Chris Worfolk's Blog

While I was at QED, I stayed at the hotel the conference is in – the Mercure. It is a good hotel for a conference, as it had the facilities right next to the bar, as I discovered when I was there last year for PHPNW. However, staying there, I was a little disappointed.

I will say that the staff were very friendly and accommodating – which really made the stay a lot better than it could have been, and they are a real asset to the hotel.

However, I’ve clearly been spoilt by too many stays at The Marriot. The room was small and if you wanted room service, there was a £3 tray charge. The room had internet listed as a feature, which I naively took to mean free internet. I’m told it wasn’t free, but I couldn’t even find out, because it wasn’t wireless and I hadn’t brought my little adapter, so I didn’t have a network port.

When we got there on the Friday night, we ate in the restaurant bar, which took ages to order and even when we only ordered two burgers, took around 35 minutes to arrive.

At breakfast, I felt the food was rather overcooked, and their lunchtime sandwiches, that master of ceremonies Brian Thompson joked “cheap sandwiches are available – I don’t know if that means inexpensive…”, were £2.50 and lacking in filling.

Given the Britannia Hotel is just across the road, I’m not sure the Mercure represents best option.

Earlier this year I started sessions at Leeds Counselling, and having recently terminated them, I thought I would write about my experiences. I’ve kept a detailed diary of my thoughts while using the service, but as there is a certain level of confidentially associated with counselling services, I’ll only discuss some general ideas here.

I think I did ten sessions in total, and then terminated the service for a number of reasons, but mainly because I didn’t feel we were making any progress.

When I started the sessions, I was told that she hoped we would be able to make some progress early on – nothing major, but we should expect to see something after three sessions. As this deadline was reached the estimates increased, and increased again, and I still don’t feel like any sign of progress had been made. Perhaps counselling just takes a long time, but I feel it was rather misleading if this is the case.

Having spoken to a number of counsellors, it seems clear that nobody in the field of counselling really knows what it is. That is to say, if you compare it to a field like CBT, which is quite specific and has methodology and a clear expectation of results, counselling seems very fuzzy and nobody can really define it very accurately.

I didn’t feel there was a strong knowledge of mental health. For example, I had to explain a lot of the techniques and ideas behind CBT. Obviously I’m not expecting them to be CBT experts, but you would expect people who work in mental health, particularly people who tend to deal with clients who have previously done CBT and then being referred, so have a basic knowledge of the subject.

I also found it incredibly similar to Scientology. This could be because Scientology copied many of its features to give it a feeling of legitimacy, or for some other reason, but the principles behind Scientology and counselling bare a very strong resemblance.

Leeds Counselling charge me £47 per session, meaning I have invested over £500 in their service once you include the initial screening. That is a worthwhile investment of my time and money if it was having a positive impact on my health, but as I didn’t seem to, it doesn’t seem worthwhile.

At the start of the film Rounders, Matt Damon points out that you soon forget your big wins in poker, but your bad beats linger on in your memory forever.

That is true even when given a generous definition of bad beat, as realistically, it wasn’t even that bad. But as Norm had organised a poker night a few weeks ago, we found ourselves sitting round the table, cards in hand.

Chris was obviously going to win at this point – by the time the first two players had gone, he was so far ahead in chip count that there was almost no coming back (we would have probably needed three double ups in a row). So when it got down to the final three, paying the top two, it was between myself and James for second place, both short stacked.

Then a gift of a hand arrived. James shoved on a jack eight, while I was holding pocket kings. Better still, Chris called with an ace ten. Now all I needed was James not to win – if I won, that would obviously bag me second, but even if Chris won, I would place second as well, and there are no jacks or eights to be seen.

James’ only out is a ten to make is straight, and one of those is in Chris’s hand – it was all going so well. Until the river…

At April, Dr Brooke Magnanti presented a talk on her book, The Sex Myth.

Duck of the Day is clearly a terrible name for this series. Firstly, most of the animals featured in it are in fact not ducks, but other types of birds. Secondly, the same duck appears twice. But it does have alliteration, which makes the whole thing more memorable (even if you only remember it for how semantically incorrect it is).

Recently, I took part in the Area 15 International Speech & Evaluation contest. Having won the speech contest at Leeds City Toastmasters, and evaluation contest at White Rose Speakers, there was no relaxing as I had both competitions to do – not that I’m complaining!

Evaluation isn’t my strong point, so I was quite pleased that I managed to make third place (out of five). I did rather better in the speech contest though, winning by a very narrow margin, but never the less proceeding through to the Division contest at York.

Well done to everyone who took part, it was tough competition indeed!

Regardless of what happens in York, it does mean I have a new trophy to put on my shelf, at least until the Area Context next year.

However, the show was stolen by Erik, who provided Michael with dance lessons.