.

All in all the coming year is looking pretty bright for the AHS.

Tuesday saw the End of Year Ball which this year saw several of the freethinking societies in and around Leeds unite. While it was mostly an A-Soc affair we got people from Skeptics, York Brights, the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire and HAG there, even if this is mostly the same crowd lol.

We kicked things off at Spice Quarter where I managed to get through a reasonably respectable five plates though I believe I was significantly trailing Zoltan who was on a mission to eat everything they owned.

The made in front of you stir fry had to be the winning dish as you literally can just pile everything on your plate and get them to stir fry it. Interesting, despite what sause I asked for it all seemed to come out of the same pot but it actually tasted like what I asked for so I’m not going to complain.

Afterwards we headed to Bourbon for their Mix Tape Project night which was really good if people did start disappearing – the last people to leave the place where myself and Paul! That’ll show those kids who can really party… :D.

In the end we had 34 people turn up which I think is quite respectable.

Tuesday night saw us screen Dogma for another relaxed night of de-stressing between revision periods. This was of course followed by the usual social at The Terrace though I think the best attended all evening was actually the committee meeting.

Yesterday I headed over to York for the monthly York Brights meetup.

While it wasn’t overly attended the conversation was interesting as always and the real shocker of the evening was that I managed to make it to York and back without GPS and without getting lost! Now that is a successful evening.