Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Saturday night was Michelle’s leaving do before she heads off to Lancaster, on purpose, to do a PGCE to convert her useful highly paid high potential career progression computing degree into a teaching one.

Having started the night at Little Tokyo we then headed to Cuthbert Brodrick, Fab Cafe and finally Wendy House. Wendy was pretty good as turnout was low but Stylus was closed which resulted in there being plenty of people in Mine but there still being tickets left, the perfect combination.

In any case, I hope we managed a reasonable send-off. It was 4am by the time we made to bed which is respectable if not quite all night.

Saturday saw Skeptics in the Pub roll round again with this month’s talk being delivered by Rich on evolution and homosexuality – the talk which he gave on the Thursday of Rationalist Week 2009. As always the talk was excellent and turn out was quite reasonable given it was summer. Good times.

On Monday we headed out to celebrate Tom’s birthday. I say we, it was mainly Rosie really with nobody else arriving until over two hours after it had started (at least some of us had already said we couldn’t make it until that time 😉 ). We began at Cuthbert Brodrick but soon enough Sophie got us kicked out for being under age so we ended up at Stick Or Twist before heading to Fab.

Headed over to my parents on Monday for a big family BBQ as we had relatives over from Canada. Food was good which is the most important thing plus it was a chance to brag about how how awesome my life is. Fun times 😀 .

Sunday lunch made a much welcome return today though continuing Michelle’s hate campaign against Wetherspoon’s we had to go down to the Scarborough Hotel which provided us with some very nice meals indeed though at the kind of price you have to be prepared to pay at town.

After a short break round the Armouries we then headed to Oracle which was quite nice though it was £2.80 for a pint of orange juice and on top of that the hot girl behind the bar then tried to short change me by a £1! A damning indictment of our education system (I hope).

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 😉 .