Making Own Booze

Challenge: Make your own alcohol

My mum has been making wine for about 10 years now, everything from apple wine to blackberry with varying degrees of success, and I’ve always wanted to make my own alcohol – plus every student has to have a go. I thought of making vodka but you need to distil it, mead looked quite nice and we even had snow to make it in the traditional Viking way. But instead we went with a recipe we found on studentbeans.com which involved mixing squash, sugar and yeast in a bottle with a balloon on the top and leaving it in a cupboard for a few days until the balloon deflated. Every couple of days we’d check it but the balloon didn’t seem to be doing anything, so we left it longer. And a bit longer. Eventually two weeks had gone by and we decided it should be done and we tried it. It was certainly alcoholic. And blackcurrant-y (that was the squash we used). I think I’ll stick to the supermarket stuff.

Film Certificates - 15A?

Guillermo del Toro's new film, Mama is being released with a 15A certificate - or so I heard on the radio. So that means that children can go and see the film at the discretion of their parents. To be honest they'd be pretty bad parents if they let a child go and see a film such as Mama.

The synopsis: Annabel and Lucas are faced with the challenge of raising his young nieces that were left alone in the forest for 5 years.... but how alone were they? Creepy, scary things start to happen that are linked to the girls' mother which simply aren't suitable for children to see.

The trailer is scary enough in my opinion and I'm 19:

I think the world is becoming desensitised to things such as language, violence and sex. Just today I watched Men in Black 3, which is a PG, yet they're saying Bulls**t on more than one occasion and I think it's wrong. Maybe it's just me but I think children are losing their innocence during their childhoods because they're exposed to those things that we were protected from when we were children.

12A certificates I can understand but only if the parents know what is going to happen in the film. Quite a few parents took their young children to see the Hunger Games in which children are killing children and were horrified at what was happening on the screen.

12A yes if you've seen it first

15A no, it's wrong and pointless - you may as well make it a 12 if you want kids to see it.

Bake Sale

Challenge - Do something for charity!

This was without a doubt our most successful challenge. And the most successful way of making money for charity – a good ol’ bake sale. We decided on Breast Cancer for our charity as we all knew someone who had had it so it was quite close to our hearts.
Off we went to ASDA and bought everything in packet mixes – had we the skill and the time we would have made everything from scratch, but we don’t so we didn’t. Ten hours of hard labour later and we were finally done baking everything from cupcakes and brownies to cookies and millionaire’s shortbread. We also made a big Victoria sponge for a ‘guess the weight of the cake’ game. The prize cake of 1.1kg went to Helen McLaughlin, Director of Business at the university. “Oh my gosh!” she said, “I can't believe I’ve won it”. Her guess was the closest, estimating 1kg.
Everything sold like, well, hot cakes and overall we raised £171.63 for Breast Cancer Care.

Nicola and Jenny selling away!

To the beach?

Challenge number three! - Go to a beach and swim

I have to admit from the start that we didn't exactly achieve this one, but we certainly tried.

We put on our costumes, tshirts, shorts and took jumpers towels and thick socks to change into. Being February in the UK it wasn't exactly going to be like the Mediterranean.
As we drove through the town we saw how rough the sea was and as we pulled up and got out we saw what prevented us from achieving our challenge: red flags!

We climbed the dunes, sand blowing everywhere in the rough winds and admitted to ourselves that it wasn't going to happen, not today at any rate.

So we went to the arcade instead! And had a much better afternoon, found a machine where you win tickets everytime and won over 1,000 tickets between us, spent about a tenner altogether and won quite a good haul if I do say so myself.

We will try again if we have the time, but I only have a few weeks left so it's not looking likely.