Posts Tagged ‘ahs’

The recent AHS AGM, which took place in Southampton, was the a personal first for me in that it was the first AGM I haven’t attended (but in my defence – Southampton really is a long drive). Luckily James, Elettra, Nicola and Norm were all down there, so Leeds was well represented.

Tension was rather high going into the weekend with the far too public way that certain members of the outgoing executive choose to air their dirty laundry, as well as several societies quitting and people raising motions against the BHA’s ultimate control over the AHS, but never the less the storms seem to have been weathered.

The AHS now has a brand new committee, composed of Jenny Bartle, Michael Paynter and Dom Blacklock – a group of people which I am sure the AHS will be in safe hands with!

Most of us have seen Jenny’s leadership close up when we headed down to Bristol for the 2010 AGM, and she is clearly someone who has an ability to get things done.

This style should work well alongside Mike, who is almost certainly one of the nicest people you will ever meet. Always pleased to see you, even if he has never met you before, it is always a pleasure to see Mike’s face at an event.

While I’ve only briefly met Dom at the national convention and BHA reception, but he seems like a great guy as well and I’m sure the three of them will oversee a great year for the organisation. Congratulations to all!

Despite only packing up from All Night Debate at 3am, we were all up bright and early the next morning to head down to Conway Hall in London for the AHS 2011 convention.

The day started with stalls from various related organisations and then moved into speakers starting with Lord Warner who is chair of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group talking about his experiences as a humanist, in politics.

Second up was Gerard Phillips, vice president of the National Secular Society. His talk was disappointing, it seemed to be an hour talk compressed into twenty minutes, I’ve literally never heard someone speak so fast when delivering a talk. It was also pointed at the wrong audience a little I think – given we’re all at the AHS conference, we don’t need to be told what secularism is and why we should advocate it – you’re preaching to the converted. Never the less, Gerald is clearly a passionate secularist and having had a chat with him later in the day, he seems like a great guy who really wants the best for the freethought movement.

He was followed by BHA chief executive Andrew Copson who, despite a lack of organisation with getting the slides ready, delivered a concise, informative and educational talk which made for one of the best of the day.

After a break, we welcomed Robin Ince to the stage. Jonni was hugely impressed with his talk and although it was evident he had, as he admitted, written it on a series of postcards in the hour, I really enjoyed it. Robin is also forming part of the line-up of the Enquiry 2011 Conference.

He was followed by Johann Hari, who, for my mind, gave the best talk of the day, reminding us all that despite we have all this nonsense such as faith schools often overly vocal religious people, when it comes down to it – we’re winning; more and more people every year declare themselves as non-religious.

The day was closed off by a speech by Professor AC Grayling and a performance by the BHA Choir. I have to say I was somewhat disappointed by Grayling’s speech – it was good, but then it was good when I heard it two years ago at the AHS press launch and it hasn’t really changed since then.

Afterwards, we all headed to a local pub for some well-deserved relaxation.

On Saturday we were down at the AHS (National Federation of Atheist, Humanist & Secular Student Societies) national convention to promote the services that we offer to student societies. Taking place in Oxford the convention drew in student groups from across the UK including some coming from as far as Belfast!

Last weekend the AHS ran it’s first region social. It was somewhat less than a success with only Leeds actually turning up to it but it still remains the most success regional social the AHS has ever run. Good times.

Headed down to London for the AHS meeting on Thursday.

The station car park was full which resulted in me parking literally a mile away. Still cost me £3 as well because the parking ticket machine ate half of my money. I scribbed on the ticket though “I have this machine £3!” and didn’t get a ticket despite it expiring so one way or another I got an almost fair amount of parking (I should have only paid £2 really). Interestingly, if you phone the help number on the parking machine, you get a modem on the other end.

Got the train down fine and found my way to 1 Gower Street which was very irritating as I came from King’s Cross so I started at something like 137 Gower Street. That is one of the very annoying things about London – just because you’ve found the right road doesn’t mean you’re anywhere near where you want to be!

The BHA offices were nice enough, they were very much old converted houses with many small floors over about four different levels. We finished up there and headed round to the College Arms for a pint which again was small but nice enough.

Myself and Andrew were both getting the train back from King’s Cross so we headed off not long after though unfortunately by this point it had started raining. Having already got a coat I offered my umbrella to Andrew who hadn’t brought anything. This turned out to be somewhat of a mistake as the heavens properly opened and it began pelting it down, I was not impressed by the time we finally reached the station. Especially because earlier I had thought to myself “should I switch to my walking boots in case it rains?” and decided against it in the end.

It was also rather irritating how many people were on the train back to Leeds at 9:30 at night though it gradually thinned out as we headed northwards from an almost full carriage to an almost empty one.

