Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Last night saw the first A-Soc social of the holidays, regular meetings having been suspended until everyone gets back to Leeds in January. Given it was holidays, and indeed the 23rd of December, we did alright for attendance, I think we had a total of eight of us in the end.

I was a good night as I got to chat to Paul about some of my suggestions regarding the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire and we also battled with Facebook to try and sort it out as his new phone is geared towards Facebook but won’t actually let you register or anything.

In a highly amusing situation also, Norm got ID’d. Clearly the big beard is taking years of his look 😀 .

Having driven back up to Leeds on Saturday we set about preparing for a house party of our own to celebrate Liz and Sarann’s birthday (to which the latter is today, happy birthday Sarann!). As to be expected it was a night of drunk antics enjoyed by all who attended.

Importantly, the night included chicken. Kate mentioned that her Nando’s voucher, from when she found a brain in her chicken, expired in a few days so we headed over to Nando’s to get some take-out, which it turns out, they do indeed do.

It seems to be becoming somewhat of a tradition to go out and get chicken as our previous house party saw myself and Kieran disappear off to get KFC. I have to say, it’s a tradition I could certainly get used to.

Friday saw myself, Norm and Liz head down to sunny Tamworth just outside of Birmingham for Jenna’s AHS festive party. It turned out (as if we were expecting anything less!) to be a really good night talking to plenty of old faces and some new faces too.

The food was good though I think I got through more than my far share of pigs in blankets (you snooze you loose I guess) and there was much fun to be had with games of Extreme Jenga, which is like regular Jenga but the blocks have sloping slides (rhombi). It was also made more difficult by the fact myself and Norm insisted on taking two of the bottom three pieces out each time 😀 .

It also turns out that Jenna’s dad, Bob Catley is a massive rockstar. Not only does he have a Wikipedia page (as if that isn’t enough), his band Magnum have had 14 studio albums, a top 10 charting album, a Gold Certified album and have supported the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Whitesnake – what a legend!

Having had a good night we headed down to Weatherspoon’s for a recovery breakfast, after all, it’s never too early for a good steak! Big thanks to Jenna for hosting said party, it might have to find it’s way into the AHS annual calendar 😉 .

After the a month of development and planning, Leeds Skeptics in the Pub is finally officially going ahead in January. The idea is that once a month people can get together and discuss a chosen issue over a few pints, though no doubt any topic selected will simply be a starting point that will be long lost after the first few rounds!

Massively disappointing is all I can really say about Casa Mia.

When we initially approached them to host our Winter Solstice meal they were very enthusiastic and said they loved to get student groups down there. However things turned sour a few days before the event when they started getting arsey with us and started demanding Norm’s credit cards so they could bill if we didn’t turn up with the exact number of people.

When we got down there they were alright though not overly friendly and they can’t add up apparently. They gave us 15 menus for the 16 of us, a mistake which they refused to correct, which is odd that they would get it wrong given they were so insistent we bring that number of people.

The food was alright, I rather enjoyed by rib eye steak but the portions were small and all I got was a steak with chips, nothing else which is cheap given you get a bit of salad with your £5 pub steak. I will admit the ribs were nice though.

Finally as we settled up the bill they tried overcharging us which we quickly shot down. All in all, I don’t think we’ll be ever going back there.

Afterwards we headed on to Courtyard (though the freshers went home because they just can’t keep up :p ) for a few drinks which was really good. It’s not the cheapest place but not out of line for the city centre and they have a quiet atmosphere and very comfortable seating so I stand by it as an excellent choice.

We ran a second sports night at A-Soc on Friday for those who didn’t want to engage in the traditional end of term celebrations. It was quite well attended given how many people have gone home for the holidays.

I didn’t stay long as I was still feeling awful but I did see some of the marathon Trivial Pursuit game – never underestimate how long that game takes!

There having been much talk about Thursday Night Dogging as a house activity when we first moved it and it being so highly requested when we passed round the A-Soc sports sign up sheet we finally got a dogging evening going yesterday.

Despite the cold weather some people were still braving it and all that attended had fun so I’m going to count this one as another victory in terms of events. Good times.

So, Liz is now officially a lesbian.

So, Zoltan is now dating a 15 year old.

They’re both great openings so I’ll let you pick which one you prefer.

This weekend was of course Atheist Society’s Weekend Away 2008 and with a total of 22 people we headed down to London on Friday afternoon. We arrived shortly before 4pm and checked into the hostel without much problems. I managed to get some work done on the train down there which was useful.

We first headed out to Smithy’s, a local pub which used to be a blacksmiths and retains many of the original features and character. We ended up on two seperate tables, the other table ended up getting kicked out. They claimed it was because people weren’t buying any drinks though I suspect it was because Tom was far too drunk and his renditions of Oasis songs were distracting other customers 😉 .

I left with that table to guide them to another pub only to find that the table I had just left got kicked out soon after because Nicola started causing trouble by throwing candle wax around. So after a quick stop at the Euston Flyer we made it down to Pizza Express for dinner. My meal was quite nice though I have to say Nicola’s meat feast looked even more appetising.

