Chris Worfolk's Blog

We are pleased to announce the addition of Simon Munnery to the already exciting line up of speakers for the Enquiry 2010 Conference!

Simon, also known by his stagenames of Alan Parker: Urban Warrior and The League Against Tedium, has previously worked alongside Stewart Lee, Richard Herring and Steve Coogan and his material often wanders onto the topic of atheism and religion.

Indeed I first saw Simon during a show he did with Stewart Lee in York a few months ago and was so impressed that I asked him to speak there and then.

More speakers are still to be announced for Enquiry 2010, so if you haven’t picked up your ticket yet head over to the Enquiry 2010 Conference website and sign up – tickets are available from £49 standard and £29 student!

I have to say, the general election was rubbish.

I had to queue for 40 minutes to vote. I actually really regret that now, as much as you should participate in democracy, no metric when you think about it would actually have been worth a whole 40 minutes of my precious time given that Hilary Benn was always going to win the seat for Labour once again.

But yes, that footage of everyone queuing outside Trinity Church in Leeds, that was me. Well, that footage wasn’t me, I did it earlier in the day, but much like everyone else I went at first (around 6pm) and saw how long the queue was so I thought I would come back two hours later when the queue had died down only to find it had gotten even longer.

The error in my logic was thinking that most people didn’t live in the city centre and so would be voting at around 6pm as they got the bus home from work, passing through town of course. It was only later I realised how silly this was – obviously if they were bussing it home to somewhere else, they would be in a different constituency.

In my defense though, having looked at the queue I believe most people would have thought the same thing – it was full of shabby looking poor lower-working class people so my instant reaction was that they obviously couldn’t afford to live in the city centre and must just be voting here and then going back to whichever slum they live in. I still think this is probably the case and just the Leeds Central constituency stretches father than I realise.

And then after all that, I stay up all night to watch the election and we don’t even get a real result.

I think the biggest argument for our current electoral system is that if we switched to proportional representation, most election nights would be such a massive anti-climax. I stayed up until about 5:30 because all the interesting results – the Leeds ones for me obviously, Brighton Pier, Barking, Buckingham and Oxford West took absolutely ages to declare.

Indeed the only one I managed to catch while in some state of consciousness was when Oxford West was announced, only to find out that very disappointing Dr Evan Harris had lost his seat. And thus was the death of science and evidence based policy in the House of Commons.

What a massive disappointment all round really.

Back when I originally moved over from Nerd Federation to my own personal blog, one of the major reasons I quoted from getting a “fresh start” with the move to WordPress and a new policy of direct, to the point blogs, was that I just didn’t write much on Nerd Federation anymore because I had got myself into a pattern where I felt I needed to write a lot, and so didn’t, and so never blogged.

Of late I feel I have fallen into this trap once again. I’ve simply been too busy of late to write long, photographed blog posts and so I just haven’t been blogging. But there is a lot going on I would like to talk about and share and so it seems an appropriate time to try and start fresh with new, shorter blog posts – which also has the advantage that anyone reading my blog doesn’t have endlessly long posts to slog their way through.

I really have been busy recently – the last time I can remember having an evening at home relaxing, rather than working, was somewhere near the start of April. Still, everyone thinks they are busy, indeed every year I seem to look back and think “I thought I was so busy a year ago – but it’s nothing compared to now.” Makes me wonder how we will all feel next year when if the model holds, we’ll be even busier than we are now lol.

Last Sunday saw the May meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. It was well attended and all those who spoke to me gave positive feedback – indeed a record number of people stayed on for Sunday lunch and we had to have the restaurant expand the area we are normally in!

Last Friday saw the the Answers course start once again at the University of Leeds, hosted by Leeds Atheist Society. Answers is a course for those who have decided they are atheists but are not really sure where to go from there – how do you express your beliefs and make sense of your thoughts? Luckily, Answers has answers!

Tuesday saw Leeds Atheist Society’s 2009/2010 AGM. Congratulations to all those who were elected to the coming year’s committee, especially John who is now our new president. Afterward we finished off with the tradition karaoke session that constitutionally every AGM must end with.

Leeds Reason Week has come and gone for another year and what a year it’s been! 22 events and 7 days later and we’ve had another amazing week in which we’ve talked to hundreds of people acquired many new members as well.

The marquee was packed out every night, often with us running out of chairs to put people on. The Christian Union debate alone has 67 people attending and the other nights weren’t too far behind in terms of attendance either.

See the official photo gallery for pictures from the week.

Last Saturday we kicked off Leeds Reason Week 2010 with Skeptics in the Pub. The duty had fallen to me to deliver the event so I settled on the topic of L. Ron Hubbard. I wanted to find out the true story behind his life and came across the book Bare Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard.

Whether the book itself is entirely accurate is of course open for dispute too, though it does at least go as far as to regularly cite sources. It was a fascinating journey because in many ways Hubbard was an amazing man – everyone laughs at Scientology but he convinced millions to take it up and follow him – no mean feat by any standards!

On Wednesday myself and Gijsbert headed down to London on CWF business. Actually we almost didn’t – when I phoned Gijsbert at 17:40, an hour before the train was due to leave, he answered the phone with the question “so, what time do we leave tomorrow?” :D.

Luckily he made it in time though and we were on our way. As well as some productive meetings we managed to get round the Imperial War Museum in the morning, which was cool although I didn’t think it was as fantastic as most people had talked it up to be.

I have to say I really like the taxi system in London also. It may be rather expensive (though what isn’t in London) but just the fact that there are so many of them driving around that you can flag down and you just can’t beat a chatty London cabbie.

This morning we held out “Easter Sunday” event at the Humanist Community of Leeds. The day started with Chris talking to BBC Radio Leeds about the event though given so many people were spending time with their family this weekend we were expecting a fairly low turn out.

It was quite a shock then when we got such a turnout, though certainly a pleasant one! The discussions were great, the feedback was positive and Sunday lunch was as enjoyable as ever. Roll on our May meeting!