Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

I delivered my first proper talk of the academic year last night, the ever popular debating the theists. It went down very well from the people I spoke to in the pub afterwards though I did end the question with “none of this constructive criticism BS, just positive adjectives please” so who can really say.

We got around 25-30 people to the meeting and most stayed for the social afterwards which continued on until about 11:30, just in time for us to get to The D afterwards which worked out well. London is now sold out too so that is going to be an amazing weekend. As ever, things are looking up.

By last Sunday that time of year had rolled around again so we headed out to Nando’s for a meal Sunday evening. It being Sunday night and all with a lot of people having work Monday morning, turn out was limited to those really hardcore people, a select group of myself and 18 of my good friends.

We arrived at The Light at 7 as planned to find that Nando’s had in fact run out of food.

I’m not kidding.

Apparently, they were closing for a week to refurbish so rather than maintain a sensible stock level and transfer any remaining food to a different restaurant they just let it run out. So we headed down to the one at the bottom of Briggate. I like to think of it as a surprise party as we didn’t tell them we were coming.

Having got down there they said it would take us an hour to get a table and to come back then. They also asked for an exact number of people, which I gave them based on how many people we had there at the time. After that, we headed off to the Hog’s Head around the corner for a quick drink while we waited.

Problem was, people started turning up faster than they could seat people. By the time we had got back we had another two people and by the time they had found seats for those two we had another two people! Needless to say the staff at Nando’s were not amused. But I was 😀 .

The food was excellent as usual, although we did find a chicken brain in Kate’s meal.

Afterwards, we headed up to Bourbon which was of course closed – it’s like an A-Soc event all over again. So we ended the night at the Cuthbert Broderick next door drinking until kick out time. Good times.

Once again Friday saw a well attended One Life course where we were discussing ethics. It was an interesting session, we spent most of the night with me arguing in favour of objective morality to get the debate going which was fun 😀 .

Photos of the event can be found on Facebook.

Tuesday came and it was time for another exciting A-Soc meeting. We bashed our way through quite a number of issues at the committee meeting before heading down to set up for our screening of Jesus Camp, a film about the Evangelist summer camps for young children to prepare them to “lay down their lives for the Gospel” in the same way Muslims are.

It is a scary film. Some of the one liners in it are incredible.

Attendance was following our usual numbers of popularity, I’ve also got almost everyone’s name now which I’m quite pleased about. It was good being able to put names to faces. The real bonus though is the amount of people that have signed up for London – we’ve sold almost all the places now, there is like one or two left.

The social went on long into the night and I ended up getting home at like 1-1:30 or something with a very drunk Michelle and Liz in toe.

It’s possibly the end of an era. The Crusader has closed down! No more pub quiz on a Sunday night 🙁 . At least for the moment, the pub is up for sale but it’s been up for sale for a long time and apparently built up quite a lot of debt while they were unable to find a buyer and so has now been closed down.

Every cloud has a silver lining however and this has been a bit of a catalyst for ideas as to what else we can get up to on a Sunday night. The quiz wasn’t that important, mainly because we lost every week, so maybe this is the start of something new.

As a result the first of our new ideas for night’s out was to go to Xscape in Castleford to shoot some pool. I’ve never been to Xscape before it is a fairly impressive place in terms of size and facilities (complete with a 24 hour Friday Saturday McDonald’s just over the road) and the pool was good, £4 an hour all you can play.

It’s a good enough replacement to fill the void left by pub quiz, we got plenty of conversation in as I hitched a lift down there with Zoe, came back with Rich and had a phone call with Scoj live from Ireland too. As usual Becky ended the night on the floor too. Fast times indeed.

Having said our goodbyes to Rich as people continued to drop us angry calls about not being at the union yet, myself and Liz headed up to Wendy House on Saturday. We didn’t have quite the group turn out we managed last month which was quite nice as we could actually keep track of each other (well, most of the time lol).

I also got chatted up by some random girl named Sarah which was annoying really as since then I’ve spent most of my time questioning whether I really am a man having stopped her when she started kissing me. In my defence, I was sober which, according to Zoe at least, makes it all ok.

Made it home a little earlier than last year and had KFC waiting for me when I did. Such a good decision 😀 .

So it turns out Rich has friends! We headed out for his official birthday gig on Saturday and went down to Mojo which was a little different to what I had expected. Not having been there before and it having come highly recommended I imagined it as a trendy bar with wide open spaces and a well lit atmosphere. Needless to say, I was wrong, very wrong. Not that I’m complaining – it is basically what Cockpit should be if they actually spent some money on it.

We also swung by North Bar, another bar which I had heard a lot about but never actually drank in. Service took a bit of time but they had an impressive range of beer so I guess they can be forgiven.

I also met one of Rich’s friends who used to be involved with the Christian Union while studying at the University of Leeds which was interesting. Quite an interesting insight into the rest of Rich’s life in general to be honest.

Last Friday was the second session of One Life. Not having our guest speaker in to do the human needs session we re-arranged things a little and Norm delivered an excellent session on society and community. Sarann’s cooking and Sophie’s recipe were excellent as usual.

The real success of the evening though was the turn-out. We had no less than 17 people turn up in the end, we could hardly fit people in and this is after having moved from the Parkinson building to the union after campus security declared we couldn’t have the room the union had booked us after all because they wanted to close the building and go home.

As it happens this caused perhaps the best part of the evening though. I was chatting to Joel, male president of the Christian Union as he greeted people outside the union turning up to Ignite (previously known as Friday Night Live) and not really doing much greeting myself until over a dozen people turned up en masse 😀 .

There was also a great deal of discussion for hours in The Terrace afterwards too. All in all another fantastic success.

Friday night saw the long awaited return of One Life.

We managed 13 people to the session which was a fairly respectable number and it was rather amusing to be just down the hallway from the Christian Union’s Friday Night Live (now re-named to Ignite I believe). The food that Norm cooked based on Sophie’s excellently prepared menu was excellent and we got some good discussions going. Another event to chalk down as a success I recon.

Having been invited down to Fonze’s church to do Alpha, myself, Norm, Paul and John went down this evening to check out a session. We arrived at the second week which was all about why Jesus died.

Having met Simon, the head guy, who was a nice guy as you would expect, we enjoyed a meal of rather higher standards than we are used to expect – I love it when the CU provide free food but they simply don’t have the resources to add the fancy touches such as a place mat full array of cutlery.

The session then took the form of a video lasting around 40 minutes which was reasonably interesting then we had a group discussion afterwards. It was good although it was no replacement for the speakers offered at Christianity Explored, it’s just not the same as an interactive speaker you can question on their talk afterwards.

We ended up heading back to The Terrace and got to know John a bit more who seems to be a really sound guy. He is doing joint honours artificial intelligence so we have some common ground and he also has excellent slogans on his t-shirts so it’s win win.