The Man with No Time

Later today the blog will be going quiet for a bit, as I'm about to embark on a road trip around the UK. The next 11 days will see me drive up and down the country travelling from event to event. I'm starting off in Sheffield at the RLSS Speeds Championships this coming weekend. Two days of the fastest lifesavers competing to be best in the UK. It should be fun, but I'm not competing; I'm going down to shadow the organisers and get some last minute help and tips for my own competition. After that I'm going down to London for a two day conference at the Royal Society, before heading to Chicheley Hall (near Milton Keynes) for the associated discussion meeting. I'm particularly looking forward to the latter, as it should be a different atmosphere to a normal conference. I'm expecting a much less formal structure, which will be a nice change. While I'm at both conferences I'll be poking around to see who's got postdoc positions opening up so...

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)

The second competition weekend of the BULSCA calendar has been and gone. This time around it was the turn of Bristol to host University lifesavers from around the UK, as they held their second league competition. Their inaugural effort for the 2011/12 season had been a great success (with some reservations regarding the social muttered from some of the older members), and we were all interested to see whether they’d be able to repeat it. Hamish, the club mascot, psychs himself up for the 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.

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!