Chris Worfolk's Blog

For me, 2015 has been a year dominated by reading and wedding planning. I have been on a mission to get to the bottom of my reading list – a goal that has almost been achieved. Of course, before all of that, every new year starts the same way: clearing up from our New Year’s Eve party.

I have been a vegetarian for almost ten years. However, in January, I took the step of going from in principle to actually eliminating meat for a month or two. It was interesting. Elina spent the month wedding dress shopping, in Finland, or both. I said goodbye to my Harrogate commute. Elsewhere the Charlie Hebdo attack took place.

In February we visited The Big Smoke and took in a show. We celebrated Darwin Day, Valentine’s Day and Galileo Day. The Patriots bested the Seahawks in Superbowl XLIX and we said goodbye to Mr. Spock. I spent a lot of time on the road as I conducted by winter club visits as part of my role as Toastmasters area governor.

I took a break from reading Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in March to give me some time to watch his shows instead. I took Elina to Sheffield for her birthday (lucky girl!). I settled on a backup career choice and read one of the most important books of my life. The F1 season started and we said a sat goodbye to the greatest author of our generation. The Sunday Assembly band, The Assembly Line, played its first gig. There was a solar eclipse, which was rubbish.

Things became rather political in April. There was a leaders debate, but more importantly, I announced my candidacy for local council. Our Easter Potluck went down well. Far better than my three first roast for example. Frinks returned and we published the 4th edition of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. The Assembly Line continued to rock and I played my first league games with Leeds Samurai.

Responsive web design was on the cards for May with both Worfolk Online and CWF websites getting a make-over, including a lovely update to Worfolk Lectures. At home, it was all about baking bread. We were shocked and stunned when the Conservatives took a majority in Parliament, but at least I received 104 votes. We warmed
GabrielÄ— & Tim’s flat. We visited Nottingham for the Toastmasters district conference, and Sheffield to see Mark Knopfler.

Nothing much happened in June, so I made a list of my favourite books. He had a weekend away in the Peak District with friends. The Assembly Line played a gig and the Women’s World Cup kicked off.

I actually found a use for reading Jane Austen in July and the United States triumphed in the Women’s World Cup. The Assembly Line performed and we launched FinnStore. We attended the Finnish picnic and held our first annual family BBQ. Leeds Samurai earned their second ever league victory while in Manchester. I started piano lessons and I enjoyed my first month free from Toastmasters area governorship.

I read the most incomprehensible book ever in August. There was a trip to Finland for our Finland wedding. Jack dropped by from Australia and the flag football season came to a close. We held the Humanist summer social at Kirkstall Abbey.

I was finally eligible to compete again at Toastmasters in September and did so with a vengeance. We celebated Samantha’s first birthday, saw Dr Hassall interview Richard Dawkins, and published the Finland Restaurant Guide. Atheist Society showed a revival at the kick-off quiz. We visited Hugh & Anna, Blackpool for the Loony Party conference and Skiption for Yarndale.

I spent October doing wedding prep and baking pies. We had our Leeds wedding. I entered my final year of my 20’s and triumphed in the Area 15 speech contest final, the video of which is now online. We visited London to see the Jets v Dolpins at Wemberly. It was Back to the Future Day. We finished the month off with our Halloween party.

I completed my second Abbey Dash in November and I received my Parkrun 50 t-shirt. My dad earned his too. I wrote my first novel as part of NaNoWriMo. We finished the month with Finnish Christmas carols and another gig by The Assembly Line.

In December we completed the 6th annual Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters and published the 5th edition of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. We celebrated my grandma’s 90th birthday and held the Humanist winter social at the Lawnswood Arms.

At this time of year, people often make New Year’s resolutions. Really, by definition, it is the only time you can do it.

I have never been very good at them. Not because I never stick to them, but because one of my few talents seems to be having some resolve. So when I decide to do something over the Christmas holidays, be it learning guitar or changing my diet, I just get on and do it without waiting for New Year to actually arrive.

Many other people fall into a different group. The one that devices to work on a weakness or eliminate a vice, and typically fail to stick to it. A study by Richard Wiseman suggested that 88% of people fail to keep them. If this is you, you could try again this year. However, as the old phrase goes, ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.’

However, in The Happiness Hypothesis, a book I will be writing about in early January, Jonathan Haidt makes another suggestion. Work on your strengths. This probably should not be a novel suggestion, but thanks to society’s focus on self-improvement and being a well-rounded person, we tend to focus on our weaknesses so much that our strengths get overlooked.

This is something I have pondered for a while with Toastmasters. I am not very good at Table Topics. But, modesty aside, I am good at prepared speaking. I’ve already been to the UK & Ireland finals once. I could spend my time improving my Table Topics, and become an okay Table Topics speaker. However, do I need to be good at Table Topics? Spending time on my prepared speeches with the aim of going to the world finals seems a much more exciting prospect.

