The Man with No Time

I've just got back from a long weekend spent with some of my best friends. It's been almost a year since I left St Andrews, but I still miss the people that I met, and the friends that I made while I was there. I've been able to catch up with some of them sporadically via conferences (for the astronomers) and competitions (for the lifesavers), but time's always a bit short and it's not really the best way of spending time with your friends. (Credit: David Brown) As a rule the St Andrews Seacows are pretty bad at organising themselves to do anything, but we finally managed to arrange a weekend away for as many people as we could get. Options were limited for places with enough space to sleep all of us, but my friend Ella's parents were away for the weekend, so we all traipsed down to Sandwich, on the Kent coast, for four days. Well, some of us for four days, others for less than that owing to prior commitments. Even with the dates planned nearly three...

After what seemed like an interminable length of time with no lifesaving to do, the BULSCA calendar restarted at the weekend with the second official St Andrews league competition. Which meant that it was road trip time - yay!

This week has been a busy one for astronomy here in St Andrews. Not because of any goings on at work, but because there's been a big conference in town! Several hundred astronomers descended on our little corner of Fife for the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting (NAM). The 2013 edition (dubbed 'St NAMdrews' by some witty folk) finished off yesterday, and it's been an enjoyable week.

Today was a said day. I've spent the weekend packing up all of my stuff, and today I moved out of the house that I've lived in for the last three years.

Time for another job update, and as you might guess from the title of this post it's good news - I've got myself a new job. Or rather, a first job. I'm not sure a PhD counts! In the  last update  I posted about my job hunt I talked about the jobs I'd applied to. I also mentioned in my  Le Mans retrospective  that I'd missed out on a couple of things I wanted to do, and had to trek into the town. Well here's the story behind it all.

Last night saw yet another piece of my life here in St Andrews come to an end. After my final quartet concert last month, swiftly followed by my last orchestra concert, it was time to bring my membership of the St Andrews Lifesaving Club, aka the Seacows, to a close. Man am I going to miss this club. (Credit: Teddy Woodhouse) Every year we have a handover meal to mark the end of the current committee's reign, and the commencement of the new committee's term in office. Our AGM is before the Easter holidays, giving plenty of overlap time so that the new committee can learn their roles, and the handover takes place just before the exam period starts.

After last weekend's manic musical mayhem, last night was the culmination of all of that work. My last ever University of St Andrews Symphony Orchestra concert was a great success, and one of the best orchestra concerts that I've been part of whilst at this university.

Last night the St Andrews Lifesaving Club held its annual Pie-Off event. Sounds intriguing doesn’t it? It’s not a complicated event; everyone attending makes at least one pie of some kind (we have a fairly loose definition of ‘pie’) and brings it to the social’s location. We then all eat as much pie as we can, and vote on who made the best one. Mmmmm, pie. (Credit: David Brown)

Time for another lifesaving competition report. Except this time it's a little different - there's not road trip to talk about, because for once we didn't have to travel anywhere! The rest of the BULSCA clubs came to us, for the first ever St Andrews league competition. Now, this wasn't our first competition ever. Three years ago my friend Chris ran a competition and invited Scottish RLSS clubs. It was a small event, but fairly successful. Then last year I resurrected the idea of hosting a competition, and organised a slightly larger one. I didn't try for a league competition, as I wanted to check whether we could deal with the logistics, but invited the BULSCA clubs up anyway and was pleased when we actually got a really good turnout. Teams in isolation for the competition. Visible are teams from London,  Nottingham,  and Bristol. We had a decent turnout considering the distance teams travelled. (Credit: David Brown) But this year the club's Compet...

This weekend was the first BULSCA competition of the new year: the Warwick Refreshers Competition. I always enjoy travelling back to my undergraduate haunt, and to be honest would have gone down even if we hadn’t had a team.  This wasn’t entirely a foregone conclusion given that the competition was taking place on the weekend directly preceding the start of the semester at St Andrews, but we did pull a team together (we even had an extra helper with us), so away we went. Or at least three of us did; the other two were travelling straight to Coventry from home. Having isolation in this lecture theatre brought back memories for me. (Credit: Adam James Martin)

Today has been a good day. Not only did we get another heavy snowfall, but it lasted all morning and was that wonderful snow that makes great snowballs. You know, the kind that's all large flakes, sticks together nicely, and looks really pretty when it settles. I woke up late thanks to my over-optimistic observing sleep-pattern (I don't know why I was still hopeful that I'd get any observing done this week, and it was snowing heavily. More excitingly, it was settling! It didn't stop snowing until about 1 o'clock, at which point everything had a lovely layer of snow all over it. This was the view from my bedroom window when I woke up about at about 10:00. It only got better from there. (Credit: David Brown) So after our usual Friday lunchtime pub trip we stopped in the gardens above the Physics department to make a snowman, and have a snowball fight. It was glorious. Best day I've had at work in a long time. Oh, and I handed in my first draft thesis ...

