You're not leaving!!......SLAP!

This is what you're waiting for. I hope I didn't build it up too much.

At the weekend I had a most enjoyable weekend scuba diving in the town of Oban on the west coast of Scotland. Whilst the rest of the UK took cover from sleet, snow, high winds and baltic temperatures, we enjoyed two days of what can only be described as summerish weather. If you were in the UK this weekend, observe the photos and gasp in wonderment. I even got sunburnt!






The diving was great, as was the company, and I saw many exciting things:
A conger eels
Mermaids purse (shark egg)
Starfish feeding frenzy (yep, those critters can go crazy when there's a tasty crab to be eaten!)
Gary Glitter (not quite, but someone looking a lot like him)
A girl riding a bycycle down a very narrow single track road next to the sea with a snowboard on her shoulder. (maybe she was going to use it for wakeboarding)


Watching Scotland beat England at the rugby was particularly entertaining. This weekend also saw the annual Scottish Young Farmers conference decend upon Oban, with 400 young muscley types who sweat beer painting the town red, and we watched the game in a partizan pub full of them. There were probably only 4 or 5 England fans in whole place, and they got a lot of abuse. And Scotland won (for the first time in 8 years or so and deservedly so) -cue much dancing on tables and hugging of complete strangers. Comeon!





Saturday night the whole group of us had an 80's themed fance dress party. My costume was supposed to be Magnum PI - you can decide for yourselves how successful I was. I don't know how many of you ever tried to drink with a fake moustache on, but it aint easy. The hair had a knack of soaking up the beer before it reached my lips, and unfortunately the accumulated moisture was too much for it in the end and it breathed its last and feel off my face after a mere couple of hours.



Anyway, a very strange night ensued. We had planned to go to a few bars and end up in Oban's only club, but then we discovered the juke box in the first pub had an astonishingly wide selection of 80s classics which immediately got pumped full of small change. However, this was NOT the kind of pub you would go to under ANY normal circumstances. It was a locals local, small, very busy and full of people with no teeth, large women with moustaches and tatoos and several lonley alcoholics in severely inebriated states. I was VERY scared as we walked in. I'm guessing that had we been in normal attire we would have been immediately piocked up and hurled back through the door. As it was they seemed to appreciate our choice of outfits and welcomed us with open arms, slurred words and gep-toothed smiles and we stayed their for several surreal hours. (We did make it to the club eventually, but it was so pap and such a waste of £6, it's not worth mentioning)


And finally, my favourite story of the weekend. On Friday night we tried to get into Oban's only 'classy' (note the inverted commas - i say classy because it had a bouncer on the door. and an alleged dress code), only for the bouncer to turn me away because I was wearing tracksuit trousers. On reassesment of my outfit (trackie bottoms, blue hoodie - chosen for comfort on the 3hour car journey), I realised I'd never looked more like a ned/pikey/charver/scally/chav (choose your colloquial term appropriately) on a night out in my life. As we were debating what to do next, one of the guys decided he would have a word with the bouncer. A short conversation followed, after which the bouncer went inside, only to reappear and let us in. But what had Dougal said to make him have a change of heart?

"We're all member's of Edinburgh University Sub-Aqua club, and that guy you're not letting in is a devout Christian"

Evidently, my faith gives me license to wear comfortable clothes and not be a threat to the management or other customers! As it turned out, everyone had much more to worry about with the young famers turning up and throwing bales of hay around....

"It's ok, he's a devout Christian..."

Hold your breath for a fantabilocious post soon to come. It's so great, I can barely wait!

11-4. My word.

Parkour, or free running (for the less culturally suave) is a sport originating out of France involving running around town, jumping over, through and off stuff. A more technical description can be found here at Wikipedia, but essentially its having a body stacked like a machine, wearing lots of trendy 'urban clothing' and acting 'street'. You also have to have fine poise, balance, technical ability, flexibility and most of all lots of balls (which isn't to say grils can't do it, I've just never seen them) to make sure you avoid landing on your head.

To see what I'm on about, check out these 'traceurs' (prakour practitioners) in action. They're flipping amazing!

