Wednesday

Cartmel College graduated on wednesday so quite a few people from chaplaincy graduated. Abbs, Rachel Jackson, Daffy and Melissa all came up into Chaplaincy and had a cup of tea. Abi and Cath Jordan came up as well, who were in Grizedale and graduated on thursday.

Thursday
Grizedale and Lonsdale graduated, so as well as Abi and Catherine, Steph and Matt arrived. Steve Hoyland was preparing food for friday and saturday night so Melissa, Matt and later Rachel Jackson and I were helping to prepare it in the kitchen in the catholic flat. After a while the conversation got quite deep and theological. There was nobody in one bedroom in the Anglican flat that night, so I got to sleep in a bed.

Friday
All the graduation ceremonies today are for Edge hill college which is miles away in Ormskirk so nobody I know or who comes to Chaplaincy is graduating today. Matt and Steph have been getting stuff ready for the wedding; the barrel of beer is in central lounge and has been tapped, the fridge here in Gills office is full of wine, the vodka is in the freezer.

posted at 11:15:00 am

Graduation

Today I got up at 8am so that we (me and mum and dad) could set off for my graduation. Dad went and picked up my sister from her house down the road in Wakefield. My brother couldn't come because he started his new job yesterday, so we went to Woodlands near Doncaster to pick up grandma Jones. She got in the car and we drove on to Lancaster, and the only traffic jam we encountered was on the A6 coming up to the university, presumably all the other people coming to the graduation ceremony. We parked near County marquee but found that we were early the lunch but that we couldn't actually get in to the marquee that side. We walked round and then I went to the toilets in Chaplaincy to change into my suit. When I got back they were sat down ready to get some food, so we went to the buffet, and I just had some chicken curry and rice. We stayed there until twenty to two when I went and got my robes from Chaplaincy, and then we went to the great hall, but the doors weren't open, so we stood around for a while and Faith took a photo of me. The doors opened at 2pm exactly and Mum, Dad, Faith and Grandma went into the great hall to be seated with the guests, and I went up into the nuffield theatre to line up with the other Bowland Bsc students.

The ceremony took 35 minutes, and I've left it so long to complete this entry I can't remember what the speech was about, but my parents have bought the DVD, so I will hear it again. The Graduands were ushered up on to the stage one at a time, and had their names read out before shaking hands with the Chancellor, Princess Alexandra. Afterwards we went back outside and I saw Kevin Hugget and he introduced himself to my family. We then went and had the college photograph, which took a while because they called people up in height order, so 5 foot 2 or less, then 5 foot for or less, etc. up to 6 feet or more, so I went up with the last lot. The area around where they were taking the photos (outside) was only cordened off with tape, so peoples family (including my dad) stood around taking their own pictures of the college photograph. After that I ducked under the tape and joined my family drinking tea at a table outside the marquee, before showing them the way to the conference centre to have my photograph taken. After much debate about which pack to get, I went and got photographed in my robes holding a fake scroll. After that Mum, Grandma Faith and I went back to the chaplaincy centre to return my robes and Dad drove the car round to the centre so I could get my sleeping bag and bag out of it. I then waited for Kevin to get back so I could blag somewhere to sleep until Matt and Stephs wedding. I ended up in what was Gills office, and still has a computer in it which is connected to the network (a Pentium II 400 running windows NT4) which I have duly upgraded to Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2(from Netscape communicator) and am typing this now.
posted at 8:13:00 pm

This morning I got up at 8:30 for the 9:30 service at St.Helens in Sandal Magna. It's on Barnsley road so it's just around the corner and only 10 or 15 minutes walk. I walked round the corner and saw on their board outside that the service actually started at 10am every sunday. So I went for a walk around the church.

It is an old church building which was 'restored' in the 19th century and most of the stained glass windows are 19th century. By about 9:30 some people had arrived to set up the fairtrade stall. As I walked in I was met by a fairly large (but probably friendly) dog called Guinness and had to wait for its owner to call it away. Plenty of people said hello and good morning and introduced themselves.

The vicar, Rupert, introduced himself, told me that there is a housegroup and apologised
for the website being wrong. His sermons were following a theme of the things people spend
most of their time doing, and they had already done eating and sleeping so this week it was television. He talked about the good points and the bad points, then he moved onto what the bible has to say about television. Unsurprisingly as he said, 'television' was not in his concordance but there was plenty about vision, seeing etc. The readings were Genesis 3:1 - 7 and Matthew 6:19-24. Afterwards I went and had tea and met a few more people.
posted at 12:43:00 pm