Whilst most of the UK seems to be in the grip of something approximating a very small blizzard (which naturally is causing panic everywhere), St Andrews seemed to escape the snowy menace. For the last few days it's been mostly wet, punctuated by periods of glorious sunshine. I confess that I was disappointed; I rather like the snow, and enjoy riding through it on my bike. Not to mention the snowball opportunities. It's also very pretty. However, over lunchtime today we actually had a snowfall. More like a snowstorm actually - it was pretty heavy for a while! Sadly though it didn't settle really, and what little that did vanished within an hour after the snow stopped. It was just too wet. Ah well, it makes me hopeful at least that we'll get more in the next few days. Fingers crossed.

It’s time for another lifesaving competition report.  Yesterday saw the London Universities’ competition, held at the University of London Union (ULU). This is always a slightly odd event, and doesn’t start until the afternoon owing to the BULSCA Rules Meeting that takes place in the morning, at the same venue. It’s usually a great competition though, and in the last couple of years has seen success for St Andrews, with a Bronze medal two years ago followed by a Silver last year. We weren’t aiming for medals this year, but I was confident that we could get a strong result. The Seacows team for London Competition. (Credit: David Brown)

This weekend was the first BULSCA lifesaving competition of the year. Taking place in Southampton, as has been traditional in the last few years, the Freshers' competition is designed to ease new University lifesavers into the experience of BULSCA competitions. The St Andrews sent only a single team of Seacows, none of whom were truly Freshers! I've been doing this for some time now, and Teddy has been competing for three years. The two girls on the team, Robyn and Hanna, joined the club last year, have been to a couple of competitions as bodies, and have each competed once before. We did have a Fresher with us though; Amandine came along to see what it was all about, and to act as a body.

Last weekend I took a big step on my lifesaving journey. After 9 years of being involved in RLSS awards as a candidate, I took the Survive and Save assessors course to become an official trainer/assessor. It's a fairly big step, but one that I'm pleased to have taken. With lifesaving having been such a big part of my life, I feel that it's time I put something back into it. I've already done that at the local level, but now it's time to expand that. The Survive and Save program was introduced last September by the RLSS (Credit: rlssonline.com)

Last weekend it was miraculously relatively sunny up here in St Andrews, so I decided to tackle an item on my bucket list that I've been planning for a long time. My housemate, John, his academic son, Alex, and I walked the Fife Coastal Path from St Andrews to Anstruther. Naturally, we stopped for fish and chips at the end. Trekking across one of the small but beautiful beaches along the path. (Credit: David Brown)

So back on Saturday 12th May I competed at the Loughborough University lifesaving competition, the final competition of the BULSCA calendar. It took place in the afternoon after a typically long-winded AGM, about which I've already written . It was a strange day actually. The previous competition had been the Student Championships back in mid-March, so it was long time since I'd competed. This is a perennial problem with Loughborough competition though, so I'm used to it after 7 years of competitions!

On Saturday morning, BULSCA  held their AGM before the final competition of the academic year. This was a bit of a change from previous years; traditionally the AGM has been on the Sunday following the competition. But with a start time of 2:30pm, and the problems experienced in the past with tiredness, hangovers, and travel for some attendees (particularly our representatives from St Andrews), the decision was made to move it to Saturday. A very popular decision it was too! Two years ago I ended up taking a flight home after the AGM whilst the rest of the team drove back, so I was glad not to have to do that again. 

This week has been a busy one so far for me. We're in the middle of the "On the Rocks" arts festival here in St Andrews, which means music, music, and more music! Monday lunchtime saw the St Andrews Bassoon Quartet's last formal concert of the year. We had a pretty intense rehearsal schedule for it, as the other three only arrived back from the Easter break a week prior to the concert, and I was away in Bath . We therefore had to resort to our first ever weekend rehearsal, but we still only had 3 & 1/2 hours of practise under our belts. Fortunately our theme this time around was film music, which allowed us to pull out a couple of pieces that we'd performed before and meant that we were all pretty familiar with the music we were playing. It also helped that we'd made the conscious decision to avoid long medleys; playing multiple shorter pieces definitely cut down on the time required to get them up to scratch. For interest's sake, he...

The 8th and final part of the series introducing my plethora of hobbies will be a "bucket"post, encompassing the varied activities that I get up to that haven't already been covered. Mostly these are sports, which would be a shock to people that knew me at school!