So why do I mention this interesting, but slightly random sport? Well, walking through the university campus last week, I spotted 3 young whippersnappers aged between about 11 and 14, fully decked out in urban clothing, running throuhg the campus. But as I looked to see who was chasing them, I discovered that they weren't just running, they were FREE running!! Only they were rubbish at it. For the most part they were too short to properly vault barriers, and they weren't able to leap far enough to cover the gap between walls. But still, kudos for them for having the balls to face ridicule in the face and give the sport a shot. But they've a looong way to go.

In other news this week was the universities Christian Union's missions weeks. Edinburgh put up a huge parquee in the meadows and had a ton of events and stuff going on. It was a super week and loads of really cool things happened, not least the sports day event on thursday afternoon, comprising of a medley of egg and spoon and sack races etc. Tres fun, especially as we won and the prize was a 3 man catapult capable of throwing eggs 150feet (it's supposed to be water balloons but we only had eggs. Fortunately we missed the old lady walking her dog.)!


The fabled prize

Team victory!

Kelly Clarkson believes WHAT?

So the weekend. Aston Villa lose the football, Scotland lose the rugby. Everthing back to normal then. Last weekend (with Villa and Scotland both winning) was blantantly an anomaly. It also was a stormer of a weekend in other respects. 720 miles driven, 700 or so folk having the oppertunity to hear the gospel, and 3 people comign to Christ. Yep, it was Agape's stonking National Studnet conference. We drove the 6 hours down to Kidderminster with 20 or so students and had an ace time. I had the fun (and simple task!) of leading a seminar on God's sovereignty in evangelism, which was a great experience, and just gerenarally had a great time gettin to know students better. The guys from Edinburgh really loved it and gave a testimony to what had happened in the CU on Friday night, which to be honest, could have done as the main talk, the spiritual content was so good! Man, it got me pumped! For a full run down of events, check out Andy Dixon's report here.

This was followed by the now annual Vellacott Super Bowl party - a late night extravaganza of hot dogs, cookies and other strange american snacks, and of course spending 2 hours trying to understand the intricacies of American Football. Home at 3:30 and then spending the next 2 days feeling rotten because of utter exhaustion. Fun times.

And so the rest of the week has been uneventful. Edinburgh for once has failed to provide me with unusual sites. The Hari Krishnas are still farting around the royal mile and there is still the people standing outside the 'mind school' on north bridge, but I've got used to them now.

One remotely intersting thing of note is that I have manged to keep to my new years resolution of going to somewhere new every week (thankyou to Antica for the suggestion). Indeed I have so far discovered several funky spots. So far my favourite has been the honeypot, a little bistro hidden underneath George IV Bridge. Crammon Island I'm sure would also be a favourite if we hadn't had to hide out for half an hour in the car waiting for the rain to die down. Today's new place was Cafe Roma, an italian restaurant that had a cheap lunch deal. Nothign special to be honest, but I guess I couldn't have hoped for a hit every time.

Anyway, i'm spouting rubbish now, but I relaised I hadn't posted for 10 days, so thought I would give you some semi-amusing drivel to pass 3 minutes. The pictures are from the weekend

Team Edinburgh

Team Seminar!

Team National Team!

Who's Job Is It Anyway?

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Why is it that every time I come to write a new post, I want to start it with a big-text based sigh? I resist most the time, but this time I couldn't supress it. Tomorrow sees the start of Agape's National Student Conference, probably the biggest event of our annual calender (with the exception of summer projects), and a wonderful 6 hour drive to get there, encompasing all the delights of the M6. The weekend will be awesome, but the drive will be tedium. And if I can't stay awake it will end in post mortem.

So, this is my 50th post on here. Cue whistles, bells and party poppers. Or actually, you don't really care. What it really shows is that I'm an ego-manica who has nothing better to do with 20 minutes periods of his day than write fluff about himself. Oh well, at least I still think I rock. Go me!

And so it turns out that I have nothing interesting to write about, save for the good old emergency British topic, the weather. On Monday and Tuesday, it was the coldest I've ever felt in Edinburgh and in the evening on Monday, we were treated to a rare spectacle of freezing fog. To be honest, this was pretty darn beatiful, with ice crystals suspended in mid-air drifting in the breeze, but I didn't have my camera with me so you'll just have to believe me.

And to brighten the post with pictures...I was thinking about my degree today, so here's some memories from it.




Someone needs to give me something interesting to write about.