Afterwards we headed out to Sin City at the Electric Ballroom which was absolutely amazing! It took us a while to find it, I ended up having to phone Leeds Nightline to give us directions lol but we made it there in the end. Unfortunately Jenny took a blow to the head near the end of the night and had to go home but I had a brilliant time, they played such a fantastic playlist, every song was good.

Myself, Mike, Gaz, Sophie and Jon made it to almost the end of the night and had an interesting walk home running into a crazy Irish man who insisted on telling us lots of jokes while he was “raising the price of a hamburger.” We also found a phonebox full of prostitute adverts so picked up a few as you never know which way these weekends will go 😉 .

Meanwhile Rich and crew headed to the gay club Heaven. Yep Tom, John and Heini were at a gay club until 5am. And not particularly quite when they got back in either, Rich burst into our room with “I don’t know what the fuck you were doing, he was a gay man.” Apparently Nicola had pulled when a guy mistook her for a man in drag.

Downstairs Liz was apparently even more loud on her entry waking most of the room up which wasn’t exactly helping matters as Norm and Michelle had already made Zoltan cry by not letting him go to sleep. As I mentioned in the intro, while Liz hasn’t explicitly come out, staying at a gay club till 5am has to be the final proof really.

Saturday
We kicked Saturday off with a visit to Conway Hall where we meet Tessa from the NSS as they prepared for their AGM. We then headed over to the Natural History Museum with a quick stop for lunch in which Heini managed to work his way through a large big cheese and bacon meal (the new Big Tasty sized promotional burger) as well as another big cheese and bacon burger on top of that!

The Natural History Museum wasn’t quite as good as I was expecting but never the less still good – the Darwin exhibit we were booked onto was well worth a visit and we got plenty of good pictures so I’ll count that as a victory.

Just as it was closing I finally ran into Kieran so we got a quick chance to catch up then. We got seperated on the underground however and by the time I made it to the pub we were meeting at there were only ten minutes before we had to go for dinner so in the end I only got about 20 minutes to chat to Kieran. Still, I’m sure we’ll get chance to catch up at new year.

Dinner was courtesy of Nando’s and despite half the group bailing on it, the staff were friendly enough towards us and it was a damn fine meal. Unfortunately we didn’t find a brain this time but there is always next time.

After dinner we headed down to The Big Chill which Norm had managed to wangle us free entry to. It was rather disappointing when we got in there, it was rather packed and music was blasting out – not exactly chilled out, at all. Never the less it was a good place to grab a few drinks in, heading home about 1ish, once again with myself and Mike being the last people there along with John and Liz in tow.

Sunday
We had to check out Sunday morning so a bit of an earlier start which we then headed over to Speakers’ Corner to see what was going on. There were quite a few good speakers there, neither Mary or Jay Smith showed up but a number of other good speakers were there and I got a good crowd when I got up on my ladder and started talking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

So much so in fact that everyone left the Muslim speaker to come listen to me at which point I added a rather cheeky “where is your god now?” in his direction which I’m not sure he appreciated too much 😀 . He also turned down the opportunity to have a debate with me but there you go.

Afterwards we headed over to Blackfriars where the Church of Scientology was and found a nice pub to grab a few drinks before our appointment. I decided to walk it and found myself going down Fleet Street and past the Royal Courts of Justice which are some amazing buildings and then down onto the waterfront which was fantastic.

After a quick drink or two in the pub we headed down to the Church of Scientology where we were shown round the building and exhibition centre which explained about Scientology and what they do. I picked up a copy of Dianetics which I am looking forward to reading 😀 .

Afterwards we decided to split up to find somewhere to eat as we weren’t booked in anywhere. We found a nice pub that I believe was just off Farrington if that sounds like a real street in London, myself and Gaz tooked into some very nice rib eye steaks meanwhile Nicola decided to have meat balls in flat bread.

Continuing our history of running into random people I know down in London, while we were in the pub Hind Hassan, formally equality and diversity officer at Leeds University Union spotted us.

As we were leaving Norm was elsewhere checking train tickets and realising that the train in fact left at 22:10 not 22:30 😀 . So after a bit of a mad rush back we safely made it onto the train and back to Leeds. It was scheduled to arrive at 1:30 and Liz was so confident of this she proclaimed she would perform a sexual act on the platform if it got in an hour early. It got in at 12:30…

While I will blog far more extensively when I return to Leeds, having finally got onto the wifi network at my hostel I feel the need to blog. London has been an interesting bag of tricks so far, the Natural History Museum was a bit disappointing but Sin City was amazing and I meet up with Kieran even if our catch up time was brief. Stay tuned for more stories.

On Thursday we headed over to the University of Bradford for a talk entitled “Secularism – The Big Discussion” which was sort of a debate slash discussion about religion but it was all fairly wishey washey and never really got on topic. Not that, that made it a bad event. It was good.

One of the speakers was the chair of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group Peter Cave who we ended up going for a pint with afterwards! He’s actually a fantastic guy, not only does he know his stuff (which is to be expected) but he is also incredibly quick witted and entertaining.

Well worth the trip. Even if I didn’t get to bed until 1am while still having work the next day. Like every day really I guess.