First month back in London - a few highlights

I've now been in London for about a month, so a quick update.

Centrepoint Houseparty

The weekend before the start of term I went on a great weekend youth camp with St. Nick's church, Sevenoaks. My friend Lucy is from there and they needed more leaders so a few of us from St. Helen's (all Imperialites/ex-Imperialites) went along to help out. It was my first experience of camp (yes, I'm a student age Christian who has never been on camp...weird, I know!) and I loved it. It's great to see the kids really grow over the weekend and gradually come to more of a grasp of what Jesus has done for them, and hearing the simple truths of the gospel presented really grounded me for the beginning of the year too. And there was of course the necessary silliness involving shaving foam and water balloons:

Left to right: Phil, Lucy, me, Tom, Rob
Yes we are all at least 21 years old and making water balloons ended in
wondering what happens if you fill  them with shaving foam...don't judge!
(I haven't uploaded my photos yet so this is borrowed from Andy Solanki...I'll replace it with mine once i find them)

CU does Freshers' Week

The mixed madness and awesomeness that is CU does Freshers' Week was very busy. We spent the end of the week before and the Monday doing more typing and printing than I've ever seen in my life. Tuesday was Freshers' Fair, this is our first opportunity to meet Freshers and show them who the CU is and what we do:

Back row (left to right): Joshua, Ezequiel, Andy, Guy, John, Tom, James
Front row (left to right): Alex Lisa, Chloe, me, Phoebe, Luke

It was a great day, I then added to the week of insanity a little by leaving half an hour early to go to Bristol for Nicole's surprise Birthday party. Got the train at 1630, arrived at 1915ish, rocked up at the house of someone I'd never met (accidentally still in my CU facepaint!) then went over to surprise her. It was pretty awesome :) I got the coach back the next morning, leaving at 5:45 in order to get to creche at church...I never said I was sane OK!
Freshers' week continued with lunchtime talks on Thursday (Who is Jesus?) and Friday (Has Science Buried God?) where we met some Freshers' who'd joined CU and also people who were interested in finding out more about what we're talking about, which was awesome!
We finished the week with 2 events on Friday evening, an International Dinner organised by Phoebe, and a LIve Lounge organised by Chloe. This got a little complicated for a while because we couldn't get into the rooms till later than we'd hoped and because the events overlapped we got silly things muddled like where the paper plates and drinks were. Tom and Ben outdid themselves in running between the two and the storage cupboard, in the rain, and Phoebe and Chloe did so well and we ended up with 2 awesome events.
This week really showed me God's faithfulness and power, a lot the time it felt like we barely knew what we were doing but everything came together.

Everything else:

Since then I've just been trying to get life sorted, setting up times when I have to revise, organising the weekend away and other CU things, but not getting drowned by admin, getting to know my new RML group at St. Helen's, getting to know new students and church and uni, chilling with my housemates and other friends, and lots and lots of baking (look out for my first Have the Cake guest post here coming soon).

Long time no speak real world - a brief(ish) update.

So life kind of caught up with me for a while there, so much mess, literally and figuratively. Summer term of Imperial Chemistry is generally pretty insane, labs, lab reports and exams, then add in crutches for an undiagnosed foot injury and a massive terror over the above mentioned exams because I'd already failed 3 exams this year and it all made for a bit ridiculous.

Turned out that my exam fear was completely correctly placed and I failed those exams too, so my summer holiday was pretty revision filled (see later posts Latitude and A Lancashire Wedding for the best work breaks a girl could ask for).

So I was retaking 6 exams...i.e. every exam based chemistry module of 2nd year, quite a task I hear you say? Well I thought so too, so realising that I pretty much didn't have a hope of passing all of them with a month to revise and 6 exams within 5 days, I prioritised. I focused on the June set of exams, figuring that it would be far nicer to do retakes in January than have to wait till June 2013! And it worked...that never happe9ns to me! I passed exactly half of my retakes, all the ones that I would have had to retake in June 2013. I also give part of the success credit to the wonderful Mr. and Mrs. Ness (see A Lancashire Wedding) staying and looking after me for the week).

So this year's going to be a little different. The way Imperial work retakes is that you take the entire year out, do the exams with the year below you and restart in next October. So I've declared myself year 2.5, am still living in London, staying on CU committee, in Wind Band etc etc...all the student stuff without the labs and lectures, sounds like a good deal to me! Though of course there's some revision thrown in there too!