It wasn’t the most pleasant journey back, I hadn’t brought a jumper because I was trying to travel light and I thought I could just put my coat on if I was cold but it having been soaked right through that wasn’t really an option so it was rather cold, especially with me not being overly dry. I did manage to get a discounted hot chocolate from the snack cart though which was most welcome.

By the time we reached Leeds I was ready to give up for the night (though I still had to drive to Halifax and back, but that is a whole different story – coming soon) so I gave in and jumped in a taxi back to my car. Well worth not freezing to death on the talk back to my car and more importantly, my beautifully warm Wikipedia hoodie.

Last weekend was the AHS national conference 2009 hosted by Warwick Atheists. It is an interesting setup they have down there, it is a campus university based in the middle of nowhere as most of them are – but most of the students don’t live on campus. That seemed the point of a remote campus university to me but there you go. It’s also not in Warwick, nor in Leamington Spa were we were all staying lol.

We did however get the pleasure of spending some time in Leamington Spa as well as visiting my first 24/7 McDonald’s (though I’m sure most of you can’t really appreciate how exciting that is for me :p ), it’s good to know what where ever you are you can always really on Wetherspoon’s for a cheap pint.

Warwick’s campus was quite nice, they have a great bar there called the Dirty Duck which serves what I can only describe as duck steak – it’s like a full size big steak rather than the breast fillet you get from chickens and was absolutely delicious. They also do a fine carvery which we sampled on the Sunday.

In terms of AHS stuff we now have an exciting new committee with Jenna as president, Adrian as secretary and Stuart as treasurer. A number of other appointments were also made, congratulations to all who got positions! I am stepping down as webmaster as I believe I can better serve the AHS as a trustee so Michael will be taking on the web duties.

All in all the coming year is looking pretty bright for the AHS.

On Saturday myself, Tom and Norm were down at Conway Hall for an AHS meeting. Unfortunately given that it was sandwiched in between two shifts at work I wasn’t able to spend any extra time in London, which is very disappointing especially given it was a bank holiday and so otherwise I didn’t have to be back in Leeds until Tuesday. Still, probably for the best given I don’t have any money at the moment.

The meeting itself was resonably productive, at least given the baseline of not productive in any way which was what I expected. It has certainly given some food for thought although I think as well as moving things forward we’ve still come away with conflicting visions of what we think the AHS is as this issue never really got raised in the meeting.

At the end of the day though that is probably always going to be the case in a free thinking organisation. And all the better for it.

For those of you that have been following my Twitter feed you will probably have seen me counting up the hours over the Friday Saturday period. Why? Because I had a 44 hour marathon to work through.

As usual I did my regular day job on Friday at Open Door Design which is about managable but this Friday I was also doing a close that evening so I headed straight off from Open Door at 5pm to start my close at 6pm. That finished at just gone 3 at which point I dropped my Tesco to pick up some essential supplies and home to pick Norm up before heading down to the station.

By 4:45 we were sitting on a train about to head down to London for an AHS exec and trustees meeting at Conway Hall. This lasted most of the day though I had to leave at 2pm so I could be on a train by 2:30 to get back up to Leeds in time to start another close on Saturday evening. I ended up getting home from that at 4am Sunday morning. Crazy.

I couldn’t really sleep on the way down there as the train was too noisy, on the way back I was far more tired but was on my own by this point so I didn’t want to have any real sleep given I had my laptop and DSLR camera on me.

Most impressive of all, I managed it on like two cans of Red Bull compared to the several litres I would normally be on. That’s only slightly very unhealthy 😀 .

I had a meeting on Monday with Mike and Daryl from the University of Huddersfield to discuss the creation of an atheist society there. I think we bashed out a few good ideas and there is certainly a lot of potential, we just need to get a few more students on board and it should be ready to rock and roll.

More importantly though, this brings me one more step closer to Patrick Stewart 😀 .

Wednesday saw us head down to London for the launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies, better known as the AHS. We managed to get ten of us down there from Leeds – a number unmatched by any other society with the closest competitors only achieving five (not that I’m bragging of course 😀 ).

The day itself went quite well, we eventually managed to get the technical sorted and all of the speeches were very good. We got some good pictures too which will do very nicely for publicity not to mention the endless angles we got video from.

I met Richard Dawkins, I said “what kind of microphone would you like?” and he said “a lecturn will be fine.” That is my Richard Dawkins story 😀 .

The hotel was alright, we had quite a big room for the amount we paid. I think I managed to spend as much money on taxis getting to and from the train station I did as my train tickets which I found quite amusing but the important thing is, I actually made my train (unlike certain other people who had to go via Manchester at 4am to get down there).

All in all if the AHS can continue like this, we’re going to do very well. Congratulations all on a victory well deserved.