Headed down to Alpha at South Parade Baptist Church last night.
I was expecting a fairly young audience given South Parade is reasonably heavy with students but that certainly wasn’t the case. It was very much a whole of church thing and it was nice to have a bit more of a classy atmosphere for the evening 😉 .
You could tell students weren’t involved from the standard of the food to be honest, which was excellent.
The event itself though was reasonably disappointing, it was a live speaker and the turn out was reasonably good which are both plus points but the standard of table leaders provided was somewhat lacking. Answers like, “yes, that is a tough question” aren’t really what we were looking for.
Still a fairly enjoyable evening and we got an Alpha book out of it so far from wasted time.
Tuesday night saw A-Soc hold it’s Introduction to Atheism talk. This year is was presented by three different speakers – Money Bags did a philosophical look at atheism, Norm did a look at the various terms atheists use to describe themselves and I did applied atheism – atheism in the real world or as I like to put it…
Taking your bucket of atheism and throwing it at the wall of life.
The talk overran a little but was overall very warmly received. We finished off with a social at The Old Bar which featured a surprise visit from Brett who is up in Leeds for a few days!
All in all it was a good night, although attendance was sorely lacking. This is something we can hopefully sort out in the coming weeks.
Went over to my parents for dinner on Monday and somehow got ambushed into sorting through a lot of my old stuff.
So, so many trees worth of paper thrown away. Including my prize collection of empty refill pads which I built up over the years. Not to mention and endless series of course notes from a-levels, books, magazines, comics and a whole heap of other junk.
I also found a few of my early writings including the self explanatorily titled A Stern Letter from Richard Nixon. I vaguely remember writing it though I didn’t dare read it – doing so could only reduce the treasured place such a work has in history.
Wetherspoon’s have now introduced their new menu, which while almost identical to their old menu, provided us with a good excuse to expand our options for Sunday lunch. I’m glad to say that after nearly five years of campaigning, we have finally got profiteroles on the menu. Win.
Last Friday saw the citywide Alpha launch event in Leeds which saw churches from across the city come together for a big launch event for the 36 Alpha courses which are apparently launching across Leeds this week.
The event began with a speech from Nicky Gumbel, the man behind Alpha who was a good speaker as ever though also, it turns out, a massively repressed homosexual. I wouldn’t know myself but Rich who was sitting next to me assures me he is gay, not only in spite of how much he mentioned his wife, but because of it.
Rich enjoyed much of Nicky’s speech too – or at least he did the first time he saw the material when performed by Jasper Carrott. Apparently the jokes aren’t as good the second time around.
After this we got onto the “celebrity guests” which were Cameron Stout the winner of Big Brother 4 and an apparently famous fitness video instructor. She did have some good advice though – the way to loose weight is to actually do some exercise. So at least she has some common sense when it comes to wellbeing, if not in the field of religion.
The show finished off with a few personal testimonies talking about Alpha, all carefully selected to hit each demographic. Flawless all the way.
Today was Lachlan’s birthday so the obvious solution was for everyone to sleighly leave the office, don fancy dress hats and accessories and then go back in singing “happy birthday.” I say obvious, it was certainly successful. This was followed by us heading over to The Box for a few drinks or two at 4:30. 5 hours later and we were all still there.
Given it was Nathan’s first day, we came very closing to telling him that every Thursday was Fancy Dress Thursday but as amusing as that would have been, we decided it was just a little too unfair in the end. Aren’t we nice people 😉 .
Tuesday saw A-Soc hold our 2009/2010 intro meeting. The meeting itself went well if a little poorly attended – well, I saw poorly attended, there were plenty of people there but a lot of them were old faces, it would have been nice to get some more new faces. We seemed to do an excellent job on the conversion rate however so it was far from a loss.
Afterwards we headed down to karaoke. It would seem a fair comment to say I got rather drunk. Rich was threatening not to sing It’s A Sin due to the price of beer required to get him intoxicated, which resulted in me having to buy a bottle of wine between us and that resulted in Rich having to buy one back, and after that I was buying drinks and after that someone else was buying me drinks long after I had convinced Nicola my archers and lemonade was in fact water so by the time I left I couldn’t really see too much and it was 2am.
Then I had to grab some food of course, which was delayed while I chatted to a very attractive randomer about A-Soc and then I had to get home and sober up before I could actually go to sleep as it always ends badily if you don’t. So it was well into the early hours of the morning and even with flexi I still had to be in work for 9:30 the next morning so by the time I made it in I was shattered. I ended up leaving shortly after 4:45 and headed home for a power nap before I could get anything else done.
Of course we managed to get the obligatory group photo and myself and George performed The Eagles’ Hotel California, not that I remember much about doing it, except of course that we completely rocked and for some reason look like we were doing a love duet in the photos.
In any case, a fitting start to the 2009/2010 academic year I think.
The secret is, it never looks good.
I finally made it over to the A-Soc picnic on Woodhouse Moor to find a rather nice turnout and, amusingly, A-Soc members trying to participate in sporting activities 😉 . We spent a while longer in the park chatting before heading over to The Old Bar for what we expected would be a few drinks – 10:30 in the evening, several drinks and a jazz band later and I finally left. Crazy times.
Sunday saw us hit Cuthbert Brodrick as usual for lunch but with one important change – George finally having been paid he could actually afford to eat this time! We also saw a guest appearance from Rich as well so it was a rather good afternoon.
Unfortunately due to a series of iritating events it took them an hour to get me a dessert, which resulted in me being quite late for the A-Soc picnic. They had a new lass working behind the bar who took 20 minutes to serve us and once we had done they lost my dessert and had to make it again!
