Chris Worfolk's Blog

At the end of October we went down to Wembley to watch the San Francisco 49ers at the Jacksonville Jaguars.

It was quite worried before going in that the stadium would be so huge I would find it intimidating, but it was actually okay – I found it a lot better than the MEN, despite it holding four or five times as many people. The hot dogs were pretty good. The queues to get into the stadium were annoying.

The game ended 42-10, which was always going to happen given Jacksonville has lost all 8 games this season, and the 49ers went to the Super Bowl last year. It would have been nice if the game had been a little closer, but far more enjoyable than spending all that money to see San Francisco lose.

It moves quite slowly on TV, with them constantly stopping and starting. But that wasn’t the case in the stadium. Between every play there were a band, the cheerleaders doing a dance, scoring from NFL Red Zone or other distractions to keep you entertained. In fact, before I knew what was happening, the game was over!

Here are some photos, albeit taken on my phone:

The Jaguars ran onto the field with flags twice. This is from the second time; the first time they spelt it “JAGAURS”.

Also a panorama, click for full size:

On the Saturday evening we stayed at the Belgrave Hotel in London. Or at least one of them. According to the internet there are two in London with that name, so for clarification it was the one on Belgrave Street.

It was okay for what it was. It had a big TV that I was able to watch the Grand Prix on on the Sunday morning (luckily it was on BBC, as they only had limited Sky Sports like most hotels seem to) and the shower was nice. The room was what you would expect from a London hotel though – pretty tiny. The wifi was unusably slow when I tried it also.

Before we disappeared down to London, I went for food and drink at Chaophraya to celebrate my birthday. Myself and Elina ordered one of the banquet menus, of which we ate about half and took the rest home in a carrier bag full of food.

On our way down to London, we stopped off in Daventry to visit family. There are a couple of reservoirs nearby that I went for a walk around. Click for the full size panorama.

After a three month break covering July, August and September, Wendy House finally returned this month. Here are some truly terrible photos.

Everything is premier, even the phone number to call reception.

Back in May I read I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan. It was well worth a read and so James recommended I listen to the audiobook as well.

I was good, but not amazing. Steve Coogan did a good job of providing the Partridge voice for so many hours (though his normally voice is very similar anyway) but I would have liked it to be even more annoying. It’s not quite the emotionally-charged whining that I remember from the TV show.

After a great time last year, we returned to the North West Humanist Conference last weekend to represent our work in Leeds.

Organised by Greater Manchester Humanists and Central Lancashire Humanists the organisers do a great job of putting together a programme. This year featured a keynote by David Pollock, Sara Passmore talking about the BHA, Robin Cross talking about Humanism in the Armed Forces, Amy Walden talking about Humanist chaplaincy in prisons and the inaugural performance of the North West Humanist Choir.

Videos of the talks will be available via Worfolk Lectures at a later date and you can see the full set of photos on Flickr.

Last week we held the second meeting of Anxiety Leeds, a new self-help group for people living with anxiety.

We got off to a great start with the first meeting in September and this month’s meeting built in that success with even more people turning up and giving us positive feedback. We saw some returning faces and some new. There was such much discussion going on that we actually had to interrupt to bring the session to a close after it ran over!

It’s great to see people getting benefit from the group and we’re hoping to reach even more people. If anyone is willing and able to distribute some flyers for the group, get in touch and we can send you some.

Our next meeting takes place on Monday 11th November.

Having taken on the role of Table Topics Master at last Thursday’s meeting of Leeds City Toastmasters, I got the chance to use my new TableTopics box. This is a cube full of conversation starter cards – take a look here. Most of them turned out to be really good topics and made for a very lively session.