My own petty concerns aside, should Wayne Rooney work on his tennis, or John Grisham focus on advanced maths? Probably not. You don’t actually have to be good at everything; having one awesome skill may well be far more useful.

Utility aside though, there is a far more important reason that you should work on your strengths. That is that you are more likely to stick to it. Achieving your goals actually gives you very little reward or happiness. Yes it’s good, but probably not as good as you think it will be, and probably wears off quite quickly. To lead a truly fulfilling life, you have to enjoy the journey.

A weakness is probably a weakness because you do not enjoy it. Whether it is stopping drinking, starting exercises, or tackling your fear of public speaking, you are probably going to find that journey quite unpleasant. I am not saying do not tackle it, but do not be surprised if you soon find yourself giving up on it.

In contrast, if you make a resolution to do something you already love doing, taking it to the next level, you are far more likely to stick at it. This is important if you attach any esteem to following through on your New Year’s resolutions. So if you are planning to make them, do yourself a favour this year and pick a strength to work on.

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To end the year West Yorkshire Humanists held a social at the Lawnswood Arms.

For the December event at Sunday Assembly Leeds, Dermot led an assembly on “traditions”.

This is my Toastmasters speech for Project #5 of the Storytellig manual ‘Bringing History To Life’. I told the story of Alan Turing.

When I tell people that I did NaNoWriMo in November, they often ask how popular it is as most people have not heard of it. This is not surprising as I only heard about it through a friend at Toastmasters. It is predominantly an American thing, as the international shipping I refused to pay for my winners t-shirt demonstrates. It does have a large international following however, with plenty of people here in Leeds entering.

In total, 351,489 people entered this year. 40,301 finished it (11.5% of entrants).

In Yorkshire, a total of 1,034 people entered. The average word count was 20,000, though there is no break down of this. It could have been that 400 people finished it and 600 people wrote nothing, it could be a similar breakdown to the worldwide stats. Probably the latter.

The End of Eternity is a science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov. It is one of a handful of full-length novels that does not form part of one series or another (Robot, Foundation, Empire).

It’s a wonderful read. It explores the idea of time travel and the causal loops and problems that follow from that. It had some suspense, but once you have read some Asimov some of it is a little predictable. Other bits are brilliant because I should have been so closing to getting it but did not quite make it.

This is one of my favourite Asimov novels.

After being recommended the book Teach Like a Champion by another book, I decided to give it a read. I thought it was worth doing because it would have a lot of transferable skills that I could take into my community groups and public speaking. I was wrong; lesson learned.

A lot of it sounded very useful (although I am not a school teacher, so how would I know) but directly relatable to a classroom environment and therefore of little use to a wider audience. In my opinion, this certainly is not worth reading unless you are a school teacher.

One issue that came up again and again was time. This certainly does have wider applications. Time boxing for example. At Sunday Assembly we often give people “about 5 minutes” to talk to the people around them. We call it ‘meet your neighbours’. It’s always a struggle to get people focused again though. Ideally we would say something specific “take 3.5 minutes” and then conclude with a “time is up”.

Following on from my previous post looking at statistics we can pull out from the Leeds Restaurant Guide dataset, I wanted to look at how the restaurant scene has changed since we first published the guide.

Here it is:

In this graph, I have plotted each cuisine type against the number of restaurants. This is shown for the 1st edition (2013), 3rd edition (2014) and 5th edition (2015). As we learned in the last post, the number of restaurants has risen, so in general, we would expect most categories to have grown between each addition. I have not included pub grub as the size of it makes the rest of the data difficult to see.

For the most part, this holds true. Some cuisines have grown faster than others though. We have seen a rise in restaurants serving American, British, International (those that serve food from all over the world with no real speciality) and steak.

In other areas we have seen a decline though. Buffet, French, Indian and seafood have all seen a decline. Persian has too, but this was always a small market. The biggest change is possibly Chinese restaurants. In the first edition we had seven Chinese restaurants, now we have only four.

In terms of the most popular cuisines, Italian remains king. When we first wrote the guide we even considered splitting Italian into two categories, one for general Italian and one for restaurants that specifically did pizza. Latin is also very popular thanks to the growth of tapas bars. It used to be equally as popular as Indian, but Indian has since fallen away.

We can draw the most popular cuisines in a table. I have omitted hotels and casinos, and international because these do not really tell us anything about people’s tastes.

It is a pretty consistent story. The only change is that Indian has dropped off from a joint-second spot in 2013 to now being 5th, behind British and American. Much of the growth in these categories is down to meat places such as burgers and BBQ so it could be people are looking towards more meat-heavily dishes in recent years. Or it could also just be random chance. The sample size is not that big after all.