Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

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.

Another acamedic year has arrived and once again the A-Soc machine is rolling. We delivered out intro meeting to a packed out room last night at which Norm gave an excellent talk resulting in another load of sign-ups for the society.

Afterwards we headed down to OK Karaoke, taking around 30 people with us and despite the fact that nobody else turned up we still managed to make the place look crowded all by ourselves. They were so impressed that we’re now in talks for regular visits 😀 . Not to mention that they kept the bar open all night for us having been planning to close at 11.

Everyone seemed to have an amazing night and by the looks of things we will have lots of new people coming back. I had to leave at 1am due to having to be up for work that morning and most people were still in there! May the good times roll.

Speaking of freshers’ week events, Thursday was the pub crawl, a bit of a good old fashioned social to introduce the new members to the society.

Not that our new member turn out was particuarly impressive, it wasn’t, and it certainly wasn’t what we hoped for but they came none the less. More importantly in the end, plenty of existing members turned up and had a great night by all accounts. I’m glad someone did.

We made it through The Old Bar, The Fenton, Dry Dock, Bourbon, Courtyard and Weatherspoon’s before finally being stopped by a very closed Bar Censsa. I mean, who the hell is closed on freshers’ week? Apparently quite a few places. Town was dead for what you would think would be the busiest week of the year. Still, that just got us served faster 😀 .

Wednesday saw the arrival of the long awaited Make Your Own God event.

It went really well to be honest. We got a rather large collection of home made gods in the end and signed up a fair few members too. Not to mention the debate that was sparked surrounding the event.

I’m looking forward to running the event again in the future.

Tuesday night saw the A-Soc members’ dinner party to welcome in the new acamedic year and say thanks to our existing members for sticking with us before the intake of fresh faces arrives.

No less than eighteen people turned up to sample the “delights” – a modest four courses by comparission to our last dinner party but never the less when you scale that up to that many people that is rather a lot of food to cook. Luckily Liz and Michelle very kindly contributed dishes, as did Tesco.

The real hero of the night was Fonze however who battled his way through the various dishes and a mountain of washing up alongside myself for the entire night.

I haven’t really had a debrief with most people as I didn’t get chance to get that much chatting done on Tuesday night though most people seemed to enjoy the food – I got no less than three adjectives in Paul’s thank you text message. I’m still fairly convinced the rice was awful and the soup was stone cold but for now everyone is at least pretending the food was edible.

And, as with last time, nobody died (that I know of), so perhaps we can chalk this one down as another success.

Yesterday was International Freshers’ Fair, a chance for international students to find out about the societies at LUU. It was quite busy, much better than last year and as usual we had an interesting placement. We had ISoc to our left and the CU just down from them. Plus the Irish Society were on the same table and apparently asked to be moved!

Our banners seemed to work well, they were the tallest their (with ISoc just coming in behind us) and we did very well for representation – we had 7 of us there, 5 of which were in t-shirts or hoodies so I think we had the best coordination going.

Some pictures of tonight’s podcast…